Chapter Twenty-One
Callum had wanted nothing more than to see Isabel again—but he would not have chosen a moment like this for their reunion. Never like this, with her ward in makeshift cuffs and a marquess’s heir lying in his own blood.
She laid a hand against the wall, bracing herself. “What is this? What is happening? You—what are you doing to Lucy?”
“The Duke of Ardmore asked the Bow Street magistrate, Fox, to recommend some people to keep peace at his daughter’s engagement ball. Guess His Grace was wiser than I realized.” Callum picked up the pistol from the floor beside the prone lord. “Lady Isabel, this belongs to you.” He offered it to her grip first.
She extended a hand, looking full of questions.
“It was your husband’s,” Callum explained.
At once, she recoiled. “I don’t want it. I don’t even want to touch it. But—why is it here?”
Callum looked at Lucy. Isabel’s gaze followed.
“Lucy!” She took the girl’s shoulders, shaking her gently, even as Charles Benton put another knot into the cord about her wrists. “Lucy? Is—did he—what has happened?”
“He made me pose,” she whimpered. “He made me pose for him.”
“What is she talking about?” Isabel’s wild gaze swung between the Bentons and Callum. “Tell me right now. What did this man do to her?”
“Why . . . nothing.” Cass spoke haltingly. “He didn’t even touch her, not that we saw.”
Isabel crouched beside the man. Lord Wexley, Callum thought his name was. She swallowed heavily as she looked at the injured man, but she did not flinch. “She shot him, didn’t she? The bullet grazed his scalp and was buried in the wall.”
Callum held out a hand to help her upright. “Exactly right. I believe he’ll come to at any moment.”
“But . . . she shot him.” Isabel’s brows were knit. “Why? I don’t think she’s ever even met him.”
“He made me pose for him,” Lucy cried. “I’ve been carrying his gun in case he made me do it again.”
“His gun . . .” Isabel’s eyes widened. “Dearest. Lucy. Who is it that you shot at? Who made you pose?”
“Uncle Andrew. Up in the hidden room. I had to pose like his paintings while he looked at them and he . . .” She was crying now, great blubbery tears. “I had to agree. You always said how nice it was that I was an agreeable girl, and I knew I had nowhere else to go.”
Cass looked away, her eyes wet. Callum found it difficult to watch the girl too. For she was just a girl—terribly young, and more fragile than he could have imagined. He understood now, and he guessed that Isabel did too: in her distress, Lucy had mistaken Lady Selina’s fiancé for Andrew Morrow. Dark hair, going silver at the temples. In his early forties. There was a marked resemblance.
Lord Wexley moaned, coming to. “What happened to me? Am I shot?”
Charles left Lucy’s wrists and helped the man to his feet. “Not mortally. But that head of yours could use stitches.”
When Wexley took a step forward, Lucy screamed. “No! Not again! Not again!”
“Who—why is she shouting?” He put a hand to his head, then flinched when it came away wet with blood.
“What sort of posing?” Isabel had gone pale. “What sort of posing, dearest?”
Lucy cringed, hiding behind Isabel as if she were a wall.
“Oh, God.” Isabel looked stricken. “Morrow did—and I made you believe that—oh, Lucy, oh no. No, no.”
Gently, Callum put an index finger under Lucy’s chin. “Lucy. Miss Wallace.” He waited until her gaze flicked upward to meet his. “Did he touch you?”
“I don’t even know her!” Wexley yelled.
“Not you,” Callum all but snarled. “Andrew Morrow. Cass, will you go find Lady Selina? And Charles, a physician for his lordship. Or even a seamstress.”
When he returned his attention to Lucy, his voice was gentle. “Did Andrew Morrow touch you?”
“He never put a hand on me. But on himself, he did. He touched . . .” She turned her head away. Isabel stroked her hair, a mass of plaited gold. “I was so afraid. It kept happening. It happened again and again, even before I came to live with you.”
“Even before . . . ?” Isabel shook her head. “He didn’t—I don’t understand.”
Callum thought he did. He wished he didn’t. “I shouldn’t be surprised if her parents treated her much as Morrow did.”
She took his meaning at once. “Oh, my poor girl. My poor girl, so trespassed against, and so violent. And I thought to marry her off, never suspecting how unhappy she was.”
“She might not have been unhappy with you.”
Lucy Wallace was a shrinking figure, a pitiable one. She had not committed a crime for gain. She had not done it for money. No, Callum had been incomplete when he’d once told Isabel that everything went back to money. Some things were even deeper. Sex. Power.
