A Murder at Kew Gardens (Rosalynd and Steele Mysteries #5)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

Steele House

A Vow Kept

Istood at the window that overlooked Grosvenor Square, desperate for a glimpse of her.

Three weeks had passed since we’d last spoken.

Oh, I’d seen Rosalynd. I hadn’t deprived myself of that much.

But it had been from a distance, as she climbed aboard a carriage on her way to a ball or some other social event.

It hadn’t been close enough to capture her luminescence, to see how her eyes lit up when she found something amusing, to breathe her bewitching scent. To touch her.

I had asked the Queen for an instrument.

She’d granted it. And I had spent every day since learning to wield it against a man who did not exist on paper but existed everywhere else.

He had been the hand on the river. He had stood in Rosalynd’s own ballroom and told her she was remarkable, then walked out leaving no name.

I was hunting a ghost. But to catch him, I'd surrendered the one thing I wanted most: Rosalynd. Beautiful, captivating Rosalynd.

That was the part no one knew. London believed the Duke of Steele and Lady Rosalynd had cooled toward one another, as the overheated do when a season runs long.

Rosalynd believed the gentler version—the Queen’s warning about scandal, which fit the truth closely enough to pass for it.

She did not know I had gone to the Queen myself.

She did not know that every yard between us was a yard he could not use against her.

Were I to hunt this man with her at my side, he would come for Rosalynd. So I had taken the choice from her.

She would never forgive me, if she knew. She would not know. I had made certain of it.

In the three weeks since, I had not been idle. What the Queen had granted me was not manpower—a clerk or a watcher I could hire myself—but sanction.

With her authority behind me, I had gone to Scotland Yard and obtained what no private gentleman could command: Chief Inspector Graves and a handful of officers, handpicked and sworn to secrecy, working a case that sat in no ledger and bore no inspector's name.

I had also brought in Caleb Finch—the enquiry agent whose discretion I trusted beyond any badge—and Mr. Whitfield, a forensic accountant with an uncanny gift for following money wherever it chose to hide.

Between us, the thing had begun to take shape.

But it was slow work. Maddening work. And the only thing keeping me on my feet.

It would pass, I told myself. This longing, this ache. I just needed to keep busy. Heaven knew I had enough to do. I returned to my desk and the draft bill on the regulation of cabmen’s fares because the work of the Lords could not be ignored. Dull. Boring. Maybe that would keep me from the window.

An hour later, Milford’s knock at my study door was a relief. “Lord Nicholas, Your Grace.”

The tension I’d been holding eased. My brother would provide a welcome diversion. “Send him in.”

Nicky strode in with the air of a man who hadn’t a care in the world. But then he’d always been the sunny one while Philip was the scapegrace, and I the solid, serious one. But then I was the Duke of Steele.

“Warwick.”

I came to my feet. “Nicky. Good to see you.”

He came forward and embraced me, which was unusual. We had outgrown such gestures, but he revived them at intervals when he meant something by them. I did not ask what he meant. He would tell me soon enough.

Stepping back, he looked at me a moment longer than usual. “You are losing weight.”

“I am the same weight I was at the beginning of the year.”

“You are not. I can tell.”

“Then it is the cut of the coat.”

“It is not the cut of the coat. It is your face. Your face has gone narrow, Warwick. You have not been eating. Mother has remarked upon it.”

“I am glad to hear that Mother has continued her interests. Now, shall I order tea or whiskey?”

He gave a theatrical shudder. “Too hot for tea. Something refreshing would suit.”

Milford, still by the door, spoke up. “Some lemonade, perhaps, Lord Nicholas?”

“That’s the ticket, Milford,” Nicky replied. After Milford withdrew, he took the chair in front of my desk. “Did you see her?”

“See who?”

“Lady Rosalynd. You were watching for her.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You have a window.” He pointed to it. “From it, you can see the front of her house. I saw you standing by it when my carriage pulled up.”

I poured myself a whiskey from the decanter on the sideboard.

“You might have offered me some,” Nicky said, pointing to my glass.

“You wanted something refreshing. Whiskey is not that.”

Just then Milford returned with a pitcher of lemonade and filled one which Nicky drank down in one gulp. “That’s better. It’s hot as blazes out there.”

“July tends to do that.” I paused. “What brings you? You did not come all this way on a hot summer day to quench your thirst.”

“You’re right.” He poured another glass and drank half of it. “Mother thinks you should attend the Liddell ball,” he said.

“It’s on my calendar.”

“Lady Constance will be in attendance. Mother thinks you should dance with her.”

“Then Mother shall be disappointed.”

“Mother has gone so far as to write her mother, Lady Pembury, to that effect.”

I set the whiskey down with more force than was necessary. “She has done what?”

