Alyssa Everett

  “It’s quite all right.” The duke handed me his handkerchief. “I’ve known ladies to cry over far less consequential matters, I assure you.”

  I dried my eyes ineffectually with the handkerchief he’d given me, noting vaguely that it bore the same comforting almond scent as Ben’s shaving soap. “But you’ll think me a watering pot, and I’m not, truly. I realize you have more right than I do to worry. It’s just—” I gulped down a noisy sob, “—it’s just that I love Ben so very much.”

  I gasped, realizing I’d spoken the words aloud, and to the duke of all people, a lofty personage with whom I was barely acquainted. Yet at the same time it felt oddly liberating to make the confession, as if until that moment I’d been a slave to my pride and only by confessing my feelings had I finally broken free.

  The duke squatted down on his haunches before me so that we were eye to eye. “Well, of course you do. Anyone can see that. All the more reason we must set matters right. Was this Mr. Harriman the same man Ben saw watching you through the windows?”

  I shook my head. “I think Mr. Harriman was already dead when Ben saw the Peeping Tom. Ben rushed out so quickly, I can’t imagine how anyone would have had time to kill a man, conceal the body and escape before he arrived on the scene.”

  “But unless we can prove someone else was outside the house, Ben remains the prime suspect.”

  I hesitated a moment before reaching for the folded caricature I’d tucked into my reticule. “And there’s another problem, Duke. Even if the victim wasn’t the Peeping Tom, Ben had good reason to be angry with him. Mr. Harriman was the editor of the Courier, and this appeared in his paper yesterday.”

  The duke unfolded the caricature and studied it. At first he said nothing, reading with his mouth curved down in a frown. Finally he looked up. “Ben saw this?”

  I nodded.

  He sighed, and with a pang I remembered that the duke himself figured in the scurrilous verse printed below the caricature. For his nature he got from that b——, his father. I looked away, acutely uncomfortable.

  “I’m sorry, my dear,” the duke said, clearly misinterpreting my blush. “Sorry to see your name dragged into something so vulgar and sordid.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.” And, to my great surprise, it didn’t. All my old worries that the ton might laugh at me or pity me seemed suddenly unimportant. “The only thing that matters is Ben, and proving his innocence.”

  “Steadfastly put, Lady Barbara. You have a great deal of your grandmother about you.”

  That only made me blush harder, especially since Grandmama Merton had been famous for a youthful career on the stage in which she’d appeared in flesh-colored tights and precious little else. “As to the murder, sir, I...”

  “Yes?”

  I’d been about to say, I have my suspicions who’s really responsible. But pointing the finger of suspicion at John Mainsforth would also mean divulging what I knew about Helen and the blackmail letters.

  Could I trust the duke? There was so much ugly gossip about his private life, and John Mainsforth was his nephew by marriage. Ben himself disapproved of his father. On the other hand, surely a duke must have highly placed connections, useful contacts I could never hope to match myself. He seemed so very kind, and Cliburne evidently trusted him, and any fool could see he cared for Ben.

  It took scarcely a second to make up my mind. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Balling the handkerchief he’d given me in my fist, I told the Duke of Ormesby everything I knew about Helen, the blackmail plot and my suspicions.

  Ben

  “Let me go!” I shouted as my captors pushed, pulled and dragged me through the narrow door of the Bow Street magistrates’ court. “Damn it, you’re making a mistake!”

  All four of them, the Leonards’ three servants and Mr. Dawson, ignored me. With flinty determination they hauled me back to a drab, cheerless room and up onto the raised platform at one end, where iron railings enclosed a padded bench. Apparently this was the dock, for I was summarily dragged up to the enclosure and shoved inside. A jailer with a ring of keys hanging from his hip had been leaning with a look of boredom against the outer rail, but as I stumbled in to join the grubby street urchin and the two lightskirts already inside, he eyed me with undisguised curiosity.

  He wasn’t the only curious spectator. On the same raised platform as the dock stood the witness box, and beyond it, the magistrates’ desk. In the lower part of the rooms, however, members of the general public stood gawking at those of us awaiting justice. Seeing so many eyes turned my way, I was momentarily startled into silence, too shocked by the scrutiny even to fashion another protest.

