Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
Porter’s boarding house was one of the more respectable looking buildings in Spitalfields.
Hugh wasn’t unfamiliar with the East End—most of the riff raff he brought in to Bow Street dwelled in its narrow warrens and alleyways.
This was the part of London that the ton chose to ignore.
Hell, maybe he should have brought the duchess along with him after all.
Letting her have a good look at the lower denizens might have broken her illusion of safety.
But as maddening as the lady was, Hugh couldn’t have subjected her to possible danger.
Not after what she’d witnessed that morning.
For the umpteenth time, he questioned his foolhardy leap from the open theatre office window.
As he’d given chase down the alley, seeing nothing but a blur of a man turning the corner far ahead, the thought that there might have been more than one intruder slammed into him; that he might have just left the duchess alone and vulnerable.
He barely remembered racing back inside the theatre, drawing breath even, but the sound of her sharp scream coming from within the office was still staggering.
The relief at seeing her unharmed, if white-faced and shaking near Bernadetto’s body, had almost made him lightheaded.
Just as quickly, however, his blood boiled again.
There was more—far more—to Belladora Lovejoy’s murder than what had initially met the eye.
If he were to be honest with himself, the duchess’s relentless pursuit for the real killer was both a knife in his pride and a challenge to correct a mistake.
Now that the theatre manager had become a second victim, he was, unsurprisingly, in a foul mood.
He brought his fist down on the door to the room Sir had directed him to. After their unsettling encounter at the theatre, Hugh had paid the lad a few shillings to follow the actor named Porter and to report where the man kept rooms.
The door swung open. Porter stood alert. He filled the doorframe, his menacing glower just as Hugh remembered it.
“What’re you doing here, Runner?”
“I’ve just come from a visit with Bernadetto.” He purposefully neglected to mention that the manager was now on his way to the bone house.
“What’s that got to do with me?”
He didn’t show a flicker of surprise or doubt, which led him to believe that Porter didn’t know of his employer’s death just yet.
He was inclined to believe this was not the man he’d seen whipping out of sight at the end of the alleyway next to the theatre.
However, that didn’t mean he was ignorant to information that might prove useful.
“Your obsession with Miss Lovejoy was a topic of conversation,” Hugh lied.
He could tell which people to step lightly around, questioning them slowly and methodically. He could also tell which people that tactic would be lost on. Porter was one of the latter.
“My obsession?” he sneered. “We were friends. Nothing more.”
“Not for your lack of desire.”
Porter peered down his angular nose at Hugh.
He used his height to its full effect, and then stepped aside, allowing Hugh to enter.
He did so with caution, his hand prickling with the anticipated need to draw his flintlock pistol.
The room was small and cold, with a single window and a coal stove, where a greasy pan sat with a few fish scales stuck to the bottom.
The odor of last night’s dinner hung in the air.
Porter shut the door and went to a chair at a small table, where colorful fabric and beads were sprawled about.
“I cared for Belladora,” he said, picking up a cloud of lime green silk. A needle and thread hung from a line of stitched red beads. “And yes, I would have cared for her as more than a friend, if she’d have allowed it.”
“Why didn’t she?”
Porter snorted and continued stitching. A piece for the stage, Hugh presumed. “She had standards. Expensive ones, even though I told her she was being a fool.”
“You argued with her?” Hugh relaxed his hand, no longer expecting the stage actor to come at him. In fact, he appeared at ease as he worked on the costume piece.
“I didn’t shut my mouth and look the other way, if that’s what you mean.”
“You’re wise to the world in which you live, Porter—wasn’t her arrangement with Lord Wimbly commonplace? Why criticize her for bettering her situation?”
He glanced around him, taking in the shabby room.
It reminded Hugh of the one he’d lived in after his mother’s death, when he’d taken his leave from Neatham’s household as a young man.
The former viscount had offered Hugh funds so that he could live a gentleman’s life, but he’d refused it.
Out of pride or resentment, he didn’t know, but he’d been angry and heartsick, and he’d wanted nothing more than to sever all ties from his father and the half-siblings that had always done well pretending Hugh was just a servant’s child.
Bartholomew, Thomas, and Eloisa had all known the truth.
The similar features the four of them all shared could leave little doubt.
It had been Eloisa who’d sought Hugh out some months after he’d left, and after their father had passed.
She’d convinced him of her sisterly feelings.
God, he’d been a fool. He’d known his place within the viscount’s household, but like Icarus flying too close to the sun, Hugh, blinded by what he assumed were familial ties, had tread over an invisible line.
“Bettering her situation would be one thing, but what Belladora was doing…” Porter shook his head, reclaiming Hugh’s attention. “It didn’t sit right. It was too incestuous if you ask me.”
He flinched. “Incestuous?”
That word. Hugh didn’t like how often his past had been nipping at his heels lately. Time and distance, and a hell of a lot of hard work, had finally separated his current life from his past one, so that they sat apart from each other, like oil on water.
“I told her she was playing with fire, stringing along both father and son the way she was,” Porter replied.
Hugh stepped closer to the table. “Do you refer to Lord Wimbly and his heir?”
Porter looked up from his sewing. The glittering beads caught the light of the table lantern and sent it over his dark, pitted skin.
Old scarring from adolescent spots, perhaps a case of the pox.
He had no scratch marks on his face or neck, or on his hands, which continued to deftly stitch even as he held Hugh’s stare.
