by Lynn Messina
This sentiment, so sincerely expressed, only confounded the young lady. “For me? But I didn’t do it.”
Mr. Hill pulled his head back in surprise. “You didn’t?”
“No, I was trying to go to the gallows for you,” she explained. “You killed him because of me, because of my credulity and stupidity. I could not let you hang for that. The sin is on my soul. I cannot add to it by letting you die for an act of misplaced gallantry that I drove you to. Do not ask me to bear it, for it is beyond bearing.”
“I didn’t do it,” Mr. Hill said.
The adamant young pair stared at each other as if nothing in the world made sense.
What a ridiculous turn of events, Bea thought.
“If I may hazard to explain what is going on right now,” she said, struggling in her disappointment to hold on to her patience, “it is this: Mr. Hill, Miss Cornyn believed you were the perpetrator of this heinous crime and confessed to spare you punishment. Miss Cornyn, Mr. Hill believed you were the perpetrator of this heinous crime and confessed to spare you punishment. Neither one of you murdered Lord Fazeley, and unless I miss my mark, you both care for each other deeply. You might want to take up the matter privately between the two of you later, assuming, of course, that you have your father’s permission.” Bea spared a glance at the publisher, who still seemed incapable of digesting the fact that his daughter had been seduced and abandoned by the earl. Clearly, he had no idea the event had occurred.
Despite Bea’s very practical suggestion that they wait until they were alone to discuss their feelings in a more favorable setting, Mr. Hill would not be denied. He rushed to Miss Cornyn and said, “Is it true, my love? Do you care for me? Is it possible?”
Miss Cornyn blushed prettily, nodded shyly, her eyes tilted down, and insisted that she did care for him. Quite dreadfully. “But surely you can’t care for me after…after…after I ruined myself.”
“All you did was fall prey to a scoundrel who knew exactly how to woo an innocent like you,” he said in her defense. “I could no more hold that against you than the sun for shining. But if you do not pine for him, why do you wear his necklace? Naturally, I assumed you wore it as a token to remind you of him and your great love.”
Although Bea thought this was a logical supposition, as she herself had drawn the same conclusion, Miss Cornyn found it quite surprising. “I wear it because it’s beautiful and I like the way it sparkles. But if you’d prefer not to see it, we can sell it to a jeweler. It’s probably quite valuable, and we can use the money to buy a little house.”
With this sundry detail nicely arranged, the duke reached his limit and announced it was time to go. “I have indulged you, Miss”—he broke off at Jenkins’s cough, suddenly aware of what he had been about to do, and changed course—“Mr. Wright, but enough is enough. This afternoon has not turned out as any of us expected, especially Mr. Cornyn, who must now assimilate many uncomfortable truths. Let us have the decency to allow him to do so in private.”
Bea, who tried and failed to find consolation in the fact that she had inadvertently united a pair of hapless lovers, agreed there was little reason to linger. Remaining in the office served no purpose other than to remind her of how wildly off the mark she had been in her conclusions. If thinking she was clever enough to identify a murderer made her giddy, then realizing she was not made her forlorn.
It was only a temporary setback, of course, for they still had the manuscript and she was as convinced as ever that its pages held the secret to the mystery. Given the earl’s clutch-fisted miserliness—his refusal to deal fairly with either Lord Duncan or Mr. Cornyn—she thought blackmail was still a likely possibility. Despite the publisher’s insistence that there was nothing interesting in Fazeley’s tedious accounting of shirt collars and fish servings, she felt confident she would find something. Perhaps the monotonous details formed a code that revealed secret information to a foreign power such as France.
Outlandish, yes, Bea thought, but one never knew for sure what depravity hid in the hearts of men.
