Page 31 of Brilliance and Betrayal (The Diamond of the Ton Regency Mysteries #1)

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"You should never care for anything that can be taken from you. And remember: everything can be taken."

—Marian Fitzroy, to both her young children

I t was as though time had slowed to a crawl, stretching the moment wide enough for Peregrine to register everything at once.

As the guards stormed in, their eyes locked onto him first. They had heard his words. They thought he was a traitor.

And he sensed, more than saw, the blonde woman entering the room after them. Though she wore men’s clothing, her shape was unmistakably feminine. It was as though she filled the room—not just with her presence, but with her authority, her scent, her certainty.

But none of that mattered, because Cameron flinched. A twitch of his arm, the slightest shift toward his hip—Peregrine’s full attention snapped to it, and he began moving.

Even before Cameron’s face twisted in rage. Even before he reached his own weapon.

Peregrine’s fingers slipped into his pocket, closing around cold metal. His thumb found the cock of the pistol, pulling it back as he drew.

But Cameron’s hand had begun to rise first—and his gaze wasn’t on Peregrine. It was on her.

The duchess stood behind them, still as a doe, staring down the length of Cameron’s gun as though waiting for the hunter’s hammer to fall.

As the next heartbeat stretched into eternity, Peregrine didn’t waste time raising his pistol any higher than Cameron’s waist.

The gunshot cracked like thunder, and Cameron’s hand jerked open, his weapon slipping from his palm as he staggered back, blood blooming across his lower belly.

The sound was still ringing in Peregrine’s ears when rough hands tore his pistol from his grip. Another guard threw Cameron to the ground, pinning him even as the life drained from his eyes.

From the doorway, a sharp voice cut through the chaos. "Bind his lordship. He’s under arrest."

Disbelieving, Peregrine’s head swung to Charity, who looked alarmed. In the end, all he could manage was a question: “Charity?”

She shook her head firmly, eyes entreating. Whatever this was, the arrest hadn’t been her intent. But her folly had earned it for him. Anger boiled, following that initial surprise. She had followed him. She brought these guards here to catch up with him.

What a sodding mess .

All of Neal Street was in for a treat this early morning. A public arrest of a nobleman for murder—if not treason—and the scandal that would follow wasn’t even the worst of it.

Their best chance of finding out Cameron’s accomplice, not to mention whoever else might be working in his mother’s employ, was lost. The man of business’s minions and contacts would scatter like rats, as people destroyed any evidence of their association. It would be difficult—maybe impossible—to figure out if the contract on Charity’s life ended with Cameron’s.

And with Cameron dead, there would not be a hope in hell of contacting his mother now, much less pretending to reconcile enough to guess at what she was planning.

Black despair weakened his knees, and he had to grit his teeth to keep from falling to them.

The guard in front of him, no doubt seeing Peregrine’s bloodied shirt, interpreted his stagger in a different way. “His lordship’s hurt himself again,” the guard said, taking him by his arms and depositing him bodily into a chair.

He still put the iron cuffs on him, however.

“Perry!” the duchess shouted, and tiredly he looked up, seeing one of the guards carefully restraining, keeping her from approaching. “Stop what you are doing. This is wrong. I did not order you to do this.”

The Lieutenant of the Guard who had ordered him cuffed strode forward and bent down to check Peregrine’s side, prying up the bandage just enough to see that while his stitches had torn, the damage wasn’t all that severe. “We don’t follow your orders, Your Grace. Not too much harm done there, your lordship. I reckon you’ll be fine while we bring you back to the palace.

“You—take Her Grace home. Go now. You’ll have to hire a hack. And for God’s sake, do not address her by name or title until she is wearing something appropriate to her station,” the lieutenant told the man holding Charity back, and the man nodded, hurrying her away.

As they left, the remaining two guards bracketed him, picking Peregrine up from the chair by his arms and guiding him towards the front door.

He let them. They were only doing their duty. He was the one who had done the fool thing, leaving Charity the letter in the first place.

His mother had always maintained that most emotions were bloody inconvenient, and could only ever cause them trouble. That showing caring and consideration for another’s thoughts or feelings was as good as trusting them with a weakness.

This was a bloody inconvenient way to discover his mother had a point.

Being escorted by three armed guards to St James’s Palace in their official carriage was an experience Peregrine Fitzroy could have done without in his life.

