Chapter Twelve

  Since coming home, it had begun to weigh upon the Earl of Wenning’s mind that not only had he behaved badly to his bride, but that he had got everything horribly wrong. Which meant, he suspected, someone malevolent had meant one or both of them ill. Tonight’s shooting certainly bore that out. Someone had tried to kill him or Grace.

  The chilling events spun through his head, along with possible culprits, things he needed to discover, things he needed to do to ensure Grace’s safety. He began by lurking outside the gates of Maida Gardens to be sure she was traveling home with people who were safe. From behind the next carriage waiting in line, he stuffed his mask into his pocket, then rolled the domino cloak up and hid it inside his coat while he watched Leyton hand her and Bridget Arpington inside then climb in beside them. Phineas followed.

  Safety, he thought with relief, in numbers. But he wouldn’t take the chance. Moving swiftly out of the shadows, he leapt onto the footman’s plate at the back of the carriage just as it began to roll forward. Having never traveled in this position before, it was something of a novelty.

  It was also weirdly soothing, for he could hear the hum of voices from within. His wife did not say much, but more than once he heard her merry laughter, and that made him smile—a distraction in his scouring of the road for threats, for the area between the gardens and Mayfair was not all well populated.

  However, if the attack at Maida had been deliberate, then the culprit knew who they were and where they lived. He remained watchful, skulking on the far side of the carriage as Bridget was deposited at her front door. After the carriage drew to a final halt in Mount Street, he stepped off his platform once more, scanning both sides of the street and the windows of surrounding houses.

  Fortunately, the street was empty. The neighbors might have found the earl’s behavior odd in the extreme.

  He waited until his wife was safely inside the house, then began to walk in the other direction to the carriage making its way to the mews. Five minutes later, he had doubled back and entered the house with his key before he made his way up to his lonely bedchamber.

  Once, preparing for his marriage, he had made plans to change the apartments around so that his were next to his wife’s instead of at the other side of the house. That had been the only one of his intended improvements she had not carried out in his absence.

  Instead, the rooms that had been his since he had inherited the title as a boy felt alien and cold because she was not in them. And because, it seemed, he had been thoroughly taken in by someone he thought of as a friend. The question was, who?

  *

  In the morning, he rose early and made a number of calls, beginning with the Bow Street magistrate’s house, and moving on to St. James, where he found his cousin Phineas breakfasting in his rooms.

  Phin wore a luxurious dressing gown and seemed none too pleased to be interrupted. “What do you mean making social calls at such an uncivilized hour?” he growled.

  Wenning lounged in the chair on the other side of the table and helped himself to coffee, Phin’s landlady having helpfully supplied a cup and saucer. “Hardly uncivilized for a martyr to insomnia. Or a man who was enjoying a ride—or at least a gossip—in Hyde Park only a couple of days ago.”

  Phin sighed. “A man may choose peace occasionally, may be not?”

  “Thick head?” Wenning asked sympathetically, “You must have had quite a night at the Maida masquerade.”

  Phin shuddered. “My dear, the wine is positively third rate, and the vulgar were so thick on the ground, one couldn’t have mown them down if one tried.”

  Wenning sipped his coffee. “Being mown down seems a harsh price for mere vulgarity. What did you expect? Almack’s with fresh air?”

  “Yes, yes, call me naïve, foolish, over-optimistic. But I shan’t be going back, I promise you.”

  “Was none of it to your exacting standards? Not even the fireworks?”

  “They were pretty enough,” Phineas allowed grudgingly.

  “And I imagine your company was pleasant.”

  “The best, of course, although the ladies—especially Grace—were plagued by insolent fellows from other parties having the temerity to expect dances with them.”

  “And did Grace accept?” Wenning asked.

  “Mostly, I think. Apparently, it’s considered bad form to refuse.”

  Wenning set down his cup and twirled it in its saucer. “Tell me about the fireworks.”

