With assurances to Leonora and Ophelia that she would inform them if she learned anything further about Saintcrow’s death, Hermione closed the door of the rented Upperton town house and hurried upstairs to scrub away the memory of the afternoon’s horror in a steaming bath.
She was staring sightlessly out her bedchamber window toward the back garden when she heard a shout from the direction of the neighboring yard.
The Fleetwoods’ garden.
Mindful of her promise to Mainwaring not to go near her neighbors, she was, however, grateful for the distraction from the events of the morning. So she watched with interest as a lady and a gentleman stood arguing near the gate of the neighboring yard. It was too far away to tell if the gentleman was Mr. Fleetwood, though the build looked right. His hair was obscured by his hat, however, and as she hadn’t ever met Miss Fleetwood there was no way to know if it was her neighbor’s sister she saw now.
She knew they argued because of the vehement gesticulations on the part of the lady, and something about the way the man held himself. It wasn’t a happy conversation—that was certain. And Hermione, wondering if their enmity had something to do with Mainwaring’s warnings against the Fleetwoods, watched fascinated and horrified as the gentleman took the lady by the shoulders and shook her.
And, as she watched, the man in the garden pulled his companion closer and, to Hermione’s surprise, dipped his head and appeared to kiss her.
Yes, she thought, watching wordlessly as the lady’s arms wrapped around the gentleman’s shoulders and seemed to pull him closer, they were most definitely embracing. Either that man wasn’t Mr. Fleetwood or the lady was not his sister.
“Your bath’s ready, my lady.”
Hermione leaped up in alarm at her maid’s voice. Her cheeks reddened at being caught spying on her neighbors. And reluctantly, she turned away from the scene below. “Yes, thank you, Minnie.”
Determined not to look down again, she pulled the curtain closed and hurried into the dressing room where she allowed Minnie to help her undress and sank into the fragrant hot water.
But once she was alone with her thoughts, it wasn’t the embracing couple next door she remembered, but the face of the deceased Lord Saintcrow. Despite her anger with him yesterday morning, she had not wished the man dead. And certainly not in such a violent manner.
He’d seemed so vital. So alive. It was shocking to think all that vigor had been snuffed out in the space of a day.
Had it been simply a thief who’d killed him? Someone who was caught in the act of robbing his lordship and panicked?
Recalling the gaping wound in Saintcrow’s throat, Hermione doubted it. One didn’t slit someone’s throat out of surprise. Indeed, she thought, turning her mind to the puzzle of it, one would need to get behind the victim to do such a thing. It was possible that the killer had heard Saintcrow coming and hid somewhere, only leaping out once the man’s back was turned to inflict the wound. But somehow she didn’t think it had happened that way.
There hadn’t seemed to be any sign of struggle. Perhaps the killer had been known to his lordship. Had seemed innocuous enough for poor Lord Saintcrow to turn his back on him. And then when he wasn’t looking, the killer had made his move.
Despite the heat of the bath, Hermione shivered. It would take a great deal of anger to make someone want to kill another in such a personal way. She’d been as angry at the man as she had ever been at another human being—with the exception of her father, of course—and yet, she’d never considered doing such a thing. Stealing her grays back, yes. Murder? Absolutely not.
Recalling her grays, she sat up in the tub. What would happen to them now that Lord Saintcrow was dead?
Not waiting for Minnie to return to help her out, she stood and wrapped herself in the toweling the maid had left beside the tub. On bare feet, she padded across the thick carpets into her bedchamber and the small writing desk there.
When her note was finished she rang for Minnie, asking her to give the note to a footman and have him deliver it posthaste.
Mindful that she shouldn’t let on that she knew what had happened to Saintcrow lest for some reason the note were intercepted, she’d only requested that Lord Mainwaring do what he could about her poor horses. He had already done so much for her—unbidden, but even so—that she felt slightly guilty asking for one more favor. But she rather supposed he’d prefer that she follow his orders to stay home instead of going to see about the horses on her own.
When had her life become so complicated?
Only yesterday she’d been pleased to begin her tenure as a member of one of London’s foremost driving clubs. And now she was without her precious horses, she’d seen the man who won them dead, and spied on one or (shudder) both of her neighbors engaged in an illicit embrace. And to top it all off, she had kissed the Earl of Mainwaring.
