Chapter Nine
Mel spent the night moving from room to room around the club, joining conversations with groups and initiating chats with individual ladies. Her presence as a guest acted as a guarantee of wealth and status, and the masks most of them wore relieved them of social obligations such as introductions.
She found it easy to be accepted as one of them—married women and widows with money to spend and the freedom to please themselves.
Guiding the discourse in the direction she wanted it to go was also easy. A mention of the Marquess of Teign prompted all the gossip she had already heard, and much more. He was ruthless, amoral, resented, and feared.
The club member who was boasting of a wedding the previous night—she was the mother of one of the brides—was occupied in a private room, but two of her friends—or rivals might be an apter term—were happy to share the news of the marriage agreement.
“Lord Ernest Sheppard is reluctant, I’ve heard,” said one of them. “He tried to frighten my friend’s daughter by telling her that Teign expects to sleep with his daughters-in-law. Do you think it is true?”
“I should not be surprised,” said another of the women. “I take it our dear friend does not believe it.”
“She says not. She told her daughter it was all nonsense. I do not think she cares one way or another, as long as she can boast of marrying her daughter to one of Teign’s sons.”
“Those Sheppard brothers all tell such stories,” scoffed one of the listeners. “I’ve heard similar tales from several mothers who backed out of a marriage agreement with Teign. I daresay the brothers are just marriage shy, and make the stories up to scare off their brides.”
A woman in a cat mask did not agree. “But what about Lady Kemble? Do you not remember the rumors? That she and Kemble were estranged and her second child was Teign’s?”
They gossiped on, but Mel learned nothing she did not already know.
In another group, she heard from women whose husbands had been cheated by Teign, whether in politics, in racing, or in a business deal (though these ton ladies concealed the nature of the deal to remove any implication that their husbands dabbled in trade).
Several ladies whispered of more intimate problems with Teign—seductions and outright assaults—though even in this secretive environment they spoke of “a friend of mine” or “the daughter of a friend” or “someone my cousin knows.”
Most conversations gave her the same result—verification that Teign was widely mistrusted and disliked, but also that his very reputation protected him, since no one dared go against him without iron-clad facts that would stand up in a trial by his peers—for he was a marquess.
Getting a case to trial would be hard enough.
Convincing the House of Lords to convict one of their own would be near to impossible.
Still, she did confirm that his fall would be applauded within the ton, at least by most of those families represented here tonight.
Again, this was nothing new. To stop him, she needed evidence he had broken the law in ways that the House of Lords would take seriously.
Rape and assault wouldn’t do it, unless the victim had a rank equal to Teign’s.
The man could probably be acquitted even of murder, if the corpse was from the lower sort.
But did she need him to be tried and convicted? When she had believed him guilty of Thomasina’s murder, that had been her goal, but Thommie was alive and well. Perhaps she should be rethinking her objective.
The thought surfaced in her mind. Help the Sheppard brothers to break free of the marquess, and to stay free.
Yes. That was it. That was her objective.
It would mean finding a way to neutralize the marquess, but she was confident that, if she marshalled his enemies, starting with his sons, they could get the job done.
By the first light of dawn, she and the brothers made their way back to the tower.
Most of the brothers. “Cornelius has somewhere else to go today,” Kemble told his brothers, when they were gathered on the wharf waiting for the boats to take them across the river.
“I shall tell you all about it once we are home.”
Hidden by her mask and the hood of her cloak, Mel allowed herself a smile that she didn’t want to have to explain. Not yet. Not until they had heard her out. But even without their consent, the change had begun. The first of the Sheppard brothers was out of his cage.
*
The brothers were tired after working all night.
Mel would get a better hearing from them once they had slept.
She listened while Kemble gave a brief outline of what had happened when he, Cornelius, and Mel met with Thomasina.
“Our brother’s wife vouches for Mrs. Blackmore,” he said.
“Furthermore, Mrs. Blackmore pointed out that we can hide Cornelius’s absence for the few days left until we all must disappear.
