Page 14 of The Lady and the Secret Lord (The Duke’s Men #3)

P hoebe’s breath left her chest. Her heart gave a painful thump. Her mother had been slandered. Her brother, her dear brother, had been told he wasn’t wanted, and didn’t belong in the family. Who had done it? Who had wanted Andrew gone? Who in the so-called Benevolent Assistance League knew Andrew existed? Had Jones been right all along that someone in the family, someone she knew, meant harm to her brother? A chill seized her. Her skin went cold.

Jones gave her a look. “Keep talking, Leary,” he prompted.

“They said the letters proved that Lady Marchmont had… a lover. I could repay my benefactor by finding the letters.”

“And did you find the proof you sought?” Jones asked. He was maddeningly calm.

Phoebe could not let the lie pass. “There is no proof. My mother was never unfaithful.”

Leary shook his head. “I couldn’t make sense of the letters. They were mostly in Latin.”

“Latin?” Phoebe’s thoughts flashed to the letters from her father’s desk.

“What happened when you couldn’t give the league the proof they wanted?” Jones asked.

“There was a paper in the desk, an article of some kind, at least it was in English. It had a treasure list. I gave them that instead, but they didn’t want it.” Leary slumped over the table.

“And then?” Jones did not let up.

Leary dragged himself upright again. “Then they asked me to bring the boy to the park. I was to give him to another league member in a red tie who would return him to his real family.”

“But you didn’t do it, did you?” Jones pressed on.

“I no longer believed them.” Leary turned pleading eyes toward Phoebe. Phoebe could not look at him. A year Andrew had been missing, in peril, not safe yet.

“We were chasing the dog. The fire exploded at the House of Lords. I saw the fellow in the red tie. The look of him was…” Leary shuddered. “I knew he would not return the boy to his people. I took off my tie and hid it under some bushes. I told Andrew we would go to the fire. I knew that in the crowd no one would notice us. We got wet and cold and covered with ash. Then he wanted to go home. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t let him go home. I told him bad men were looking for him and would take him away from his sister because he was a bastard. His job was to hide from them. And never tell anyone his true name.

“In the end I took him with me to Wardour Street. I gave him the last of my money, and a pawn ticket for Hayward’s. They’re square at Hayward’s.”

“You didn’t take him to the magistrate’s office? You sent him off at night, alone?” Phoebe heard her own voice raw and angry. Leary was not a monster, merely a man who had been desperate and afraid. He had meant no harm to Andrew. He simply put his sister’s children first.

“I had to get to my sister. They knew where I lived.”

“You did not see the boy again?” Jones asked.

“Never. Can I get to my sister now?” Leary asked.

*

Leary stopped speaking. Robin put his notes away and rose from the table. He extended a hand to Phoebe. He could no longer think of her as Mrs. Kendall. Her stare was blank, unseeing, as if she’d withdrawn deep inside herself, her widow’s attire some sort of shell. He suspected that Leary’s story had revived the shock of Andrew’s disappearance, the impossibility of it all. The random intrusion of loss dividing an ordered life in half, the way the Thames divided London. He could imagine the thoughts running through her head. How could her brother have vanished from her life in an afternoon?

She took the hand he offered. “Where are these friends of yours?” he asked.

“Here, at Greenwood’s,” she said. “There’s a workroom at the back of the shop.”

“Let me take you to them.” He pushed aside the alcove curtain and signaled Constable Thrupp to stay with Leary. Once Robin had someone to look out for Phoebe, he would settle Leary’s family in something like safety, and secure Leary for later questioning. It could not be good for Leary’s health that he had seen faces of men in the league.

The moment Phoebe came back to herself, she halted. “What is this Benevolent Assistance League?” She gave him an accusing look. “I saw the sign across the street from Shattuck’s shop, next to the hiring agency. Is Shattuck some kind of… spy?”

“He’s a convenience, a tool for whoever is behind this league.”

“Then we must question him.” She tried to tug free of his arm.

He stopped, took her by the shoulders, and turned her to face him. “We will. First, I must see to your safety, and the safety of Leary and his family.”

“And my brother’s safety? My brother is not a… bastard. My mother…”

“Remember the note. boy safe. stop serch. Leary’s account makes you imagine Andrew frightened and alone on the night of the fire, but he isn’t in that situation any longer. He’s survived. He’s with someone who cares enough to protect him.”