  Phineas blinked. “They made a lot of noise, filled the air with the smell of gunpowder, and made pretty patterns in the sky. What more is there to say?”

  “Who did you watch them with?”

  “The party I was attached to. Why are you asking about the fireworks at all? You could just have come.”

  “I’m asking,” Wenning said carefully, “because of an incident that took place during the firework display. Someone shot at my wife.”

  Phineas paled. “Dear God. But we returned her to you safe and unharmed! Surely, she was mistaken?”

  “She was not. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “Ah. So you were there.”

  “As you say. So, tell me, Phin, did you leave the others at all for any reason during the display?”

  Phin’s mouth fell open. “Are you accusing me of—”

  “Hardly,” Wenning interrupted. “I’m trying to establish if you could have seen who remained in the party for the whole display. And who did not.”

  “Of course,” Phin said. “But have a care, Ollie. You can’t go around accusing gentlemen—or ladies, for that matter—of shooting your wife! Especially since the same charge could be leveled at you.”

  “I shall certainly be careful. So, did you notice that anyone disappeared?”

  Phin put down his knife and fork and frowned with the effort to remember. “I did notice that Grace vanished. Wherever she watched the fireworks from, it wasn’t with us. I wasn’t going to tell you that, in case you got—er…the wrong end of the stick.”

  “I was never likely to, since I was with Grace at that time.”

  “Being shot at,” Phin said grimly.

  “Go on,” Wenning urged.

  Phineas sighed in a long-suffering kind of way. “Let me think—no easy matter after a night on such inferior wine, I can tell you. Boothe and Curtis both milled around, restless. I don’t recall seeing either of them after we settled to watch. Leyton wandered off, too, at one point, though he was back before we returned to the pavilion. And I lost sight of di Ripoli, as well, though he claimed later he had gone in search of Grace.”

  “I’m glad someone thought to. Anyone else?”

  “Perhaps Mrs. Fitzwalter, who, it must be said, does not care for your wife for obvious reasons.”

  “I’d be surprised if my wife cares for her. I certainly don’t.”

  “Perhaps you should tell her, for if ever I saw a woman hunting for a discreet—or not so discreet—affaire de coeur, it is she whenever she looks at you.”

  Wenning waved that aside, although he did make a mental note to discover if the woman had any skill with firearms.

  “Seriously, Ollie, why would anyone shoot Grace? Who would benefit from such an atrocity? Except robbers, I suppose.”

  “It wasn’t robbers,” Wenning said flatly. “And it is possible the shot was not aimed at her but at me.”

  “But you are everyone’s hero, dear boy. Who would do such a thing to you? To either of you?” He put another forkful of ham in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “A jealous colleague? A would-be or cast-off lover?”

  Wenning regarded him for a moment, then finished his coffee and stood up. “Thank you, Phin. You have been most helpful.”

  Apparently mollified by such praise, Phineas called after him, “Game of cards this evening?”

  “Alas, I must refuse. I am escorting my wife to the opera.” Which would, he reflected as he cast an airy wave over his shoulder at his cousin, be news to his wife.

  Since he was in the area, he called round to Leyton’s rooms. Discovering his friend was out, he walked home to Mount Street, where he found his wife absent and the Marquess of Tamar painting the largest wall of the ballroom with a huge image of a turreted castle with a wild sea behind it.

  “Based on your ancestral pile?” Wenning guessed. He did not know Tamar well—the man had enjoyed an unconventional upbringing, to say the least—but he had always found him engaging, good-natured, and formidably talented.

  “Actually, it’s my brother-in-law’s Braithwaite Castle, up in Cumberland, though I’ve stylized it a bit.”

  “It does look very medieval.”

  Tamar, his smock and nose daubed with paint, grinned. “Well, I hope it inspires you to a particularly silly costume.”

  Wenning laughed and left him to it, returning to his own bedchamber, where he opened a drawer in his private desk and took out a packet of letters. From the middle, he took one crumpled, abused piece of paper that he had hidden there and spread it out on his desk.

