After the Scandal (16 page)

Claire flinched, her head smacking the wall smartly, knocking some sense into her. “No.”

He stopped immediately. The brim of his hat brushed against her temple, enclosing them in a tiny, close tent of privacy. And then he waited. Waited for her to accustom herself to him. Waited for her to protest or say she’d had enough. His touch at her nape turned even more gentle and careful—almost reverent, as if he feared she was fragile and might break. As if he thought she needed his protection.

But she would not break. She was determined.

And so was he—determined to take his time. Determined to be controlled and light and careful. His left hand came up to barely caress her elbow. “All right?”

“No.” She was all right, even if her voice did sound small and breathy. “Almost.”

She needed—

She wasn’t sure what she needed, besides more time—which they didn’t have. But Tanner didn’t rush her, so Claire took her time, and let her instinct be her guide and clasped his elbow just as he had clasped hers and swung herself around.

So he was the one with his back to the wall and she was the one who was free and could choose how close to him she wanted to be.

He accepted the reversal with an easy grace. He relaxed back against the wall and waited, holding his hand carefully at her nape so she could follow him if she chose. And in another moment she did choose to lay her hand upon his chest, resting lightly against the front of his coat.

He touched her face again—that soft, gentle, reverent touch—and she let him. Let the warmth of both his fingers and his regard chase away the lingering cold within.

It was nothing like before. He was nothing like Lord Peter Rosing. Tanner was protecting her. Teaching her.

And it was nice. He was nice. He even smelled nice—of starch and cedar spice from the chest where he must have stored his clothes. Homey and practical. Safe.

So unlike the chilly, aloof Duke of Fenmore.

This Tanner was warm and confident. “Are you ready now, lass?” His voice regained the low rumble of roughness, tumbling across his tongue like an agile acrobat.

Claire found herself looking at his mouth, watching his perfect lips form the imperfect, mangled words and still make then sound so compelling. “Yes.”

“That’s the girl.” And then he pressed his lips to her forehead—a quick benediction and encouragement. “Stay close to me so we’ll look like we’re together, see? Like we’re a … couple.”

Like they were intimate was what he meant. Like they were lovers.

A new heat blossomed deep under Claire’s skin and made her feel flushed and tingling and discomfited. Every nerve in her body was awake and, if not exactly uncomfortable, then alarmed.

But she could no longer deny her attraction to him.

He showed no such susceptibility. He was only playing a part, putting on the role of intimate just as easily as he had put on the worn redingote and the casual, rangy stride that took up the greater portion of the narrow roadway, and made people pull back to let them pass.

But there was something still of the duke in him—though he certainly looked humbler, rigged up in such worn clothes—something, if not of privilege, then of command. Yes, if anything, the rough-spun clothing made him more masculine, more powerful and commanding in an entirely different way than the sharp, clever tailoring of his perfectly cut evening clothes ever had.

But this was not a place for evening clothes, for polite euphemisms and flattering, soft talk. This was a place for the sort of cagey swagger and quiet bravado that clung to him more surely than his highwayman’s jerkin.

And he seemed to know this city, these dark, festering places, like he knew the sharp lines of his own face. He walked with authority, moving as if he knew exactly where he was, when she could barely keep conscious of which way was east the moment the crowded buildings blocked out the sight of the rising sun.

The crooked buildings soon loomed over them, until it seemed as if they were walking back into the night. There was nothing familiar now. The farther they moved off the river, the thicker the air seemed to become, though no less damp, laden with the gritty stink of the fires that coughed out of listing chimneys leaning against the low, dirty hovels.

He urged her closer with a hand at her elbow, though she was nearly walking upon his heels in an effort to stay near. “Snug up close, lass.”

“Oh, yes.” She needed little urging to take advantage of the comfort of his sheltering height, as the fetid stink from the gutters assailed her nostrils, and the acrid smoke stung her eyes. But then she came to a fuller understanding of His Grace’s meaning when he slung his arm across her shoulders, and pulled her flush against his side in the casually rough way of the stevedores and their girls working in the Hungerford Market down near the river, or the carters working Shepherd Market near her father’s house in St. James’s, where she sometimes went in the morning at her mother’s request.