  The most important pair of eyes in the courtroom, of course, belonged to the magistrate. He sat behind his battered desk, a clerk at his elbow. He wasn’t even the chief magistrate—I knew from the papers that was a new appointee, a man named Sir Robert Baker—but at that moment, he held my fate in his hands.

  The magistrate had been in the process of questioning the lightskirts when I arrived. After finishing his examination, he acquitted both women for want of evidence—an encouraging sign, I hoped. I assumed I’d have to wait my turn behind the street urchin, but whether due to the gravity of the charge or to my rank or both, the court addressed my case next.

  The magistrate looked me up and down. “I know you, don’t I? Have you been before this court before?”

  I drew myself up stiffly. “Certainly not.”

  The clerk consulted a piece of paper handed to him by Mr. Dawson. “He’s the Marquess of Beningbrough. He’s here to answer to a charge of homicide.”

  “Homicide!” said the magistrate.

  Mr. Dawson had taken his place in the witness box. “Yes, your worship. One murder happened scarcely an hour ago, and he remains a suspect in an earlier death which occurred at the same location.”

  I lunged to the dock rail. “I haven’t killed anyone, and that other death was ruled an accident.”

  At my outburst, the jailer guarding the dock stirred from his torpor. “Quiet, you.” Remembering to whom he was speaking, he added uncertainly, “I mean—my lord.”

  “You’ll have your turn to speak in a moment, Lord Beningbrough,” the magistrate told me. He looked at Mr. Dawson. “I take it you were a witness to the events?”

  “I was.” While the magistrate’s clerk scribbled furiously, Mr. Dawson proceeded to relate how he’d been on his way to Lord Woodford’s house to settle the final details relating to Sam Garvey’s burial. Passing before Leonard House, he’d spotted me outside the servants’ entrance, bent over Harriman’s lifeless body.

  “And did you actually see the accused strike down the dead man?” asked the magistrate.

  Finally, someone had thought to ask the all-important question. “Of course he didn’t!” I burst out.

  The magistrate cast a stern look in my direction. “Lord Beningbrough, do contain yourself. You’ll have your say once I’ve heard from this witness.”

  “’E don’t take kindly to speaking out o’ turn,” whispered the street urchin sharing the dock with me, his sage air clearly the fruit of prior experience. “I’d stubble it if I wuz you.”

  How had this happened to me? Only an hour before, Barbara had been in my arms, soft and eager and like a taste of heaven, and now I was in a shabby courtroom, accused of murder. I’d always resented my father for bringing our family the worst kind of notoriety, but even he had never been dragged bodily before a magistrate, charged with a felony. I could still picture Barbara’s horrified face as her family’s servants had hauled me away.

  Only one hope remained to me, that the magistrate would dismiss the case. Though my father’s peerage entitled him to the privilege of a trial in the Lords, I was only a marquess by courtesy, and thus technically a commoner until I inherited the dukedom. If the court accepted Mr. Dawson’s version of the events, I’d be clapped in irons and led off to prison like an ordinary criminal. What if a jury believe
d me guilty? Murder was a hanging offense.

  Meanwhile, the real murderer was still on the loose and could strike again at any time. I already knew from the peephole in Barbara’s room and the eye at the window today that the killer was watching her. She could be his next target.

  “I didn’t actually see the fatal blow fall,” Mr. Dawson said, “but I caught the accused in the act of attempting to conceal the body.”

  I surged to the rail again. “I wasn’t concealing the body, I was trying to discover his identity!”

  I’d hoped my explanation might carry some weight with the magistrate, but he peered severely down his nose at me. “I’ve already warned you about these interruptions, Lord Beningbrough.”

  “You heard his worship,” the jailer said. “Er, my lord.”

  I gritted my teeth and struggled to keep silent. It wasn’t easy. There could be no question of bail in a murder case. How could I find the real killer, or keep Barbara safe, while locked in a prison cell? How could I prove my own innocence?

  “Might the accused have been merely determining the dead man’s identity, as he claims?” the magistrate asked Mr. Dawson.

  The clerk scribbled furiously.