Lucky him; he had done something like this twice now. The first time, of course, had been the day his mother left aboard a ship bound for the continent, and Selina had kicked him to the curb with an order to go back to his estate, where half a contingent waited for him, and face the consequences of Marian Fitzroy’s actions. Now fortune’s wheel was turning once again, and here he was, walking a far too familiar road.

He supposed it could always have been worse. He wasn’t being dragged straight to the Tower, after all.

When he had been taken there to be interrogated by Sidmouth that first time, he had been in a swivet of fury. There was still a spurt of that old, familiar anger, but it spent itself before he reached the palace.

Now he simply felt empty. Empty, and cynical.

He was only briefly planted on the bench in the Guard Room while matters were sorted. As befitting his status as an earl, the room he had finally been placed in wasn't a cell, but still, it was decidedly less comfortable than where he had been sequestered at Buckingham House. An officer’s quarters to judge by the cot.

He wouldn’t turn up his nose at such basic accommodation and demand better, as was his right. Indeed, he couldn’t really bring himself to care. He blandly followed every order and request put to him by the guards and the pinch-faced butler who had asked him to surrender his bloodied outer clothes.

He lay back, barely twitching when the royal physician came to examine his injury, except for when it was bathed once more in alcohol. And then he allowed himself to be rebandaged, not speaking.

After the physician was finished, he lay back on the cot, half-naked and exhausted, waiting.

He hadn’t expected to be able to sleep, but his body, still healing, had other ideas. Sleep snuck in like a thief—this time dark and dreamless, pulling him under.

They let him sleep until late in the morning, and by the time he was roused, he found the satchel of his own clothing that had been taken to Charity’s house waiting for him. He was prodded into dressing, and then escorted to the throne room where both the Prince Regent and the Queen waited imperiously without looking at him, their faces grim.

He dropped into the customary deep bow, holding the position while both of the royals ignored him.

After a long minute, Prinny began to inspect his nails. “Is that it? A bow? Not quite the gesture of supplication from a man about to face a second accusation of treason, is it, Mother?”

It was one thing to show him a lack of courtesy in the room he had been kept in for a few hours. This was intended to be a deliberate humiliation. Even peers who were under suspicion would not normally be treated like commoners supplicating their betters, and Peregrine could feel his cheeks heat with rage.

He paused stiffly, and then carefully dropped to a kneel. The colour he could feel rising in slashes across his cheeks would speak volumes about Prinny’s pettiness, but he kept his eyes half-lidded so that he wouldn’t be tempted to glare in return.

“You kneel quite prettily, though I must say, you do look rather… resentful,” Prinny commented. Peregrine breathed through his nose, trying to seek the mocking calm he would have used to deal with this—as he had everything—before his life had been shattered within a span of less than two weeks.

“Enough with the theatrics.” Queen Charlotte’s voice could cut glass. “Get up, Fitzroy, and explain to me whether you are a fool or a traitor.”

Peregrine couldn’t help it. He laughed. This was like a grand farce.

It was the Queen’s turn to colour this time, and Prinny shifted uneasily in his seat.

He couldn’t remember ever feeling such a storm of emotion. At the moment, he could muster no sense of respect for the Queen and Prince Regent at all. Did it even matter what he uttered? They had likely already decided his fate, so he was finally going to say his piece.

At least, whatever part of it he managed to say before he was cast into a gaol and forgotten.

“All my life I have been offered choices like this, Your Majesty,” Peregrine said defiantly, before they could demand an explanation for his laughter. “Choices that really are not fair options at all. So I will say I am neither a fool nor a traitor; both your selection and your imagination are too limited.”

“You dare—” the Queen hissed.

“I do dare, yes. Because you see, last year, I decided what other people were offering me was inadequate. I had been driven for decades along the roads mapped by other people’s ambitions. It was high time, I decided, for me to make my own choice to explore the paths that were not being offered to me by my mother. Which is a part and parcel of how you ever came to lay hands upon me last season to accuse me of treachery in the first place .”

The Queen leaned forward on the throne. “Your words are boldly spoken, Fitzroy, for someone who was overheard begging to return to kneel at your mother’s feet. I do believe the exact words related by my guard were ‘I have nowhere else to go, and I want to come home.’”

“Those were the words, yes. But is that what truly happened, ma’am?” he shot back. “Or is that only what you want to believe, because you cannot stand the idea of possibly being wrong?”

