Selby, Annesley, and Barnstable had been lucky, exiting from the window of the room where they’d shot the constable just in time to seize four horses freshly saddled for a party of travellers. Driving one horse ahead of them, they galloped out of the village heading north, leaving confusion behind as villagers and guests scrambled to respond.
“They have a considerable head start,” Aldridge observed.
David caught a serving maid by the arm, and asked, “How much of the road north can be seen from up on that hill?”
It rose gently to the east, the only elevation in the otherwise flat landscape, and was crowned by a tower the maid referred to when she said, “Some ten miles, could be? More from the old watch tower.”
It took them ten minutes to make their way to the top, along with a crowd of others who had heard David’s question. From there, the drama of the chase unfolded—the three escapees strung out along the road, still maintaining their lead, but with the pursuers drawing in on the hindmost.
As they watched, the lead rider left the road, leaping a hedge and ditch and taking to the fields, heading for the woods that stretched out into the distance. The second rider followed, the horse soaring easily across the obstacles. The last rider continued up the road, but then, as the pursuers approached, set his horse at the hedge.
From this elevation, his poor choice of crossing was clear. The hedge was taller, the ditch wider: the leap was doomed from the start. The horse barely cleared the hedge and landed in the ditch, stumbling, almost falling, throwing the rider. Some of the pursuers who had already crossed into the fields veered from the tracks of the leading two miscreants to investigate. Back on the road, the hunters were looking for the gate into the field; when they found it, the whole group surged through en masse.
The remaining two runaways disappeared into the trees, chased—but from further behind now—by half a dozen others. More collected the downed rider, slinging him over the back of a horse.
“Dead?” Aldridge suggested.
The rest of the watchers headed back down the hill to see the fallen man brought in, but David put out a hand to stay Aldridge, and Gren stopped, too.
David waited until only the three of them remained on the crumbling top of the tower.
“Why are you here, Aldridge? Prue has been through enough at your hands.”
If Aldridge considered a flippant reply, as the slight sneer hinted, he reconsidered. “I wanted to see my daughter.”
“Now? After six years?”
“Not that it is any of your business, but I did not know Prue was with child. There was a letter, she says. But I never saw it. His Grace had sent me off to learn estate management in the North Country, and was choosing what letters to send me.”
“I’m making it my business,” David said. “I won’t let you hurt her again, Aldridge.”
“Your turn, is it?” Aldridge mocked. “Who are you to judge me? You’re swiving her, too.”
David clenched his fists but held his punch. “She was an innocent when she met you.”
“She would not have stayed one, Wakefield. She was ripe to fall. If it had not been me, it would have been someone else, and they would not have made sure she enjoyed it.”
David’s punch caught him by surprise. “She did not enjoy being abandoned in prison, you self-centred, spoilt idiot.”
Aldridge shook his head to clear it, rubbing the incipient bruise out of his jaw. “I will concede that was not one of my finest moments. I told them to treat her with every consideration. I found out later the king’s man thought me a fool in the toils of a scheming woman and countermanded my orders. By then, she was gone, though.” He frowned. “I’ll never understand why. I would have showered her with gifts, set her up in style, given her anything she wanted…”
“Anything except your name.”
Aldridge’s eyes widened at David’s comment. “She did not honestly think I meant marriage, did she? I could not marry a nobody. And one who wasn’t even pure?”
David punched him again, and this time Aldridge gathered his legs beneath him to throw himself at David, until Gren got between them.
“Stop baiting him, Aldridge,” he commanded.
Aldridge tried to skirt around Gren’s blocking arms.
“I warned her about you, Wakefield.”
Warned her about what? The question must have been clear on David’s face, because Gren spoke. “Aldridge says you made a pet of him, encouraged him to believe in you, then abandoned him because of an argument with His Grace. Is that true, David?”
“Jon!” Aldridge protested. “You make me sound like a needy infant.”
Gren said nothing, just regarded David with anxious hope.
David was too angry with Aldridge to care what he thought, but he answered Gren. “Not exactly. Or, at least, not by choice. Did Aldridge tell you His Grace had me beaten nearly to death and carried off the property? That I was left in a ditch and would not have survived if Her Grace had not sent someone to take me to a physician in Margate? All for the sin of being nearby when Aldridge knocked himself unconscious.”
Gren turned the same anxious look on Aldridge, who was shaking his head in negation. “No. It cannot be true. You nearly died?”
It was David’s turn to sneer. “Are you telling me you did not know?”
“I had no idea! His Grace said you had taken offence at something he said and run off, and no one else would talk about it.” Aldridge’s face paled, and he stared down at the ground, his eyes bleak. “I waited for you to come back. I could not believe you would just leave me. But you never returned. You never even came to see me at school, where His Grace would not know. I swore I would never let Jon down the way—”
“I came to Eton,” David said. “They would not let me visit. His Grace had left orders… Then, the next night, two men came to the inn where I was lodging and beat me again. They said His Grace would have me killed if I approached you.”
