Chapter 2
Chapter
Fred did not follow his wife. He’d stood alone and miserable in the corridor outside Thomas’s room and listened to her footsteps move steadily away. Down the stairs. Through the foyer and out the front door.
She was gone. And it was his fault.
Just like everything else.
Another thing you’ve ruined.
The best thing.
He’d let Chester out when he knew he shouldn’t. But it had been too much, too hard, to see that look of betrayal on her face. He’d lied to her when he said he wouldn’t. He’d kept secret after secret. And not even important ones. She already knew those.
It was harder than he’d thought, to let her all the way in. To stop using Chester as a shield for his heart. It felt too open and vulnerable, like the very pink skin that grew back after a bad sunburn. He’d protected it the only way he’d known how, like a goddamned coward.
He ran a hand down his face. And then exhaled sharply, only to find Gilbert turning into the corridor.
“Inspector Hughes has arrived, my lord,” he said. “Shall I show him into the morning room?”
Fred nodded once, absently. He found he no longer cared about the Inspector or that someone in his household was leaking information to The Poisoned Quill.
He didn’t care about anything, really, that wasn’t his wife and the echoing silence she’d left in her wake.
He felt his chest constrict and his breathing go shallow.
“My lord?” Gilbert said again after a moment when Fred hadn’t moved.
“Yes. Quite.” Fred shook his head and gulped in air, trying to clear his mind. And then he followed Gilbert down the hall.
The Inspector arrived a moment later, his gaze already moving about the room as Fred now knew it habitually did.
“Thank you for coming,” Fred said and Hughes narrowed his eyes on him.
“Difficult morning, my lord?”
“You’ve read The Quill, I take it.”
“I have. And unless you did make plans for Mister Farrow to return to Sedgewick Manor, I believe we have our culprit. It was the chef’s letter who insinuated Mister Farrow’s return. Should we make our way to the kitchen?”
“Yes. I suppose we should.”
They may as well, even though it no longer mattered to him. Not without Jules.
Clara was at her station when they entered the kitchen. The room looked as it always did, with the late morning sun streaming through the high window and the scent of stock and herbs wafting over from the large kettle on the hob.
It was, Fred thought, the most orderly room in the house.
Peaceful and beautiful in ways he’d always loved, always found comforting.
But now, now, he could pick up one of those knives and hurl it straight at the chef without a single moment of hesitation.
He glanced at the orderly array of them and considered it.
And then he considered setting fire to the whole damned manor house instead.
Except that Hughes was standing next to him, watching him consider those things, and the Inspector’s presence stayed his hand. As did the fact that in the end, this was no one’s fault but his own.
Clara did not look up immediately when they entered. She continued chopping her way through various piles of root vegetables with steady, practiced strokes.
“Miss Clarke,” Hughes said.
Fred watched her closely. She did not seem surprised to find them in the kitchen, though perhaps her movements were jerkier than he might have expected from a practiced chef. And her knife strokes were landing closer to her fingertips than was prudent.
“My lord, Inspector,” she finally greeted them.
“I must pass on my thanks,” Hughes said, voice as mild and calm as always. “Inadvertent though your actions might have been.”
Clara’s knife did pause then for a moment before she scraped the sliced turnips into a pile and began on the carrots. “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
“I think you do.” Hughes stepped further into the room. “You have worked here for how long, Miss Clarke?”
“Here in Dorset? I’ve just come down this spring when my lord moved from London.”
“And before that?”
“Seven years with Lord Chester. Five with the previous Earl.”
“Ah.” Hughes nodded. “Thank you.”
And then the Inspector fell quiet and just…
stared. Fred didn’t immediately understand what he was doing, but then he clocked how nervous Clara became under his gaze.
It only took a few minutes for her hands to begin to tremble.
Another before she squirmed. And then she reached up with a sleeve and wiped perspiration from her forehead.
He had to squelch a smile. The Inspector was letting her marinate in her own nerves and guilt.
And only when she was good and ready, fully saturated as it were, did Hughes say, “Do you know, Miss Clarke, what the sentence is for larceny? Given the on-going nature of the crimes under discussion, three to seven years hard labor in a penal colony. Do you think you would like Australia?”
