Chapter Two
As a man of fashion, George used to stay up all night during the season as a matter of course, but he hadn’t made a habit of it since his mother’s brush with death the previous year. After spending a day and a night and a day with the physician, keeping the duchess alive despite her own best efforts to slip away on a wave of laudanum, George had been ready to fall into bed and sleep the sleep of the righteous.
His mother was in decent health now, though she remained in laudanum’s thrall. And eventually, Lord Deverell would be all right, too—thanks, after another endless night, to Cassandra Benton.
He faced Miss Benton over tea in the Ardmore House drawing room in late morning. It was the same day Lady Deverell had screamed the house down, the same day that Charles Benton had tried to play romantic adventurer and fallen from a trellis—but it felt as if days had passed since the countess’s cries had split the nighttime silence.
How Miss Benton had passed the hours after their parting, she had already told him: the wounded earl discovered, the physician summoned, the old earl’s treatment. It seemed certain Lord Deverell would have bled to death in his stupor if no one had intervened. As it was, he would be all right.
“Or if he isn’t, it’ll be the brandy that kills him and not the knife wound,” Miss Benton said crisply. She was as tired as he, surely, but her bright brown eyes showed no hint of fatigue and her black housemaid’s gown was as tidy as her coppery hair. She was the most damnably capable person he’d ever met.
“Have some more tea,” George replied. “I certainly will.” It was overbrewed and bitter from sitting in the pot this past half hour, but he didn’t mind that. It kept his brain alert. Sort of.
“I will, thanks. To your health.” She clinked cups with him, then poured each of them another splash of tea. “I resigned my post as a housemaid before I left Deverell Place. Probably I ought to have mentioned that right away. You see, I lost my head when I called for the physician.”
“Am I missing something? It rather sounds as if you did not lose your head.”
“Yes, but a housemaid wouldn’t have done what I did. She would have screamed and called for the housekeeper or butler. It was wrong of me to take charge of the situation.” As she spoke, she crumbled a lump of sugar slowly into her cup with her fingertips.
“You don’t sound the slightest bit sorry.” George set down his teacup, giving up on the bracing power of the brewed leaf. “And Lord Deverell is no doubt grateful that you broke character.”
“Eventually he might become so. For now, he’s displeased that I entered the study while the door was closed.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “It is his private domain, into which no servant is to intrude. If I hadn’t resigned, he’d likely have given me the sack.”
“Thus punishing a great favor that happened to accompany a small disobedience,” George said. “If it helps, I realize how little sense that makes. But the question is, what shall we do next?”
She lifted her pale brows. “Am I to be involved still? I have other work to do, my lord. Charles’s work.”
That brother of hers. No one had come from within Deverell Place to check on him; Lady Deverell’s screaming seemed to have killed the household’s curiosity or humane feelings entirely. George had had the devil of a time getting Charles Benton home and hailing a surgeon to examine him. The false footman had broken one of the long bones in his right leg and wouldn’t be up and about for some time.
But he was safe in his rented rooms off of Langley Street, a space that George gathered he shared with his sister. The rambling lodging house had seen better days and was far too close to Seven Dials for George’s taste. It was well-kept, though, and despite being awakened in the dead of night, the landlady clucked over Charles like a mother hen.
Once he’d seen Charles settled, George had been sorely tempted to peek into Miss Benton’s bedchamber. Manfully, he’d resisted the urge, but the rest of the rooms told a familiar enough story. Good pieces of furniture in the parlor and in Charles’s chamber, but all long out of fashion and showing their wear. The Bentons had once had money; now they didn’t.
The Godwins—the family name of the Duke of Ardmore—were much the same, thanks to the duke’s fondness for gambling. But a duke could always get more credit, and thus he could live in a fashionable house in Cavendish Square and keep a houseful of servants and have a drawing room that looked like the inside of a cloud, if a cloud were also draped in silk and cluttered with elegant furniture and hung all over with those damned oil paintings the duke kept collecting.
George would prefer to have his own household. He had, once. But this arrangement was a compromise, and one that served him well enough. He had room enough in Ardmore House for his experiments, and he came and went as he pleased.
“I grant that your brother’s indisposition will dump more responsibilities on your head,” George said. “But I have paid for your time until the end of the week. And surely the events of last night—this morning . . . ?”
“I know the time period to which you refer,” Miss Benton said drily.
“Yes, right. Well. When a man is stabbed in his own home, and a mysterious note left behind, surely that proves there’s something suspicious about this tontine.”
