Hull grinned. “Many thanks, my lord.”
Shrike, meanwhile, raised a hand to trace Wren’s jaw with his fingertips and draw him in for another kiss.
“Are you satisfied?” he murmured against his lips as they parted.
Wren twined his arms around his shoulders and replied, “Kiss me once more; then I’ll be content.”
And to his delight, Shrike indulged him.
~
Mr Grigsby’s Clerk
Staple Inn, London
Autumn 1845
No one blamed Ephraim Grigsby for what had happened.
Possibly, Ephraim thought, because no one remained to blame him.
His ward, Felix Knoll, had vanished first. More than a month passed without any hint of where he’d gone.
Then, all in one day, Ephraim’s other ward, Miss Flora Fairfield, had disappeared from her academy. Ephraim’s clerk, Wren Lofthouse, had gone in pursuit of her and likewise had never been heard from again. Felix’s uncle, Mr John Tolhurst, had also attempted to find Miss Fairfield.
And been found that very night in his own rooms.
Dead.
With his throat cut.
Perhaps Ephraim ought to have feared for his own safety. His friend, Dr Hitchingham, certainly thought so and had no compunctions against saying it aloud.
But Ephraim didn’t feel afraid. No more so than usual, at any rate.
What he felt most of all was guilt.
He should have known Felix was frittering his fortune away. The boy had asked for an advance on his trust fund often enough. Any daft fool would’ve seen what it meant, but Ephraim had assumed the charitable opinion that Felix merely wanted things. He didn’t assume Felix would find a means to get them by throwing himself into such debts as would weigh down an earldom.
He should have seen Miss Flora was unhappy. As her guardian, he ought to have realised her misery and either shielded her from it or removed her to somewhere she might find joy again, before she took it upon herself to run away.
He hadn’t the faintest idea what he ought to have done about Tolhurst, but good Lord, a man must do something against cold-blooded murder.
And he knew not what he could have done to rescue Lofthouse from meeting the same fate.
One thing alone prevented Ephraim from sinking into total despair. A month after Miss Flora vanished from Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy, he received a letter in her hand—from Canada, of all places—assuring him of her good health and happiness and begging him not to worry. While he could not follow this last instruction, it still did his heart good to think her safe and sound. Likewise it renewed his hopes that he might yet hear from Felix again once the young gentleman had improved his prospects.
There remained no such hope for Tolhurst—dead, throat cut, in his own rooms in the quiet streets of Rochester—but while Ephraim mourned the loss of any good man, he could not with honesty say he missed Tolhurst, having never known him well enough in life to feel the absence of him afterward.
Wren Lofthouse, however, he missed very much.
Particularly as the violent beginnings of summer faded into a quieter season towards autumn. Which would, in due time, draw ever nearer to Christmas.
Some gentlemen might not consider Lofthouse good company for holiday cheer or otherwise. Ephraim found comfort in the presence of a sharp-minded young man with a marked talent for figures and fanciful notions alike and little patience for dilly-dallying. In certain moments now and again, Ephraim caught glimpses of his own younger self in his clerk. As a confirmed bachelor, Ephraim had no children. Lofthouse, a second-cousin once-removed on his mother’s side, had come to embody something of a son he’d never had.
And now Lofthouse had vanished.
On the same night Tolhurst had been murdered.
