The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel (20 page)

“No one. Only my own word of honor.”

“From a man with no name,” retorted the duke.

“He’s a man with three names,” Sally pointed out helpfully. “He’s merely rearranged the order of them.”

Neither man paid any attention to her.

Mr. Quentin’s eyes moved over his former charge, subjecting him to a long, thorough scrutiny. “You’ve changed.”

The duke didn’t blink. “You haven’t.”

“I wish I could think you meant that as a compliment.” Mr. Quentin tugged at his ink-stained sleeves. “If I could change the past, Lucien, I would do so. Believe me. But I was young then, as young as you are now—and when they said to go, I went. Don’t you think I’ve regretted it?”

The duke’s Adam’s apple bobbed beneath his cravat, but all he said was, “Tell me about Fanny Logan.”

“The devil with Fanny Logan,” said Mr. Quentin impatiently. “Her kind are a shilling the dozen: a girl on the make with a pretty face and grasping fingers. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead—if she is dead—but Fanny was the sort who’d have trampled her own mother for the sake of something shiny.”

The duke’s expression didn’t change. “And what of my mother? What did she do to deserve to die?”

“Oy!” called Molly from the stage. “My shoes are beginning to pinch something fierce.”

“Take the rest of the day for yourself,” said Mr. Quentin, without taking his eyes from the duke. “We’re done here.” And then, “I would never have hurt your mother.”

The duke raised a brow. “Oh?”

On the stage, Hamlet snored.

Mr. Quentin shook his head in a helpless gesture. “All right, then. Let’s be blunt. Man to man. You’re old enough for me to say it. I was more than a little bit in love with her.”

The duke’s lips were white around the edges. “They said as much at the time. I didn’t believe it.”

“It wasn’t like that. She was my Gloriana—my Faerie Queene. Everything that was great and good. And unobtainable.” Lost in memories, Mr. Quentin looked ten years younger, a boy with a boy’s enthusiasms. He looked up, his expression disarmingly frank. “She’d never have returned the sentiment. It was a boy’s love, nothing more. I was hardly older than you are yourself at the time. If that.”

“You had some knowledge of botany,” the duke said stubbornly. “You could have prepared that fatal draught.”

“And for what?” The pages of the script crumpled beneath Mr. Quentin’s fingers. His knuckles were white against the dark wood of the stand. “I was
happy
at Hullingden. Your father gave me free use of his library; I even liked teaching you, precocious brat that you were.”

There was no mistaking the affection beneath the insult. Sally saw something like pain cross the duke’s face.

So did Mr. Quentin. He pressed his point home. “Why would I ruin it all? Why would I make it all go away?”

The duke’s voice was tight. “Two women, Sherry. Both with connections to you.” After a pause, he said, “That woman—Fanny—was dressed up in a black wig. Someone had left my father’s snuffbox by her body.”

Mr. Quentin recoiled as though he had been struck. “I swear to you, Lucien, I knew nothing about it.” And then, in a quieter voice, “Did you think I kept your father’s box—as a trophy?”

“I don’t know what to think.” The duke stepped back, drawing the folds of his dark cloak around him.

Sally opened her mouth to say something, and closed it again. Something in the duke’s face precluded easy raillery.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” said Mr. Quentin. He smoothed the crumpled pages of his script with one hand, in an absentminded gesture. His hands were large and long-fingered, with calluses on the right hand from holding a pen. Large enough hands to subdue a small woman, especially if she wasn’t expecting foul play. “After Tuesday’s performance, Fanny announced to me that she wouldn’t be appearing again. She said she was moving on to better things—a new protector, I assumed.” He bowed towards Sally. “My apologies, Miss Fitzhugh. Such arrangements are common in the world of the theater.”

“Naturally,” said Sally grandly, trying to look as though she discussed such affairs all the time. “A new protector? Does that mean there was an old one?”

Mr. Quentin’s lips twisted wryly. “With such a one, Miss Fitzhugh, there is always a protector. As to his identity . . . Fanny was always close-lipped about her affairs.” A shadow crossed his face. “She was convinced she was destined for greater things. She thought her face would be her fortune.”

