After the Scandal (32 page)

No one but the murderer.

“You can take that up with the magistrate,” the earl informed Tanner, his belligerence ebbing not one whit.

“I don’t intend to do anything with the magistrate,” Tanner informed him coolly.

“No,” the earl snapped. “I imagine you don’t, what with your history. It’s a wonder you’re accepted at all into society.”

“Ah.” It was too predictable a slur to do more than glance off his hide. “Been listening to gossip, have you?”

“I’ve been listening to my daughter, sir.” The earl’s voice began to rumble like gathering thunder. “My daughter, who was missing for an entire night and morning.”

“Who, I have every faith, will have told you exactly what really happened.” He knew she had. He was damnably proud of her for it. “And whom I intend to protect at all costs from being questioned by the magistrate. Think of her, before you talk of charges.”

“Which brings me back to having you horsewhipped.”

Tanner felt his mouth stretch into a wide smile. Oh, yes. He liked this—the ferocious matching of wits. He could feel the nearly primeval thrill of contention come over him like a physical thing—a pleasure that soaked down into his bones and made his life worth living.

But he forced himself to remember that it was never a good idea to antagonize a man one wanted for one’s future father-in-law. So Tanner accepted the earl’s point with a small inclination of his head. “Point taken. But I didn’t come here to argue.”

“No? What did you come here for? Eighteen hours overdue, I might add.”

“I came here to propose.” Tanner was pleased his voice was level and smooth and did not betray the mad leaping of his pulse—whether from trepidation or hope he did not know. “Which I would have done eighteen hours ago, but I did not think you would be any more receptive to my suit then than you are now.”

“I will tell you plainly, Fenmore, that you are the last man on earth I would choose for my daughter.”

Tanner had to give the Earl Sanderson credit for not purposefully misunderstanding him. “Acknowledged. I am deeply aware that I am not worthy of her, sir. But circumstances being what they are, your daughter has chosen me.”

“Chosen? You stand here, threatening to drag my daughter’s name through the mud of scandal unless I intervene with those who have laid the charge, and you—”

“No.” Tanner stepped toward Sanderson before he could stop himself. “No. That is the opposite of what I am saying. I will do anything, even
face
a charge, rather than see her exposed in
any
way. I was not the person who made this”—he spread his hands in angry frustration—“a public scandal. I took her away from Rosing so no one would know what occurred. So she would be spared the vicious pleasure your
society
seems to derive from others’ misfortunes.”

“You took her out of a boathouse, out of your grandmother’s house, without so much as a by-your-leave, sir, and you disappeared for an entire night. You took an innocent girl, who was in circumstances so far beyond her experience, and you led her away from everything and everyone that she knew. And you did not bring her back until well into the next day. Are you mad? Or suicidal?”

“Yes. Yes to all those things. But the fact still remains, she was not so bereft of all good sense that she did not know that she chose. And she chose me. Quite emphatically.”

The earl’s face blanched white and then went red. “By God, if you have touched one hair on my daughter’s head, I will—”

“I have.” He had touched her hair, stroked its silky length. He had held her in his arms. He had kissed her as if he were a dying man and she a drop of water. He had done as much as he dared.

Sanderson took a threatening step toward him. “You bastard.”

Tanner felt his own volatile temper begin to heat and took his own step forward to meet the man toe-to-toe. “I am not a bastard in breeding, nor in action. And if you have been listening to your daughter,
sir,
then you will know that I saved your daughter.
I
saved her. Where were you, sir, when Lord Peter Rosing was dragging her down the length of that lawn?” He raised his hand to point to the exact spot where Lord Peter Rosing had wrapped his meat hooks around Lady Claire Jellicoe’s delicate white arm. “Where were you when he smashed her lovely porcelain face into the wall? Where were
you
?”

The quiet lash of Tanner’s accusation was met with utter, charged silence. The Earl Sanderson could obviously think of no suitable retort. But neither did he acknowledge his nearly fatal mistake.

“I was there,” Tanner reminded him. “And no matter your horsewhips, and your insults, and your distaste for me as a son-in-law, I would do it again in a second. Without thinking. I would do it for her.”

