She watched Dunstan’s big body jerk as if she’d truly pierced him, but he wasn’t a man to bow to a woman’s words. His long, dark queue fell over his shoulder as he bent his head and brushed his hand against her cheek. She prayed he didn’t find the tear streaking toward her chin.
“Thank you.”
Without another word of warning or explanation, he strode past the footman at the door and into the street.
Desperate to follow him but knowing she mustn’t do so without aid, she turned back to glance up the stairs and discovered her whole blue-eyed, blond-haired family hovering on the landing above.
Interfering, manipulative witches they might be, but she loved the way they banded together in times of need.
With joy, she understood that they banded together for her, because they accepted and loved her just the way she was. Flying up the stairs and into her mother’s arms, she poured out the problem while the music of Felicity’s ball soared above them.
“Staines and Lord John left with Lady Mary,” Christina reported, rushing into the family parlor where everyone waited.
Crashing past a footman who was attempting to prevent his entrance into the parlor, Joseph Ives shoved his way into the family conclave. “I can’t find Viscount Handel or Henry Wickham,” he announced, “but David is following Lord John.”
Behind him sauntered Joseph’s older half brother, Ewen, accompanied by Dunstan’s son. Leila wished she could reach out and reassure the worried boy, but Griffith’s expression was as closed as Dunstan’s at his worst.
Even Ewen’s normally charming mien looked grim as he took in the gathering of Malcolms in one glance. “Drogo isn’t home. No one knows where he is.”
Leila uttered a foul curse under her breath. As magistrate over Baden, the Earl of Ives was Dunstan’s best hope of staying out of prison. “Find him,” she ordered.
“He’ll find us,” Ewen countered. “Griffith and I are riding out to Baden tonight.” He turned to meet Leila’s gaze. “Is there any message you wish me to carry?”
“That I’ll have Dunstan’s head on a platter for shutting me out,” she answered with mocking sweetness. “Wickham and his dastardly tricks do not alarm me, but tell your noble brother I’ll personally rip all his turnips out of the ground if he thinks to desert me.”
“Please, Mr. Ives.”
To Leila’s surprise, Felicity interrupted them. Even Ewen looked startled as he turned his full attention on her younger sister.
“I’m certain the secret lies in Celia’s jewels.” Felicity twisted her gloved hands together and regarded him with an earnest expression. “If you could find the green jewel, it would help tremendously.”
Her offer produced a genuine look of concern from the normally careless Ives. “We’re making every effort, Lady Felicity. And I almost forgot, I brought you a gift in honor of your come-out.” From the capacious pocket of his coat, Ewen produced a miniature mechanical toy and held it out for her.
Leila held her breath as her sensitive sister gazed on the tiny bouquet of enameled roses with longing. With one gentle finger, Felicity reached out to caress the toy. Then, smiling rapturously, she accepted the gift, touching off a pin that produced a tinkling cascade of music.
“Oh, my!” she exclaimed, holding the roses in the palm of her hand. “It’s marvelous. Thank you so very much. How does it play?”
Watching the roses dance on her glove with fascination, Ewen shrugged and tore his gaze away. “Bits of metal turning around. I need to work on the gears some more. But the flowers last longer than real ones.”
Leila doubted if the heedless Ives had any idea how unusual is was for her sister to accept objects from virtual strangers. She would ponder the oddity another time. Dunstan occupied her thoughts too fully now.
Admiring her unusual gift, Felicity looked dazed, but Ewen merely nodded at Leila, bowed his farewell to her mother, and strode out, accompanied by his brothers.
Leila frowned as Christina slipped out with the Ives men, but the younger ones apparently knew each other well. She glanced apologetically to Felicity. “I’m sorry, dear, but I have to leave you on your own. I can’t lose to stupidity the best, most boneheaded agronomist who ever lived!”
The duchess managed to look both imperious and uncertain. “There is no chance that he is truly a wife murderer?” she demanded.
“None, Aunt Stella. You have my word and Ninian’s. Both of us cannot be wrong.”
