Secret Admirer

by Michele Jaffe

  The killer must have taken advantage of—caused?—CeCe’s absence to set the paintings up. And just as Tuesday knew she could have put them away again, could have hidden them once more, she knew more profoundly that it would be just a matter of time before they reappeared. Better to get it over with.

  It was as if the killer wanted them to know, wanted them to link the killings to her. He threatened her to keep quiet in the dreams, but now he was telling them. The inconsistency nagged at her, because the only explanation was one she did not like: that he wanted control, that he was playing with them, that he was crafting an intricate puzzle whose pieces he could scatter around as he wanted them found. If they continued like this, continued playing by his rules and following only the clues he left for them, they would always be one step behind. The murderer was running things and the only way to change that was by telling Lawrence everything.

  Or almost everything.

  “Are you going to kill me?” Lawrence asked casually. “Because if you are, it would be easier through the chest.”

  “I have no desire to kill you.”

  “You expressed one earlier, at Miles’s house.”

  “Take off your clothes and get into that bathtub.”

  “Thank you but I prefer to bathe at night.”

  The only response was a bit more prodding with the sword.

  “I presume these paintings are from your brush,” Lawrence went on as he loosened the ties on his doublet and slipped out of it. “Or are they more presents from the Secret Admirer?”

  He did not see her shudder. “I will tell you everything as soon as you are in the tub.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  Because it is hard to talk to you when you look so austere and earl-like. Because after what happened in your coach I feel more vulnerable than I ever have in my life and I need you to be vulnerable too. “Because I don’t want you stalking around, interrupting me. I want your undivided attention. Now get in.”

  Lawrence, naked, stood at the edge of the tub. “You could just invite me to sit. Like a polite hostess would do.”

  Tuesday’s mind was buzzing with the realization that her previous experience with the male anatomy was hugely inadequate. The sooner he was submerged, the better. “I am notoriously impolite. I pride myself on it. And I want to guarantee that you will be immobile.”

  Clenching his teeth, Lawrence slipped into the water that CeCe had drawn earlier, which was now chilly. It smelled familiar, spicy, like jasmine and cardamom and roses. Like Tuesday’s skin. He blocked the memory of her taste from his mind and asked, “Well?”

  “I suspect seeing these paintings is going to make you jump to a conclusion but please keep an open mind until I am done.”

  “I always have an open mind about women pointing rapiers at me. Now tell me about these—”

  “Murder scenes,” she supplied helpfully.

  “Yes. Why did you paint them?”

  “I did not have any choice.”

  Lawrence was looking at the nearest painting, the one of the corridor where her husband’s body had been found the day before. He had read his men’s reports of Tuesday’s movements the previous day and knew exactly how she had spent every hour. She had not painted anything while she was under surveillance. So she must already have painted her husband’s murder scene when he had arrived to tell her Curtis was dead. Where are the rose petals she had asked. Which meant—

  “Before or after? Did you do that—” he gestured at the picture of the corridor, “—before or after you killed him?”

  “Neither.”

  He rose from the tub. “I am telling you, Lady Arli—”

  “Sit down.” She pointed the rapier at him, trying not to notice that the cold water had no effect on his ability to loom. “This is exactly why I wanted you immobilized. I knew you would overreact.”

  “I never overreact.”

  “Really? I am surprised that water is not boiling.”

  “How else do you expect me to react? What other option is there than that you killed your husband and for some reason memorialized the place? Kindly tell me how you would have me view this.”

  “During.”

  “What?”

  “I painted it during the murder.”

  Lawrence frowned at her, uncomprehending, and she went on. “That is what I want to explain. For the past month I have been having these strange dreams. Each time the dream gets a little longer, and they have become more frequent. I thought they came on days when I have been under a strain, days when I get headaches, but now I understand that they have all been on Tuesdays. I always woke up at the end of them and could not get back to sleep, until CeCe suggested I paint them. I did and afterwards I always hid them. I didn’t think anyone knew where. Until today, when I came in and saw them arranged like they are now.”

  “This water is too damn cold for me to sit around listening to nonsense about how you killed your husband in a dre—”

  “Stay where you are, Lord Pickering.” Tuesday glowered at him. He glowered back. She won and went on. “At first the dreams were all of being chased through a forest. Then they started getting longer, so they would start at the forest and move on to a garden, then a storeroom. There is always someone chasing me, calling my name, calling—” she hesitated, “—calling me mean, horrible things. And saying he is going to get me. Early yesterday morning, I had the final one, which ended with me being chased down a corridor. When I woke up I painted it and went back to sleep. But then you came and you told me about Curtis and I went there and—it was the same. Exactly the same. I don’t know how but the killer is in my head. It is like we are collaborating. Like what George and I do but—but much worse.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this yesterday?”

  “Because the killer threatened me. He said ‘You just keep your whore mouth shut or I’ll do the same to you as I did to him. Do you understand, bitch?’ ” She suddenly looked scared and frail and Lawrence found himself tempted to pull her into his arms and hold her and tell her it would all be fine and no one would hurt her again and he would stay with her forever to make sure she never had another nightmare.

