After the Scandal (9 page)

Behind His Grace, Jinks’s face broke into a snide smile. “Serve him a thorough basting, did you?”

And out came that crooked, secret half smile, curving up one corner of His Grace’s mouth. “I might have done.”

“Ah.” The Irishman’s small eyes brightened and crinkled at the corners in amusement. “Like that, is it?”

“No.” The uncompromising tone slid back into His Grace’s voice like a bolt going home in a lock.

“’Tis,” the little man contradicted with sly humor, wrinkling up his face.

The duke was having none of Jinks’s lip. He infused his tone with chilly command—all trace of the roguish tough banished from his voice. “The deceased was her maid. I’m helping her. And she’s helping me. Please get her a cold compress for her face. Then make the coffee. Then get Pervis.”

Jinks already seemed to have a cold, wet cloth in his hand, and was proffering it to her, but he was squinting over his pug nose at her, and shaking his head. “What you’ll want for that is a beefsteak.” He clomped away toward what must be the larder, and came back a few moments later with a fresh-cut piece of red meat, which he slapped into her hand. “Put that up on yer face bone.”

Claire started to do as she was bid—because she
always
did as she was bid.

But there was something about the juxtaposition of the bloody red meat and Maisy Carter all laid out as if on a slab and the idea of what they might do to the poor girl next. Claire’s stomach cramped in emphatic protest. “Thank you, Mr. Jinks, but I think I’ll just use the compress.”

The Irishman was having none of her. “Don’t be a stubborn mort,” he growled, and shoved her hand, and the beefsteak it held, up toward her face. “Best thing for it. You mark my word. An’ I know a thing or two about darklights.”

His Grace intervened. “Jinks, that’ll be enough of that. Fetch Pervis. Bribe him if you have to, to get him out of bed. Away with yourself. Now.”

“Aye, aye then, sir. I’ll go.” The man Jinks finally began to act the servant, though he winked at the duke as he went toward the stairs. “But I’ve a mind to do you one better.”

“If you’ve a mind, that’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Fenmore muttered in response. But his attention had already turned from the departing Irishman’s guffaw of laughter to the still form stretched along the table.

Fenmore hung a third lantern on the iron rack over the table, and then His Grace wasted no more time but straightaway set about his examination of the body, putting his face up indecently close, moving her bodice clothes to inspect poor Carter’s corpse in the most indecorous fashion.

Claire grew hot and then cold when she realized that she was quite alone with His chilly, off-putting Grace of Fenmore and a corpse. “Whose house is this?”

“Mine.” His Grace straightened. “Apologies. I’ve forgotten myself—my manners—again. I’ve brought you to my house, so you’ll be safe.”

“Oh. Thank you. But, I thought you lived in Green Park?” Everyone knew Fenmore House loomed out over Piccadilly onto Green Park the same way His Grace loomed about the edges of ballrooms. Indeed, the image had for years given Claire pleasure as she watched him not dance and not converse.

“Yes. But I keep the lease on this house as well. It was formerly the home of my sister and her husband. I like to keep it for her.”

“How thoughtful.”

Her mention of thoughtfulness seemed to have reminded him of how to achieve it. “Lady Claire. Perhaps you would like to…” He looked around the homey kitchen, as if it might give him some suggestion or inspiration for what to do with her. “Perhaps you would like to … see to yourself?” He gestured to the kettle on the hob. “A cup of coffee or chocolate perhaps?”

“Yes, I would.” She would have crossed to the fire, but her glance was interrupted by the line of knives slotted into the rail of a dresser. A new kind of dread sliced into her lungs. “Are you—” She swallowed and made herself return his sharp regard, but her voice was losing ground with every word. “Are you going to cut her up?”

“No.” He followed her glance to the knives, and back looked at her face, softening his scowl. “No, I’m not an anatomist. But I’ve called for the surgeon, Pervis, who may need—” He stopped himself at her instinctive and altogether involuntary little wail of distress. “I beg your pardon, Lady Claire. But it cannot be helped. Miss Carter is beyond pain and fright, but she is not beyond help.”

“And you mean to
help
her by poking and slicing at her so?”