Hope and desperation warred in those changeable eyes. Her gaze said she was lost in images of her brother helpless and alone. “I must look at those letters. There is no proof.”

At the back of the shop, a tall, plain-faced young woman in a pale-green gown met them. She had streaks of color on her fingertips and in her light-brown hair. She came forward and drew Phoebe into a gentle hug. Over Phoebe’s shoulder, the plain-faced young woman studied Robin. It was an uncomfortable scrutiny, like a spell, as if the woman had some other sight that showed her the boy Robin sitting in a street clinging to his dead mother’s skirts.

“I’m Georgie,” she said. “Phoebe is safe with me.”

Robin nodded. At least for the moment Phoebe wasn’t charging into danger. There were two searches now, the search for the still-missing boy and the search for an active enemy. If Leary’s account of the league was accurate, the original plan to discredit the boy had turned murderous.

*

Within minutes Phoebe found herself among her three school friends, this time in the little room they kept for themselves at the back of Greenwood’s. Once again, she had a cup of coffee in front of her. At their urging, she explained where the new search for her brother had led, and told them of the shocking accusation against her mother.

“You must examine those letters, Phoebe,” Maddie said. “We know your mother was never unfaithful, but your father kept the letters for a reason.”

“Sentiment, don’t you think?” said Georgie in her soothing voice. “They could be love letters.”

“The letters were in a locked drawer. How did anyone know about them to tell this false footman of yours to look for them?” Bree asked.

Phoebe thought back to Leary’s testimony and the story of Ned Bartling’s sacking. Over a year earlier, someone from the Benevolent Assistance League had made a plan to get Leary into Marchmont House as a servant. It made no sense. Her mother had been dead five long years. Who in London cared about an old rumor, if such a rumor ever existed, when new scandals abounded? Her mother had not moved in the most fashionable circles. She had known governesses and vicars wives and women who shared her scholarly interests, including Lady Hester Britt, the founder of the school where Phoebe had met Maddie, Georgie, and Bree.

“I don’t know.”

Georgie reached out and laid a soft, paint-stained hand on Phoebe’s.

“Well, I have an idea,” said Bree. “You won’t want to hear it, Phoebe, but what if your great-aunt said something about your mother to the wrong person?”

“Now, Bree,” Georgie said. “You mustn’t think ill of Phoebe’s family.”

“But I do,” Bree insisted, leaning forward. “Your great-aunt never liked your mother, Phoebe.”

“I know, but can you see my great-aunt scheming with this Benevolent Assistance League, or with the likes of Mr. Shattuck?” Phoebe shook her head.

Bree laughed. “True. Your great-aunt would want a month of ablutions just from breathing the same air. But isn’t she behind the visit you had from the family solicitor about having Andrew declared dead?”

“Yes, that’s very much Great-Aunt’s style,” Phoebe admitted.

Georgie shuddered. “Would your great-aunt murder anyone?”

Phoebe turned to Georgie with a little shake of her head. “I just saw her. She’s as cold as ever, but she told me to use my Marchmont looks to get a husband this season. That doesn’t sound murderous.”

“What does your detective think?” asked Maddie. “Does he suspect anyone?”

Her three friends looked at her. Jones would be right at home in their conversation. “He has suspected all along that someone in the family sought to benefit if Andrew disappeared.”

“Hah!” said Bree. “Then the man is not merely pretty. I’m glad he has a brain. The first one you had, that runner, was useless.”

“Who,” asked Maddie, “is the next male heir?”

“A cousin of my father’s, Thomas Marchmont. He’s as unlikely a murderer as Great-Aunt. He has an estate in Dorset, never comes to London, and breeds sheep. Why would he harm Andrew?”

“Money?” Bree shrugged.

“For more and better sheep?” Maddie shook her head.

“Isn’t there someone else?” Georgie asked.

“My cousins Henry and Mary, are Thomas’s children, so, technically Henry is his heir. But they were with me on the day of Andrew’s disappearance. They were as shocked as I was. Henry has done everything to help me find Andrew.”

The friends fell silent and sipped their coffee. Without them Phoebe was sure she would not have held on to hope as long as she had.

“There’s nothing for it then, but to go over those letters,” Maddie said.

Their employer, Richard Greenwood, his ginger hair in its usual wild state, opened the door. “Girls. What is this? What am I paying you for?”

