Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
“You’ve been quiet since we left Mrs Haggert.” Daphne watched him from the opposite carriage seat, too many questions flitting through her mind. “Were you expecting more from her?”
The formidable woman clearly had a fondness for Mr Hawke. It was there in the softening of her wrinkled lips and the warmth of her gaze, woven into her words and the fabric of their history.
Mr Hawke didn’t answer right away. He gazed out the window as buildings passed in a blur, his mind somewhere far from the interior of the elegant carriage.
What was he picturing, she wondered.
Something grim? Someone precious?
But she knew what those pursed lips meant. She’d paid attention during the waltz. They bore the strain of plotting revenge. The tightness that came when one denied themselves pleasure while in pursuit of a cause.
He was both a victim and a perpetrator. The hero of his mother’s tale, the villain of hers. So why should comforting him be a priority?
She wasn’t here to soothe his conscience.
Her own was trouble enough.
“We got what we came for,” he finally said, but the nonchalant comment told her that was not what plagued his thoughts. “She agreed to speak to the Moseley brothers.”
She seized the moment to probe further.
“Mr Ramsey said you’ve always lived at Shadowmere. Why would your mother send you to stay with Mrs Haggert?”
He glanced at her, and she could almost hear his feral growl. She wasn’t afraid of fangs. The beast she’d lived with had torn strips off her while wearing a feigned smile.
“Ramsey should rein in his loose tongue. I’ll remind him where his loyalties lie when we return to Kingston.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’ll get.”
She smiled to herself as she imagined rummaging through a box of munitions and picking the one most likely to secure his surrender.
“We could barter. The name of my suitor in exchange for the reason you went to live with a known criminal.”
His head shot up. “Why should I care who offered a king’s ransom to bed you?”
Oh, he cared.
He’d asked three times on the journey to town.
She shrugged. “Because he may have killed my father and tossed him over Blackfriars Bridge. He’s desperate enough to drive to Shadowmere and kidnap me in the middle of the night.”
“He’ll be dead before he reaches the gate.”
“I didn’t know you slept with one eye open.” She pushed her fingers firmly into her gloves, quickly banishing the image of him in bed. “And the dratted lock on the cottage door is broken again.”
He braced his foot on the seat beside her, half caging her in. “Then I’ll have it replaced. And shoot the next man who tests it.”
She pictured him shooting his own foot, considering how often he lingered nearby.
“Would it be easy to smuggle a woman aboard a ship?” It was a genuine question. A scenario she needed to prepare for. “I don’t suppose my suitor will care about the law. Not when he planned to whisk me away to Bengal.”
His foot brushed her thigh, accidentally, perhaps. “No one is taking you from Shadowmere. They wouldn’t get as far as Wandsworth, let alone Bengal.”
She offered an uncertain smile. “As long as you’re sure. I’ve spent sleepless nights worrying about the lengths he might go to.”
It wasn’t a lie.
She’d woken in a cold sweat last night, heart hammering like a warning bell as she tried to shake the nightmare. Mr Irving’s breath had been hot against her neck, his fingers plucking the pearl buttons of her gown with clinical patience.
“You promised your father,” he murmured, slipping a wedding ring onto her finger—a band of cold iron that burned her skin.
She’d looked into the mirror and found no reflection.
Only him. Smiling. Rotten cabbage between his teeth.
As the carriage bumped through a rut in the road, she clutched her middle and closed her eyes. She hadn’t killed her father, but she would kill Mr Irving if he so much as—
“One of Mrs Haggert’s boys found me crying in the street.”
She opened her eyes and glanced his way, but it wasn’t satisfaction tightening her chest. He had wavered. Wavered when he thought she was afraid. Confessed to something most would not, and she could see how much it pained him.
Mr Hawke was indeed a complex man.
And complexity was a dangerous thing to admire.
“Where were your parents?”
“My father brought me to town to visit Tattersall’s. A friend persuaded him to look at a stallion at Aldridge’s Horse Bazaar. We were separated en route. I searched for him for hours. Mrs Haggert sent word to Shadowmere.”
He spoke with an air of detachment, as though the memory belonged to someone else, as though the boy left wandering the streets was far removed from the man before her now.
But the truth was there, in the stillness of his hands. In the faint tension that pulled at his jaw. In the way he failed to meet her gaze.
Whatever wound he’d buried had not healed cleanly.
Whatever defences he raised, she kept finding cracks in his armour. And each one unsettled her more than the last.
