Lady of Sin (21 page)

Bianca brushed the admonishment aside. “Just as well, for Mr. Knightridge must attend if he can. He was important to the happiness that will be celebrated.”

Nathaniel smiled noncomittedly. He was handling the awkwardness with aplomb, but Charlotte could tell that he was alert to Laclere’s increasingly suspicious demeanor.

“All the same, we should excuse ourselves,” Vergil said. “Although I am wondering if the meeting was already well concluded when we intruded.” He gave Nathaniel a deep look on the last sentence that made Charlotte’s caution prickle. She saw the big brother in him, thinking that a private chat with this man was in order.

Bianca still had not picked up the cue. “You are making plans regarding the petitions?”

“I trust that a petition came up at some point in the visit,” Vergil said dryly. “Correct, Knightridge?”

Charlotte wanted to die. “Indeed one did,” she said. “Mr. Knightridge is proving to be a great help in the cause.”

Bianca beamed. “I always knew that the two of you would find common ground in something.”

“Yes, we have discovered we think alike in one small area,” Nathaniel agreed.

Charlotte wanted to hit him.

“Indeed,” Vergil muttered. He turned his attention on her. She guessed he was looking for indications that she had not been importuned by this man whom she did not like.

Short of explaining everything, there was no way to reassure him. Nor did she feel an obligation to do so. She was a grown woman and her brother should not force his way into her house on a whim.

Fortunately, Nathaniel decided to make his exit. He took his leave of the others, and then of her. “We can continue our discussions another time, Lady M.” His quick, deep gaze made it clear how hot those discussions would be.

As soon as he was gone, Vergil turned to Bianca. “I told you it could wait until calling hours. I also said that Pen might want to send the news herself.” His palpable ill ease made his tone sharp.

The scold took Bianca aback. Suddenly confused, she looked at Charlotte. She glanced at her husband’s stony countenance. She turned once more to Charlotte.

Charlotte watched the clouds part and a beam of illumination stream through. Bianca’s eyes turned very shrewd. She examined Charlotte closely, her scrutiny pausing on every wrinkle in her skirt and every mussed tendril in her hair.

A little smile broke, one that only another woman would understand.

“Shall we take our leave now?” Vergil demanded. “I am sure that Pen will let you know all the particulars, Charl.”

Vergil hauled Bianca away. Bianca looked back and cast Charlotte another womanly smile.

“Damned embarrassing,” Charlotte heard Vergil mutter.

“I told you,” Bianca muttered back. “I saw it at Laclere Park.”

“It makes no sense. They have never liked each other.”

Their whispers died away. The door closed behind them.

Charlotte returned to her chair and sat in a sated stupor for a long time. Eventually she remembered why she had entered the library this morning.

She rose and moved a chair to the pedestal table and opened the drawer again. She sorted the letters by date and began reading them.

At noon, she came to a flurry of correspondence between Philip and his tutor. The letters had been exchanged almost seven years ago, not long before she became engaged.

At five minutes past noon, some veiled allusions in the letters began making sense to her. A pattern emerged. Her instincts comprehended first and reacted with dread.

By ten minutes after noon she was staring sightlessly at those letters, now spread out on the table.

Shock immobilized her. Her soul screamed with denial. Her heart burned like it had received a raw cut.

She would never forgive Nathaniel Knightridge for starting his horrible investigation.

Never.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

I
remember it,” Williamson said. “It was hard to get her out. The clothing was sodden, but she was not yet. Had we been quicker . . . Well, accidents happen. It is always a sad duty, but common enough. She was a striking young woman, however, and looked to be of good birth, so she was one I remembered.”

“Her identity remained unknown?” Nathaniel asked.

“Nothing on her to send us looking for family. No one who saw her pulled out recognized her.”

Nathaniel had left Charlotte’s house the day before triumphant, sated, and of clear resolve. He intended to finish with the Finley matter as quickly as he could, but while he did he would no longer allow Charlotte to avoid him.

If their only common ground would be pleasure and passion, so be it. He would not relinquish that. He could not.

He had thrown himself into his investigation the last two days. With any luck he would lay the whole matter to rest in the most benign way. Even if the answers were bad ones, he had hopes they could not destroy the unmistakable hunger he and Charlotte felt for each other.

Whether anything more could survive, he did not know. An impasse had been reached on that score. Only settling the “much that divided them” would ever resolve it, however.

Focused now, ruthlessly so, yesterday he had set in motion some inquiries to learn the name of the tutor who had accompanied Mardenford on the grand tour. Today he had sought information on the death of Harry’s mother.

The Metropolitan Police kept records like the good English institution it was. Although many members of that brotherhood did not like Nathaniel much, due to his defenses, a few of the inspectors had become his friends. By midafternoon he had the name of the constables who had helped drag a dead foreign woman from the Thames near the Salisbury Stairs four years ago.