Sally thought of the woman’s face as she had last seen it, garishly adorned with lip rouge, glassy-eyed in death, and she shivered. True, she might be wrong; it might have been another woman entirely, but . . . She shivered again.

“Here.” The duke unfurled his driving cape from around his shoulders. “Take this.”

Before she could protest, a heavy weight of wool enveloped her, smelling a great deal of wet, and a little bit of the duke’s cologne. The duke’s arms slid around her shoulders to fasten the clasp at her neck. As Sally turned to look up at him, the side of his gloved hand brushed her cheek in an unintentional caress.

Their eyes met over her shoulder. The duke looked, thought Sally, as though he’d lost something incredibly dear.

Sherry
, he’d said, and there had been such a wealth of confusion and affection in that one word.

How would she have felt, two years ago, if Arabella had slipped Turnip a poisoned Christmas pudding and then fled? Like someone had torn the heart right out of her chest, that was how. Hurt. Confused. Angry. And too proud to say it.

Without thinking, Sally reached up and covered the duke’s gloved hand with hers.

“It is a bit nippy in here.” Mr. Quentin’s voice was carefully neutral.

Sally dropped her hand. The duke stepped quickly away.

“Thank you,” said Sally primly. “It is, indeed, rather chilly.” Gathering together the folds of the cloak and her dignity, she turned a beady-eyed stare on Mr. Quentin. “You were telling us of Miss Logan?”

“Yes.” Mr. Quentin rubbed his forehead, looking deeply weary. “There isn’t terribly more to say. She told me she would be here today to clear out her dressing room—but she never came.” There was a pregnant silence. “Now I know why.”

“Her dressing room.” Sally nearly tripped over the folds of the duke’s cloak. “Is it still as it was?”

“You can look at it if you like,” offered Mr. Quentin doubtfully.

“We like,” said Sally promptly, and took the duke by the arm, dragging him forward before Mr. Quentin could change his mind. “Show us the way.”

Perversely, Sally found herself hoping that their woman wasn’t Miss Logan after all, that there would be something in her dressing room to corroborate Mr. Quentin’s claim that she had simply left, of her own volition. She wasn’t quite sure what that something would be: it was too much to hope that the woman would have left a signed affidavit stating that she had left, thank you very much, and wasn’t at all lying dead in the morgue with fang marks on her neck.

Would that take the wounded look from the duke’s eyes? Probably not. But it might go some way towards helping.

Mr. Quentin led them through a door in the side of the stage, down a short corridor, and through an unmarked door. Unlike the front of the stage, which was gaudily decorated, the back regions were dusty and unadorned. Inside the dressing room was another matter entirely. The windowless room was crammed with fashionable furniture, all just a little shabby, the upholstery just a little worn, the giltwork just a little chipped. The dressing table was cluttered with paint pots. Paste jewelry glittered in the light of Mr. Quentin’s lantern, hanging off the side of the mirror, fallen on the floor, decorating the hems of gowns and the heels of shoes. Great bouquets filled the vases at various places throughout the room, enveloping the small space with the sickly sweet smell of half-dead flowers.

Pinned roughly to the wall was a series of engravings, the sort one saw in stationers’ shops with the faces of the current beauties on them. These all featured the same woman in different poses.

“She was so proud of those pictures,” Mr. Quentin said roughly. He cleared his throat. “Don’t mind me. Just a touch of the grippe.”

“That’s she,” said the duke. Sally wasn’t quite so sure, but his voice brooked no disagreement. “That’s the woman we found.”

Mr. Quentin set the lantern ceremoniously on a small table. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said tactfully. He turned to the duke. “Lucien . . .”

“We can see ourselves out.” The duke busied himself with drawing off his driving gloves. As an afterthought, he added, “If you recall anything that might be of use to the investigation, I suggest you contact Sir Matthew Egerton.”

There was regret on Mr. Quentin’s face, but he accepted the dismissal without demur. “I shall.” Pausing in the doorway, he subjected his former charge to one last, long look. “If you need me, my door is always open to you.”

