“We don’t know that yet. There is so much I don’t understand, including the why of this. I beg you to take this seriously.”
She opened her mouth to answer, but just then Emma called out her name, and Charlotte turned. She stepped back into the hall and through to the front steps, where the little group waited to say their goodbyes.
“You will take care?”
He’d come up silently behind her, was walking just beside her before she realized he was there.
“Yes. It’s a lesson I learned very early in life, Lord Durnham. If I don’t look after myself, no one is going to do it for me.”
He’d said nothing to that, and stepped back as she’d said her farewells and kissed the boys, telling them to hurry back.
He’d closed the coach door on Emma and the boys, swung himself up into his saddle, and waved to her and Catherine. She’d felt his eyes on her like a hot caress, and despite the warmth of the morning, she’d shivered as she turned back into the house.
And now a whole day had passed and she hadn’t even been out. A listlessness had overcome her, and she had gone to bed early, and slept late. Her ride this morning with Kit had been short and left her with a pounding head, and now she’d retreated into the soothing shade and light breeze of the garden.
This was a tangled mess.
She could not understand Luke’s involvement. It was one thing for Geoffrey and Edward’s stepfather to be involved. They were related by family ties, and it was all too believable that they had gone into something together. Frethers, too, she could understand. He was part of Geoffrey Holliday’s set, and a man with no moral qualms.
It may have been he who drew Geoffrey into the affair, and Geoffrey took Emma’s stepfather along with him. But Luke?
He had nothing to do with the upper classes. Ever.
He hated them, and would do nothing with them that would allow them to profit, no matter how much he could gain by the deal.
There was something off here, and she would have to ask Luke to tell her.
She had no expectation that he would, though.
She took a deep gulp of tea, and it was almost painful as it quenched the dryness in her throat with its sharp heat. She took a more dainty sip and set the cup down, glad that Catherine was with a friend, shopping, this morning, so she could sit quietly with no demands on her at all.
Greenfelt came out of the house, his step as spry as it had been the day she’d met him, so many years ago, and he set down the paper, a fresh pot of tea and some ginger cake still warm from the oven.
The scent of it lifted her spirits immediately. She murmured her thanks and poured the tea, breathing the fragrance of ginger deep into her lungs. She barely glanced at the paper, but a single name caught her attention.
Heart suddenly tight and painful in her chest, she flipped the folded sheet open. Stared at it until the breeze rattled the paper in her hands, tugging at it.
Sometime yesterday, Frethers had been found dead.
There was a subtle sense of relief at Fairlands, Geoffrey’s country seat in Kent. Edward felt it in the light steps of the staff, the extra effort of the cooks, and the quick service of the butler.
The estate manager had been almost manic in his delight at Edward’s proposed injection of cash, and his threadbare clothing and gaunt look told Edward more than words how close to the bone Geoffrey had been running things.
Now he stood in the magistrate’s rooms in Manston and noticed the lack of any real regret in Sir Humphrey’s eyes over Geoffrey’s death.
“Could have been his own hand,” the magistrate said, voice gruff with discomfort. “It could go either way. The angle of the shot could be accounted for if he turned his head as he pulled the trigger, or someone stood close to his right shoulder, just behind him, and shot him.”
“It would have had to be someone he knew, unless they crept up on him.” Edward saw that the pile of clothing, the gun, and other small items found on Geoffrey’s body were lying on the magistrate’s desk.
“Couldn’t say, one way or t’other.” The magistrate pushed the release documents forward for Edward to sign. “No one has come forward. He was found by one of his laborers. The house was empty of guests. Butler said they’d all left earlier that morning.”
Edward signed, and waited for a clerk to wrap the items up in brown paper for him to take away.
“There’s one thing.” The magistrate waited for the clerk to leave and close the door before speaking. He hesitated a moment. “We’re not known as a smugglers’ haven for nothing here; it’s a way o’ life. Damn Crown men don’t understand how to deal with it, but never mind that. Lord Holliday was—” He fiddled with the quill on his desk. “There’s rumors he were dabbling in owling himself. Them owlers aren’t people to cross, nor to go in with lightly. If he did either …” The magistrate shrugged.
Edward could see he had no sympathy for Geoffrey if he’d been killed because he’d got into bed with smugglers. And he was also prepared to put it down to being the most likely scenario in which Geoffrey had gotten a bullet in his head.
He gave a nod, careful not to show his shock. “How long has the rumor been around? About Geoffrey being in with the smugglers?”
The magistrate gave him a considering look. “At least a year. I didn’t do anything ’bout it—no proof, just whispers, y’know. But he had money troubles, that was clear from the way he ran the estate. Many a lord’s been seduced by the danger and the profits o’ owling, I’m sure.”
“I’ll warrant you’re right.” Edward collected everything and took his leave.
He walked out into the small town, savoring the fresh breeze off the sea. He’d never thought about the location of Fairlands in relation to his investigations. Had only connected Geoffrey to the gold smuggling since yesterday. But of course, his brother-in-law’s local connections, the location of his estate, would have been a boon for whoever was financing the smuggling of gold guineas from England.
