Unmasking Sin, page 8
“Mrs. Jones,” explained Frankie, the older of the two. “Your office cleaner.”
“I see. Where is Mr. Napper?”
“Barclay Square,” Frankie said, sliding off the desk. “The nipper’s ill.”
Ludovic paused in the act of throwing his coat at the stand. “What?”
“Tommy, the pretty lady’s little kid. He’s not well. Stopped playing yesterday, and they had the quack out in the afternoon.”
Ludovic scowled, dragging his hand through his hair. Some foolish impulse urged him to go to her. From what he had learned, sick rooms must appall her more than most, and her son’s…
Common sense intervened. What use was he in a sickroom? She had servants, a doctor. The child would have the best care. And he was the last person she would wish to see. No, he could help her most by writing his damned report to the Rawlston brothers.
He sat down at his desk. “Anything happen in Barclay Square during the night? Any intruders?”
“Not a one, but the light was on in the kitchen.”
Ludovic nodded and fished in his pocket for coins which he threw to Frankie. “Well done, lads. Make sure you divide the fee fairly. Now off you go. I have work to do.”
By midday, he had finally finished his report. Andrews brought him copies of the documents, which he clipped to the report, and placed in his document case. Then he went to the washroom, splashed water over most of his person, and donned the clean shirt and cravat he kept at the office for emergencies.
He was just about to leave when Andrews stuck his head into the office, wide-eyed. “Sir, the Duke of Dearham is in the office.”
“I’m not here,” Ludovic said impatiently, just as a handsome, amiable head appeared above Andrews.
“You look pretty much here,” it observed.
Andrews slunk off, leaving the expensively yet carelessly dressed person of the young duke to stroll into the office. “The elusive Mr. Dunne, I presume. Anyone would think you didn’t want business.”
And there was no denying that ducal business would be advantageous in the extreme. So Ludovic curbed his impatience. “Then anyone would be wrong. I apologize for what must seem like rudeness. Did Your Grace not receive my letter postponing our meeting until tomorrow?”
“Oh, yes, I got it.” His Grace leaned his hip on the corner of Ludovic’s desk. “But having just come from my man of business, I found myself outside your office. On inquiry, an urchin told me you were inside but—er… dreadful busy. Everyone thinks a duke trumps dreadful busy. They’re wrong, of course, but I thought I’d try my luck.”
Ludovic began to like the young nobleman. “Actually, in normal circumstances, everyone would be right. But I find myself with an urgent matter to put right. I could call on Your Grace later this afternoon if your matter is equally urgent.”
“I don’t suppose it is.” His Grace straightened. “Tomorrow will do.”
“Ten of the clock?” Ludovic suggested.
The duke looked lazily scandalized. “My dear sir, I have a lifestyle to maintain. My head is never bearable before eleven.”
“Then I shall call at eleven if that suits.”
“Perfectly.” His Grace tipped his hat and wandered out the door. “Good day, Mr. Dunne.”
“Your Grace.” Following him, Ludovic saw Andrews falling over himself to open the door for the duke and bow him out.
“Sorry, sir,” Andrews murmured. “But you were here, and he is a duke.”
“Well, at least he isn’t so high in the instep that he insisted. Or dismissed me. Yet.” Recalling the earlier urchin invasion, he thought about asking Andrews to close and lock the office window when he wasn’t in. Then he decided that in the winter, it would hardly be fair, and said nothing at all.
To his annoyance, Mr. Rawlston was not at home when he called. “But he should not be long,” the butler told him. “We are expecting guests for luncheon. Perhaps you would care to wait, sir?”
Ludovic squashed his instinctive hatred of waiting and followed the butler into the bare reception room within.
As it turned out, he did not have to kick his heels for long. From the window, he saw a coach deposit the Rawlston brothers and two fashionably dressed ladies who were, presumably, their wives.