“Ah.” Aldridge was silent for a moment, reconsidering the past. “Yes. That sounds like our revered progenitor.”
The Duke of Haverford’s three sons nodded at one another.
Aldridge held out his hand. “I owe you an apology. All these years, I’ve been blaming you for leaving me to our father… and… others. And all along, I should have been blaming His Grace.”
What others? What else had happened to the cheerful child who had trailed after David, to turn him into this cynical young man whose charming grin masked a haunted soul?
“Just don’t hurt Prue and Antonia,” David growled.
“I could say the same,” Aldridge returned.
“The difference between us, Aldridge, is that I mean marriage.”
Aldridge stared, his jaw dropping. “Truly? You and she plan to wed?”
David studied the toes of his boots when he said, “I have not asked her yet.” His chin lifted and jutted out in a moment, though, and he glared at Aldridge. “But yes. I hope she will marry me.” To himself, hardly aware he was saying it aloud, he added, “I cannot imagine life without her.”
“And Antonia?” Aldridge asked.
“Is already my niece and will be my daughter, if Prue agrees.”
Aldridge was silent for a while, clearly thinking.
“That is better for them both than anything I could do,” he decided. “David, I wish you happy. I… uh… should tell you… I sent Prue a letter asking her to let me keep her and the child. I am sorry, David. I did not understand you meant marriage.”
“I should hit you again, Aldridge,” David told him, but without heat.
As they walked back down the hill together, there was a peace between them that had not existed in many years.
Back at the inn, they learned the man who had fallen was Annesley, and that he had broken his neck. One by one, the other searchers returned, but none had seen Barnstable or Selby since they took to the woods.
David joined Gren and Aldridge for dinner in a private parlour Aldridge hired.
“We need to return to Margate,” Aldridge said. “His Grace said Jon was to go there and stay. I tried to leave him behind, but you know what Jon’s like. He sticks worse than a burr.”
Gren made a rude gesture. “Aldridge only let me come because he needed someone to crew the yacht,” he told David.
Aldridge just grinned. “I have a crew. And you were not much use draped over the rail puking, Jon.”
“You sailed from Margate?” David asked. “Clever.”
“Yes, to Ipswich. His Grace’s spies at the castle will think we are on a pleasure cruise for a few days. It’s good the days are getting longer. We sailed at first light yesterday, then rode all day to get here. We can make it back again by tomorrow, late afternoon, if we change horses regularly.”
A succession of maids carried in dinner: a roasted bird, a leg of lamb, and a stew, with a variety of side dishes.
“The claret is acceptable,” Aldridge decided, and they talked about food and wine till the last maid left the room, blushing and dimpling at Gren.
“I think she likes me,” he told Aldridge and David.
“Do they not all like you, Gren?” David asked with a sardonic smile.
“I expect she likes your coin,” Aldridge said.
David enjoyed the conversation over dinner. Gren used his frivolous manner to hide the clever man underneath, as David had already discovered. Aldridge, when he let the rakehell mask slip, was the intelligent child David had known, grown into a man with broad general knowledge, wide interests, and deep insight into how his aristocratic world operated.
They exchanged opinions on everything from literature to the slave trade to the war with Napoleon and the tensions with the former colonies in North America. By tacit agreement, they avoided anything personal until they were sitting over port, after the maids had cleared the table and quit the room.
“I need to ask you something, Aldridge. Richport’s masquerade.”
“Death’s last orgy? Society’s wildest having a good time,” Aldridge said. “What do you need to know?”
“I am trying to place who was there and when.”
David only realised that the guarded look had left Aldridge’s eye when it returned. “I see. What am I supposed to have done?”
David made a sudden decision. “We suspect someone left from that event to kill a blackmailer.”
Both of Aldridge’s brows shot up. “How enterprising of me. Gren’s blackmailer, I take it? Did it not occur to me that simply handing him over to the law might be as effective? Or a press gang, perhaps?”
Aldridge’s choice of pronoun could be innocence or cleverness. How to know? But, while Aldridge might kill a man in a fair fight, strangling a woman seemed out of character. “I am looking at a number of suspects, Aldridge. It would help me to know what you remember of the evening.”
“Hmm. Death always provides many light women and lots of places to enjoy them. Plus, liberal quantities of food and drink, music, of course, various other entertainments. Many people were masked, but of course, one knows most of them by their voices or shapes or mannerisms. Who in particular do you find of interest? I was not there the whole evening, but I will help as I can.”
Gren sobered, and Aldridge caught the concern and lifted his chin, the sardonic note back in his voice. “You are interested in me. How exciting. It has been an age since I was suspected of a crime, and never before of murder.”