He has gone with his wife to meet his son.
He’ll return to fetch his belongings, but he is the first of us to escape. I rejoice for him.”
“Cornelius is truly blessed,” said Lord Baldwin.
“Brothers, we must make certain that he remains free to enjoy his family life. Mrs. Blackmore, you say that you came here to find a way to find out Thomasina’s fate, and to punish whoever harmed her.
Why are you still here? Are you not satisfied to know that she lives? ”
So much for her intentions. “The man who stole years of her marriage still walks free, and will hurt her again, if he can. I shall not be satisfied until the marquess can do no further harm to my cousin, her husband, or anyone else, for that matter.” She fought back a yawn. She really needed to get some sleep.
“Bold words,” said Kemble. “But who can touch him? Those who have gone up against him in the past have all failed and suffered for it.”
“Are you so certain?” Mel asked. “Separately, we are no match for the man. That is true. But together, have you not deceived him and resisted him for years? For nearly long enough to break free of him altogether? What if we build an alliance of all those who have reason to oppose him? Can we not bring him down?”
“Perhaps,” said Baldwin, “this is one of the reasons he keeps us isolated. To prevent us from seeking allies. Allan, she makes good sense.”
Mel couldn’t resist the yawn any longer, and hers set off Frank’s. She shared a sheepish grin with him, and then laughed when Donald and Ernest yawned too.
“That’s it,” Allan said. “Let’s pick this up after a good sleep.”
“Good,” said Mel. “Together, we are strong.” Or at least they would be after they slept.
*
It was a full council of war when they met again after noon. Even Cornelius and Thomasina were there, having entered through the tunnel. All the brothers were keen to fight back, but for some time, the discussion centered on the marquess’s wrongs.
Allan didn’t particularly want to discuss his marriage.
“Ancient history,” he said. “My wife’s second child was a stillborn son.
Not mine. I had not shared her bed for over eighteen months, ever since she and the marquess taunted me with their affair.
She died of childbirth fever a few days after the little boy. No need to revisit any of it.”
Mel left the subject alone and forbore to add those sad details to her notebook. Allan clearly still carried considerable pain over the matter. At some point, though, she needed to know what had happened to his first child. And was the marquess responsible?
Cornelius was brutally frank about his marriage.
He had seen what happened to Allan and had not wanted to marry, especially to someone chosen by the marquess.
However, he and Thomasina had been attracted to one another from their first meeting.
Their happiness was fleeting, though. The marquess soon attempted a seduction, and when Thomasina rejected him, he had both her and Cornelius beaten.
With the help of Allan and Baldwin, Cornelius and Thomasina arranged her disappearance, leaving evidence behind to suggest that she had committed suicide.
The other brothers had tried various methods to discourage the matrons of the ton from considering them as prospective husbands.
They pretended to be fools, or rakes, or profligate gamblers. They talked about the marquess’s predilection for raping anyone in skirts, including his daughters-in-law. They hinted at something shady about the deaths of his three wives and Allan’s wife.
Indeed, it had been the antics of some of the brothers—and Allan’s open support of those antics—that had resulted in them joining Jerome and Frank in the tower.
“Jerome had been here since he was ten, and Frank since he joined the army and was forcibly retrieved,” Baldwin explained. “They had been exploring and had discovered many of the hiding places. And in one of them, they found a previous Teign’s journal.”
The man had been the predecessor to the current marquess, but back when he was merely the heir, he had lived in the tower.
In his journal, he wrote about its secrets.
“My ancestors secretly continued to follow the old religion,” he had written.
“When the Roman Catholic mass was forbidden, they converted the lower tower to be a chapel and a hiding place for visiting priests, while the upper tower was traditionally the home of the heir.”
“So why was the knowledge of the secret ways lost?” Mel wondered.
“Ah,” said Cornelius. “That was because the current marquess was a distant cousin to his predecessor. But when the man and his three sons were all killed in a carriage accident, Teign inherited, having—as far as we know—never met his predecessor nor set foot in the house before it became his own.”