A Matter of Grave Concern (26 page)

“No, Your Grace. I’m here about your son, as I told your butler at the door.”

She waved her hand dismissively. “Lucien is visiting a friend in the country. He isn’t even in town.”

“In the country?” she repeated, surprised by this statement.

“Yes. He has been gone for several weeks.”

Apparently, his mother didn’t know, didn’t even suspect, what Max was doing. But of course, given how she felt about Madeline, he wouldn’t be foolish enough to tell her. Otherwise, she would have done all she could to stop him.

Now Abby was about to divulge the big secret. If he didn’t need help, he would probably never speak to her again. But they had no reason to remain in touch, anyway. And the possibility—the strong possibility—that he was in danger forced her hand.

“I’m afraid that isn’t true, Your Grace.”

The dowager’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “
Excuse me?
”

Abby cleared her throat and stood. “I regret to inform you that your son is actually in Wapping and has been there some time.”

“How do you know that?” she asked. “How is it that you know Lucien at all? Don’t tell me you’re from there—that you’re one of his little . . . diversions—and you dare come here, to this house!”

Abby wasn’t sure whether she could honestly answer that she wasn’t one of Max’s diversions. Given the difference in their social status, she was no one who could expect him to take her seriously. But she had not been working as a prostitute. And she had given her heart as well as her body.

As she explained how they met, the dowager stepped closer. “He went after that . . . that trollop?” she cried.

“Because he feared for her safety, Your Grace. I’m sure he felt he had no choice.”

“But to risk his own life in the process? A life worth infinitely more than the one he is trying to save?”

Abby said nothing. She valued Max’s life more than any other, too, but she couldn’t approve of how careless his mother seemed to be of Madeline’s safety. Madeline was her husband’s bastard child, which would rankle—Abby had to admit it—but Madeline had no culpability in her conception. She deserved to live as much as anyone, even a member of the aristocracy.

“What I am here to convey is that . . . I believe Jack Hurtsill has figured out your son is there under false pretenses,” Abby said, “and Jack is a very dangerous man.”

As soon as Madeline explained why she was so concerned, the color drained from the dowager’s face, but she flew into action—calling for her brougham to be prepared, for her coachmen and footmen to be armed, for someone to send a message to the home secretary to get some of his bobbies over to St. Catherine’s as soon as possible.

“I have also sent for the police,” Abby said. “I just thought . . . I thought you might like to be notified as well.” She had paid the dowager a visit for her own peace of mind—because she knew, if anyone would provide the help Max, or Lucien, needed, it would be his powerful family.

“Indeed. I will not let that bastard cost me my only son.”

Abby said nothing to that—but she winced, for Madeline’s sake. Then the butler reappeared.

“All is ready,” he informed the dowager. “Shall I send them off?”

“Not without me,” she replied.

Although the butler tried, as diplomatically as possible, to talk her out of going—by telling her how dangerous it was and that His Grace would not want her to put herself at risk—she would have none of it.

“That’s my son!” she shouted and barely gave the maid who brought her cloak time to put it around her shoulders before she marched out of the house.

Abby dared not presume that she—a mere messenger as far as Max’s mother was concerned—would be included in this rescue party. And she wasn’t. The dowager duchess didn’t so much as turn back to thank her. Completely devoted to her task, she climbed into her coach and, the moment the door closed, they started off.

Abby stood at the entrance and watched them go, feeling a strange mixture of emotions. Had she done enough?

Or was it already too late?

The butler stood next to her. “I’ll have someone take you home,” he said after they had gone.

For this welcome kindness, she managed a polite smile.

Max staggered toward the light. Every few minutes, his vision would dim and he would almost black out. But, with effort, he was able to continue on. Although he had never traveled a distance that felt even half as long as the fifty feet to the warehouse office, that light acted as a beacon. Hobbs was there; he could hear the poor man moaning.

