The Duke (2 page)

Evenly, Coldfell held his gaze, then nodded as though satisfied, but of course he had already known.

“Ah, Robert,” he said heavily after a long moment, “it is so strange, the way they found her. She went out to our pond every day to sketch the swans. How could she have slipped? Perhaps my brain is muddled with grief, but it makes no sense to me.”

“She could never slip,” he said vehemently. “She was graceful... so graceful.”

Coldfell was taken aback by his ferocity. This was going to be easier than he’d hoped.

“Did your servants report anything strange that day, my lord, if I may presume to ask?” pursued the duke.

“Nothing.”

“Did anyone see anything? Hear anything? She was in earshot of the house. Could they not hear her cries for help?”

“Perhaps she had no time to cry out before she fell beneath the water.”

Hawkscliffe turned away again, his firm mouth grimly pursed. “My lord, I have the blackest suspicions.”

Coldfell paused, watching him. “I wish that I could put your mind at ease, but I’m afraid that I, too, am haunted by severe doubts.”

Hawkscliffe turned and stared penetratingly at him. His dark eyes glowed like hellfire. “Go on.”

“It doesn’t add up. There was no blood on the rock where they said she... struck her head. What am I to do? I am an old man. These sore limbs are weak. I haven’t the strength,” he said slowly, emphatically, “to do what a husband should.”

“I do,” vowed Hawkscliffe.

The earl felt his dry soul thrill to the resolve in the fiery young man’s eyes.

“Whom do you suspect?” Hawkscliffe asked in tautly leashed savagery.

Coldfell had never seen the man look so wild and fierce. He had to hide his glee. All he need do was utter the name, provide a target for all that churning wrath, then Hawkscliffe would duel and the viper who had turned on him would be struck down. He was not above playing Lucy’s devotees against each other to save himself and his sweet, flawed daughter, Juliet. What else could he do? He was nearly seventy, a little weaker every day. Dolph was in his prime, a brutally skilled hunter who had been blooded at the tender age of nine with his first stag.

The tremor that moved through his limbs was real. “May God forgive me,” Coldfell said under his breath with a look of distress.

“Whom, Coldfell? Do you know something? I know this was no accident, even if the coroner said it was. You and I are not fools,” he said hotly. “She was in that pond for four days before they found her. There is no telling what else might have been done to her before she was killed.”

“I see our fears run a similar course, Robert. To think that she might have been... violated. Oh, God.” He leaned on Hawkscliffe, who steadied him. “It’s almost worse than her death itself.”

Hawkscliffe’s chiseled jaw tautened. “My lord, I beg of you. Tell me what you know.”

“I don’t
know,
Robert. I only suspect. Lucy said to me once—”

“Yes?”

Coldfell paused. So hungry for someone to punish, someone to blame, he thought, passing a shrewd glance over Robert’s face, assessing his features like an artist preparing to sketch his portrait. It was the hard, noble face of a warrior. His raven hair flowed back richly from his broad forehead; beneath his wide, flared, charcoal black eyebrows, his piercing eyes burned with iron will; his hooked nose was aquiline, hawklike, his mouth, firm and clamped, yet there was a sensitivity about his lips that captivated women.

“She said there was a man who... frightened her.”

“Who was he?” Hawkscliffe demanded.

Coldfell drew a breath and looked away, knowing he was handing down a death sentence.

He was glad of it.

“My nephew, Your Grace,” he said, cool as a consummate Italian. “My heir, Dolph Breckinridge.”

“
Oranges
here! Penny apiece, sir, thank you and good day! Who’s next?”

In the hustle and bustle of a gray day in the City, she was as out of place as the bright, sweet oranges she sold on the hectic corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, handing them out like small suns to the dark-clad working gentlemen who gusted by between the worlds of government and finance—Westminster and the City, respectively. Bank clerks and barristers, city scrubs, journalists, hacks, tailors, respectable shopkeepers—even a passing deacon who was hurrying toward
St. Paul
’s stopped in his tracks at the sight of her, then, like the rest, was irresistibly lured.

