Exasperating woman. Three days after the soirée, David Wakefield, the Shadow, was still trying to extract more meaning from his encounter with the woman he could not forget. He had seen her as soon as she entered the banquet hall, drifting along the wall. She’d vanished among the companions, but he’d seen Tolliver and guessed she was there to meet him.
After his own meeting with the daughter of the house, interrupted to expel the Earl of Selby, he’d gone upstairs more eagerly than he wished to examine, hoping their time apart might have affected her as it did him. The guarded look on her face, the stiff way she held herself, stopped him in his tracks.
And her voice. Calm. Devoid of emotion. As if that passionate night had never existed. Or as if it meant nothing to her. It didn’t escape him that he had given her his real name on that night, but he knew only her code name, Mist, and a few of the invented names she changed job by job.
Perhaps, while David had spent five months yearning for her, she had moved on, and his presence was an embarrassment. Surely his own cravings created the longing he imagined in her eyes when she first saw him.
He should be thinking about the coming meeting instead of mooning over a woman who had decisively rejected him. Lady Georgiana had hired him to find out who was blackmailing her friend, the courtesan Lily Diamond, and had given him the names of her most persistent admirers. And one name on the list was very familiar.
He frowned at the fire in the small hearth. The private parlour he had hired was small and shabby, but at least its size made it easy to heat. And it was neutral ground, which mattered. David hadn’t had a prolonged conversation with his expected guest in a decade and a half.
He must have been seventeen or eighteen on the last occasion, staying at Haverford Castle in Kent between the end of the school term and his first term at university. The Duke of Haverford’s son and heir, the Marquis of Aldridge, would have been twelve. The day had begun happily enough with the boy tagging along while David went out after small game with a gun. It had ended with David beaten and driven from the property.
Aldridge had tripped and knocked himself out, and Haverford, finding David leaning over his unconscious heir, had not waited for explanations.
Once the young marquis left school and entered Society, they met from time to time, usually when the Duchess of Haverford insisted on David coming to one of her entertainments. Her husband, the duke, was almost always engaged elsewhere, but her sons often attended. They paid their mother the courtesy of not being rude to her protégé, and he responded with the same polite reserve.
He was expecting Aldridge now. Older brother to one of the courtesan’s lovers. David’s despised father’s oldest legitimate son. His half-brother.
A knock on the door heralded Aldridge’s arrival. A maid showed him into the private parlour. He’d clearly been treating her to a display of his facile charm: she was dimpling, blushing, and preening.
David examined him as he gave the girl a coin “and a kiss for your trouble, my darling.” The beautiful child had grown into a handsome man. David had heard him described as ‘well-put together, and all over, if you know what I mean.’ The white-blonde hair of childhood had darkened to a guinea gold, and he had his mother’s hazel eyes under a thick arch of brow he and David had both inherited from their father.
Aldridge navigated the shoals of the marriage market with practised ease, holding the mothers and their daughters off but still not offending them, and carrying out a gentleman’s role in the ballroom with every evidence of enjoyment.
But his real success, by all accounts, was with bored widows and wives, where he performed in the bedroom with equal charm, and perhaps more pleasure. Society was littered with former lovers of the Merry Marquis, though he had the enviable ability to end an affair and retain the friendship.
Aldridge ushered the laughing maid out of the room and closed the door behind her, acknowledging David’s appraisal with a wry nod.
“Wakefield. You summoned me. I am here.”
David ignored the thread of irritation in the young aristocrat’s voice, and took a shot in the dark. Lord Jonathan was unlikely to be the blackmailer, Lady Georgiana thought, but was probably also being blackmailed. Would he have confided in Aldridge?
“I have some questions I wish to ask about the blackmail.”
Aldridge arched a brow, a trick they had both picked up from the duke. “Tolliver has engaged you?”
David hid his surprise at the spymaster’s name. “What is your brother paying blackmail for?”
Uninvited, Aldridge grabbed a chair and straddled it, resting his chin on his forearms. “Our brother,” he said, flatly.
“That won’t prevent me from turning him in if he is a traitor,” David said.
“He isn’t. He’s young. He’s an idiot. But he isn’t a traitor.” Aldridge met David’s eyes with an uncompromising glare of his own.
“Then you have nothing to lose by answering my questions.”
Aldridge held the glare for a long moment, then let his breath out with a huff and unfurled himself from the seat. David watched him pace, content to let silence do the job of convincing Aldridge to talk.
It worked.
“You have to understand, Wakefield. If he hears what Jon has done, His Grace will… I don’t know what precisely, but it won’t be pretty. You don’t know what he is like. When he loses his temper, anything can happen. And once he’s said something, he won’t go back, no matter what.”
“Oh, I know,” David said. “I do know.” For a moment, he was seventeen again, the duke screaming at him, the walking stick crashing on his shoulders and arms as he tried to protect his head. “But you haven’t explained to me why I should care what His Grace does to your brother.”
“Your brother, too,” Aldridge said again. “I don’t suppose you do care. Not about Jon, and not about me. And I daresay you’d do His Grace an ill turn if you could, and I would not lift a finger to stop you.”
David shook his head. Yes, he had resented the duke for years. But he refused to waste the energy any longer. “No. Though I wouldn’t cross the road to help him, either,” he said honestly.
“But you care about Mama,” Aldridge insisted. “You do. You would not tolerate her soirées otherwise.”