The need to save oneself.
What privilege he had grown up in, to be protected and kept safe by his parents. Compared to that, Lucy Wallace’s silks were nothing.
As Wexley leaned against the wall, dabbing at his scalp with a handkerchief, Isabel and Callum teased out the missing pieces of Lucy’s story.
Her parents had abused her, and in desperation, she one day shot them. She escaped with the pearl brooch—but after she came to live at Lombard Street, Andrew found it among her things. He made her pose nude, barely more than a girl, with the bare, false portraits in the hidden room.
Mutual blackmail. Mutually assured silence. These circles were dangerous and fragile. Lucy had shattered it at last, warning Andrew Morrow that she would tell Isabel about the posing and the pictures and the hidden room. Everything.
He couldn’t stop himself. And he couldn’t bear for his fraud and exploitation to be revealed. So he ended himself.
Isabel stroked Lucy’s back, just as Callum had seen Lucy pet Brinley. “Shhh, shh. I know now. It’s over. It will never happen again.”
Lucy was calm now, quiet. She had retreated within herself, like a turtle pulled into its shell. All they saw now was the shell. Callum did not know when she might come out again.
By this time, Lady Selina had returned with Cass and a grim-faced housemaid was plying a needle in Wexley’s torn scalp. There ensued a clamor of explanations, reassurances, re-reassurances, and many complaints from the stitched-up lord.
“We’re all witnesses, Mr. Jenks,” Cass said solemnly. “To how you saved Lord Wexley from the poor mad girl.”
Isabel shut her eyes. “But what you all heard about Morrow—”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Cass. “I heard nothing except Lady Selina’s thanks for ensuring the safety of her betrothed. Miss Wallace was out of her wits, poor lamb. Raving. It was impossible to make sense of what she said.”
The lanky redhead’s certainty was like a dash of cold water to the nerveless paleness of the duke’s daughter. “Of course,” said Lady Selina. “I cannot think what would be gained by looking for evidence of further crimes the girl had committed. I certainly observed none.”
Isabel looked mulish. “Now that I know that Andrew—”
“Lady Isabel.” Charles looked solemn for once. “In the eyes of the law, his trespass against her was nothing that is not excused every day. But hers against her parents or Wexley could see her hanged. You could best protect her with your silence.”
Isabel pressed her fingers to her eyes. “It’s unfair, all of it.”
Callum knew what she meant. Andrew Morrow had escaped the consequences of his actions again and again, finally choosing death as a blanket over the truth. Who he truly was would never be known to the world.
“Isabel,” he said gently. “We know. That’s the most important thing. We know.” He touched her arm lightly. “Remember, you’ve always acted for Lucy’s benefit, ever since the first time you summoned me.”
To steal a painting and save a reputation. For Lucy, it had begun; for Lucy it would end here, and these few people would hold the truth in their hearts.
Isabel held Lucy tightly, the girl’s head cradled under her chin. Callum had seen artwork like that before. It was always called La Pieta.
“Do not let her be taken to a madhouse, please,” Isabel said. She exchanged some private words with Lady Selina, during which the young woman’s eyes grew round with shock, then soft with pity.
“I shall not lay evidence against her,” said the duke’s daughter. “Nor will I protest whatever arrangement you think best for her.”
Wexley grumbled a bit, but he too agreed. His adoration for his young betrothed was clear. And he would get to play a heroic, embattled figure when this scene was described for eager ears and scandal rags in the days to come.
“You are very generous,” said Isabel. “I cannot thank you enough.”
Cass took one of Lucy’s arms, Charles the other. They guided her down the corridor as one would walk a puppet. She was still but a shell, compliant and silent. Lady Selina and Lord Wexley followed them from the corridor, prepared to rejoin the ball.
Isabel followed them all with her gaze.
“You are blaming yourself,” Callum said. “I see it in the slump of your shoulders.”
With an effort, she drew herself up straight and turned to face him. “How can I not blame myself? She was mine to protect.”
“And before you, she was her parents’ to protect, and then Andrew’s. You alone took proper care of her. You gave her a year and a half of peace.”
“But the anger and sadness were only waiting to come out again.”
“How were you to stop that, if you didn’t know it existed?”
“I don’t know.” She seemed transfixed by the bullet hole in the wall.
“Did you do your best by her?” Callum pressed. “Would you have protected her if you knew what Morrow was doing?”
“I hope so. I cannot be sure.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I did not always know how to protect myself.”