Miss Benton had extracted the note pinned by the stiletto that slashed Deverell’s leg. It was written in block letters on fine-quality paper: FOUR LEFT. The suspected plot to eliminate members of the tontine was now made explicit.
At least, that was George’s interpretation. According to Miss Benton, Deverell had dismissed its significance. He’d argued that it could mean he had four limbs left, or four remaining glasses of brandy in his favorite decanter, or—
“Four pints of blood left in your body,” Miss Benton had suggested, but this was regarded as unhelpful by both Lord Deverell and the physician.
George was grateful that Miss Benton had accepted his own theory. “I see dreadful things all the time,” she said now. “Lord Deverell was not stabbed by a well-wisher, but by someone who longs for his end. Yet why would that person let members of the tontine know they are targeted?”
George had to think about that. “Suspicion. Fear. The onetime partners will all become ready to turn upon each other. Already my father has started carrying a pistol.”
Miss Benton patted her reticule. “Wise man. I do the same. Yes, those are good reasons indeed. Though they will be wary, they will also all be suspicious and exhausted. And likely to shoot themselves accidentally upon seeing a mouse, thus saving the killer the trouble of going after each.”
“You’re not wrong.” George sighed. “But I wish you were. There is no one so stubborn as noblemen of advancing years.”
“You’re not wrong either,” she replied. “Deverell doesn’t want to involve Bow Street. He wants to keep the whole matter private, from the stabbing to his wife’s mysterious nighttime visitor.”
“Which is why I need you to stay involved in this matter.”
Miss Benton shook her head. “Although I failed to keep your godfather safe? I cannot shrug that off and keep my pay as if I’ve done excellent work.”
“I don’t blame you for what happened. Surely Lord Deverell doesn’t blame you either. Nor do his wife or the physician.”
“That doesn’t matter to me so much as whether I blame myself. Someone got past my watch, and a man almost died. I’d best be back to Bow Street, where one sees one’s foe coming.”
She looked as if she were ready to rise—and on impulse, George held out a staying hand. It landed rather long of its mark. Where he intended only to gesture wait, don’t go, he instead batted one of her knees.
It had the intended effect; she sank back into her seat. True, she also looked at him reproachfully, and she drew her knees in farther.
“Sorry about that,” George excused. “I flail sometimes when I’m having a brilliant realization.”
“And this was one of those moments?”
“Of course.” He schooled his hands into calm, then organized his thoughts. “Here are the most important facts to me. First, you followed your instincts and checked on Lord Deverell’s welfare. Second, you called for help at once and saved his life.”
She looked as if she were about to speak, and he held up a hand again—less wildly this time. “Third, and most importantly to me, your failure bothers you. It bothers you that you didn’t protect him completely, and it bothers you that someone hurt him. Those things bother me, too.”
He watched her carefully as he concluded. “You care, Miss Benton, just as I do. Lord Deverell isn’t merely a job to me. He’s the man who gave me my first rattle as a baby and who taught me to shoot with a bow and arrow when I was far too young to be trusted with sharp objects.”
“How old were you?” she asked. It was a stall, clearly. Her brows were drawn together and her head tilted, as though her thoughts were shifting to such a degree that they upset her balance.
“Too young. But I’m a wonderful shot now, so it was all worthwhile. Never mind that, though. Do you see what I mean, Miss Benton? I could hire another investigator, but I couldn’t pay someone to care about Lord Deverell as I do. You care, and that makes you the right person to stay on this case.”
In the ensuing silence, she took up another lump of sugar with the tongs, then held it up to the light coming through the tall east-facing windows. It sparkled like white sand; sunlight winked off the silver of the tongs. By contrast, Miss Benton was all sunrise colors of gold and copper and peach, with her black gown a sharp shadow. It would be a lovely image to view through his camera obscura, though if he ever fixed it upon paper, all the color would be lost.
But he was getting distracted, maybe staring a bit. When Miss Benton returned the sugar and tongs to the china bowl on the tea tray, the expensive clink of silver on Adams dishware snapped him from his reverie.
“Thank you,” she said, her attention on the tea tray as if it had been the one speaking. “I had not thought how the matter might seem to you.”
“Then you’ll stay? Keep to the case?” He held his breath.
She lifted her eyes. “Yes. Through the end of the week at the very least, since you have paid already. Longer than that, if need be, and if you wish it.”
