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Draven.Henry’s brow furrowed at the name. The earl had been pushed off a balcony at a ball weeks earlier. A woman had been seen fleeing the crime. A group of them. “They thought it was you lot.”
“Really, Duke,” Sesily said. “We’ve a name now.”
“We’ve also more finesse than to toss an earl off a balcony during a ball,” Duchess added.
“Didn’t you blow up Scotland Yard, as well?” Henry asked.
“No one can prove that,” Lady Imogen replied happily.
Pride filled Adelaide’s gaze, as though she’d been hoping he would put it all together. “Lady Helene came directly to us to request help, knowing that if she went anywhere else, she might not be believed. Of course, we agreed. She needed to escape her father’s house and find hiding as quickly as possible, for a long enough time that we could sort out his capture.”
“Not easy with a peer,” he said.
“Precisely, so we concocted an elaborate plan—Lady Havistock’s meeting with the Matchbreaker was intended to be a distraction for Lady Helene’s escape. But she and your brother eloped, without apprising us of the plans.
“It wasn’t what we’d intended, but we decided it could be turned to our advantage. Her father might believe it was the reason she’d disappeared, and she’d be protected by Jack. All we had to do was follow her to the border and collect her. She’d be married and safely out from under her father’s thumb.” Adelaide paused. “We didn’t expect . . .”
“You didn’t expect me unconscious in your hideout for five days.” He cursed, guilt crashing down around him. “You should have told me.” He was furious. They’d all been in danger. Adelaide, Jack, Lady Helene. “You should have told me why we were headed north. Why it was important that we find them.”
“I didn’t have to,” Adelaide said, stepping forward, sensing his frustration. “We knew where they were every step of the way... until you were hurt. And then...” She trailed off.
She’d stayed for him. Because she cared for him.
Because she ached for him as much as he ached for her.
“We were watching them,” Duchess interjected. “We knew where they were. Every overnight. Every horse change. Every stop for food or weather. You did not disappear them, Adelaide. Something went wrong.”
“Are they dead?” Henry finally voiced the question that had been knocking around in his head since the beginning of the conversation. Had his brother been so caught up in this mess that he’d died for it?
“We don’t believe so,” Duchess said. “First, any person willing to take money to kill not one, but two aristocrats isn’t smart enough to do it quietly. We are talking about men who cannot cut a purse without regaling half the world with the tales of their great adventure.”
“And the second?”
She reached into the pocket of her skirts and extracted a small card. “This.”
Adelaide’s gaze locked on the ecru square. “What is that?”
“It was delivered to the Hungry Hen not two hours ago.” She paused. “Addressed to one Adelaide Trumbull.”
***
Adelaide went cold in the wake of Duchess’s words.
Trumbull.
Not Frampton. Not the name she’d used for years as she’d rebuilt herself.
She reached for it. “What does it say?”
“I don’t know,” Duchess said.
Adelaide trembled as she slid her finger beneath the blood red seal there, her heart pounding as she realized the gravity of the moment. As she realized what this small missive meant. How, even before she read it, it returned her, without argument, to the world she’d escaped years earlier.
How this cold reminder of her past—of where she’d come from and who she had once been—highlighted all the reasons she would never settle into this new world. This new life. How she had spent the past five years living half a life. For fear of this—of becoming too tied to the world north of the river, and still, being nothing but a girl from the South Bank.
Opening the parchment, she read, recognizing the jagged writing on the paper. The creative spelling of a man with a head for numbers who had taught himself to read and write.
Received yer package. Well done, Addie.