“I’m . . . coming,” Max gasped. Although he was tempted, he couldn’t simply launch himself out onto the wharf and shout for help. There was no telling what might happen if he did. With so much valuable inventory tempting the desperate individuals who frequented the docks after dark to rob him, chances were they wouldn’t survive. First, he had to arm himself with the pistol Hobbs kept in his desk. At least then he would have some way to defend himself and his clerk when they sallied forth, hopefully together.

Once Max finally reached the office and saw Hobbs’s reaction to the way he looked, he knew he wasn’t in any better shape than his poor clerk. Hobbs had managed to light the lamp but couldn’t do much else. Briefly closing his eyes, he muttered a curse and shook his head.

“Your Grace . . .” he started, but Max cut him off before he could put any more effort into speaking. At this point, only one thing mattered—and that was the one thing he could use to protect them until they could get help.

“Where’s the . . . where’s the pistol?” he asked.

“I tried to . . . to get it out . . . when they came. But . . . there were too many of them. I knew . . . it would wind up costing me my life instead, so—”

“Where?” Max couldn’t wait for a long explanation, and he couldn’t string a whole sentence together, not again.

A bloodied Hobbs motioned to the desk drawer. From what Max could see, Hobbs had been stabbed in the throat. He kept gripping it as if he could staunch the blood. Max was doing the same with his chest.

As Max reached for the drawer, he swayed on his feet. He feared he would not be able to retain consciousness this time—that he would crumble to the ground and that would be the end of them both.

But the sound of the doors sliding open kept him fighting, kept him pushing himself beyond what he thought he could do, especially when he heard Jack’s voice.

Chapter 28

Abby knew her father would want her to stay well away from St. Catherine’s. He would tell her she had done all she could by sending for the police and getting the dowager, that whatever was going to happen would happen. But Abby wasn’t willing to accept that. Although it took some convincing, she managed to talk the stable hand, who the butler had employed to drive her home, into taking her halfway to St. Catherine’s. Then she paid a cabby to take her the rest of the way.

What if the dowager’s coachman had never been to the docks and didn’t know quite where to find the warehouse? Or Sir Robert Peel’s bobbies couldn’t locate Jack to arrest him for Tom’s murder?

Jack needed to be in custody. Until he was, Max wouldn’t be safe. At the least, Abby felt she could guide whoever needed help to the warehouse, if she came upon them before arriving herself. Or she could show the police Bill’s house or even Emmett’s garret, should that be necessary.

By the time she arrived, however, she realized that she couldn’t affect the outcome of what had just transpired. Fortunately, the police had found the warehouse. So had the dowager. But it appeared as if they were too late to help Max. Abby heard a gaggle of onlookers talking about the shots that had rung out only moments before several bobbies came rushing onto the scene. She could even smell the gunpowder—and when she went inside, she could see Max lying on the ground at the entrance to the office, covered in blood. His mother was leaning over him, weeping.

“God, no,” the dowager wailed. “No, not him!”

Was Max dead? He couldn’t be . . .

Tears sprang to Abby’s eyes. Max’s clerk, Mr. Hawley, didn’t look much better. He was also in the office, but he was groaning and moving and attempting to tell them what happened. Several men were in a hurry to carry him out and load him into a wagon so they could take him to the closest hospital, but the way they shifted Max to one side suggested that they thought he was beyond help—and the dowager assumed they were right, because she did nothing to stop them.

Unable to hold back, Abby pressed through the tight knot of people surrounding Max to see him for herself. She couldn’t accept what had happened, couldn’t conceive of the fact that the man she loved, a man so full of life, was really gone.

The dowager glanced up at the disruption Abby caused, but her eyes were so glazed with pain she didn’t react.

Praying that Max’s pale, inert body was not as lifeless as it seemed, Abby pressed her fingers to his carotid artery to search for a pulse. She knew exactly where she would find it; she had sat in on enough anatomy lectures to be able to locate it with her eyes closed.

At first she thought she had to be imagining what she felt—that her heart just wouldn’t accept the truth. Max
looked
dead. Everyone thought he
was
dead. But, to her surprise, she found a faint heartbeat.

“He’s alive!” she announced. “Get out of the way. Hurry, we need to get help—he doesn’t have much time.”