  Mr. Dawson’s forehead wrinkled. “It’s true enough he was rifling the victim’s pockets. But the victim’s body was still warm to the touch, and the accused seemed not all fazed by dealing with a dead body.”

  “Yet you didn’t actually see Lord Beningbrough strike down the victim.”

  “No, your worship.”

  Before I could breathe a sigh of relief, however, Mr. Dawson pressed on. “But there are other circumstances pointing to his guilt. Alongside the body in the first death, the one ruled an accident, I noted a blunt instrument which might have been used as a murder weapon, and the second victim died of a similar blow to the head. I now believe the coroner’s verdict in the first case was in error. Lord Beningbrough was present at Leonard House on the date of both deaths, and a witness testified at the inquest that his lordship had a personal relationship with the first victim. He’s of a size and strength to have dispatched both men with a single blow. Moreover, the accused is widely known for his hot temper.”

  “Hot temper?” I spluttered. “Oh, come now. This is ridiculous!”

  I realized at once I’d made a tactical error. Ridiculous is not a word dear to any magistrate’s heart, at least not when applied to the legal proceedings in his charge, and throwing it about only lent credence to Mr. Dawson’s assessment of my character. The magistrate pursed his lips in an expression of annoyance.

  I struggled to contain my frustration. “Forgive me, but I hardly see how Mr. Dawson is qualified to offer an opinion on my temper. We’re scarcely acquainted.”

  The magistrate reflected a moment. “Lord Beningbrough, do you know a gentleman by the name of Henry Rigsby?”

  “Rigsby?” I couldn’t think what he had to do with the case. At Eton, Rigsby had been my first and most gleeful tormentor, two years my senior and never scrupling to take advantage of the greater size those years conferred. I could still hear his crowing voice taunting, “Your father is a bugger.” At least I’d obtained some measure of satisfaction in recent years, since my last brush with Rigsby had involved thrashing him in a fistfight after he’d mouthed the word princess at me outside the Albion coffeehouse. I’d broken his nose with my first punch. “As a matter of fact, I do. I—”

  “Henry Rigsby is my nephew,” the magistrate said. “This court is well acquainted with your temper, Lord Beningbrough.”

  I knew then and there that the magistrate had no intention of dismissing the charges against me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Barbara

  We arrived too late. The court was in recess, and when the four of us—the duke, the barrister the duke had conjured up as if by magic, Cliburne and I—mobbed the magistrate’s clerk to inquire about Ben’s hearing, the clerk simply shook his head and read the verdict from a sheet of paper. “Held to answer.”

  I didn’t understand. Held to answer to a murder charge? Neither Cliburne nor I had even had an opportunity to speak on Ben’s behalf. How could the magistrate have decided so quickly that Ben belonged in prison?

  “We mustn’t let it worry us unduly,” said Sir Francis Ames, KC, the gaunt, gray-haired barrister the duke had retained. “These committal proceedings require a much lower standard of proof than a jury trial. It’s no indication Lord Beningbrough will be found guilty.”

  “And Ben was without benefit of counsel.” The duke spoke in a bracing tone, though I’d seen the troubled look that had crossed his face at the clerk’s news. “Sir Francis here is the very best.”

  “Yes, and remember how well things turned out for me at the inquest,” Cliburne pointed out for the second time.

  I forced a smile and nodded, but only because they all seemed so determined to pretend we had no cause for concern.

  Unfortunately, it was impossible to completely dispel the air of gloom. Sir Francis sighed and shook his head. “I can’t think why the magistrate didn’t suspend the proceedings, at least until Lord Beningbrough could secure counsel.”

  “I know why,” piped a fluting voice behind me, only the words were spoken in such a strong Cockney accent, they came out sounding more like Oy knaow woy. We turned as one to find a raggedly dressed boy of no more than eight or nine, thin and dirty and with a shock of brown hair hanging in his eyes.

  “Do you really know?” I stooped down to peer encouragingly into the soot-streaked little face. “We’re interested in what happened to a gentleman who was brought here—tall, not quite thirty years old, with dark hair and—”

  “Oy know the cove you mean, miss. A bang-up swell wif a rum phizz like this ’ere gen’lman’s.” The boy gestured with a tilt of his head at the duke. “Markis o’ Beningbrough, ’e sez, and a lot more beside.”