Through the open reception room door, he heard the butler say respectfully. “Mr. Dunne is here, sir. I thought you would prefer to see him immediately, so I had him wait.”
“Ah, excellent! Go up, my dear. Constantine and I will join you presently, hopefully with good news.”
Ludovic allowed himself a sardonic smile before the brothers entered the room.
“Mr. Dunne, good afternoon!” Aloitius greeted him eagerly. “What news?”
Ludovic’s bow was more of an inclination of the head as he turned and took the report and supporting documents from his case. “I have here my final report on the matters you asked me to investigate. I brought it in person in case you have questions for me to answer. After that, I believe our business is concluded.”
“Excellent, excellent,” Aloitius said with enthusiasm while his brother echoed him, his impatient eyes scanning the report over the elder’s shoulder.
Aloitius frowned, flipped forward to the end, and positively scowled. “You find no evidence of unnatural death, let alone culpability on Lady Cornish’s part? Moreover, it is your opinion that there are no grounds to declare her unfit to carry out the duties assigned to her by Sir Theodore’s last will and testament? Really? You cannot have looked!”
They were both glaring at him.
“I have followed every line of inquiry you mentioned and a few that you did not,” Ludovic replied mildly. “If you trouble to read the documents—they are copies of signed affidavits—you will see that not only was your nephew’s wife at death’s door herself during her first husband’s illness but that the doctor who treated Sir Theodore is of the opinion that he—and several neighbors who never came in contact with Lady Cornish—died of the same natural causes, a putrid sore throat.”
“What had Sir Theodore to do with sluts and farm laborers?”
“I understand the—er…slut in question had considerably to do with Sir Theodore. And the laborers. There is nothing there, sir, to support your theory. All the evidence points, in fact, in the opposite direction.”
“Are you imbecilic?” Aloitius exploded. “Are you really so stupid that you don’t understand you were meant to find that evidence? At least enough to show her unfitness to care for the child!”
Ludovic let the silence hang for several seconds. “Let us understand each other, sir. I am a solicitor—and a barrister for what it’s worth, though I rarely practice. My duty is to the truth and to the law of the land. If you want someone to lie and cheat, you are most definitely imbecilic to come to me. Good day, gentlemen.”
He allowed the faintest emphasis on the final word to convey his contempt for his use and picked up his document case.
“Wait, sir, wait!” Constantine said in alarm. “Let us not be hasty. My brother spoke in mere frustration. If she did not harm Sir Theodore, then we are glad of it. But we are genuinely concerned to have the care of the boy out of her hands. You must have found some evidence of her unfitness as a mother! The rumors alone—”
“The rumors are alone. And those, as far as I can trace them, appear to have begun with you and your lady mother.”
He inclined his head once more and walked out, collecting his hat from the hall. On the front steps, the breeze whipped at his hair, and he drew in a long, deep breath. For the first time since he had met Rebecca Cornish at Maida, he felt clean.
He walked smartly on to Barclay Square, where he discovered Napper idling through a newspaper on one of the wooden benches. He didn’t stand up but moved the newspaper to allow Ludovic to sit beside him.
“The boys told me the child is ill,” Ludovic said.
“Good afternoon to you, sir,” Napper said politely. “Yes, the doctor was there yesterday, but the nipper toddled over here to the gardens for ten minutes, just an hour ago. He didn’t want to go back in, but the nurse made him. He looks fine, now.”
“Well, that at least is good news.”
“The uncles were here, though. Almost crack of dawn it was. Brought a huge footman with him, who elbowed her ladyship’s footman out of the way, and they all barged in.”
Something clawed at Ludovic’s stomach. “And?”
“Five minutes later, the footman was all but thrown down the steps by the coachman and a liveried servant, while the butler looked on with positively human satisfaction.”
“And the uncles?”
“Departed some ten minutes after that. They did not look pleased.”
“They look even less pleased now. So little pleased, in fact, that they will probably never pay their account.”
“Then we’re shot of them?” Napper asked with apparent pleasure.
