One Touch of Scandal Page 6

  “Fucking Moorish bastard!” Pinkie jerked against Bessett’s grip, his visage swollen red with rage.

  Belkadi sat, unmoved. “Terribly sorry, old boy,” he said with an air of utter boredom. “I could have sworn you insulted the cut of my coat.”

  “The cut of your coat, eh?” Lord Bessett let his gaze drift over Pinkie’s rumpled brown affair with its mismatched buttons. “A misunderstanding, I daresay. Gentlemen, we are neighbors—occasionally even business associates. Let this one go, shall we?”

  “But of course,” said Belkadi.

  Pinkie shrugged off Bessett’s grip, rolled his shoulders restlessly, then sat, snatching up the slab of raw beef one of Belkadi’s minions had just set down.

  Belkadi regarded him dispassionately as Pinkie slapped the beefsteak to his right eye. “Send me the bill, Ringgold, for your ruined cravat,” he said.

  “I shall see to that.” Ruthveyn spoke for the first time. He extracted his purse and peeled off a pile of banknotes, then pushed them across the table to Pinkie. “Here. This should take care of it.”

  Pinkie’s left eye narrowed to a squint. “Oh, aye, you rich bastards fink you can buy ol’ Pinkie orf anytime yer please,” he said. “That pile’d fetch threescore o’ fine cambric stranglers. What d’ ye really want, Ruthveyn?”

  Ruthveyn smiled faintly. “Let me be blunt, then.”

  “Yer ain’t never been known for yer pretty conversation,” Pinkie returned.

  Ruthveyn and Bessett exchanged glances. “There was a murder done Wednesday night in Belgravia,” said Ruthveyn, tapping the tip of one finger pensively on the tabletop. “I want to know the word round Town.”

  Still gripping the beef, Pinkie grunted. “Cove by name o’ Holding,” he said, eyeing Ruthveyn warily. “And ’e’s dead, ain’t ’e? I’d say that’s the word.”

  Ruthveyn peeled off another banknote. “I want to know if it was robbery,” he said, tossing it onto the pile with two fingers. “I want to know if a window or door was damaged. I want to know if anything was stolen. And I want the fence’s name. In short, Pinkie, I want to know everything the underworld knows. Do I make myself plain?”

  The doorman licked his lips, hesitated, then gave half a head shake. “Don’t waste the rest o’ yer blunt, gov,” he said, plucking a banknote from the pile. “This tenner’ll do for me trouble today.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Ruthveyn’s voice was dangerously soft.

  Pinkie’s squint narrowed. “That it weren’t no cracksman wot done Holding. That’s Johnnie Rucker’s turf. ’E’d know if somefink got pinched. ’E’d make it ’is business ter know—an’ ’e’d tell me.”

  “And he did not?”

  “Said ’e didn’t know noffink about it,” Pinkie said confidently. “Besides, Johnnie don’t tol’rate that sort o’ violence. Rumor is one o’ the servants did ’im in.”

  “Which one of the servants?” Bessett interjected.

  Pinkie shrugged. “The governess, per’aps,” he said. “Fancied ’erself in love wiv Holding—an’ a Frog, too, for all that.” Here he eyed Belkadi nastily. “Temperamental creatures, them Frogs, I always ’eard.”

  Belkadi merely smiled. “Pick a slur, Ringgold, and stick to it, won’t you?”

  Ruthveyn ignored him and pushed the pile of banknotes back at Pinkie. “Make sure of all this,” he gritted. “Talk to Quartermaine, and see what he can discover. Talk to Rucker again. Spread the word to every fence in London. Whatever was stolen, I’ll pay twice what it is worth, no questions asked.”

  “Weren’t noffink stole,” Pinkie warned.

  “So you say.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Pinkie slapped the beefsteak back on the plate with a clatter, then swept up the money. “It’s your blunt, gov’nor,” he said, rising.

  Ruthveyn extracted his pocket watch. “I’ll be at Quartermaine’s tonight round eleven,” he said, checking it. “You’ll have a report for me then.” It was not a request.

  “Ha!” said Pinkie dubiously. “Come have a toss wiv us, will yer? Quartermaine won’t like that a bit.”