He nodded, accepting. “With every case, there are what-ifs. Too many of them can break a person’s heart.”
“I do not know which crime I ought to regret the most,” Isabel said. “She did wicked things, terrible things. But wicked things were done to her first.”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned well since knowing you, Isabel, it is that the law and justice part ways more often than the police realize. She protected herself; she counted on nothing else.”
Isabel swayed on her feet, then took a step forward. Another, blessedly, until she stood right before Callum. He took her in his arms, wrapping up all that gold silk in his plain black-coated embrace.
“She will be safe,” Callum assured her. “And others will be safe from her.”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “I will see to it.” She pushed back, dashing a hand against her eyes. “Sorry. Thank you. You prevented a disaster, Callum. I can’t think what would have happened without you.”
“Oh. Well.” He scuffed one of his boots against the floor. The warmth in her eyes was everything he wanted but never dared ask for.
“Come, let’s get away from this grim place,” she said. He agreed, slipping the unwanted pistol into his pocket after making sure it was unloaded. They retraced the steps to the ballroom, the sound and heat multiplying like fireworks as they drew closer to the grand space.
At the edge of the ballroom, they halted. “Do you need to make a report to your magistrate?” Isabel asked him, low under the noise of music and conversation.
“I do.” Callum tilted his head, speaking near her ear. “Though he’s not my magistrate anymore. I’ve resigned my position with Bow Street. The Bentons and I were here as private security, as I said. Ardmore hired me. I hired them.”
“But you resigned? You love that job!” She pulled back, sounding genuinely shocked.
“No,” he said. “I love many things, but that job is not one of them. I love justice more than the law. I love seeing right done. And I love the woman who helped me realize all of that.”
“You . . . love . . .” Isabel tipped her head. “You love her. You love her?” A smile spread across her features. “She must be marvelous.”
“She is,” he said. “I was a fool to think I could do without her. But I don’t know how she’s doing without me. I’ve never wanted to impose on her good will or her wealth. There is so much that I cannot give her.”
Isabel shone like gold guineas: her eyes, her gown, her smile. “No one but you, Callum Jenks, can give me your heart. I have all else that I want and need. Will you make me utterly spoiled and utterly happy?”
“Spoiled, you could never be. Happy, I would that you’d be always.”
“No more of that nonsense about us not suiting each other?”
“I’m greedy,” he said. “You suit me, and if you say I suit you, I’ll never give you up.”
She leaned against the wall, putting her hands behind her back. It was an enticing pose, pushing out her breasts. Her smile was flirtatious. “I have an idea about how we shall make our way in society. It will be rather like being an investigator.”
“Oh? Do tell.”
“We play the game, Callum. We follow the rules.” She grinned. “These people have manners, but they’re afraid. They don’t want to do anything wrong lest they topple. So we only have to show them that it’s not wrong to accept us. It’s quite right.”
He considered. “Being accepted by the ton could be good for business. As a personal investigator, one could charge more.”
She gave a determined nod. “There, an economic argument for tonnishness.”
“A personal investigator wouldn’t work well alone, though,” he said. “I would need a partner.”
“I’d be wonderful,” she said. “You ought to hire me.”
“Done. And I already have a consulting office large enough for two. I took a lease using my savings.” He coughed. “It’s not far from Bedford Square.”
She laughed. “You really do love me! I love you too, you know. I was trying to tell you that when I gave you the boots.”
He looked down at his battered pair, rueful. “I wish I’d known. I wish I’d taken them, too.”
“You can have them,” she said, “as a wedding gift. If you ever end up asking me to marry you. And in whatever we take on together, we shall succeed.”
Was he wearing boots? No, he was flying. “I like a lady with ambition.” He sank to one knee, took her hand in his. “Lady Isabel, will you have me? I’m not a sentimental man, but I love you deeply. Dearly.” He smiled. “Irrevocably.”
“Of course I will. And I love it when you smile.”
“That’s good, because I can’t stop just now. Oh, you ought to have a ring. Let me see.” Releasing her hand, he stood and patted his pockets. “Ah, this will work.”
“My thimble?” She held up her thumb, mystified, as he slipped the silver cap onto it. “You kept it all this time?”
His face heated. “I might be a little bit of a sentimental man.”
“You are an utter rogue, Callum Jenks.”
“Then we are perfect for each other,” he said, and he kissed her soundly. So soundly that heads turned, whispers eddied, and the orchestra even missed a beat.
It was one more scandal to add to the total at Lady Selina’s engagement ball, making it the pinnacle of the elite’s Season.