It was then that Burke, who had been baffled and hurt before, began to grow angry.
He did not know why he was angry. After all, it was not as if Kate had stolen from him, or betrayed him by running off with some other man. No, nothing like that. She had merely disappeared. Disappeared without a word, and after a night such as the one they had spent together. A night such as Burke had never experienced in his life, and he was a man who was no stranger to such delights.
But never, never in his thirty-six years, had he spent such a night as the one he’d spent with Kate. How any woman could simply walk out after having spent a night like that, he could not fathom. He could not fathom why she had left, or what he could possibly have done to drive her away. Certainly he’d been wrong about Daniel Craven—stupidly, idiotically wrong. But she’d forgiven him that. He was quite certain she’d forgiven him that the moment their mouths had met. So why? Why?
He had been, he was convinced, the most careful of lovers, conscious all the time—well, all right, not all the time. But most of the time, after that first initial thrust, that thrust that he’d felt destroy the thin fabric of her maidenhead—of her inexperience, her innocence. He had, he felt, exerted iron self-control, keeping even his climaxes, the most powerful he had ever known, in check, as much as he was able, for fear of either hurting or frightening her. She was so very young, and so very small, he’d been afraid of breaking her.
And yet, incredibly, that delicate vessel, which he had lifted as easily as one would lift a child, and held aloft with a single arm, had contained a spirit more genuinely sensual, more passionate, more giving, more everything, than any woman he had ever known.
And now she was gone, in spite of the pleasure they’d shared, in spite of the care he’d taken, even in spite of his offer of a town house and carriage, even—what could he have been thinking?—his promise of purchasing for her a bookshop. Never had he been so generous with any of his other mistresses.
But never, it had to be admitted, had he felt this way about any of his other mistresses. Or even, truth be told, his wife.
It was on the fifth day of Kate’s absence that Burke summoned the servants to him, and quizzed them, one at a time, on the chaperone’s possible whereabouts. But though their concern for the missing young woman was quite genuine, not a single one of them could tell him where Miss Mayhew might have gone. No, she had never mentioned an ill relative in their presence. In fact, she had stated quite plainly that all of her family was dead. Burke’s next move was to send Mrs. Cleary to the Sledges, and put to them—and to their servants—the same questions. It was absurd, he knew, to go canvassing the neighborhood for news about one of his own staff, but he did not see any other way to go about it. Cyrus Sledge might think it strange, but Burke didn’t give a whit what Cyrus Sledge might think. All he wanted was to find Kate Mayhew.
He did not, of course, wish to alarm his daughter, and so he kept from her, as best he was able, his concern over her chaperone’s disappearance. And Isabel, quite preoccupied with her romance with Geoffrey Saunders, only periodically said things like, “I do wish Miss Mayhew would hurry up and come home. I’ve got so many things to tell her,” and “If only that horrid relative of Miss Mayhew’s would hurry up and die so she could come back to us.” The only thing for which Burke could be grateful was that in Miss Mayhew’s absence, Isabel had not much interest in attending the dozens of functions to which she’d been invited, and did not ask her father to accompany her. It was no use, she said, going to balls without Miss Mayhew to help her with her hair. Geoffrey would quite go off her if he happened to see what a rat’s nest was growing on her head.
It was on the tenth day after Miss Mayhew’s abrupt and mysterious departure that Burke was pacing the upstairs hallway, and happened to pass by the door to her room, and notice that it was open. There were sounds of activity from within it.
With a myriad of emotions in his chest—relief that she was finally home; bitter outrage that she’d left him so coldly; and a certain amount of salacious delight at the prospect of once again hearing his name pronounced by those adorable lips—he stepped into the room, but saw only Mrs. Cleary there with one of the footmen, lowering Kate’s books into a crate. At the sound of his footstep, Mrs. Cleary looked up, and then, incredibly, blushed. Burke, who had never before seen the old woman blush, could only stare.
“Oh, my lord,” the housekeeper said, all in a rush. “I’m so sorry if we have disturbed you.”
