After the Scandal (25 page)

She knew she was frowning at him, scowling really, but his tone—everything about him—was making her worry. “I know it’s not a lark. It’s to help Maisy Carter, isn’t it, and bring her murderer to justice?”

“No.” He shook his head, and his grim vehemence was back, just as strong and startling as it had been in the first moments she had met him. “Not just today, for Maisy Carter. I do it all the time, really. Whenever I’m needed.”

He was still looking at her rather intently—waiting in that way that made her feel that what he was saying was a sort of a test. Her chest began to feel tight. “Needed by whom?”

“The Admiralty, mostly. Jack Denman is the only other person who knows the whole of it.”

The creeping unease she had been able to hold at bay was back, skittering up her spine and down her arms, and wrapping itself tight around her chest. “The whole of it?”

He was frowning too now, leaning down toward her, as if he were willing her to understand. “I inherited the job from my brother-in-law. He did it before me—the difficult, impossible, illegal things that need to be done sometimes. Find things or people. Like murderers. People and things that the Admiralty or other parts of the government can’t get for themselves. So I get them. I steal things for them. Whenever I can.”

Claire hardly knew what to say. “Good heavens.”

“I keep my hand in. Keep up the old connections, the old habits and places that are still useful to me. Like those footpads. And the Lark, and Elias Solomon, and Tilly Wheeler. All of them. So it’s not just a lark, a game, all this.” He spread his hands out before him, much as he had before. “I do have a purpose. I just thought you ought to know. That’s all.”

As if her opinion of him, her esteem for him, mattered.

She had thought him a strange, different sort of man—haunted like the veteran sailors and soldiers. And that was what he was—haunted by a criminal past he could not give up.

But there was one more thing she had to know. “And do you like it? This helping and stealing and finding murderers?”

“Ah.” He let out a great draught of air, as if he were relieved to get the whole of it off his chest. “God, yes.”

*   *   *

Tanner had never felt so exposed. He had never felt less disguised, even rigged up in livery. Everything that he was, was laid bare to her. And he didn’t know what he was going to do about it, because he had no idea in the world what she was going to do about it.

Her face—her tiny, heart-shaped orchid bloom of a face—was entirely blank. Or perhaps it only seemed blank because so many different, conflicting emotions ran across it at once—horror and pity and astonishment and fear.

But she didn’t say anything about horror or pity or astonishment or fear. She nodded and said, “You like it.” Then she asked, “Do you like me?”

“Yes.” He said so immediately. This at least he knew. “Yes,” he said again, in case she had not heard or understood him.

She nodded again, solemn and troubled and wise. “And are you doing this for me? These illegal things?”

“Yes.” He would do anything for her. “You should know that. I will do whatever you need me to do. Always. No matter what.” No matter if she rejected him. No matter if she never spoke to him again. He would always watch out for her and help her, any way he could.

Always.

She smiled then. A small, ironic little smile. “As if I’m a sort of a private Admiralty?” she asked in a way that gave him hope. “Or are you my private naval force, ready to vanquish all comers, just as effectively as you vanquished Lord Peter Rosing?”

“Yes.” Anything.

She turned and faced down the length of the Mall. “Then, Tanner, tell me how we are going to vanquish Mr. Edward Layham, or whoever it is that murdered Maisy Carter?”

There it was again—his name on her beautiful lips. The name he gave himself in the privacy of his own mind. When she smiled at him and called him Tanner, whatever else he had meant to say was drowned out by a wave of pleasure so incomprehensible and inexplicable and vast, he was hopeless to resist. And so he didn’t. “Stealthfully.”

She looked as neat and respectable as a pin, in a plain gray frock, white apron, and starched cap. She looked as if she had just starched her mistress’s sheets and had wandered out into the sunshine for an illicit meeting with a footman. But under all that respectability was the heart of determination—the heart of a thief.

He held out his hand. “Come with me. And let’s go steal a few things from Tattersall’s.”

When they came nearer to the Queen’s Buckingham House, he cut them across into Green Park, where he found a willing urchin to take instruction to his home, Fenmore House, standing in the distance across Piccadilly.

