Page 2 of Lady Isla and the Lord of Rogue (Merry Spinsters, Charming Rogues #6)
“Well, yes. I pierced his stomach,” she made a movement to show him how she did it, “and there was an alarming quantity of blood.” She had to make sure he understood the gravity of the situation, for it irked her that he remained so calm. “He is quite dead.”
“Where?”
“In St Giles. I went there to visit the poor.” That was only half the truth, but it would have to do for now.
“Ah.” Algie weighed his head back and forth. “St Giles. Then of course it is perfectly understandable why you had to kill a man.” He continued to peel his orange and ate another slice, utterly composed.
Isla stared at her brother. “Algie.”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Is this all you have to say?”
He looked at her with tired eyes. “What else would you have me say?”
Isla fell into the chair across from him. “What else do I want you to sa—Algie! Don’t you want to know why I was in St Giles rookery in the first place?”
“It’s not that big of a mystery, my dear.
Another fruitless search for your Jem, I suppose?
” He looked at her with weary affection.
“It’s quite a futile endeavour, I am compelled to note, this entire search of yours.
It has always been. So I have said for years, but you must do what you need to do. ” He sighed .
She snapped her mouth shut.
“An endeavour that was unsuccessful, judging from the depressed expression on your face,” he continued.
“An endeavour that merely ended in you killing a man.” He did not reprimand her, chide her, or rant that she now had lost her reputation forever.
He did not threaten to lock her into her room or forbid her to ever visit St Giles again.
He didn’t even reprimand her for going there in the first place.
Instead, he kept feeding her orange slices.
Isla took the offered slice, chewed and swallowed. Then she said, “Sometimes you just leave me speechless, brother.” She regarded him thoughtfully. “Especially given the fact that you are actually a rather important person in this country.”
He looked up, mildly interested. “Am I, indeed?”
Isla shook her copper-red locks, exasperated by her brother’s indifference. “You are one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful man in this town, this country, this entire British empire!” She took a big breath. “You are not just anyone. You are this country’s Home Secretary.”
He meditated on her words as if that piece of information was news to him. “I am, am I not? Dash it if I hadn’t forgotten for one moment.”
“Algie!” Isla looked at him in exasperation.
In moments like these, she doubted that her brother, Algernon Clyde, Lord Wynthorpe, was the brilliant, powerful, ruthless politician everyone thought he was.
He’d single-handedly reformed the Home Office and whipped legislation after legislation through Parliament with a speed and tenacity that no predecessor had ever accomplished.
The prime minister bowed to him, the Prince Regent feared him, and the ministers’ knees knocked together when they had an appointment in his office in Whitehall.
Behind his back, they’d given him the nickname of ‘Deathmark’, for his deadly aim whenever he shot a pistol.
They also called him ‘The Bloodhound of Whitehall’ for his fearsome reputation in tracking down criminals. But Isla knew better.
Algie was no bloodhound. He was a lonely puppy seeking love and attention.
He loved pruning roses in the garden, eating oranges, and was forever on a quest to grow his special orange tree.
He loved going to the opera to see the Magic Flute, only to see a single aria, sung by the glorious Angelica Catalani, to which he wept, and then left.
He was a terrible coward when it came to love, and because of that, an eternal bachelor who was doomed to be hopelessly in love with Lady Catherine Redgrave, a beautiful widow and Isla’s best friend.
Rather than confess his love to her friend, he preferred to adore her from afar.
This sweet, helpless, kind, lovable person, in short, was her brother, Algie.
“It is your duty to keep the citizens in this country safe,” Isla lectured him. “Your sister confesses she killed a man in St Giles and all you do is keep eating oranges?”
He set down his pocketknife with a sigh. “What do you want me to say? If you killed him, I daresay he must have deserved to be killed.”
Isla kept staring at him with an open mouth.
Algie finally took pity on her. “You say he is dead?” His chair scraped on the floor as he pushed it backwards. “Well, let’s have a look at the fellow. Let’s go to St Giles. I’ll tell Falks to get the carriage ready.”
“That’s unnecessary.” Isla cleared her throat. “Because he’s upstairs.” In an afterthought she added, “On my bed.”
He looked at her blankly. “Repeat that?”
“I had him brought home to have him cleaned up and to give him a decent burial. I thought it was the least I could do, having basically murdered him in cold blood.” Isla smoothed the folds of her dress.
“I thought it unclean to have him laid out on the table in the servant’s hall, because, you know, people eat there.
Since the guest room is currently occupied by Aunt Agatha, I gave orders for him to be brought to my room. ”
Finally, she had his undivided attention. “He is in your bedroom ? You brought a man to your bedroom, and he is lying on your bed ? Heavens, Isla. Have you no sense of decorum at all?” Finally, he exploded.
Isla was almost relieved but then thought with some indignation that her brother was somehow missing the point.
“He’s dead,” she clarified. “Perished. Extinct. A cold corpse. He’s been bleeding a bit over the Aubusson carpet, and I daresay the silken bedsheets are now ruined.
The maids will have substantial work washing out the blood from the sheets, but I think that sheets are replaceable.
Lives aren’t, even if they are those of criminals.
Even though he may have been a criminal from the rookery, a sad sort of character, he deserves a proper burial. That’s why I brought him here. ”
Algie’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head. “Show me.”
Isla threw the bedroom door open, and Algie pushed into the room behind her. Both stared on the bed, which, save for some rumpled sheets, was empty. In the open window, the curtains fluttered lightly in the evening breeze.