CHAPTER 3
Wincing as a dappling of cheery sunlight danced through the windowpanes, warming the sheaf of blank watercolor paper on the blotter, Charlotte gingerly took a seat at her work desk.
“Mmph.” The movement, though slight, drew another grumble of protest from her lurching stomach. “It seems that I engaged in one too many gavottes with a sparkling glass of champagne last night.”
Pleasure had its penance. No matter that she wished to crawl back under the bedcovers, she had a drawing due today.
Steepling her fingers, Charlotte contemplated the top sheet, its pristine white hue seeming to stare back at her with a taunting challenge flickering up from its rough-grained surface.
“Right,” she murmured. “The city has been unnaturally peaceful of late. Why, even the Prince Regent has stirred no new scandals. So . . .” A sigh. “What other foibles are there to skewer?”
Her gaze strayed over to the recent editions of Ackermann’s Repository stacked on the side table. The journal’s on-dits on Polite Society were often useful for sparking an idea, but they, too, had been awfully tame of late.
“Oh, come.” A sigh. “Surely I can think of something to ridicule. Scandal and secrets are my bread and butter.”
Alas, her mind, like the paper, remained blank.
She tried to concentrate. Her thoughts were usually well focused, sharpened, no doubt, by the fact that peace and quiet put no pennies in her purse. But this morning they kept waltzing to their own tune, spinning and twirling like the dust motes dancing in the gold-flecked light.
Dancing. The word stirred a different sort of flutter in her belly.
Waltzing with Wrexford, she mused, had been oddly wonderful. . . though, of course, those two words made no sense together.
“But then, neither do the two of us,” murmured Charlotte, then reminded herself that work must take precedence over personal lollygagging. She reached for her quill and penknife and began shaping a sharp point.
And yet her damnable wayward brain seemed to have another idea in mind.
Wrexford. His name—like his physical presence when he sauntered into her pleasant little parlor—seemed to shove all else from her thoughts. She wasn’t precisely sure how that had come to be. At first blush, he wasn’t a gentleman to make a girlish heart flutter.
Irascible. Arrogant. Sarcastic. His scientific mind valued cold-blooded logic over tender sentiment.
Putting aside her newly sharpened pen, Charlotte picked up a pencil and began to doodle.
But as with most things in life, such a starkly simple first impression had given way to a far more nuanced portrait.
She stared down at her caricature, with its sinuous curls of too-long hair—the earl was always in need of a barber—and subtle shading that softened the hard line of his jaw.
Strange how comfortable she had become with the austere planes of his face.
Rather than just the starkly chiseled edges, she now saw all the subtle contours and vulnerabilities that made him . . .
That made him Wrexford.
Their relationship had taken a number of twists and turns, the way all too often darkened by danger.
And of late, it had taken a new spin . .
. one that still seemed to have both of them off-balance.
Perhaps if in the future they stopped tripping over dead bodies, they could begin to sort out their personal feelings. . . .
“The future? Ha!” Shoving aside her musings, Charlotte crumpled the sketch and drew a fresh sheet onto the blotter. “I had better concentrate on the present.”
After several long moments, a sigh of relief slipped from her lips as she suddenly remembered the bit of gossip McClellan, the redoubtable woman who served as both maid and general taskmaster in their little household, had mentioned at breakfast. A highwayman had apparently accosted a carriage last night on Hounslow Heath and robbed the lone traveler of a princely sum of valuables.
That the victim was the notoriously eccentric Duchess of York, wife of the king’s second son, would delight the masses, who, along with having a soft spot for the romantic image of a dashing highwayman, loved nothing more than to laugh at the follies of their betters.
The duchess’s marriage was not a happy one, and she had taken up residence at Oatlands, the family estate in Surrey, where she lived alone, with a vast menagerie of animals to keep her company.
She was said to be particularly fond of her pugs and pet monkeys.
Repressing a grin, Charlotte reached for her paint box and began mixing a batch of garish colors.
Already she was imagining the drawing’s composition—the carriage, with drooling dogs peering from all the windows and a capering monkey dressed in a footman’s livery throwing a coconut at the pistol-wielding highwayman.
After all, the public needed to laugh as well as ponder the serious issues that often resonated in her satire.
With a few quick pencil strokes, she drew in the basic outlines, then reached for her pen. . . .