How remarkable it was that she felt safe in the Duke of Fenmore’s roughly casual embrace—in what he had proclaimed to be one of the worst slums in London. She felt safe, when she had felt exactly the opposite with Lord Peter Rosing in the seemingly safe environs of a wealthy estate.

How astonishing. And how dangerous.

Claire’s pulse quickened and began to keep time with her footfalls upon the dank cobbles. No. Tanner was nothing like Lord Peter Rosing. Everything Tanner had said and done had already proved that true. Everything.

Tanner angled then toward the side of the narrow lane, where what her buckish brothers would have called a likely-looking chum was splayed low against a barrel.

“Lookin’ fer a ken.” Tanner looked down at him from under the brim of his slouchy hat. “Carters live along ’ere?”

The greasy little chum squinted up at them but didn’t move another muscle. “Whot’s in it fer me?”

Tanner pushed his voice so low it raked the gutter. “Mebbe me not darkening your daylights. Mebbe a copper if you can furnish it sharpish-like.”

The speed with which he devolved to casual violence shocked her to her core, and sent a sharp wedge of doubt prying into her fresh convictions. Despite his injunction to stay close, Claire pulled herself back from him. She had conveniently forgotten how ruthlessly Tanner had broken Rosing’s leg. How coldly and efficiently it had been done. Despite the fact that Rosing certainly did deserve it.

But neither Tanner nor the chum paid her crisis of confidence any mind.

The chum evinced a sour smile. “There’s a Molly Carter takes in washin’ up Union Place way. Mean-eyed old mort. I’d watch my baubles with her, if I was you.”

Tanner turned up one side of his mouth in a tight smile. “Obliged.” And with a flick of his fingers, he sent a single copper coin spiraling through the air.

In the dimness Claire couldn’t see if it were caught, but she didn’t hear the penny drop.

And had to smile to herself.

This was what His Grace had been talking to her about—about how she knew more than she knew she knew. How she knew the chum had caught his penny because she never heard it hit the ground. How astonishing.

Tanner led her in his meandering, loose-limbed way down the meanest, most filthy, most stinking streets she had ever encountered. And every step brought them somewhere meaner and filthier and more stinking still. They came along the back wall of Saint Margaret’s workhouse, where the place stank of stale sweat and something stronger—desperation. Claire had to put her hand across her face to combat the stench.

“Don’t, if you can help it,” he leaned close to rumble into her ear. “It will draw attention to you if you look like you can’t stomach the odor. Lean in to me. Jinks launders what he keeps for me, regular-like. Or hide a bit in your shawl. Even cut up, you’re too bloody beautiful for the Almonry.”

The offhand compliment warmed her cheeks and restored her faith in His Grace’s essential kindness. He might be violent and vehement, but he was violent and vehement on her behalf. It certainly was not what she might have expected from the aloof and chilly Duke of Fenmore, but it certainly was serving her well now.

Without his stunningly swift violence, she would have been raped. And perhaps murdered.

The grim reminder made her hitch the plain-spun shawl higher over the crown of her head. Her abigail, Silvers, would have an apoplexy if she ever saw Claire looking like a worn-out shopgirl, with her hair sliding loose from its pins.

But despite her misgivings, she didn’t feel worn-out. She felt alive and exhilarated by the exciting newness of it all.

Her guide had another low word with an old slattern propped against a semi-derelict brick building on the ill-lit corner of Orchard Street—semi-derelict only because people were streaming in and out of the place even though it looked as if it were about to fall down on top of them. The old trull pointed them around a corner, and in another few moments they turned into the darkly narrow confines of Union Place.

“It’s a dead end,” Fenmore said low into her ear. “In more ways than one. Look sharp. Stay behind me.”

Claire wasn’t entirely sure how she might look sharp, other than keeping her eyes wide-open and trying to remember the way they had come. She began to count the number of footsteps they took into the dim little court.

“Carters’?” Tanner growled his inquiry at an urchin, who simply pointed to the open door of number 10.

Tanner steered Claire across the gap where a thin gutter ran down the middle of the lane, whereupon he knocked on the door frame with the side of his fist.

