Chapter 23 #2
“I’ll clean the wound again, suture it, and get her warm and dry.
Infection is a possibility,” Thornton answered as he wiped his hands on a length of linen.
“But the damage is minimal. There is nothing more you can do right now, Hugh. If there is somewhere you need to be regarding whatever happened here, this is the time.”
His friend knew him well. Hugh looked at Audrey and nodded tightly.
“Take care of her,” he said, needlessly. Thornton would not leave the duchess’s side. He motioned for Sir to follow him from the room. “I’m going to Wimbly Manor. Head to Bow Street and find out what’s come of Fellows’s arrest.”
Sir nodded and dashed away, disappearing before Hugh even emerged onto the front steps.
Goodwin followed him. “I will have a carriage brought around for you, sir.”
“Thank you, but I think I’ll go on foot.” Hugh needed time to comb through his approach at Wimbly Manor—and time to let off enough steam so that he wouldn’t geyser as soon as he laid eyes on either St. John or the marchioness.
It was a ten-minute walk through the now darkened streets, which were thick with a soupy fog, the kind London knew so well.
With any hope, Wimbly Manor had not yet heard of the fracas down at the wharves; then again, Fellows might have given up Lady Wimbly the moment he was in custody.
Whether or not Sir Gabriel would believe him was another story altogether.
Knocking on the front door was a risk, but Hugh had to get in legitimately. He wanted Lady Wimbly on edge and angry. As his hand slammed down upon the manor’s door, he had but two avenues of potential success.
The butler appeared and instantly took in Hugh’s wet visage. His hat was gone, lost to the Thames, and his clothing was still soaked. The butler sneered at him.
“You again.” He recalled him from his previous attempt to speak to Wimbly a few days ago. “What is it you want, Runner?”
“A moment of Lady Wimbly’s time.”
“The lady is out.”
It was entirely possible she was, though it was still too early for any social function.
“It’s imperative I speak to her. Please, tell her it’s about St. John. Tell her, I know.”
At the mention of the heir’s title, the butler’s brow arched with annoyed interest. Servants knew everything, and something about his new scowl said he knew what Hugh spoke of.
He stood aside. “Wait here.”
Hugh stepped into the grand foyer, his boots squelching. His untidy appearance might just do him a favor and unsettle the lady of the house even more. The butler had turned into a room beyond the twisting front stairwell a moment ago, and now, he emerged.
“Her ladyship is indisposed and asks that you return tomorrow afternoon.”
Hugh sighed. So, it would be Avenue Number Two, would it? “Tell her that Fellows has been arrested and that I will most certainly be back.”
The butler frowned. “Fellows?”
“Fellows,” Hugh repeated, loudly. A glass clinked and fabric rustled within the sitting room. The butler turned his head, having heard it too.
The marchioness would not be prepared to run out the back door of the manor and flee. She would require a few things first.
“Stay here. I will inform her ladyship,” the butler intoned, and then entered the sitting room again.
Hugh slipped out through the front door, onto the front steps.
He then went around the manor to the mews, toward the carriage house, where within a minute, as he’d expected, a groom began to ready a pair of horses and a small brougham.
Hugh waited, unnoticed, behind an ivy trellis. Within ten more minutes, two shadows quickened through the fog: Lady Wimbly and her maid, a valise in each of the servant’s hands.
“Did you put the laudanum into your son’s bottle of scotch, or did St. John do it himself?”
Hugh stepped out, and Lady Wimbly came to a halt. Her maid knocked into her elbow and gasped. It took the marchioness a few seconds to recover. She turned to the maid. “Go fetch Beckett. I want this riffraff turned out.”
“Yes, miss, and while you are at it, signal for a street patrol. Kindly inform him that Chief Magistrate Poston will be arriving within the quarter hour.”
Lady Wimbly spun toward him. “You lie.”
“You know Fellows has been arrested. It’s why you are running—because he will talk. He won’t go down for the murder of Belladora Lovejoy alone. That’s why he kept the letter and stashed it on his boat.”
The maid hesitated, looking between her mistress and Hugh, eyes glassy and wide. At the mention of the letter, the marchioness hitched her chin. Her face, lightly lined, regal by any standard, froze into a mask of panic. She didn’t need to know the paper had been destroyed.
“What letter?” she demanded. “I’ve nothing to do with that villain or murder.”
“Well delivered, your ladyship, except for the slight tremor in your voice.”
She flicked her hand at her maid, encouraging her to continue to the carriage house.