“I wish it.” He was blurting, he knew—but God, it was so good to know she believed him. He wouldn’t have to sort out on his own how to protect his father and Lord Deverell and the other fools who’d formed the tontine so long before.
“One point that strikes me as strange,” Miss Benton said slowly, “is that everyone in Deverell Place, from scullery maid to the earl himself, knows that Charles paid visits to Lady Deverell’s bedchamber. But the earl is now choosing not to admit that.”
“Quite natural, it seems to me,” George replied. “He’s preserving his own reputation. A man never wants to be known as a cuckold.”
“True, though his lady seems determined he shall be.” Miss Benton leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees. “It was one scene of drama after another during the night, and it needn’t have been. Her ladyship could have said she didn’t know what had happened, she’d never seen the man before, he fell from the trellis before he ever reached her window. Instead, she tearfully told her husband that she and Charles had only exchanged kisses before he left.”
“You doubt her tale?” Fair enough. George doubted it, too.
“My brother wouldn’t climb a trellis only for kisses!” She rolled her eyes. “Well, he might. Charles does love a trellis.”
“Never mind the trellis,” George said. “Whoever left the note will soon know that Deverell survived, and that person will try again to kill him. You’ve got to get back into that household and keep watch again.”
She slapped her hands on her knees, an unmistakable gesture of farewell. “If I must, but I can’t stay any longer at the moment. I need to see how Charles fares, and then I’ll go in to Bow Street and talk to the magistrate about covering his cases myself.”
“Because you don’t want to lose his salary?”
She stood, shaking out her skirts. “Obviously. It is what we live on. If I can do Charles’s work while he’s unable, the magistrate might not stop his pay.”
That was a fair assumption, yet the necessity of it seemed unjust. “You work very hard, Miss Benton.”
“And you don’t work at all.” She stood. “There, we’ve exchanged obvious observations.”
He had to smile. Miss Benton had a beautiful speaking voice. Her accent was undistinguished, neither the swallowed consonants of the wealthy or the blurry vowels of London’s working class. But the timbre, oh!—it vibrated through one like the playing of a glass harmonica. Swooping, vibrant, crystalline. She could have insulted him in every way, and he’d have leaned into the sound of her voice on the tips of his toes.
Thus it had gone the first time they’d formally met, too. It was at the Bedford Square house of his old friend, Lady Isabel Jenks—who had married a former Bow Street Runner, Callum Jenks, and assisted him in private investigations. Just recently, Lady Isabel had stepped back from active investigation due to her expectant state; still, one never found more interesting conversation than at the Jenkses’ place.
On the occasion when George met Miss Benton, she was in deep conversation with Jenks about disguise. “The ton notices only the clothing of servants,” she’d been saying. “If I’m placed among his staff, Wexley won’t even realize we’ve met before.”
Wexley. He’d thought the red-haired woman was familiar, and now he placed her. She’d helped rescue Lord Wexley, George’s brother-in-law, from an attempted murder at a ball celebrating the man’s betrothal to George’s sister. It had been a year or more by now, hadn’t it? Yet he knew Miss Benton’s name, and her face wasn’t the sort one forgot.
“Wexley would know her at once,” George blurted to Jenks. “She’s so plain.”
This was, of course, the wrong thing to say. It wasn’t even what he’d meant to say. Better for him to have called her plainspoken, or plain and straightforward in her manner. Plain of dress, plain of hairstyle; even those would have been marginally acceptable.
Yet what he’d meant was none of those at all. He’d meant that Miss Benton was not a woman of fashion, so decidedly that she made fashion seem irrelevant. She was so capable that she made chivalry seem like self-indulgence and mannerly words a useless frippery.
Before he had the chance to bumble through any apology or explanation, the lady’s head had whipped around. “Jenks,” she said sweetly, fixing George with a narrow stare. “You might mention to the gentleman that the front of a lady’s face has nothing to do with the brain behind it.”
Jenks looked amused, damn the man. “Right. Lord Northbrook—”
“You might also mention,” Miss Benton said, “that a woman’s appearance has nothing to do with how good an investigator she is.”
Jenks tried again. “I was about to—”
“And,” she added ruthlessly, “you could note that it is most rude to comment on the appearance of a lady when one’s opinion has not been solicited.”
Jenks gave up; he simply made a gesture from Miss Benton to George. “You heard the lady.”
“Since I heard him, I’ll warrant he heard me just as well,” Miss Benton sauced back.