He had found Williamson on duty at his post near Covent Garden. Williamson was an average-sized man, of placid appearance overall but with very intelligent eyes.

“It was kind of you to record it as an accident, so she could have a decent burial.”

Williamson’s mouth flattened into a hard line. “I do not falsify my reports, sir. She fell in. The evidence indicated as much.”

“Did people see that?”

“None we talked to. She wasn’t the first dead body fished out of the river, though. We get to know the difference. Could be she was a suicide, but I doubt it.”

“Why do you doubt it?”

“Wearing expensive clothes, wasn’t she? Not normal. Ones who do themselves in don’t want their best ruined. Usually they weight themselves too. Nor do they have gold pinned to their petticoats. This one did. Part of a chain, about as long as my finger. The links were found by the surgeon when she was delivered to him. It was used to pay for her burial, as I heard it.”

“Perhaps that was why she wore it. To pay for her burial.”

“Foreign woman, she was, from her face and clothes. What was the chance she knew it would matter? If you ask me, and you have, that woman fell in the river.”

Nathaniel turned their exchange over in his mind while he returned to his chambers. Williamson’s conviction that it had not been suicide made some sense. Would she bring the boy with her if she planned that? She had to know he would be left adrift in the city afterward.

She had put Harry at a spot nearby, and told him to wait, however. If she had not wanted him to see her jump, what was the purpose of bringing him at all?

The most obvious answer only heralded more trouble. Nor, he suspected, could it ever be proven.

Harry’s mother had not gone to the river to kill herself. She had dressed in her best garments, and taken the boy, in order to meet someone. Someone to whom she had been writing for nearly a year, with no response. Someone whom she had journeyed to London to confront.

She had left the boy close by so that he could either be seen or fetched once that meeting began.

He saw it all play out. A woman in a dark, expensive dress meeting a man on the bank of the Thames. A quest for privacy, perhaps on the stairs near where her body had been found. Only she had received coldness, not welcome. Rejection, not acceptance.

Did she threaten him? Did she say she would let the world know?

Whatever had been said, she had not left the river’s edge alive. Perhaps in a fit of despair at the results of that meeting she really had jumped to her death. Or perhaps she had fallen by accident.

There was another possibility, one that the Old Bailey lawyer in Nathaniel could not ignore.

She may have been pushed.

The letter did not arrive in his chambers by the post late that afternoon. Instead it was delivered by a footman whom Nathaniel recognized as one from Charlotte’s house.

“I will be at Albany at ten. Please remove Jacobs,” the note read.

Her message surprised him on several counts. Although he had been more than bold at her house, he did not expect her to return the favor and match his precipitous demands for passion with her own. Furthermore, her visiting him was potentially ruinous in ways his visit was not.

Finally, her abrupt note implied he had not established mastery of this affair quite the way his pride had thought upon leaving victorious yesterday morning.

He gave Jacobs leave to visit his sister in Middlesex for the night, then waited with distracting impatience for Charlotte. He left the door ajar so she would not need to stand outside even for one indiscreet moment.

The clock’s chimes had not yet finished when she arrived. He had been waiting so hard, so completely, that he sensed her enter despite her silence. He shut his eyes, astonished by how thoroughly her presence entered him as well as the apartment.

He opened them to see her standing in the sitting room where he sat. Dressed in black, as if in mourning, she wore a veil that obscured her face. If anyone had seen her on the walk, that person would have observed no more than the shadows shifting in the night.

He rose to go to her. She held up a hand, stopping him. She set down her black parasol, then lifted her veil.

Her appearance stunned him. She might have truly arrived from a funeral, she looked so wan. Her eyes showed no light, but only dull distant thoughts. Her face had turned drawn and tired.

He went to her anyway and embraced her with concern. She did not soften against him. She seemed to stiffen a little, as if his hold hurt her.

“You are unwell,” he said.

She extricated herself and stepped back. She regarded him with a cool expression, but her eyes glistened now.

“I am not unwell, but I am sick,” she said. “You had to know, damn you. Well, now I am the one who knows, and I do not think I can survive the knowing.”

“What are you saying, darling?”

Her expression folded into one of distraught grief.

“Nathaniel, it was not James who had that youthful liaison in Spain. It was Philip.”

She had arranged this assignation in a fit of mindless fury. She had come here to berate him, to scream at him like a madwoman.

Instead, saying the words sapped her strength. She broke and tears poured out, even though she made no sound.

Strong arms surrounded her. That made it worse. She fought the desolation, and him. She pounded her fists against his chest even as she sobbed against his coat.

It felt good to be angry. To hit him. The hours since reading those letters had been horrible. Frightening. She had felt dead all afternoon. Then, at night, the truth had begun slashing the picture of her life to shreds. The Charlotte she knew had been cut to pieces too.