“I’ve sent for a horse,” he told Claire. “Easiest thing to walk into Tattersall’s Repository at the lead end of a horse.”

She smiled, but she looked across the park toward Piccadilly and Fenmore House for such a long moment, as if she could see up White Horse Street to her own home at Sanderson House.

The short distance between the two gated town houses had tantalized him for years. When he had been a raw youth, struggling to find his place at in society and Eton, he would return to ground in London. He would sneak away from Fenmore House, eluding tutors and minders alike, to return to wandering the streets as he had when he had been a hungry, ambitious boy. But even then, he had always gravitated toward young Lady Claire Jellicoe’s orbit, toward the Earl Sanderson’s wedding cake of a house behind the wrought-iron gates on Curzon Street, in the hopes that he might see her, coming or going, the pale, blond moon of her face looking out at him from the window of her family coach, or riding her pony under the supervision of the huge, protective coachman in the wide front yard.

“Still determined?”

She turned back, and he could see her resolution writ across her face, in the clarity of her gaze and in the firm line of her jaw. “Yes. Quite. As you said, past bloody time.”

He liked when she swore. He like the passionate incongruity of foul words coming out of such a pristine mouth. It amused him. And it reminded him that she was a great deal more than he had ever thought her. She was unique and special, and he needed to have a care with her.

A stable lad from Fenmore House met them at the Hyde Park turnpike gates, all wide eyes and gaping mouth at the sight of his master clad as a footman. But the lad knew enough to mind his jaw and not ruin the rig.

But the boy did sidle close and whisper, “There’s goings-on, up to the house, sir. Powerful lot of folks looking for you.”

“Are they?” Tanner kept his voice calm and reassuring. “Not to worry. Turns out I’m looking for them, as well.”

He might have thought to say more or make further inquiry of the boy, but they were so close to Tattersall’s he could see the well-dressed crowds and feel the pull of that jangling excitement he got before a job. His fingers nearly itching to get to work. But he also knew some of his excitement was a sort of raw happiness at having told Claire. At having her still by his side in the aftermath.

He led her down the long court off Grosvenor Place and through the milling crowd toward the back side of Tattersall’s famous ring. He’d run a number of different scenarios through his head about the best way to find Layham. The easiest would be to find a central vantage point from which Claire could identify him.

“Stick close. It may be very crowded. We’ll make our way across the yard to a better vantage point.” There was a wagon, still loaded with hay, parked up flush against a wall—a number of younger boys had already clambered aboard in search of a way to see over the crowds.

“I don’t think I can go in there.” Claire swallowed hard, and shook her head, and he could see that her face had gone pale. “All those men. What if one of them recognizes me? I know most of them. And what if my brother sees me?”

Tanner could hear the panic edging into her voice. “Easy, Claire. Hush. The animal will give us some room—no one will crowd her.” Then he pointed the hay cart out to Claire. “We’ll go there, and be sheltered. You can stand on the whiffletree or some such, and I’ll stand in front to screen you. You can hide behind me. Will that suit?”

She nodded, but he could tell she was still overwhelmed. More than overwhelmed—scared. And he couldn’t blame her. She ducked her head and raised her hand to cover her bruised cheek.

But without her he had no way of identifying Layham. He put his arm around her shoulder and used the animal to cut a wide swath through the crowds, but even before they had reached the wagon he heard mutterings in their wake.

“Did you see? Fenmore’s livery,” some sharp-eyed sportsman said, turning to his friend as they passed.

“Is he here? Did you see him?”

“No. Why?” another asked. “What have you heard?”

Tanner slowed as best he could, letting the horse put her head down to whuff at the grass, making the crowd jostle and buffet around him, so he could keep listening.

“I heard he killed a man,” the first one said.

“I heard he’s cut and run,” a second sportsman reported, “with the Earl Sanderson’s daughter.”

“Eloped with Lady Claire? Fenmore? Is he mad?”

“Must be. The earl’s likely to gut him. But they do say Fenmore’s peculiar.”