*

It was dark when Robin and Phoebe reached Marchmont House. The effort to settle Leary and his family had consumed more hours than Robin liked. He had no official authority and strict orders not to make the case known. In the end he called in favors from fellows with whom he’d worked the Holborn beat. Now Molly Leary and her boys were in the Bread Street School run by Helen Jones, Wenlocke’s sister-in-law, and Leary was lodged in Wapping in a room above a pair of constables. Robin had alerted Constable Trigg on his night beat to be on the lookout for activity at the league office.

Robin sent Phoebe into the kitchen. He heard the dog greet her, then a low female voice, then silence. Immediately, he relaxed. She, too, was safe. He had been afraid for her for hours. She returned, signaled him to remain silent, and taking his hand, led him through the darkened house and up its main stair. She moved with the unhesitating certainty of possession. It was her house.

Robin, who had lived at Daventry Hall for nearly ten summers and in Wenlocke’s mother’s house on Hill Street for as many winters, recognized the elegance of the place. He did not need to see the marble entry, the rich carpet underfoot on the stairs, or the flourishes of woodwork and plaster. He could smell the wax and turpentine with which the furniture had been polished to a gleam visible in the dim light of sconces as they passed.

The dead earl’s study resembled Wenlocke’s, on a smaller scale and without the usual children’s building blocks that Wenlocke’s offspring left around their father’s desk. A quick perusal revealed a desk before the window overlooking the dark garden, a wall of bookcases, a pair of chairs by the hearth, and a glass-fronted cabinet filled with pots and busts and fragments of the Roman past.

“Close the door,” she whispered.

As soon as he closed it, the room felt too small, too quiet. He had stopped thinking of her as Mrs. Kendall , in spite of the rustling black skirts. Leary had called her my lady . She moved about lighting lamps and trailing tendrils of her disturbing scent in the room’s cold air. He went to the hearth and got the banked fire going, concentrating on the simple acts of laying coals in the grate, touching a lighted spill to the kindling, and breathing the plain odors of hard coal and ash.

When he rose from the grate, she stood in the lamp glow at the desk looking down at piles of paper. She had pulled off the black hat and veil and removed the netting from her light honey-colored hair. For once she was not in motion. She looked very young, younger than Robin himself. Her slim neck rose from the wide collar and padded barrel-shaped bodice of the dress. She seemed unaware of him, while his awareness of her filled the room, created a charged current between them, like one of Faraday’s machines. Who she truly was eluded him, a mix of boldness and rebellion and vulnerability.

“What am I to call you?” he asked. His voice sounded rough in his ears.

Her chin came up. Her defiant gaze met his. “You mean if you decided to be polite and respectful and observe the distinctions of rank?”

He took a step toward her. “I mean,” he said, “if you decided to observe the proprieties that govern a lady’s behavior, that keep her reputation and her person safe, Lady Phoebe .”

“I don’t like lady ,” she said. “It is a title tighter than this corset.”

He laughed. “That corset would fall off you without the padding.” He wished it would. He wanted to see her true waist, to measure it with his hands.

“That’s easy for you to say. You have no restraints. You come and go without anyone remarking your conduct or condemning it. No one requires you to hire a lady’s companion.”

“True,” he said. “A lady’s companion would be a most inconvenient partner for a policeman.”

She stepped out from behind the desk, advancing a little into the room. “If your brother went missing, you would not be obliged to hire a companion merely so that you could attend a musicale while other people searched for him. Well, I’ve had enough of that. Enough of well-meaning people telling me that I should abandon the search and have him declared dead so that I can return to society and take my place as a lady. So, no, you will not call me Lady Phoebe .”

“Do you have another name?” he asked. “A secret name? A name you’d rather be called?”

She appeared to consider the idea. “My father called me his birdie .”

“ Birdie? ”

“Because I’m a Phoebe , a small bird,” she explained.

“Phoebe, it is,” he said. He wasn’t going to call her Birdie . Phoebe was going to be hard enough. He wanted to repeat it, but it was going to distract him to say it.

He needed to get his head working on the evidence. A boy was missing, and he and Phoebe were not the only ones searching for him. They needed to find Andrew before the mysterious league found him. Robin moved to the desk. She had arranged the letters in a sequence.

She picked up a loose length of black ribbon and offered it to him. “These are my mother’s last letters to my father. I think the letters were tied up with this black ribbon.”

