Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
The duchess’s slim gray brougham had been winding down every street for the last half hour. Traveling at a slow clip, it meandered from Long Acre to Floral, to Covent Garden to the Strand, and every court and side alley along its circuitous route.
“Where in hell is she going?” Hugh muttered as the hired hack he’d flagged outside the magistrate’s offices trailed her from a safe distance. He sat up in the box with the driver, much to the man’s obvious discomfort.
“Not used to passengers ridin’ up with me,” he’d told Hugh, who’d then slipped the man an extra shilling.
“Just follow the gray brougham.”
Constable Davis had shown the duchess into her husband’s holding room and had then quietly flagged another constable on the street outside from the tavern’s corridor window.
Hugh had suspected she would return, and so he’d asked all the patrolmen present to fetch him if she showed.
If he wasn’t available, he’d instructed them to follow her themselves as soon as she left.
Thankfully, Hugh had been speaking to Chief Magistrate Gabriel Poston about another arrest, this one a man accused of hitting his friend in the temple with a grappling hook and nearly plucking out his eye.
A bloody mess, but one the accused had confessed to doing.
It was so much simpler when they confessed.
Hugh had been waiting with the hired hack when the duchess left the Brown Bear. After brief instruction to her driver, she disappeared into the stylish brougham.
And now, he’d followed her on a protracted tour of every street and passage and corner within ten blocks of the magistrate’s court.
Hugh was about to give up and turn back when the brougham came to a stop on Yarrow Street.
He nudged the jarvey next to him, who pulled to the curb as well.
Hugh watched as the duchess’s driver handed her down in front of a row of terraced homes.
She stood outside one of the homes, looking at the door, and yet not moving toward it.
Her driver stayed by her side, as though awaiting her command.
Hugh ground his molars, his senses sharpened to pin pricks.
Finally, she walked up to the door and knocked pertly, rather than sending her driver to announce her as would normally be done.
She stood close to the door. Too close. And was it just his perspective or were her hands hovering near the knob?
Hugh suddenly didn’t know whether to laugh or growl—she was picking the bloody lock! What sort of duchess knew such a skill? A moment later, the door opened, and she slipped inside.
Hugh held up another shilling. “Distract her driver for a few seconds.”
The jarvey took the coin and turned it over between his fingers before it disappeared into his coat. “Aye, guv.”
Hugh hopped to the pavements and walked toward the terrace house, waiting for the jarvey’s diversion. He heard the wheels of the hack rumbling past, drawing to a stop by the fine brougham.
“Oi there, guv!” the jarvey shouted. “Are ye familiar with these roads? Looking for Clarendon.”
The duchess’s driver turned away, toward the hackney, and Hugh darted up the small stoop and inside, saying a silent thank you to the duchess for not locking the door behind her.
The jarvey’s voice grew muffled as Hugh entered the foyer and closed the door.
The silk wallpaper was a cool shade of blue touched with mint green.
He listened carefully, but the house was still as a tomb.
In the sitting room, the furniture had been draped and the curtains closed to prevent the paper and paintings from fading.
The house had been closed up, though there wasn’t any dust gathered on the polished hand railing as Hugh made his way to the upper floors.
He followed the lady’s scent of rosewater.
He peered into rooms as he passed, his footfalls absorbed by thick, blue carpet. Not a masculine Prussian blue, but pale robin’s egg. Everything, from the carpet to the paper to the paintings…all of it was feminine.
He heard the creak of a floorboard on the second level, and he climbed the curve in the stairwell.
What the duchess was doing breaking into this closed up home was beyond his grasp.
He came around the newel post and traveled down the corridor, toward the next room with its door open wide—and heard an errant floorboard creak beneath his own weight.
A gasp sounded from the room ahead. He’d given himself away. No use skulking about now. Hugh let his muscles loosen and walked with ease to the open door, pushing it all the way aside.
“I know you are here, Your Gr—”
His side vision caught something coming at his head, and Hugh ducked, raising his arms to fend off the blow. He felt the stinging impact of a weapon and grasped it—something long and metal—and he yanked it forward, out of his assailant’s grasp.
“Oh! Mr. Marsden!”