The door closed behind him.

Sally looked at the duke, her lips pursed.

“These doors are always open to anyone,” said the duke defensively. “Here.” He thrust a pile of tumbled costumes into Sally’s arms. “I’m not sure what we’re looking for, but since we’re here, we might as well look.”

“You were very rude.” Sally dumped the pile on a stool and went to the dressing table instead. “I like him.”

“Oh, yes, he’s very likable,” said the duke disagreeably. “Actors generally are.”

“He’s not an actor; he told us so himself.” Sally looked at the duke over her shoulder. “You wouldn’t be so disagreeable if your feelings weren’t wounded.”

The duke disappeared behind a large embroidered screen. His voice, slightly muffled, emerged from behind the frame. “There are three people dead. That’s hardly a little case of wounded feelings.”

Sally sat gingerly down at the dead woman’s dressing table. There was a fascinating array of paints laid out on a silver tray and, next to them, a box of cherrywood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, far nicer than anything else in the room. “I thought you said spies murdered your mother.”

The duke’s head popped over the top of the screen. “What
Mr. Quentin
isn’t telling you is that he was a member of a series of revolutionary societies.”

Sally poked at the box, looking for secret compartments. She had one rather like this. If one pressed in just the right way . . . “That’s hardly illegal.”

“Actually,” said the duke, “it is. But that’s beside the point. My mother had a contact. How do we know it wasn’t Sherry? How do we know he didn’t leave because his work there was done?”

“Or,” suggested Sally, carefully keeping her voice matter-of-fact, “he might have left because he was dismissed.”

The duke shook his disembodied head. With the dark waves of his hair disordered around his face, he looked more than ever like a poet’s romantic ideal of a tortured hero. “And now we have a dead woman who worked for him. We have only his word for it that this Fanny even had a protector.”

Sally’s fingernail hit a crack in the wood and a little drawer popped out of the cherrywood box.

“His word and these letters,” she said smugly.

Chapter Twelve

“I have a box just like this,” said Miss Fitzhugh cheerfully, as she neatly dispatched the blue ribbon holding together the packet of papers. “So, naturally, as soon as I saw this one . . . Goodness, did people really
do
such things? I can see why she tucked these out of sight. Her protector appeared to have a pet name for her—”

“I’ll take those.” Lucien plucked the papers out of her hands.

Miss Fitzhugh was certainly right about the nature of the documents. The first one, dated six months before, began with the words “I burn.” The subsequent elaboration made clear that the writer wasn’t referring to a freak cooking accident.

Lucien flipped the paper over. With some disappointment, he said, “There’s no signature.”

Miss Fitzhugh sat back on the stool. “No, and I’m not surprised! Would you put your name on that?”

Looking down at her, Lucien raised a brow, his voice rich with amusement. “I would prefer to voice such sentiments in person rather than committing them to print.”

“Do you— Well, never mind.” Miss Fitzhugh hid her blushes in a brisk reorganization of Miss Logan’s paint pots. “At any event, there’s your protector. I mean, Fanny’s protector. Goodness, it is close in here, isn’t it? You would think they would have arranged for a window.”

“Mmm,” said Lucien, busily scanning Miss Logan’s correspondence. The letters certainly bore out Sherry’s story—and his reading of Fanny Logan’s character.

Not that that proved anything, Lucien told himself hastily. It was still just too much of a coincidence, Sherry appearing out of nowhere, after all this time. Sherry, who had belonged to subversive societies. Sherry, who had been in love with his mother. Sherry, who had left without a word.

In this, at least, though, Sherry had been telling the truth.

Miss Fitzhugh was craning her neck, trying to see over his arm. “You’re holding them too high,” she protested.

“I’m trying to spare your blushes,” said Lucien drily.

Miss Fitzhugh sniffed. “I’m hardly so naïve as
that
.”

Lucien lifted his eyes from the letters. “No?” he said lazily, and had the satisfaction of watching Miss Fitzhugh bristle.