“I told her that when they found out, she’d catch hell.”
The marquess and his heir were unaware they shared her, then? The Wimbly heir, Lord St. John, could not be very old, perhaps still at university.
“And did she?” Hugh asked. “Catch hell?”
“Never happened, far as I know.”
Hugh recalled Wimbly’s comment from the Seven Sins. “Did she ever mention anything about wanting to go to the Continent?”
Porter scowled. “The Continent? Never. What would she want to go there for?”
If she worried about angering Wimbly or his son with her duplicity, it might have been an attractive option.
Though, Hugh couldn’t picture the marquess angering over her deception, even if it was with his heir.
How St. John would react, however, was uncertain, as Hugh didn’t know much about the boy.
“Where does the Duke of Fournier come into play?” He was asking Porter as much as he was musing aloud.
Hopefully Sir was nosing around Jewell House right then, asking what others might have known or suspected about the toff in apartment twelve. The theory that the duke had been meeting other men, rather than women, felt right.
“Belladora never mentioned him,” Porter answered. “But she ended up in his room, dead, didn’t she?”
“Tell me about the night of the murder,” Hugh said, coming back around to why he’d made the trip to Spitalfields. “How did Miss Lovejoy seem?”
“Her normal self.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary happened that night, before or after the performance?”
Porter ripped the end of the thread with his teeth and looked at his work with an assessing eye. He then set the green silk down. “I wouldn’t call it strange, as Belladora received flowers and notes most nights, but there was something different about a letter she got before the performance.”
Hugh silenced his many thoughts and paid close attention. Whatever Porter was about to reveal, he sensed it was important. “Different how?”
“A tiger delivered the letter instead of messenger boy.”
Messenger boys had their territories staked out and would usually be readily available for any servant who opened a back door and hollered for them.
Sir ran messages from time to time, but he complained it was dull work.
A tiger, on the other hand, rode along with a lord who was at the reins himself, or whose driver could not spring down from the box so easily—like Thornton’s driver for instance.
Tigers often wore livery, just as a driver or footman, would.
There was no need to question Porter’s intelligence—he would know the difference between the two.
“That didn’t happen often, I presume,” Hugh said. Porter gave a shake of his head. “Do you know what the letter said?”
Again, Porter shook his head. But then, after a moment of hesitation, said, “Belladora was thoughtful after, though. Like whatever the letter said confused her.”
There wasn’t much room to pace while thinking, but Hugh took a few steps forward and back as his mind spun in different directions. “Did she share the letter with Bernadetto?”
Porter got up from his chair and started gathering his sewing supplies. “I don’t see why she would’ve.”
“Did she have a dressing room? A place she might have kept her things? This letter, perhaps?” Hugh chastised himself for not thinking to look around for her dressing room earlier.
“She had a room, sure. Hettie asked Bernadetto to clean it out, though, now that she’s taking the lead role.” Porter frowned. “You think the letter is important?”
“Possibly.”
The actor grabbed the green silk, rolled it between his fingers, then set it down again. “Ask Bernadetto about it, why don’t you?”
There was no reason to keep the truth from him any longer. He would learn of it soon enough anyhow. “I can’t. He’s been murdered.”
Porter went utterly rigid. He stared at Hugh, nostrils flaring. “You said you were just with him.”
“I lied.” Porter shoved aside a chair and came toward Hugh. Quickly, he continued, “I needed to be sure it wasn’t you who killed him—or Miss Lovejoy, for that matter.”
Porter drew up short of Hugh. “I would never have harmed her. I got nothing against Bernadetto either.”
“I believe you.”
The actor seemed to lose his fury and stumbled back. “Why would someone do him in?”
It might not have anything to do with the letter Miss Lovejoy had received the night of her murder, but Hugh couldn’t rule it out.
“I don’t know. But if you think of anything, send word to me at Bow Street. I’ll see myself out,” Hugh said.
Porter sniffed and kept his head down. “The lady was right, then. The murderer can’t be the toff you arrested now, can it?”
Hugh held still, the brass knob of the door cold in his palm. Admitting the duchess was right, even to someone as inconsequential as a stage actor, churned his gut.
“Thank you for your time,” was all he said before closing the door behind him.
A stone tossed about in the pit of his stomach as he hailed a cab.
There was a push and pull happening within him, an undercurrent of unease.
Following the duchess as she blazed ahead in her investigation was not only revealing his own mistakes with the arrest of Fournier, but also peeling back the scabs that had for so long formed a thick layer over an open wound.
Every layer was a month, a season, a year he’d spent with his back turned on his past life.
Now, the crust he’d built over that open wound was thinning.
Self-preservation screamed at him to stop, to forget the duke and the duchess, to take the next assignment and move ever onward.
But at the same time, he couldn’t possibly leave Audrey Sinclair to do as she pleased on her mission.
Even after seeing Bernadetto’s mutilated body, and then swooning at the horror of it, she had refused to back down.
She was either absurdly brave, or asinine.
Perhaps a bit of both. Either way, the danger was evident and seemed to be deepening with every passing day.
A hot swell of agitation roiled inside him when he imagined what might have happened if she had gone to the theatre alone that morning…
The urge to go to Curzon Street and see if the duchess was there was both keen and grating. No, she would not stop. And because he would not have the death of the duchess on his conscience, Hugh would not either. Not even if it ended in his own self-destruction.