It really was not to be borne.
* * *
After reporting Saintcrow’s death to the magistrate, Jasper went to Brooks’s in search of Trent and Freddy.
Since Lord Upperton had so recently lost an estate as well as his daughter’s horses to Saintcrow, it was likely that suspicion would fall upon him. Or, worse, upon Hermione.
And, since he knew Hermione hadn’t killed the man, he needed to speak to his future father-in-law to determine whether he’d been the culprit. Given Saintcrow’s involvement in the theft ring, it seemed unlikely, but he needed to question Upperton all the same. Before the magistrate’s investigators did if at all possible.
Trent and Freddy he wanted for moral support. It wasn’t every day one questioned one’s prospective in-laws about murder.
“Thank God!” Trent said as Mainwaring approached the table where the duke and Freddy were reading the papers. “This fellow has been boring me to death with his constant praise of married life. I suppose I should expect something similar from you any day now, but you can’t be there yet since you only won your bride last evening, so you’ll do for a diversion.”
“I hear congratulations are in order,” Freddy said with a grin as Jasper took a seat at their table. “It’s not every day a man wins his bride’s hand in a game of cards, Mainwaring. Well done! Though I have a feeling Lady Hermione is not going to be best pleased with the news.”
“An understatement,” Jasper said grimly, indicating to the hovering waiter that he’d like a glass of claret. “I haven’t told her yet, but then she was busy this morning stumbling over dead bodies and the like.”
Quickly, he told the other two about what had gone on at Saintcrow’s house that morning, being sure to tell Freddy that Leonora had been there but was well enough when he’d sent them on their way.
Even so, Freddy was not best pleased to hear his wife had been involved. “She is not feeling her best at the moment,” he said. “I would have thought that now of all times she’d choose to avoid madcap stunts like this.”
Jasper and Trent exchanged speaking looks.
“In the family way, is she?” Trent drawled, as Freddy stood.
Biting back a laugh as his friend’s expression warred between worry and pride, Jasper said, “Congratulations, old man!”
Giving himself over to self-satisfaction, Freddy grinned. “Indeed she is,” he said proudly. “But she’d been devilishly ill. Which is why I’m so angry she allowed the other two to persuade her to go to that scoundrel’s house. I realize Hermione wants her horses back, but was it really necessary to involve Leonora in her schemes?”
Jasper rather thought that Leonora would take exception to her husband’s assessment of her ability to make her own decisions, but forbore from pointing it out given Freddy’s understandable protectiveness.
“I suspect Leonora would have had her guts for garters if she’d tried to embark on the errand without her,” Trent said, having no such compunction.
To his credit, Freddy didn’t disagree. “You’re likely right. She’s scolded me more than once about trying to wrap her in cotton wool. But it’s damned difficult to keep from doing so when she’s so damned vulnerable.”
Knowing how he’d felt that morning when he’d learned Hermione had been in Saintcrow’s house, Jasper didn’t doubt how Freddy felt. It was difficult to put into words just how terrified he’d been to imagine what might have happened if Saintcrow’s killer had still been there when Hermione and her friends barged in.
“Go look after your lady,” he said, clapping Freddy on the back, “She seemed well when I sent them off in the carriage, but I have little doubt you’ll not be content until you see for yourself.”
“Thanks, old man,” Freddy said with relief, rising. “We’ll drink a toast to your own betrothal just as soon as you’ve had a chance to talk it over with Hermione.”
“You haven’t told her yet?” Trent asked, once Freddy was gone. “What the devil?”
“I was going to,” Jasper explained, taking a swig of his wine, “but when I arrived at her house, it was to learn she’d gone off with Leonora and Ophelia. So, I thought to seek out Saintcrow to see if he could be persuaded to give up her horses. Imagine my surprise when I found Hermione and her two best friends terrified in the front entry hall of Saintcrow’s house.”
“I might have expected it of Lady Hermione,” Trent said, “but I thought Leonora and Ophelia had more sense than that.”
At Jasper’s pointed look, he shrugged. “You have to admit that she’s a dashed headstrong filly. Once she takes a notion in her head it’s impossible to change it.”