If Miss Belinda Hamilton at all divined that it was some indescribable quality in herself that brought male foot traffic to a halt, she showed no sign of it, all businesslike efficiency, counting out change with her cold-reddened fingers poking through ragged gloves, determined, in all, to take her coming down in the world with a true lady’s uncomplaining grace.

A few months ago, she had been preparing giggling debutantes for their entrance into Society at Mrs. Hall’s Academy for Young Ladies; now, here she was, tenaciously clinging to the outermost rim of respectability by pride alone.

A wheat blond tendril of her hair blew against her rosy cheek as she looked up at her next customer and gave him his change with a fresh smile, weary but cheerful.

“
Oranges
, here! Who’s next, please?”

One of her regulars stepped to the fore, a portly barrister from one of the nearby Inns of Court. His black robes billowed and he sent her a chagrined smile as he clamped his legal wig atop his beefy head to keep the thing from blowing away. His gaze skipped down the length of her.

Bel looked away, picking out a large bright orange for him. She gave it a polish with the end of her apron, then leashed her large pride by sheer dint of will and put out her hand expectantly. “A copper, sir,” she sighed.

The barrister hesitated, then placed in her hand, not a coin, but a paper bank note that almost blew away. Bel knit her brow and looked at it more closely.
Twenty pounds!
She suppressed an appalled gasp and pressed the note back into his sweaty palm, revolted, though it represented a sum equal to almost three months’ worth of this work. “No, sir.
No.”

“No?” he asked, with a glow in his small eyes. “Do but consider it, my dear.”

“Sir, you insult me,” she said, dealing him a frosty set-down like a baroness in a drawing room instead of a desperate and nigh-penniless girl alone on the streets of the great city.

“I’ll double it,” he whispered, leaning closer.

She lifted her chin. “I am not for sale.”

At her grand, withering stare, his heavy-jowled face turned beet red. He fled in embarrassment, his wig slipping askew. Bel shuddered slightly, scratched her forehead to gather her ruffled composure, then turned to deal hurriedly with the rest of her customers. It hadn’t taken long to realize that not all of them wished to buy oranges, a fact she politely allowed herself to ignore.

After her last customer had gone, she bent down over her large oval basket and began straightening up her oranges in tidy rows.

“Hey, ye wee bit o‘ muslin!” yelled one of the rough-faced costermongers across the street. “We ain’t gonna tolerate you on our corner much longer, girly. We got mouths ta feed. You’re runnin’ us outta shop!”

“Aye, why don’t you go make yer money on yer back?” yelled his companion. “Why hawk oranges when you can get more sellin‘ your pretty
peaches!”

They roared like drunken Huns at their own hilarity.

“Shut up, you cretins!” she belted back in a rough-and-tumble tone that would have shocked her girls at Mrs. Hall’s. But really, rudeness was all that got through to such low, vulgar creatures. They interpreted good manners as weakness or cowardice—and it was imperative in her circumstances not to show fear.

“You don’t belong out here, Miss Prissy. Just a matter o‘ time till you’re some rich man’s ladybird.”

“I am a gentleman’s daughter!”

“Aye, you look like it in those rags.”

They guffawed and she glanced around in belated, ladylike embarrassment just in time to see little Tommy, the street sweep, nearly get run over by a hackney coach. His brother, Andrew, yanked him back by the scruff of the neck in the nick of time. Gasping at the close call, Bel stifled her exasperation.

“Andy! Tommy!” she called.

“Hallo, Miss Bel!” The roguish, underfed pair waved.

She beckoned them over. They nearly plunged out under the wheels of a dray cart, and when they reached her side of the street safely she scolded them to be more careful, then gave them each a few pennies and an orange. With a troubled countenance, she watched the two ragged youngsters scramble back to their post, Tommy peeling his orange while Andrew plied all his merry charm trying to persuade a passing gentleman in a top hat to let him sweep the crossing before him.