  Ruthveyn flicked a dark gaze up at him. “I do not gamble,” he said softly. “Not with money. Tell me, Pinkie, who’s been assigned this business down at the Yard?”

  At this, Pinkie grinned, peeling back his lips to reveal a set of yellowing canines that would have done a wolf proud. “Now that’d be yer good friend Royden,” he said. “Royden Napier. So good luck to you, Ruthveyn.”

  Then Pinkie stuffed the wad of banknotes into his coat pocket and waddled off toward the door.

  Ruthveyn uttered a curse beneath his breath. Napier. He might have guessed the murder of a Crown favorite would draw attention from the top. No lowly police sergeant could possibly do justice to the corpse of Ethan Holding.

  “Most interesting,” murmured Bessett, watching Pinkie go.

  Belkadi, too, stood. “If there is nothing else?” he enquired.

  “There is something else,” said Ruthveyn. “The lady who just left us—Mademoiselle Gauthier. She is the daughter of Commandant Henri Gauthier.”

  At last, Belkadi looked surprised, a rare occurrence. “Is she indeed?”

  A wry smile twisted Ruthveyn’s mouth. “So she claims,” he confessed. “And she is apparently English on her mother’s side.”

  “Le commandant did have an English wife, long dead,” Belkadi acknowledged. “And a daughter, who was said to be beautiful.”

  “Mademoiselle Gauthier is certainly that,” Ruthveyn remarked. “She claims to make her home with an aunt by the name of Hythe in Manchester Square.”

  “But you do not believe her,” said the majordomo pointedly. “And you wish me to confirm what she has said.”

  “Bloody hell, Adrian!” Bessett jerked to his feet. “Do you mean to suggest that you just put us through our paces for a woman whom you do not even trust?”

  Ruthveyn lifted both shoulders. “For once, gentlemen, I do not know what to believe,” he answered. “It is a novel experience, to be sure. I daresay the lady is precisely what she claims, but I haven’t the time to verify it—so Belkadi will.”

  On a soft curse, Bessett threw up his hands and walked away. Belkadi gave one of his tight, mocking bows, and followed suit.

  Ruthveyn was once more alone at the table.

  Just the way he liked it.

  “Grace! Grace, is that you?”

  The petulant voice rang out as soon as Grace cracked the front door of her aunt’s modest Marylebone town house.

  “Good afternoon, Aunt Abigail,” Grace called.

  “To you, perhaps!” came the affected cry. “Not to me!”

  Grace shrugged off her cloak and wished fleetingly that she had prolonged her walk home even further and savored her freedom while she had it. But there were only so many shop windows to stroll past and too much weighing on her mind to enjoy them.

  Miriam, the second housemaid, hastened in, caught Grace’s gaze, and rolled her eyes.

  “Police been here,” she mouthed, taking Grace’s cloak. “Left not ten minutes past. Then her ladyship took a spell.”

  A spell was servant-speak for one of Aunt Abigail’s self-indulgent tirades.

  “Oh, dear.” Grace tucked her key into her reticule. “Has she had her draught, then?”

  Miriam pursed her lips. “Aye, and I mixed it stout, too.”

  “Good girl.” Drawing in a steadying breath, Grace checked her hair and her face in the looking glass over the console, then tucked up a wayward curl. “Here, Miriam, will I do?”

  “As well as anything,” said the maid evenly. “Nothing’s apt to please her today.”

  The warning was wholly unnecessary. Grace flashed Miriam a brave smile, then hastened down the passageway into the back parlor.

  Lady Abigail Hythe lay reclined in all her faded glory upon her favorite fainting couch, a befeathered fan waving lethargically in the air, her vinaigrette and her ever-present glass of cordial on the little rosewood ta
ble beside her.

  “Aunt Abigail, are you all right?” Grace hastened to her side.

  “Oh, Grace, you cannot imagine!” cried Lady Abigail, fanning more frantically. “What a frightful morning we have had! After having murder done practically in your face! Whatever were you thinking, to take a place with such people?”

  She had been thinking, Grace muttered inwardly, that she was not wanted here.

  Indeed, she had thought to escape. She had had no wish to be a burden to a woman who so clearly preferred her fantasy of grandeur past and her dreams of what might have been over life’s sadly shopworn reality. But now Grace was back again, and life with her aunt was more intolerable than ever.

