More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (9 page)

“And how much has Ferdinand wagered on the outcome?” Jocelyn asked.

Garrick provided the answer. “One thousand guineas,” he said.

“Hmm.” Jocelyn nodded slowly. “The family honor worth one thousand guineas. Well, well.”

Jane Ingleby was no longer standing in her corner, he saw idly. She was sitting there very straight-backed on a low stool, her back to the room.

She did not move until his friends took their leave more than an hour later.

*   *   *

“G
IVE ME THE DAMNED
thing!” The Duke of Tresham was holding out one imperious hand.

Jane, standing beside the sofa, where he had summoned her the moment after the drawing room door had closed behind his visitors, unfastened the ribbons beneath her chin and removed the offending cap. But she held it in her own hands.

“What are you intending to do with it?” she asked.

“What I am intending to do,” he said irritably, “is send you to fetch the sharpest pair of scissors my housekeeper can provide you with. And then I am going to have you watch while I cut that atrocity into shreds. No, correct that. I am going to have
you
cut it into shreds.”

“It is mine,” she told him. “I paid for it. You have no right whatsoever to destroy my property.”

“Poppycock!” he retorted.

And then to her horror Jane knew why he had suddenly blurred before her eyes. An inelegant sob escaped her at the same moment as she realized that her eyes had filled with tears.

“Good God!” he exclaimed, sounding appalled. “Does the wretched thing mean that much to you?”

“It is mine!” she said vehemently but with a lamentably unsteady voice. “I bought it and one other just two days ago. They cost everything I had. I
will
not allow you to cut them up for your own amusement. You are an unfeeling bully.”

Despite the anger and bravado of her words, she was crying and sobbing and hiccuping quite despicably. She swiped at her wet cheeks with the cap and glared at him.

He regarded her in silence for a few moments. “This is
not about the cap at all, is it?” he said at last. “It is because I forced you to remain in the room with a horde of male visitors. I have hurt your sensibilities, Jane. I daresay in the orphanage the sexes were segregated, were they?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I am weary,” he said abruptly. “I believe I shall try to sleep. I do not require your presence here to listen to me snore. Go to your room and remain there until dinnertime. Come to me again this evening.”

“Yes, your grace,” she said, turning from him. She could not say thank you even though she knew that in his way he was showing her a kindness. She did not believe he wished to sleep. He had merely recognized her need to be alone.

“Miss Ingleby,” he said when she reached the door. She did not look back. “Do not provoke me again. In my service you will wear no cap.”

She let herself out quietly and then raced upstairs to her room, where she shut the door gratefully on the world and cast herself across the bed. She was still clutching the cap tightly in one hand.

He was dead
.

Sidney Jardine had died and there was no way anyone on this earth was going to believe that she had not murdered him.

She clutched a fistful of the bedspread in her free hand and pressed her face into the mattress.

He was dead
.

He had been despicable and she had hated him more than she had thought it possible to hate anyone. But she had not wanted him dead. Or even hurt. It had been a pure reflex action to grab that heavy book and the pure,
mindless instinct of self-defense to whack him over the head with it. Except that she had swung the tome rather than lifting it and bringing it down flat, because it had been so heavy. The sharp corner had caught him on the temple.

He had not fallen but had touched the wound, looked down at his bloodied fingers, laughed, called her a vixen, and advanced on her. But she had sidestepped. He had lost his balance as he lunged and had fallen forward onto the marble hearth, cracking his forehead loudly as he went down. Then he had lain still.

There had been several witnesses to the whole sordid scene, none of whom could be expected to tell the truth about what had happened. All of whom doubtless would be eager to perjure themselves by testifying that she had been apprehended while stealing. The gold, jewel-studded bracelet that would seem to prove them right was still at the bottom of her bag. All those people had been Sidney’s friends. None of them had been hers. Charles—Sir Charles Fortescue, her neighbor, friend, and beau—had been away from home. Not that he would have been invited to that particular party anyway.

Sidney had not been dead after the fall even though everyone else in the room had thought he was. She had been the one to approach him on unsteady legs, sick to her stomach. His pulse had been beating steadily. She had even summoned a few servants and had him carried up to his room, where she had tended him herself and bathed his wounds until the doctor arrived, summoned at her command.

But he had been unconscious the whole while. And
looking so pale that a number of times she had checked his pulse again with cold, shaking fingers.

“Murderers hang, you know,” someone had said from the doorway of the bedchamber, sounding faintly amused.

“By the neck until they are dead,” another voice had added with ghoulish relish.

She had fled during the night, taking with her only enough possessions to get her to London on the stagecoach—and the bracelet, of course, and the money she had taken from the earl’s desk. She had fled not because she believed that Sidney would die and she would be accused of his murder. She had fled because—oh, there were a number of reasons.

She had felt so very alone. The earl, her father’s cousin and successor, and the countess had been away at a weekend house party. They had little love for her anyway. There was no one at Candleford to whom to turn in her distress. And Charles was not home. He had gone on an extended visit to his elder sister in Somersetshire.

Jane had fled to London. At first there had been no thought of concealment, only of reaching someone who would be sympathetic toward her. She had been going to Lady Webb’s home on Portland Place. Lady Webb had been her mother’s dearest friend since they made their come-out together as girls. She had often come to visit at Candleford. She was Jane’s godmother. Jane called her Aunt Harriet. But Lady Webb had been away from home and was not expected back any time soon.