He stared at the crate. He stared at the books in the footman’s hands. He stared at the blush on his housekeeper’s face.
“Where is she?” he asked.
He did not shout it. He did not hit anything as he said it. He merely asked it, in what he considered a quiet, reasonable voice.
“Oh, my lord.” Mrs. Cleary rose from her knees, and, wringing her plump, dimpled hands, cried, “I only just received the letter this morning. I would have shown it to you straightaway ....”
He said, again in what he considered an utterly calm voice, “Yes?”
To Mrs. Cleary, however, he did not evidently sound so calm, since she hastily thrust a hand into her apron pocket, and drew out a piece of foolscap.
“Here it is,” she said, hurrying toward him. “Right here. It’s not from Miss Mayhew, you see. But it does say she does not believe she will be able to return to London anytime soon, and begs to inform you, my lord, that you had best engage a new chaperone—”
Burke took the letter from his housekeeper’s fingers and perused it.
“I only hesitated to tell you, my lord,” Mrs. Cleary went on, “because I knew how much it was going to upset poor Lady Isabel. She was so very fond of Miss Mayhew—and I’m quite sure the feeling was mutual. Miss Mayhew never had a harsh word to say for my lady, and you know, my lord, as well as I do how she can be ... trying. Well, young girls are trying, I suppose, by nature. But I’ve never seen anyone improve as much as Lady Isabel improved once Miss Mayhew came to stay. Almost like she was a different person.”
But Burke had come to the part of the letter where an address was given, to which Mrs. Cleary was asked kindly to send the remains of Miss Mayhew’s belongings. He stared at this address for nearly a full minute while Mrs. Cleary chattered on.
“Lady Isabel’s going to take this news very hard, I’m afraid,” the housekeeper went on. “Very hard, indeed, my lord.”
But Burke hardly heard her. Because he had already turned around, and was heading out the door.
Chapter Twenty-one
The maid who answered the door stared very hard at the card Burke presented to her.
“Lord Wingate,” she said, “to see Lady Palmer. Yes, my lord. I’ll just go and see if her ladyship is in.”
Then off she scampered, her apron strings flying behind her. Burke, left standing in the morning room, briefly entertained the thought of tearing the house apart, stone by stone, until he found her. But he thought that might not ingratiate himself to his hostess.
A door was flung open a few minutes later, and an elderly, but by no means frail, woman entered the room, her neck and hands heavily bejeweled, her gown a season out of date. But then, when one had reached one’s seventies, fashion was not necessarily one’s primary concern.
“Lord Wingate,” the Dowager Lady Palmer said, coming toward him with only the lightest taps of her ivory-handled cane. “I hardly believed my eyes when Virginia handed me your card. You have some gall, young man, to come paying social calls this late in the game. You are still in disgrace, you know, from polite society, for divorcing that pretty young wife of yours. Some bootlickers might be willing to forget such an affront, especially when it happened so long ago. But not me. I consider divorce a sin, young man. A mortal sin. I don’t care how many lovers she had.”
Burke’s lips parted. What came out from between them was more of a growl than anything else.
“Where is she?”
“Where is who?” The dowager waved her cane at him. “I don
’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know very well what I’m talking about.” Burke thought he would have liked, despite the woman’s age and sex, to wrap his hands about her wobbly neck and choke her to death. “Katherine Mayhew. I know she’s here. I’ve seen the note instructing that her things be sent to this address. Now I demand that you let me see her.”
“Katherine Mayhew?” The dowager looked geuninely shocked. “Can you be so stupid as to think, just because I receive a man like yourself, who is as base as base can sink, that I would admit to my home the daughter of the man responsible for driving my husband into an early grave? You must be mad, Lord Wingate. You certainly look it. I’ve never seen any gentleman look quite so scruffy as you do at the moment. How long has it been since you shaved?”
He said only, “I know she’s here. If I have to, I will rip this place apart until I find her. But I will find her.”
The dowager snorted. “We shall see about that. Virginia! Virginia!” The pretty maid poked her head in. “Fetch Jacobs at once. I want this madman removed from my house.”