The dowager reared back and gaped at her. The look in her eye was so fierce Abby thought she might fly into hysterics. But she didn’t. She scrambled to get out of the way. “Yes, take him to the hospital!” she ordered. “Take him now!”

Abby willed Max to be strong as she watched four men carry him to the wagon outside and lay him inside next to Mr. Hawley.

Be strong, my love. Be strong
, she prayed. Then she was again forgotten as everyone rushed off, except the bobbies that remained. It was only then that she realized Max and Mr. Hawley weren’t the only ones who were hurt. Jack had been shot. Bill, Emmett and some tall, bony man she didn’t recognize, were in custody.

“What happened?” she asked Bill.

He seemed dazed as he stared at his brother—too shocked to react with the appropriate anger or sadness. “Somehow he dragged himself into the office and got a pistol.”

“
Who?
” Abby pressed.

“Max! The bastard shot Jack dead just before the police arrived.”

Abby bent to feel Jack’s carotid artery. If Max could survive what he had been through, Jack could, too, she thought. But she didn’t feel so much as a slight flutter. “He’s dead.”

Wiping his blood on her dress, she backed away and eyed each of the other members of the London Supply Company.

“Who ever thought it would come to this,” Emmett mumbled.

“The night doesn’t have to be a complete loss,” Abby said.

They seemed surprised at her words.

“What do you mean?” Emmett asked.

“He’ll make a nice dissection specimen. I’ll pay you fifteen guineas for his corpse.”

“
You’re
not going to dissect him!” Bill cried. “Nobody’s going to dissect him!”

Abby managed a small smile for her joke. “You don’t have to worry about us doing it at Aldersgate. They’ll take care of him at the College of Surgeons—make a public spectacle out of it, just like they did with William Burke. And they won’t pay you a farthing for the pleasure.”

“The rest of us haven’t done anything!” the tall man cried. “They should let us go.”

“Jack and Bill murdered Tom. I would say that’s something.”

“I wasn’t even there,” the same man said.

“And you know I wasn’t,” Emmett added.

Abby turned to the man she didn’t recognize. “Who are you?”

“No one,” one of the bobbies supplied. “Just a lowly undertaker who will be standing trial for trying to kill a duke.”

“We didn’t know who he was!” the man cried.

“Did
you
know?” Emmett asked her.

“Not until recently. Where’s Madeline?” she asked Bill. “Did Jack kill her? Is she dead?”

“Madeline left,” he said.

So he was sticking to the usual story. She focused on Emmett. “I thought maybe you were rethinking the course of your life.”

He scowled at her. “
What?
”

“If you had stayed away, maybe you wouldn’t have been involved.”

She had always sort of liked Emmett, but he didn’t seem to return the sentiment.

“You’re just another stupid woman,” he snapped, and a police officer led him away.

Abby let them go without further comment. The bobbie who had spoken to her was starting to remove Jack’s possessions from his body, which caught her attention. She saw him show a fellow officer the knife he took from Jack’s boot.

“That’s all he’s got?” the other man responded.

“Not quite.” The first bobbie drew Madeline’s locket from Jack’s pocket. “There’s this, too.”

Abby interrupted. “That’s mine,” she said and believed it was true. She had traded her brush, comb, dress and elephant for that necklace. She wasn’t about to let it get lost—or taken home to someone’s wife.

The second constable raised his eyebrows in question, but there was no one to refute her claim—and it obviously didn’t belong to Jack. “Go ahead and give it to her,” he said.

“What if she’s not telling the truth?” the first constable asked.

“Who’s going to say anything about it?” he replied. “If the duke lives, it’ll be because of her.”

He
had
to live, Abby thought. She couldn’t bear the thought that only a few minutes could have made the difference.

For the next two weeks, Lucien faded in and out of consciousness. He didn’t think he was going to live. He had never felt so weak in his life. But every time he slipped away, he came back again and grew more determined to keep fighting. He may have failed in what he had set out to do by becoming Max Wilder and going to Wapping. He hadn’t been able to find Madeline, let alone help her. But he would not let Big Jack take his life. Although he had been told, at various points in his recovery, that Jack was dead and the others arrested, Lucien felt as if “Max” still had something to prove.