  That snapped him out of his sympathy. “You expect me to believe this?” he demanded. “That somehow a killer is making you have a dream and when you paint something he kills someone, but that you have no idea who he is? I would have thought you could come up with something a bit more plausible.”

  “I could have. I scarcely understand it either. Unfortunately, this is the truth.” Not all of it, but enough. The rest, Tuesday assured herself, did not matter. And even if it did, she could not bring herself to tell him. Not after what had happened in the coach. Not after—“I don’t care if you believe it.”

  “You had better care. I can arrest you for murder.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would not be honorable. You know I am not the murderer.”

  “I must tell you, Lady Arlington, it would be easier to remember that if you were not pointing a rapier at me.”

  She looked down at the weapon in her hand as if she had never seen it before. “Oh, it’s not real. It is just a prop for my painting.”

  “It is very realistic looking. And feeling.”

  “Yes,” she said animatedly. “George found it somewhe—what are you doing?”

  “Getting dressed and then packing up your possessions. You are leaving London.”

  She dragged her eyes from the scar on his right shoulder. “No! That is the point. I have to be here. I have to find him.”

  “We will find him better without you.”

  “You won’t find him at all without me. In order to know where those paintings were hidden, he would have had to watch me for days. He is close by, close to me. If it is the Secret Admirer, which now seems likely, I am the closest link you have to him.”

  It was true. She was a link to t
he murderer. Which meant she was in grave danger. Lawrence dressed more quickly.

  “You would not even have a witness if it weren’t for me,” she pointed out.

  “We don’t know he is a real witness. We have no guarantee that it is our killer he saw. For all I know you are in cahoots with him and paid him to describe a man with brown hair to remove suspicion from yourself.”

  “That is untrue and you know it.”

  “Feel free to call me a liar.”

  “Thank you. If you really believed it were that simple, you would not have orchestrated that elaborate ruse today with the viscount Dearbourn to get your men into my house. You would just have arrested me and shipped me off to Newgate. You must let me work with you.”

  “That is out of the question.”

  “Why? Wasn’t that the whole point of this charade, you pretending to be giving me protection? So that you could learn what I know? Well you will. And you will also get my help. But you have to let me see what you know as well.”

  She has you Lawrence, my friend.

  “No.”

  It was a last, desperate act. Tuesday crossed to where he was standing and fastening his breeches. She put her hands on his bare arms and he froze. Slowly his eyes came up to meet hers. “Lord Pickering. Please. He is toying with me, with all of us. He has invaded my life; he is inside my mind and I hate it. Hate it. You don’t have any idea what it is like to have your enemy living in your head.”

  Because he knew exactly what that was like. Because she was a connection to the killer. Because she had noticed things a dozen of his men together had overlooked at her husband’s murder scene. These were the reasons he agreed.

  It was not because he wanted to have her close to him.

  He shook her hands off of him. “Very well. But you must do what I say. Whatever I say. If I tell you to sit still in a corner and not move or speak for ten hours, you do it. I will not be responsible for your death.”

  “No.” Tuesday shook her head.

  His head was halfway through his linen shirt. “What?”

  “I would not be able to sit still that long. Five hours is probably as long as I—” Lawrence looking like he might explode was what cut her off. “All right,” she rushed on. “I agree. I shall do anything you say.”

  Lawrence did not miss the emphasis but before he could wonder at it, Tom appeared in the doorway. He quavered slightly under the double glares that met him. “I—I am sorry if I am interrupting, sir. They told me to come in.”

  “You aren’t. Lady Arlington and I are finished. What is it?”

  Tom swallowed. “We’ve got a problem, sir. It is the witness, Mr. Marston. He is missing.”

  Chapter 16

  The inanimate body of Albert Marston was found by Grub twenty minutes later in the alley next to his house, the same alley where he had seen the killer. That was where, while on an excursion to get more food for the Ladies, he had fallen when the pistol shots had whizzed by his head.

  Inanimate, but not dead. The killer, it appeared, was not as good with a pistol as he was with a knife. It was a shaken yet very much alive Arthur Marston who was shown into Tuesday’s studio an hour later. He was slightly dazed but not so much that he hesitated at all in his description of the killer they had begun calling the Secret Admirer.

  “Nose like that one, number twelve,” he said, singling it out for Tuesday from the drawings in her book. “And lips like these—” he pointed to number thirty-seven, then squinted, then said, “—no, these,” with his finger on thirty-one.

  Tuesday was feeling some apprehension as she sat down with Albert Marston, but it soon evaporated. Although he did not look like a man borne for decision and observation on the best days—and now, with his clothes at odd angles and a smudge of something on his temple, he seemed to be a prime candidate for disorientation—he turned out to have a keen memory and a good eye. Except for his darting, frequent apprehensive glances at the windows, presumably looking for assassins with pistols, everything went smoothly. There was no name-calling, there were no tears, and they were done with the sketch in forty minutes.