David did not apologise. “You. The Earl of Selby. Annesley. Tiverton. No one appears to have seen Barnstable or Wharton, so perhaps they were not there. Nor, it seems, was Baron Hurley. Captain Talbot, possibly. The Earl of Sutton. His son, Elfingham. Possibly his sister, Lady Georgiana Winderfield. No one has recognised her, either, but the noble ladies who attended were more heavily disguised than the men.”
Aldridge controlled his irritation, and clarified, “Death won’t have Barnstable in his houses. The man is a cardsharp, and Death said he’d remove his liver with a blunt knife if the man ever crept into one of his entertainments again. But at any rate, Barnstable was out of town that week. Wharton never goes to these things. Death is relaxed about other people’s sexual games, but he draws the line at forcing children. I did not see Hurley or Lady Georgiana, though they may have been there. It was a big crowd.”
He hesitated. “I would not expect Lady Georgiana to be there. She is a sedate and sober woman, and very discreet about her preferences. Her brother and nephew are oblivious to them, I think.”
Aldridge was looking at nothing, his mind reviewing what he had seen. “The others were there for at least part of the evening. Sutton was much in evidence early on, but left about midnight to escort his wife and sister to a ball. He and Elfingham had a row about whose turn it was to dance attendance on their ladies. Elfingham had dropped them off at some rout and said it made him so late for Death’s masquerade, all the best whores were taken.”
This was news. David had been told the father and son had argued, but no one had been close enough to tell him about what.
“So Sutton left and Elfingham stayed?” He already knew the answer.
“No. Sutton took offence at Elfingham’s insolence, and insisted they both go. The Belvoir chit’s engagement ball, I believe, if you wish to check they actually arrived. Elfingham had been one of her suitors, though I doubt he had much in mind, beyond following the latest beauty.”
David nodded. If the two men actually arrived, he could eliminate them from his list of suspects.
“Selby, Annesley, and Tiverton were in and out of public view. They had a bet on. They always do—same bet every time.” He raised an eyebrow in question, and David nodded. They kept score of how many women they could copulate with in any given evening, the loser to keep the others in drink the next night.
“Half the room was keeping count. And then, not long after Sutton left, all went quiet. Tiverton had been off with… Well, not gentlemanly to name names. Shall we say the Bad Baroness, and leave it at that?”
Lady Carrington, then.
“She came back, but he didn’t. I might not have noticed, except she decided I would be next.” Aldridge shuddered.
“Not to your taste?” David asked.
“One can never be sure of her motivations, David. The baron uses her to gain information and advantage, or even just for the pleasure of watching. I’ve no objection to allowing myself to be seduced, but if I’m just going to be used, I would rather it was by a harlot who needs the money than a harpy like the Bad Baroness.”
“So what did you do? Tell her ‘no’?”
Aldridge smiled, a slow, lazy stretching of the lips and twinkling eyes. “She isn’t very good at taking ‘no’ for an answer. I ran and hid. Not alone, of course. And I truly regret, David, I cannot give you the name of the lady I was with, since she should not have been at Death’s masquerade at all.”
“Has a husband, does she?”
Aldridge smiled. “One can only admire the lady’s courage, venturing into such a scandalous affair to discover whether the miscreant was there. He was, of course, and with his current mistress. I came upon their confrontation when I first escaped Lady… my pursuer. He was most unkind to the poor lady, accused her of fri… well, never mind. I saw her home, David, as a gentleman should, and stayed to console her. And,” his smile turned dreamy and reminiscent, “to show her the fault lay with her husband, not with her.” He grinned. “It was the gentlemanly thing to do.”
That altercation had also been witnessed. The man told his wife that her sexual coldness had driven him into his mistress’s arms. David had heard Aldridge took the lady away, but not that he had taken her home. The two people who had told him of the incident had recognised the husband. He could check Aldridge’s story, and would, but he already believed it. A tightness in his chest loosened. Aldridge was not the murderer.
“Very well,” he said. “What of Talbot?”
“Talbot is the admiralty man, is he not? Short fellow. Tubby belly. Ends every second sentence with ‘eh?’”
David nodded. “That’s him.”
“Yes, he was there at the beginning, dressed as a pirate. I do not think he remained for long, though. Some woman came for him—not an attendee. She must have been able to show her invitation at the door, but did not even take her cloak off. I didn’t see the pirate costume again that evening.
“Funny thing though… I was coming home through Belgravia at first light, and I am reasonably certain I saw Talbot helping a courtesan known as Little Joy into a carriage. I thought he’d been pursuing The Diamond.”
Gren let out a whistle, and David raised his eyebrows. In light of the letters he’d found, it should not have been a surprise, but he had not expected confirmation.
“I’ve said something significant?”
“A man and woman were seen leaving the courtesan’s house, but the watcher could not identify them. They left a dead maid inside, so if you saw what you think you saw, Aldridge, we know that one of those two was her killer.”