One Dance with a Duke (13 page)

“Am I?”

The room went quiet. Uncomfortably quiet, as all eyes trained on Spencer. He felt the keen scrutiny of every person in the room: Bellamy, Lily, Ashworth, Beauvale, the curate … Amelia.

She spoke first. “You are mistaken, Mr. Bellamy. I was there when he learned of Leo’s death. It took His Grace completely by surprise, I assure you.”

Bellamy dabbed his bleeding lip with the back of his hand. “Forgive me, but your assurances aren’t worth much.”

The knave. Spencer wanted to grind him into this revolting pink carpet and cast both pieces of refuse out onto the street. But he wouldn’t waste the effort. There were more effective ways of wounding a man. Julian Bellamy came from nothing. In the eyes of the
ton
, he
was
nothing. And there was no one so well positioned to remind him of it as the fourth Duke of Morland.

“You will refrain,” he said with crisp, aristocratic diction, “from addressing my bride in that familiar manner. You will refrain from speaking to her at all, unless you afford her the respect and deference her superior rank demands. Know your betters.”

A flash of jealous hatred crossed Bellamy’s face, and Spencer knew his cut had slashed deep. Obviously the man harbored a poisonous mix of envy and loathing for the social elite. Someone ought to inform him such an attitude was a grave weakness, ripe for exploitation. But that someone wouldn’t be Spencer.

“As to the value of Lady Amelia’s assurances,” he continued in a low voice meant for Bellamy’s hearing alone, “I assure you, they are worth far more to me than your miserable life. Disparage her again, and you will find yourself at the point of a blade.”

“Spoken like a murderer,” Bellamy growled.

With a careful appearance of nonchalance, Spencer bent to retrieve the bank draft from the carpet. “If Harcliffe’s token is missing, I also have an interest in locating his killers. In one hour’s time, meet me at the mews where Osiris is stabled. We’ll discuss the matter further. But for now …” He carefully pocketed the bank draft, then finally had the satisfaction of speaking the words he’d been longing to say since Bellamy entered the room. “Get out.”

“No, wait.” Amelia clasped her hands together. “Don’t leave. We still need a groomsman.”

Unbelievable
. Spencer blinked at her. “Are you seriously suggesting this … this
cur
should witness our wedding?”

Bellamy put in, “After all you’ve heard and seen, are you still seriously planning to marry this villain?”

“Do I have a choice?” Amelia tilted her face to Spencer’s and studied him quietly.

“It’s not yet official,” he made himself say. “You haven’t signed. I will release you, if you’ve given some credence to Mr. Bellamy’s accusations.”

After a moment’s lip-biting hesitation, she reached forward and touched one hand to his. The light touch dissolved the tension in his wrist, and his fingers uncurled. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding them in a fist.

Wordlessly, she bent over the register and wrote her name in careful, deliberate strokes. After blowing lightly over her signature and returning the plume to its inkwell, she straightened and said simply, “There.”

It took a great deal to humble Spencer, but his bride—his
wife
—had just managed to do it.

Lily came forward next. She took the quill and signed in one of the two spaces marked “Witness” before extending the pen to Bellamy. “I think you should sign
it, Julian. You know what an amiable sort Leo was. When he conceived of the Stud Club …” She paused. “Forgive me, I still can’t say that without wanting to laugh. Anyhow, he began it with the purpose of making new friends. This was why he decreed membership should be dependent on chance—he wanted to draw together people from different classes, form unlikely alliances. Don’t let his death tear that apart.” She pushed the quill at him. “Please. Do it for Leo. Or if not him, then—”

Cursing, Bellamy ruffled his hair. “Don’t ask it, Lily.”

“Then do it for me.”

With a strangled groan, he snatched the pen from her grip and bent as if he would sign. At the last moment, however, he cast the quill away. “I can’t do it. Even if I believed …” He swore. “I just can’t.”

“For Christ’s sake, I’ll do it,” said Ashworth. The battle-scarred warrior elbowed his way past Spencer. “There’s your unlikely alliance, my lady.”

