Olivia kept her head down as she passed through the black iron gates into St. James Park. Strollers wandered down the path, sipping mugs of fresh milk and fussing over children, full of Christmas cheer. Vendors hawked baked apples, hot chocolate, and fried oysters. The grass was littered with brown paper cones stained with grease.
As she walked, she pretended great concern with avoiding the rubbish. It excused her from having to look into people’s faces, and to let them see hers. She wore a staid walking dress of unremarkable brown wool, purchased secondhand from a dolly shop along with the only hat she had seen there that looked unlikely to carry fleas. A Christmas present to herself, she thought blackly. But the hat covered only half of her head; she felt the warmth of the sun on her brow, which meant that her hair was also catching the light, making a gleaming beacon for anyone who looked for her.
Nobody was looking for her. Not yet. She had been very cautious in her approach, having gone all the way to Hampstead to rent a room, these past four nights. She had even taken the train back to Broad Street to post the letter to Bertram.
She had not signed her name. There was no use in baiting a bear before the trap was fully laid. But in the letter, she had laid out the evidence against him: enough to hang him in public opinion, and to prosecute him, too. The building society of which he was the director, and that he had hawked to the lower classes as a fine opportunity for investment, was a sham. Of the developments his investors had funded, he had built only a quarter, and the dividends had gone directly into his own pockets. The documents evidenced his crime quite clearly.
The details of her letter ensured that he would not trust this matter to Thomas Moore, or any hired hand. He would come himself, and when he did, she and her pistol would make clear to him that he must cut her a wide berth for the rest of his natural life if he did not wish to be ruined.
The bird-keeper’s cottage came into view. She scowled at the knots in her stomach. There was no cause to be nervous. She was armed in more ways than one. She was not walking to her doom now. She was walking toward her freedom. God knew she had paid dearly for it.
No. She would not allow herself to think of Alastair.
There were rooms in the club in which conversation was discouraged. The dining room was not one of them—though a stranger, stumbling inside, might have been forgiven for thinking otherwise. Tracking the avid, rapt attention of the other diners, this stranger might have imagined that some miracle was unfolding at the table by the window, when in fact all that transpired was the meeting of two brothers, nothing more.
“I thought you’d booked a private room,” said Michael.
The onlooker also might have wondered that these two were brothers—for the one was pale and blond, lean after a long period of deprivation, and eating heartily, for he was trying to flesh out. The other was dark haired, as robust and tanned as a farmer—but he picked at his steak like an invalid.
“You misunderstood,” said Alastair. He had not booked the private room for this luncheon. Right now, he wished his presence advertised.
“I count a dozen stares,” Michael said moodily. “You could have charged admission.”
He’d forgotten how easily Michael sulked. “Buck up. They aren’t staring at you.” But he could feel the stares like ants crawling over his nape. His back felt painfully exposed, braced for the impact of an arrow.
Let it fly. He would welcome it. These past four days, he had been gripped by a rage so pure and intense that it made him giddy, like fine whisky. His calisthenics no longer sufficed to trammel it. Bloodshed would be a better cure.
Michael produced an unhappy sigh. In reply, Alastair gave him a smile, easy, confident, meant to reassure: the old routine, picked up again as easily as a shirt. “Let them look,” he said. “I expect they’ve missed me.”
Michael laid down his fork. “You’ve been following the news, I hope? Don’t expect to find your place reserved for you. You’ll need to knock down a few pins, first. Bertram, for instance—”
“I’m aware.” Alastair was aware of very little else, in fact. In the sleeplessness of these past four nights, he’d been laying plans. Johnson and Bertram, Nelson and Barclay, Fellowes—the chant had run through his head so often that it was beginning to take on a melody. “Do you have the records I asked for?”
Michael retrieved them from his jacket, a padded envelope whose thickness would be evident from across the room. That these were the employee rolls from the hospital would not be evident. “As you’ll see, the damage from the hospital’s closure was extensive.” The closure you effected for no reason, he did not add. “We lost several doctors. I had to raise their salaries considerably to lure them back.”