She had not been able to accommodate it. Her mind refused. She had never known such confusion before. Thoughts jumbling, emotions careening, she thought she would die if she did not release the building shock and resentment.

There was only one person with whom she dared do that. Only one to whom she could confide and speak. The same one whom she wanted to thrash.

She thrashed now. She pounded him as she cried. He let her, holding her closer even when her flailing fists hit his face. She truly lost control of her senses and went mad for a moment.

Then it passed. Nothing remained in her. No tears and no thoughts. She rested her face on his coat, tired and numb.

She lifted her head. His expression was so concerned, so gentle, that her heart twisted. She hated him.
Hated
him. But her heart refused to understand that.

“Did you know? You said you did not believe it was him, but did you really, all this time—”

“No. I swear. The possibility entered my head, but I was sure it was James,” he soothed.

“I wasn’t.” It was out before she realized the words had formed. She was too tired, too angry to lie to him. To herself. “Oh, I did not believe it, not really, but it was there, underneath all the other fear, like a dark, dangerous animal hiding in the cellar. My soul knew it was there. It knew just how dangerous you were to us. To
me.
I dared not contemplate all the reasons why.”

He let the accusation stand. He did not attempt to mollify her with reassurances. Of course not. Nathaniel Knightridge was a man of honor, damn him. A man of truth and justice, by heavens.

“Can you speak of it?” he asked. “Will you tell me why you think this? You may be wrong.”

“For once I wish I were.” She moved to the settee and dropped into her familiar spot. The agitation that had left her walking for hours, unable to remain still, mercifully retreated. The exhaustion and limpness that claimed her was almost welcomed.

Nathaniel stood nearby, watching her closely.

He reached over and found the pins on her hat. He slid them out, then lifted the hat away. Its veil fluttered on its path to a table.

The gesture touched her. It did not imply seduction, although it could have. It said she would stay even if she hated him, and he would take care of her.

Perhaps that was really why she had come. To bask in his aura of command and confidence. To remind herself that there was more to her life than the past.

“Now, tell me,” he said.

She explained the drawer and its letters. “They were private. I had never read them.”

“Nor had you destroyed them.”

“No.”

Why not?
She could not answer now, but she supposed she should someday. “I thought that perhaps, if something in Spain had transpired as Jenny’s story implied, there might be information in those letters that explained it away.”

His expression altered slightly. Mr. Knightridge, who could always spot her dissembling, knew he was hearing less than the truth.

He was good enough not to say so. “What was in the letters?”

“They were ordinary. Quite dull. Philip was not famed for his skill at the pen. There was nothing of interest from the years right after the grand tour. Nothing to raise concern or suspicion. Later, however—”

She faltered. She wanted to slide over the painful parts. The parts touching on
her
.

Except it all touched her.

“I found a series of letters from his old tutor, written very near the time Philip began courting me. At first they appeared dull too, as if Philip had written asking for news of a mutual friend. Then it became clear the tutor was making inquiries. Not in England. Finally a letter informed Philip that he had received confirmation that she was dead, lost in the war. That was what caught my eye. We had no war then, but Spain did.”

“Did the letter say ‘she’?”

“Yes. I might never have read those letters closely but for that one ‘she.’ ” Seeing that word as she skimmed had made her head ring. “At the end, after writing of common things, his garden and a sermon he was preparing, the tutor closed with another reference. ‘Be assured that the legality of the alliance is now an irrelevant question. There is no need to pursue that.’ ”

A question entered Nathaniel’s eyes. She did not wait for him to ask it.

“I am quoting exactly. He used the word ‘legality.’ ” Desolation flooded her again. “An alliance with a woman that had legal implications. Tell me there is another besides marriage, Nathaniel. I very much want to hear that is so.”

He stepped closer and rested his palm on her cheek in comfort.

She grasped at composure. His touch helped. It should have repulsed her, not given solace. She had spent all day slicing him to ribbons with scathing accusations in her mind, but here she was drinking his sympathy instead of laying blame at his feet.

“Have you told anyone else?”

His concern remained palpable and his voice quiet, but she could tell his mind was working.

“I called on Bianca today, intending to confide, but found I could not speak of it. What would I say? I wanted desperately to share my shock with her or Pen, but if I voiced one word I would start raving. The implications are too shameful.”

“It is not shameful. It was long ago. He thought her dead. If he returned to England without her, he must have thought he lost her to the war even before he left Spain.”

“But she wasn’t dead, so
my marriage was not legal
.” Her voice broke as she spelled it out. She looked at her hands, knotted on her lap, and grit her teeth. “That is not the worst of it, however. I feel stupid and angry. I am unsure of every memory I ever had. It is as if I lived a lie every day of those three years.”