Nicola Cornick Collection

by Nicola Cornick

  Which was not the matter on which he was supposed to be concentrating his attention.

  “We’re hunting dangerous criminals here, Rothbury,” Lord Sidmouth had warned him when he had offered Owen the role of special investigator for the Home Office. “No bloody respect for law and order.” He had tapped a rather fine caricature that was lying on his desk, a drawing that had evidently been crumpled by Sidmouth’s angry and impatient hand. “Treason,” the Home Secretary had grumbled. “Sedition. Stirring up trouble, inciting the masses to riot. I’ll see them all hang.” His brows had snapped down. “You’re a British peer now, Rothbury, even if we had to pass an Act of Parliament to make you so.” He drummed his fingers on the cartoon. “Need your help against these traitors.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Owen had said, a little grimly. The irony was not lost on him. Once, not so long ago, Sidmouth would have had no hesitation in branding him a renegade and a criminal. As an American he had been an enemy of the British state when the two countries were at war. That was before he had inherited a British peerage and turned into a slightly unlikely pillar of the establishment. He owed it to his family to uphold their honour now. Once before he had disgraced the family name under the most appalling circumstances. He would never do it again. Accepting his responsibilities now was his chance to atone.

  Tess Darent shifted within the depths of the carriage, drawing his attention back to her as she pulled the peacock feather cloak more closely about her. Owen could smell her perfume, a crisp light scent, tart but sweet, rather like Tess herself. It was perfect for her, pretty and provocative, another element of her charming and flirtatious facade. Owen wondered what it was that she was hiding. Her wide-eyed pretence would fool nine out of ten men into believing her to be every inch as superficial as she appeared. It was a pity for her that he was the tenth and did not believe a word.

  He had no grounds on which to arrest her, however. Visiting a brothel was not illegal and nor was carrying a pistol, and if she was a secret radical then he was the Queen of Sheba. The idea was absurd.

  “Good night, Lady Darent.” He kept one hand on the carriage door. “I wish you a safe journey home.”

  “And I wish you good luck in catching your miscreants.” Tess’s eyes were very wide and innocent. “What did you call them—madrigals?”

  “Radicals,” Owen said gently.

  “Whichever.” She made a little fluttering gesture with her hands. Her expression was blank. She even yawned. Owen wondered if she could possibly be as vacant as she seemed. If not, she was certainly an extremely good actress.

  “Pray give my best wishes to Lord … Sidmouth, was it?” She paused. “Is he rich? Married?”

  “Not at the moment,” Owen said.

  Tess smiled. “Rich or married?” she queried.

  “Yes, Sidmouth is rich and, no, he is not currently married,” Owen clarified.

  Tess’s smile deepened. “Then I should like to make his acquaintance.”

  “You’re looking for another husband for your collection?” Owen said ironically.

  “Marriage is my natural state,” Tess said. “Is Sidmouth old?”

  Owen laughed. “Probably not old enough to be relied on to die anytime soon.”

  “A pity,” Tess said. “I always find that a useful attribute in a husband.” Her blue eyes mocked him, sweeping over him from head to foot in knowing appraisal. “What about you, Lord Rothbury?” she asked. “Are you seeking a rich wife to go with your pretty title? I hear that your coffers hold nothing but moths.”

  “The gossip mongers have been busy,” Owen said shortly.

  “It is their function,” Tess said. “Just as it is the job of every matron with an eligible daughter to parade her under your nose.”

  “I don’t seek a wife at present,” Owen said. His feelings felt raw. Odd that Tess Darent’s clear blue gaze should, for a moment, strip away his defences. It was common knowledge that he had no fortune to go with his title. Only that morning he had had an awkward interview with his great-aunt by marriage, one of a host of elderly relatives his inheritance had also blessed him with. Lady Martindale was obscenely rich, eccentric and fearsomely opinionated. She had told Owen that if he wed, she would give him sufficient money to put his estates in order and would make him her heir. Owen knew he had reacted to her commands like a small, obstinate child; he had no wish to take a wife simply because Lady Martindale demanded it, and the alternative, to seek a rich heiress, was equally abhorrent to him. He had never yet met an eligible woman who did not bore him.