For more than three weeks now Jane had been well-nigh paralyzed with terror, afraid that Sidney had died,
afraid that she would be accused of his murder, afraid that she would be called a thief, afraid that the law would come looking for her. They would know, of course, that she had come to London. She had done nothing to hide her tracks.

Worst of all during the past weeks had been knowing nothing. It was almost a relief to know at last.

That Sidney was dead.

That the story was that she had killed him as he had been apprehending her in the process of robbing the house.

That she was considered a murderess.

No, of course it was not a relief.

Jane sat up sharply on the bed and rubbed her hands over her face. Her worst nightmares had come true. Her best hope had been to disappear among the anonymous masses of ordinary Londoners. But that plan had been dashed when she had so foolishly interfered in that duel in Hyde Park. What had it mattered to her that two gentlemen who had no better use for their lives were about to blow each other’s brains out?

Here she was in Mayfair, in one of the grand mansions on Grosvenor Square, as a sort of nurse/companion to a man who derived some kind of satisfaction out of displaying her to all his friends. None of them knew her, of course. She had lived a secluded life in Cornwall. The chances were that no visitors to Dudley House over the coming weeks would know her. But she was not quite convinced.

Surely it was only a matter of time.…

She got to her feet and crossed the room on shaking legs to the washstand. Mercifully there was water in the pitcher. She poured a little into the bowl and scooped
some up in her cupped palms, into which she lowered her face.

What she ought to do—what she ought to have done at the start—was simply turn herself over to the authorities and trust to truth and justice. But who were the authorities? Where would she go to do it? Besides, she had made herself look guilty by running away and by staying out of sight for longer than three weeks.

He
would know what she ought to do and where she should go with her story. The Duke of Tresham, that was. She could tell him everything and let him take the next step. But the thought of his hard, ruthless face and his disregard for her feelings made her shudder.

Would she hang?
Could
she hang for murder? Or even for theft? She really had no idea. But she had to grip the edge of the washstand suddenly to stop herself from swaying.

How could she trust in the truth when all the evidence and all the witnesses would be against her?

One of the gentlemen downstairs had said that perhaps Sidney was not dead after all. Jane knew very well how gossip could twist and change the truth. It was being said, for example, that she had been holding a pistol in each hand! Perhaps word of Sidney’s death had spread simply because such an outcome titillated the senses of those who always liked to believe the worst.

Perhaps he was still only unconscious.

Perhaps he was recovering quite nicely.

Perhaps he was fully recovered.

And perhaps he was dead
.

Jane dried her still-hot cheeks with a towel and sat down on the hard chair beside the washstand. She would wait, she decided, looking down at her hands in
her lap—they were still shaking—until she had discovered the truth more definitely. Then she would decide what was best to do.

Was there a search on for her? she wondered. She pressed her fingers against her mouth and closed her eyes. She must stay out of sight of future visitors just in case. She must remain indoors as much as possible.

If only she could continue to wear her caps.…

She had never been a coward. She had never been one to hide from her problems or cower in a corner. Quite the contrary. But she had suddenly turned craven.

Of course, she had never been accused of murder before.

ICK BODEN OF THE BOW STREET RUNNERS
was standing in the Earl of Durbury’s private sitting room at the Pulteney Hotel again, one week after his first appearance there. He had no real news to impart except that he had discovered no recent trace of Lady Sara Illingsworth.

His failure did not please him. He hated assignments like this one. Had he been summoned to Cornwall to investigate the murder attempt on Sidney Jardine, he could have used all his skills of detection to discover the identity of the would-be murderer and to apprehend the villain. But there was no mystery about this crime. The lady had been in the process of robbing the absent earl when Jardine had come upon her. She had hit him over the head with some hard object, doubtless taking him by surprise because he knew her and did not fully realize what she was up to, and then she had made off with the spoils of the robbery. Jardine’s valet had witnessed the whole scene—a singularly cowardly individual in Mick’s estimation since the thief had been a mere girl with nothing more lethal than a hard object to swing at him.

“If she is in London, we will find her, sir,” he said now.

“If she is in London?
If
?” The earl fumed. “Of course she is in London, man. Where else would she be?”

Mick could have listed a score of places without even
taxing his brain, but he merely pulled on his earlobe. “Probably nowhere,” he admitted. “And if she did not leave here a week or more ago, she will find it harder now, sir. We have questioned every coaching innkeeper and coachman in town. None remember a woman of her description except the one who brought her here. And now we are keeping a careful watch.”

“All of which is laudable,” his lordship said with heavy irony. “But what are you doing to find her within London? A week should have been time enough and to spare even if you put your feet up and slept for the first five or six days.”

“She has not returned to Lady Webb’s, sir,” Mick told the earl. “We have checked. We have found the hotel where she stayed for two nights after her arrival, but no one knows where she went from there. According to your account, sir, she knows no one else in town. If she has a fortune on her, though, I would have expected her to take another hotel room or lodgings in a respectable district. We have found no trace of either yet.”

“It has not occurred to you, I suppose,” the earl said, going to stand in front of the window and drumming his fingernails on the sill, “that she may not wish to draw attention to herself by spending lavishly?”

It would strike Mick Boden as decidedly odd to steal a fortune and then neglect to spend any of it. Why would the young lady even have stolen it, if she was living at Candleford in the lap of luxury as the daughter of the former earl and relative to this present one? And if she was twenty years old and as lovely as the earl had described her, would she not be looking forward to making an advantageous match with a wealthy young nob?