“Stay where you are, if you please, miss,” Hugh said. She’d alert the grooms to his presence, and in his current state—cold, soaked, and fatigued—he wouldn’t be able to fend off more than one or two.
The maid froze in place.
“I could scream for help,” the marchioness said.
“But you won’t. You know it’s only a matter of minutes before Bow Street arrives. I’m here to make a bargain.”
She canted her head. “A bargain?”
“You don’t want your son’s private life put on display and dragged through the mud, and I am here to see the same is done for Fournier.”
He needed to appeal to her to get her to speak; justice was required for Miss Lovejoy’s death but that didn’t mean two other men needed ruination.
“State your business,” she finally commanded.
“Was it laudanum in the scotch? I didn’t find a bottle at Fournier’s rooms at Jewell House. I presume you had your hired man take that with him after he finished with his bloody task.”
“I’ve told you—I have no idea what you are talking about,” she insisted, and this time, the annoyance on her tone rang true. But there was something else there as well. Something harsh, bitter.
“You arranged for the duke to be incapacitated enough for Fellows to make it appear he had stabbed Miss Lovejoy to death,” Hugh pressed on, thinking of the blood found on the duke’s hands, his face, his clothes. The boning knife next to him on the floor.
How easy it must have been for the real murderer to drag Fournier across the room, into the slain singer’s pooling blood, and then position him back on the floor.
“But the risk,” Hugh said, the accusation unfurling as he put it together in his mind. “The risk was great. Dear Auggie was there; he’d had some of the tainted scotch. How did you know he would leave in time? Before Belladora arrived. Before Fellows did.”
There was no chance the marchioness would have allowed her son, the heir to the marquessate, to be implicated in a murder so gruesome. Her entire world, her family name and legacy, would be ruined.
A sixth sense warned him, but too late. Cold metal pressed against the back of Hugh’s skull. He knew the shape.
“Unlike you, Marsden, I am thorough in my actions. I find peace in order, in precision. Lift your hands.”
Hugh exhaled through his nostrils. “Wimbly.”
The marquess stood behind him, in the shadowy corner of the carriage house exterior. The nose of a pistol nudged Hugh a little more insistently.
He raised his hands. “I underestimated you.”
“You lost your focus,” the marquess said. The steady weight of his flintlock in his hip sheath disappeared as Wimbly claimed it, though after the jump in the Thames, the powder would be useless anyhow.
Much like Hugh right then.
After that evening at the Seven Sins, he had written off Lord Wimbly as a clueless ingrate.
He didn’t care about the death of his own mistress, but he also didn’t care enough to be jealous of her supposed connection with Fournier.
He would have had no motive to kill her when he could find another woman to replace her so easily.
Porter had been wrong. Wimbly had known about his son and Miss Lovejoy. And he had known something more.
“Belladora told you about Auggie and the duke, didn’t she?” Hugh asked.
“Augustus!” the marchioness hissed to her husband. “What are you going to do?”
Within a minute, the carriage that the grooms were preparing would be ready and emerge into the courtyard.
“Was she blackmailing you?” Hugh mused aloud. “Did she ask for more money, hinting that she might otherwise let the knowledge slip? You needed to be rid of her, and you also wanted to be rid of your son’s lover.”
Two birds, one stone, as it were.
“I’m thankful for Belladora, actually.” Wimbly sounded far too calm for a man who was holding a gun to another person’s head. “Learning of my son’s transgressions from the likes of her was far better than learning of it from one of my own set. No, she didn’t blackmail me. She knew her place.”
“Then why kill her?”
Lady Wimbly’s maid clapped a hand over her mouth and made a soft yelp. She and the marchioness huddled, uncertainly, together in the courtyard. Lady Wimbly, however, didn’t act as surprised as her maid. She knew of her husband’s actions, though how involved she’d been remained unclear.
“It was as much a lesson to my son as it was a guarantee that Belladora would remain silent on the matter,” he replied.
“And Fournier?”
“You must know he would rather hang for the murder than speak of what he was truly doing in those rooms.”
It seemed the marquess had the duke pegged correctly.
The carriage house doors opened on their hinges, and the jangling of tack and hooves on paving stones followed.
“Augustus,” the marchioness again pleaded.
“You will be riding with us, Marsden,” Wimbly announced.
He couldn’t possibly put a bullet in his brain here, at Wimbly Manor. He’d wait until they were in the countryside. Lead him into the woods. Leave him there to rot into the forest’s undergrowth.