London's Last True Scoundrel (37 page)

Short of marrying her himself, that was.

She gazed up at him, wonder and a good deal of shame in her eyes. “All along, I knew. I tried to fool myself that you deserved to be deceived, that you were just like all of the other rakes who take cruel advantage of such innocents as I was. But you’re not, are you, Davenport? You never were.”

She bit her lip and turned her face away. In a suffocated tone, she said, “Pray accept my apologies, my lord. I behaved badly. So badly that I cannot conceive how you should forgive me or wish to help me. But … I thank you. And I … I wish you happy with—”

Tears choked her and she couldn’t go on.

“Not at all,” he said, patting her shoulder gingerly and glancing about for means of escape. “Why don’t you, er, dry your eyes and tidy up? I’ll see you back in the ballroom.”

He needed to get to Honey and reassure her, do whatever he could to dispel the grave trouble he’d seen in her face. Surely she couldn’t think that he cared for Lady Maria? Not after all he and Honey had been to each other.

He climbed the stairs again, knowing that the forthcoming conversation would be the most important of his life. If he messed this up, he might as well blow his brains out.

Every instinct told him that convincing Honey to marry him was not going to be easy after that scene with Lady Maria.

By the time he arrived back at the music room, he was wound so tightly he could barely breathe. He opened the door and peered through the shadows, inserting his index finger into the space between his collar and his neck. Why had he tied the damned thing so tightly? It was strangling him.

“Honey?” He moved farther into the room, but he could tell even before he did so that the room was empty.

Honey had gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

For many moments, Davenport stood like a bloody pillar of salt in the doorway to the music room, unable to move or think for the conflicting imperatives that crowded his brain.

Had she returned to the ballroom without him? Perhaps she’d gone to find Rosamund to beg her to take her home.

“My lord! I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” A footman, out of breath, caught up with him as he entered the ballroom and handed him a paper. “This was delivered here half an hour ago.”

“Thank you.” His thoughts filled with Honey, it took him a second or two to focus on the note.

When he read Gerald’s hasty scrawl, he uttered a blistering oath that made a passing matron give him a shocked stare.

As he crushed the paper in his fist, he muttered an apology to the lady and scanned the crowd, hoping against hope to see Honey.

He found Rosamund, but his cousin hadn’t laid eyes on Honey.

“I thought she was with you,” she said under her breath, the sharpness of her tone belied by the society smile. “Don’t tell me you’ve lost her.”

“If she comes back to the ballroom, keep her with you,” he instructed her. “Don’t let her out of your sight.”

He lost valuable minutes in his search. Mason was in grave danger, if he only knew it. And now Honey was missing, too.

An inquiry of the butler told him Miss deVere hadn’t called for her cloak or for a carriage to be brought. Nor had anyone see her leave. Perhaps she’d gone to the ladies’ retiring room to freshen up. He scrawled a message and left it with a footman to be delivered to her.

Davenport questioned Mason’s sister, then inquired of several people whether Yarmouth had been seen at the ball. He couldn’t find Beckenham, but there was no time, so he left him a message with a linkboy who loitered outside, then he bolted through London streets until he found a hackney cab.

He didn’t know what he’d find at Mason’s laboratory, which was situated in the attics of an old house on Upper Wimpole Street. He hoped he wasn’t too late.

He paid off the driver and drew out his pistol, hoping to God he wouldn’t need it, that Gerald hadn’t been quite as foolish as he suspected.

The front door stood slightly ajar. A bad sign, one that had Davenport moving silently through the poky hallway, up the stairs to the second floor, where Mason kept his library.

A board creaked on the landing. Davenport froze. He listened, ears straining, but the only sound he heard was the faint ticking of a clock.

Back against the wall, he peered around the doorframe.

“Damnation,” he muttered, releasing the hammer on his pistol and pocketing it. He was too late.

Heart pounding and a sick dread in his stomach, he strode over to Mason, who was slumped over his desk.

“Gerald!” Davenport put fingers to the man’s neck and detected a pulse.

Relief washed over him in a heady rush.

His hand came away sticky with blood and he saw the spot where Gerald had been struck. It was still bleeding, which meant the culprit wasn’t far.

