Honor Unbound (Lady Mary Mysteries #3)

Chapter One

Lady Mary

I slapped at the hand prodding my shoulder. “Go away,” I muttered. My eyelids felt pasted shut, and I didn’t want to expend the effort to try to open them. It had been a long couple of days.

“Wake up.” The voice held no gentleness, no deference for the mistress of the house. In my exhausted state, I found it more irritating than usual.

“Unless the house is on fire, Jane, you’re dismissed.” I pried open one eye to glare at my lady’s maid. Soon to be former lady’s maid. “Permanently.”

She gave me her back and bustled across the room as fast as her rheumy joints would allow. The candle in her hand flickered as she opened the armoire and pulled out a wrapper. “Stop being a slug-a-bed. Quickly. Put this on.” She tossed the silk garment on the bed.

I looked at the clock on my side table. I couldn’t make out the hands, but it was early, I could tell. Diffuse light from the full moon broke through the crack in my curtains, making the light-colored cotton of Jane’s skirts glimmer.

I sat up. “What time is it? And why are you already dressed?” My night bonnet slid toward my ear, and I tugged it back into place.

“It’s about half after four, and you know I don’t sleep.” She pressed her lips together, the grooves around her mouth deepening. “Now get up. We need you.”

Jane had been my maid since before I was out in society.

I knew every inflection of her voice. The urgency in it wiped the remaining sleep from my brain.

“What is it?” I had been making a jest about a fire, but perhaps I shouldn’t have.

I knew from personal experience the devastating effects of that disaster.

I sniffed, but didn’t smell any telltale signs of smoke.

I wasn’t prepared for Jane’s next words.

“There’s a dead body on your front steps.”

I paused, one foot in a slipper, the other hovering above its mate. “Pardon me?”

“You heard correctly.” Jane hobbled to the bedroom door. “Mr. Stavers has already been notified and is standing guard.”

I had a hard time envisioning my elderly butler standing guard over anything, much less a body, so I shoved my foot in the remaining slipper. I knotted my wrapper as I hurried to the door. “Do you know who the man is on the doorstep? Is it a man?” I asked as we hurried down the stairs to the foyer.

“It is, and I do not.” Jane blocked the candle’s wavering light with her hand as the breeze from the open front door threatened it. “We were hoping you might recognize the unfortunate fellow.”

Mr. Stavers looked as deprived of sleep as I felt. He blinked at me through puffy eyes. “Morning, milady.” He ran his needle-thin fingers through the wisps of hair on his head. “I daren’t call it a good one.”

A strange man stood beside him. The gas lamp half a block down the street faintly illuminated a dark-blue suit. Unfortunately not that of a night watchman. “And who is this?”

“Joseph Higgs, ma’am.” He turned a matching blue cap in his hands. “I deliver your milk each morning.”

I finally turned my attention to the body. He was lying along all four of the steps that led down to the street. His hand was outstretched, as if ready to knock on my door. Even in the scant light I could see the pool of dark liquid that spread out beneath him.

“And it was you who found him? While making your deliveries?” I stepped around the body, cocking my head. The man appeared to be in his thirties with dark hair and well-tailored clothes. There were no marks on the one side of the face I could see, and he wasn’t known to me.

“Yes’m. Well, me and Miss Smith, here.” He nodded at Jane.

“She’d just handed me my morning cuppa when we heard this poor soul stumbling along the pavement.

He fell to his knees right back there at the entrance to the alley down to your kitchens.

He pulled himself up, but I saw that he was struggling, so I walked back to the street to see if I could help. ”

“We walked to the street to see if we could help.” Jane frowned down at the body, as though his dying was a personal affront against her offer of assistance.

“Yes’m.” Mr. Higgs slapped his cap against his thigh. “But when we reached him, he was just like this. He breathed his last before us.”

I looked down the steps and to the pavement in front of my alley. In the faint light, I could just barely make out the trail of blood the man had left. I wondered how far the trail went and why the man hadn’t stopped at any of the houses before mine on the street to ask for help.

“Who did you send for a constable?” I asked.

Mr. Stavers and Jane shared a look. “We haven’t yet,” my butler finally said.

I rocked back on my heels. “A man has died. Violently, it appears. Why wouldn’t you send for the authorities?”

“The lad passed every other house on this street. He died climbing the steps trying to get to you.” Jane tucked her shawl more tightly about her frail body. “We thought, if his death has something to do with you, you might not want the Charlies to come calling.”

I blinked. And blinked again. “And if I were somehow involved in this death,” I said slowly, “what exactly would you propose doing with this man’s body?”

Mr. Stavers delicately cleared his throat. “It isn’t hard to make a body disappear in London. The Thames isn’t too far away. And there’s the Water Works. Me and the boys could—”

“No.” I held up my hand. I didn’t want to hear just how far my servants had plotted out disposing of a body, and just what they thought me capable of.

I’d worry about how they perceived me later.

“Thank you, but no.” I tried to hide the exasperation I felt from my voice.