Isabel looked as if she wanted to laugh, but she schooled her features almost as soon as George turned suspicious eyes upon her. “Lord Northbrook,” Isabel hastened to explain, “is a very old friend.”
Miss Benton looked him over. “He doesn’t look that old.” She studied him for a moment, then snapped her fingers. “We’ve met before. You were at the ball celebrating the engagement of the Duke of Ardmore’s daughter.”
“I was indeed,” George said. “You see, the Duke of Ardmore is my father, which makes his daughter my sister. So I was rather expected to be there.”
“Well done, then,” she replied, and turned away from him again to pick up the thread of her conversation with Jenks.
And there he was, standing like a ninny. He’d done wrong, and she’d put him in his place, and there was nothing for it but to grovel. “I beg your pardon, Miss Benton.” He spoke up. “What I said was flippant and rude.”
She did not face him again, but she went very still. The back of her neck looked vulnerable, a pale stripe between the collar of her dark gown and her fiery pinned-up hair. “It was honest” was all she said.
“No, it was flippant and rude,” George repeated, trying to explain. “Those are the qualities I’ve cultivated. Not honesty. I assure you, honesty would get me nowhere in high society.”
“Politeness would,” Isabel pointed out with all the unhelpfulness of a lifelong friend.
“Men don’t have to be polite,” said George. “Especially not ducal heirs. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be. And I should.”
The stern posture had relaxed a bit; Miss Benton showed him her profile. “Yes. I agree. And if there’s an apology in there—”
“Oh, there definitely is. I apologize for my flippant and rude words that were not at all honest.”
“Then I accept it, with the understanding that if you ever insult my person or ignore my intelligence again, I will give you cause to regret it. Physical cause.”
Strange how soothed he felt by her reply, coupled with a threat as it was. “You intrigue me. But not enough to want to discover what you mean.”
With this, she granted him a smile. “Truth be told, Lord Northbrook, you’re not the first to call me plain. I suppose I was piqued to have it be your first judgment of me, when surely the Jenkses have told you of my abilities.”
“And those are the relevant qualities. Of course.”
He hadn’t forgotten it since—and not because of her threat. Because he’d been wrong, and she’d been gracious enough not to hold a grudge.
Since that inauspicious meeting, she had stayed with his godfather to make sure the man didn’t bleed to death. She’d shared news with George by the stairs each night after toiling all day. She had agreed to continue working for him when she already had so many other jobs to do.
Yes, she was gracious indeed. And she worked damned hard, and he wanted her at his side. On his side.
She was pulling on her gloves now, her expression as distant as if she were already on the way to her next destination. The only reason George had a right to her time was because he’d paid for some of it.
But what to do for the remainder of the week? Would keeping a watch on Deverell be the most effective way to protect him, or would it be better to trace the old earl’s attacker? What would be the best way to use Miss Benton’s unique skills? Could he even ask her to keep watch, burdened as she was by the need to carry out her brother’s work?
And then it came to George: the one thing that was more likely to yield answers than spying.
He sprang to his feet, cursing as he barked his shin against the tea table. “Miss Benton. I’ve an idea. For the rest of the week—or beyond, if need be.”
She flexed her fingers in their gloves of tan kid. “You’re not planning to ask me to be a housemaid again, are you?”
“No, no.” He waved the possibility away. “You were a terrible housemaid anyway.”
She laughed, a quick peal too soon cut off.
“We need to cast a wider net,” George said. “Collect gossip. You need to be in the midst of the ton, not hanging about its fringes cleaning fireplaces and listening at doors when you can.”
“Admirable summary of my time in the Deverell household,” she granted. “You pay a good wage, and if it doesn’t require me to clean out grates, so much the better. What do you have in mind?”
His idea was coming into focus, like lining up a camera obscura with just the right sort of light. “I want you to listen to gossip. Women talk about all sorts of things when men aren’t around, surely, and such secrets might be relevant to this case. Someone saw something, or heard something, or knows something—”
“Yes, but what would you have me do? Parade through Almack’s with an ear trumpet? You’d have to get me a voucher, and the proprietresses won’t be eager to grant one to ordinary Miss Benton.”
“So you’ll have to be someone else. Someone fashionable and tonnish. Maybe even a bit fast, so you’re always at the center of a swirl of gossip.”
She looked much struck by the idea. “A noble by-blow would serve the purpose, maybe. Or shall I have made a scandalous marriage, which I must now escape?”
He grinned at her. “Perhaps both at once. How would you like to pose as my notorious cousin, arrived lately from the Continent?”