Perhaps even in this room—

A flash of movement caught the tail of Davenport’s eye. He snatched up the closest thing to hand, which happened to be the ink pot, and flung it in his attacker’s face.

Even spattered with blue ink, Davenport recognized the face instantly.

Ridley.

Rage raced along his veins like fire, roared in his head. Without pausing to draw his pistol, he launched himself at the killer.

Ridley’s knife bit into his skin, slashing a long gash up his forearm, but Davenport made the sacrifice to get close enough to wrestle for the weapon. His hand clamped over Ridley’s wrist as they hit the floor, rolling, scuffling in a struggle for supremacy. The fight was silent, bloody, and brutal, but Ridley was simply a hired thug. Davenport had righteous fury on his side.

The pistol fell from his pocket and skittered across the floor. Ridley’s attention was caught. His gaze tracked the weapon, and the distraction was all Davenport needed. He pinned Ridley to the floor in a wrestling move he’d perfected at Cambridge. A vicious smash of Ridley’s wrist on the bare floorboards made him let go.

The knife dropped to the floor just out of Ridley’s reach.

There was a flare of fear in Ridley’s eyes as Davenport loomed over him. Then he curled his lip. “You don’t have the guts to finish the job, do yer? Useless toff.”

“This is for Nail, you bastard,” Davenport snarled. He drove his fist into the man’s sneering face.

The urge to keep hitting him even after the man lost consciousness was so strong, Davenport exercised a severe effort of will to stop. He wasn’t here to kill Ridley, satisfying and just as that might be.

Quickly he ripped the man’s coat open and searched inside it. No pockets. Inside his waistcoat, then. Grimacing, he slid his hand between the man’s waistcoat and his graying shirt.

Paper met his touch. He whisked it out and unfolded it with trembling fingers.

By George. Gerald had got it.

The method for synthesizing the nitroglycerine. The reason Davenport had been hounded and forced into hiding was all here on paper. Gerald had cracked it.

He checked over the workings and frowned. Then he shoved the paper in his own pocket and searched for something to bind Ridley’s hands and feet.

*   *   *

“You’re a damned fool,” said Davenport, handing Gerald a soaked washcloth to bathe his aching head. “More of a fool than I was. At least I had the excuse of youth. Don’t you know why I had to disappear? Because of that damned formula. And now you’ve gone and replicated my work they’ll be after you.”

As briefly as possible, he’d told Gerald the truth of his feigned death and reappearance, only to discover that his friend and rival had guessed most of it already.

Gerald winced as he pressed the wad of cloth to the back of his head. “It was always a competition between us. Yarmouth played on it; I realize that now. But you won this time, Davenport. You got the girl.”

Davenport’s brows twitched together. “Do you mean Lady Maria?”

Gerald nodded.

“Don’t be daft, man. She doesn’t care a button for me.”

In fact, he was almost certain now that if Gerald could accept another man’s child as his own and marry the chit they’d have a reasonable chance of happiness. It wasn’t his place to tell Gerald about the babe, however. He’d leave that to Lady Maria. Sadly he doubted the girl had the wit to realize how lucky she was in having Gerald’s heart at her feet or the courage to pick it up.

Gerald grunted, shifting in his chair. “That’s not what it looks like to me.”

“What does Lady Maria have to do with this?” Davenport gestured to the paper in his hand.

“Yarmouth,” Gerald touched the back of his head and hissed. “He promised me he’d approve my suit if I succeeded where you failed.”

“It’s not in your line of work,” said Davenport. “Why did he choose you?”

A grim twist to Gerald’s mouth told Davenport that if he’d ever harbored illusions about Yarmouth he didn’t have them any longer. “At the time, I was flattered. Now, I think he chose me because if I was tied to his daughter I’d be under his control.”

“What changed his tune?”

Gerald shrugged. “I started thinking with my brain instead of the contents of my trousers, began asking questions. Yarmouth didn’t like it. But I was stupid and jealous of you with Maria. I let him goad me into admitting I’d solved the problem.”

A scuffle at the door made Davenport snatch up his pistol. He cocked it with deadly purpose and trained it on the opening door.

Hilary stumbled into the room, her neck held in a harsh grip by Yarmouth, the man Davenport now knew was his enemy.

