The Duke Decides (Wayward Dukes’ Alliance #46)
Chapter One
A charitable institution for orphans and outcast women was the perfect hideout for a murderer.
Louisa Bickford would know; she had been hiding at the Sisters of Benevolence Hospital for the Relief of Poor Orphans and Women in Distressed Circumstances for fifteen years.
So why not add to her list of her crimes? She could find the man blackmailing her, do him in, and dispose of the body, perhaps even here on the premises. Thus would she defeat the threat to her future and hide the evidence, all in one fell swoop.
“Ought the matter, mum?” Her newest maid, Alice, hugged herself with worry, watching Louisa slump in the wooden chair before her desk. “Your face come over all queer. Like you’ve taken a fright.”
She was only staring at the possible end of her life, Louisa thought. The life she had built carefully, painstakingly, always looking over her shoulder for the bloodhounds of judgment and destiny to pounce and tear her to pieces.
When they hadn’t, for so many years, she’d become complacent. Thought she’d escaped.
Thought, foolishly, that she might have expiated her former crimes with good works and honest living. For the past fifteen years, she had been humble, penitent, and poor. She had been chaste, God knew. She had made sacrifices and endured humiliations.
And the bloodhounds had been waiting, all this time.
Now that she had built something good and lasting, that could be a credit to her name and testament to her reform, this villain turned up to tear it all down and take everything.
Not only her name, not only her own self, but every stick of furniture in this place that had been her refuge, every brick that held up its once-safe walls.
“No,” Louisa said aloud, staring at the letter in her hands. “No, Alice, naught is amiss.” She forced a smile, brittle on her lips. “I won’t allow it to be.”
“Aye, mum.” Alice dipped in a brief curtsy, her eyes wide. She had not been at the Hospital long, but she clearly comprehended the power of the Matron’s dictum. What the Matron did and did not allow ruled the Sisters of Benevolence Hospital, and no one questioned her judgment or brooked her will.
Matron did not permit impertinence or unkindness directed at the residents from anyone, visitors or staff. She did not condone rivalries and petty jealousies among the Sisters. She did not sanction bullying among the children nor cruel gossip among the women in their care.
Matron did not allow tradesmen to overcharge the Hospital simply because they were an institution staffed by and devoted to the care of women and girls. She did not permit residents of the Hospital to behave in ways that would cast a shadow on the upright reputation of their home.
She did not let thieves or loiterers on the grounds of the Hospital, and she did not allow employers to take her children unless they could promise them safe homes and decent pay.
And Matron did not, under any circumstances, conduct herself in ways that might raise questions about the integrity or morals of the institution over which she presided.
She was generous within the bounds of wisdom, scrupulously fair to those in her care, and every aspect of her person bespoke the qualities of piety, chastity, and modesty.
She was as much as the modern world could offer of the medieval nun, though the Order of the Sisters of Benevolence was not Catholic.
In short, Matron had left every shred of her reckless past behind. Yet this letter promised that her crimes had caught up with her, and she would be brought to account for every wrong she had done before, no matter how she tried to hide behind the edifice of her good works now.
Louisa folded the letter as small as she could, the thick vellum digging into her palm through her lace indoor mittens. No, she decided. No. She would not allow this belligerent unknown to take everything away from her.
What kind of man used high-quality parchment for a blackmail letter? The seal bore the ominous insignia of a raven perched on a death’s head, wings outspread and beak partially open as if prepared to devour its prey. She knew that mark and had hoped she might never see it again.
“Alice,” she asked, “did this come through the regular post?” How humiliating if she were obliged to pay for her own extortion, but there was no signature for a frank.
“Nay, mum, a messenger come to the door. One of the street boys as brings us things.”
Messenger, of course. Nothing about the letter identified the sender, aside from the pseudonymous signature—Lord Vérité.
A thief who would sign himself Lord Truth was almost certainly out for her blood.
Alice shifted on her feet, detecting the turmoil within Louisa’s breast, hard as she strove to let nothing appear on her face. “Shall I bring yer tea, mum?”
“Thank you, no. I shall make some calls. Have you a notion where Sister Agatha might be found?”