  “A lot more beside?”

  The boy nodded. “Oy warned ’im, miss, but ’e wouldn’t keep ’is gob shut. Well, that’s a mistake, innit? ’E got more and more peppery, ’til finally the beak tells ’im ’e needs to mind ’is manners and packs ’im off to the Whit.”

  Cliburne’s brow furrowed in puzzlement. “The Whit?”

  “Newgate,” our informant translated succinctly. “Charged wif two murders, ’e was, one today and one afore that.”

  I gasped. “Two murders!”

  The duke’s expression looked even graver than before. “Thank you, young man. You’ve been most helpful.” He tossed the boy a half guinea—the sum brought a look of stunned gratitude to the child’s face—before turning back to Sir Francis. “Newgate. I feared that quick temper of Ben’s would land him in trouble one day.”

  I was too shaken by the way events were spinning out of control to offer any words of comfort. So now Ben was charged not just with Mr. Harriman’s murder, but with Sam Garvey’s as well? If only we hadn’t arrived too late to speak on Ben’s behalf... And where was John Mainsforth? He knew Ben had left the house only a short time before Mr. Dawson happened on the scene. Why hadn’t Mr. Mainsforth come here to testify while Cliburne and I were meeting with the duke?

  But I knew the answer. Why should Mr. Mainsforth wish to clear his cousin when Ben made the perfect scapegoat? Unfortunately, when I’d told the duke my suspicions about his nephew, he had merely nodded without comment, a certain reticence in his manner suggesting he wasn’t entirely convinced.

  Just then I spotted a familiar face in the courtroom. Frye, my family’s footman, stood amid the crowd of spectators, his eyes fixed on me.

  Frye! How could I have forgotten about him? He’d been among the servants Mr. Dawson had enlisted to aid in Ben’s arrest. Perhaps he could shed some light on what had happened here. “Excuse me a moment, would you?” I said to the gentlemen with me, and slipped away to have a word with my footman.

  As soon as Frye spied my approach, he smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry I haven’t returned to my post yet, my lady. I was about to leav
e when I saw you come in. I thought it best to see whether you required anything first.”

  To judge from Frye’s looks, Ben must have put up quite a struggle. Frye’s livery was rumpled, with one sleeve torn at the shoulder, two buttons missing from his coat, and a strip of gold braid dangling by a thread. Still, I took no satisfaction in his battle-scarred appearance. It wasn’t his fault Ben had been arrested. He’d merely been following orders.

  “It’s all right, Frye. I’m relieved to find you here. At least you can tell me what happened. Did you explain to the magistrate how little time Beningbrough would have had to attack the dead man?”

  Frye’s brow knitted. “What?”

  He wasn’t usually so obtuse. “Back home, you were stationed at the front door just before Lord Beningbrough’s arrest, weren’t you? You must have seen him rush out of the house. Did you tell the magistrate how only a minute or two passed before Mr. Dawson called out for his arrest?”

  Frye looked down and mumbled, “I wasn’t asked to testify, my lady.”

  I threw a glare in the direction of the magistrate’s vacant desk. “Well, we’ll just see about that! Not allowed to testify? What kind of courtroom—”

  “Not asked to testify, my lady. And if I had been, I’d have had to tell the truth in any case.”

  That brought me up short. “What do you mean, you’d have had to tell the truth? It happened just as I said. Lord Beningbrough left the morning room only a minute or two before his arrest.”

  Frye avoided my gaze. “I hardly noticed how much time went by, my lady. I was at my post, admitting Mr. Mainsforth, when Lord Beningbrough went charging out, grim as death...”

  That was hardly promising, but I persisted. “At least you could’ve testified Mr. Mainsforth had only recently arrived, and might have dispatched the victim himself before knocking on our door. How did he look when you admitted him—rumpled? Furtive?”

  “No, my lady, there was naught amiss with Mr. Mainsforth. It was only after Lord Beningbrough went out...” Frye shook his head. “Well, never mind. I was probably only imagining it.”