No sooner, however, had the maid closed the door, than it opened again, and the Earl of Palmer strolled in, looking annoyed.
“What’s all the infernal shoutin’ about, Mother?” he demanded. “I can hardly hear myself think.” When his gaze fell upon the marquis, his eyes widened.
Burke did not hesitate. He was across the room like a shot, his fist plunging into the younger man’s face with all the force of a blow from a blacksmith’s hammer. The earl went down, taking a small table, and the vase of flowers that had been sitting on it, with him. The dowager screamed, then promptly joined her son upon the floor in a dead faint. But Burke paid not the slightest heed. He reached down and seized Bishop by his lapels, then dragged him back to his feet.
“Where,” Burke demanded, giving him a shake, “is she?”
But the earl had only been dissembling unconsciousness. He swung round his right fist and caught Burke in the jaw with it, a full, roundhouse punch that sent the marquis staggering backward, into a sideboard filled with porcelain shepherdesses, all of which slid to the parquet with a crash.
“She isn’t here, you bastard,” Bishop said. “And even if she were, you would be the last person I’d admit it to.”
Burke, rising up from the wreckage of the Dresden shepherdesses, threw a solid punch to the younger man’s nose. It hit home, and blood flew, in a bright red arc, from the middle of Bishop’s face, and onto the pale blue sofa.
“She is here,” Burke said. He was breathing heavily by now, but he was by no means through. He might have ten years on the earl, but he was still in top fighting form. “My housekeeper had a letter from you this morning, directing that her things be shipped to this address.”
“Certainly,” Bishop said. He circled the marquis warily. “Because just this morning, I got a letter from Kate, asking me if I’d be so good as to allow her to keep her things here for a bit—”
“A likely story,” Burke said. There was an ottoman separating him from the earl, so he kicked it out of the way. It landed in the fireplace. Fortunately, as the weather was warm, there was no fire burning in the hearth. “I imagine you’d say just about anything, wouldn’t you, to keep her to yourself.”
Bishop was still backing up, holding the ends of his cravat to his streaming nose. “I would,” he said. “In fact, I’d say anything, if I thought it would keep a brute like you from her.”
This assertion earned the earl another wallop to the head that sent him tumbling back over the pale blue sofa already spattered with his blood. Burke followed, but wished he hadn’t when Bishop kicked his legs out from under him, and he landed, with a thunderous crash, on his back beside the earl.
“The truth of the matter,” Bishop said, scrambling to throw himself astride Burke’s prone body, and then wrap his hands around the marquis’s neck, “is that she isn’t here. You’re mad to think it. My mother would sooner allow Attila the Hun to spoil her guest linens than Kate Mayhew.”
Burke, struggling to break the slighter man’s grip, paused in his efforts to ask, “Why?”
“Why?” Bishop was gritting his teeth as he tried to choke the marquis to death. “How can you ask why? You know why.”
Burke, tired of the game, clubbed Bishop in the temple with his fist, knocking him against the wall, where Bishop collapsed, bleeding profusely, and breathing rather noisily. Burke, less injured, but still sore, crawled toward him, and eventually sank down to lean upon the wall beside him.
It was while the two men were slumped there, attempting to catch their breaths, that a side door was flung open, and a butler, followed by two enormous footmen, entered the room.
“My lord,” the butler said, after he’d taken in the wreckage that had once been his mistress’s morning room. “Are you in need of assistance?”
Bishop looked at Burke. “Whiskey?” he asked. Burke nodded. “Whiskey, Jacobs,” Bishop said.
The butler nodded and, with one last glance at the broken shepherdesses, heaved a shudder, then withdrew, the footmen following him with the dowager’s unconscious body cradled between them.
“Why,” Burke asked, when his breathing had grown more regular, “does your mother hate Kate?”
“You are such a fool,” Bishop said disgustedly, as he dabbed at his nose with his coat sleeve. “Do you even know Kate at all?”