“In the herb garden, more’n likely, mum,” Alice reported. “D’ye need ought else?” She accompanied the request with another small, awkward curtsy, a gesture that seemed instinctive but not yet natural.
She needed a knight of old to fight a dragon for her, Louisa thought. But in this year of our Lord 1830, while there might be knights aplenty, they were none of them the dragon-slaying kind, and not at all likely to take up the cause of a matron running a home for orphans and distressed women.
She rose from the inlaid desk where she stored her correspondence, locking the rest of the post in one of the small drawers. The hated letter she slipped into the pocket of her skirt, where it lay like a bare blade against her thigh.
“You needn’t call me mum with every breath, Alice, nor is there reason to curtsy to me. I am not a grand lady.” She had sacrificed that right long ago.
The girl’s eyes went wide. Louisa had yet to properly place Alice’s age, and the girl herself had to notion of it.
Her earliest memory was of everyone mourning a dead princess and her dead child—the death of the Princess Charlotte, Louisa supposed, which would place the girl’s age at perhaps fourteen or fifteen.
But malnourishment had kept Alice small and bearing the form of a girl, not a woman, and she had only in the last weeks lost the gaunt, haunted look of near starvation.
She still ate as if the food might be snatched from her very mouth, and she trembled in Louisa’s presence as if in the audience chamber of the Queen.
Unexpectedly, the girl’s eyes welled with tears, and she clasped Louisa’s hand in her own thin, roughened ones.
“Doan send me away, mum. I’ll do better. I promise.”
“Alice, child!” Louisa laid her other palm on their clasped hands.
“You will not be sent anywhere you do not wish to go. I vow it. We have taken you in, and this is your home now. When you leave, it will be of your own free will, and on to better circumstances. I promise,” she added, which was a reckless thing to do.
Right now she could promise nothing—not even that she could keep the roof over the girl’s head.
“But ye doan demand anything, mum. I’m fed, an I’ve a cot all my own that ain’t straw on the floor, and I’ve this nice gown and apron and cap.
” Alice touched the starched white cap with her free hand, her expression of wonderment as strong as the day she’d first been handed the small pile of fabric that would comprise her belongings.
“An shoes, mum. I ain’t never ’ad such shoes in me life.” The girl extended a foot, and both Louisa and Alice regarded, for a long moment, the sturdy, well-sewn leather.
“An you doan make me do anything but fetch and carry now an agin, and ’elp in the kitchen, and sure there must be more I be doin? As I doan bring in any money, far as I kin see.”
“We don’t require you to earn money for us, Alice. Our benefactors provide the coin that pays for your clothing and keep. All we ask is that you follow our rules, do your best to learn your letters, and train at the skills that will help you find a post and a home of your own away from here.”
“Eno’ food, me own bed, and a new frock when I need it?” Alice screwed up her mouth, thinking. “Doan see as’ow I’d ever want to leave here, mum.” Her brows drew together. “Unless these here’re jes th’honey days, and soon enough there’ll be the whip drivin’ me out to work in the street.”
Louisa gave a shaky laugh despite herself. “If these are honey days, Alice, I hope they last for all of us, as long as they may.”
The hall which contained the Matron’s private set of rooms led in one direction to the back courtyard that served the kitchen, laundry, and bath house.
Louisa took the other direction toward the large, shared dining parlor where luncheon was underway.
The lofty oak beams of the high ceiling gave the room the feel of the hall of a medieval castle, though Louisa’s exposure to medieval castles and their halls had been limited to her young girlhood, a time she only dimly remembered.
Large oak tables ran in orderly lines with the benches bearing the occupants of the Hospital, ordered by age: the elders at their own table, single women at another, girls arranged in descending sizes, and the young boys lords of their own domain, supervised at their own table by one of the sterner Sisters.
Mothers with young children sat apart, some with babes on their laps, all of them striving in the way of mothers the world over to instill in their young one some manners.
Many of the single women and older girls adopted an orphan at mealtimes, while the wet nurses sat before the hearth, warm from the kitchen fires on the opposite side.
The air rang with the customary clatter of pewter utensils scraping bowls and plates, along with the usual low chatter and gossip, as the Hospital, not being a workhouse and having no charge to shame its residents into silence or submission, did not discourage talk at meals nor any other times.