Chapter 8 #2
Two pink blotches colored Jenny’s cheeks. “It is not the kind of thing I normally talk about.”
“Perhaps you can manage it just this once, so I am properly forewarned. I promise to forget at once that you spoke of scandalous things. That is what it is, correct? Something scandalous?”
Jennie nodded.
“Recent scandal?”
“Not recent. Also not a scandal as such. But scandalous.”
“How can one be scandalous without creating a scandal?”
“I suppose if one, in a private conversation, broaches subjects that are not virtuous.”
Padua wondered if the conversation in question had been hypothetical. “Pray, enlighten me.”
“Well.” Jennie licked her lips. “My friend says that when he was younger, and pursuing a lady, upon gaining her favor but not, I think, her favors, he was very frank in explaining his preferences regarding the latter.”
Padua hoped blotches were not now on her cheeks.
“I suppose there is something to be said for finding agreement on the expectations,” she murmured.
“According to my friend, those expectations were not merely the ordinary sort. They involved things ladies do not do. Wicked things.”
“If your friend knows so much, this lady must have told others and not kept her discovery to herself.”
“It would be hard to keep it to oneself, what with the shock.”
Padua pictured that lady enjoying the attention for a whole Season while other ladies cornered her in drawing rooms, wanting the details. Did her descriptions get specific? Unlikely. This gossip was built on innuendos and euphemisms.
“You say it was some time ago. He was very young then.”
“My friend says most ladies will not allow his pursuit as a result. His reputation precedes him. Although one can’t picture him forgoing all female companionship.”
“I am sure he does not do that.”
Jennie took her hand and gripped it. “He probably pursues others now. Actresses and such. And women who are vulnerable and in need, who can be lured to wickedness due to their poor circumstances.”
Women like you.
Padua stood. “How good of you to warn me, although I am sure that, even with wicked intentions in his heart, he can do better than me. Now, let us investigate this house and ogle its riches. Wait until I show you the dining room. The table can hold fifty guests, I am sure.”
* * *
Anight of drinking and gambling with old friends took its happy toll, and Ives slept soundly, oblivious to the impulses that plagued him. With daylight came sobriety, however, and thoughts of Padua once again intruded.
While he dressed, he considered that perhaps he should visit a brothel, so he might avoid going around town insulting women by propositioning them.
One good rut, and Miss Belvoir might cease to fascinate.
He had better do something, because if she continued to absorb his attention, he would be thoroughly compromised regarding her father.
How bad would that be? He mulled the question while he broke his fast. He was not the only lawyer who could prosecute.
Let them find someone else. He knew the likely prospects.
While all good men, they placed winning above fairness, just the way the courts expected.
The way he used to. Justice sometimes suffered then.
Rarely, but it happened, especially in cases where the guilt was not clear-cut.
Of course it was with Hadrian Belvoir. Supposedly.
Only, between imagining what he would do with Padua when he had her naked, he also mulled her father’s case.
And Strickland’s information. And that apartment on Wigmore Street.
For a crime in which the man was caught with the evidence in his home, there were questions unanswered and coincidences unexplained.
He called for his horse, with the intention of riding out of town. Instead after a few blocks he cursed, and turned his mount toward that apartment.
When he stopped at the nearby corner, he was still trying to convince himself to ride on. Then he noticed the blond head at the low window. Mrs. Trenholm had not left for the flower shop yet, despite it being two o’clock.
The head disappeared. A few minutes later the door opened, and out she came. Even from a distance he could see the paint on her face.
He followed her as she walked down the street, then turned left for several blocks. She stopped and stood there. Once more he watched from a crossroads.
Five minutes later a carriage stopped where she stood. She approached the window and spoke. A man’s arm reached out and their hands met. Then the carriage door opened and Mrs. Trenholm climbed in.
Ives rode back to the apartment. He could not damn the woman for lying about working in a flower shop, considering the work she did instead. Still, her presence in the same building as Hadrian Belvoir had become one of those coincidences that nudged at him.
What were the odds of two people with serious criminal activity in their backgrounds living on that street, let alone in the same building?
And although Strickland thought there were no political overtones or suspicions in Belvoir’s case, Ives was not convinced.
So Mrs. Trenholm’s husband and Belvoir may have had something else in common.
Back at the apartment, he dismounted and tied his horse. He climbed the stairs and entered the cluttered chambers. Padua said there was nothing of use here, but he did not think she had looked very far before those old letters absorbed her.
He opened a window, shed his frock coat, and began digging.
An hour later he had viewed enough mathematical notations to last most men a lifetime.
He sat back in the desk’s chair and viewed the chamber.
He was disappointed. He had hoped—damn, he had hoped to find something that might help Hadrian, he supposed.
He would bear it to Padua like a gift. And he would avoid the moment when he had to choose whether to don his wig and robe and enter the Old Bailey, or whether his friendship with Padua meant he must leave her father to his fate at the hands of another lawyer.
While his mind worked, his gaze drifted over the motley assortment of publications that filled the case of books on the chamber’s wall.
The collection spoke of other interests besides mathematics.
He could spy history books and volumes of poetry amid the scientific titles.
Many purchases had never been bound, however, and their contents remained invisible.
Just as his thoughts were leading to unfortunate introspection about the first time his instincts on a case had been proven right, but too late, his gaze lit upon a binding that made him smile.
He rose and walked over. Thin, small, and red, a schoolbook for children on mathematics had been stuffed between two tomes on chemistry.
His tutor had used the same book when he was a boy.
His gaze saw another one, then another, interspersed on the shelves. Padua’s schoolbooks, he assumed. He pulled out the first one. Perhaps she had put her name inside. The idea of seeing her childish hand charmed him.
He opened the book, and froze. He turned the pages. Then he pulled out all the other children’s books, and did the same. When he was done, he had a stack of ten little books. No, twelve, because two others had already been removed and placed on the table near the chair.
He also had a stack of something else.
Money.