His smile turned gentler. “Ah. I see it’s you who is not beyond pain and hurt. Please let your rather vivid imagination rest, Lady Claire. I mean you no harm.”

“It’s not just my imagination. I read the newspapers.” They were full of gruesome tales of bodies being stolen or murder victims being sold to doctors and surgeons who studied corpses by dissection. Her stomach twisted tighter at just the thought of it, even as his words echoed inside her, resounding and reminding.
He meant her no harm.

“So you do.” He acknowledged her with that curt but oddly respectful nod. What a man of contradictions he was. “You needn’t fear dissection. It should be enough to make a close observation of Miss Carter’s more obvious injuries and bruises.”

“Injuries? You mean she is not dead?” A flare of hope made her stupid. She started around him, toward Maisy Carter’s pale, closed face.

“No.” He stopped Claire with a hand at her waist, light but unyielding. “I’m sorry. She is quite dead. I meant to say ‘injuries that led to her death.’”

“Oh.” She retreated, slowly. The slight pressure of his hand, the articulation of his fingers, spread against the thin muslin of her dress front, and his thumb, upright along the line of the hard busk in her stays, was strangely comforting. It were almost as if she wanted the contact to last as long as possible. “Then you’re certain now that she didn’t drown?”

She looked up at him to find His Grace slowly opening his eyes, as if he were awakening from a trance—thinking hard about poor Carter, no doubt.

“As certain as I can be without— Her lungs don’t appear to be full of water. I’ve depressed them—her lungs—and no water has come out of her mouth, nor froth. And she’d had something of an awful fight beforehand.”

“A fight? How do you know?”

“Fingernails, broken—quite shredded at the end.” He returned to his close inspection, taking out a small hand lens like the ones her mother’s jewelers used to judge the worth of the stones they presented to her. “And there is some blood, and probably skin, beneath her nails—either her own blood, or, if we’re lucky, it means she scratched her assaulter. But the broken nails mean she clawed and scrabbled hard at something.” He carefully raised one of Maisy’s lifeless hands up to show Claire. “Very hard. It would have hurt. But she did it anyway, either because she was beyond hurt or because she was desperate.”

“I should think anyone would be desperate enough not to die.”

“Yes. Most times.” He looked at the hand and then closed his eyes quickly, as if he had to take just that moment to come to a decision. “I think she knew what this man—and it was a man; look at the bruises, here, across her neck.”

And despite herself, despite her dread and her disgust and her fear, she did look, because he was showing her something she could see and understand. And it seemed important, and right, and grown-up in an entirely uncossetted way that she do so. That she bear witness along with Fenmore.

“He crossed his thumbs here—these darker marks,” His Grace went on in his inexorably factual way, “to crush down on her windpipe and choke the life out of her.” Though even as he described the injuries matter-of-factly, Claire could hear the rage—the clawing, impotent fury—rattling around behind his voice. And it calmed her.

It calmed her to know that there were men in the world who did not think like Lord Peter Rosing. Who did not think they could mistreat a girl just because she was a servant, or abuse a young woman and push her up against a hard brick wall just because she was not strong enough to stop them.

The Duke of Fenmore made her feel as if she had a friend. A good, reliable, capable friend. A friend who noticed a maid’s broken fingernails, and knew the marks of strangulation, yes. But a friend Claire could trust.

What a strange duke he was proving himself to be.

“Quite purposefully, do you mean? Not an accident?”

“Quite purposefully.” He looked up from under his brows at her. “There is no way her death could have been an accident. Her eyes were open when I took her from the water. Meaning that they were open at the moment of her death, which was therefore likely not in the water. And her skirt is ripped. A vertical tear from the hem up. Which points the way to her being—”

A sound of distress echoed down into, rather than out of, Claire’s chest despite her effort to stifle it. Or perhaps because of it. But it could not be helped. Nor avoided, though His Grace tried to spare her feelings.

“I beg your pardon, Lady Claire. I should not have said—”

“That she was likely raped?” She took a gulping gasp of a breath, and then one more. “There, I’ve said it. It is an ugly word and an uglier crime, but if it is what happened to Carter, it must be said. Just as you said it almost happened to me. Though I am lucky enough to be able to thank God you came when you did. Who knows if I might have ended up like poor Carter.”