He’d worried over what Geoffrey had to offer, other than a connection to Edward himself, that could have drawn the men in this to his brother-in-law, but this explained it.
Explained a great deal.
Up ahead he saw Emma, stepping from the vicar’s large house, her body drawn tight with tension. He raised a hand and she stopped short, waited for him in the road.
“What is it?” he asked when he reached her and held out an arm.
She latched on to it like a limpet. “It’s the way they look at me, as if I’m lacking for not sobbing and wailing and gnashing my teeth because Geoffrey’s dead.” She drew in a long, shaky breath.
“Hush.” He drew her down the narrow lane, toward the carriage, parked in the yard of the inn. “That’s all in your head. They see you’re distressed, and unhappy, and burdened. They think you’re grieving him. And they’re right. You are.”
She was quiet as they entered the yard. He waited for the coachman to open the doors and then helped her in.
“I am grieving. And I’m not. It’s all mixed up inside.” She fell back into her seat and closed her eyes.
Edward followed her in. He waited for the carriage to start moving, for the noise of the horses’ hooves and the rumble of the wheels over the cobbles to create enough noise that they could not be overheard. “Did you know Geoffrey was involved in smuggling?”
She looked up at him sharply. So sharply, there really was no doubt as to her answer. She gave a tight nod. “When I found out, I made him promise to stop it. He said it would save us from ruin, but he wouldn’t tell me any more than that. I made him swear he would stop.”
“He lied.” Edward suddenly wished the words unspoken, but Emma was nodding, her lips twisted in a bitter smile.
“So I discovered. When Charlotte came to tell me about Frethers, asked to speak to me in private, at first I thought she’d heard something about the smuggling.” She shook her head. “Instead, she saved my sons, and when I confronted Geoffrey, he told me he hadn’t stopp
ed the smuggling, and he’d got into some trouble with a ship as well, something about it sinking with all his money invested in the cargo.” She rubbed her brow. “He’d sworn by all that was holy he would stop, but he hadn’t, and he had sold our sons to a lech.” She brushed a tear from her cheek. “How could he, Edward? How could he do those things? I never knew him at all.”
She put her face in her hands, her body shaking with her effort to keep control.
Edward shifted, rested a hand on her upper back and held it there, not sure there was anything he could say to her that would help.
As they entered the long drive down to Fairlands, he could hear the boys whooping and laughing in the distance, and the sound of it seemed to center her. Slowly, the racks of her body lessened and she raised her face from her hands, dug into her reticule, and wiped the tears from her face.
“You never wanted me to marry him. What did you see in him that I didn’t?” Emma turned to him, her eyes red-rimmed.
Edward shook his head. “Let’s leave it now. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
She paused and shook her head. “I need to know. I never want to make that mistake again.”
Edward shrugged. “I saw an ugliness in him, a sense of entitlement, which I didn’t like. I knew his reputation as a gambler, and a risk taker, far beyond his means, and I didn’t think marriage to you would change that. I didn’t think he deserved you.”
She looked at him, her face solemn and serious. “Well, you’ll get no objection from me with your choice, not that I have any say in it.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “What on earth are you talking about, Em?”
“Charlotte Raven.” The coach slowed, and she concentrated on collecting her things. “If anything, you don’t deserve her.”
22
Charlotte refused to meet Luke back at the gin house. She would not. It was time, for once, that he come to her. He agreed to a meeting in the garden—he wouldn’t come into the house.
But when he walked from the direction of the stables, he did so with familiarity and confidence in the dim moonlight. She had a strange, certain feeling that he had done this before. Come here before under cover of night.
She looked up from where she was standing and saw her bedroom, lit up with a warm glow from within, and Betsy’s shadow as she made the room ready for Charlotte to sleep in. It was hard to breathe, suddenly. Her chest was tight and her hands shook.
She should’ve guessed he would keep an eye on her personally. Why hadn’t she?
She turned her gaze back to him, and found he had stopped, and was watching her, watching her make the connections. But he said nothing.
He’d been limping when he’d come round from the stables, but he made an effort to walk without one as he took the last few strides to her.
Her fingers trembled, wanting to stroke him, ease the pain. She had been there when it was at its worst and she had never been able to shake the bone-deep empathy she had with him over this.
Falling from a height, lying helpless and in pain with no one to help, had been a fear, a daily, all-too-real fear, for so much of her childhood. He had suffered exactly that, except the irony was it was not in the chimneys he had long before gotten too big to climb, but the narrow, foul stairs of the Hulks.
His gaze met hers, and she could not read him at all. He was so closed, she shivered.
“Frethers,” she said.
His eyes narrowed, and he pursed his lips. “I told you to stay out of that, Charlie.”
“And I told you I wasn’t yours to command. Was it you who killed him?”
The question surprised him, and he slid onto the garden bench beside her. He did not sigh with relief, or show the slightest sign of his pain, and her heart broke a little more. He was ripping her up from the inside out, and offering nothing in return—no kindness, no gentleness.
All for pride. Or it had been, at the start. Now she wasn’t sure he hadn’t truly become what he pretended to be.