Alastair nodded. The hospital was a charitable endeavor, which he funded—and which he had briefly closed, during his blackest days, to punish his brother, a doctor by trade, who had founded it. “That’s fine.”
“You can’t blame them for demanding it.” Michael shrugged. “They have no way of knowing if you’ll decide to shut the place down again.”
“But I won’t.”
“Of course not.” Michael stared at his plate, grim faced. “I was . . . surprised to receive your note, I must say.”
They were coming to it now. It had taken only three courses and some grumbling. “My apology was long overdue.”
Michael reached for his wineglass, gave it a quarter turn on the tablecloth. “It’s in the past now, I suppose.” He could not have sounded more hollow.
It would be easier, of course, not to force the issue. But Alastair knew that if he wanted to repair this breach, he would have to expose his throat. “Your wife would disagree with you. And if you’re honest, you’ll admit that you haven’t forgiven me.”
Michael’s mouth flattened. He said nothing.
A flash of insight struck. Alastair smiled, genuinely amused. “You fear you’ll send me into another decline? Is that why you’re tiptoeing around it?”
“Well. You can’t blame me for worrying.”
Alastair caught himself lifting his own wineglass, and made his hand return to the table. He did not deserve the comfort of tipsiness for this conversation. “I disappointed you,” he said bluntly. “I behaved with reckless, irrational bile. I regret it extremely. You cannot know how much.”
Michael’s face darkened. “She could not understand your opposition to her.”
Very well, let them pretend this quarrel centered solely on Elizabeth Chudderley’s—Elizabeth de Grey’s—hurt feelings, and had nothing to do with Michael himself. “Tell me how I may make amends to her,” Alastair said. “Shall I write to her directly? I’d imagined she would not want to hear from me.”
“She would read a letter, I think.”
“Then I’ll write to her at once.”
Michael leaned forward, giving him a searching frown. “If you could only explain to me why you did it. That is—I know how deeply you were injured, how bitterly you took Margaret’s deceit. You had cause to be furious, but never at me, Al.” Here he looked down to his plate again, but not before Alastair caught a glimpse of his bewilderment, his pain. “You had no right to force my hand. Or to endanger the hospital—and every single patient there. Three hundred of them, transferred without notice!”
Here lay the heart of the breach. “No. I had no right.” Surely it had been madness that had led him to shut down the hospital. And while he would have chosen a different bride for his brother, one less beautiful, less sociable, less worldly than Elizabeth Chudderley . . . someone less confident of her charms, who did not remind him so much of his late wife . . .
That battle was lost. And he could not account for his actions, for he no longer understood them, though he remembered them with perfect clarity. How much he had cared about the wrong things—and then, how little he had cared at all.
But now there was a new battle. “Tell me,” he said, “what I must do to have your trust and love again.”
Michael blinked. “My trust, or my love? Because you know you have the latter. The former will be more costly to you.”
This had always been Michael’s special skill: to see love and trust as separate things. In Alastair’s view, neither was worth having separately. “Both,” he said.
Michael nodded, then took to sawing at his steak.
In the silence, Alastair grew aware again of the stares from the room. He could feel, like an open wound, the doors behind him, through which anyone might enter, any of the four men on his list, any of these men’s confidants. If he turned now, he might encounter a knowing sneer, a snicker, a furtive grin. Someone who knew.
And he would slice those smiles off their faces. If he could not stop the news from spreading, then he would make it the worst mistake a man could commit, to know it, and to discuss it freely.
He schooled his breath. He allowed himself a single sip of his wine. He glanced across the room, making note of who nodded at him, and who quickly looked away.
This was his club. This was his seat, by the window. This was his place. Anyone who wished to challenge him would pay for it. He was taking back what belonged to him—starting with his brother’s good opinion.
He turned back to Michael. “Tell me,” he said, taking care to speak gently, the better to coax the dove into hand. “How may I make amends?”
Michael cleared his throat. “For my sake, Elizabeth is willing to move forward, let bygones be bygones. And as for me . . . time, I believe. That is what it will require. And your company,” he added gruffly. “God help me. But for some lunatic reason, I seem to have missed you.”
