Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
Sunday Evening
The arm that had snaked around Audrey from behind tensed, the gloved palm over her mouth stifling her instinct to scream.
She went still. Then, pleasure broke through her, flooding her with warmth and chasing away any fear.
It was Hugh’s hand, Hugh’s arm, no random intruder.
He lowered his palm from her mouth, and as she spun to face him, she simultaneously threw her arms around him.
He stiffened only a moment before indecision melted away.
His arms came around her again and he returned the embrace, holding her close with more might, more hunger, than she’d expected.
For the span of several breaths, Hugh’s lips coasted against her forehead.
As she felt his lips kiss her brow, Audrey pulled back with a quick gasp of surprise.
“Where have you been?” she asked, noting his grime-smudged cheeks. A welt and a fresh bruise darkened under one eye. “You’re hurt.”
He shook his head. “I’m not hurt.”
Wind whistled through the gap in the open window, and she left Hugh’s hold to shut the sash and draw the drapery. The plane tree outside and its broad, stretching branches had provided him access to the narrow ledge of her window embrasure.
She turned back to him. “How did you know which room was mine?”
He had never been in here before. That he stood within her private bedchamber set off another uneasy spark under her skin.
Hugh grinned wryly. “Sir. And he distracted the two foot patrols on Curzon Street to give me time to climb up.”
Of course there were patrolmen watching Violet House; she should have thought of it before.
Bow Street knew of Hugh’s connection to her.
They might have anticipated his coming here.
And she needn’t have asked how Hugh had known which window was hers.
Sir was adept and clever and had likely spied on Violet House’s many upstairs windows until he knew for certain which set of rooms belonged to her.
Hugh was no less adept or clever; he’d come through her window as stealthily as a burglar. Though it had been an awful risk.
The crackling of the fire filled the silence for a moment. Then, Hugh stepped toward her, his eyes grave and pleading. “I didn’t kill her.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I would never have hurt her. She’s my sister,” he added, as if he hadn’t heard Audrey’s reply.
She met him where he stood on the carpet and grasped his arms. “You don’t need to convince me, Hugh. I know you didn’t harm her.”
He held her gaze, his eyes roving over her face, her dressing gown. Down to the tips of her stockinged toes. “I will leave if you don’t want me here. I know this is deplorable—”
“Stop.” He did as she commanded and sealed his lips. She released him, overwhelmed by how intensely she wanted him to wrap her into another embrace. A bit frightened by it too. “You will stay. Of course, you will stay.”
Hugh nicked off his hat and scrubbed a hand through his disheveled dark hair.
His rumpled clothing and lack of a neckcloth would have surely made his valet weep; dirt, or perhaps grease, spotted his collar and waistcoat, and his hands and nails were also streaked with grime. Good lord, he needed a bath.
“Where have you been?” she asked again. He would not have become this dirty if he’d been hiding in Lord Thornton’s home on St. James’s Square.
“Whitechapel mostly. Wherever I could stick to the shadows.” He tossed his hat onto the blue silk chaise, where she often liked to read, and then shed his coat.
With his hands on his hips, he twisted back to look at her.
“You found her. At the soiree, the newssheets reported that you and the duke found her.”
She had spent the whole day entertaining curious and calculating minds by relaying the story of how she and Philip came to discover the poor woman’s body.
But it was only now that she felt the same pangs of shock and distress, of cold disbelief, that had gripped her the evening before, in those terrible moments.
Something about Hugh Marsden caused the protective walls Audrey tended to stand behind to disappear.
For reasons she couldn’t quite determine, she was as readily honest with him as she was guarded with mostly everyone else.
Renewed shivers wracked her body, and Audrey wrapped her arms around herself. “Yes. I found her. The duke wasn’t very far behind me.”
“I read she was stabbed. In the back?”
Audrey nodded, the motion strained by tensing muscles along her spine and neck. The room was still chilled from having the window sash open for nearly half an hour. A few strides brought her before the fire. With any hope, the heat of the flames would stop the shivers jittering through her.
“I took her ring,” she admitted. “I wanted to see what it might reveal.”
“And?”
Quickly, she divulged to Hugh what the ring had shown her, and then, of her ill-fated visit to the marchioness that morning.
“She didn’t want Tyne to know she’d seen Eloisa,” Hugh said, having crossed the bedroom to stand near the fire too. “To avoid having to confess the reason for Eloisa’s visit, no doubt.”
Lines of concentration cut into his brow as Hugh peered into the fire, as though mulling something over. The firelight brought his bruised eye and a split bottom lip into better view. Audrey closed her hands into fists to stop herself from reaching a gentle finger to his injury.
“I returned the ring to Colonel Trenton,” she said, not wanting any stretch of silence to settle over them. It would be safer to remain occupied, to ignore that they were alone, in her bedchamber.
“Trenton?” he echoed, snapping the name with harsh surprise. He peered at her, the firelight creating a devilish shadow to arch above his brow. “When did you see him?”
“At Lady Reed’s,” she replied, curious as to his alarm. “He was leaving as I was arriving.”
Audrey sealed her lips against describing his red-rimmed eyes and hoarse voice; conveying the details of Hugh’s younger half-brother’s grief would have smacked of gossip.
The hardening lines of his jaw, and his newly dull and distant glare into the flames, hinted that he did not care to know anyway.
“I said the ring was on the floor near her…” She bit back the word ‘body’ and kept silent. “You aren’t on good terms with him then, I take it.”
He rolled his head, stretching the muscles along his neck, and then squinted into the fire as if eyeballing a particularly disgusting object. “No. I have not spoken to him in six years, and nor do I wish to.”
Colonel Trenton had been perfectly polite to Audrey, but then, she was a duchess, not his accused half-brother.
