Page 19 of The Lady and the Secret Lord (The Duke’s Men #3)

W ell after two, the Huntingdon dinner party broke up. Footmen ran up and down the short wide stairs, holding umbrellas over ladies and gentlemen hurrying to their carriages. Robin had the dubious satisfaction of seeing Phoebe go with her cousins in her great-aunt’s coach without Bolton. He did not see Bolton leave.

In the Wenlocke coach there was little talk. Robin did not trust himself to speak. He did not resent their help in the matter of finding his true family, he just didn’t want any other family than the one he had found in them. In the end, the duchess warned him to be careful, and Wenlocke offered to seek more information about Bolton in the morning. His friends descended from the coach at their door and dashed laughing through the rain into the house.

The coach was Robin’s if he needed it. Wenlocke’s coachman, an old friend, willingly delivered Robin to Marchmont House. He arrived at the kitchen door drenched, and weighed down with the consciousness of having disappointed his truest friend and troubled him in some way. The duchess’s warning now struck Robin as odd. He shook off the rain and the heaviness. There was a boy missing and a murderer at large.

Mrs. Kendall answered his knock in her lace cap and blue wrapper. “I take it,” she said, with a frown, “there is work to be done.” She handed him a towel. “You will work here.”

Robin hung his wet outer coat near the kitchen fire, toweled his head more or less dry, and shed the tight evening coat, ruined tie, and uncomfortable evening shoes. His collar lay cold and damp against his neck, and his toes left wet prints on the spotless kitchen floor. He rolled up the cuffs of his dress shirt, feeling more himself at once.

Phoebe came down the kitchen stairs in a soft printed gown of an earthy russet color like ripe apples, a cream-colored shawl around her shoulders. He stared at the transformation from the ballroom lady to the country miss, another version of who she was, a kissable version, the sort of girl a policeman with no prospects other than his own wits might court. Lamplight made a sort of glow around her.

In answer to his stare, she explained. “The dress was my mother’s. I wear it sometimes to feel near to her.”

She placed a file of papers on the kitchen table, and Robin gathered his thoughts. He didn’t have his notebook and pencil, but he was the detective. She was the client.

He looked up and found her studying him. “How do you know Wenlocke?” she asked. Her gaze took in his unbuttoned appearance, his tousled hair and open collar, his rolled-up cuffs.

The question caught him off guard, a reminder of his unkindness to Wenlocke earlier that night. He lifted me out of the street when my mother died. He settled for saying, “He is my Jones family. His mother’s name was Jones before her marriage.”

He lowered his eyes to the file on the table and opened it. Lucy Walker’s reference from the household staff agency lay on top of a pile of papers, and there was no question that Shattuck’s was the meticulous hand that had written it. Robin had seen enough forgeries to recognize the signs.

“It is Shattuck’s work,” he said. “The agency’s name looks genuine, but here,” he pointed, “you can see the shakiness of the hand, and here, where he’s copying the usual language covering the agency’s policies, the pressure of the pen is uneven. He lifts it and puts it down again as he copies.”

The idea shocked her. Her face looked stricken. “If it is a forgery, and my cousin did not get these papers from the agency, does that mean she knows about the league?”

“Not necessarily.” Listening to Leary had given Robin a theory about how Bolton operated.

Mrs. Kendall shuffled around them in her slippers, serving tea and a plate of small cakes. “I will leave you to it,” she said. “Mind. The girls will be stirring before long.”

“Thank you, Mrs. K.” Phoebe took one of the cakes and began to break it into pieces.

“Tell me,” Robin said, “what you know about your cousin’s recommendation of this woman?”

She gave him a glance that said he was being very much the detective. “It started when I paid a call on my great-aunt after my cousins’ visit with Mr. Wigmore. It was the day you went to the watch dealer.”

“And?”

“Mary pointed out that because of mourning my father and searching for my brother, I had had a year of unusual… latitude for a lady. But if I wished to return to society, I would need to hire a proper companion, not merely Mrs. K. I didn’t want to do that because I thought a companion would interfere with my plan to search for Andrew myself.

“Great-Aunt Serafina advised me as well. Mary gave me this file the day we went to Berwick Street. She mentioned it tonight, on our way to the dinner. I promised I would look at it.”

Robin wondered whether the pressure to hire a false companion came directly from Bolton. “What was the reason for Wigmore’s visit that first day?”

She took a deep breath. “He came with my cousins and advised me to begin a legal action to have Andrew declared dead. I refused, and Henry saw Wigmore out the door. My cousins supported me in standing up to him. I thought they were on my side,” she concluded sadly.

He didn’t answer the unstated plea in her words, but he wanted to give her something to explain Mary’s betrayal, lessen the hurt of it. “If your cousin Mary saw the letters between your parents and got a mistaken idea about your brother, would she tell your great-aunt?”

Phoebe was silent, breaking the little cake into even, bite-sized pieces while Robin’s soggy coat dripped on the slates, and the fire, going strong now, snapped and hissed. At last, she said, “If she did, Great-Aunt would likely tell her she was being a goose.”

“You know your cousin. How would she feel to have her concern dismissed? Would that be the end of it, or would her wounded pride make her keep thinking and wondering about what she had seen?” He could imagine resentment building.

Phoebe stared across the table at him. He was leading her to the unavoidable heart of the matter now. “Her pride would be hurt, I think, at such a rebuff,” Phoebe admitted. “She would want to be listened to, and Great-Aunt is not much of a listener.”

He led her to the next step. “But her friend the count is, isn’t he?”