For a long moment there was no sound in the room but the storm of Tanner’s indignation and the answering strain of the Earl Sanderson’s tightly controlled remorse. Neither spoke. They stood there, facing each other, inches apart on the carpet. Each of them, he thought, equally full of regret and hope.

Tanner pressed his skeletal advantage. “The vile rumors must be stopped, and stopped now. I will not stand for her name to be besmirched for another moment.” He made each assertion a statement—there could be no further debate. “I will be her husband.”

He said it to convince them both. But it was nearly frightening, saying the words, admitting to himself that marrying her was everything he wanted—everything he had dreamed and plotted and schemed for the past twenty-four hours to make happen.

And he wanted it settled, one way or the other,
now
. “Every moment that you delay hurts her more. Think about that while you’re still trying to blame me for your lapse in oversight.”

Still the earl resisted. “She has not yet agreed.”

“But she has been asked. She knows my intention. She has my ring. I did not do her the dishonor of asking her for her answer, as I thought it best to do
you
the honor of making clear my intentions. But I will ask her for her answer. I am compelled to.”

“And if she says no?”

Tanner could not contemplate such an outcome without going stark, raving mad as a rabid cur dog. But he knew the answer he had to make. He would be a gentleman. “I will abide by Lady Claire’s choice. And by yours. Not to do so would do her a dishonor. But there will be a scandal, greater by far than the rumors snaking their way across society’s forked tongues now. But you will have to ask yourself what purpose such a scandal will serve. You will have to figure out just why your lovely daughter was a target of Lord Peter Rosing, who usually prefers to rape servants—girls who have no power and no protection—in the first place.”

The Earl Sanderson’s face whitened as if Tanner had struck him. And indeed he had. He had struck right at the heart of the matter. But the earl withstood the blow and kept his own counsel.

But Tanner was not yet done. He played his most telling—and most wildly speculative—card.

“You will have to ask yourself if Lady Claire or
you
were really the target of Lord Peter Rosing’s rape. You will have to ask yourself just how far you are willing to go for your interest in counterfeiting gold coins in St. Catherine’s Dock before the cost is the sacrifice of your daughter.” Tanner gave him one last piece of advice before he turned on his heel and marched purposefully up the sinuous spiral of the stair. “You will have to decide, sir, whose side you really need to be on.”

*   *   *

Tanner retreated—although in truth he ascended—to his chamber, like a clever fox going to ground. A clever fox who has clever friends.

He found his clever friend Jack awaiting him, drinking his friend the Duke of Fenmore’s fine French brandy, and going over his meticulous notes.

“Hello.” Jack looked up over the top of his spectacles. “Where have you been, dressed like a pallbearer?”

“Proposing. You?”

“Nothing so dangerous.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“That girl—that walking mudskipper that Jinks calls ‘the Lark.’ Ridiculous name. She told us you’d come here.”

“Clever girl.” But Tanner had no time to waste. “Jack, tell me what you know. Did Maisy Carter drown?”

“Cause of death in my opinion?”

“Yes. Whose else?”

“Shut up.” Jack flipped the notebook shut and looked him in the eye. “She never drowned herself. Her windpipe has been crushed. Quite thoroughly. Quite purposefully. I’ve seen convicts less hanged than that girl appeared to be.” Jack’s mouth was turned down in an expression of pained distaste. “And her nose had been broken. There was some swelling, and considerable bruising all up into her eyes, so it was not an old injury. There was some bloodstaining remaining on the edge of her shift, despite her time in the water. Noses bleed profusely. And blood stains.”

“Ah.” This Tanner knew, but he let that information seep into his brain and sort itself out where it belonged. “Yes. So by the time I found her, the river had washed most other traces of the blood away?”

“Yes,” Jack agreed on a sigh. “But there was enough. In my opinion, whoever did this was violent, and knew what they were doing.”

“For power or pleasure?’

“Christ, Tanner.” Jack turned his weary old-before-his-time eyes away. “The questions you ask.”

“Questions that need to be asked.” Tanner didn’t have time for useless, interfering sentiment. “Well? Do you have the impression that it was done for power, or for pleasure?”