Determined to resume her investigation at once, perhaps even in the carriage if the duke did not take offense at being ignored, she made her goodbyes to the occupants of the cramped office. To Miss Cornyn, she offered her best wishes on the happy prospect of her upcoming nuptials, for which, she felt certain, the bans would be posted in the coming week. To Mr. Cornyn, she held out her hand to shake, desiring some sort of physical contact with the poor man, who seemed incapable of comprehending the loss of his daughter’s virtue. To Mr. Hill, she bid a brusque good day from several feet away. Although his affecting scene with Miss Cornyn had convinced her he wasn’t quite the dyed-in-the-wool villain his vicious assault had indicated, she felt more than a tinge of fear in his presence. She could not look at him and fail to recall the way his fingers had squeezed her neck.
Kesgrave, it appeared, suffered from the same defect, for when he approached Mr. Hill to say goodbye, he fisted his right hand and rammed it into the other man’s eye. The associate’s head swung back, reeling from the force of the punch, as Bea gasped and Miss Cornyn cried out. In anticipation of a second blow, Mr. Hill rounded his shoulder, making himself smaller as he seemed to shrink into his shirt like a turtle vanishing into its shell.
Suddenly, as if struck herself, Bea gasped again as she remembered the turtle she had glanced on Mr. Cornyn’s forearm. Now, finally, she understood everything.
“I know who killed Lord Fazeley,” she announced loudly, forgetting in her agitation over the truth to use Mr. Wright’s appropriately masculine tenor.
’Twas no large matter, however, for nobody heard her over Miss Cornyn’s pleas to Kesgrave to stop beating Mr. Hill and Jenkins’s staunch defense that his employer was only returning fair for fair.
“If ye don’t want yer man to get beaten up, tell yer man to stop beating up helpless wo…uh, Wrights. Defenseless Mr. Wrights and any other stewards in the duke’s employ,” the groom said, ending his eloquent defense on an awkward note.
“Thank you, Jenkins, for that well-reasoned argument,” Kesgrave said with an appreciative nod at his groom. Then he turned to Miss Cornyn, who was cradling Mr. Hill’s head against her bosom, an act that provoked a glare from her father. “I must apologize for distressing you with my rough treatment of your beloved,” he said gently, “but given that only a few minutes ago he was willing to go to the gallows to expatiate his guilt over unfairly abusing Mr. Wright, I should think a few jabs to the face seems benign in comparison. But I could be wrong. Would he prefer to try the other and report back on his findings?”
Having not committed a capital offense, Mr. Hill stood in no real danger of being subjected to a hangman’s noose, and yet the expression on Kesgrave’s face, rigid and hard, stated otherwise. With a cock of his head and a word in the right ear, he could arrange the matter as easily as ordering dinner.
For Bea, it was a truly terrifying moment, for it was the instant when she finally understood who the Duke of Kesgrave really was. He was a man endowed by his creator with power and influence few could dream of possessing. She’d thought his authority came from the sycophancy of a beau monde unable to resist the lure of money and status combined in a pleasing form. But in her naïveté she had gotten it backward, for it was very much the other way around: Authority demanded compliance.
Miss Cornyn, thoroughly chastened, did not bother to answer the question, which she knew to be rhetorical. Mr. Hill, however, straightened his shoulders, looked Kesgrave in the eye and apologized for harming Mr. Wright, as if the injury had been done to the duke and not his steward.
Although she took exception to the misplaced apology on principle, Bea had more important matters to discuss. “I know who killed Fazeley,” she said again, this time ensuring her voice aligned with her identity.
As she had already made the exact claim with the same conviction earlier in the day, she expected cynicism and doubt from Kesgrave. Instead, he nodded briskly and said, “Of course
you do. Please proceed.”
Was he mocking her, Bea wondered, or showing an alarming degree of respect for her abilities?
No, not alarming, she told herself, for she had earned his esteem, if indeed that was what he was displaying.
“The mistake we made, your grace, was assuming his murder had something to do with the contents of the book,” Bea explained. “But it was far simpler than that. Having been rejected by Mr. Cornyn—and there is no way to describe the wholesale dismissal of his chronicle of everyday life as anything other than personal rejection—Fazeley determined to get revenge on the publisher by reporting his whereabouts to the Navy Office in Somerset House. He is a deserter, you see, and still subject to punishment.”
