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Chapter Seven

J asper cracked open his heavy eyelids and took in the state of Lord Oliver Hayes’s library in the early dawn light.

Someone had left the terrace doors open overnight, letting in the cold morning mist. He smelled dew on the air.

It was fresh and clean—entirely the opposite of everything that had occurred the previous evening.

The sight of empty whisky bottles on the carpet, a broken glass near the open French doors, a pair of men’s shoes slung over the curved arm of a chandelier, and what looked to be Jasper’s suit jacket pinned to the dartboard with a bone handle knife accompanied the painful throbbing of his temple.

It had been a long while since he’d traveled out of town and into Kensington for one of Oliver’s soirees.

They were always wild and slightly unhinged, but after a full day of sorting through the rubble at Scotland Yard, moving his office for the time being to the other half of Roy Lewis’s desk, and assisting the Special Irish Branch detectives with interviewing witnesses to the bombings—most of which were pointless and repetitive—an evening of highbrow intoxication and entertainment had been preferable to going home to drink and sleep alone.

Or enduring another late-night visit from Leo in which she recoiled from him in loathing.

The invitation to Hayes Manor had come a week ago, when Jasper had still been courting Constance. She had likely told her cousin all about their break-up, and as such, Jasper had gone to the soiree with the full knowledge that he might very well be turned out.

Oliver, however, had only clapped him on the shoulder as soon as he’d arrived.

“You should know that Constance has asked me to call you out. But as I am a terrible shot, and as dueling is illegal and you could arrest me for issuing the challenge, I told her she’d have to settle for your utter humiliation in a sparring session at the boxing club. But first, let’s drink.”

And that had been that.

The promised sparring session had never come about, but the women, drink, and opium had been overflowing at the party.

The lattermost vice was something Jasper had not touched and had turned a blind eye to.

Drink, he’d indulged in. And though the attentions of a woman who went by the name of Azure—for her blue, erudite eyes, he imagined—had been bountiful, they’d left a hollowness within him that extended to every corner of his body.

And more than once during the encounter, he’d needed to push any thought of Leo from his brain.

Your precious Leo.

Damn it all.

The incessant pounding in Jasper’s skull and his sour stomach capped off a truth he did not want to acknowledge: His feelings for Leonora Spencer were becoming impossible to ignore. Coming here, giving in to his base desires, had only served to highlight them.

He shifted on the leather chaise longue where he’d ended the night, his back and neck stiff from having slept in an awkward position. Getting up with a groan, he felt the room spin.

While waiting for the dizzy spell to cease, muted shouts came through the open terrace doors from the garden.

Oliver’s voice and the deeper tenor of his butler, Riverton.

Jasper staggered toward the dartboard and his wrecked coat.

Thankfully, the shoes hanging from the chandelier belonged to another man; his boots were still on his feet.

He’d just pulled the knife blade free from the board’s cork when Oliver rushed inside from the terrace, heaving for breath.

“Jasper. Come quickly.”

“Has a wife or two turned up?” he asked, inspecting the tears in his jacket.

Vaguely, he recalled of one of Oliver’s guests declaring that a jacket as ugly as his needed to be put out of its misery.

Checking the coat pocket, Jasper found the pound note the man had stuffed inside after using it as target practice, telling him to buy a better one.

“No,” Oliver said. “A body. In the duck pond.”

Sobriety snapped up Jasper’s spine, clearing his head in an instant. “One of your guests from last night?”

The young viscount had the washed-out, pallid complexion of a man who needed to vomit if he wanted to become sober again. “Follow me.”

He turned and stumbled to the stone steps leading down to the clipped grass, a vibrant green carpet that a team of gardeners maintained.

Past the garden bordered by a hedgerow, the lawn sloped toward the small pond, the edges thick with water lilies and bulrushes.

Two other men present the night before were approaching the duck pond too.

In their shirtsleeves and trousers, Lord Hastings and Sir Daniel Winthrop looked to have just risen from their stupors as well.

“Saw him from the window,” Sir Daniel said. “Just floating there.”

Riverton stood at the edge of the pond, his hands clasped behind his stiffened back, waiting. He turned to Oliver. “My lord, shall I fetch a footman to pull him out?”

Jasper held up a palm. “No, Riverton, not yet. Everyone, stay back.”