“Hardship brought its own kind of wisdom,” he said. “Mrs Haggert taught me something valuable. Something I’ve never forgotten.”
Daphne knew it wasn’t that retribution came at a price.
Perhaps it was how to wound and protect a woman in the same moment. How to make her believe he cared for her and disliked her in the same breath.
“What did she teach you?” she asked, hoping to peel back one more layer of the man who kept so much hidden.
“That doing what’s right doesn’t always look noble. Sometimes the right path runs straight through the gutter. Not every man born of a wastrel has to become one.”
He spoke with pride and an edge of defiance. He was not a man others held in high esteem. The ton feared him. Many loathed him. But she couldn’t bring herself to do either.
“Mr Irving is the man who hopes to settle a fortune on me.” Saying his name made her skin crawl. “I believe he planned to have me in a pew minutes after the ceremony. Such is his desperation to sire an heir.”
Mr Hawke went still. His eyes narrowed. “He wished to buy you like livestock at Smithfield Market?”
She gave a curt nod. “For a sum greater than ten thousand pounds, I imagine. My father would have insisted on enough to line his own pockets.” And to treat his mistress to a trip to Brighton. Mrs Foster enjoyed dipping her toe in turbulent waters.
A muscle ticked in Mr Hawke’s jaw. “If Irving so much as looks at you again, I’ll put him in the ground. Where might I find him?”
“He owns an ammunition firm. There’s a warehouse down by the Limehouse docks, and others in Birmingham and Manchester. He won the contract to open a factory in India.”
He didn’t speak right away. He just turned his signet ring once on his finger. “Irving won’t get his grubby hands on you. Not while I live to draw breath.”
The carriage felt smaller, and not because his threat loomed large. It was him. The idea that he might die to keep her safe. A cruel exaggeration, surely. So why did she believe him?
“Perhaps we should visit Mr Irving together.” They were already suspects in one murder. Heaven forbid they were charged with another. “Tell him we were married by licence yesterday. That should put an end to his plans.”
All that mattered to Mr Irving was siring a legitimate heir.
Mr Hawke arched a brow. “Let him think I’ve had you?”
“Just when you rise in my estimation, you say something to remind me you’re a beast.” When he frowned, she added, “Call me naive, but doesn’t making love require two participants?”
“And your point is?”
“I might do some having of my own.”
Mr Hawke’s thumb dragged along his jaw, mirroring the focus in his gaze. He leaned back, his wolfish eyes pinning her in place as the silence deepened.
“I have a feeling you’d devour me, Miss Harland.”
Heat rose to her cheeks, then spread like fire beneath her skin. “We’ll never know. Only a fool would make love to a man who wished to ruin her.”
The challenge in his eyes was unmistakable. “Indeed.”
Nelson Square
Southwark
“This doesn’t look like the home of a humble witness.” Mr Hawke glanced at the scrap of paper in his hand, then at the Georgian square with its neat oval garden, and back to the elegant row of brick-and-stucco townhouses. “I imagined something less refined.”
Daphne looked at the polished windows and prim facades. “Mr Brown might be a servant.” But what would a servant be doing near the river past midnight? And if he was the owner, perhaps he’d been travelling home late.
“He’s not a servant,” he said, those hawk-like eyes glinting with suspicion. “I’ve seen the witness statement. Brown claims to be a clerk. How does a man earning fifty pounds a year afford a house like this?”
He’d read the statement and not told her? Mr Hawke clearly didn’t grasp the meaning of a partnership.
Why was she surprised? He distrusted everything and everyone. Had the seed been planted during his time at Mrs Haggert’s, or had it taken root later, during the dark days at Shadowmere?
“An inheritance?” she suggested.
“The witness was walking along the riverbank. That’s why he claimed not to have seen the perpetrator.” He spoke like a barrister addressing a jury. “Men who live in houses like this don’t walk shadowy footpaths alone at night.”
“Perhaps we should knock on the door and put the same questions to the owner.” She’d noticed the curtain twitching in the lower window. It was hardly surprising, given the ominous black carriage parked outside.
Mr Hawke’s coachman didn’t help. He had the grim stillness of a hangman waiting for the bell to toll.
“If we have any hope of Mr Brown answering our questions, we need to appear professional,” she said. “I’ll be the grieving daughter. You can be the agent I hired to help solve the case. Everyone knows constables are incompetent.”
“You’re hardly grieving, Miss Harland.”
“No. Grieving implies sorrow over a loss.”