A loud pounding on the front door nearly caused Charlotte to spill the inkwell.
“Now what?” she murmured after expelling a harried sigh.
“Oiy, oiy!” cried a reedy voice as McClellan admitted the caller. “There’s been a ’orrible murder down by the wharf where de rich skivvies bring in their puffers from the east!”
* * *
“Hold your horses, Skinny,” called Charlotte as she hurried down the stairs. The rail-thin streetsweep, never easy to understand under the best of circumstances, tended to mangle his vowels when he was excited. “And please repeat what you just said—at a walk, not a gallop.”
“Oiy,” snorted the lad in frustration. “Ye didn’t skibble wot I jez sed?”
Charlotte smiled at McClellan. “Perhaps ginger biscuits would smooth out the rough edges of Skinny’s tongue.”
The boy was part of a small band of urchins—all friends of Raven and Hawk from their time of living on the streets—who regularly gathered information for Charlotte. Their eyes and ears had also proved invaluable in previous murder investigations.
“Indeed,” agreed the maid. “I daresay a jam tart and a cup of sugared tea would help, as well.”
“Aye, that would do the trick.” Skinny’s pronunciation was suddenly greatly improved.
Charlotte looked down at the boy’s muck-encrusted shoes and gave a mental wince before saying, “Excellent. Now come have a seat in the parlor while McClellan fetches the refreshments.”
“Where’s Raven and Hawk?” asked Skinny as he scampered to one of the pillowed armchairs, leaving a trail of dried dung on the carpet.
Charlotte furrowed her brow, suddenly realizing she hadn’t yet seen her young wards.
The brothers had first come under her wing while her late husband had still been alive—two half-wild street urchins who ran errands in return for scraps of food and a place to sleep.
But they had come to be a family, tied together by love rather than blood.
In fact, she had recently become their legal guardian, though how that had come about was rather complicated. ...
She sighed. A maid proficient in wielding a pistol and picking a lock . . . two streetwise-beyond-their-years urchins . . . and herself, a lady with so many personas she sometimes feared her true self was becoming blurred beyond recognition.
Theirs was, admittedly, an exceedingly eccentric household.
McClellan’s brusque cough brought her back to the present. “I believe they went out before you awoke.”
“To do what?” she asked.
“As to that, I really can’t say.”
“Hmmph.” Charlotte pursed her lips. “Well, I do hope Raven remembers that he has a mathematics lesson with Lady Cordelia later this afternoon.” Though whether his tutor was in any frame of mind to recall the appointment was another question.
However, she pushed that thought aside on hearing Skinny start to squirm. For her, adding up all the elements of a murder was a far more intriguing challenge than a page full of numbers.
* * *
Wrexford tightened the sash of his dressing gown and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“I must be getting old,” he muttered. In the past, a night of dancing and drinking champagne wouldn’t have left him feeling as if a spike had been hammered through his skull.
Though in truth, he admitted after swallowing a sip of the scalding devil-dark brew, it was unlikely that the ballroom revelries were responsible for his throbbing head. They had been surprisingly pleasant. Dancing with Charlotte was . . .
He suddenly recalled her musings on how some things defied words. What a pair they were—conundrums wrapped in conundrums. And yet, strangely enough, that thought provoked a smile.
A mistake. The tiny facial movement sent another sharp stab through the back of his head.
Wrexford took another swallow of coffee and then began massaging at his temples.
The fault for his present condition lay in his workroom, not the Countess of Lexington’s opulent mansion.
On returning home from the ball, he had taken a moment to read over the books that Tyler had left out for him regarding Silliman’s experiments.
One thing had led to another, and he had stayed up until well past dawn, working at close quarters among the fumes of some potent acids.
Ah, but science requires sacrifice.
After picking up his cup, the earl ambled out of the breakfast room and headed for the rear of the townhouse, curious to see how the experiments were progressing. To his surprise, he heard voices emanating from the workroom. One of them was Tyler’s. And the other . . .
“Ah, there you are, milord.” A big, beefy man turned from studying the esoteric objects displayed in the curio cabinet and eyed Wrexford’s sleep-tousled hair and unshaven jaw. “Apparently, there’s no truth to the old adage ‘No rest for the wicked.’ ”