Not in the least. He was using it as an excuse for why he stayed sane.
Or he tried to, anyway. The fact that he found the possibility of losing her to be alarming wasn’t a good sign. He told himself he was only worried about her safety, about the possibility that the arse who’d blown up her laboratory might show up here and try to harm her.
But the truth was, he didn’t want her to leave with her stepmother. In the course of telling Gwyn about his offer of marriage, he’d grown used to the words “engaged” and “betrothed.” And especially the word “wife.” Mad as it might be, he rather liked the idea of having Olivia as his wife.
The drawing room door opened to reveal Lady Norley with her arm around Olivia’s shoulders.
Thorn walked in, his heart hammering oddly in his chest. “Well? Will I be making a trip to London to meet with the baron or not?”
“You will,” Olivia said, rather smugly.
Thank God. “In that case, Lady Norley, would you be so kind as to join us for dinner this evening? Gwyn and I would also be happy to have you—and Miss Norley, of course—as our guests for the night, assuming you’ve brought sufficient clothes for that.”
“I’d be delighted to stay.” Lady Norley patted Olivia’s shoulder. “I’ve missed having my dear girl around for the past several days.”
He nodded to Gwyn, who hurried off to consult with his cook about that evening’s menu.
Olivia smiled at her stepmother. “Now that I’ve finished my experiments, Mama, I can go home with you tomorrow.” She looked at him. “If that’s all right with His Grace, that is.”
“Whatever you wish to do is fine. But I’ll accompany you both to London.” When Olivia shot him an odd look, he added, “So I can gain the baron’s permission to marry you, of course.” There was no way in hell he would risk having Olivia caught in their villain’s snare, especially since he still had no idea who their villain was.
“Lady Norley,” he went on, “I do need to discuss one more matter with you while my sister is out of earshot.” He walked over to the settee. “Please, have a seat. You too, Miss Norley.”
Soon to be the Duchess of Thornstock. His duchess. How odd was it that those words sounded amazingly satisfying?
When they were all three seated, he said, “When you told me years ago about my father’s mistress, to whom were you referring? And how reliable was your source of that knowledge?”
Lady Norley colored deeply. “I’m afraid I may have . . . er . . . exaggerated a bit about how much I knew.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, leaning forward.
“I mean it was plain old gossip. Something bandied about in society that no one had proof of.”
“Mama!” Olivia said. “You trumped up false information just to blackmail Thorn into offering for me?”
The baroness thrust out her chin. “I don’t know for sure that it was false, just that it wasn’t necessarily . . . well . . . true.”
Olivia shook her head, obviously none too happy with her stepmother’s answer.
Thorn was, however. He sat back, feeling his heart lighten for the first time in a long while. But he couldn’t bask in it. He still had to uncover the truth. “So you didn’t get the information from my mother.”
“No,” she said firmly. “Your mother wouldn’t ever have said a bad word about your father. She adored him.”
“That’s not in question,” Thorn said. “What I need to know is did he adore her?”
“I believe he did. It’s difficult for me to say for sure,” she said archly, “given that I’ve never experienced such a thing, but he did seem to adore her.”
Thorn let out a breath. All these years of thinking his mother had either outright lied to him or had been deceived, and it was based on nothing but rumor and innuendo. Coupled with what the constable had told him, it solidified his conviction that his father had done nothing to deserve whatever nonsense the rumormongers had been spreading about him in his final days on this earth. “Can you tell me who the gossips believed was his mistress?”
This time Lady Norley looked positively mortified. “She’s a friend of your mother’s, actually, and was at your sister’s ball. Eliza. Lady Hornsby.”
“Lady Hornsby,” he repeated. “With my father? Did you . . . ever see anything between them that might have lent credence to the rumor?”
“Not really. He did court her briefly when she was still Miss Rundle and your mother was preparing to marry the Duke of Greycourt. That was the seed of the rumor, I believe, that began growing once Eliza and your mother had married their respective husbands. In fact, I think Eliza might have introduced your mother to your father a few years later. But beyond that, I don’t know.”
