Chapter Three
THE FIRST TIME Mickey drove Tommy to the Duke of Ashington’s town house, he brought the horses to a standstill in the quiet mews around the back, assuming they would enter via the kitchens.
For days afterwards, Tommy ragged him silly.
Mickey had been invited several times since, yet still felt like a fraud tripping up the front steps.
Handing his hat to the snooty butler, Hawkins, was odder still.
As he led them into Ashington’s private sanctum, the second study, dislike leaked from the old butler’s every pore.
“Mr Thomas Squire and Mr Michael Maurice, Your Grace,” Hawkins declared grandly, and left them to it.
Rossingley and Kit Angel were already seated at the card table, listlessly thrashing the young twins at paired whist. Never far from Rollo, Fitzsimmons skulked in a leather armchair.
None was especially cheerful-looking. Even Willoughby and Rollo’s greeting seemed unusually subdued.
The duke’s jaw clenched hard enough to splinter bone, whilst his brother’s face was a dark storm cloud, his fiery eyes two seething, churning coals.
“I sense there’s a problem, Benedict,” said Tommy, addressing the duke. He lay a hand on his lover’s arm, full of concern. “Are you ill? Is there some bad news?”
“I’m quite well.” Briefly, Ashington placed his own hand over Tommy’s and squeezed.
“It’s…it’s that chit,” he began without preamble.
“The American, whose curvaceous side dear Willoughby was glued to last night. Miss Amelia Chesterton. She was…” He stepped away, his fingers curled into two tight fists as if desperate to punch something.
Mickey couldn’t recall ever seeing him so distressed.
Ashington clutched at Tommy’s hand again.
“She was…she was wearing the Ashington parure.”
“The what?” Tommy wrinkled his nose in puzzlement. Mickey was equally bemused.
“The Ashington parure!” The duke’s voice rose. “Around her neck! And in her bloody ears!”
“I know what a parure is, my love,” Tommy answered calmly. “I was merely unaware of the existence of an Ashington parure.”
The duke strode to the window. “That’s because it vanished.” He shot his brother an opaque look. “Funnily enough, at that damned shooting party we were only discussing the other day. Thirty years ago, give or take. Isn’t that right, Lyndon?”
“About that,” Fitzsimmons agreed. He seemed nearly as distressed as Ashington. “Bloody Talybridge. I should wring his neck.”
“If one strangled everyone deserving of it,” Rossingley murmured without glancing up from his cards. “One would scarcely have time for anything else.”
“What does the Marquess of Talybridge have to do with it?” Tommy demanded. “Except that he’s about to marry her?”
“That’s what I want to find out!” Ashington bellowed. “Who knows? No one ever got to the bottom of it. But…our grandmama’s parure disappeared after that blasted shooting party, and now it’s draped around the neck of a bloody American.”
Willoughby emitted a small whimper.
“A beautiful, and no doubt entirely innocent, young lady,” Ashington corrected.
“Tell me the little information you have about this shooting party,” Tommy pressed, eyeing Ashington anxiously.
“Yes, do,” added Rossingley, intrigued. “Start at the beginning.”
Fitzsimmons made a harrumphing sound. “That’s the trouble. We know next to bugger all! Our damned parents refused to speak of it. Any knowledge we’ve ever gleaned has come from our butler, Hawkins. He was a youthful second footman at the time.”
He sent his brother a questioning look as if checking whether he could continue.
The duke nodded miserably. “As we said, there was a shooting party at the Ashington estate. All very grand, thus Grandmama wore the parure. Much champagne was consumed, there was a lake, swimming, larking about. You know the sort of thing. Grandmama died, and the damned set disappeared.”
“Into the lake?” queried Rollo.
Fitzsimmons winced. “If only it was that simple. The baubles were never found, and they’re bloody hard to miss.
One can see them from up in the heavens, they blaze so bright.
No wonder Willoughby instantly spotted Miss Amelia; the damned parure entered the ball last night a good five minutes before its wearer. ”
Mickey was intrigued. Why were the details of this salacious tale apparently news, including to the likes of Rossingley?
The earl was a walking, talking almanac.
“You said it wasn’t simple,” Mickey prompted, forgetting he normally let others speak first. Perhaps sparring with Beauregard had given him courage.
Fitzsimmons answered. “On the final day of the party, our grandmother was discovered down by the lake by one of the footmen. Dead.” Once more, his grim gaze flicked up to his brother.