“It was a friendly note. Mother is incapable of writing any other kind. Lady Pembury will receive it in the spirit in which it was meant, which is to say ruthlessly. Constance is twenty-two, disengaged from one suitor through no fault of her own, and considered the most eligible match in London for a man in want of an heir.”

“I am not going to dance with Lady Constance. And I am not in want of a bloody heir.” The words came out harsher than I intended.

I scrubbed a hand across my jaw. It was not the prospect of an heir that angered me.

It was the assumption that one woman might be exchanged for another as neatly as changing partners in a quadrille.

“Then I will counsel you, gently, to be seen dancing with someone.”

“Why?”

The look he directed at me held an unhappiness I was unaccustomed to seeing on his face.

“Because if you do not, Warwick, every matchmaking mother in London will do as Mother is doing—writing notes and making calls—and you will spend what’s left of the season batting them off. Is that what you wish?”

“I wish very little. That is the difficulty.”

Nicky refilled his glass and drank slowly. “I saw her. Lady Rosalynd.”

Desperate to know more, I asked, “Where?”

“At Lady Winthrop’s recital on Tuesday evening. I was there for my friend Gerald. He is courting the Winthrop girl. Lady Rosalynd is a close friend of the family.”

I picked up the whiskey, swirled it around the glass. “Was she well?”

“She looked precisely as you do. Miserable.”

I did not speak. I couldn’t. Misery may love company, but I would never wish it on her.

“Warwick,” Nicky said, “I do not pretend to know what happened between you. I know only that after the Opera investigation ended, you have not been the same man. I know you visited Windsor. Did the Queen say anything about your association with Rosalynd? Did she counsel you against—”

“She did not counsel us against marriage.”

“What did she counsel you against?”

I was a long moment in answering. I had considered, many times, what had been said in the small private sitting room at Windsor on a June afternoon.

The words had been few and the meaning unmistakable.

Her Majesty did not issue decrees. She stated preferences.

But a sovereign’s preference, delivered privately, was indistinguishable from any other instruction a subject might receive.

I had gone into the audience knowing what I was to be told, and I had come out of it having been told.

“Her Majesty knows neither Rosalynd nor I wish to marry. So she counseled an end to our friendship before circumstances forced the issue. Rosalynd and I agreed that a complete and visible separation would serve best.”

“You are never to see each other again?”

“The season ends in a month or so. In mid-August, she will return to Rosehaven Manor in Yorkshire, and I will depart for Thornburn Abbey.” I brushed a hand across my brow. “Next year, our friendship will be a distant memory, and we will have moved on with our lives.”

Nicky sat stunned, the glass in his hand, not drinking. And then, very slowly, very deliberately, he set it down. “I have never said this before, nor even thought it. Warwick, you are a fool.”

“Don’t.”

“You have the most disciplined nature of any man I have ever known. I have always admired it. I have begun to wonder, however, whether you use that discipline to avoid the choices you are afraid to make. You love her. And I believe she loves you. For the love of God, ask her to marry you.”

“She doesn’t wish to. She doesn’t wish to break up her family.”

“She can have a family with you.”

I slammed my glass down. “No, she won’t. The day Alice died in childbirth, I swore I would never put another woman through that ordeal.”

“Alice was—”

I held up a hand. “Don’t say another word.”

“My apologies.” Nicky put down his glass and rose. “Mother sends her love. I shall tell her you are eating well. Good day, Warwick.”

I simply nodded.

Milford’s footsteps followed him down the hall. The front door closed, and Steele House was silent again.

I did not return to the cabmen’s bill. I sat in the chair behind the desk and stared at the papers without seeing them.

Four weeks since I had last been inside Rosehaven House.

Three since I’d been near enough to Rosalynd to hold her.

I had marked the dates because I could not stop counting them.

I had begun to fear I had miscalculated the cost of what I’d proposed.

A footman came to the door. “Begging your pardon, Your Grace.”

I did not, at first, register the alarm in his voice. But something in it brought my head round. “What is it, James?”

“You have a visitor. Lady Ros—”

I was on my feet before he finished speaking and then crossed the study, descended the staircase, and arrived at the entrance hall without conscious thought.

Rosalynd was standing just inside the door.

No bonnet. No gloves. One hand pressed against the wall for support, Milford at her side.

A smear of something marred the hem of her gray skirt—dust, perhaps, or chalk from a paving stone.

Her hair, ordinarily impeccable, was an arrangement of copper that was no arrangement at all.

Her face, when she lifted it to mine, had gone white.

I broke every discipline I had set myself in the time it took to cross the floor to her. “What’s wrong?”

She raised her gaze to me, her eyes filled with pain.

“They have taken Cosmos.”