  Except for Tess Darent. She was not precisely eligible but she certainly did not bore him.

  The thought caught him by surprise.

  Tess was watching him. Owen observed that she had the same lavender-blue eyes as her sister Joanna and the same heart-shaped face. Her hair was a few tones lighter than Joanna’s, red-gold instead of golden-brown, but the darkness of the carriage smoothed out all subtleties of shading. Years before, Owen had had something of a passion for Joanna Grant, before she had had the bad taste to prefer his best friend, Alex, to him. Now he felt something move and shift in his chest, a pang of sensation as though his emotions were playing games with him. His rational mind knew that Tess and Joanna were very different women, but gut instinct and desire were not so logical, nor so biddable. He could remember when he had first seen Tess and had been winded by the physical likeness between the two sisters. But Tess Darent was not her sister. He needed to remember that. He could not have the one and he did not want the other, except in the most fundamental physical sense because she was a very desirable woman.

  He released the door and gave the driver the word to move off, watching the hackney carriage as it disappeared into the dark. He had the strangest instinct that he had missed something important but he could not put his finger on what it might have been. Shaking off the sensation, Owen strolled back up the white stone steps and into the chequered hallway of the brothel. The last few dragoons were leaving; their captain, a sour-looking man with a permanently pained expression saluted Owen grimly. Owen knew the regular troops disliked having to work with Sidmouth’s special investigators.

  “Don’t mind Captain Smart,” his friend Garrick Farne said in his ear. “He took shrapnel in the groin at Salamanca so a raid on a brothel is a particular type of torture for him.”

  “Poor fellow,” Owen said feelingly. “Did you find anything useful?” he added.

  “Not much, I’m afraid,” Garrick said. “If any of the leaders of the Jupiter Club fled this way they are already gone.”

  Owen shrugged. “It was always going to be a long shot.”

  He was accustomed to playing a long game. This sort of work was different from anything he had done before, but it required some of the same qualities of patience and resourcefulness and cool-headedness. It was not the same as exploring or sailing or fighting for his country, or any of the other things that Owen had done since he was old enough to make his way in the world, but it was still a challenge. The only thing Owen knew was that without a challenge, without action, he would fossilise. He might have accepted the responsibilities of his role but he could not see himself becoming the classic English aristocrat, wedded to his club and his country estates, settling into a life of luxurious emptiness. He had too much of his American heritage in his blood, the desire to carve his own future, the need to achieve.

  “No sign of Tom either, presumably,” he added.

  Garrick shook his head. “I’ll keep looking.”

  Garrick had accompanied him that night because there were rumours that his errant half-brother, Tom Bradshaw, had been heard of back in London, and with connections to the radical movement. Tom, Duke’s bastard son and master criminal, had wed an heiress the year before and then promptly abandoned her, absconding with her fortune and leaving her ruined. This on top of Tom’s attempt to ruin Garrick and murder his wife, Merryn, the year before had been enough to send Lord Sidmouth into near apoplexy. The Home Secretary ha
d decreed that noblemen who had the misfortune to have such disreputable relatives should hunt them down and see them stand trial. Garrick had agreed, although his motives were more straightforward, Owen suspected. Tom had tried to kill the woman Garrick loved and he would move heaven and earth to capture him.

  “Was there anything else of interest?” Owen queried.

  “This isn’t the place for a happily married man,” Garrick said, smiling. “I had to avert my gaze on more than one occasion but despite my impaired vision I did find these.” He held up a shirt, a jacket and pair of trousers. “No one is claiming them though, particularly as there was this in the jacket pocket.” On the palm of his hand he held a wicked-looking knife with a carved ivory grip and a thistle design on the blade.

  Owen’s brows shot up. “Very nice,” he murmured. He picked up the dagger and felt the worn handle slip smoothly into his palm. The knife was light but deadly sharp, with beautiful balance. “We might be able to trace this,” he said, “if we ask around.”