During those times when he was lucid, he found his mother at his side. She hovered and worried and employed a nurse, who fed him soup whenever she could rouse him. The clinical atmosphere he had noted upon first opening his eyes, however, had been replaced by his own bedroom. So he knew he had been moved. He was more comfortable in his bed, but he wasn’t pleased by the change. He was pretty sure that, at the hospital, Abby had come to visit him at least once. He even feared that it was the fact that he had begun calling for her that his mother had closeted him away. Since those foggy, early memories of Abby holding his hand, right after what had occurred at the warehouse, he had found his fiancée at his side instead.

“Lucien?” His mother had noticed him stirring. “Can you eat? Are you feeling stronger?”

He was, for a change. It was no longer such a struggle just to open his eyes. And his stomach felt empty. “A meal would be welcome. Preferably something besides broth.”

“Thank God,” she responded, and he smelled her lavender perfume as she bent to kiss his forehead. “You’ve given me quite a scare, you know that, don’t you? I won’t quite forgive you for it, either. You didn’t have to go to Wapping. You nearly lost your life for nothing.”

She had to start on this already? “Not for nothing, Mother. For Madeline.”

Straightening, she propped her hands on her hips and glared down at him—those old familiar sparks in her eyes. “And did you find her?”

Leave it to his mother to strike at the heart of the matter—
his
heart, in hopes of finally beating it into submission. But he didn’t have the strength to argue, especially with someone as headstrong as she was. He didn’t regret what he had done. At least he had tried. He only wished he had befriended Madeline while he could have saved her.

“It’s time to quit blaming her for what Father did,” he said but moved right on, hoping she would let that subject go. “How’s Hobbs?”

“Recovering far quicker than you, I’m afraid. He’s actually on his feet, although not quite back at work.” They had told him before that Hobbs survived. It was one of the things that had kept him clinging tenaciously to life—that and the knowledge that Abby was somehow close.

“I’m glad to hear it.” He shifted to ease the ache in his back. “Where’s Hortense? She must be staying here with us.”

His mother frowned. “Don’t talk like that.”

“Like what?” he asked with a slight chuckle. “I can barely talk at all.”

“As if having her here is such an . . . imposition.”

“I’m supposed to awake eager for my coming nuptials?”

“Why not? And of course she’s staying here. Being the dutiful fiancée that she is, she came as soon as she learned you were hurt.”

“You mean she came as soon as you sent for her because I was calling for another woman,” he said dryly.

“You were delirious and obviously didn’t know who you really wanted.”

No. He definitely knew who he wanted. Duty didn’t change that. But he wouldn’t argue with her about Hortense. What was the point? He had made the commitment to marry his mother’s cousin many years ago—and he couldn’t go back on it now, not without compromising his honor and good name, and having it reflect poorly on his entire family.

“Food,” he reminded her. “And then I need to sleep.”

Although Abby periodically considered going to Herefordshire to visit her aunt, where she could lay low and, hopefully, mend her broken heart, she couldn’t bring herself to leave London, not while Lucien was in such a compromised state. She felt as if he might die if she did. She knew that didn’t make a lot of sense. She wasn’t even able to see him. But the fact that she wanted to be close, that she was thinking of him and praying for him constantly, just in case there was a God, held her in London all the same.

So she threw herself back into her old routine and waited for some word, to hopefully learn that he was fine and would go on with his life. Then she could, too, she told herself. But even though he had acted pleased to see her when he roused, briefly, during her hospital visits, she heard nothing from him. She was reduced to watching the obituaries, and breathing sigh after sigh of relief when she saw nothing in there about his passing.

After six weeks of waiting and wondering, she began to consider paying him a visit. She didn’t want to disrupt his life; she merely craved proof that he yet lived and was going to be as close to the man she had known as possible. And she wanted to deliver Madeline’s locket. That was the last of any business between them. One final meeting, the good-bye they had never received—that was all she asked.