Davenport’s quick reflexes nearly had him pulling the trigger on his own sweetheart. Thank God some instinct had stayed his hand. His hand shook. His body went first hot, then cold before his mind kicked into gear, his senses sharpened to a deadly point. There was no room for error here.

Fear stiffened Honey’s features. She was white as death. That she wasn’t dead or maimed or injured was no thanks to him. Where the hell was Beckenham? He was supposed to have been watching Yarmouth.

“What’s he doing here?” Davenport ground out with a glare at Gerald.

Mason swallowed hard. “I sent him a note, too. I thought the three of us could come to an arrangement.”

“Apparently, you were wrong.” God, he could kill Gerald for being such a fool. What had he sought to achieve by bringing them all together? A pity he hadn’t realized the full extent of Yarmouth’s villainy before this.

But then, even Davenport hadn’t been certain. Not until Lady Maria had betrayed knowledge about his journey to town. Yarmouth could only have come by that information one way: by having Davenport followed.

“Put the gun down, Davenport, there’s a good fellow,” said Yarmouth. Even with a pistol to a lady’s head, he smiled benignly, like a vicar at a tea party.

With Honey held so close against Yarmouth’s bulk, the pistol was useless anyway. Davenport released the hammer and complied, placing the weapon carefully on the desk, within reach if he needed to dive for it.

Even in these circumstances, Yarmouth’s mouth stretched in that wide, urbane grin Davenport found so irritating. He glanced over at his henchman, bound and gagged on the floor. “I see I was right not to trust Ridley with this. He is usually such a reliable tool.”

“Not so reliable, after all,” said Davenport with a glance toward Ridley, who lay helpless on his back in the far corner of the room. “I’d lay you odds he’ll testify you hired him to kill the porter at that club. I’m sure the Duke of Montford could arrange for leniency on his sentence in return for—”

Davenport moved even before the report of Yarmouth’s pistol shattered the air. Hilary cried out, her instinctive recoil wresting her free of Yarmouth’s slackened grip. Davenport shoved her aside, dealing Yarmouth a blow to the guts that doubled the man over. Groaning, he slid down the wall.

Between wheezes and gasps and fruitlessly squeezing the trigger on his now-spent pistol, Yarmouth still managed a sneer. “Where’s your evidence now, Davenport, eh?”

“Right here,” said Davenport, moving to crouch over Ridley. “You missed.”

He’d banked on Ridley providing a difficult target, lying flat on the ground. Not that he’d weep real tears over the man’s demise, but he’d prefer that Ridley spill his guts in a signed confession and implicate Yarmouth in the business first. Ridley might get his sentence commuted to transportation if he laid information against his employer, but he wouldn’t entirely escape justice for killing Nail.

The man was awake now, and his fury and fear at being gagged and bound showed in his ferocious glare and reddened face. But Yarmouth’s pistol ball had missed him and buried itself in the floor a yard or two away.

Having assured himself Ridley was unscathed, Davenport moved quickly to Hilary’s side. “My dear, are you hurt?”

She flinched from his touch. “No. I am unharmed.”

She glanced at him and away again. There might not be pain in the rest of her body, but there was a world of pain in her eyes, and he thought he knew which particular villain was responsible for that.

He’d failed her. He’d led her into danger of the gravest kind. She probably thought he’d abandoned her back at Montford’s ball, too.

There was no time to dwell on that now. He needed to get Honey away from here. But how to do it when he had so many loose ends to tie up? He couldn’t trust Mason with Ridley or even Yarmouth, come to that.

But Yarmouth wasn’t finished. He smiled groggily at Gerald, who had looked on with his mouth opening and closing like a fish throughout. “Just out of curiosity, do you still wish to marry my daughter, Mason? You see, I’m inclined to look favorably on your suit. With or without the solution you promised me.”

He gave a dramatic shudder. “When I think of the profits that you’re letting slip through your fingers … You could be set up for life, man! You could support my daughter in grand style, never have to work again.”

Gerald pressed his lips together and didn’t deign to answer.

“You can give them your blessing before you stand trial,” said Davenport dryly.

“But you’ll have to tie the knot quickly,” continued Yarmouth as if Davenport hadn’t spoken. He made a moue expressive of distaste. “You see, Gerald, the stupid little bitch went and got herself with child.”