I fear I failed. “Please send for the nearest night watchman or constable. I believe there’s a sentry box two streets over. ”

“Of course, milady.” Stavers nodded and crept back inside the house, on the hunt for our fastest footman, I presumed.

I sniffed and shot Jane a look, one she willfully misinterpreted.

“Oh, Joe’s all right.” She bobbed her head in the milkman’s direction. “He wouldn’t have said anything if I’d asked him not to.”

Lovely. Another citizen willing to cover up a crime for the sake of friendship. I feared I’d underestimated how scrupulous the average Englishman to be.

“Can you roll him over?” I asked.

Mr. Higgs’s face creased. “Ma’am?”

“Roll the body over.” I made a circular motion with my finger. “I want to see his face more fully. Maybe I’ll recognize him.”

“Of course. Erm. Sure.” The milkman ran his palms down the sides of his jacket and stepped to the body. “I’ll just… uh….”

I tapped my foot as he gingerly gripped the man’s shoulder and hip and eased the body to its back. Mr. Higgs jumped back and rubbed his hands over his jacket again.

The new position didn’t help me to identify the man.

I took Jane’s candle and knelt beside the body, lowering the flame as close as I could without burning the corpse.

There might have been something familiar about the man’s features, but one thing I had learned was that once death took a person, it changed their appearance almost immediately.

A man known for his humor could become unrecognizable once death stole that emotion from his features.

I didn’t think I knew this man, but did I know someone related to him?

I turned my examination to his wound. The whole front of his waistcoat was darkened with blood, but it wasn’t hard to find his injuries.

The silk of his waistcoat was nearly shredded from stab wounds.

The blood from his wounds had flowed down to soak much of his trousers and splatter his boots.

“I find it hard to believe this man didn’t die instantly from the attack upon his person.

” I looked back over the trail of blood down the street.

How far had he walked? Whoever the victim was, he had some determination in him. Or he had when he was alive.

Heat coursed through my body. Not an hour ago, this man had been alive. Someone’s son. Perhaps someone’s husband and father. And his life had been viciously stolen from him, stolen from those who loved him. The injustice of it made me burn.

The soft tinkle of a bell met my ear, growing louder as the beast who wore it came nearer.

“Jane, shut the door,” I said sharply. “We don’t want….”

The cairn terrier burst through the entryway before Jane could block it. He arrowed straight towards me, his short tail waggling with excitement.

“Southey, no.” I pushed his front paws off my knee. “Go back inside. No, don’t step there!” I grabbed the dog’s collar and hauled him back from the pool of blood on the steps.

“I see ’e’s forgiven you for putting the bell on ’is collar.” Marie Murphy, my most recently hired maid, stepped onto the front porch and yawned. Her bright-red hair tumbled about her shoulders. Her hastily donned uniform fit loosely around her curves.

I shoved the small dog at her. “The beast gets underfoot and almost made Jane fall down the stairs. He needed a warning bell.”

Marie’s eyebrows slowly rose as she looked upon the scene. “Cor, that’s a lot of blood.” Being of sensible country stock, she didn’t shy away or feign hysterics. Instead, she inched closer. “What did ’e do to deserve that?”

I chose to believe she was asking a rhetorical question, not that she thought one of us could provide an answer because we had done the deed.

“I have a hard time believing anyone could deserve that.” I looked back to our victim.

Had he been hunted like prey, or had the attack been unplanned, committed in the heat of passion? “What are you doing up?” I asked Marie.

“Mr. Stavers has roused the whole lot of us.” Marie leaned closer. She cocked her head, a lock of her red hair tumbling to her shoulder. “Seems to think the authorities might want to ask us questions about your friend ’ere. Who is it?”

I lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Perhaps something in his pockets might tell us more?” The milkman flushed when we all looked at him. “Or we could wait for a constable.”

“No, I liked your first idea better.” What I didn’t like was putting my hand inside the man’s pockets.

The blood was starting to harden and felt sticky against my fingers.

I quickly searched him and was glad when the task was done.

I held up my hand away from my body, not wanting my red-tipped fingers to touch my wrapper. “Nothing.”

Mr. Higgs tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to me.

I shot him a grateful smile as I wiped my hand.

“What about that there?” Readjusting the squirming dog in her arms, Marie used her elbow to point at the dead man. “It looks like there’s something in ’is ’and.”

I didn’t see what she was pointing at. It wasn’t until I squatted by the victim’s hand and lowered the candle that I saw the triangle edge of a letter poking out from between the man’s thumb and forefinger.

I frowned, annoyed that I’d missed that. But Marie’s eyes had a couple decade’s advantage over mine, and in my haste to follow Jane earlier, I’d left my spectacles on my bedside table.

I uncurled the dead man’s fingers, ignoring the chill that skittered down my spine at the touch of his cooling flesh, and tugged the missive from his hand.

It had been crumpled in his tight grip. It was thin, not more than a folded page, and soggy from blood. I carefully unfolded it. The paper was almost all red, the ink scratched onto it succumbing to the man’s blood.

All that was visible on the unmarred patch of white were the initials of the person to whom it was addressed:

L. M.