“Then of course you will have my company, whenever you like.”
Michael flashed him a startled smile. “My God. Not even an attempt to pawn me off on your secretary? Schedule me in? It’s clear something has changed. I think this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever seen you humble!”
Alastair managed a fine laugh, perfectly balanced between amusement and abashment. For if humility was what his brother needed to see, then very well, humility it was.
But it was not, of course, humility that kept his spine straight (if you had shown them half the spine you’ve shown me, Olivia Johnson had said with contempt) as they made conversation over port and dessert, with the entirety of the room still ogling him. And afterward, in the hallway, as they paused to make plans, he recognized that while he was truly contrite, and entirely genuine in his intention to write a pretty note of apology to Michael’s wife, these feelings were more conceptual truths than embodied sensations.
He stood there, watching Michael walk out the door, and had the uncanny sense he had performed very well in a play: he had recited the proper lines with the appropriate amount of feigned conviction, and the audience had responded positively.
The falsity troubled him. His relationship with his brother had never felt rote. He loved Michael. Even now, he knew he loved his brother. But he wanted to feel it again. He wanted to feel something healthy, wholesome, and good. Something, moreover, that was true.
In time. All in good time.
He leaned against the wall, taking advantage of this odd remove to watch passersby disguise their surprise at seeing him. Old acquaintances, who probably counted themselves as friends, stopped in astonishment and hastened to speak with him, smiling and pumping his hand, expressing their gladness at the meeting.
And here, too, he excelled, managing to intimate, with his own smiles and a certain warm tone, that they had indeed been much missed, their proposals for dinner gladly received, the old confederacy officially resumed—as though nothing had changed during the endless months in which the world had moved on and he had not.
But all the time, as he made idle talk and remembered the rusted reflexes of charm, he wondered, Do you know what a fool I have been made? Will you be wise enough to hide it, if you do? For I will not spare you, either.
And after almost an hour, his wait ended. Bertram stepped through the double doors into the lobby.
Revenge was not a descriptive term. It was a category, within which fell a thousand possibilities, ranging from a mild snub in the street (face turned, a social death) to a blade against the neck, a jugular severed, a hot, wet murder. Savages painted their faces in the blood of their enemies. It had its appeal. But with a slit throat, the enemy could not speak—and Alastair required answers.
Bertram, of course, mistook him for a gentleman. Bertram did not imagine he was carrying a knife; otherwise, he would not have agreed to accompany Alastair down this hallway, which grew progressively dimmer the farther they withdrew from the dining hall. Bertram had a great deal of faith in the civility of his enemy. The fool.
But once Alastair had stepped into the room after him, once the lock was turned and they faced each other, he saw Bertram catch a glimpse of another possibility.
The man went pale. He retreated a pace and reached into his jacket.
“It’s your choice,” Alastair said.
Bertram hesitated. Then he felt down the buttons of his waistcoat, as though that had always been his intention. “Duke,” he said flatly. No pretense of old friendship here, though he had once dined nightly at Alastair’s house, and familiarly called him Marwick, and put his head close to Margaret’s as they laughed at shared jokes.
There were so many reasons for savagery. Alastair saw now how stray memories might chip away at a man, a crack here, a crack there, until the wall broke, and the rage, undammed, rushed out and destroyed all in its path.
But to have his revenge, while also keeping his place at this club, at the table by the window—to have his revenge and his brother as well, and Elizabeth’s forgiveness (for that was necessary, if he meant to keep his brother)—well, for that alone, Alastair would not reach into his own jacket pocket, where he could feel the weight of a stiletto, which he knew would do its job neatly, with a minimum of gore.
“Sit,” he said.
Bertram had once taken orders with unusual eagerness. For a man fifteen years’ Alastair’s elder, his ingratiating manner had made him slightly pitiable, if also—what irony—reliable. Trustworthy.
But Bertram had since gotten his hands on power. “No,” he said. “I will not sit. But I am glad you wished to talk. There’s something you’ll want to hear.”