“She’d been shot. We believe, through snippets pieced together, that she was with child—and not our grandfather’s.
Apparently, she had been having liaisons with one of the guests.
There were also rumours of a duel with pistols, earlier that morning, between my grandfather and a male guest. Whether it is true or not, or merely idle gossip, I cannot say.
But our grandfather was a first-class shot. I doubt he’d have missed.”
“And the parure?” Rossingley leaned forward, card game forgotten.
“Not around her neck when her body was brought up to the house,” the duke replied.
He paced between the window and his bookshelves.
“Mud was flung, as you can imagine. In anger and in every direction. Naturally, the whole thing was hushed up; the theft glossed over. The keepers of law and order certainly knew nothing of it. My grandfather hated his family being the subject of rumourmongering, even more than I. And doubly, I imagine, if there was a hint he was being cuckolded, though theirs wasn’t a love match.
Twelve hours later, Grandmama’s death was attributed to a stray shotgun bullet, nothing but a tragic accident and never spoken of again. ”
As the room fell silent, Mickey marvelled at the story. These nobles were made of something else, he thought, picturing a bloodless duke calmly ordering that his wife’s murder never be mentioned again in order to protect the family name. He’d not heard anything like it. Poor, poor woman.
Frowning, Kit Angel was the first to speak, addressing Fitzsimmons.
“Earlier, you mentioned the current Marquess of Talybridge? Why? Was he at the party?”
Fitzsimmons shrugged. “Probably. He would have been twenty or so at the time. But his father certainly was. Until that dreadful weekend, the old marquess and my grandfather were great chums.”
“And now the parure has appeared around his betrothed’s neck,” mused Rossingley. “Gadzooks. It sounds like a hell of a weekend bash. When did we all become so staid?”
“I, for one, enjoy staid,” Ashington responded tartly.
“Needless to say, my grandfather never hosted guests at Ashington again. In fact, he became rather a hermit and died not that many years after. My father always said appearances and upholding the Ashington title meant everything to him. Which is why no one, including my father, ever spoke of the scandal beyond the walls of Ashington.”
“And explains why this story never reached my ears.” Rossingley nodded. “The family has hushed it up splendidly.”
Briefly, Ashington paused patrolling the room to exchange grim, guarded looks with Fitzsimmons.
“Indeed. And I trust no one here will speak of it.” Fitzsimmons voice was stern. “We’d have preferred this unedifying tale to have stayed tucked away in the closet, never to see the light of day again.”
“And it would,” Ashington’s pacing started anew, “If that blasted girl hadn’t been festooned in our priceless family jewels.”
“Regrettably,” Rossingley observed with a sigh, “There is something about a closet that makes one’s family skeletons so terribly restless.”
“How can you be certain the parure is one and the same?” queried Tommy, a question Mickey had thought of himself but building up the courage to ask. “I accept it was striking—I’ve never seen jewellery quite like it, but—”
“Because,” the duke interrupted, “for the last five years, every time I look up from my desk, I come face to face with a bloody picture of it!”
Seven pairs of eyes trod a trajectory from Ashington’s sturdy oak desk, positioned under the study window, to the panelled wall opposite, adorned with a solitary oil painting. Mickey blinked rapidly.
From her gilt-framed canvas, the former Duchess of Ashington gazed imperiously down at him as if sensing he didn’t belong.
Mickey thought her handsome rather than beautiful.
Her ebony hair was swept in an artful coiffure; her gloved hand clutched a lorgnette, no doubt useful for magnifying scandal sheets.
No smile graced her lips, perhaps due to the strain of holding the entire Ashington ancestry in place under the weight of a bergère hat that could double as a small carriage.
Pinned to Grandmama’s aristocratic ears and hanging like a noose around her stately neck glittered the marvellous Ashington parure.
“Um…I…goodness. I think that…” Willoughby trailed off, perhaps feeling the effects of that quelling gaze.
“Miss Amelia Chesterton wore it better?” suggested the duke kindly. “We are of an accord. Though still revered as a society beauty, the duchess became somewhat fearsome in her latter years, did she not?”
“Ah…possibly.” Turning crimson, Willoughby sounded on the verge of tears. “What I was going to say was, yes, the necklace and earbobs do appear to be the same. I could draw Miss Amelia’s swanlike neck and her tiny, shell-like ears in my sleep.”
“Could…could it be possible that there is more than one parure in existence?” suggested Rollo, rolling his eyes at his teary twin.