“Of course I know her.” Burke was tempted to tell the younger man just how very well indeed he knew Kate, but decided that would be ignoble. And so he only said, “I know all I need to know about her.”
“Well, I would have thought you’d look into her background a little more before you hired her.”
Burke blinked at the younger man. “If you are going to tell me that Kate is a thief,” he said, feeling anger, white-hot and liquid, course through his veins again, “then all I can say is, you’re the one who doesn’t know her at all.”
“Of course she isn’t a thief,” Bishop said. “Her father’s the thief.”
Burke stared at him. “Her father?”
The door opened again, and this time the butler entered alone, carrying a silver tray on which rested a cut-crystal decanter filled with amber liquid, and two glasses. Observing that, in their tussle, they had overturned all the tables in the room, the butler knelt down upon one knee, and placed the tray on the floor beside the earl. Then he unstopped the decanter, and carefully poured out two fingers of whiskey in each glass, handing one to Bishop, and one to Burke.
“Thank you, Jacobs,” Bishop said. “Is my mother all right?”
“Fainted, my lord,” Jacobs replied. “We carried her to her room, where her maid is applying smelling salts.”
“Very good,” Bishop said. “That is all, Jacobs. You may leave the tray.”
“Certainly, sir.” The butler, climbing back to his feet, left the room, closing the door quietly behind him after a final glance at the headless shepherdesses.
“Kate’s father,” Burke prompted, after he’d swallowed most of the contents of his glass.
“Oh,” Bishop said. He sipped more cautiously than Burke, having, apparently, some loosened teeth. “Right. You mean to tell me you don’t know who her father was?”
Burke leaned his head back against the flowered wallpaper. They were sitting below a window, and outside it, he heard a bird begin to sing. “No,” he said.
“Well, does the name Peter Mayhew sound familiar?”
Burke said the name experimentally. “Peter Mayhew? Yes, actually. For some reason, it does.”
“For some reason.” Bishop rolled his eyes. “The reason it sounds familiar, Traherne, is because it was on everybody’s lips about seven years ago. At least as much as yours was, a decade before that.”
“Why?” Burke stared at the other man sarcastically. “Did he divorce his cheating wife and throw her lover out the window, as well?”
Bishop looked disgusted again. “Certainly not. Peter Mayhew was
a prominent London banker. He lived with his wife and daughter in Mayfair.”
“Mayfair?” Burke said, his eyebrows raised.
“Yes. Mayfair.” Bishop looked a bit smug. Well, as smug as a man with a recently broken nose could look. “On Pall Mall. Right next door, as a matter of fact, to this house.”
“So,” Burke said. He tried to tamp down an unreasonable desire to take the earl’s face and grind it into the floor. “You and Kate really did grow up together.”
“Correct.” Bishop reached over, unstopped the decanter again, lifted it, and poured more whiskey into Burke’s glass. “Her father handled a number of substantial accounts, including my parents’. Eight years ago, Mayhew had the misfortune to meet a young man who claimed to own a diamond mine in Africa. The only reason, according to this young man, that he had not tapped this mine was that he lacked the financial backing to do so. I did not meet this gentleman—if he was one, which I very much doubt—but Mayhew seemed to believe in his claim, strongly enough to encourage his friends and neighbors to invest in his mine.”
“Which,” Burke said, “did not exist.”
“Of course not. Mr. Mayhew’s fine young gentleman took all of his clients’ money, which included most of Mayhew’s own fortune, and absconded with it. Or at least, that was Mayhew’s story.”
“There was reason to doubt it?”
“Let’s just say there was enough reason to doubt it that several of the men who’d lost money—including my own father—felt the appropriate course of action was to take Mayhew to court.”
Burke licked his lips. They tasted salty. He realized that was because one of them was bleeding. “And?”
Bishop looked surprised. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, who won?”
Bishop blinked. “You don’t know? Kate didn’t tell you?”
Burke inhaled deeply. One one thousand, he counted. Two one thousand. Three—
“No,” he said, when he was certain he could keep himself from lunging at the younger man again. “Kate did not tell me.”
A little scandal Page 22