“I’ve already heard so much from you,” Alastair said. Again, so calm. This script was excellent. “Granted, the letters were intended for my wife. But you know the saying: Adam’s rib. What was hers is mine, and so on.”
Bertram gave him a thin smile. “Of course. And I imagine you must be feeling very pleased with yourself, for I have received your letter, as well.”
“Did you? I sent none.”
Bertram took a seat. “You must hope that your henchman denies it, too. Ah—that surprises you, I see. Did you really imagine that I would go myself?” He laughed shortly. “Did you imagine those documents were genuine? Your own wife drafted them—it was her idea, in fact.”
He deserved a knife across the throat for daring to speak of her. For mentioning so casually what should be his shame and dishonor.
But Alastair kept his hands loose at his sides, his face neutral. He gathered that Bertram felt convinced he was sharing a great coup. “I don’t understand,” he said. “You’ll have to elaborate.”
Bertram sighed. “Must I? All those sordid secrets you collected, imagining yourself somehow superior—what did you mean to do with them anyway? Did you truly imagine that honorable men would stand for blackmail?” He shook his head. “Margaret agreed with me. It simply isn’t done. And if you were vulgar enough to try it . . . why, she thought, and I agreed, how fitting it would be if your blackmail was turned against you. If the evidence you collected was, in fact, forged—and in such a way that, should you ever attempt to use it, you would be exposed as the villain.”
Alastair held himself very still. The files on Bertram that Olivia Johnson had stolen—these were what Bertram meant. “They were false,” he said softly.
“You fool!” Bertram’s color was rising. A redhead could never hide an emotion as piquant as triumph. “Of course they were false. Did you truly imagine me so idiotic as to get myself tangled up in a land swindle? But no, you thought yourself so much cleverer. And so you’ve destroyed yourself, Marwick—for as you may have gathered, I did not make that meeting today. Scotland Yard paid the visit in my stead.”
Alastair felt something shift inside him, minute but profound: the center of his gravity, readjusting. “I see.”
To feel so right—to feel one’s instincts, with savage bitterness, confirmed—and then, after all, to be so wrong, to be so blind: Olivia had not been lying about her intentions.
She had tried to use the documents to blackmail Bertram. We have a common enemy, she’d said.
Was this relief? Why? He took a great breath, for he felt suddenly drunk, though he’d not finished his wine.
Bertram interpreted this breath as a sigh of despair. “Yes, indeed, now you’re seeing the way of it. And for your own sake, you must hope you paid your man well enough to resist interrogation. For when he confesses your role in it, what will the world think? That you hired a man to blackmail me with documents that you forged. Ruination, Marwick. A laughingstock extraordinaire! Yes, I hope you paid your man very well.”
Looking at him now, Alastair saw, with fresh eyes, the significance of details he had not thought to notice before:
The man’s square jaw. His unusual height. And his hair, carrot red, even in the darkness of the room.
He felt his lip curl. He knew something of how a man earned enemies. But Bertram’s deeds must be blacker than he’d imagined. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “But I wonder if you guessed that my henchman would be a woman—ginger, by the name of Olivia.”
Bertram gave a gasp. And then he leapt from his chair for the door.
“No.” Alastair grabbed his shoulder, hauled him around. And then, with great satisfaction, he made a fist and slammed it into Bertram’s nose.
Bertram dropped to the ground.
Alastair stood over him, breathing heavily. His knuckles throbbed, the sweetest sensation he’d known in a very long time—or at least, since that night in his library.
He shook his head to rid it of that thought. “Dead?” he said.
No reply.
Kneeling, Alastair felt for a pulse, and found it beating strongly. Convenient; this would give him a fine head start.
“Never fear,” he said as he rose. “I’ll take very good care of your daughter.”
Alastair had been instrumental in drafting several measures for prison reform. As he followed the jail keeper down the moldy corridor, he wondered what he had been thinking. It was very useful to have a penal system so dependent on bribery and corruption.
The keeper took the precaution of looking through the peephole before unlocking the door. Intriguing. Olivia had obviously made quite an impression during her arrest. To believe the official account, she’d been waving Alastair’s pistol and threatening to take off somebody’s head.