“I planned to kill him, but later. It’s inconvenient he’s dead, truth to tell. And I wouldn’t have done it like that, anyway.” He gave a contemptuous snort. “Shot dead in his library, in an armchair?” Luke shook his head. “I’d have slit his throat in a brothel and taken all his clothes. Maybe tied him up, put on a little rouge or powder.” He snorted again. “Or like as not, he’d have been like that already. And I’d have nothing to do but the cutwork.”
She hesitated a moment, the image he created tightening her throat, and then she slid next to him, stared up at the stars and the half-moon.
She believed him. He hadn’t killed Frethers. “What business were you doing with him? What was enough to make you break your rule and get involved with the nobs?”
He was silent a long time. “They came to me. And I took them up on it ’cause I finally caught wind of something that would make the people hate ’em.”
“Hate who?” She turned.
“The upper classes. Like the French. A revolution, Charlie. I saw a chance to maybe move this feeling of resentment that’s all round us up another notch. And like the French did, we’ll get some real change.”
“How?”
“I’m digging a hole for ’em. Sure, I’m making money, but I put every cent o’ it back into the rookery. An’ all the while, I’ve kept a record of meetings, and I’ve written down names, and kept lists of transactions. The newspapers will ’ave a fine story with what I’ve collected.”
“Who else is in this?”
Luke paused. “That’s a problem. They’ve kept it small. Just the person who approached me to start, and Frethers. All the others are just lackeys. I don’t know who came up with the scheme. I’ll ’ave to wait and see if they send anyone else to me, now Frethers is dead. Just a matter o’ time—my initial contact’s too old to do the legwork. They need me. And I’d like to bring at least one more down, if I can. One dead peer doesn’t make a conspiracy. But two or three live ones? That’s convincing.”
“How do you know Frethers wasn’t the leader?”
He laughed. A genuine laugh, the like of which she hadn’t heard since she was much too young. “Frethers was an idiot. There’s no way he was behind this. He was the front man.” He shook his head, still smiling. “I’ve ’ad someone on him from day one. Other than me and the trips to the brothels, he only met with nobs. They’re in this, up to their starched white collars.”
“And what is this?” Edward hadn’t told her, and Luke wouldn’t, either, the other day. She waited while he sat silent beside her.
“It’s dangerous to know, Charlie.” He shrugged, as if that were the end of that, and she stared at him.
She wondered if it was worth fighting him over it. Edward had promised to tell her when he got back. But how much would he actually tell?
She shook her head. “I’ll have to do my own research then.” She leaned back on the bench. Closed her eyes in the silence that had been thrown up like a barrier at her words.
“Why?” His voice was quiet. “Why would you even want to look into it?”
“Because I’m involved.” She fiddled with the ribbons on her skirt.
“That’s not a good enough reason.”
She looked across at him, but Luke’s eyes were closed like hers had been, his head tilted up to the sky.
“I’ve been told to watch my back. That I’ve come to these people’s attention because of my visits to you, or because Emma Holliday was staying with me. But either way, I’d rather know what this is about than go around with a vague sense of fear for everyone and everything.”
Luke straightened. “Who told you that? Your nob?”
“Yes, Edward told me.” She looked him in the eyes. “Those men watching the house, he says it’s them—sent by Frethers’s associates.”
He touched his jacket, and she noticed for the first time that he was dressed like a delivery boy. He never dressed as well as he could afford to, but he never pretended to be something he wasn’t.
H
e caught her stare and shrugged. “Didn’t want the watchers to suspect me. So I delivered some vegetables to the kitchen. They’ll think I’ve stopped for a cuppa and a chat.”
“So there are still watchers.” Something didn’t jibe here. Why was Luke tolerating them?
He must have sensed her surprise, because he finally looked at her. “This is a deep game, Charlie. Just stay the hell out of it. Trust me. I won’t let the blighters watching you touch you. For every one of them, I’ve got a couple of watchers of me own.”
She hesitated, not sure whether what she was about to say was a secret or not. But no matter what, she couldn’t not warn him. “Edward is investigating this thing you’re involved in for the Crown.”
Luke went very still. “He’s investigating it for the Crown.” He repeated the words slowly. “And you’re only just telling me now?” He threw himself back against the bench in disgust.
“I only found out yesterday morning.”
He swore, low and vicious. “You’ve known a whole day and didn’t let me know? He could ruin this, Charlie. I’ve been working on it for months.”
She looked back at him without a shred of regret. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t read your mind, and your people don’t confide in me the way mine do to you.”
He swore again and turned from her, looking farther into the garden, down to where the apple tree and oaks spread their branches and threw deep shadows over the lawn. His hands were fists resting on his thighs.
She reached out and covered one with her hand and he flinched. Pulled away.
“I asked you this before, and you said no, but I’m asking you again. Do you not come to me because of what I can’t do—can’t be—anymore?” His voice was hoarse.
She wanted to weep. She faced, in that moment, the truth that while the harm Luke might do to them was one reason she held back from any would-be suitors of the ton, another was this. This guilt and sorrow, all mixed up, because of how Luke’s accident had left him.
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