“We’re shot of any obligation to them, but I still want to know what’s going on. There’s a reason they want control of the child, and it’s nothing to do with family love. And I want to know what business Renwick has that necessitates him breaking into her house.”
“You going to see her now?”
Ludovic thought about it. Again. “No,” he said at last. “I’m the bastard who worked for her uncles. We’ll be doing this one without instruction.”
“Or payment,” Napper pointed out. “Don’t you want to get rich?”
“Why should you care? You’ll be going back to Dominic Gorse any day, now.”
“I’ll be needing the rest. Do you want me to watch here any longer?”
“No,” Ludovic said ruefully. “There’s a difference between watching over her and spying. Let’s go back to the office.”
*
Annie made an unexpected appearance in the library while Rebecca was almost nodding off over a book.
At the nurse’s entry, she sat bolt upright again. “Tom?”
“Fine, my lady. But you asked me to say if I saw that man again—the one asking questions in the square?”
Rebecca rose and hurried to the window behind Annie.
“That’s him,” Annie said, pointing to two men walking east across the square garden. “The short, stocky fellow.”
Rebecca had never seen him before, though she would remember him now. But it was the man walking beside him who made her stomach tighten. He was tall and well-dressed, though his coat was black rather than the blue gentlemen tended to wear as morning dress. His face was turned away from her view as he listened to the stocky man beside him, but his height and his grace of movement betrayed him.
She was sure it was Ludovic Dunne. Damn him.
*
“Well, that was a waste of time and money,” Constantine Rawlston said, tossing Dunne’s report onto the highly polished table with some contempt. “What on earth made you think he would come up with what we needed?”
“What, a grubby lawyer who specializes in poking into people’s business? He seemed ideal.”
“Well, he wasn’t. Addicted to the truth and self-righteousness, and positively bad for our cause.”
“There is no need to tell me that,” Aloitius snapped. His scowl smoothed a little. “So we haven’t achieved much. But still, his questioning of so many people can hardly be good for her reputation. The rumors will persist. And in the meantime…it should not be too hard to lure her into public misbehavior.”
Constantine pushed at Dunne’s report with the toe of his polished boot. “How? According to this, she’s a damned saint. Or at least keeping her nose clean.”
“No, she isn’t. She has been to Maida Gardens, to the masked balls. Several times.”
“But she did not take Dunne’s lures.”
“Why would she? She is a gently born lady, and no doubt smelled the shop—or at least the grubby office—on him.”
“Do you think?” Constantine asked doubtfully. “He seemed surprisingly personable to me. As if he at least knew how to behave like a gentleman.”
“Trust me, she knows. She has hooked two landed gentlemen already.”
“Steady, old fellow,” Constantine mocked. “You’re in danger of believing your own play here. We all know Theo married her in a moment of drunken bonhomie. Probably because she wouldn’t bed him otherwise. And frankly, she’d have to be a fool to take on another rake. Once bitten, you know…”
“Twice bitten,” Aloitius pointed out. “Bowden was a voracious old goat with highly questionable appetites. You’re correct, though. I imagine she is wary. But we knew from the beginning our task requires…creativity. Dunne, clearly, has no imagination. So we set up the play ourselves.”
“And when she doesn’t bite?”
Aloitius smiled. “That’s the beauty. She doesn’t need to. She just has to seem to. In public.”
“And how exactly do you plan to set that up?”
“There is a seed in my mind. Shall we go to luncheon and feed it?”
*
Ludovic prowled the rooms above his office. They were his home, and he had always thought them as good a place as any other to lay his head. But that evening, they suddenly seemed too small, too constraining for his troubled spirit.
For the second time, he threw himself down at his desk and began to write a letter to Rebecca Cornish, explaining his earlier conflict of interest, through being employed by her husband’s family and informing her he was now free and able to help her.