She dropped her chopping knife and stared at him. “Now you wait a minute here. I gave over a pack of letters once. Once! And I put them back so no one can say I stole them! That’s ridiculous.”
Fred stepped forward. He couldn’t take another word from the woman. “That will do, Miss Clarke.” To Hughes he said, “That is enough, I take it, for charges to be brought?”
“It is,” Hughes agreed. “It was enough before, frankly, but her corroboration will come in handy should it be needed. Next time, Miss Clarke, it would be best to inquire which crimes an inspector is referring to before immediately denying them. Or confirming your participation, for all that.”
She held their gazes for a long while before she said, “It got out of hand.”
“Unquestionably,” Hughes agreed. “Always seems to. Although, all is not lost. Tell us everything, starting with the identity of the editor of The Poisoned Quill, and I believe we can see our way to leniency. Is that correct, Lord Chester?”
Fred only nodded, bile rising up in his throat at the thought of what she’d done. What she’d ruined. His own culpability in all of it.
“Then start at the beginning, Miss Clarke, and leave nothing out.”
The chef looked back and forth between the men.
But in the end, there was no other decision for her to make but to start talking.
“The Baroness Van Austerleigh is my cousin. She married well. And then when her first husband died, she married even better. And when Lord Chester arrived at Chester House, I wrote to tell her about him and she put two and two together and knew it was the young man that she’d been so in love with before. ”
Fred had to suppress the horrible noise that tried to make its way out of his throat.
The Baroness may have felt many things toward him but love was not one of them.
He could say that with certainty now that he’d experienced love himself.
He unquestionably loved his wife—and the experience bore no similarity at all to his time with the Baroness.
But he kept quiet while she continued.
“And he was just like she said.” Clara looked at him with so much hatred in her eyes Fred was taken aback.
“Should I leave?” he asked Hughes quietly but the man only shook his head and motioned for Fred to stay.
“And how was that?” Hughes asked. “You may speak freely, Miss Clarke. The damage has already been done.”
“He was awful. Even worse than the other Chester. Cold, self-serving, demanding. Kicked Miss Catherine and her mother out of Chester House even!”
He wanted to protest that he’d done no such thing, but he had done that.
Chester House had been entailed and went to him when the first Chester had died.
So he’d alerted his cousin Catherine and her mother, the Dowager Countess, that he would be moving in.
He didn’t tell them they had to vacate the premises exactly, but nor had he explicitly invited them to stay.
It had not been one of his better moments.
He had, however, made it up to them. Generous dowries and allowances and helping his cousin escape from her own wedding and the like. For Christ’s sake. Not that any of that was the chef’s business.
“And so you humiliated my wife in public?” he interrupted. “For these alleged crimes against my cousin, who is now a Duchess, should anyone be concerned for her welfare.”
“I didn’t know,” Clara said, “that was what she was going to do with the letters. I truly didn’t. I wouldn’t hurt the Countess for no reason. She seemed a decent sort.”
Unlike you went without saying, but Fred heard the insinuation clearly enough.
“The Baroness took a great interest in your marriage and asked for any information I could find. She was paying well, so I sent her copies of the letters. And then I put them back. That was all. I don’t know how The Quill got a hold of them or who the editor is. I swear it.”
Fred stood in the kitchen long after Inspector Hughes led Clara away.
The room was still warm and orderly and beautiful.
And he still wanted to set the damned place on fire.
The chef had betrayed him. But no more than he’d betrayed himself and Julianna, and that knowledge was burning a hole in his chest. He didn’t know what to do about it—didn’t know how to assuage the pain he caused them both.
He didn’t know how to be the better man he damn well knew he had to be.
He considered writing a letter but he no longer wanted to hide behind an ink and quill. That had caused enough trouble.
He thought about donning the armor of Chester, and going to find the Baroness. Setting her afire, perhaps. He couldn’t, of course. He would have words with the harridan, but not before he’d done what he could to fix this mess with Julianna. And not as anyone other than himself.