More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (30 page)

“And for this you have felt guilt ever since?” Jane asked. He discovered suddenly that she had got up from her place and crossed in front of the hearth to stand before his chair. Before he realized what she was about to do, she sat on his lap and burrowed there until her head was on his shoulder. His arms closed about her in sheer reflex action.

“It felt like incest,” he said. “She was my father’s
whore
, Jane.”

“You were at the mercy of a ruthless man on one hand and a practiced courtesan on the other,” she told him. “It was not your fault.”

“I was in love with an innocent young girl,” he said. “And yet I spared her not one thought as I rutted with a woman ten years my senior whom I thought to be a relative. I learned one valuable lesson from the experience, though, Jane. I was my father’s son through and through. I
am
my father’s son.”

“Jocelyn,” she said, “you were
sixteen
. No matter who you were, you would have had to be superhuman—or subhuman—to resist such a powerful temptation. You must not blame yourself. Not any longer. Those events did not prove that you have a depraved nature. Far from it.”

“It took me a few years longer to prove that,” he said.

“Jocelyn.” He could feel her fingers playing with a button on his waistcoat. “Tell me something. Someday in the future when you have a son, will you ever do that to him? Initiate him with one of your own mistresses?”

He drew breath slowly and imagined it—the precious human who would be his son, product of his seed, and the woman with whom he would slake his appetites rather than remain true to his wife. Coming together, performing while he watched.

“I would sooner tear out my heart,” he said. “My nonexistent heart.”

“Then you are not your father,” she said, “or your grandfather. You are yourself. You were a sensitive, artistic, romantic boy, who had been repressed and was finally cruelly seduced. That is all, Jocelyn. You have allowed your life to be stunted by those events. But there is much life left to you. Forgive yourself.”

“I lost my father on that day,” he said. “I lost my mother soon after, once I had arrived in London and learned the truth about her.”

“Yes,” she said sadly. “But forgive them too, Jocelyn. They were products of their own upbringing and experience. Who knows what demons they carried around inside them? Parents are not just parents. They are people too. Weak like all the rest of us.”

His fingers were playing with her hair. “What made you so wise?”

She did not answer for a while. “It is always easier to look at someone else’s life and see its pattern,” she said, “especially when one cares.”

“Do you care about me, then, Jane?” he asked, kissing the top of her head. “Even now you know those most sordid of all details about my past?”

“Yes, Jocelyn,” she said. “I care.”

They were the words that finally broke his reserve. He did not even realize he was weeping until he felt wet drops drip onto her hair and his chest heaved convulsively. He froze in horror. But she would not let him push her away. She wrapped her free arm about his neck and burrowed deeper. And so he sobbed and hiccuped ignominiously with her in his arms and then had to search for a handkerchief to blow his nose.

“Dammit, Jane,” he said. “Dammit.”

“Tell me,” she said. “Do you have any kindly memories of your father? Anything at all?”

Hardly! But when he thought about it, he could remember his father teaching him to ride his first pony and playing cricket with him and Ferdinand.

“He used to play cricket with us,” he said, “when we were young enough to saw at the air with our bats and hurl the ball all of six inches ahead when bowling. It must have been as exciting for him as watching grass grow.”

“Remember those times,” she said. “Find more memories like that. He was not a monster, Jocelyn. He was not a pleasant man either. I do not believe I would have liked him. But he was not a monster, for all that. He was simply a man. And even when he betrayed you, he
thought somehow that he was doing something necessary for your education.”

He kissed the top of her head again, and they lapsed into silence.

He could not quite believe that he had relived those memories at last. Aloud. In the hearing of a woman. His mistress, no less. But it felt strangely good to have spoken. Those ghastly, sordid events seemed less dreadful when put into words.
He
seemed less dreadful. Even his father did.

He felt peaceful.

“Skeletons are dreadful things to have in our past, Jane,” he said at last. “I do not suppose you have any, do you?”

“No,” she said after such a long silence that he thought she was not going to answer at all. “None.”

“Come to bed?” he asked her with a sigh almost of total contentment. “Just to sleep, Jane? If I remember correctly, we were rather energetically busy most of last night. Shall we just sleep tonight?”

“Yes,” she said.

He almost chuckled aloud. He was going to bed with his mistress.

To sleep.

His father would turn over in his grave.

OCELYN WENT STRAIGHT HOME THE FOLLOWING
morning, as he usually did, to bathe and shave and change before sallying forth to his clubs and engaging in his other morning activities. But Hawkins was waiting for him as he crossed the threshold, bursting with important information. Mr. Quincy wanted a word with his grace. At his earliest convenience.

“Send him to the library in half an hour,” Jocelyn said as he made his way to the stairs. “And send Barnard up to me. Warn him that I feel no burning need of his personal company, Hawkins. Suggest to him that I will need hot water and my shaving gear.”

Michael Quincy stepped into the library thirty minutes later. Jocelyn was already there.

“Well?” He looked at his secretary with raised eyebrows. “Some crisis at Acton, Michael?”

“There is a person, your grace,” his secretary explained. “He is in the kitchen and has been there for two hours. He refuses to go away.”

Jocelyn raised his eyebrows and clasped his hands at his back. “Indeed?” he said. “Do I not employ enough footmen to pick up this—this
person
and toss him out? Am I expected to do it myself? Is this why the matter has been brought to my attention?”

“He is asking about Miss Ingleby, your grace,” Quincy explained.

Jocelyn went very still. “About Miss Ingleby?”

“He is a Bow Street Runner,” his secretary told him.

Jocelyn merely stared at him.

“Hawkins referred him to me with his questions,” Quincy explained. “I told him I knew nothing about any Miss Ingleby. He said he would wait and speak with you, then. When I told him he might have to wait a week before you found a moment to spare for him, he said he would wait a week. He is in the kitchen, your grace, and shows no sign of going away.”