Quite credible, that story. A wonderful system they had at work here: lies, money, mold. “Leave us,” he said.
The jail keeper hemmed and hawed as though working himself up to an argument. How quaint. Alastair let his own face telegraph his opinion of the prospect.
The man snapped his mouth shut and pocketed the key. “When you’re finished, sir—”
“Your Grace,” Alastair said softly.
“Simply ring,” the man said in a more subdued tone. He nodded to the small bell by the door. “A guard will come to lock up.”
Alastair waited until the jail keeper’s footsteps had faded. The bell, the iron door, the reek of filth and damp, the narrow peephole—positively medieval. When he laid his hand on the latch, he was introduced to a layer of cold, slimy moisture.
He pushed open the door. In the moment it took his eyes to adjust to the dimness, he heard her gasp. “You came!”
Her greeting threw him off. The gratitude in it struck at some small, tender, rotten spot inside him. She came into focus in the dimness, standing two feet away, bedraggled, straw clinging to her skirts, her right cheek swollen and purpling. “How did you know I was here?” she asked hoarsely.
“That doesn’t matter.” She brandished the gun, the jail keeper had told him. She was hollering that she would shoot anybody who tried to lay a hand on her.
The point of that bunkum was apparent now. Short of a proper murderess, perhaps even a cannibal, the public would scruple at police striking a woman.
He scrupled. That the police, whose sacred duty was to protect, would abuse a slip of a girl . . . Contempt burned through him.
He resisted the impulse to go to her, to tilt her chin up to the meager light from the murky window and make certain her eye was intact. She had stolen from him. Made a fool of him. Lied to him. These were her just deserts. It was not his job to protect her.
“I can help you,” she said. “Do you believe me now?”
He felt his upper lip curl—an animal reaction to this confusion swelling inside him. She could help him? She had decided to take on Bertram singlehandedly. See how well it had turned out.
If you had shown them half the spine you’ve shown me, perhaps Bertram would not have been my problem to solve.
He recognized the childishness of his anger. He was sick of being shown up by her.
Her hands nervously kneaded her skirts. “Please,” she said. Her knuckles were bloodied. Had she thrown a punch? Or—the image flashed through his mind, sudden and vivid—had they dragged her? Had she grabbed onto the gravel, the walls, to save herself—
He gritted his teeth. “Very well. Tell me, Olivia, why I shouldn’t leave you here to rot.”
Her lips trembled. And then, quite suddenly, her strength seemed to leave her. She fell onto her knees in the straw, and the gasping breath that tore from her sounded too much like relief. He had not promised he would help her. He should warn her of that.
But instead, he knelt and took hold of her elbows. “Are you all right?” Whose words were these? Whose concern was this?
“Yes,” she whispered.
His grip wanted to tighten. He understood suddenly that this was his concern. She was his concern. He was no longer going to hide in the dark, for she had pulled him out of it. He would not hide even from himself.
To hell with that! She was a thief. She had deceived him. Stolen from him.
But she had also brought him into the garden. She had shown bravery that he had no choice but to admire.
He made an angry noise and let go of her. “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “We’re done with lies. You will speak the truth to me, or nothing at all. Now, tell me: are you all right?”
She swallowed, the noisy sound of a very dry throat. She looked past him to the door, and then around the little cell, a certain blind quality in her gaze, as though she was only now discovering where she was, and did not trust her vision. “Yes,” she said unsteadily. “And I will tell you—everything. But quickly! Once Bertram realizes I am here . . .”
Her naked fear struck some chord within him, a shocked and startled note that reverberated. How had he missed her fear? In his bedroom, when he had manhandled her, he had thought her afraid of him. But he saw now that he’d been mistaken.
He could not make sense of it. This terror was for Bertram? He had not understood his wife’s choice of lovers, Bertram least of all—and now he could not understand Olivia Johnson’s fear. She had never flinched in front of him. But the mere mention of Bertram made her shake.
He grabbed her arm again. His fingers flexed on her smooth skin; he wanted to run his hands over her, to check for hidden wounds, because she was a liar, he could believe nothing she said, not even her protests that she was well.