She had thought her lot was bad until she discovered these children. They were an inspiration to her, with their high hearts and happy-go-lucky spirits in spite of the hellish conditions they endured. The streets were crawling with them—homeless, shoeless, half-naked, and starved. She had only become aware of the true, horrifying scale of the problem one frigid night in January, when snow had covered
London
in the greatest blizzard in memory. While the rich had held a winter festival on the frozen
Thames
, she had gone looking for Andrew and Tommy with the intent of bringing them into her single-room lodgings in a ramshackle City tenement, at least to give them a roof over their heads. Searching everywhere, she had been at last directed by a surly girl to a dark building that looked like a deserted warehouse. Upon stepping inside, she had raised her lantern and beheld a mass of shivering children huddled together. There must have been seventy of them.

This was a flash house, Andrew had explained when she found him there. The youngster hadn’t needed to tell her what her adult reason instantly grasped—here, the boys were apprenticed as thieves, the girls as prostitutes. It had been the most shocking and horrible moment of her twenty-three years. Never in all her days as a refined country gentlewoman of Oxfordshire had she ever imagined such a nightmare.

The worst part of it was how little she could do to help. She didn’t have the arrogance to tell them not to steal when they were starving. The greater crime was the heartless penal code that would hang any child over seven for a theft of five paltry shillings. All she could do besides lend a hand at the relief societies was to give the little wretches affection, mind them as best she could, and nag them to go to church.

She saw Tommy drop a piece of his orange on the ground and quickly pick it up, brush it off with his grubby fingers, and pop it into his mouth. She heaved a sigh and turned away just as a flashy, all-too-familiar phaeton turned the corner and began rolling toward her.

Her face paled. Her empty stomach clenched and made a knot. She quickly bent down and heaved her basket up into her arms as the thunder of the horses’ hooves grew louder.

God, please don’t let him see me.

As she strained with the basket and began hurrying away, the sleek phaeton slowed to a halt alongside her, traces jingling. She clamped her jaw, realizing it would gratify her tormentor too much if she fled. Better to stand and hold her ground, unpleasant as their long war was. Turning slowly, she braced herself for battle as the flamboyantly dressed Sir Dolph Breckinridge leaped down from his equipage, his requisite cheroot dangling from the side of his mouth.

Abandoning his phaeton to his groom—who had a black eye—he swaggered toward her. He was tall, tanned, and sinewy, with short-cropped sandy hair. Grinning, the glowing-tipped cheroot clamped between his wolfish white teeth, he was the very picture of what she had taught her girls at Mrs. Hall’s to fear as A Nasty Man.

“Don’t come near me with that thing,” she warned.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered—today it amused him to obey her.

He tossed the cheroot carelessly onto the pavement and crushed it under one of his expensive champagne-polished boots, then stalked her slowly—just as he had for the past eight months. Since the early autumn of last year, Sir Dolph had been utterly, destructively obsessed with her. She had no idea why. Perhaps it was merely his nature to fix upon one object until he had captured or destroyed it. She only knew one thing for certain: Everything that had befallen her was his fault.

With a cold expression she turned away and walked on, carrying her basket of oranges. She could smell him coming after her. He always wore too much cologne.

“Going somewhere, my heart?”

Bel merely sent him a withering glare and turned to the passersby. “
Oranges
, here!”

His dashing smile widened, revealing his chipped tooth, the result of one of his countless brawls, as was his off-center nose.

Dolph was proud of his battle scars. Possessed of no sense of decorum whatsoever, he was wont to start pulling off his clothes at the slightest provocation in order to give anyone he met the chance to stand in awe of his illustrious scars. He was especially proud of the one that slanted across his muscled chest where a bear had once swiped him during a hunting trip in the
Alps
. Bel had seen the scar, God knew. He had shown it to her the first night they’d met, to her astonished humiliation, considering that they had been at a Hunt Ball. She only wished the bear had been more determined.