Claire peeped around Tanner to see a middle-aged woman with a uncapped head of fair hair, a face red with exertion, and a cynical, distrusting look in her eye come to the door. “Whatta you want?”

“Lookin’ fer Molly Carter,” Tanner said.

The sharp-eyed woman narrowed her gaze. “’Oo’s asking?”

“A friend o’ your daughter, Maisy.”

The woman cut a sharp eye over him and shook her head. “My Maisy ain’t got no friends as look like you. She’s a good girl, she is, and not for the likes of you. There’s summat off about you, like four-day-old fish.”

The woman made as if she would slam the ramshackle door in their faces until Claire stepped quickly forward.

“We’ve come from Riverchon Park, ma’am. We need to speak with you.”

At the sound of Claire’s voice the woman stopped, and took another look from Claire’s face to her skirts and back. “Yer no friends of my Maisy.” Her eyes were slitty with suspicion.

“No, ma’am.” Claire swallowed over the sudden heat in her throat. “I’m so very sorry, ma’am. Despite present appearances, we have come from Riverchon Park, and we must speak to you. I’m afraid it is very bad news.”

Molly Carter’s red face fell pale, and she put her hand to her chest to steady herself for the blow. Tanner put a hand to Molly Carter’s elbow to support her and urged them both over the threshold in uncompromising tones. “Inside. Private-like.”

Even as she stepped into the dimly lit, grim interior Claire could see the fear darken Molly Carter’s eyes and hollow out her features. And in the way of her kind, fear made the woman pugnacious. She shook off Tanner’s assistance and rounded on them threateningly, snatching up a rusty pair of scissors. “What have you done to my girl?”

In his blunt, straightforward way, Tanner did not try to cushion the blow. “She’s dead.”

The scissors clattered to the wooden floor.

“No.” The mother’s denial was no more than a whisper, but it went through Claire like a blade.

But Claire did the only thing she knew how to do—she took the hand the woman had clenched into a fist and held on tight. “I am afraid we’ve found her, ma’am. But too late.”

“No.” The poor woman clasped on to Claire’s hand and gripped harder, till her knuckles were white. “Not my Maisy.”

“I’m so sorry.”

The poor woman shook her head, as if the action could stave off both the tears and the terrible truth.

But it was impossible. Molly Carter began to cry. Loud, wailing sobs that tore Claire’s heart to absolute bits. And all she could do was bleed with her, and hold on.

Chapter Ten

Maisy Carter’s mother was a washerwoman. Tanner had instantly taken in her raw red hands—chapped from constant dunking in the lye soap vats that no doubt littered the small yard at the rear of the house—and rheumy, squinting eyes, and concluded her profession. Her face looked as rough as her hands. And likely her withered old-before-her-time soul. He recognized the face of a cynic. He had looked in the mirror often enough.

And the inside of the hovel, though canting dangerously to the north, was scrubbed within an inch of its life. Scrubbed so viciously there were scrape marks in the uneven wood-plank floor.

Molly Carter hated the dirt. But she must have loved her daughter.

“She were marked for something better,” Molly Carter said between sobs. “She were free of this place.”

He hadn’t expected her tears. He had expected the kind of cynical stoicism that only a place like the Almonry could produce. He had expected Molly Carter to be what she appeared, cutty eyed and deeply distrusting, hardened and worn to a dull blade by care and ceaseless work.

There was nothing more that could be done. He and Claire had done their Christian duty and given the poor creature the awful news, but hysteria was taking over. The woman’s sobs racked her stout body. They would learn nothing more from her now.

And weeping had always made him uncomfortable.

“Claire.” He touched her elbow to show themselves out.

But Lady Claire Jellicoe wasn’t listening. She was rounding her delicate elbow out of his grip and reaching toward Molly Carter, instead of away. Lady Claire Jellicoe moved close to Molly Carter and took up the woman’s hand where it lay pressed flat and white against the bleached and battered table.

Lady Claire made one of those strange wordless sympathetic noises. Like a well-bred mourning dove, making an empathetic coo. And then she took the hard-boiled harridan who was Molly Carter into her soft, pale arms, as if she were giving the woman a lifeline. As if she would save her from drowning in her sorrow. And somehow, she was.