“Then we must go on as if nothing has happened.” Stella tugged her sister’s lace neckerchief back into place. “Come along, Hermione, Felicity, we will be missed.” Frowning, she glanced about. “Where is Christina? Lord Harry will be looking for her.”
“Lord Harry left earlier,” Felicity whispered, throwing Leila a glance, then following her aunt toward the door. “Perhaps Christina has gone to find him.”
Leila sighed in relief as her shy sister diverted the attention of their mother and aunt, and they returned to the safety of the ballroom.
Sweeping past the footman at the door, seeing no sign of either Ives or Christina in the hall, she fled to her chamber to change from her ball gown into traveling clothes.
Leila slipped down the back hall, away from the laughing, chattering guests departing at the front. She’d donned her blacks again, to better hide in shadows.
She couldn’t wait until the ball ended, not if Dunstan and the others were already on the road to Baden.
She knew that this so-called witness must be part of an evil plot. She simply could not imagine how the villains planned to perpetrate it, or why. Or even who the villains were. Wickham might have become deranged with grief over the loss of his brother, but he’d had no reason to murder Celia.
Leila gasped as a shadow darted out of a gateway and fell into step beside her. She would have thought it another young Ives were it not for the scent. “Christina! What on earth are you wearing?”
“Breeches,” her sister replied. “It is the safest way to travel. You really ought to try it. The freedom is wonderful.”
“I do not have the time or presence of mind to reprimand you and explain why you’re mad to go about like that. Go home, where you belong.” Reaching the side street, Leila gathered her skirts and hastened toward the waiting carriage.
“I’ll ride beside the driver. Moonlight isn’t enough for him, but I can see even better at night. Lots of things have auras.”
“Only living things have auras,” Leila argued, but her sister was already stopping to talk with a gentleman who was opening the carriage door. She squinted in the darkness to discern the man’s identity. “Lord Handel?” she asked in surprise.
He bowed. “Lady Leila. I tried to catch Dunstan before he departed, but he was too far ahead of me. Would you know how I might get a message to him tonight?”
The man’s heady perfume covered a scent of anxiety and concern. She was learning to sort scents and pay more attention. Biting her lip against her fear, Leila nodded. “I am following him to Baden. What may I tell him?”
Handel studied her, then apparently concluded she meant well. “Sir Barton Townsend argued with young David Ives over a rather large gem he wore in his cravat this evening. The baron then spoke with Henry Wickham and Lord John. I could hear only part of the conversation, but it seems the stone greatly resembles one that Celia Ives flaunted frequently. Sir Barton seemed to be accusing the other two of lying to him, but I could not catch more than that.”
“And what has this to do with Dunstan?” she asked.
“I cannot say for certain, but I followed Wickham to a pawnshop not far from here. The shopkeeper would not let me in after Wickham left, so I could not question him. I’ll do so in the morning. If you would just relay the message?”
“I shall.”
If, that is, she caught up with the wretched Ives before he got himself killed.
Still in his fashionable evening clothes, Dunstan arrived in Baden-on-Lyme just before dawn. Cursing the haste that prevente
d him from changing into more suitable attire, he swung down off the horse he’d borrowed from Drogo’s stable and handed the reins over to a sleepy groom.
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled as he stared up at the aging inn where Celia had been found with her neck snapped. Once upon a time he had come here regularly to drown his sorrows in the tavern. They knew him here. The innkeeper’s livelihood depended on Drogo and the Ives estate. That alone should keep them silent.
But did their silence hide an ugly truth?
Striding up the stairs into the inn, he prepared to face the consequences of whatever had occurred the night of Celia’s death.
He found the lobby empty and unlit. Taking a bench in the tavern that most suited his breadth, he found a hollow in the wall that fit his shoulders, sprawled his legs across the wooden bench to a chair beyond, and closed his eyes.