David said nothing. He was not going to discuss Her Grace with Aldridge. The son of privilege could never understand what David owed the woman who had rescued her husband’s bastard after his own mother died, saving him from the workhouse, if not from death. She had his lifelong devotion just for that, but she’d done so much more. She’d paid for his education and keep, found him his first job, protected him from her husband, and never ceased believing in him.
“Mama would be heartbroken if His Grace disowns Jon, or sends him away, or worse. And, truly, Wakefield, he hasn’t done what they will tell His Grace. He hasn’t. He’s just been a fool, and any normal father would cut his allowance and give him a job to do.”
“If what you say is true, he has nothing to fear. I’m only interested in finding the blackmailer, not in causing trouble for your brother.”
“Our brother,” Aldridge insisted. “If you find that Jon is a blackmailer, or a traitor, I’ll stand aside while you do whatever you have to do. But you won’t.”
“So you’ll answer my questions.” David brought them back to the main point.
“You promise that this will stay between us unless you find something you need for your case?”
“I promise.” David didn’t want to be impressed by the man’s devotion to his brother. Far better for David’s peace of mind if Aldridge were the useless, self-centred fribble he appeared.
Aldridge said, hesitantly, “I’ve heard you are a man of your word. I’ll trust you.”
David waited, but Aldridge took his time.
“He went to The Diamond because she is fashionable, of course,” he began, after a while.
“Of course.”
“She favoured him. Well. He’s a pretty boy, and will be rich when he comes into his own, for all he’s a second son.”
David nodded to show that he understood. Miss Diamond had welcomed young Jon to her bed in return for lavish gifts.
Aldridge continued. “Do you know Selby and that ghastly pack he runs with?”
“By reputation.”
“They were at school with me and Jon, but he has had nothing to do with them since he came up to town. Given how they hounded him at school, I have no idea why he… he met them again at The Diamond’s, and they are in this mess up to their necks. Whatever is happening, they are part of it, you can be sure.”
“He started playing with the card sharp, I take it?”
“That was part of it, yes.”
“He lost a lot of money.” David sighed. Such a predictable story.
But Aldridge was shaking his head. “If that were all… If it was just money, His Grace would blow him up, Mama would make him feel about two inches tall, I’d dress him down and then pay the bare minimum to keep him out of prison, and he’d go with pockets to let until the next quarter day. No. They set him up, Davey. They set him up well and truly.”
It was a measure of Aldridge’s concern that he slipped back into his boyhood name for his half-brother.
“What happened?”
“Drink. Drugs. Women. But one morning, when he woke up, he was with a man. Well, a boy really: a naked boy.”
“Is he in the habit of…?” How could David delicately ask if his younger half-brother had such inclinations?
“No, not at all.” Aldridge shook his head. “He adores women. All kinds. Put him in a brothel and he’s like a child in a sweet shop. He’ll try the whole range. He was horrified. He’s…” Aldridge shook his head.
“I take it there were witnesses.”
“A number,” Aldridge confirmed. “Selby and his pack among them. They all swore they’d keep it quiet. It’s a hanging offence, and you can be sure His Grace wouldn’t lift a finger. Even if we could keep him from the gallows, he’d never be able to stay in England.”
David knew what happened next. “But then the demands began to arrive. Money?”
“At first. He paid. He stole some of Mama’s jewellery and pawned it. Silly fool told me he only took the stuff she didn’t like, as if that made it better! Then the letters asked for papers from His Grace’s office. It was something to do with a land deal. He thought it wouldn’t matter.”
“Idiot. Couldn’t he see they were sucking him in deeper and deeper?” David shook his head at the sheer stupidity of the boy.
“I know. Even if His Grace could overlook the embarrassment of the first escapade, even if he forgave the theft from Mama, he isn’t going to let a theft of his ducal papers pass. He’d regard it as betrayal of the worst kind. More than lèse majesté. Blasphemy, really.”
They both contemplated the duke’s likely reaction. No wonder Aldridge wanted to keep this information between themselves. “So what happened next?” David asked.
“That’s when they overstepped. They asked for more papers, but when he checked the paper they wanted, he realised that it was… well, he didn’t tell me what it was. Just that it was information Napoleon would give his eyeteeth for. So, he came to me and told me the whole, and I made him tell Uncle Tolly. He has put a servant in the house. And hired you, apparently.”
Uncle Tolly? The Marquis of Aldridge called the aloof and secretive Tolliver ‘Uncle Tolly’? And a servant in the house. Mist, perhaps? It could be someone else, but if it were Mist… Would they be allies or opponents?
“So, now you have it,” Aldridge said, oblivious to David’s sudden stillness. “I’ve paid the gambling debt, of course. And redeemed Mama’s jewellery. Uncle Tolly thinks that will help to draw their fangs.” David shook off the red herring of the relationship between Tolliver and the Grenford family, and got back to the point.
“But they still have the duke’s papers, and the witnesses to the catamite incident.” What was he thinking? Saving his half-brother wasn’t his job, nor his inclination. He was here to catch the blackmailer. Still, if saving Lord Jonathan was a by-product, he would do so. For Her Grace’s sake, if nothing else.
As if following David’s thoughts, Aldridge said, “My mother knows nothing of this. For her sake, won’t you see what you can do?”
David nodded, shortly. “I’ll catch the blackmailer, and if I can, I’ll clear your br…” Aldridge opened his mouth to object and David conceded, “…our brother. Now, we go back to the beginning and you tell me everything you know. Who Lord Jonathan met at Miss Diamond’s; his card-playing friends; Selby’s cronies; who was there the night they trapped him. Everything.”