She stopped crumbling the cake. “You think she poured out the false story about Andrew to the count? Not to Wigmore?”

Robin nodded. “Wigmore, if he thought the papers significant, would go to your great-aunt. That would be his duty. For that reason, your cousin wouldn’t go to him. If she wanted support for her theory, not a rebuff, she would turn to someone else, someone sympathetic to her position.”

Phoebe stood and began to pace. “I don’t know. I can see that Mary would want to be right, but she would want Great-Aunt to believe her.”

“Her word alone would not convince your great-aunt, so she would need to get hold of that letter, to place it in your aunt’s hands.”

“What are you suggesting?” she asked, wide-eyed. “If Mary, if anyone in the family truly believed that Andrew was not my father’s legitimate heir, wouldn’t they take the matter to court?”

“Too long. A court case is a protracted, expensive, and very public solution to a family problem.” Robin knew. Wenlocke had spent years in court winning his claim to a dukedom. The court battle had so embittered Wenlocke’s grandfather that the old man had sent his spies to find a way to kill his grandson. “I think the count offered your cousin a private solution.”

Her face changed as some realization came to her. “The count suggested she could get the proof she needed with the help of a servant, a servant who was not loyal to my father.”

“He probably offered to help her find such a man.” To Robin’s way of thinking Bolton never needed to mention the league to those who benefitted from its work.

“She would show the letter to Great-Aunt and force her to listen.”

“But then Leary failed to get the letter,” he prompted. They were working together again as they had in solving the puzzle of her parents’ letters.

She halted and sank back into the chair opposite him, her face troubled. She plainly didn’t like where the logic of the evidence was taking her. She wanted to believe in the goodness and loyalty of her cousin. “You and I heard Leary. He never mentioned Mary, so how could she be involved in Andrew’s disappearance, no matter what she believed?” She lifted a pleading glance.

He kept his gaze level, his expression blank. There was an inevitably to a case, like a Thames tide rising, first in little wavelets lapping at the mud, then in the rocking of the boats moored along the shore, lifting them free of the muck, then in the swallowing up of the pilings along the embankment as the tide-swelled river reached its full height. He saw it, and he suspected she did, too. Her resistance to the truth of betrayal was strong, but it could not hold out against the evidence.

“I don’t think your cousin gave any orders. I think the count encouraged her to trust him, to let him see to things. I think he promised in some vague way that he would make the problem of Andrew go away. And she was content not to inquire, to go along.”

“That’s why she was as shocked as I was the day of the fire when Leary and Andrew disappeared.” Phoebe shuddered, her expression bleak, as some new thought occurred.

“What?” he asked.

“The first thing Mary asked me the day they returned to London was whether I had news about Andrew. Had he been found? I thought she asked out of concern, but…” Her voice trailed off. “Why? Was her situation so desperate?”

Robin could more easily answer a why about Bolton than about her cousin. Bolton, he imagined, was the sort of person to take pleasure in a kind of seduction, a seduction to his way of thinking the world unjust, thinking that others had received good things that were properly owed instead to oneself. Robin had been searching for a motive. Now he saw that there was a twisted pleasure in the names Bolton had given his enterprises, Thames Property Recovery, Ltd. and the Benevolent Assistance League.

Across the table from Robin, Phoebe yawned. It was perhaps the most trusting of human acts, preparing to succumb to sleep, to give up vigilance. It woke Robin from the drowsy comfort of the warm kitchen. His own sleepiness fled. Phoebe wasn’t safe. He could see the mistakes of his investigation, which led to danger closing in around her. Clearly, Bolton did not want to be discovered. Already one man who knew too much had been killed. And that man had identified both Robin and Phoebe in disguise to someone in the league office. He closed the little file on the table.

“Did she mention these papers in the coach going home? Was she suspicious of you?”

Her eyes met his. “Henry teased me about my tall, awkward admirer, but there was little talk. I pled fatigue. Mary will call tomorrow, though not until afternoon. If we are right, she will press me about this Lucy Walker.”

He heard that we and told himself he could resist it no matter how approachable she looked in this new guise. He rose and looked round for his clothes. “When she comes, you must stall without seeming unwilling. She must not think you suspect her candidate of being a plant. Can you set up a time for Mrs. Walker to come to Marchmont House?”

Phoebe stood, gazing at him, a little stubborn. “You are warning me not to confront her because of Andrew.”

“I see that I don’t have to.” He shrugged into his greatcoat and shivered at the contact with cold, damp wool against his neck. “I will let you know when Andrew is found and truly safe.”

She collected his dinner jacket and tie and handed them to him. He stuffed his finery into the vast pockets of the coat.

They stood for a moment in the warm, comfortable kitchen, partners again, her face with its sweet mouth, tilted up to his. The real evil of her disguise was plain to him. On the streets she was anonymous. To Lumley, she was a figure of fun. As Mrs. Kendall , Robin himself had considered her an annoyance, and obstacle to his work. Now he saw that the disguise had shrunk the proper distance between them as detective and lady. The black bombazine and padded waist had permitted an intimacy of mind, a partnership. Her voice and the flash of her eyes when a new idea came to her were part of his thinking. His guard had been down. He had allowed sentiments to grow, which now, he must firmly put aside. With the disguise removed, society’s established barrier between them stood as solid as the bricks of London. She thought him a cheeky, presumptuous copper who ordered her about. He couldn’t deny it. A further presumption came to mind. He wanted to kiss her. It might be his only chance. If he were a different man, not a detective, he would.

“Thank you,” she said. “Andrew is my only family now. You showed me that.”