Chapter 12
Chapter
Twelve
Hugh had one chance. If the lady screamed, it was over.
He’d waited for the carriage at a distance, one eye on Lady Reed’s landau and another on the pavements, watchful for foot patrols.
It was entirely possible the marchioness had alerted Bow Street after receiving the anonymous note that morning.
However, after what Audrey said, about the marchioness deliberately lying to Officer Tyne and withholding information about Eloisa’s visit to the soiree, Hugh had gambled on the lady heeding the note’s ultimatum: Be at St. George’s at Hanover Square today at one o’clock, alone, or Lady E.
’s secret will make the evening editions.
Whatever Eloisa had been withholding from Hugh, he was willing to bet Lady Reed knew and didn’t wish it to be revealed.
Hugh stayed behind a parked cart as Lady Reed’s landau pulled to a stop and as she entered the church alone. After waiting until her driver was distracted with the pair of grays at the traces, and until he was certain no foot patrols were present, Hugh then entered the sanctuary.
The muffled quiet of the church had the opposite effect that many claimed was a comfort.
With his own pulse thudding in his ears, and his breaths sounding unnaturally ragged and quick, he stood for a few moments behind a column at the entrance to the nave.
Fewer than a half dozen people sat scattered among the pews; the pastor in his formal robes was currently in whispered conversation with someone near the front.
Lady Reed had slipped into a pew near the back.
He didn’t have much time. Risk be damned—he needed answers.
Audrey had been right to worry; if he was to be apprehended now, Eloisa’s murder would be pinned on him, and he would certainly hang.
Barty would see to it. The idea of execution didn’t frighten Hugh as much as execution for a crime he didn’t commit—and one in which he failed to solve—infuriated him.
He slipped into the pew behind the marchioness’s and sat directly behind her.
“Here to make a confession, my lady?” he whispered. Her spine stiffened. Her profile came into view as she turned to see him.
The coiled scarf around his neck, all the way to his chin, and the two-day stubble on his cheeks wouldn’t be enough to disguise him. Recognition flashed in Lady Reed’s eyes.
“You,” she hissed.
“I’m going to assume you have a modicum of intelligence, Lady Reed, and that you know that I am not Eloisa’s killer.
If I were guilty, I would currently be on my way to France instead of risking my neck sitting here with you.
I want answers. You were the last person my sister spoke to that night—and don’t bother to say you did not see her.
I know you did.” He had cut the lady off as she’d attempted to deny it.
She sealed her lips and faced forward again.
Voice hushed, she replied, “I see you’ve spoken to the duchess.”
“Which duchess would that be?” Before she could take a breath to retort, he continued, “You lied to Officer Tyne. Why would you want to conceal Eloisa’s visit to you that evening?”
His voice reached no further than her ear; their hushed discussion had not yet drawn the attention of the other parishioners. The marchioness kept her eyes forward.
“If you did not harm Eloisa, prove it to Bow Street,” she replied. “Leave me out of it.”
“I plan to prove it. Odd…I would think you’d like her killer to be apprehended too. Unless you’re protecting the person.” A thought struck him. “Or are the killer yourself.”
She twisted, gray eyes spearing him. “I would never! Eloisa was my friend’s child.”
The marchioness was careless with her pitched voice and heads turned in their direction. Hugh gritted his molars, lowering his chin to obscure his face with the brim of his hat. “Is that why she came to you?” he asked.
Lady Reed had been friends with the former viscountess? He hadn’t known; then again, he’d deftly avoided his father’s wife when he’d been younger. “Eloisa asked for your help, and yet you refused her.”
“You know nothing, Mr. Marsden.”
“I know Eloisa was in London to harm Lord Neatham’s reputation and upend his life.
I know she had a secret that she wished to be made public,” he said, wishing he could view the marchioness’s expression while he spoke.
“And I know if the murderer suspects Eloisa told you anything of value, your life could be in danger.”
Silence followed. She made no quick denial, no comment at all. In the quiet, he sensed a new reserve in her; some notion she had not yet considered.
“Tell me what she wanted from you,” he pressed.
The curious glances from the other parishioners had turned away from them when the marchioness spoke, this time with caution.
“It was terrible timing. I don’t know what she was thinking coming to me in the middle of a soiree.”
Hugh thought Eloisa’s choice of time and place had either been intentional, and a way to agitate Lady Reed and force her hand, or she had been desperate, with no other choices available to her. But now that the woman was talking, he kept his lips sealed.
“I hadn’t seen her in years.” A note of wistfulness revealed she’d cared about Eloisa. “When my butler informed me that she was there, wishing to speak to me in private, I couldn’t comprehend it. At first, I wondered if her aim was to speak to Colonel Trenton.”
“Thomas?”
“He was supposed to be at the soiree,” she explained. Then, with a flap of her hand, “But he never came. Perhaps now that he’s landed himself a bride-to-be, an evening at some stuffy party paled in comparison to an evening at a gentlemen’s club.”