  She looked about the lofty chamber with its faded, almost tattered draperies, and furnishings that had been fashionable a hundred years ago. The smell of old money long spent was as heavy in the air as the moldering dust motes that rose from the sagging brocade settee by the windows, and Grace suddenly understood just why her mother had felt compelled to escape it all so long ago.

  “Aunt Abigail, they really were quite nice people,” she said gently. “And I am sure Mr. Holding had no inkling his murder was imminent, or he would never have inconvenienced you with even the vaguest connection to his household.”

  At that, Lady Abigail’s head twisted toward her. “Oh, you callous, callous girl,” she whispered, trembling with outrage. “Go on. Make a mockery of my distress. But you will not think it so amusing when I tell you that we have had the police here today.”

  Grace clutched her hands in her lap. “I am very sorry, aunt.”

  “Yes, the police!” Lady Abigail spoke over her. “And that spiteful cat Mrs. Pickling saw them from across the street! By now everyone in Manchester Square will know that we have been involved in this vile business. Oh, the indignity of it! And I blame you, Grace. I truly do. And I blame your mother for…”

  For taking that long-ago trip to Paris. For falling in love with an impecunious Frenchman. For bringing low our entire family. For living in tents and consorting with Spaniards and Arabs and God only knows what else. For dying too young, and suffering not nearly enough…

  Oh, this last, perhaps, Aunt Abigail never actually said aloud.

  She did not need to. And Grace had no need to listen to what she did say, so often had she heard her aunt’s tirade. So she simply shut her ears to it, stroked Aunt Abigail’s withered hand, and reminded herself that her aunt was her mother’s only living sibling. That she was old. That she did not really mean what she said.

  Grace only hoped that was the case.

  “Aunt Abigail, tell me what the police wanted,” Grace suggested when the harangue faded away.

  “You!” cried Lady Abigail, lifting her head from the divan. “They wanted you, Grace. They seem to imagine you can help them answer questions. Can you credit it? Questions! The vile man had a whole folio full of bits of paper—and was none too pleased to be told you were still out. Indeed, I thought him suspicious.”

  “You thought he was suspicious of me?” asked Grace. “Or you were suspicious of him?”

  “Both!” cried Lady Abigail, struggling to sit up. “Oh, dear heaven! The room is still spinning! Fetch me my hartshorn.”

  Grace found it, then fussed and frittered over the old woman for a time, easing her back down again. Miriam came in to help, refilling Lady Abigail’s restorative cordial, this time tipping the brandy bottle over it for the lightest splash.

  It was time, Grace realized, to go back to Paris—whether it felt like home or not. She had been born in London, in this very house, and had lived parts of her early childhood in both France and Spain, but never had Grace felt truly settled until Algeria. And her last trip to Paris—to take her father home to die—had been an especially unhappy one.

  But an unwed lady was at something of a loss in North Africa, and she had had to go somewhere. To belong somewhere. To be either fish or fowl—and Grace had hardly cared which. But now Ethan was dead, and the England of her childhood no longer felt so welcoming.

  When the dust had settled, and her aunt’s cordial was nearly finished, Grace pulled a chair nearer the chaise. “Now this policeman, Aunt Abigail,” she said quietly, “do you recall his name?”

  “Oh, heavens no!” She snapped her fingers repeatedly at Miriam. The girl darted off to fetch a footed silver salver still holding an ivory calling card. Which was rather odd. One would not have imagined common policemen to have calling cards.

  “Are you quite sure, Aunt Abigail, that he was a policeman?”

  “He might as well have been!” Abigail declared.

  The wave of fatigue that Lord Ruthveyn had managed to assuage swamped in around Grace again. Resigned, she took the card.

  Royden Napier.

  “I fear, Aunt Abigail, that he is not a policeman,” she said quietly.

  “Well, I did not mean he wore a uniform!” Lady Abigail sniffed, folding her hands together. “I told him to leave those blue-coated creatures in the street. But his attitude—well, I dared not refuse him. So I let him in, though I vow, I paid him little heed.”

  “I am sorry you did not,” said Grace dryly. “You might take some comfort, Aunt Abigail, in knowing that your caller was just a step or two removed from the Home Secretary himself.”

  “The Home Secretary? Whatever can you mean?”

