“What do you mean she’s gone?” Jasper demanded, his fear for Hermione’s safety overcoming his good manners.
“She took a footman,” Trent said patiently as he and Jasper discussed Hermione’s disappearance from the house in her husband’s absence. “Ophelia said that she tried to dissuade her from going, but that Hermione was insistent. You know how persuasive she can be.”
He did know, and that’s what made him so damned afraid. Not only was she persuasive, but she’d use that skill to convince the footman to let her go inside the Fleetwood house on her own just to issue the invitation for the lady to join her next door. After all, it was only a visit to a sick friend, he imagined her saying with that winsome smile she used when trying to wheedle. Damnation. He should never have let her out of his sight this morning.
“Don’t think the worst, Mainwaring,” said Trent, whose calm was quickly becoming an open invitation for Jasper to plant his fist in his face. “Fleetwood is a questionable character, I agree, but if the note really did come from his sister, then Hermione is very likely only visiting a sick friend as Ophelia said. Let’s just go after her now and you can see that for yourself.”
With a grim nod, Jasper climbed up into Trent’s curricle with no hesitation whatsoever. He needed to find his wife and he was damned if he’d wait for his horse to be saddled, no matter how much he might dislike traveling by coach.
When they arrived in Half-Moon Street after a brisk drive that saw Jasper holding onto the sides of the vehicle to keep from being thrown out, the two men hurried up the stairs of the Upperton town house and their brisk knocks were rewarded with a confused Greentree.
“Where is my wife?” Jasper demanded before the man could even speak. “She should be here with Miss Fleetwood as her guest.”
“I’m sorry, my lord,” said the butler with a frown, “but we haven’t seen her today. Perhaps she called next door and was detained?”
Not waiting for the older man to finish his query, Jasper turned and hurried over to the house next door, followed by a grim-faced Trent.
In answer to his knock, the Fleetwoods’ butler opened the door.
“Where is my wife?” he asked.
“And who might that be, sir?”
“Lady Mainwaring,” Jasper said through clenched teeth. “Is she here?”
“I’m sure I don’t know—” the man began, but Jasper and Trent pushed past him into the foyer, which was the mirror image of the same room in the house next door.
As they hurried toward the stairs, Jasper saw Hermione coming down them, her arms akimbo. “What on earth do you mean causing such a ruckus in a house where there is a sick lady?” she demanded in a loud whisper. “Miss Fleetwood is quite ill. And you have upset the poor girl greatly.”
But Jasper was only interested in clutching her against him. “Thank God.” He sighed. “Thank God you are well. I thought … well, I cannot tell you what I thought.”
She was stiff in his arms at first, but as his worry communicated itself to her, she began to relax. “I am perfectly fine,” she said, patting his back. “Truly, fit as a fiddle. Nothing has happened.”
When he finally accepted the fact that her visit to the Fleetwoods hadn’t, in fact, done her any irreparable damage, Jasper allowed her to pull away. Trent, he saw, was leaning against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched them. He gave his friend a sheepish look, to which Trent simply offered a shrug. As if to say “it could happen to any of us.”
“Do you mind telling me what that was all about?” Hermione asked, after she’d gone to assure Miss Fleetwood that the commotion had been a misunderstanding. “For I don’t mind telling you that you frightened the life out of me.”
“Perhaps we should go next door?” Trent asked. “Or rather, the two of you can go next door. I will take myself off if you have no further need of me, Mainwaring.”
With a nod of thanks to his friend, Jasper slipped his arm through Hermione’s and they all three left the house. Trent going back to his curricle and Jasper and Hermione going into the Upperton House.
They were greeted with welcome from the servants who asked after her father’s health. After a few moments assuring them that he was resting comfortably, Hermione asked the housekeeper for a pot of tea and she and Jasper retired to the drawing room where they’d met with Rosewood only a few days before.
And almost as soon as the door closed behind them, Jasper pulled her into his arms and kissed her with every bit of the relief he felt on finding her safe.
When they came up for air, she pulled back a little to look into his eyes. “You were really frightened, weren’t you?” she asked.
“Of course I was,” he said, leading her to the sofa and pulling her into his lap. “I came home to find you’d gone, and though I’d asked Trent to keep watch on you, you’d managed to slip through the net.”
“I didn’t realize you were having me watched,” she said with a frown.
“For your safety,” he said firmly. “And I could trust no one but Trent to do it properly. Or couldn’t as it turned out.”
“Don’t blame Trent,” Hermione said. “I went out the back door so I could look at the scene of my attack. Just to see if I could remember anything else. And when I could not, I asked the coachman to bring me here.”
“Why would you go there alone when you’ve already been attacked there once before?” Jasper asked in exasperation.
“The reason for my attack—the coaching pair—was gone,” Hermione explained with a frown. “And you can hardly keep me prisoner. I am allowed to come and go as I please.”
“I don’t want you to feel like a prisoner,” he said. “But I do want to keep you safe. It won’t be forever. Just until we can catch these ruffians.”
“I don’t understand,” she said with a frown. “Why in God’s name is this person so willing to hurt—kill—other people over those horses?”
She shivered at the notion and Jasper took her hand in his, offering her comfort.
“I’ve learned,” he said, “that the mysterious Fleetwood happens to be the younger brother of Lord Payne.”
“Of the Lords of Anarchy?” Hermione asked, puzzled. “What an odd coincidence.”
“Does it not puzzle you that it was Payne’s brother who sold them, then tried and failed to buy them back?” Jasper asked. Then, careful about the way he worded his next question, he continued. “And only a short time later Payne, his brother, offered you membership in his club?”