Unlikely indeed. “You don’t think me a murderer, then?” Spencer asked. Strange, that Ashworth should become his defender. In his entire life, Spencer had only come remotely close to killing one man, and it was him.

“No.” As he bent to scrawl his name across the register page, Ashworth spared him a cryptic glance. “You don’t have it in you.”

The tone of his remark hardly made it a ringing endorsement of Spencer’s character. Then again, Spencer didn’t really care. “Meet me at the mews,” he told the men. “One hour.”

“This is a travesty.” As he approached the mews, Spencer swore quietly into the late-morning fog.

Osiris, the greatest racehorse of a generation—champion at Newmarket, Doncaster, Epsom Downs—was stabled here, amongst common carriage horses?

The barn was dark and dank as a cave inside. A blizzard of dust motes whirled in the lone shaft of light penetrating the gloom. The horses’ stalls were cramped, as they always were in Town. Spencer’s nose wrinkled at a trough of stale, fetid water—in Cambridgeshire, his grooms drew fresh water twice daily from the stream.

At his order, the groom opened the door of the stallion’s stall and released him into the small yard. The horse shook himself, nostrils flared and head swinging from side to side. The groom jerked roughly on the halter, and Spencer’s jaw clenched with anger. Had the man been in his employ, that one move would have cost him his post.

“How is he exercised?”

“We turn ’im out twice a day. Sometimes a walk about the yard on a lead. Don’t like to be saddled no more, this one. Touchy with the grooming, too.”

“So you’re letting him tell you what to do, instead of the other way around?”

Tsking softly, Spencer circled the horse. His dark bay coat was in dire need of a brisk raking with a currycomb. Gray hairs mingled with the ebony, giving a hoarfrost look to his forelock, a sign of the stallion’s advancing age. He’d worn a bald patch on his right flank, likely from chafing against the stable wall. Despite the deplorable state of his grooming, however, Osiris remained an impressive example of horseflesh. His high, taut haunches and long, arched neck displayed his Arabian ancestry.

Spencer circled to the front again, standing slightly to the horse’s side, allowing the animal plenty of space to see him, and several snorting breaths to investigate his scent. The look he saw in the stallion’s large, dark-fringed eye pleased him, as did the haughty head toss that yanked the groom off-balance. There was spirit there, and fierce arrogance. That look said,
I’m better than this
.

“Most certainly,” Spencer agreed. The horse was spoiled as the devil and would need a great deal of retraining with an expert handler, but at least his spirit hadn’t been broken.

He removed his gloves and tucked them beneath one arm, murmuring gently as he approached. After extending his hand palm-down for the stallion to nose and inspect, he laid it against the horse’s withers.

“Far better than this,” he said, giving the horse a brisk rub. The horse turned and nosed his palm, displaying the narrow blaze of white that ran the length of his nose, with the look of a lightning bolt.

Spencer was tempted to saddle the beast and ride him straight out of the mews. But as it was, he already stood accused of murder. It would seem unwise to add horse theft, another hanging offense, to Julian Bellamy’s list of suspicions.

“Holy Christ.”

Spencer’s gaze jerked to the entrance.

Ashworth strode into the barn, chasing the fog of his breath with a low whistle of admiration. “That is one magnificent animal.”

Spencer’s opinion of the man took a small leap in favorability. No matter their history as youths, there was something to be said for a man who recognized quality horseflesh when he saw it. Or, for that matter, a man who recognized a baseless accusation when he heard one.

“That he is,” Spencer said, pride enriching his voice. “His grandsire was Eclipse; his dam’s line goes back to the Godolphin Arabian, with several champions in between. No finer pedigree to be found in English horseflesh.” He took the stallion’s halter himself, dismissing the groom with a glance.

Ashworth tilted his head to examine the horse further. “Had a gelding once from the Darley line. Red chestnut, white markings. Fast as a demon, with a temperament to match. I must have pushed that horse over every moor in Devonshire. Perfect mount for an angry, overgrown youth.”

Spencer wouldn’t have said it aloud, but he too had spent more hours of his youth in the saddle than in the schoolroom. “What’s happened to him now?”