  Grace laid the card back on the salver, facedown. “Mr. Napier,” she said softly, “is the assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard.”

  And just possibly, she inwardly added, my nemesis.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Visit to Belgrave Square

  It required no gift of prescience the following day to discover the residence of the late Ethan Holding. The morning’s haze was waning a bit, and though all the massive white monoliths facing Belgrave Square looked rather alike, the black-clad mutes in sashes and weepers who materialized from the gloom at the foot of Holding’s steps were the only visions the Marquess of Ruthveyn required.

  He went up the stairs, his footsteps hollow and disembodied in the fog. With an air of haughty condescension, he produced his card, dropped his title, and soon found himself escorted through a soaring two-story entrance hall made mostly of white marble, and into another vast, opulently furnished chamber called—ironically, one hoped—the small parlor. Ruthveyn looked about in bemusement, finding it all a little nouveau riche for his taste, though the gilt pier glasses between the windows had been obscured by black crepe, the ormolu mantel clock lay silent, and all the draperies were drawn, in deference to the deceased.

  “What a remarkable room,” he commented.

  Halfway out the door, the butler cut him an odd glance. “Mr. Holding himself designed it,” he said neutrally, “when he bought the house three years ago.”

  “I see,” Ruthveyn murmured, looking about. “Where, pray, did he live before?”

  “At Rotherhithe,” said the servant, “in a family home near the shipyards.”

  “Ah.” He could see why a man might wish to relocate. With its dockyards, shipyards, and warehouses, Rotherhithe was, for the most part, a working-class part of town.

  Ruthveyn was just in the process of pretending to admire the gilt frieze that encircled what looked like a solid gold ceiling medallion when the echo of voices in the vaulted entrance hall caught his ear. He glanced through the open double doors to see a tall, handsome woman with a pile of dark red hair coming down the lower staircase on the arm of a lanky, balding gentleman. A brace of footmen followed, bearing various portmanteaus and bandboxes between them.

  “Have them set everything here, Josiah,” she ordered the gentleman, “until the carriage comes back around,” she ordered. “I shall be but a moment.”

  Miss Fenella Crane, who looked to be in her midthirties, swept into the room dressed as if for travel. She had already drawn on her gloves, Ruthveyn was relieved to see, and, as with Mademoiselle Gauthier, wore a black hat and veil. It did not, however, entirely obscure her gaze, and
he could feel her curiosity burning through him like molten iron. Curiosity, and something more.

  Ruthveyn opened himself quite willingly to it, and felt a certain wariness and anger thrumming through the room—understandable given the very ugly thing that had just happened here. Her eyes, he saw, were rimmed with red as if from crying. He stepped forward and bowed, praying the lady did not think to ask precisely how well he’d known the deceased Mr. Holding.

  “Miss Crane, my apologies,” he said smoothly. “As your butler warned, I can see you are on your way back out again.”

  She gave a stiff nod, but did not, thank God, extend her hand. “Yes, I’m sorry,” she acknowledged.

  “I beg your pardon, my lord, but have we met?”

  “We have not.” His was the sort of face people remembered, he knew.

  “I am honored, of course,” she went on, sounding something less. “But I’m afraid my cousin Josiah Crane is escorting me back to the Lesters’. We’re expected by teatime.”

  “Then permit me to promptly offer my deepest sympathy, ma’am,” he returned. “Your brother was a fine gentleman, and—”

  “Stepbrother,” she interjected.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Ethan was my stepbrother,” she corrected, something catching in her throat. “Though I loved him no less for it.”

  “Ah,” said Ruthveyn. “My apologies.”

  “None are necessary,” she said. “We always laughed at how the different names confused people. Now what, sir, may I do for you before I go? I am staying elsewhere, you see, until this frightful business is settled. Even poor Ethan’s”—here her voice gave—“poor Ethan’s corpse cannot be laid out until tomorrow.”

  “I am so sorry,” he said again. “Your butler did explain you’d come merely to collect some things.”

  “A very few things,” she said a little tightly. “The police have been most unaccommodating. They seem to imagine one of us killed poor Ethan.”

  Ruthveyn lifted one eyebrow. “How appalling.”

  “Not to mention preposterous,” said the lady. “No one here meant Ethan any harm. Indeed, he was beloved by all.”