Page 16 of The Lady and the Secret Lord (The Duke’s Men #3)

T he carpet bag stuffed with Phoebe’s discarded black gown sat in reproachful silence on the floor of Mrs. K’s room. Phoebe’s disguise had failed her. Andrew was still missing while dangerous men searched for him. Phoebe paced the room in the lilac-checked dress from Shattuck’s shop. It stank of fish. Her chest was tight. Her throat ached with unshed tears. Most of the story had been told, how she and Jones found the league’s empty offices and Shattuck’s body. All that remained to tell was how he sent her away from the scene. She thought they had a partnership.

“I helped him find Leary. I thought we were going to find Andrew… together. But Jones…”

“Mr. Jones what?” Mrs. K sat at the little window table that served as her desk, vanity, and workspace, a cup of tea cooling at her elbow.

“He makes me furious.” Phoebe took a steadying breath. Jones’s rebuke stung. She told herself that her vanity was wounded, but her tight lungs didn’t want to cooperate. She still wore the corset and padding of her widow’s attire. “He doesn’t want my help. He works alone. He doesn’t report to me. I thought I was so free in those clothes, but maybe I just led evil men to innocent people.”

Mrs. K offered a bracing word. “Stop. You did not create the danger to your brother. This wretched league, whatever it is, created the danger.”

Phoebe shuddered. She thought she knew death. She had lost both her parents, her mother to childbirth, her father to illness, but not to malice. She did not know death as Jones knew it. Her parents had died loved and tended, mourned and remembered, while Shattuck had been cut down and shoved aside. His death made her flesh cold. “Oh, Mrs. K there is something so cruel in this league. Shattuck was a little sly, a little corrupt, but he didn’t deserve such a death.”

“Now that you are known to the league as a widow, isn’t Mr. Jones right, to send you home, to ask you to put aside your widow’s disguise?”

“And go back to being a helpless lady ?” Phoebe glanced at the sorry stained bag again. It had the look of disappointed hopes. Her disguise had given her a bolder identity. She had believed she could continue the search in spite of the warning note. She had felt both free and concealed in those clothes. But she had been wrong. Someone had found them out and dangerous men were nearer to finding Andrew.

Mrs. K took up her tea cup. “Must a lady be helpless?”

Phoebe looked up. Mrs. K was the picture of a proper matron in her lacy cap and gray silk gown with a blue teacup in her hand, but Phoebe caught the glint of rebellion in the blue eyes.

If Phoebe must be a lady, then she would be a different sort of lady than she had been before. Jones believed that someone from the fashionable world was behind the league, someone from Phoebe’s own world. Who better than Phoebe to investigate that world? The thing for Phoebe to do was to go out into that world as boldly as she had gone into Berwick Street. One thing she would not do was stay home and wait.

*

Once the authorities descended upon the scene of Shattuck’s death, Robin had no further opportunity to conduct an investigation of his own. He would have liked to examine the floor for any sign of the round chalk markings from the league office, but the footprints of the coroner, his clerk, the local sergeant, and two more constables quickly obscured any earlier markings on the floor of the shop. Robin’s suggestion that the league was a front for a radical organization worked to explain much of Constable Trigg’s account to the coroner. With considerable patience Robin let the idea take hold in the man’s mind. The theory made sense of Robin’s part in the affair without involving the Yard. It explained why Robin had asked Trigg to keep an eye on the place, why he had come to Shattuck’s shop at such an early hour of the day, why Shattuck’s back office had been torn apart, and why the league premises were now empty. If the coroner did not quite buy the story, he did see it as a useful way to account for a grisly murder without arousing wild fears in the populace.

Once Robin told his tale, the Yard’s role in unfolding events appeared to be no more than that of discovery. None of the neighbors crowding about the door to Shattuck’s shop mentioned seeing a widow. Only one man said he thought that Shattuck was too friendly with the fellows in the office across the street. Robin observed the crowd closely. Most of those who had gathered were women hoping to gain entrance to the shop itself. A few expressed their grievance that Shattuck had promised to sell items for them, items they had a claim on. They wanted to know whether the police were going to keep them from getting what was theirs. Voices and fists were raised until Constable Trigg and his partner sent the crowd about its business.

It was dusk when Robin reached Mayne’s office. The news of Shattuck’s death had arrived hours earlier.

Mayne delivered his opinion of the outcome of the case so far in a crisp manner at a volume that must have opened the ears of anyone in the vicinity. Robin’s faults were many and grievous. He had lost a key witness. By all accounts he had lost critical evidence. He had involved the coroner. He had aroused suspicions in that official about the nature of police activities. He had endangered an important member of the ton , and he was apparently no nearer to finding the missing boy than he had been three days earlier.

“Jones, do you want to return to your beat in Holborn? It can be arranged.”

“No, sir.”

*

Lumley was in the office when Robin returned.

“Dog-napping case not going well?”

“No result yet.” Robin shed his coat and turned his back on Lumley. He added the charred bit of paper and the remains of the red tie from the league office fire to the evidence on his desk. Whoever ran the league had wanted to cover his tracks.

Lumley wasn’t done. Any opportunity to needle Robin could not be overlooked. “What good are friends in high places, eh, Jones? If you can’t solve the case, you’ll be back on the beat in no time, a leather collar around your neck.”

“Or I might get lucky.”