Robin took the ribbon. It was at least a yard in length, too long for the stack of letters alone. Next to the letters were the pages of the article she mentioned when she told him about the break-in to her father’s desk. He straightened the pages of the article, placed the bundle of letters on top, and slipped the black ribbon around the lot.

She understood at once, and pulled the ribbon into position to tie a bow. And stopped. The creases in the ribbon lined up. “The article and the letters were bundled together.”

“What took her away from home? Where did she write from?” he asked.

“She went to Sussex to care for her widowed father, who was in poor health. She was near her confinement, so the country seemed a good place for her to be. My grandfather’s physician visited almost daily.”

“You were here?”

“In school with my friends.”

“So the letters came to Marchmont House. Who would see the post?”

She shot him a quick haughty look. “Mr. Trafford, our butler. You can’t suspect him of any wrongdoing. He would never read my father’s post or betray my mother.”

“I do not suspect anyone yet, but you and I both know that someone knew of the existence of these letters, and believed the letters would embarrass your mother.”

“Well, they won’t. They can’t. She was above reproach.” She pulled out the chair and sat and opened a letter. Instantly, she seemed to forget him. He picked up the loose sheaf of closely written pages of the article and carried it over to the chair by the fire.

Almost at once he saw that there were two writers. One had made a fair clean copy of the article, and one used a different pen to cross out lines and add words and phrases. The writing was primarily in English with a few Latin phrases thrown in. The subject was the likelihood of finding Roman treasure in Sussex. The early paragraphs identified the area’s Roman roads and fortifications and the locations of Roman villas for the wealthy, the sort of men who could acquire goods from everywhere in the Roman world.

Then the article turned to the village of Findon as an overlooked site with associations with Roman fortifications and old flint mines. In Findon, the writer asserted, a treasure existed, buried not for the usual reason, the Saxon attacks along the coast, but because of one man’s history, a man named Decimus Flavus Galba.

Robin looked up from the article and found Phoebe, shoulders slumped, staring with an unseeing gaze at the fire.

“What,” he asked her, “is lex lulia de adulteriis ?”

“It’s a law of Emperor Augustus, making a wife’s adultery a crime. She could be tried in a public court, and punished with loss of property, or with infama , with having her status reduced to that of a prostitute, and even with death.”

“You knew all that?”

She rose from the chair, a letter in hand, and came to stand beside him. “It’s in my mother’s letters. A farmer found letters stashed in an old wall on his property and gave them to my grandfather. Because he was ill, my grandfather asked my mother to translate them. She wrote to my father about a wealthy Roman in Findon, who accused his wife of having had an affair with a visiting emissary that resulted in the birth of a son he no longer believed was his. The letters were difficult to read. In an early letter, she writes,

Shall I boil some gall nuts?

Robin looked at her. “Which means?”

“Gall nuts make a formula for reviving faint ink. In the next letter, she tells him she’s making progress, the letters are from a man called Decimus Flavus Galba. Come look,” she invited.

He couldn’t tell whether she was more disturbed or excited. Something had aroused her instincts. There was no way she could ever be a detective, but he had to admire her mental tenacity. He rose and followed her to the desk covered with the letters arranged by date. He recognized the way her mind worked as it had with the clues in his office.

“Some of these are actually his letters to her. They were folded inside hers. I think they are working out a translation together, so there are lines in Latin and English.” She pointed to each. “I want to believe she translated for him, but the words are in his handwriting”:

“You are dead to me. You are a woman who will go tobed

with any man who flatters your art. I have noheir.

I will begin divorceproceedings.”

Robin stared at the words. Someone reading them without looking at the sequence might wrongly conclude that Lady Marchmont was an unfaithful wife and that her son was a bastard. Whoever found the letters had made a fundamental error of detection, separating a single clue from the chain of evidence. The question was—who had found the letters and misread them? “It looks bad,” he said. “But you see something different.”

“To me, it looks like a story they were putting together out of fragments of the past.” She sounded wistful. “This letter is her last to him, where she explains what happens to the wife.”

“What did happen to her? To her child?” Robin couldn’t believe he was asking that last question. What did it matter that a long-dead woman had been slandered and her child rejected for being a bastard?

With the swiftness of a startled bird taking wing, his thoughts flew to the moment of sitting at the edge of a street, clinging to his mother’s skirts. She had stopped to rest, and he waited for her to wake up, to keep going. They had left home. Someone was to take them in. He didn’t know the name, so he waited. People passing began to stare, and a man stood over her and told her to move on. She didn’t answer the man. Then two men came, and began to argue over who was going to take care of her. That’s when the boy in the long velvet coat came. He took Robin’s hand and lifted something from his mother’s neck. Come , he whispered, I will take care of you while your mother has her rest.