“It’s unusual for such a young, respectable woman to be rumored to be anyone’s mistress, so why did people even believe it possible?”
Lady Norley shrugged. “Eliza was always rather fast. I mean, there’s a reason people call her a merry widow behind her back. But she doesn’t care. She does as she pleases. Always did.”
“An admirable trait,” Olivia muttered under her breath.
Thorn stifled a laugh before turning to Lady Norley. “So you really don’t think there was anything going on between her and my father.”
“I doubt it. Eliza was already married to Lord Hornsby by then, and I don’t think he would have tolerated any misbehavior on the part of his wife, if you know what I mean. Though she didn’t have to put up with the old devil for long. He died only a few years into their marriage as I recall.”
Thorn looked at Olivia, whose quick glance told him they were thinking the same thing: that it was odd how Lady Hornsby’s husband had died so soon after their marriage.
“What did he die of, Mama?” Olivia asked.
“Oh, I don’t recall.” She waved her hand. “An ague perhaps?”
“There was a lot of that going around, I take it,” Thorn said dryly.
“Honestly, I’m not sure,” Lady Norley said. “But he was quite old when he married Eliza. She was his second wife, you see. He was in his seventies, I believe.”
“And she was twenty-something,” Olivia pointed out. “Poor woman, to be married to a man fifty years her senior.”
Poor woman, indeed. Unless she made a habit of getting rid of husbands—sometimes not her own.
“In any case, Duke,” Lady Norley said, “I hope you realize what a good woman you’re gaining for a wife. Olivia may be an unusual young lady, but she will be loyal to you.”
“Rather like a basset hound,” Olivia said, the corners of her eyes crinkling with merriment.
Her stepmother snorted. “That wasn’t what I meant, dear, and you know it.”
“I’m just teasing you, Mama.”
She was teasing him. But he didn’t care. He’d gained her hand in marriage. And he found that more satisfying than he’d expected.
He was just basking in that knowledge when he heard a commotion in the hall.
“I won’t do it!” a young man shouted. “And you can’t make me!”
“I can bloody well make you do whatever I please if you want to escape the gallows.”
Thorn recognized the second voice as that of Gwyn’s husband. Before Thorn could do more than rise from the settee, Major Wolfe was entering the drawing room with a young man whose hands were tied together behind him.
“We found the villain you were looking for, Thorn.” Wolfe shoved the lad forward. “This is Elias. He’s the fellow who blew up Miss Norley’s laboratory.”
Chapter Fifteen
Olivia stared at the culprit in disbelief. The man had to be younger than she—a fellow barely the age to shave, much less blow up anything.
She rose from her seat. “Why would you do such a thing, sir? I’ve never even seen you before, and I certainly haven’t done anything to you. So why would you try to kill me?”
“This, Elias, is Miss Norley,” Major Wolfe said. “The woman whose laboratory you destroyed.”
> Elias paled. “I swear I didn’t try to kill nobody.”
“But you do admit you were the one to decimate her laboratory,” Major Wolfe prodded.
“I don’t know about no decimating, whatever that is,” Elias said hastily. “I was only told to throw things about and make it hard for the lady to keep on with her experiments. Nobody warned me some of them things could catch fire all by themselves. I got out right quick when that happened. But I barely got shut of it before all hell broke loose. Then ’twas like Guy Fawkes Day behind me, with explosions and flames up to the sky.”
Mama jumped to her feet to wag her finger at Elias. “You awful creature, you! That’s my daughter you nearly murdered!”
Olivia took her by the arm. “Perhaps, Mama, you should go upstairs and get some rest. You traveled far this morning, and I’m sure you could use a nap. I daresay His Grace has already ordered your room to be made ready, and his servants are in the process of bringing up your trunk.”
“Absolutely,” Thorn said. “It’s being handled as we speak. All you need do is walk in.” When her stepmother hesitated, Thorn added, “We promise we’ll tell you everything we learn. But I fear this scoundrel’s tale will only upset you.”