  Garrick nodded. “And even nicer …” He put his hand in his pocket and extracted a set of crumpled papers, unfolding them and passing them to Owen. “I found these in one of the chambers upstairs, hidden beneath a pile of underwear in a dresser. The old bawd swears blind she had no idea they were there and there’s no budging her from her story. She says one of her guests must have left them.”

  Owen looked at the cartoons. They were stunningly executed, conjuring a vivid image in only a few stark lines. One was a particularly cruel but accurate caricature of Lord Sidmouth as a hot-air balloon. The other showed a posse of dragoons trampling men, women and children beneath the hooves of their horses. The banner overhead read Freedom is Not Free. Owen grimaced at the sheer visceral shock and power of the picture. Something in it seemed to grab him by the throat. In the corner of each drawing was the signature of the cartoonist, a loopy black scrawl that simply read Jupiter. He let his breath out on a soundless whistle. “So Jupiter was hiding here,” he said slowly.

  Garrick nodded. “It would seem so. Powerful propaganda, these cartoons,” he added. “It is no wonder that Sidmouth hates them.”

  Owen nodded. “They are dangerous,” he said. “An incitement to violence.”

  He pushed the cartoons into his pocket. The pile of clothes on the floor caught his attention and he stirred it with one booted foot. An evocative scent hung for a moment on the air, crisp and fresh, with a perfume he recognised. He squatted down and picked up the shirt, feeling the fine quality of the linen against his fingers.

  So now he knew what Tess had been wearing when she arrived at the brothel. Had she come there incognito because she did not want the ton to hear that she disported herself in a bawdy house? Or was her choice of clothing all part of a sensual game? Did she enjoy having a lover peel off those layers of masculine attire before he made love to her?

  Owen thought of Tess Darent’s body beneath his hands as he had lifted her down from the rope, the flare of her hips and the delicate curve of her waist. He thought of the heat of her skin through the slippery silk of the lavender gown, then he thought of what she might look like with those curves confined within the stark lines of the jacket and trousers, the thin cotton of the shirt pressing against her breasts. He raised the shirt to his nose, inhaled a long, deep breath and felt his senses fill with Tess, with her scent and her essence. Once again he was impaled by a jolt of lust that was hot and fierce and utterly uncomplicated.

  “If you have an imagination, Lord Rothbury, now would be the time to use it….”

  Owen, who had had no notion before tonight that he was such an imaginative man, found that imagination positively running riot.

  “I met your sister-in-law just now,” he said abruptly to Garrick.

  Garrick, unsurprisingly, looked completely floored for a moment by the apparent non sequitur. “Joanna—Lady Grant—is here?”

  “Is that likely?” Owen said. “No. I was referring to Lady Darent. I found her out in the street, shinning down a makeshift rope from one of the bedrooms upstairs.”

  Garrick’s face spilt into a grin. “Oh, I see. Yes, that sounds exactly the sort of thing Tess would do. She is thoroughly scandalous. She had probably been enjoying an orgy.”

  Owen grimaced. He had only just managed to force his imagination away from the vision of Tess naked beneath the thin cotton shirt and now he found his mind had filled with an entirely new and darker set of imagery representing the way she might have disported herself here in the brothel tonight. Tess, pale limbs spread in abandoned wantonness, her cloud of red-gold hair fanning over her shoulders, Tess tied naked across a bed … He swallowed hard and fixed his gaze on the middle distance in an attempt to distract his mind. Unfortunately the middle distance consisted of a painting of a nude nymph and a group of lavishly endowed gentlemen indulging in a riotous orgy. Owen raised a hand to ease the constriction of his neckcloth. Evidently the lewd atmosphere of the bawdy house was turning his mind.

  He wrenched his thoughts away from wayward visions of Tess and turned to find Garrick watching him closely, his gaze narrowed, perceptive. “Do you have an interest there?” Garrick asked.

  Owen ran a distracted hand through his hair. “In Lady Darent? I’d be a fool if I had.”

  “Which,” Garrick said, smiling faintly, “doesn’t quite answer the question, does it? Those Fenner girls,” he added, shaking his head, “could make a fool of any man.”