A man wearing a long, black cape floated face down in the center of the pond.

“Be sensible, Reid. We cannot leave him in there,” Hastings argued. He was an earl, Jasper recalled. They’d met last night, so everything was a bit hazy, but he did recall Hastings’ belligerence even then.

“He is dead. It doesn’t matter if he is in or out of the water just now.” Jasper stepped forward, his eyes peeled on the ground. The lawn turned to marsh near the water’s edge, and as he circled the perimeter of the small pond, he spotted boot prints.

“Has anyone been over here this morning?” he asked Oliver.

The viscount shook his head. “I don’t believe so. Riverton?”

The butler shook his head. “No, my lord.”

Jasper crouched for a better look at the prints. Two different sizes, it appeared. One pair could belong to the dead man, and the other to a second individual. Or two men could have been carrying the man’s body.

“What is it you are doing?” Hastings queried.

“Looking for evidence. Before any of us mucks it up.”

A fleck of white against the darker, marshy ground near the water’s edge caught his attention.

Jasper moved closer, plucking it from the wet ground where it had been crushed beneath a boot.

A man’s linen handkerchief, monogramed at the corner.

NLF . He could not think of any man he’d met the previous evening with those initials.

He would put the question to the others when he interviewed them.

For now, Jasper folded the handkerchief and put it into his trouser pocket.

After a thorough search of the pond’s perimeter, he was satisfied.

By then, two more guests and a few additional servants had descended on their group.

“All right, Riverton,” Jasper announced to the forbearing butler, “you may have him pulled out.”

Two footmen waded into the water, and Jasper turned to the gathered guests. “I need all of you to remain on the property for now. Are there any others still abed?”

Shrugged shoulders and dense expressions met him.

“Oliver, have your staff check all the rooms, not just the bedchambers. I’ll also need to speak to the staff, so gather them as promptly as you can. As for the ladies who were here last night?—”

“They were hardly ladies,” Hastings snorted. Sir Daniel and the two newcomers joined him in sharing mischievous glances. Jasper tamped down the urge to box Hastings in the teeth.

“I will need their names and how to contact them,” Jasper finished, ignoring the earl’s smug grin.

Though he sincerely doubted the women who’d joined in the revelry last night had anything to do with the man’s death, he couldn’t overlook them. Most likely, he was a drunken guest who’d imbibed too much, stumbled out onto the darkened lawn, fallen into the water, and drowned.

Oliver came to stand beside Jasper as the footmen dragged the body toward shore. The pond wasn’t deep; the footmen were only in up to their shoulders.

Jasper showed the viscount the handkerchief. “Are these initials familiar to you?”

Oliver peered at the mucky linen with the pale blue embroidered letters but only frowned. “I don’t know whose they could be.”

Jasper would ask again later. Oliver had smoked a fair amount of opium and consumed far more drink than Jasper had the previous night and was looking peaky.

The footmen in their sopping clothes climbed out onto the marshy lawn, pulling the dead man’s body by the arms. His legs had not even cleared the water before they dropped the poor sod and scuttled away, unnerved to have been handling a corpse.

Jasper thought again of Leo and how she would have handled the task with enviable composure.

He crouched next to the man and rolled him over onto his back.

As he’d suspected, the man had been young.

Twenty-something, if Jasper were to guess.

His drenched black cape, plastered to him, was reminiscent of what a barrister might wear, or a university student.

His hair was brown, and a smattering of freckles crossed his fair-skinned face, now cast with an ashen blue pallor.

A gash marred his left cheek, and his left eye was blackened from an altercation before his death.

“My God,” Oliver gasped, then turned in haste to retch into the reeds. Jasper stayed crouched, observing the body and waiting for his friend to finish. When he did, he wiped his mouth and stared at the body. “It is Niles.”

“Niles who?” Jasper asked.

“Foster. Niles Foster. A family friend.”

“Was he here last night?” He had no memory of meeting this man at the soiree. Oliver shook his head. “No. I didn’t invite him.”

Jasper peered at the black cape. “Why is he wearing this?”

“He is—or rather, was—a parliamentary aide,” Oliver answered, sounding distant and blinking rapidly, appearing to be in a mild state of shock.

Jasper moved to the body’s feet and with some effort, thanks to the sopping laces, removed the man’s left shoe.