Page 29

He’d intended to go straight to bed, or at least to the bottle of brandy. However, he had only just set his hand on the stair rail when suddenly both Croft and Quinn emerged together from a side passage, hurrying towards him .

“My lord,” Quinn said urgently. “A problem arrived on our doorstep while you were out?—”

Croft had reached for Peregrine’s jacket and helped him remove it in the dim light of the foyer. But in just his lighter waistcoat, the dark stain on the front was visible. Quinn halted his train of thought, his face inscrutable. “Do we need to call a physician?”

“It has already been tended,” Peregrine told both men as Croft began to prod at his waistcoat. Then his valet turned and hurried upstairs. “What is the problem?”

Quinn hesitated only a second more before continuing, his voice lower.

“One of the former servants came to the door while you were out, begging to be sheltered. He is afraid—” Quinn cut off his words, looking to see that Croft was out of the room before continuing in a much lower voice.

“He is worried your mother has marked him for death, and he says he has nowhere else to go.”

Peregrine’s shoulders tightened as a curious rush of exhilaration and dread filled his veins. His mother was going so far as to strike down the pensioned former house staff? “Who is here?”

His butler’s face remained neutral, but the pause said everything. “He would not give his name. I ensured he was unarmed and shut him in my office.”

Perry trusted Quinn wouldn’t have admitted a person without at least a strong suspicion of the truth. Looking down at himself, he sighed. “I suppose I should change first.”

“No need, sir,” Croft said, returning with a new waistcoat and linen shirt in his hands. “Best not confront someone from the past looking like you have already lost a fight.”

Peregrine gave his new valet a sidelong look. Croft might certainly be put to a test of loyalty tonight. “Thank you, Mr Croft. And let me remind you that if a single word of what you see or hear reaches the general—or anyone else—you will be out by morning.”

Croft, to his credit, didn’t argue or even look dismayed. “Understood, my lord. Not my first secret.”

“Thank you. Wait for me upstairs. I expect this will not take long.”

Quinn led the way toward the steward’s office. At the door, he stepped aside and lowered his voice. “He wouldn’t give a name—but I believe it’s your former butler.”

Peregrine’s gaze narrowed, disbelieving.

Quinn offered him the handle without ceremony, and Peregrine pushed the door open. Locking eyes with the ageing man waiting in Quinn’s office, Peregrine halted abruptly, his hands balling into fists at his side. “Quinn was right. It is you.”

Edmunds, his mother’s butler of nearly thirty years, stared back at him, his jowls wobbling as he trembled beneath Peregrine’s sudden fury.

“How dare you set foot back here,” Peregrine shouted, prowling forward when Edmunds said nothing.

The man looked like he had aged ten years in the last twelve months, but Peregrine couldn’t find it in himself at all to pity the old butler. Not after he had found out Edmunds had been the one to ensure Charity had been drugged and put in a carriage, kidnapping her from his ball that evening.

This was the man who had helped concoct the scheme and overseen her captivity for the week she had been missing, ensuring she was kept compliant and helpless.

No wonder Edmunds had refused to give his name to Quinn.

Peregrine would have ordered him tossed out of the house without ever laying eyes on him. Or worse.

“ I had to ,” Edmunds whispered in a plea, lifting his hands pathetically as he cowered in front of Peregrine. “You, of all people, know that I had to do what she ordered me to do, my lord. If I hadn’t…”

Peregrine knew. Marian might have chosen a different path to gain her revenge on her nemesis, Vanessa Cresswell.

Perhaps a slow poison like belladonna to give her fits of erratic behaviour, getting Charity consigned to an asylum.

Or arsenic, which gave Robin Fitzroy his wasting illness.

Or foxglove, which had caused Grenville’s heart to seize.

Edmunds may have felt he was choosing the lesser evil. Unfortunately, that did little to relieve Peregrine’s urge to smash his fist into a wall. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, shaking. After Vauxhall, violence was already too close to the surface.

Fortunately, Quinn saw him struggling and became the voice of reason. “We may have been handed a gift, my lord. We should interrogate him to see if he knows anything useful.”

It was the break in tension Perry needed to regain his senses. He flicked his eyes to Quinn, grateful. Then looked down at the pathetic man in front of him, hating Edmunds nearly as much as he loathed himself.

He was no better than this man. For years, he had done the devil’s work, pretending to himself it was better that way. That by making himself complicit, he might be able to control his mother, steering her away from the paths of greater evil.

It was a lie he had told himself, over and over, so naively wanting to believe it.

“Tell me why you came here tonight,” Peregrine said, gritting his teeth.

“She’s housekeeping, my lord,” Edmunds let out a half sob.

“You wouldn’t know, not after you sacked us.

Some of them wrote to me. Mrs Patch was the first to let me know there was trouble two weeks ago.

She was working in the stillroom at Blackdown and sharing a room with Mary at a boarding house.

She told me Mary didn’t come home from work one night. And then Mrs Patch disappeared too.”

Two weeks ago, Cameron was dead. If Peregrine needed more proof that another hand was doing his mother’s bidding, he had it. Not that it was required. Both he and Red Hand had seen the path of destruction this new agent had been leaving in the rookeries and on the docks.

But he had assumed that the attacks had targeted her illegal business.

He hadn’t known that the killer had been targeting the former domestic staff.

Mrs Patch had been one of the servants holding Charity that week, too—a sour, tight-lipped stillroom woman with a taste for power and a deep fear of Marian Fitzroy.

Edmunds swallowed nervously. “After Mrs Patch, then others began to vanish. I wrote the others I heard from, told them to leave London if they could. Some of them did, I think. The rest are dead.”

“And you thought someone was about to put an end to you, too.” Peregrine cocked his head. “Why are you here, instead of somewhere else?”

“For sanctuary. Someone was in my place,” the old man whispered, shuddering. “I didn’t know where else to go. Who else I could tell. Please. I’ll give you anything I can. I don’t want to die like a dog.”

Peregrine bit his tongue on the words that perhaps Edmunds deserved to. Perhaps they all did, in the end. But he couldn’t make himself say it, because he, too, was a coward who had wanted to live before he realised it hadn’t been worth the price paid.

But that had been before. The memory of Charity against his shoulder tonight, bringing him peace and filling his lungs with the smell of joy… now he wanted that, too.

Even if he could get it only in small, stolen moments, he wanted to feed his heart on whatever meagre crumbs of happiness he could seize before the Reaper came to collect his debts and he was consigned to the hell that he had earned.

Quinn was a silent, reassuring presence at his left side, letting Peregrine order his thoughts.

Coin is our adversary’s preference .

“Quinn,” Peregrine said slowly. “Write a note to the solicitor, to go out first thing in the morning. I do not care if he has not yet finished. I want him to give us everything he has accumulated so far on the accounts and the investments at his earliest convenience. And find a room for Edmunds, will you? Something with a locked door, if you don’t mind. ”