She gasped. “Are you implying that the only reason he invited me into the club was so he could have access to my horses?”
* * *
Jasper winced. There was simply no delicate way to put it. “Not to say that you couldn’t drive circles around every member of that club,” he said, “but did it not strike you as odd that you are the only female member? If he really was interested in opening up the club to all sorts of people, would he not have welcomed more than just one lady into the membership?”
Hermione was silent for a moment, and Jasper worried that he’d gone too far.
“I cannot believe I was so gullible,” she said finally, in a scandalized whisper. “How utterly self-important of me to think I was the only lady with the skills to be invited into the club.”
“Do not be too hard on yourself,” he said, soothing her with a stroke down her back. “He was very persuasive, I’m sure.”
“But how could having me as a club member help him get my horses from me?” she asked, still confused. “It’s not as if I’d simply give them over to him because I was a club member.”
“No,” Jasper said, wrapping his arms around her. “He wanted you in the club so that he could claim friendship with you and then perhaps convince you to sell them to him.”
“But he never even asked!”
“There was no time to do so,” he explained. “Before you could even go on your first promenade with the club your father lost them to Lord Saintcrow.”
“So, it was Lord Payne who killed Saintcrow?” she asked, shocked. “I must confess, I hadn’t thought him capable of such a thing. He isn’t an especially warm man, but I didn’t think him a killer.”
“And he may not be,” Jasper assured her. “I think it was actually Fleetwood who killed Saintcrow. According to Payne, the two were thick as thieves. And the man at Tattersall’s said it was Fleetwood who was there the day after Mr. Wingate purchased the grays on your behalf. I think it likely that Fleetwood sent Saintcrow to persuade your father to worst them and then Saintcrow double-crossed Fleetwood.”
“But why?” she asked. “They are beautiful and spirited, but they are hardly the most brilliantly pedigreed horses in the world. I thought I was getting a bargain because of it, but clearly someone thinks they are valuable enough to kill for them.”
“Do you recall how I told you I was looking into Fleetwood for the Home Office?” he asked. “I believe that Payne is somehow involved with the theft ring and that someone—perhaps Fleetwood—mistakenly put your grays up for sale at Tatt’s.”
“What’s so damning about that?”
“Tattersall’s is one of the most prestigious venues for horses to be bought and sold. And I think someone didn’t wish your grays to be looked at too carefully. Which is not likely at someplace like that. Certainly not in a place where their horses are seen by hundreds of men in a day.”
“You mean they were afraid their true owner would recognize them?” she asked, frowning.
“Precisely,” he agreed. “Or that they would realize that they didn’t start off life as pure grays.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Do you recall how Rosencrantz always grows uneasy when you attempt to scratch him between his eyes?” Jasper asked.
“I thought he just didn’t like it,” she admitted. “Some horses don’t. So I just stroke his neck.”
“I think your Rosencrantz began life with a white marking between his eyes,” Jasper said. “And I think someone dyed it before you bought him at Tatt’s.”
“So they’re not matched?” she asked.
“Very likely not,” Jasper said with a nod. “I believe their distinguishing marks were covered up so that their true owners wouldn’t recognize them.”
“Does Papa know?” she asked, a hand to her chest. “Was that why he was so keen to wager with them?”
He wanted more than anything to let her have the illusion that her father had been acting in her best interests. But he knew she would not like being lied to again. “I don’t think he knew when he lost them to Saintcrow, no.”
“But Saintcrow knew,” she said with a frown. “Because he was working with Fleetwood from the start. And instead of giving them back to Fleetwood when he won them from Papa, he double-crossed him?”
“I think it’s very likely.” Jasper nodded. “Perhaps Saintcrow wanted more money than Fleetwood was willing to give him for managing to win the horses from your father. It’s a risk a man involved in any sort of criminal dealings must take when he trusts someone else.”
“Perhaps we’ll never know why,” Hermione said thougtfully. “If Saintcrow was planning to marry Miss Fleetwood, then perhaps he was going to attempt to turn over a new leaf. And he needed the extra money to do it.”
“And before Fleetwood could manage to get the horses from Saintcrow’s stables,” Jasper said, “I bought them from Saintcrow’s heir.”
“And now Fleetwood has stolen them again,” she said, shaking her head. “Do they not consider that by stealing them they are just alerting us to the fact that there is something amiss with them?”
“I think at this point, he feels he has nothing left to lose,” Jasper said grimly. “One man is dead, another is lying abed with a cut across his throat, and they risked injuring you. That’s the murder of one peer and the attempted murder of two others. Once they’re caught they will be shown no mercy.”
Hermione was quiet for a little while.
Finally, she asked, “Why attack my father? He was no longer in possession of the horses when he was waylaid. And he never even went to the stables to see them once while I had them.”
“I believe that once he learned of Saintcrow’s murder, your father figured out that there was something amiss with those horses.” Jasper frowned. “Unfortunately, knowing your father and his constant desire to have more money with which to gamble, I am afraid he figured out who it was that killed Saintcrow and decided to blackmail them.”
Hermione gasped. When her eyes filled with tears, he pulled her against him. “I am so sorry, my dear. I would not tell you such a thing for the world, but I’m afraid it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Foolish, foolish man,” she said through her tears. “He was so desperate for the next game. The next win. And it almost killed him.”
“But he survived,” Jasper said, kissing the top of her head. “That is the important thing. And I will make sure that the man responsible for hurting him is brought to justice.”
“If not Fleetwood, then who?” she demanded.
But before Jasper could speak, a throat cleared, startling them both.
“I hate to interrupt this charming little tête-à-tête,” said Lord Payne from behind them. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to stop you now.”