Demonstrating none of the deference they’d exhibited to the duke, the pair of lovers roundly turned on Bea and strenuously objected to her wrongheaded conclusions.
“It’s a fiction so preposterous not even Sylvan would countenance it. My father was never in the navy,” Miss Cornyn insisted. “He assumed control of this publishing house from my grandfather as soon as he finished his apprenticeship with a printer in Blackfriar. Indeed, he has never even left the confines of London.”
“It’s true,” Mr. Hill said. “He couldn’t have been in the navy. He gets frightfully seasick. He can’t even look at a picture of the ocean without turning green around the gills. You are looking in the wrong place, Mr. Wright.”
Beatrice turned to the publisher, who had uttered no words in his own defense, and asked if he would please roll up his sleeve to display his turtle tattoo. He complied silently while his daughter grumbled that such an action was a waste of time, for she had seen the tattoo upon innumerable occasions in her life and it was hardly remarkable, as many people had such ornamentations.
“It can have nothing to do with your ludicrous and unfair accusation,” Miss Cornyn huffed.
“Do you want to explain?” Bea asked.
His face grim, Mr. Cornyn took a deep breath and let out a great sigh. “It means I’ve crossed the equator.”
Miss Cornyn stared at her father, her almond eyes vacuous and confused. “I don’t understand. How could you have crossed the equator if you’ve never left London?”
Her father looked helplessly at Bea, then Kesgrave, and then turned his back so he was facing the front door. “I was in the navy. It was an argument with my father. A vicious argument. From the day I was born, all he wanted was for me to learn the publishing business and take over the firm. But I wanted something different. I thought I wanted to travel and see what was out there in the world and decide for myself what I wanted to be. So after a particularly brutal row, I ran away and joined the navy. Life in the navy wasn’t…I wasn’t…” He shook his head as he struggled to find the words to describe the experience. “It wasn’t a good match, for the work didn’t suit me and I didn’t suit the work. I served only two years of a twelve-year commitment. When we pulled into a port in India, I stayed behind. I remained in Madras just long enough to earn my fare home and then boarded a cargo ship to return. Runners are common in the navy. Most men simply stay behind at a port like I did, and the master-at-arms is too busy tracking them down to find us all. An officer called here only once to find me and that was before I returned. I’ve felt safe here ever since.”
“Until Lord Fazeley made his threat,” Bea said softly.
The publisher lowered his head. “Yes. I don’t know how he figured it out. His writing suggests a shallow man who doesn’t notice anything that doesn’t directly concern him. And yet his powers of observation were highly developed. I didn’t realize he knew until on his way out, when he made a rude gesture and said, ‘You know what I call that? The rogue’s salute.’ And then he left, but I knew where he was going.”
“Rogue’s salute?” Bea asked as Miss Cornyn began to weep in earnest, which was only to be expected. It had been, by any account, an extremely trying afternoon for the young woman.
“Navy cant,” he said, “for the gun fired to signal a court martial.”
“And the knife?” she asked.
“Fell in the tussle,” Mr. Cornyn explained. “He didn’t notice and neither did I until after he had left. Honestly, when I picked it up off the floor, my intention was merely to return it to him. Even as I was running after him, I thought only of giving it back and taking the opportunity to reason with him. I was fully prepared to give the manuscript back without compensation, and I thought returning the dagger would demonstrate my good intentions because it was a very fine weapon and probably worth several thousand pounds. But when I saw him, his burgundy coat in the crowd on the Strand, I thought how simple it would be to make the problem go away. Just a quick, deep stab like they taught us in the navy, and it would all be over.” Now tears began to trickle down his face, slowly at first, one then the other, and then in torrents. His daughter walked over and grasped his hand so tightly her fingers turned white. “So I did it and I ran and it seemed like it was all over. Even when the duke’s steward inquired about the manuscript, I still thought it was done. I believed your interest was sparked by the gossip and you feared an embarrassing revelation. It never occurred to me, you see, that a duke would be involved in investigating a murder.”
Here, Bea felt a perverse urge to apologize, for it was her fault Kesgrave was involved in investigating a murder. If she had shown no interest, he would have shown no interest, and she would not have been able to follow where the information led without his help.