They
had no idea just how peculiar he was, nor how peculiar he was prepared to be. Not that he particularly minded for himself—he was quite at home living on the fringes of respectable society—but it was nearly killing him to walk on by without revealing himself when he heard people speak of Lady Claire in such gleefully malicious tones.

He wanted to gut them, and leave them bleeding on the manicured grass. He wanted to grab them by their starched, pointy collars, and haul them up close so he could tell them to their ugly, smug faces that they were base bastards unfit to even speak her name.

But he shut his gob, and moved on, because beneath his hands that same Lady Claire began to tremble. He gathered her closer against his chest, and leaned down to tell her, “Be brave. Keep going. We’re almost there.”

He could not read the look she gave him—incredulous and hurt and something else unfathomable. In another moment they were able to take shelter in the lee of the hay wagon, and he got her out of sight, where she could lean against the big back wheel. “Better?”

“Did you hear what they said?” Her voice was thin and more than scared—it was devastated. “My God. You were right about us being invisible.”

But he had forgotten to warn her that one of the perils of invisibility was that one didn’t always hear what one wanted to hear.

“Yes. I’m sorry.” And it surprised him, frankly, that the news had traveled so far, so fast. The Earl Sanderson had always struck Tanner as a circumspect, prudent man, who ought to have done a better job to keep such a report from circulating. And her parents would know that Tanner hadn’t run off with her to Gretna Green—they ought to have had her note by now.

Not that it mattered to him. The outcome was still the same—she was his. He had stolen her fair and square, and would make his offer as soon as he judged it would be met successfully.

But clearly he had misjudged it, and left it too late.

“Don’t listen to them. They don’t know the truth.”

“I don’t care. It’s awful, the way they were talking about you.”

“Me?” The accusation, and all its implications, didn’t do anything other than cause him mild surprise—a minor hitching of his breath.

Perhaps he had hit Rosing harder than he thought. And even if he had killed Rosing, Tanner felt no remorse. The man was a monster. He had hurt Claire—probably more than even Tanner knew.

He would kill him again in a heartbeat.

Claire was not so sanguine. “Yes, you. The truth is that I ran off with you, not the other way round.” Her lovely brow was all pleated up with indignation, but there was real worry there, in the dark shading of her eyes. “But what the other man said, about killing a man?”

What if he lost her because he had in fact killed Rosing? What if he had, and it disgusted her despite all the companionship and all the esteem and all the gentle kisses?

And the thought of submitting himself to the less than gentle care of magisterial authority was not appealing. And it would cock up his ability to find out exactly what had happened and exactly how Maisy Carter was connected to the counterfeiting at St. Catherine’s Dock.

“We have to do something, Tanner. We have to get you out of here and protect you.”

As a declaration of love it lacked a certain passion, but it was a good start. It was more than he had a right to hope after only one night and half a day. But he needed more than protectiveness. More than her admiration and more than her esteem.

He wanted her to marry him willingly. Immediately.

It was the only thing that would save them both.

And it was what he wanted.

He wanted simply to be with her. He wanted to hold her hand, and walk along beside her. He wanted the comforting pressure of her body snugged up tight against his. He wanted her soft, fine hair to brush against his neck, just so, when he slung his arm over her shoulder, and she leaned her head against his chest.

He wanted her as his lass for however long it lasted. For however long he could make it last. For however long he could have the privilege of holding her hand.

“Don’t worry about me. You saw; you heard. We
are
invisible.”

“Tanner, but for how much longer?”

“Long enough to do what we came here to do,” he told her. “And then get the hell out. We have to find Layham. If you stand here, behind me and the horse, you’ll be sheltered from view, but you’ll be able to see men as they come to view the ring.” He took up a position in front of her, standing like a sentry.

A bell across the yard clanged out its warning that the first lot of the sale was to begin. The sea of faces turned almost as one.

“God. He’s there. Right there.” She jumped down to the ground and hid behind Tanner as she pointed at a man not more than eight feet away. “The little man with the bushy eyebrows that make him look like a badger. The man standing in front of my brother.”