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Duchess watched her for a long moment before sighing, and approaching. “Adelaide, don’t you see? You’re not a girl summoned home. You’re a hero headed to battle. And someday, you will learn that you never have to fight alone.”
They were pretty words. But that night, as she climbed onto the driving block, she knew the truth. This was her battle. And alone was the only way to win it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“I told you to bring your duke.”
Adelaide didn’t flinch when her father addressed her, club in hand, from the doorway of St. Stephen’s Chapel, still a stronghold of The Bully Boys, five years after her life had changed course forever inside its walls.
She’d ridden through the night, paying handsomely for a driver at the first place she’d changed horses, which had given her the opportunity to stop only for new mounts on the way back to London. She’d had to ride fast, as she knew that the moment Henry discovered her gone, he would follow—and he’d have the Belles in tow.
Sleep had come in fitful starts and stops on the journey, until they’d entered the city at dusk on the second night, and she’d let the driver off with enough coin to get him to wherever he’d like to be. She knew better than to bring a stranger to her father’s turf, and didn’t want anyone tangled up in whatever mess she was about to walk into.
Adelaide lifted her chin and met her father’s brown eyes as he stared down at her, his craggy face made craggier by the late-day shadows. He wouldn’t like it—the defiance in her look. He wouldn’t like that she’d come alone. His gaze narrowed on her, scanning her pinned hair and her lined cloak and deep purple skirts and the leather boots she wore that hadn’t been stolen from another.
“You look like one of them.”
It was the worst of insults. The kind that would come before a good pounding on the streets—a disdain for anyone who thought to get above themselves and this place. And if she’d been twelve or sixteen or even twenty, the words might have struck like a blow.
Cor, if it had been three weeks earlier, they might have.
But things had changed, and Adelaide Frampton, née Trumbull, had no plans to be intimidated by her father that day. “Where are they?”
Alfie Trumbull didn’t like insolence, and he didn’t like being treated like just anyone—self-made kings rarely did. He narrowed his gaze on the only child he’d ever claimed and said, “Yer duke, Addie. I specifically told you to bring ’im.”
Not her duke.
It was a lie, of course. He’d always be her duke. Even when he married a lovely highborn woman and had a passel of lovely highborn children... to Adelaide, he’d always be hers.
“Why? This isn’t about him.” This was young Addie, come home to the turf that had raised her, to fight.
“Jaysus, Addie. Every time I have a plan, you turn up to send it south.” He paused. “’Salright. We’ll go get the man.” He shouted up the street. “Find me that feckin’ toff.” He looked back at Adelaide. “Danny tells me he’s after you like a hound in heat, so it won’t be difficult.”
Fear whispered through her, and she pushed it out of the way. “Where are Jack and Helene?”
“Inside,” Alfie said, pointing over his shoulder at the chapel. “Thought it was time to let the place have some newlyweds who can stomach each other.”
Pushing past him, she stepped into the chapel, half expecting to find it upended—untouched since the day her wedding had devolved into a turf war with however many men dead, including the groom. Of course, there was no evidence of the past—that night, the chapel wastidy. A handful of candles burning in the sacristy on one side of the room, the sting of incense in her nose, a light dim enough that she had trouble adjusting to it. She stood for a moment, letting the space wash over her. And then, “Where?”
“Now, now, Addie, is that any way for you to treat your old da? We haven’t seen each other in years!”
“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed that we’ve ended our streak,” she retorted, moving swiftly into the space—empty except for them. She marched down the center aisle, searching the floors, the pews. All empty. “Risky, being here alone, Alfie.”
He smirked. “You think you’d get three paces beyond this church if you harmed me?”
She watched him for a moment. “I think I’d do alright. People ’round here always thought I was the best of you.”
A beat. Something in his eyes that she’d never seen before. Something strangely like... nerves? Before she could be sure, he laughed, big and brash. “Ah, I like that. Mayfair ’asn’t cleared me out of you, ’as it, girl?”
She didn’t reply as she approached the front pew.
“But you don’t live in Mayfair, do you?” her father continued from his place at the back of the church. “You’ve never been welcome there, ’ave you? Och, you’ve got your ladies, and now that American brute who put poor Timmy Crouch into retirement—”
“Caleb Calhoun,” Adelaide said. Caleb had come for the high-ranking Bully Boy a year earlier for laying hands on Sesily.
“Yeah, that one. Timmy was one of my best boys, you know. Now ’e’s got a wonky shoulder and likes to whinge about it. I’m still piqued about that one.”
“I’ll let him know,” Adelaide replied, dryly.