Unable to withstand any more, his daughter lowered her head and pressed it against their clasped fingers. “I’m sorry, Papa. I’m so sorry.”
Her guilt at having succumbed to the seductions of the man who would have destroyed her father was all consuming, but the publisher, running his hand over her soft hair, assured her he was grateful to know the truth.
“Truly, my darling, you have no idea how much remorse and shame I have felt at my actions. I gave into a moment of evil impulse and have regretted it ever since. But now, you see, I have nothing to regret,” he insisted with a smile devoid of humor. “He was a heartless cad, a blackguard, and he deserved to die for what he did to you. It makes me free in a way I never expected to be again. Please believe that, my darling girl. Please, please believe that and suffer no more guilt.” But his pleas only made her sob harder, and he raised her shoulders so he could envelop her in a hug. “Hush, now, my darling, hush. You will be all right. Clarence will take care of you. He has loved you for a long time. I’ve known it and worried you could never return his regard. But you do and it will be well. All will be well. There, there, now, hush.”
Bea watched the father comfort his disconsolate daughter, and an irrational need to apologize rose again in her breast. The sense of responsibility she felt for the scene before her was baffling, for it was not of her making. She was not the one who had raised the jade dagger and driven it into Lord Fazeley’s back.
And yet it was entirely of her making, for it was doubtful the authorities would have traced the dagger back to the British Museum and ultimately to the victim himself. Perhaps they would have followed the rumor of a forthcoming manuscript or discovered the drawer full of love letters and assumed the villain had been a woman scorned.
There were many possibilities as to how events might have unfolded but only this moment was certain, and for that she felt awful.
But she believed in order and the sanctity of life and Mr. Cornyn, despite the mistakes he’d made in his early years, did not have the right to decide who lived and who died. For that he must bear responsibility.
Only Bea did not want to be part of the retribution and longed to leave the little office as quickly as possible. Although she had assured the duke earlier that her bruises barely bothered her, now that the urgency of identifying the killer had passed, they pained her quite dreadfully. Her face stung, her head throbbed, and her heart ached.
With no idea how to extricate herself from the situation, she looked at Kesgrave with what she fe
ared was desperation. Immediately perceiving the problem, perhaps because he felt it just as keenly, he nodded at Jenkins and quietly asked his groom to allow Mr. Cornyn to take as much time as he needed to get his affairs in order before accompanying him to Newgate.
Jenkins gave the plan his prompt approval, adding that he had been about to suggest the very same thing. “The poor miss.”
Kesgrave thanked him and turned next to Mr. Hill, who watched the father and daughter comfort each other with misery on his battered face. He murmured something to the young man, who nodded vehemently and sadly before bowing deeply. Then the duke joined Bea by the counter and confirmed with a nod that they may depart.
Bea expected her spirits to improve the moment she stepped outside, but the sense that a heavy cloud hung over her remained. Kesgrave must have felt it too because he didn’t say anything right away, instead studying his coach-and-four with a thoughtful expression.
“As Jenkins is not here to drive, the task falls to me,” he said, “and I think you would have a more enjoyable experience if you sat up front with me rather than alone in the carriage.”
Bea promptly agreed to this arrangement, for the prospect of a solitary coach ride was just as dreary as the duke implied. Furthermore, there was no harm to be done to either of their reputations because she was still dressed as a man—a thoroughly bashed-up man with two black eyes, certainly, but a man nonetheless. She climbed up with Kesgrave’s help and settled in for the brief ride back to her aunt’s house.
Once Kesgrave had the team in hand and merged with the traffic on Catherine Street, he said, “If I hadn’t already extracted a promise from you to stop investigating horrible deaths, I would do so at once. You must not keep exposing yourself to dreadful scenes like that one. It is far too disheartening.”
Although Bea agreed with this assessment, as repetitive exposure to such dismal displays would have a wearying effect on even the most cheerful person’s temperament, she took exception to his tone, for he sounded far too satisfied with himself. “That cross my path,” she said.