  “I know,” Owen said. “Born to drive a man to perdition.” He cast a last glance around the hallway. “I have to get out of here,” he said. “It’s doing strange things to my mind.”

  “Or you could stay,” Garrick said, with an expressive lift of the brows.

  Owen gestured towards where Mrs. Tong was leaning over the wrought-iron balcony on the first floor and watching them with a great deal of venom in her dark, disillusioned eyes.

  “I think we have already outstayed our welcome,” he murmured. “That basilisk stare would be sufficient to wither the most ardent man.”

  “White’s, then,” Garrick said, “and the brandy bottle?”

  “Capital,” Owen said. He bent to pick up the pile of clothing from the floor. Tess’s scent was growing fainter now. He remembered Garrick saying that the knife had been found in the jacket pocket. So Tess carried both a knife and a pistol. That was interesting. He wondered why she carried them and what she was afraid of. He wondered if she knew how to use them.

  Then there were the cartoons, found hidden in a chamber on the second floor, Garrick had said. Tess’s resourceful escape down the sheet rope had been from just such a room….

  Owen felt the strange prickle of sensation again, an instinct, stronger this time, that he had missed something obvious, something that had been right beneath his nose. A thought slid into his mind, a thought that was so outrageous, so unbelievable, that it stole his breath. It told him that he had been played by a master hand, that he had been misdirected and fooled. He had believed what was before his eyes. He had not questioned it. He had met a notorious widow climbing out of a brothel window and he had believed her when she had pretended to be running away to avoid scandal.

  Owen recalled Tess Darent claiming not to know who Lord Sidmouth was and professing pretty ignorance of the radical movement. She had claimed to be in a hurry to get home and sleep off her sexual excesses.

  In truth she had been in a hurry to escape.

  He let the clothes slip through his fingers and instead took the cartoons from his pocket once more and scanned them. There was nothing, he thought, to say that Jupiter, the witty and dangerous caricaturist, had to be a man. Sidmouth had simply made that assumption, assumed also that the members of the Jupiter Club were exclusively male. But Jupiter could well be a pseudonym for a woman, the type of woman who carried a pistol in her reticule and attended radical meetings dressed in masculine attire. A woman who hid behind her reputation for scandal and pretended to be as light and superficial as a butterfly….


  It seemed impossible. And yet …

  Owen let out a long breath. No one would believe him, of course. Lord Sidmouth would laugh him out of town if he suggested that Jupiter was the infamous Dowager Marchioness of Darent. The evidence was no more than circumstantial. Even so, Owen was sure that his instinct was right. He had wondered what it was that Teresa Darent was hiding. Now he knew. All he had to do was to prove it.

  LADY EMMA BRADSHAW HAD just returned from the meeting of the Jupiter Club and was standing with one hand on the latch of her tiny cottage, listening to the fading sound of her brother’s carriage as it rumbled away down the hill towards the city, when a man materialised out of the darkness beside her, flung open the door and bundled her over the threshold. He had one arm locked tight about her waist and his hand over her mouth. It was so sudden and so shocking that Emma had no time to cry out. She struggled and fought, necessarily in silence, kicked him and bit him, and then equally suddenly, she stopped fighting because she had recognised his scent and his touch. Vicious shock flared through her; her knees buckled, she sagged in his arms and he let her go.

  “Tom,” Emma said. Her voice was hoarse. Tom Bradshaw, her husband, here, six months after he had deserted her and left her alone, penniless and with no word….

  The shock faded and she waited to feel something else in its place, anger perhaps, or disbelief or even love. Anything. Anything but this cold chill that seemed to encase her heart.

  The cocky smile that she remembered was gone from Tom’s lips. He looked older, not merely because of the pallor of his face and the deep lines that scored it, but because there was something different about him, some knowledge in his eyes that had not been there before, something of pain and suffering. He was emaciated, as though he had been ill. He did not try to touch her again or even to draw any closer to her. He stood just inside the door, watching her with wariness and a longing that did make Emma’s heart contract. She had never expected to see Tom look so vulnerable.