Page 38 of An Inconvenient Duke

“I can’t do anything officially,” Clayton offered, “but I will ask around, see what I can discover on my own. I can’t promise that I’ll learn anything. You know how it is with criminal groups like this. If they don’t interfere with legitimate business interests or those of the crown, they’re mostly allowed to carry on unchecked. The Home Office simply doesn’t have enough men to go after all of them.”

Marcus’s hand dropped away. “Nor does Parliament or the king care if the poor are killing and cheating themselves.”

“As long as it doesn’t spread outside the rookeries,” Clayton confirmed with a sardonic lift of his brow. “Then they might actually have to do something about the fact that the poor are starving and dying instead of simply ignoring them.”

These days, many of those same poor and starving were soldiers who had returned from the wars to find vacant jobs nonexistent and their commissions worthless, with no way to support themselves or their families. The aristocracy did their best to ignore their existence, and the middle class blamed the poor themselves, calling them lazy and ignorant. The truth was that those same men would have gladly taken any job that put food on the table and a roof over their heads, but those jobs simply didn’t exist. And what did Parliament do? Passed import laws that protected their own profits by raising the cost of corn and food while taking away resources for the poor. They’d even gone so far as to make being poor a crime by passing vagrancy laws and allowing the death penalty if a man poached a single hen in order to keep his wife and children from starving.

They’d fought to stop the tyranny of Bonaparte, yet a worse tyranny had befallen their own countrymen, and at the hands of the men who were supposed to be protecting them. Marcus knew better than to believe that military men turned politicians, like Wellington, would make any difference to the ones who needed help most.

“In the meantime, I’ll post men around the property for the next few days,” Clayton offered as Marcus walked him from the room and down the hall toward the stairs. “I’ll tell the Home Secretary that someone broke into the house but spare the other details. Because it’s you, he’ll take it seriously enough to post a guard.” Clayton shot him a darkly amused look as the two men descended the stairs. “Can’t have England’s newest hero harmed after he’s returned safely to English soil. We’d be worse than the French.”

Marcus grimaced. “He wouldn’t give a damn if I were still only a general.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” They reached the ground floor, and Clayton accepted his gloves, hat, and coat from the footman. Slipping into his overcoat, he tapped his gloves to Marcus’s chest to make his point. “If Marcus Braddock were still only a general, he’d have men watching you around the clock.” His grin hid the seriousness of his words as he lowered his voice. “Your men loved you, General—still do. Don’t think their loyalty to you and their willingness to do whatever you asked of them went unnoticed in Westminster. The French had a king once, too, before they killed him and made a general their emperor.”

He slapped Marcus on his good arm as he turned to leave and doffed his hat to the women inside the drawing room as he passed by, the room’s double doors open to the hall.

As Marcus followed to see him out the front door, he glanced inside the drawing room. The others were all still there. They took comfort in one another’s presence even now, with Trousdale’s arm far too familiarly looped around Claudia as they sat on the settee in the corner. Danielle and the viscountess were together on the sofa. Pippa nestled in Danielle’s arms, not yet willing to release Danielle as she continued to talk in hushed tones to the little girl and rub her back in an attempt to ease her into sleep.

As Clayton waited for the footman to open the door, he appealed to Marcus beneath his breath, “Promise me that if I bring you information about Scepter that you won’t do anything reckless.”

“I won’t let them hurt the people I love.” That was the only promise he’d give.

Danielle looked up and somberly met his gaze over Pippa’s head. At her worried glance, something twisted deep inside him.

Since his return, she’d come to mean a great deal to him. As much as his own family. Yet she was unnecessarily putting herself at risk with Nightingale, the same way Elise had, and the stubborn woman refused to stop.

One way or another, though, he was going to put an end to Nightingale and save her from herself. He knew at that moment that he would protect her the same way he would Claudia and Pippa.

With his life.

Twelve

The man was following her.

Again.

Dani didn’t have to glance behind her as she strolled down Bond Street to know he was there. She felt it in the tingle at her nape. It was the same electric jolt she’d gotten two days ago when she’d looked out her bedroom window and noticed the same man lingering in the square across from her house, keeping watch. On her.

That’s what he’d done ever since—kept watch and kept his distance, always following after her whenever she went out but never approaching her, never coming to the door, never making his presence known beyond his mistake of letting her see him the morning after dinner with Marcus at Charlton Place. Now she saw him whenever she went out, always there just at the periphery of her vision, always lingering far enough behind that no one else would have noticed him.

But she had.Of courseshe had. Working with Nightingale over the years had trained her to notice such things.

The man wasn’t dangerous. At least she assumed so, trusting that he would have attacked her by now if he were. Which meant that he was watching her house and following her for a different reason. Because Marcus had asked him to.

But she’d had enough of secrets and surveillance to last a lifetime, and this afternoon, she planned on teaching that man a thing or two about following innocent women. Along with the man who’d hired him.

Smiling slyly to herself, she darted into the dressmaker’s shop.

Inside, the seamstresses and assistants barely glanced her way, having grown used to having her here. Oh, she spent a great deal of time here, too, because this was where she had all of her own dresses made as well as those for the women whom Nightingale vanished. Many of them had nothing but the clothes they’d been wearing when they disappeared from their old existences. They needed new clothes to match their new identities, all of which the network provided.

With a little help. In gratitude, she waved a gloved hand at Mrs. Harris, the shop owner and one of the first women Nightingale had rescued, as she walked through to the rear of the shop.

She passed through the front showroom, with its beautiful dresses on display, brocade chairs, and bone china tea services for the ladies who patronized the shop, and disappeared behind the door that separated off the work rooms in the rear. Back here, the small army of assistants made the fine gowns and accessories that had earned Mrs. Harris her reputation as one of the best mantua-makers in London. The rooms on the floors above served as warehouses for the material, beads, lace, and other fripperies used to make the gowns, as well as dormitories for the girls who worked long hours in the workshop. They’d also served many times as hideaways for women Nightingale had moved about London when other places weren’t safe.

Dani had enough trouble finding the money to reimburse Mrs. Harris for the dresses. She would never be able to repay her kindness for hiding the women.

“Thank you, Mrs. Martin,” Dani whispered, using the woman’s real name to herself as she snatched up a day dress from a pile of folded dresses waiting to be delivered to clients. She held it up to judge its fit. “This will do nicely.” She plucked up a pair of pale pink stockings that matched the dress. “And so will these.”