The Duchess of Fournier stood behind the door, her hands covering her mouth, her eyes sparkling with astonishment. He peered at the brass bed-warming pan he held and then, with more patience than he knew he possessed, set it down atop the draped four poster bed.
“You…you’re following me again!” A blush swept into her cheeks, flooding them pink like spring roses.
“I could arrest you right now for breaking into this home.”
She was clever enough not to try to deny it. She dropped her hands and clasped them behind her back.
“You wouldn’t.”
“I would. And I will,” he replied, entering the spacious room, the furnishings within also draped. “Unless you explain to me why you are here, whose home this is, and how the devil you picked that lock.”
Again, she didn’t waste effort attempting to deny the accusation. So, it would appear she was capable of thinking before she spoke, after all.
“It shouldn’t surprise me that you haven’t yet been here,” she said, smoothing the short lace veil that hung from her hat’s brim. Her voice had gone from breathy with alarm to brittle with dislike. “You don’t even know who lived here.”
Hugh hadn’t, but he certainly had a good idea now.
“Miss Belladora Lovejoy.”
The duchess brushed off his answer with a roll of one shoulder. “I practically spoon-fed you the answer.”
He sighed, long and hard. She had just come from a visit with her husband; he likely told her about the residence.
“Did you expect to find something among her possessions that will exonerate the duke?”
She looked sideways at him. “It occurred to me that there might be something here that would tell me who her benefactor was.”
Hugh crossed the room to the windows overlooking Yarrow Street. “You needn’t have picked a lock to find that out, Your Grace. If this property is owned by her benefactor, then the estate papers will show as much.”
It was odd, however. Hugh had suspected Miss Lovejoy wasn’t living in the rooms at Jewell House, but why would the duke have kept rooms there on top of this town home for her?
There would be no need to meet his mistress anywhere but here, a safe distance from the Curzon Street residence where he lived with his wife.
Hugh had followed the duchess to the manse the night before, trying to keep his eyes off the sheer magnitude of the home, and instead focusing on her hired hackney.
He didn’t salivate over grand homes. He’d grown up at Neatham House on Kensington Square, one of London’s finest addresses. He’d known luxury firsthand.
“Yes, well…if you don’t look into those estate papers, I will,” she replied as she removed her kid gloves. Hugh watched her amble across the room, toward a vanity and chair.
“How can you be sure this was her home?” he asked as the duchess touched the carved lip of the chair. She paused, staring ahead at the draped mirror. A few seconds passed. Just as Hugh wondered if she was going to answer or not, she released the chair.
“I went to the theatre again,” she replied. “And I asked Mr. Bernadetto.”
She wouldn’t look directly at him, and Hugh knew she was lying.
He couldn’t believe she would be so obtuse as to return to the theatre, and he also knew the manager wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help the duchess in her quest to free Belladora’s suspected killer.
Still, he suspected it was the singer’s home, as a second look at the walls showed several framed playbills from the theatre.
“What are you doing?” he asked as her fingers tugged on one of the vanity drawer’s handles.
“Searching, as I’ve already told you.”
“What can you hope to find? The place is shut up,” he said as her hand rummaged around inside.
“Some of her things are still here,” she replied, attention riveted to the drawer. “The staff must have been in a hurry to quit the residence.”
Hugh harrumphed, but then opened a door to a heavy mahogany wardrobe and saw a number of gowns and pelisses.
Slippers were lined up along the bottom.
He opened a few of the wardrobe’s inner drawers and found silk stockings and linen chemises, garters and gloves and ribbons.
Nothing had been packed away, or taken by the maids, as was common when their mistresses no longer had need of their things.
He closed the drawers with a frown, and when he turned back to the duchess, saw she was holding something in her fingers, inspecting it.
“What have you there?”
She clasped it into her palm, out of view. “I thought you weren’t interested in investigating.”
“I’m interested in the evidence against your husband that you’re attempting to dispose of.”
She sent him a withering look, and then opened her fingers. A round, milky gem about the circumference of her thumbnail lay in her palm. Hugh strode toward the vanity for a closer look. He’d seen one like it before.
“The Seven Sins,” he said, plucking it from her palm.
“Excuse me?” she asked, pulling on her gloves again.