Chapter Three #2
“I will have them back,” she said evenly, “no matter the cost. Those mines belong to me.”
“It’s been fifteen years!” he burst out. “For God’s sake, Kate, just let it go. The endless lawsuits, the public scandal, the espionage and political jockeying. It’s beneath your dignity. Could you not just … let it go.”
As children, Richard and Kate had met only once.
She had come upon him sitting on a chair outside her aunt’s study.
He had been small and serious; he had taken in the hall with its paintings and treasures with a wide, almost bewildered look.
His mother had been inside, attempting to rekindle the bonds of kinship. She had failed.
It wasn’t until university that Kate had met him again, and together they had managed what her aunt and his mother hadn’t been able to: They had become friends.
But by then, Kate was already beginning to amass the power and wealth that he assumed came with the title.
It was the only context in which Richard knew her.
He hadn’t known her when Lord Wroth stole her mines.
He hadn’t known the devastation, the hopelessness, what it had cost her to throw away everything she had just to slow the juggernaut coming at her.
Let it go?
“No,” she said with cool control. “Anything else?”
He stared at her, shaking his head. His eyes were deep and complicated. He was furious with her. He was sad for her. He worried for her eternal soul. And all, she knew, because he loved her. They were family.
He let out a long breath. “If he ever spies the smallest chink in your armour, he will go for you with a lance. He won’t hesitate. He won’t miss.”
He spoke of Lord Wroth. It was nothing Kate didn’t know.
“I’ll be all right,” she said, trying to sound gentle. Richard’s love was, frankly, more than she deserved. “I don’t have a single weakness he can exploit. I’ve made sure of it.”
A knock on the doorframe and a manufactured cough broke the tense, insular mood.
“Forgive me, Your Grace.” It was one of her own footmen from Howard House, in her blue-and-silver livery. “Mr. Hill sent me to inform you a visitor has come to the house, who asks after you with some urgency.”
“A visitor? Who?”
“Mr. Hill, uh, preferred not to say, begging Your Grace’s pardon. I believe it’s a matter requiring discretion.”
Ah. Mr. Murray, at last. He was a competent man she’d hired to obtain some sensitive information regarding the Wroth estates.
She stood and clasped Richard’s hand. “I must be off.”
“Do you want me to come?” he said, then added quietly, “You know you can rely on my support.”
“I know,” she said, unbending enough to give him a warm look. “You’re a good man. We’ll find another way to corroborate the report and improve the lives of those children. But for now, there’s an endless lawsuit that needs my attention.”
The gentle dig made him colour and pull an awkward face. Then he laughed and rolled his eyes, pulling her in by their clasped hands to clap her back. The last of the tension between them eased.
She rode home, leaving the footman to return on foot.
If Mr. Murray had the information she hoped for, it would mean she could appeal a recent ruling in Lord Wroth’s favour. She pushed her horse through the evening traffic, impatient to be home.
This proved particularly difficult when she came onto the Strand, as daytime patrons of the many shops, coffee houses, and pastry cooks hadn’t yet made for home, but nighttime patrons of the inns, clubs, brothels, and theatres had already begun to descend.
The Strand had once been lined with the aristocracy’s great London palaces, in the days when royalty would procession down the broad avenue and the Crown was the unquestioned seat of British power.
But Parliament had wrested power from the Crown, and the nobility left in droves for the clean streets and new plumbing of Mayfair.
Now, only two great houses remained.
She cast a troubled look at Wroth House as it loomed into view ahead. Broad, blunt, and Gothic, like a piece of the ancient bedrock on which all London had been built and in which a primordial consciousness still squatted.
She snorted. And society thought her the villain.
Her own house, directly opposite, could not have been more different behind its old street wall. Soaring, bright, and spacious, it embodied the genius of the modern age and the hopes of a brighter future.
As long as there had been an English parliament, the Howards and the Wroths had stood thus opposed.
The opposition had its roots in a vicious, bloody struggle for power in King Henry I’s Privy Council, and over the centuries, it had grown into an entrenched, bitter rivalry, made worse by a sixteenth-century cuckolding.
In Kate’s own lifetime, she had seen the devastating effects of it; Lord Wroth seemed to hold, for her, a particular hatred.
He had offered her no quarter when she inherited the Howard title, though she’d been a child of thirteen.
She had grown into adulthood beneath the extraordinary pressure he’d exerted on her.
Well, she wasn’t a child any longer.
She turned towards home, galvanised anew.
A footman opened the iron gates for her, and she entered the vast forecourt of Howard House at a clattering trot.
She dismounted, then bounded energetically up the steps.
Her steward, Mr. Hill, awaited her at the top before the open front doors.
She entered without breaking stride, and Mr. Hill followed her inside.
“Where is he?” She threw the question over her shoulder as she divested herself of coat, hat, and gloves. “The library?” If Mr. Murray had been able to make copies of everything, she would go to her solicitors directly after speaking with him.
“He, Your Grace?”
She stopped and turned. Mr. Hill was tall and stooped, with hanging cheeks, like a candle long out of the box, melted with use.
“My guest isn’t a gentleman,” she said, disappointed.
He blinked, then gravely bowed his head. “Forgive the misunderstanding, Your Grace. No. She is a young woman, the daughter of your late friend, Mr. Robert Jennet.”
“Who?” She was irritated now, having come home for nothing. Mr. Hill was usually a much better judge of what did and didn’t require her personal attention. “I know no one by that name. She’s a confidence artist or an idiot, man, get rid of her!”
Mr. Hill looked concerned. “Indeed, I thought the same at first. And the young woman herself, if you’ll forgive me, looks rather …
vulgar. I mistook her for a woman of the night, and sent her packing.
But she insisted again that her father had been a very good friend to you and produced your ring as evidence, which I recognised at once.
The gold ring with the square-cut sapphire, Your Grace, which your most noble aunt gifted you at your christening. ”
Kate, who had already dismissed the unwelcome visitor as a charlatan, was pulled violently to attention. She had no difficulty remembering on whose finger she had last seen her sapphire ring.
“Did you say her father’s name was Jennet?” Genet.
“I did, Your Grace.”
No, be sensible. It was impossible. It couldn’t be her, here, in London. There wasn’t a chance that woman had kept Kate’s ring all these years, with Paris in such upheaval. She would have long since sold it.
Somehow, the ring had found its way back to England and into the hands of a lowlife schemer. Kate would personally retrieve it, then see the wretch whipped for impertinence. She began to warm to the idea.
“Where is she?”
“In the study, Your Grace. It seemed the most discreet choice.”
“Good man.”
As she made her way upstairs, the ring preoccupied her. It was so long now since she’d given it away, she couldn’t think what had motivated her to do so. She had certainly regretted it since. She shook her head, marvelling at the vagaries that had brought it back into her possession.
She pushed open the study door. A woman stood inside. She turned.
Celine Genet had such presence that one forgot she wasn’t very tall.
Her black hair was messily pinned, with two depleted feathers waving from its mass.
She wore not travelling clothes but a cheap evening gown with a plunging neckline that almost distracted the eye from the dirty hem and the torn lace at her breast. Almost.
She ran a finger along her lip, bringing Kate’s reluctant gaze to her face. A wanton, mocking mouth. Heavy-lidded green eyes blazing with hatred. Upon the finger at her lip was Kate’s ring, sapphire, set in gold.
“Well met, my love,” Celine said, and smiled.