He woke to a slash of sunlight across his eyelids, a cock crowing, and the unsettling sensation of people staring at him. A crick in his neck told him he wasn’t in his bed, and the nervous twisting of his stomach reminded him of the night past. Setting his jaw, Dunstan donned his most stubborn expression and opened his eyes.
He recognized the local constable first. Gray-haired and portly, the man twisted his hat between his fingers.
Dunstan swallowed a lump of fear at the memory of waking up this same way the morning after Celia’s death. At least this time he did not wake with an aching head.
Twisting his stiff neck slightly to the left, Dunstan registered Henry Wickham’s sneer. No surprise there. Beyond Wickham stood a third man—a simpleton who did odd jobs around the village. Dunstan had given the boy a coin or two upon occasion to watch his horse. The lad was harmless enough, and not smart enough to lie, but he might be susceptible to suggestion.
Shoving away from the wall, Dunstan stood, towering over all of them. He experienced a twinge of satisfaction when the effete Wickham backed off. Attempting to look nonchalant, Dunstan glanced down at his fancy evening coat, brushed off some of the travel dirt, then raised an inquiring eyebrow at the constable. “You have something you wish to say?”
“I’m sorry, sir. There’s an inquiry ’as been made. I’m to ask if you know to whom this here button belongs.” The constable held out a glittering gold button with the Ives coat of arms embossed upon it.
Only one person in the world had been foolish enough to revive that ancient insignia. Celia. She’d discovered it with a childish cry of delight and immediately ordered it attached to every piece of paraphernalia her imagination could dictate—including the buttons of her mantle.
Dunstan experienced a burning sensation in the back of his eyes as he remembered Celia flashing her gold buttons in the sunlight, laughing with pleasure.
They’d carried her body home in that mantle the day she died.
Dunstan clenched his fists and met the constable’s eyes squarely. “My late wife had buttons similar to that. Where did you find it?”
Outside, horses clattered and wheels squeaked, signaling the arrival of a carriage in the yard. Feminine cries distracted his audience. They turned as one to look out the wavy panes of the bow window.
Apparently too impatient to wait for a footman to pull down the steps of the coach, a lady in black threw open the door and leapt down.
A lady in black. Dunstan swore a silent curse as the renewed pain of Celia’s death mixed with humiliation and shame. If the worst happened and they proved he’d killed Celia, he wanted to remember Leila laughing and dancing and flashing him a taunting smile in a fancy ballroom. He didn’t want her here.
“Where did you get the button?” Dunstan repeated harshly, forcing the others to tear their gazes from the window.
He heard Leila enter the foyer, heard the imperious command of her voice to the innkeeper, and wished himself to the devil. More male voices joined the argument. He thought he recognized Lord John’s, but not the others.
He scowled at the constable, who gulped and hurried to speak.
“Paulie ’ere says as you gave it to ’im the night the lady died. Paulie isn’t much of one for lyin’.” The constable watched him hopefully, waiting for an explanation.
Paulie had a button wrenched from Celia’s mantle. Before the day of Celia’s death, Dunstan hadn’t been near his wife or her clothing in months. But he’d given the button to Paulie.
He’d been beyond furious that night. He’d had a man’s blood on his hands because of her. She had laughed. Could he have reached for her? Ripped the button off?
Dunstan took a deep breath as he sensed Leila’s entrance. For her sake, and that of his children, he couldn’t believe himself capable of violence. “I was drunk when I saw her last, as I’ve told you,” he replied coldly. “She could have thrown the thing at me for all I remember.” He didn’t remember her throwing anything, but then he didn’t remember her dying not twenty feet away from him either.
“You give it to me when you woke up,” Paulie said excitedly. “It was in your hand, ’member?”
“There was buttons tore off the lady’s cloak,” the constable confirmed. “P’raps they came off and you found ’em at ’ome?”
“I would have left them at home if so.” Celia hadn’t been home to lose them there. Dunstan struggled to remain calm in the face of the evidence against him. Celia hadn’t been wearing a cloak when he’d seen her, had she?
The constable watched Dunstan, his brow crumpled in worry. “She was wearin’ the cloak when we found her dead, sir.”