He threw the pen down, scrunching up this letter as he had the last, and hurling it into the basket beneath his desk. Every offer he tried to make sounded as if he was just out to make money from her, having fleeced the uncles. Or at least left him open to such accusations.
So what? he snarled at himself. It is how you earn your living.
And yet…he would never bring himself to take a penny from her, and he didn’t know why. Perhaps the look on her face when he refused to help her. Perhaps his outrage at the way she was being treated, reviled as the Black Widow when she had simply been enduring…
A letter, then, offering his services gratis?
Demeaning to both of them, and it made him sound like a tradesman giving a good customer a free pat of butter with her groceries.
No, the solution he had given Napper was the only way. Watching over her and investigating without her knowledge. Though that didn’t seem right either.
He pushed himself back from the desk and strode over to the table to pour himself a glass of brandy.
He needed to do something, to work, although there was little enough for him to do before banks and offices opened tomorrow morning. So, he read through some correspondence, some from friends, some from clients, or people seeking various types of assistance. But although he tried to concentrate, Rebecca Cornish’s face kept intruding, blocking the words from his eyes.
Women, whatever their background, faced many challenges, not least the lack of control over their own lives or their children’s lives. How had Rebecca felt, more or less sold to an aging roué when she was little more than a child herself? Had she felt betrayed by her parents, by her husband? Sir Theodore, certainly, had not been faithful, and most ladies were brought up to ignore such infidelities, large or small. Of course, rumors of her infidelities had spread far and wide, but they were all vague and, he was sure, started by the Rawlstons.
Though who could blame her if she had sought—or still sought—a little stolen happiness? Ludovic could not. But the Rawlstons would crucify her, go to court to obtain control of her son on the grounds of her immoral conduct.
Immoral conduct! What could be more immoral than those two self-important old goats expecting him to fabricate evidence and lie? About a woman they should have been protecting.
Tomorrow, he would make a few discreet inquiries about his erstwhile clients. For now, he might as well go to bed.
Which would not banish Rebecca Cornish’s face either. In fact, bed was the last place he should think about her, imaging her in her own bed. And in his.
He groaned but still made his determined way toward the bedchamber, which was off his sitting room. He had just reached the door when something rattled against the windowpane. He paused, and it came again.
Actually glad of the distraction, even if it was the urchins annoying him, he walked to the window and gazed down at the street. He smiled with surprised pleasure at the face gazing up at him, then went down to let him in.
“Francisco,” he grinned, dragging his friend through the door and shaking his hand. “I didn’t know you were in London.”
“I didn’t know you were either.” Francisco gripped his hand in the gloom and released it. “I’ve been looking for you for two days.”
“Two days? You must be thirsty,” Ludovic said flippantly. “Come and drink with me.”
In the better lighting of his sitting room, Ludovic could see that Francisco looked well and uninjured. One never knew with him quite what to expect. He was a tall, good-looking man, Mediterranean-dark but with the accents of an English gentleman. Under normal circumstances. Ludovic had heard him speak many languages in many accents. They had chosen different paths after university, but somehow, they always ran into each other again.
Ludovic poured his old friend a glass of brandy and raised his glass to him.
“What are we drinking to?” Francisco asked. “Justice? Again?”
“Why not?”
“I’d rather drink to a beautiful woman? If you know any.”
“I can drink to that,” Ludovic said, clinking glasses and raising his to his lips.
“Can you, by God?” Francisco was clearly too intrigued to drink. “Has someone finally captured your cold and miserable heart?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I made a mistake, which I am trying to put right.”
Francisco sighed and drank before throwing himself into one of the armchairs. “I should have known. And are you any further forward with Dauncy?”
Even the name still made Ludovic’s stomach tighten in rage. “No,” he said shortly. He sat on the sofa and regarded his friend over the rim of his glass. “I don’t suppose you are?”
Francisco shook his head. “I wish I could be. I wish you could put the matter of your brother behind you. And then I wonder what you would do without your cause.”