There was a deafening silence, and Prinny looked between the two of them as though he was reconsidering the wisdom of his presence in the throne room entirely.

Perhaps Peregrine was a fool. Because he could not stop venting his spleen.

“I am tired—so desperately tired—of proving my loyalty over and over again simply because of my own name. No matter what I do, what grudging respect I earn, the moment my mother makes a move, it is abundantly clear that I will become the whipping boy. I object to that, Your Majesty. Most strenuously, in fact.

“ Yes , I put my life on the line. It was the bait I possessed—the ability to draw Cameron out of hiding, when both you and Bow Street would have had to wait, possibly until Kingdom Come, hoping he would make a foolish mistake and expose himself.

“And yes , I debased myself. I told him every single thing he wanted to hear for a chance to glimpse the design of my mother’s plans. I should not have to warn you, Your Majesty, that there is a design.

“My mother wanted to sabotage a wedding between England and the Dutch, and not once— not once! —have I heard anyone ask themselves what the purpose of such an action was. My mother is a spiteful enough creature to do such a thing for a lark, it is true, but she would never do it for only one reason, and I promise that reason is not for some sort of misplaced sense of national pride.”

The Queen, for all her other faults, appeared at least to be thinking over his words even though she was in high colour. “Bring in the duchess,” she said, not bothering to direct the words, and immediately the throne room’s doors cracked open to admit Charity. She must have been standing outside, waiting for admittance.

Peregrine couldn’t help himself. As Charity moved to stand beside him, holding a curtsey like the willing penitent he could not force himself to be, he let his eyes stray to her like a moth to the flame.

“I have a simple question. Were you informed, Fitzroy, that the Duchess Atholl sought a pardon for you?” the Queen asked him unexpectedly, nailing him to the floorboards with her gaze.

Beside him, Charity startled.

“No, your highness,” he said shortly, his mind spinning in a circle as he wondered what Charity had sought a pardon for. “Charity, did you ask for a pardon for last night?”

“Not for this, Perry,” she said in a low whisper of supplication, tipping her head slightly to him.

“I find it a curious coincidence that you are questioning your mother's intent in sabotaging wedding negotiations with the Dutch, Fitzroy,” the Queen interrupted them, tapping her fingernails on the arm of her throne. “I wonder if they might be at all similar to the reasons why you were attempting to do the same.”

“ Ah ,” he said tightly, his stomach sinking in upon itself.

He had nearly forgotten that he had confirmed Selina’s words to Charity—that he had been involved in a second plot to poison the Prince of Orange. She must have told the Queen. And it seemed darkly ironic that even though he was no longer the enemy of the Duchess Atholl, she was a well-meaning Diamond as cursed as the French Blue.

Fate would always tear us apart , he heard her voice whisper to him.

Rather than answer the monarch, he turned his head to her. She was lovely. This light in his life.

His ruinous star.

“Well, Your Majesty,” he said, taking a deep breath to compose himself. “I can try to explain the whole situation.”

The Queen, however, waved her hand at him irritably. “The duchess has already explained everything she needed to convey to me. But it is most apparent that she has explained nothing of the terms of her agreement with me to you .

“Despite your impudent words to me, I find I am no longer quite so wroth with you , Lord Fitzroy. Indeed, I would have granted you my permission to embark upon this plan—had you come to us to request it.”

A black suspicion was growing in Fitzroy, and he glanced at Charity, who nearly looked as if she was trying not to weep.

“Your Majesty, I beg your forgiveness. He only regained consciousness the day prior, and I thought he was still too ill?—”

The duchess had struck a bargain with the Queen that involved him. Without him. And it was clear from her posture and intonation that she knew he would have never approved of it.

His heart shattered into pieces.

The Queen gave her diamond a look that cowed her into silence, and then she turned her implacable stare upon him.

“The Duchess Atholl begged your pardon because she believed your loyalties could be bent by both your mother and some sinister group. She offered up your life, your loyalty, and your servitude to me, promising that you were valuable, and would run England’s enemies to the ground both within and without.

“On that agreement, I granted the pardon, and agreed to provide you with protection against your mother and anyone else who might want you dead. I was most vexed because that was a conditional offering, Lord Fitzroy. But you could hardly show the proper deference if you were not made aware of the conditions, could you?” The Queen shifted the full weight of her gaze onto Charity. “Well, my diamond, why did you fail to tell him?”