Their eyes locked. Of course she would not look away from him. “Tell me why you fear that bastard,” he said. “What do you think he will do to you?”
She lifted her face, showing him Bertram’s chin, Bertram’s hair clinging in matted curls to her temples. But her eyes were her own, an oceanic blue, the blue of prophetic heavens, cloudless summers. “He will kill me. He has already tried once.”
He let go of her. Recoiled. Preposterous. A single punch had knocked Bertram unconscious. And she thought him a murderer? A man did not kill his own blood.
Yet he could not dispute that she believed it. Her conviction showed in her pallor, in her desperate eyes. And to see her look like that, when she had never so much as flinched from him . . .
He took a long breath. Rage, confusion, amazement . . . his emotions were pinwheeling; he could not understand any of them.
He found himself groping for another script to guide him. But there was nothing now in his brain but his instinct, his rotten instinct, which wanted to smash something. Or tie her up, swaddle her in gauze, lock her away somewhere he could study her until he understood . . . something. Something important, to which he could not yet put a name.
He made himself look at her. It was not difficult. Taking his eyes off her would be the challenge. What are you?
Something was missing. “Where are your spectacles?”
“They smashed them.”
There was the anger, boiling up again, scalding. How stupid; she did not even need them to see.
He turned away, pinched the bridge of his nose. Found himself staring at the door. From this side, it looked even more of a relic from the dark ages. Streaks of rust resembled blood. The dents must be where—his mind’s eye supplied the possibility—some past occupant had banged his head, over and over, frantic for escape.
Christ, how was she so alone? How was it that she had been grateful to see him here? How had her own goddamned father put her into this mess?
He turned back. She visibly gathered herself, straightening, jaw squaring. She would not beg him. Even her eyes had ceased to plead. She merely watched him, resolute, ready to hear his decision.
She had not gotten her dignity from Bertram.
He held out his hand. Her lips parted. She seized his fingers and he hauled her to her feet—too easily. She was not light, but she was not as heavy as she should be. Her bones should be made of iron, for what else was fit to support her bravado? It would shame generals. Emperors. Professional pirates.
If anyone was going to break her will, it would be he. Not Archibald bloody Bertram.
He pulled her out the door, past the silent bell, down the hall. In the guardroom, the jail keeper and one of his thugs had begun a game of cards. When they caught sight of Alastair, the keeper stood. “How now, Your Grace! What is this? That woman is a prisoner of the Crown—”
Alastair dropped her hand—ignoring how her fingers clung, how he had to shake them off as he stepped forward. It made something in his chest twist, to feel her reaching for him. It was so unlike her. “This woman was waylaid without cause. The pistol was mine, which she was carrying to be repaired.”
The man flushed. “A likely story!”
He felt a strange smile twist his lips. The jail keeper retreated a pace. “You doubt my word, sir?”
The man looked uneasily to his guard, who found a new purpose in reshuffling the deck. “I—perhaps you didn’t know, Your Grace. But this woman is involved in a very bad business, a scheme to blackmail Lord Bertram—”
“Indeed? You mean to say that Bertram, a member of our prime minister’s cabinet, is in the business of being bamboozled by other men’s domestics?”
The keeper shifted his weight. “I . . . am not privy to all the details, but the charge sheet—”
“Yes, you’ll want to keep your eye on that. The newspapers would be glad to print it. What a curious lark. Rather awkward for Salisbury, of course. Indeed, the PM should be apprised before all of London begins to laugh at the fool he appointed. Will you inform him, or shall I?”
The jail keeper stammered a few incoherent syllables. Finally he found his retort: “This is intimidation!”
“Is it?” Alastair inspected his nails. “I had imagined that intimidation required a busted face, at the least.” He looked up. “Or was my maid abused for no cause?”
“Perhaps . . . there was some mistake. She was loitering in the very spot that the criminal had promised to wait—but perhaps that was only a coincidence.”
“I will leave it to you and the baron to decide. In the meantime . . .” Alastair lifted a brow. “Get out of my way.”
The jail keeper swallowed and inched aside, clearing their path to the street.