He wasn’t going to let himself regret sending Phoebe home. She might be clever and brave and she might even keep him sharp, but she was no match for a murderer. All the evidence Robin had collected, that he and Phoebe had collected, concerned the league’s tools and its victims. Nothing pointed to the person or persons behind the league, to human motives whether of vice or passion. Desperation had motivated Leary. A bit of greed was behind Shattuck. Something more sinister was behind the league.

The puzzling thing was that Thames Property Recovery, Ltd. had been the ratepayer for ten years on that office. Did that mean that the league had been in operation for ten years? If so, then Leary was not their first tool, nor was Andrew Marchmont their first target.

Maybe Robin was wrong, but instinct told him that whoever was behind the boy’s disappearance stood to gain from the Grafton title and estates. Phoebe Marchmont did not believe that such a person could be found in her lofty family. But Robin thought he should see for himself. As Lumley said, Robin had friends in high places. With a little help from them, he could investigate the Marchmont family. He would have to see Wenlocke.

Meanwhile, now that Leary had given them a narrower area to search, Robin had a way to look for the missing boy without making the search known to anyone official or anyone in the league. His first stop would be Moody’s Fives Corner.

*

Wenlocke’s Mayfair town house was as familiar as any place Robin had ever lived. He had a brief word with the duke’s new butler and charged up to the study. As usual, books were piled about, and a crumbling block structure stood besieged by tiny knights in the center of the Turkey carpet. Wenlocke sat in a leather armchair in front of a comfortable fire with a glass of amber-colored spirits in one hand.

“I’ve been expecting you,” he said. He rose and crossed to a tall walnut cabinet, from which he offered Robin a drink.

Robin put up a hand to refuse the offered glass of brandy. “You heard something about Shattuck?”

“You can’t do another thing today,” Wenlocke observed, giving Robin the spirits. “Even in the midst of my domesticity, a grim murder where one of my own has an interest, must inevitably come to my attention. What can you tell me, if anything?”

They settled in the chairs in front of the fire, and Robin began his account of finding Leary and hearing his story, going through the empty league office, and discovering Shattuck’s body. He weighed the wisdom of telling Wenlocke about Phoebe Marchmont’s involvement.

“I take it Mayne is not pleased.”

Robin permitted himself a small smile at the understatement.

A clock chimed the quarter hour. It was near midnight. “But the matter is pressing and you’ve been busy, haven’t you? The boy is your first concern.”

“Yes.” Robin explained how he had enlisted the crew at Moody’s, and asked them to keep an eye out for the boy, who, according to Leary, had begun a life in Soho a year earlier with only a Hayward’s pawn ticket to guide him. “I’m convinced that he’s hiding,” Robin concluded.

“As we did. We were quite good at it, remember.”

Robin did remember. He mostly shoved the memories aside when they occurred, but that was impossible to do now. Memories of being cold and hungry and small could make a man forget his position in the world, his height, and the power of his fists. A lost boy had no defense against the world except his ability to hide, and a friend if he had a friend. Robin hoped that Andrew Marchmont had such a friend as Robin had had in Wenlocke, then no more than a boy himself.

“The boy may be safe for the moment in some doss-house or hidey hole, but I need to find the man behind the league.”

“Finch is working on it,” Wenlocke said. “There’s a layer of French ownership in your ratepayer, the Thames Property Recovery, Ltd. group, but Finch will dig deeper. You suspect a man of rank behind the organization?”

“Yes, but the motive eludes me. What is it—bitterness, disappointment, a sense of ill-usage? Is that enough to lead a man to form an organization? To target strangers?”

Wenlocke stared down into his glass. Another gentleman might consider Robin mad for such a theory, but not Wenlocke, who knew what it was to be hated and pursued. “You don’t see a family connection? A more personal motive?”

“Lady Phoebe thinks—”

“Ah,” said Wenlocke, “you’ve met her.”

“I have.” It was no use trying to hide the thing from Wenlocke. He might appear to be absorbed in the conversation, but he would not miss Robin’s interest in the girl, an interest that could compromise them both, Phoebe as a lady, and Robin as a detective.

“She’s involved in the search?”

“She would run the whole investigation if she could.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“It’s a bleeding dangerous thing.” Robin had a vivid image of Shattuck’s slit throat. “She has no sense of the proper limits of a gently born maiden. She thinks she can go anywhere. She charges into danger, pokes umbrellas at villains, and now…” She had been with him every step of the way.

“Now?” Wenlocke prompted with an amused smile.

“Now, I’ve ordered her to stay home, but I know she’ll go out, not knowing who this enemy is.”

“You believe the enemy is present in fashionable society and could find her at some ball or dinner party. And that’s why you came to me?”

Robin had the grace to admit it. “Can I depend on my friends in high places ? I thought you or the duchess could get me some invitations.”

There was a swish of skirts at the door and a peal of merry laughter. “Did I hear my name mentioned? Where am I to take you, dear boy? You know I’ve been waiting an age to show you off to all those matrons with languishing daughters.”

Robin turned, and there she was, the golden girl they’d all fallen in love with as boys when she’d come to tutor them at Daventry Hall.

Wenlocke burst out laughing. “Robin, lad, you should see the expression of horror on your face.”

Robin rose and bowed. “Anywhere where the floor has been chalked for a ball,” he said.