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The lump in His Grace’s throat was merely dust, and it was dust that made his eyes smart and his voice hoarse. He wasn’t thinking of anyone else…such as a nine-year-old boy he’d been unable to save.
Nor had he felt tempted in the slightest to talk of what he felt. He had nothing burdening his heart, and most certainly had no idiotish wish to unburden himself to her. He had no reason to fear he’d be tempted to do so simply because he’d learned, in reading her work, that she was not so cynical and stony-hearted, not so much the dragon on a rampage, when it came to children. This couldn’t possibly matter to him, because he was cynical and stony-hearted about everything.
He was the last Mallory hellion, obnoxious, conceited, conscienceless, et cetera, et cetera. And because he was, he had only one use for her, and seeking a sympathetic ear wasn’t it. He did not confide in anyone because he’d nothing to confide, and if he had, he’d rather be staked under a broiling sun in the Sahara than confide in a female.
He told himself this, in several different ways, during the journey home, and not once did it occur to the Duke of Ainswood that he might be protesting too much.
“Trent made him do it, indeed,” Lydia muttered to herself as she strode down the hall to her study. “A regiment of infantry with bayonets at the ready couldn’t make that obstinate boor cross the street if he didn’t want to.”
When she entered the small room, she tossed her bonnet onto the desk. Then she moved to the bookshelves and took out the latest edition of Debrett’s Peerage.
She found the first clue quickly. Then she turned to her Annual Register collection, which covered the last quarter century. She drew out the 1827 edition and turned to the “Appendix to the Chronicle.” Under “Deaths, May,” she found the epitaph.
“At his seat, Longlands, Bedfordshire,” she read, “aged nine, the right hon. Robert Edward Mallory, sixth duke of Ainswood.” It went on from there for four columns, an unusually long death notice for a child, even for one of the nobility. But there was a poignant story here, and the Register could be counted upon to focus on it, as it did on other of the year’s curiosities and dramas.
I’ve been to enough funerals, Ainswood had said.
So he had, Lydia found. Moving from one information source to the next, she counted more than a dozen funerals in the last decade alone, and these were only the near kin.
If Ainswood was the callous pleasure seeker he was supposed to be, the relentless parade of deaths couldn’t have affected him.
Yet would a callous pleasure seeker bestir himself for a lot of peasants in distress, and labor alongside laboring men, at no small physical risk to himself?
She wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it herself: Ainswood ceasing only when assured there were no more to rescue, coming away ragged and dirty and sweating. And stopping to press his purse into a grieving girl’s hands.
Lydia’s eyes stung, and a tear plopped onto the page she’d been reading.
“Don’t be a ninny,” she scolded herself.
The scold produced no sensible result.
A minute later, though, what sounded like an elephant’s thundering approach dispelled all symptoms of ninnyness. The thunder was Susan’s. She and Tamsin were back from their walk.
Lydia hastily wiped her eyes and sat down.
In the next moment, Susan was bounding into the room and trying to bound into Lydia’s lap, and responding to the firm, “Down!” by slobbering on her skirts instead.
“It seems someone’s in a good temper,” Lydia said to Tamsin. “What happened? Did she find a plump, juicy toddler to snack on? She doesn’t smell much worse than usual, so she can’t have been rolling in excrement.”
“She has been a dreadful hussy,” Tamsin said while she untied her bonnet. “We met up with Sir Bertram Trent in Soho Square, and she made a complete spectacle of herself. As soon as she spotted him, she shot off like a rocket—or cannonball, rather, for she knocked him flat on his back. Then she stood over him, licking his face, his coat, and sniffing—well, I will not say where. She was utterly deaf to my remonstrances. Fortunately, Sir Bertram bore it all good-naturedly. When he finally got her off and himself up, and I tried to apologize, he wouldn’t have it. ‘Only playful,’ says he, ‘and don’t know her own strength.’ And then Susan—”
“Woof!” the mastiff cheerfully acknowledged her name.
“She had to show off her tricks,” Tamsin went on. “She gave her paw. She teased him with a stick until he played tug-of-war with her. She played dead as well, and rolled on her back to get tickled and—oh, you can imagine.”
Susan laid her big head in her mistress’s lap and regarded her soulfully.
“Susan, you are a puzzle,” Lydia said, petting her. “The last time you saw him, you didn’t like him.”
“Perhaps she sensed he’d been doing good deeds this afternoon.”
Lydia looked up to meet the girl’s gaze. “Trent told you about it, did he? Did he happen to explain what he was doing in Soho Square instead of Ainswood House, recovering from his herculean labors?”
“When he saw you, Charles Two came into his brain box, he told me. The king bothered him so, he got out of the hackney a few streets away and walked to the square to look at the statue.”
In Soho Square’s sadly neglected patch of greenery stood a crumbling statue of Charles II.
After their first encounter, Tamsin had reported Trent’s associating Lydia with the Restoration-era monarch. It made no sense to Lydia, but she didn’t expect it to. She was aware that Lord Dain’s brother-in-law was not noted for intellectual acumen.
“Speaking of herculean labors,” Tamsin said, “I daresay you had a shock in Exeter Street. Do you think the Duke of Ainswood is reforming, or was this a momentary aberration?”
Before Lydia could respond, Millie came to the doorway. “Mr. Purvis’s here, Miss. With a message for you. Urgent, he says.”
At nine o’clock that night, Lydia entered a small, heavily draped room in the Covent Garden Piazza. The girl who let her in quickly vanished through the curtained doorway opposite. A moment later, the woman who’d summoned Lydia entered.
She was nearly as tall as Lydia, but shaped on broader lines. A large turban crowned her head. The face below was thickly painted. Despite the paint and dim light, Lydia discerned clear signs of amusement.
“An interesting choice of costume,” said Madame Ifrita.
“It was the best I could do on short notice,” Lydia said.
The older woman signaled Lydia to take a chair at the small table near the curtained doorway.
Madame Ifrita was a fortune-teller, and one of Lydia’s more reliable informants. Normally the two women met at a discreet distance from London, because Madame would soon be out of business if her clients suspected that she shared any of their confidences with a journalist.
Since a disguise was necessary, and there wasn’t time for transforming into a man, Lydia had gone with Tamsin to the secondhand shops in Greek Street. There they’d hastily assembled the alleged “gypsy” costume Lydia was wearing.
The result, in Lydia’s opinion, was more tartlike than gypsylike. Though she wore half a dozen petticoats, in different colors, she hardly felt decently clothed. Since none of the previous owners had been Amazons like her, the hems stopped well above her ankles—as did those of virtually every streetwalker in London. But she hadn’t time for alterations.
The same difficulties of fit applied to the bodices. The one finally decided upon was scarlet, and as tight as a tourniquet—which was just as well, for Lydia’s breasts would have tumbled out of the obscenely low neckline otherwise. Fortunately, the night was cool enough to require a shawl.
Unwilling to risk a secondhand wig, which was bound to be infested with several forms of insect life, Lydia had used colored scarves to fashion a turban. With her hair tightly bound underneath and the ends of the scarves artfully draped, it not only concealed her betraying blond hair but helped camouflage her
features.
She wasn’t worried about anyone noticing the color of her eyes, since she was going out after dark in the first place, and wasn’t going to let anyone get close enough to notice they were blue in the second.
A generous application of paint, powder, and cheap jewelry completed the gaudy ensemble.
“I’m supposed to be one of your gypsy relatives,” Lydia explained.
Madame settled into the chair opposite. “Clever,” she said. “I knew you’d contrive something. I regret the hasty summons, but the information came only this afternoon, and you may have very little time to act upon it—if my crystal ball can be believed,” she added with a wink.