“There is no happy ending,” Phoebe said. “The wife tried to defend herself, like Shakespeare’s Desdemona, but her husband refused to believe her. She disappeared. Either she ran off with the emissary, as her husband claimed, or he murdered her. There is no word about the boy.”

There is no word about the boy. That was Robin’s story, wasn’t it? It was what Wenlocke said of all of them. Somewhere in London someone waited for the lost boys to be found. As Phoebe Marchmont waited for her brother to be found. He shook off the past. There was no saving that Roman boy, whether he was a bastard or not, but Andrew Marchmont could be saved.

“There is a bit of a happy ending for you,” he said. It was his turn to reveal what he’d discovered. “You are right about the letters making a story. The article proves it. Your father was not reading this article, he was writing it. He believed that Decimus Flavus Galba buried his wife’s wealth in a field on his property and that the treasure could be found. It was your mother’s work he was going to publish and celebrate. And there’s a note praising and thanking her. At least I think that’s what it says. It’s in Latin.”

Grato animo fideli et amanti uxori ob artem suam in vetustis textibus vertendis.

Her gaze flew to his. “Are you a scholar?”

“A poor pupil with a good tutor.”

“It does say my faithful and loving wife .”

They had reached this conclusion when the study door opened. A plump, rosy-cheeked woman in a lace cap and a blue wool wrapper stared at them. Robin knew instantly that the woman was the source of his companion’s black gown with its padded waist. And he had no trouble recognizing the woman’s furrowed brow as the prelude to a scold, the sort of scold that came from worry.

“Phoebe, where have you been? Did you not think to send a message?”

“Oh, Mrs. K, I am so sorry. We found Boyle. Well, he’s really Leary, but he told us what happened that night.”

The threatened scold collapsed. The woman opened her arms, and Phoebe stepped into them. The contrast between the two women was laughable. Over the younger woman’s shoulder, the real Mrs. Kendall studied Robin.

“I’m Jones,” he said. “Of Scotland Yard.”

The real Mrs. Kendall nodded, her expression suspicious. “I’ve heard a thing or two about you.”

The girl pulled back from her housekeeper’s arms.

“My girl, you cannot be found alone at night with a man,” Mrs. Kendall said.

“I know, Mrs. K, but we are solving the case. We are examining Mother’s letters. Boyle, who is really Leary, was sent to take them.”

“Take her letters. Why?”

“That’s what we need to find out,” Robin said. He received a long, wordless scrutiny that said Mrs. Kendall did not trust young men who managed to get girls alone in the night. Phoebe Marchmont had a protector.

“Someone believed that the letters proved that Mama was unfaithful and that Andrew was not Father’s son.”

“Well, that is nothing but rot,” said Mrs. K. “Who would believe such a thing? Who would even see the letters? No one comes to the study now. Oh, we make sure that things are aired and dusted and in good order, but until you came in this week, no one had come to the study for months.”

“Leary came at some point,” Robin pointed out. “And someone put him up to it.”

Mrs. K was silent, thinking. “The last time anyone went through his lordship’s papers was immediately after his death. Mr. Wigmore, the family solicitor, was permitted to look for any documents that might concern the estate.”

Robin looked at Phoebe. “The letters looked important. They were tied together with a sheaf of papers. Would a lawyer ignore them?”

She shook her head. “Wigmore is not likely to misread a Latin text. He might hastily glance at the letters. I suppose if he saw that one passage, he might be shocked.”

“What passage?” Mrs. K asked.

Phoebe showed her the lines. “Oh dear. If he believed ill of your mother based on that, shame on him. He knew how devastated your father was by your mother’s death.”

“Would this Mr. Wigmore make any inquiries, speak to anyone in his office or in the family? If only to put the rumor to rest,” Robin suggested.

“If he spoke to anyone, he would speak to your great-aunt,” Mrs. Kendall said, looking at Phoebe.

Phoebe gave a start. “My friend Bree said as much. She thought that Great-Aunt might say something in front of the wrong person. But who in Great-Aunt’s circle of exalted matrons would turn to this league?”

“Shattuck may be able to answer that question,” Robin said.