  He had read it only twice in his life. Once, on his wedding night when he had crushed it and thrown it across the room. He had almost left it there, but at the last moment, he had stuffed it in his pocket. And three days later, as his anger had died back and his guilt threatened, he had read it on board the ship and confirmed his justification in leaving his wife.

  Each word had been like a nail hammered into his heart. Even now, reading it for the third time after two years, it wrenched at his guts.

  What hurt most was not that she had not told him about this previous love, nor even that she had loved someone else when she married him. That was sad, heartbreaking in its way, for all of them. But young women were often pushed into marriages they did not want. Though disappointed, he would not have condemned her for that. He would instead have done his best to make her life happy, to win her until Anthony was a mere, faded memory of youth.

  No, what had devastated him was the descriptions of his nauseating touch, her longing to know again the intimate pleasures she had known with Anthony. Her promise to return to Anthony as soon as the excruciating trial of her wedding journey was over. She even asked him to find a way to join her in Italy.

  If he had loved her less, it would have hurt less. His reactions would have been less extreme. But the idea that her eager reception of his advances had been false, that her sighs of pleasure had merely hidden revulsion while she pined for the loving of another man whom she already planned to meet…

  He could not even look at her, let alone speak to her. And so he had gone, letting anger win because it was more bearable than the agony of betrayal.

  The words still hurt, but he read them now with fresh, critical eyes. Eyes that had witnessed the integrity of his wife under temptation. Eyes that had seen her pain, her anger at what he had done to her. He could almost swear she had no idea why he had gone. Either way, he would not let her destroy her reputation—only her reputation, he thought with awe, not her integrity—simply for revenge against him. It would not bring her peace or happiness. Only the truth had a chance of that.

  And the truth, surely, lay in this letter. Several things about it bothered him. Why had she not sent it? Why carry it in a bag that would be opened by her maid and seen by any number of servants and porters, to say nothing of himself? And why had only that one piece of paper fallen out of the bag?

  And then, the letter itself. It did not actually sound like Grace. He had always known that but put it down to the fact that he had never known her, that she had never written to him. In this letter, wild, florid flights of love had alternated with almost crude references to physical intimacies. But even now, beneath her veneer of languid sophistication, surrounded by a court of admirers—whom he could swear never got closer to her than a waltz—he could not imagine her even knowing such language, let alone committing it to paper for the delectation of a lover.

  It sounds like a man.

  The revelation took him by surprise, so he read it again. It did. It sounded like a man who used women and imagined females all regarded their lovers in a similar light.

  The possibility that someone had forged this letter for the sole purpose of destroying his marriage did not hit him like a blow. It seeped in, almost like something he had always known and yet refused to admit.

  Was he clutching at straws? Because after two years apart, two years of anger and torment, she still charmed him? Everything he had admired in the young girl had matured and strengthened in the woman who was still his wife. And God help him, he was falling deeper in love every moment. And deeper in shame for the suffering he must have inflicted upon her. That made his heart ache.

  But if he was right, someone really wanted to part them. It had worked for two years, and now that he was home and reconciliation was possible, had this same person decided more drastic action was required?

  Why? Who? Someone who had loved her before? Someone who would benefit from his death financially? Grace would, so perhaps her father or scapegrace brother, though the former seemed unlikely in the extreme.

  Wenning’s heir, should he have no sons, was Phineas. And Phineas had certainly been at Maida Gardens last night. However, Oliver balked at that idea, too. Phineas had always stood his friend and was one of the two people he had trusted to look after Grace in his absence.

  The other was Leyton, his best friend ever since school. He of the deadpan humor and absolute honesty. And yet, Phineas kept hinting that Leyton had more than friendly feelings for Grace. And certainly, he had told Wenning off for his neglect of her. But surely that didn’t fit with shooting him!