She could not judge or censure Hugh for his feelings.
Rather, she trusted them. She combed back over the memory of her meeting with his half-brother.
His grief-stricken appearance still pulled at her heartstrings.
“He is betrothed,” Audrey said, recalling what Lady Reed had imparted.
“I do not care.”
Very well then. She would seal her lips about Colonel Trenton.
“Eloisa came to see me,” Hugh went on. “Thursday afternoon.”
Audrey’s stomach dropped. Hugh had known Eloisa was in London again, and she had gone to him? And just days before she’d died. The uneasy twist of her stomach at the revelation perplexed her, but she said nothing and allowed him to explain.
Hugh started at the beginning, with Eloisa’s odd request to find the woman named April Barlow and her theory that she was, in fact, Hugh’s birth mother.
Audrey held her astonishment and questions in check as he continued, telling of his visit to Chatham Park, the secrets Sir Robert had revealed about the former viscount and his daughter, who was now apparently missing.
It had been nearly one week since she was last seen by her students and the Field Street school assistant headmistress, Miss Carey.
When Hugh described the oil portrait that he’d found on Miss Barlow’s desk at the school, and his own memories of sitting for that painting, Audrey could no longer hold back her amazement.
“Hugh…” But she found she didn’t know what more to say. These revelations, piling upon him over the last few days, and now, the murder of his sister and the accusations against him, would be enough to cow anyone.
But he wasn’t just anyone. He was Principal Officer Hugh Marsden.
And he had come to her for help. If she knew him at all—and she believed she did—he did not want to wallow in the knowledge that he’d been deceived.
That the woman who had raised him was not his mother in truth.
No, Hugh would want to solve the problem at hand—Eloisa’s murder.
“Lady Reed said Eloisa was asking dangerous questions at the soiree,” Audrey said, changing course. “She didn’t say what those questions were, but when I held the ring, I saw Lady Reed adamantly refusing her, telling her no.”
Hugh turned from the hearth and paced toward the four-poster bed. “Eloisa was under the impression that the truth about April Barlow would ruin Barty. That it would destroy him. Thomas, too.”
“How so?” Even with Miss Barlow as his birth mother, Hugh would still be illegitimate. She might very well be the daughter of a knight, but that would not absolve him of being born out of wedlock. What was it about April Barlow that Eloisa had wanted to reveal?
“I’m not sure,” Hugh said with a long sigh. But there was also a strange inflection on his tone. She suspected that he was withholding something from her.
Hugh wandered around the bedstead, toward the dish of trifle that had been delivered to her room, as requested.
“If Eloisa was aware that Miss Barlow was your mother,” Audrey began, turning to pace toward the bed, “and if her intention was to destroy Viscount Neatham, as you say…then perhaps the killer’s intention was to stop her from succeeding.”
She heard the veiled accusation as soon as the words left her tongue, and her cheeks instantly flushed. Hugh, however, only tapped his finger against the glass dish of trifle, as if in thought. “Barty would not kill his own sister.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
“Don’t apologize. You’ve only said what my mind has already considered.
Speak your thoughts, Audrey—I came to you for help.
” He looked at her from across the expanse of the bed.
Her flush traveled from her cheeks, down her throat, to her chest. Not from embarrassment, but from having him here, in this place that was her private sanctuary.
“I want to be able to help you. I will help you,” she said. It was a promise. A vow. Her throat constricted, but she cleared it with a small cough. “Is there anyone else helping you?”
He averted his eyes. “Just Sir.”
She couldn’t believe it. “Surely Lord Thornton? Your valet? Sir Gabriel Poston?” The chief magistrate was one of Hugh’s staunchest supporters.
He shook his head. “Thornton and Basil are the first people the other officers will predict I’ve turned to, and Sir Gabriel is a Bow Street man through and through; I can’t go to him until I’ve proof in my hands.
” He raised an open palm and closed his fingers, as if clutching at imaginary evidence.
“Sir will do what he can, but my association with him is well known, especially at Bow Street.”
“I see. Is there no one else?” She fidgeted with the embroidered collar of her banyan.
She wondered if there was a woman, or a companion of some kind.
He was a handsome man, and at his age, shouldn’t he have certain…
needs? In the past, her mind had consistently rejected those thoughts whenever they’d sneaked in, but now, she couldn’t be so selfish.
Another ally of any kind would be beneficial to him.
But he shook his head again. “I can count those I trust completely on one hand.”
“I am one of them?”
“I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”
She bit back a pleased grin. But then, it broke through. Feeling a little giddy, she asked, “Am I the thumb?”
He huffed laughter. “You are whichever finger you find least offensive.” He motioned toward the untouched trifle. “Are you planning to eat that?”
“No. Oh! You must be famished.” Audrey started around the bed, toward the bedroom door. She hadn’t considered that he might be hungry after two days on the run. “I’ll fetch some tea and dinner.”
“That isn’t necessary. I didn’t come here to put you out.”
“If you’re going to be eluding the police, you’ll need sustenance,” she replied, then paused to gesture toward the boudoir. “You can wash up in there. There’s soap and water.”
He rubbed the back of his neck as he craned his head toward the entrance to the boudoir. “The duke?”
Her heart gave a stronger than normal thump. “Out. Probably until morning.”
With a prickle of awareness, she realized Hugh could rest here the night. He must have concluded the same thing, for he seemed to take a much longer breath than usual. The muscles along his jaw ticked.
“You’re safe here,” she said softly. “I’ll be right back. And then you can tell me why you went to Neatham House. The newssheets said you attacked the viscount.”
And the bruises at his eye and on his chin appeared to be the consequences of it.
“Of course, they would say that. It was a mistake to go there.” Hugh picked up the trifle and speared it with a spoon. “I think it might be what got Eloisa killed.”