“With questions about Miss Ingleby.” Jocelyn’s eyes narrowed. “You had better show him up, Michael.”

M
ICK
B
ODEN WAS FEELING
uncomfortable. Only very rarely did his work bring him to any of the grand mansions of Mayfair. Truth to tell he was rather in awe of the aristocracy. And the owner of Dudley House was the Duke of Tresham, reputedly the sort of man even his peers feared to tangle with.

But he knew he was close. The servants were all lying their heads off, every last one of them. None of them knew any Miss Jane Ingleby, including his grace’s secretary, whom, to his shame, Mick Boden had taken for the duke himself at first, so grand a nob was he.

Mick knew when people were lying. And he knew why these people were lying. It was not that they were protecting her or hiding her but that they were servants who valued their employment. And clearly one rule of that employment was that one did not open one’s mouth to strangers about any inhabitant of the house, even fellow servants. He could respect that.

And then the butler, a man who had the habit of
sniffing the air as if to catch the dirty odor of lesser mortals, appeared in the kitchen and fixed his disdainful eye upon Mick.

“Follow me,” he said.

Mick followed him, out of the kitchen, up the steep stairs, and through the baize door that led into the back of the hall. The sudden splendor of the main part of the house fairly took his breath away, though he concentrated upon not showing that he was impressed. The secretary was waiting there.

“His grace will give you five minutes,” he said. “I will show you into the library. I shall wait outside to show you off the premises when you have been dismissed.”

“Thank you, sir,” Mick Boden said.

He was a little nervous, but he strode purposefully enough into the library after the butler had opened the door. He came to a halt six steps inside the door and planted his feet wide on the carpet. He held his hat with both hands and bobbed his head civilly. He would not bow.

The duke—he supposed it must be the duke this time—was standing in front of an ornate marble fireplace, his hands clasped at his back. He was wearing riding clothes, but they were so well tailored and fit so perfectly that Mick immediately felt conscious of the cheapness of his own clothes, on whose nattiness he prided himself. He was being regarded steadily from eyes so dark Mick would swear they were black.

“You have a few questions for me,” the duke informed Mick. “You are a Bow Street Runner?”

“Yes, sir. Mick Boden, sir.” Mick resisted the urge to bob his head again. “I have been informed, sir, that you have a Miss Jane Ingleby in your service.”

“Have you?” His grace raised his eyebrows and looked very forbidding indeed. “And who, may I ask, did the informing?”

“Madame de Laurent, sir,” Mick Boden said. “A milliner. She employed Miss Ingleby until a month or so ago, when the young lady gave her notice and explained she was coming here to work for you.”

“Indeed?” The duke’s eyes narrowed. “And what is your interest in Miss Ingleby?”

Mick hesitated, but only for a moment. “She is wanted, sir,” he said, “for dastardly crimes.”

His grace’s fingers found and curled about the handle of his quizzing glass, though he did not raise it to his eye.

“Dastardly crimes?” he repeated softly.

“Theft, sir,” Mick explained. “And murder.”

“Fascinating,” the duke commented just as softly, and Mick, a good judge of character, knew without any doubt that this could be a very dangerous man indeed. “And a Banbury tale?”

“Oh, no, sir,” Mick said briskly. “It is quite true. The name is an alias. In reality she is Lady Sara Illingsworth, who murdered Mr. Sidney Jardine, son and heir of the Earl of Durbury, and then ran off with the earl’s money and jewels. You might have heard about the incident, sir. She is a desperate fugitive, sir, and it is my belief she is here in this house.”

“Dear me,” his grace said after a short silence. “I perceive that I am fortunate indeed not to have woken one morning during the past month to find my throat slit from ear to ear.”

Mick felt intense satisfaction. At last! The Duke of
Tresham had as good as admitted that she was at Dudley House.

“She is here, sir?” he asked.

The duke raised his quizzing glass halfway to his eye. “Was here,” he said. “Miss Ingleby was employed for three weeks as my nurse after I was shot in the leg. She left a couple of weeks ago. You must pursue your search elsewhere. I believe Mr. Quincy is waiting in the hall to show you out.”

But Mick Boden was not ready to be dismissed just yet.

“Can you tell me where she went, sir?” he asked. “It is very important. The Earl of Durbury is beside himself with grief and will not know a moment’s peace until his son’s murderess has been brought to justice.”

“And his jewels returned to his safe at Candleford,” the duke added. “Miss Ingleby was a servant here. Am I to know where
servants
go after they leave my employ?” His eyebrows rose haughtily again.

Mick knew he had just slammed into a brick wall. He had come so close.

“That will be all?” his grace asked. “The interrogation is ended? I confess an eagerness for my breakfast.”

Mick would have liked to ask more questions. Sometimes, even when people were not deliberately hiding information, they knew more than they realized. Perhaps the girl had said something about her future plans, dropped some hint, confided in some fellow servant. But it was unlikely, he admitted. She knew she was a fugitive. Doubtless she had heard, during her weeks in this house, that the Runners were after her.

“Well?” There was a force of arrogant incredulity behind the one word.

Mick bobbed his head again, bade the Duke of Tresham a good morning, and took his leave. The duke’s secretary showed him out through the front door, and the Bow Street Runner found himself on Grosvenor Square, feeling that he was back where he had started.

Though perhaps not quite.

He had heard about the duel even before Madame de Laurent had mentioned it. The Duke of Tresham had been shot in the leg and incapacitated for three weeks. The rest of London’s nobs had probably beaten a path to his door to keep him company. The girl had been his nurse. She must surely have been seen by some of those visitors. Some of them might be more forthcoming than the duke himself.