Or a gaming hell. Hugh preferred to think of Thomas as little as possible, but he suspected his youngest half-sibling frequented the demimonde more robustly than he did his gentry peers.
Audrey had mentioned that he was betrothed, too, but Hugh had no interest in hearing more on the topic.
Thomas, five years Hugh’s junior, had always been the odd man out.
The clinger-on. When they’d been children, he’d glued himself to Eloisa’s shadow.
Though just a year older, she’d been more of a mother to him than their own mother, the cold and aloof viscountess.
Joanna Neatham had emphatically detested Hugh, and for good reason, he supposed.
Her antipathy toward her own children, however, had been a bit more perplexing.
At least they’d had a father who’d shown them affection.
Of course, sharing their father with Hugh had caused no end of friction between the four of them.
But Thomas… The viscountess had called him simple. Their father had claimed he was merely reserved and remote, but deep down, Hugh suspected the viscount knew there was something more than just a little odd with his youngest child.
“She didn’t want to see Thomas,” Hugh surmised. “She wanted something from you.”
The marchioness paused to take a shallow breath. “I was a good friend to Joanna. When my own niece, Lila, became the new viscountess, I ought to have been pleased.”
Hugh waited, his skin prickling.
“Mind you, I don’t know anything for certain,” she prefaced, “but as Joanna lay dying, she told me something. A confession.”
Hugh recalled those days vividly. The family physician had informed them that the viscountess had tumors of the breast and that they had likely spread to other parts of her body.
They were inoperable, so all she could do was make her peace with dying.
It had been a drawn-out hellscape, the viscountess wasting away in a remarkable amount of pain until the viscount had demanded the physician give her as much laudanum as possible.
She’d passed away soon after that, in all probability of an overdose. It had been a blessing.
“She was delirious, of course, and so I’ve never been certain if it wasn’t all fantasy, but Joanna confessed that…
that Bartholomew…” She looked down to her hands.
Hugh, now leaning forward in anticipation, saw she had crumpled her handkerchief in her clenched fingers.
“That he might not be the rightful heir.”
She barely whispered those last few words, and yet they tunneled into Hugh’s ears and grew thorns. Each one burrowed, multiplying as they formed a tangled route back to Eloisa and her unexpected visit earlier that week at Bedford Street.
“How is that possible?” he asked.
The viscount had married Joanna, and just under a year later, Barty had been born.
From what Hugh had always been told, just four months after that, Catherine Marsden and her infant son had come to Neatham House.
She was to be nanny to baby Bartholomew, and her own newborn was to be raised alongside the Neatham heir.
The viscountess’s displeasure and humiliation nearly brought the whole house down, but the viscount refused to turn Nanny Catherine or the child out.
Instead, he brought the babe on as a ward.
Everyone knew the truth from then on. Neither Fitzgerald Neatham nor Catherine Marsden ever denied it, either.
However, now that Hugh knew about April Barlow, he wondered why Catherine had happily taken on the censure for having had an affair with the viscount, especially among the servants at Neatham House; she had never been popular with them.
Had his father paid her handsomely? The notion sent his stomach toward his kneecaps, making him nauseous.
“It isn’t possible,” the marchioness said. “The cancer had taken Joanna so thoroughly, you see, and I dismissed her ramblings…but Eloisa, she must have overheard. The girl was around ten years old, I think, and perhaps her mother’s anguished cries have always haunted her the way they have me.”
Hugh sat back heavily into the pew. “This is what she wanted to speak to you about?”
“She wanted me to come forward with Joanna’s confession,” she replied crisply. “The absurdity of it! Calling Bartholomew’s title into question because of a fevered deathbed confession made nearly two decades in the past? Never!”
Again, her voice had started to rise in step with her agitation. This time, the pastor stood, concluding his conference with the other parishioner. Damn it. Hugh could not stay any longer.
“Now you understand why I could not tell Officer Tyne that I’d seen Eloisa,” Lady Reed said swiftly.
“To have been in her presence so shortly before her death…and if I were to let something slip about the conversation…I am not very adept at lying, Mr. Marsden. I’m much better off if I simply keep my lips sealed. ”
As soon as the pastor started up the aisle toward their pews, Hugh stood. His time was up. “Someone knew Eloisa was at your home and wished to stop her from calling Barty’s legitimacy into question.”
“By killing her?” the marchioness gasped, turning to glare at him.
“What do you know about April Barlow?”
The lines in her face deepened as she scowled. “April Barlow? Who in the world is that? What does she have to do with this?”
It wasn’t an act of ignorance. Hugh pulled his hat lower. “She is someone I need to find. Be on your guard, Lady Reed. Until the murderer is caught, do not go anywhere alone. You know more than you think you do.”
With that, he exited the pew toward the transept aisle, away from the approaching pastor.