“To say the least.” She glanced from Olivia to Thorn, then muttered, “Although I am tired after all this excitement,” and allowed Thorn to call for a servant to take her to her room. But before she left, she fixed Thorn with a dark look. “You make sure that wicked chap gets what’s coming to him.”
“Don’t worry, I have every intention of doing so,” Thorn told her. “His deeds will not go unpunished.”
Apparently, Thorn had thought Olivia would go, too, because he looked surprised when she didn’t accompany her mother and the servant upstairs. When he made some token protest, Olivia said, “The lad destroyed my laboratory and could have killed me and Lord knows who else. I’m staying.”
Thorn acquiesced, but he looked none too happy about it. At the moment Olivia didn’t care. This was her life, and she had to make sure nothing like this ever happened again—to her or to anyone.
“Like I said,” Elias told Olivia, jutting out his chin, “I wasn’t looking to kill nobody. And I damned well know you weren’t in or about there, miss, when I first broke in, on account of I waited until you left.”
A chill swept through her. “You mean, all the while I was working, you were watching me? How dare you?” It was enough to make her want to lock herself in her home and never leave. She marched up to poke him in the chest. “You had no right, curse you!”
Frowning at her, he rubbed his chest where she’d poked him. “P’raps not, but that’s how I know you weren’t in no danger of being blowed up.”
With fire in his eyes, Thorn stalked over to put himself between Olivia and Elias. “You got lucky, that’s all,” he growled at the young man. “If that laboratory had been closer to other structures, we could still be pulling bodies from buildings.”
The words made Olivia shiver. Because if Elias had been heedless enough to try and destroy the laboratory here, too, he very well could have set the entirety of Rosethorn on fire.
“I could’ve put the lady in danger if I’d wanted,” Elias protested. “I was told to destroy the place whether or no she was there, but I’m no murderer, and I waited till she were gone.”
Her heart missed a beat. Whoever was behind Elias’s machinations hadn’t even cared if she were killed in the destruction? Dear Lord.
Thorn loomed over Elias, his face filling with the fury of an avenging angel. “So who hired you to destroy the place? Who is this mysterious devil?”
Elias visibly flinched. “Can’t say, mister.”
“It’s duke. I’m the Duke of Thornstock, and the lady chemist is my fiancée. So if you don’t tell me who paid you, I’ll become your worst nightmare up until the time you hang from the gallows!”
Major Wolfe looked momentarily startled by the news that Olivia was now Thorn’s fiancée. Olivia was merely surprised to hear Thorn use rank to intimidate someone, but if ever there was a situation that required it, it was now.
With an unrepentant expression, Elias stared up at Thorn. “What I did ain’t a hanging offense. It’s damage to property, it is, and the most they’ll give is transportation. More likely they’ll give me a few years in Newgate. I can serve that in my sleep, and that’d be better any day than me endin’ up with a slit throat. Or worse.”
“What’s worse than having your throat slit?” Major Wolfe asked.
Crossing his arms over his chest, Elias got a stubborn look on his face. “A long, slow death by poison, that’s what. And that’ll be what I’m gettin’ if I talk.”
“Poison?” Thorn murmured to Major Wolfe. “At least now we know we’re on the right track.”
At that moment, Gwyn entered the room. “I heard that Joshua—You!” When everyone turned to eye her in confusion, she said to her husband, “He’s the fellow who tried to cause Thorn’s carriage to have an accident in Cambridge a few months ago, when you and Thorn and Mama and I went to London for my debut.”
The alarm on Elias’s face instantly implied guilt.
“Are you sure?” her husband asked.
“Absolutely. How could you not remember him?”
“I didn’t get as good a look as you did.”
“Well, I never forget a face.” Gwyn glared at Elias. “And I certainly have never forgotten his. We could have been killed!”
“Weren’t trying to kill nobody,” Elias muttered. “I keep sayin’ that.”
Major Wolfe shook the young man until his teeth rattled. “Then what were you trying to do, you little bastard?”