“Dead.”

“In battle?”

“No.”

Ashworth paced idly toward the rear of the yard, and Spencer sensed that he didn’t want to speak of the matter. Strange, that the man would so easily discuss the deaths of his fellow soldiers, only to fall silent when the deceased was a red chestnut gelding.

Or not so strange, perhaps.

“So why are we here?” Ashworth said.

“I’m wondering that myself.” Julian Bellamy swaggered
into the yard, turned out in a suit of rumpled cobalt velvet that looked like he’d slept in it. Or
not
slept in it. His hair always appeared slept-upon; that much was no surprise. Why a man would go to such meticulous effort to cultivate a slapdash appearance, Spencer couldn’t imagine. But then, neither could he fathom why anyone would stable a priceless racehorse in this place.

“We’re here to discuss the investigation of Harcliffe’s murder,” Spencer said. “But first, these boarding conditions are unacceptable.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

He ticked off the list on his fingers. “Fetid water. Rotting hay. Inexpert grooms. Poor ventilation. Cramped stalls. And I haven’t even started in on the lack of proper exerci—”

“Enough already.” Bellamy flashed an open palm. “To my eye, looks no different from the stabling of most Mayfair gents’ cattle.”

“This isn’t a carriage horse, nor a gelding for the occasional prance down Rotten Row. Osiris is a former racehorse, from the most noble of bloodlines.” Spencer gave him a cutting look. “I wouldn’t expect a man like you to understand.”

Julian Bellamy’s cheeks blazed a very satisfying shade of red. And the red contrasted most pleasingly with the purpling bruise on his left jaw. The man was simply too easy to provoke, once one discovered that raw, tender gash of bitter jealousy.

“I see,” Bellamy said hotly. “Only the purebred nobleman can truly understand the purebred horse, is that it?”

Spencer shrugged. His own breeding had nothing to do with it, but he definitely knew what was best for this horse. “Proper handling of a horse like this is no simple matter. He was trained to race, from birth. Not only to
race, but to be the best. Once a champion, he was spoiled with attention and permissive handling. Add to that, he’s an ungelded male, with a strong natural mating drive. It all adds up to a horse with a mile-wide streak of arrogance, bloody bored out of his mind. Without proper exercise and opportunities to mate, all that aggressive energy festers. He becomes moody, intractable, withdrawn, destructive.”

Ashworth raised an eyebrow at Bellamy. “Is it just me, or is this conversation becoming uncomfortably personal?”

Spencer fumed. “I’m not referring to myself, you ass.”

Suddenly Ashworth was all wide-eyed mock innocence. “Oh, of course you aren’t, Your Grace.” He slyly added, “But it would explain a few things if you were.”

“It would indeed,” Bellamy said. “Like this.” He indicated his bruised jaw.

“I was thinking more of His Grace’s hasty nuptials,” Ashworth said. “Though by that logic, his temper ought to improve markedly tomorrow morning.”

“Enough.” Spencer’s jaw tensed with the effort of self-restraint. “Make all the fun you like. You won’t think it so humorous when Osiris meets with an early death.”

Now that earned the two men’s attention.

Bellamy gave a low whistle through his teeth. “You are a violent one, aren’t you?”

“For God’s sake, it wasn’t a threat,” Spencer said impatiently. “All issues of breeding and training aside, this horse requires superior accommodations by sheer virtue of his value. Personally, I wouldn’t stable a draft horse here, let alone a priceless racehorse. The risk is too great.”

“He’s kept in the most secure stall,” Bellamy said. “The grooms watch in shifts, and the gate is chained and locked at all times.”

“The locks are part of the problem. Look at the condition of this barn.” Spencer swept a gesture toward the cobwebbed rafters. “Dust everywhere, loft crammed with dry hay. It’s a firetrap. One spark would turn this whole structure into an inferno, and all your chains and locks would simply seal the horse’s fate.”

“On that point he’s right,” Ashworth said, all hint of humor gone from his voice. “Stable fires are a nasty business.” He looked to Spencer. “If the two of you want to move him, I’ll take no issue with it.”