  Then there were Grace’s admirers: Sir Nash Boothe, and young Curtis, who actually had the Christian name Anthony. He preferred them as culprits, though, only because he didn’t know them. Shooting a man with the intention of marrying his widow seemed extreme, even for a loose screw like Boothe, who, in any case, would be better concentrating on a wealthier bride. Grace’s fortune, should Wenning die, was all tied up in trusts, largely to protect it from her father’s depredations, but it would work for fortune hunters, too.

  With an irritated shake of the head, he placed the letter among the others and put the packet back in his drawer. Then he drew a blank piece of paper toward him and dipped his pen in the waiting ink.

  He wrote a short civil note to his wife informing her that he had taken a notion to go to the opera and, since he understood from Henley she also planned to attend, he would do himself the honor of escorting her to their box.

  He wondered if it would annoy her. He wondered afresh how angry she would be to discover that he was Rudolf. In fact, he had meant to reveal himself several times, but something had always got in the way. Last night, just before the shot, he was sure he had seen some kind of shocked suspicion in her eyes, but that seemed to vanish during the rest of the tumultuous evening. And there was an undeniable challenge to winning her as a stranger, a man without the baggage of her own husband—although he had admitted to a wife, which might well continue to scare her off.

  It didn’t matter. If they could be friends, if they could find the truth in whatever guise, surely, they would both benefit. With that determination, he rose and strolled along the passage to her dressing room, where he left his note in the care of Henley, and again departed, this time for White’s. There, one could usually find Ernest Leyton at this time of day.

  Leyton, whom he discovered writing letters in the club, seemed pleased to see him and agreed to a constitutional in St. James’s Park to walk off a late breakfast.

  “You have a thick head, too?” Wenning inquired. “Phineas blames the inferior wine.”

  “Phineas would.”

  “Was the event as awful as he claimed? Or was he influenced by morning-after grumps?”

  “He seemed to enjoy it well enough at the time,” Leyton said wryly. He cast a veiled glance at Wenning. “You were there, were you not?”

  “You spotted me?”

  “Just before the unmasking, dancing with Grace. Did she know you, too?”

  Wenning shook his head. “No, but then she has barely looked at me since I came home, and I did take some pains to be different to his lordship.”

  “Why?” Leyton asked flatly. “To spy on her?”

  “To talk to her,” Wenning said ruefully. “It seems to be the only way. But the thing is, Ern, a rather odd incident occurred while I was with her during the fireworks…”

  Leyton looked genuinely shocked by his story about the shot, and for several moments, it was difficult to make him answer Wenning’s questions.

  “Who of our party wasn’t there?” he replied at last. “Grace, for one, though now I know why. Di Ripoli went to look for her, and I let him.”

  “You didn’t go yourself?”

  “I didn’t want all of us chasing after her, drawing attention to her, as though you had put us all up to it.”

  “Phineas said you went somewhere during the fireworks.”

  Leyton scowled. “How would he know if I did? He fled as soon as we left the pavilion, and I didn’t see him again until we returned there.”

  “Is that a fact?” Wenning said thoughtfully. “And Boothe and Curtis?”

  “I couldn’t swear they never left, but I did see them from time to time. I was just glad neither of them was with Grace.”

  “Why?”

  Leyton blinked. “Because I knew you wouldn’t like it. Because I didn’t think she would. And because I don’t trust Nash Boothe farther than I could throw him.”

  “That’s fair,” Wenning acknowledged. “Tell me, Ern, between ourselves… You don’t harbor a tiny tendre for Grace, do you? I could hardly blame you if you did.”

  Whatever reaction he expected from such a direct question, it wasn’t Leyton’s bitter smile or his sudden exclamation. “I wish to hell I did. Impossible as the situation would be, it would still be better than the one I’m in!”

  “And what is that?” Wenning asked, intrigued.

  “None of your damned business.”

  Wenning regarded him. “You were at Maida Gardens before, last week when Grace was there.”

 

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