“Stop you from goin’ to London is all. That’s what I was told—make it so the carriage ain’t able to run. Didn’t know why and didn’t care.”
“There had to be more to it than that,” Major Wolfe said. “If you were just supposed to disable the carriage, what was to stop us from hiring another? Or waiting an extra day at the inn so Thornstock could send for another of his own? It makes no sense.”
“Only know what I was told,” Elias said.
Major Wolfe shoved the lad into a chair, then motioned to the others to join him in the corner. “What are we to do with him? He has confessed to the destruction of the laboratory, but that carries a minor sentence at best.”
“Couldn’t they charge him with attempted murder?” Olivia asked.
“They could,” Major Wolfe said, “if they could prove he knew that the destruction of the laboratory might kill someone. But he didn’t know it could even blow up.”
“Yes,” Olivia said, “but since I’ve proved definitively that Grey’s father was poisoned—”
“You have?” Major Wolfe and Gwyn said in unison.
“She has,” Thorn told them with a pride in his voice that touched Olivia. “And I think what my fiancée is getting at is there’s more here than damage to property. It was an attempt at perverting justice. Surely that can carry a heavier sentence.”
“If you can prove that the lad knew that was the intention. We can’t. Nor did he seem to intend to cause murder when he loosened the screws of the perch, so he can’t be charged with attempted murder for that either.”
“Which, by the way, I found out was how our father had his own accident,” Thorn told Gwyn.
“So . . . so that’s a murder,” Gwyn said.
“Not one he did,” Olivia pointed out. “Look at the lad. He was only a gleam in his mother’s eye when your father was killed.”
“True,” Thorn said. “But whoever is paying him might have done it, and then told Elias how to do it as well. We could charge that man with murder.”
“Or woman,” Gwyn put in. “If we could find out who the wretch is, we could still discover it to be a woman.”
“I suppose,” Thorn said.
“And there’s also the deaths of my uncles,” Major Wolfe said. “We may only suspect that someone killed Uncle Armie, but we’re fairly cer
tain that whoever delivered that fake note from me summoning Uncle Maurice to the dower house also shoved him off that bridge.”
“We can’t prove that this fellow was part of any of that.” Thorn glanced over at Elias. “There’s one other thing we might be able to prove, though.” He looked at Major Wolfe. “Would you untie him for a moment, if you please?”
Although Major Wolfe looked apprehensive, he did what Thorn asked. Meanwhile, Thorn strode over to a writing table and drew out some paper, an ink pot, and a quill. Then he placed them on the table and gestured to Elias to approach.
Wary now, Elias rose and headed that way, rubbing his wrists. “I ain’t much for writing, sir.”
“I’m offering you a chance to save yourself a longer term in Newgate or the hulks.”
The mention of the hulks made Elias go pale, and rightfully so. The hulks were old naval ships that had outlived their usefulness on the high seas and been turned into floating prisons on the Thames. They were notoriously damp, crowded, and unpleasant places to serve out one’s sentence.
Thorn set the quill and ink in front of Elias. “You already confessed to accidentally blowing up Miss Norley’s laboratory. So write that down in your own words, will you? Explain how you were unaware that breaking jars and tossing chemicals around would end up setting fire to her laboratory.”
Elias cocked his head. “You sure it’ll help me not go to the hulks?”
“I can make it so, if I like what I read.” He waited as Elias scratched away, but the boy hadn’t written more than a few sentences, when Thorn said, “That’s enough,” and took the paper from Elias. Then Thorn pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket and compared the two.
He looked at Olivia. “The letter to your stepmother about you leaving Carymont was definitely written by Elias. And it could go to prove intent to harm you.” He scowled at Elias. “That is what you were planning, isn’t it? To follow Lady Norley here and then destroy this laboratory? Or worse, harm Miss Norley herself?”
Elias glared at him and crossed his arms over his chest. “I ain’t saying nuthin’ more, sir. You’ll just have to haul me off to gaol.”
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