“No.” His response was instantaneous. “You would not have.”

He said it to reassure her. But it was not the truth.

“Only thanks to you.” The truth was that the duke had suspected Rosing would do exactly what he
had
been doing to her when His Grace intervened. Which was why His Grace had laid His bloody Lordship out like an undertaker. And in case she did not sound sufficiently grateful, she added, “For which I am, and will be eternally, grateful.”

“I don’t want your gratitude.”

His voice was sharp, and Claire retreated in the face of such incomprehensible heat, her determination withering a little under the rebuke. “I don’t … understand you.”

“No.” His voice was harsh—a rough exhalation. “I misspoke. I did not do it—help you—to earn your gratitude. Rather, I hoped to earn your trust.”

Oh. Trust.

Relief had learned its way, tiptoeing less cautiously back into her lungs. That was as it should be. Everything he had done ought to have earned her trust. “Yes.”

As if he knew he had said too much, he turned away, returning to the business of examining Carter. But Claire had seen. She had seen that beyond the cool, aloof demeanor was a heart as fragile and vulnerable as her own.

And she didn’t know when she’d been as pleasantly shocked. A low sort of warmth had kindled inside her, chasing away the aching cold.

“Thank you, sir. You do have my trust. I would not be here, with you now, if I did not trust you. And realize I can trust you to do what’s right for Carter.”

She looked again at the state of the poor girl’s hands, one of which was clutched into a tight fist as the rigor of death began to settle upon her body. There must be thousands and thousands of girls like Maisy Carter—one for every house on this block, in block after block the length of London. And there were another thousand girls just like her, Lady Claire Jellicoe, lined up like so much expensive cattle, ready enough to dance with the Lord Peter Rosings of their world. Not all of them, nor many of the girls like Maisy Carter, had been as fortunate as Claire, to have such a savior and friend as the Duke of Fenmore.

Who was trying to deflect her attention by asking another question. “Tell me again all you know about her. Everything you can remember of your conversations with Miss Maisy Carter.”

“She attended me yesterday and today—or should I say the day before yesterday and yesterday.”

Fenmore was nodding, but his hand was making an elegantly silent motion of encouragement. “What would you say was Miss Maisy Carter’s frame of mind? How would you characterize her?”

She said the first thing that came to mind. “She was a lovely girl. Skillful and perceptive.”

“What were her duties for you? When did she execute them?”

“She helped me dress. Did my hair and prepared my clothes and helped me—” There was no way she could possibly talk about such a closely personal subject as the intimate relationship between a woman and her lady’s maid. “She was a great help to me.”

“Do you know anything about Miss Carter’s background? Where she was from?”

“Don’t you know? She worked for your family.” Claire could hear the defensiveness in her voice.

“Riverchon Park is my grandmother’s dower house. I know little of its management, unfortunately. And I would have warned the staff to be on guard had I known Rosing would come.”

“Yes. But Rosing could have nothing to do with poor Maisy Carter.”

“That has yet to be established. I told you, I don’t believe in coincidence.” And there was the vehemence prowling through his voice. “Did Miss Carter ever mention his name to you?”

“No.” Claire shook her head, trying to understand this connection His Grace had already made.

His Grace was back over the table, leaning his weight on his hands as he looked closely at the body. “Did Miss Carter speak of any men?”

“Only the footman. I don’t remember his name. But I do remember she said she was ‘a good girl’ when I teased her about the footman. The tall, dark-haired young man who attended in the drawing room—although I suppose they are all tall and dark haired; they’d never be hired otherwise. But when he passed us in the upper hallway, he was so obviously looking at her in the way—” The words died away in Claire’s mouth. The soft, sweet, adoring look the young footman had sent after Maisy Carter was somehow too intimate a thing to discuss with His Grace. “He looked at her in a nice way. As if he cared for her. But she said she was minding herself with her fellow, and meant to get ahead in her position, like her mam wanted her to. She said she was a good girl, and was grateful to work in such a lovely house. And ‘happy to have landed here out of the almonry,’ she said. But I’d no idea what an almonry was or what sort of work she did there.” Picking the nuts from trees, she supposed.