Crushed between guilt and doubt on one side and fear for Leila on the other, Dunstan sought a way to end this humiliating scene, but he wasn’t an imaginative man and couldn’t think like a murderer. “Celia wasn’t wearing a cloak when I saw her,” he replied.
From the doorway, the stout innkeeper stepped forward, twisting his thick fingers in his apron. “She were wearin’ it when we looked up to see why a door come flyin’ down the stairs, milord. She stood there in the doorway, laughin’ her head off.”
Still refusing to look at the woman in the entrance, Dunstan bit back a hasty retort and worded his reply carefully. “She couldn’t have been. I was in her way.”
“Warn’t no sign of you, milord, although we’d heard you bellerin’ earlier, the ways you do.”
“Then I must have already left.” But he couldn’t remember leaving. And he’d been found in the hall just outside her door. Surely someone would have seen him leave?
“She was talkin’ to you when she turned around and went back in the room.” The innkeeper wouldn’t look Dunstan in the eye. “She was wearin’ a big green necklace when I seed her last. She warn’t wearin’ it when we found her dead.”
“He murdered her in a violent fit of jealousy, Constable,” Wickham said with satisfaction. “He killed my brother, and now we have proof he killed his wife as well. I should imagine if you search his house, you’ll find Celia’s necklace there.”
Dunstan’s empty stomach clenched at this new information. Celia always wore gaudy jewelry. He never noticed such things, but in all likelihood she’d been wearing the gems when he’d seen her. Could robbery have been the motive? How the hell would he find out?
“Wickham is a coward and a liar!” Leila cried from the doorway. “Dunstan would never harm a soul.”
He didn’t want her involved in this. He’d ruined her reputation enough as it was. If she tried defending him now or using her witchy talents to hunt for murderers, she would only endanger herself and the child.
Dunstan finally allowed himself a glance at the woman who had given him something so beautiful he could place no name upon it. “Leila, go back to your family and stay out of it.” Her eyes flashed blue fire, but he knew she was listening. “Let me handle this my way.”
“You don’t know what evil they’ve plotted,” she protested.
“It’s not your concern,” he answered, willing her to heave things at him and leave in a huff. But his Leila was above Celia’s histrionics. When she merely
looked stubborn, he turned back to the constable.
“Lady Leila is an excellent judge of character. You would do well to listen to her and not to a man who wears hatred like a cross. Look after her, and I will do whatever you request.”
“I’ll send for the earl,” the constable said anxiously. “He’ll know what’s best to do.” Throwing Leila a worried look, the burly man caught Dunstan’s elbow and led him past her to the door.
“We’re sending for a London magistrate,” Wickham cried. “The earl cannot judge his own brother.”
“Go home, Leila,” Dunstan whispered as she lifted terrified eyes to his. “I will do nothing until you leave.”
Ignoring the grief and hurt in her expression, he strode out without a backward look.
Twenty-seven
Rage warred with terror in her breast, but Leila would not give Wickham the satisfaction of seeing either. Facing his knowing smirk, she drew herself up haughtily. “You are a vile coward, sir. If you have some grievance with Dunstan, you should call him out in a fair fight. Hiding behind the words of a simpleton is the mark of a villain.”
“Ives doesn’t know the meaning of a fair fight.” The voice came from behind her.
Leila swung around as Lord John entered the tavern, followed by Sir Barton. Remembering that Dunstan’s brothers had promised to follow them, she glanced beyond the door. Joseph Ives was there, lounging in a chair in the hall. He looked tired, dusty, and disgusted. He’d apparently heard more than enough. She judged from his balled-up fists that he was feeling as frustrated as she was.
In her pocket lay the vial of perfume she’d made for Lord John. She fingered the small glass tube, wishing she could think how to make use of it.
She wanted to order Joseph to stay with Dunstan, but the smell of triumph and wickedness distracted her. She could not apply the scents to the facts she knew. She could smell guilt, but no doubt these men were guilty of many things.
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