  The Secret Admirer was invisible no more. The attack on Mr. Marston erased any lingering doubts that the man he had seen was the killer, which meant that as she stared down at her sketch, Tuesday was staring at him. Him. This was the man who had somehow entered her mind, the man who had been watching her for weeks, the man who had killed her husband and threatened her and chased her in her dreams. She expected his face to look familiar or at least menacing. But nothing in its lines, in the combination of nose 12, lips 31, forehead probably 46 (Mr. Marston hesitated between that and number 96), and chin 5, looked sinister or even moderately strange. The Secret Admirer just looked like a man. Any man at all. He could be standing outside her window right that moment, staring at her and she wouldn’t know it.

  He was.

  He was right there as Lawrence’s men fanned out with hastily recopied versions of the sketch, right there as the daytime shadows lengthened into night, right there as the musicians left and Sir Dennis tried to bribe his new valet to bring one of the chambermaids from across the way up the back stairs “just for a little visit, is all,” right there as she and His Lordship argued briefly, then ate supper without speaking to each other. He had watched with interested amusement as Lawrence’s friend Tristan del Moro, a former thief-turned-security-expert, arrived after dark to check out the locks on the Windows in order to keep him from getting in.

  Fools. Locks were nothing to him.

  He was invisible. Just like the knights in the books with their magic rings and cloaks. Only he didn’t need any magic. He was that powerful. He could walk right in easy as you please, anywhere he wanted. Have anyone he wanted.

  But they didn’t understand that, just like they didn’t understand anything about him. Like that stupid name they were calling him. The Secret Admirer. “Secret” was alright, but he wasn’t his Lady’s admirer. He was so much more than that. Secret Lover would be better. Or Secret Knight.

  And the killings. They all take place on Tuesdays, that was what they thought. Stupid stupid stupid. Certainly it was all about his Lady, but they were miles from grasping how. Especially if she kept her little secret. He had suspected that his Lady was falling in love with him—sometimes she left her brushes arranged the way he liked, with all their hard ends sticking up, the way that made him think of—

  (Wicked boy!)

  —lances. Then other times she’d opened her curtains just when he came on the scene, as if she’d been waiting for him, at the Window. And, of course, the dreams. But it wasn’t until now that he had proof of how she was feeling. Because she wasn’t telling His Lordship everything she knew. She was protecting him, the Lion.

  She needn’t have bothered, though. They weren’t going to figure anything out. They weren’t even close. And they wouldn’t be, not before he had a chance to kill more men. He knew what they were going to find next and it was so good. So good. He wanted them to find it now, right away. Maybe he should just walk right over and—

  What are a knight’s best weapons?

  Cunning and deception.

  And? And? Answer me, dammit. Don’t look away. You worthless idiot hell cat, if you don’t say—

  Patience.

  Right. Don’t make me ask again.

  The Lion winced from the imagined blow.

  I hate you!

  He would allow his Lady and His Lordship to sleep undisturbed this one night, he decided. Lull them into security. That way it would be better when they saw what he could do. More surprising. More exciting for her.

  Besides, it looked like there might be a storm coming and he didn’t want to get his boots muddy.

  Albert Marston stood at his window, a golden bird perched on his finger, nipping at his nose.

  “She reminded me of you, Judith,” he said to the bird. “Lovely lovely lovely.”

  Judith respo
nded to the compliment by plucking his eyebrow.

  “It was a real pleasure to watch her work,” he mused on. “She is quite a good artist. And I don’t think she suspected anything.”

  Judith showed her agreement by climbing on his head.

  “No, everyone believed me completely.” He reached up and lifted the bird from his head. He cradled her in his hands for a moment, rubbing her chest with his thumbs, then circled the bird’s neck with his long fingers. Judith’s dark eyes began to dart around the room, fast, and she made a squawking noise in her throat. “Oh, don’t worry, my love,” Albert Marston said, releasing the pressure slightly. “I won’t hurt you. I love you. We do not hurt what we love.”

  He broke her neck with a clean, painless snap.

  “No, no, we never hurt what we love.”

  Chapter 17

  “I won!” Tuesday announced. “Hand them over.”

  Lawrence took three biscuits from the three neatly stacked rows in front of him and pushed them across the table toward her messy pile. In the course of the evening, Lawrence had learned that she was a dangerous card player. He had also picked up several other pieces of information about Lady Tuesday Arlington—that she had always wanted to ride an elephant, that she had once kept a snake as a pet until her father found out, that since the death of Mrs. Burns she had been the children’s surrogate mother and confidant and they arrived and left at all hours to tell her jokes or have her fix a knot or complain that their dog was missing, that she preferred him dirty and scruffy to “puffed up and ready for a royal visit,” that she had never read any of the news sheets about him—but nothing as interesting as what he had learned from CeCe earlier.