“I’m a man of science,” Jack countered. “I don’t form impressions.”

Tanner was impatient with his friend’s quibbles. “Of course you do. You said whoever did this knew what they were doing. That is an impression. And no doubt a correct one.”

Jack shook his head and passed Tanner a small china bowl with some items in it—his own bowl, nicked from Sanderson House the only time he had even visited. He had been a boy and new to being His Grace of Fenmore. His seventy-two-year-old cousin, Charles, who had been Fenmore before him, had taken him to meet the earl. Tanner had stolen the bowl then. An early keepsake of his attraction to the house of Sanderson.

“She had money in her pockets,” Jack told him. “Six shillings. Not an inconsiderable sum for a housemaid.”

“Ah. Just the right amount for a generous vail from a visitor she had been assigned to assist.” It made him fonder of Claire than ever to know that she was a considerate employer.

But Tanner’s mind also leapt to two other conclusions instantly. “Whoever killed her didn’t want her money. Any professional worth his salt would have turned out her pockets before she had even breathed her last. And she must have been interrupted—and murdered—before she had a chance to store it away. It was simply too much money for her to be carrying around. What else?”

“Earbobs. Or one earbob.”

Tanner picked up a small piece of jewelry from the bowl.

“Earbobs,” Jack repeated. “Ladies wear them, as jewelry, in their ears.”

“Don’t be an ass, Jack. I know what they are.” And he knew whose they were as well. He had spent years watching Lady Claire Jellicoe. He had seen these dangling aquamarines on many occasions—a subtle counterpoint to the sparkling blue of Lady Claire’s eyes. “They are Lady Claire’s.”

“Are they? But there was only one of them. In the girl’s other pocket. The money was in one, and the earbob in the other. So it rather looks like theft on her part, except why would she be strangled for theft?”

“Which one?”

Jack frowned and shook his head in confusion. “Which pocket?”

“Yes.” Tanner tried to keep the edge of impatience from his tone, but it was impossible. “Which one?” he demanded. “Tell me you noted it. Or tell me you have the clothes, still. Tell me.”

“I have the clothes, still. I thought that you might want to see them again.” Jack was regarding Tanner as if he were mad. But he wasn’t mad. He was on to something. “Where?”

“There. I judged her clothes too ravaged and too distressing for the body to be dressed in for her mother to see. Jinks and I found some other clothes.”

But Tanner wasn’t listening. He was rifling through the neat stack of clothing so he could turn out the pockets. “The right pocket has a hole in it. The left does not. Was the money found in the left?”

Jack consulted the notebook he brought with him. “Yes.”

“She was right-handed.”

One of Jack’s brows rose over a narrow-eyed look. “I could determine that, were I to examine the muscle attachment of her arm bones, but how do you come by such a conclusion?”

“Callus. On the inside tip of her right index finger. Presumably from sewing, as one of the most important skills required of a lady’s maid is the care and repair of clothing. There was no callus on the left.”

Jack bent to his notes to see if he could find the same observation, but Tanner’s mind was already speeding ahead. “What sort of maid, who is said to be meticulous, and very good at her job, who is ambitious, and wants to move up in her position, maybe become a housekeeper someday— What sort of competent professional servant throws it all away to steal an earbob, and put it in a pocket she knows has a hole in it?”

Jack was giving him another baffled, squinty-eyed look. “Wait a moment. How do you know she knew her pocket had a hole in it?”

“It was her job to take care of clothing. The rest of her appearance is neat, her clothes in good repair. And the hole is small, and formed by the unraveling of the seam, here”—he showed Jack the loose threads in question—“not by any wear in the fabric. So it was a recent thing, this splitting of the pocket seam, perhaps by a small scissors if she was doing mending.” He shook his head to pull himself back into his train of thought. “It doesn’t matter how; it only matters that it was fresh—or else she would have repaired it.”

“Come now,” Jack objected. “This is all conjecture.”

“No!” Tanner could hear the aggravation invade his voice. “Think, man. She is right-handed. She would have normally put her coins in her right pocket, where she would have access to them. But the coins came from the left pocket. So she put them there because she knew she had a split in her right.”