“Might I remind you that you are speaking of my future bride?” Jasper said mildly. He could take umbrage at what Trent was saying about Hermione, but even he had to admit that she was not the meekest of creatures.
“Oh, you know as well as I do what she’s like,” Trent said, unrepentant. “The only question is, what will you do to protect her from suspicion?”
“At the moment, it’s her father I need to speak to,” Jasper said, explaining why he’d run his friends to ground in Brooks’s in the first place. “I sent Hermione home to await further instructions from me, and before you ask, she was shaken up enough by finding Saintcrow’s body that I believe she will not venture out for the rest of the day at least.”
“And you want to see if Upperton knows anything about Saintcrow’s demise?” Trent guessed.
“Precisely,” Jasper said, rising. “So, let’s go.”
They ran Lord Upperton to ground at White’s, where he’d somehow managed to keep up his membership.
“My lord,” said Jasper to Hermione’s father, where he slumped in a dark corner with a cup of strong coffee—obviously nursing a headache from overindulgence the evening before. “Might we have a few words?”
Without waiting for an invitation he and Trent took chairs on either side of the older man.
“What do you want?” Upperton said indignantly. “Didn’t you get what you wanted from me last night? I would have thought you’d be off celebrating your impending nuptials.”
“Is that any way to speak to your future son-in-law?” Jasper asked, noting the nervous way that Upperton beat his fingers on the table before him. “I would have thought you’d welcome me with open arms. Especially if you’re hoping for any sort of beneficial marriage settlements.”
That woke Upperton from his malaise. Sitting up straighter, he said, “But I thought because you won her at cards there would be no settlements.”
It was really too disgusting that the man would let his daughter go into a marriage thinking there would be nothing put in place to protect her interests, Jasper thought. “Of course there will be settlements,” he said, biting back the scold he longed to give the man. It would do no good, and since he knew that he would provide adequately for Hermione and any children they might have, even if her father would not, it was beside the point.
“That’s a relief,” said Upperton with a grin. “I look forward to meeting with you, Mainwaring.”
“We’re not here to speak of settlements, however,” said Jasper, exchanging a glance with Trent who was looking at Upperton as if he were a toad. “We’re here to ask you about Lord Saintcrow.”
At the mention of Saintcrow, Lord Upperton frowned. “What of him? He hasn’t found some fault with those damned horses, has he? If so, it’s too late. The fellow won them fair and square and I haven’t got the blunt to pay him the amount they’re worth.”
“Nothing like that,” Jasper assured him, suppressing his annoyance at the ease with which Upperton discussed his daughter’s horses. “Indeed, he won’t be able to find fault with anything ever again.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Upperton demanded.
“He’s dead, man,” Trent informed Hermione’s father, who blanched at the bold announcement.
“Well, don’t look at me!” he said, throwing up his hands as if to ward off an accusation. “I had no reason to see the fellow dead. We’d completed our business. I was finished with him.”
“But what of Hermione’s anger over how you lost her horses,” Jasper asked, watching the older man carefully. “Did you perhaps try to get them back, and argue with Saintcrow over the matter?”
Upperton’s look of puzzlement was reassuring on the one hand—that he did indeed have nothing to do with Saintcrow’s murder—but on the other, it was highly angry-making. Because it was clear from his expression that asking for his daughter’s horses back was so far from the realm of his possible motivations as to be unthinkable.
What a delightful man he would have as a father-in-law, Jasper thought with sarcasm.
“It was finished,” Upperton said with a shake of his head. “My daughter might not understand the whys and wherefores of gentlemanly behavior, but I thought you would, Mainwaring. A gentleman does not renege on a deal. No matter how angry one’s daughter might be over it. I would no more ask for those horses back than I would cheat at the tables.”
At the very least, Jasper was glad to know that neither of the Uppertons was responsible for Saintcrow’s murder. He might despise the way Hermione’s father dismissed her wishes out of hand, but he was relieved not to need to defend the man against a murder charge.
“Very well,” he said aloud. “Now, I must ask you to return home and inform your daughter about what passed between us last night. Because I mean to ask for her hand this afternoon, and it would be better if she knows about it beforehand from you.”
Upperton looked as if he would like to object, but on seeing just how serious Jasper was, he bit back his protest.
“Very well,” he said with a nod. “I’ll just finish up this drink and—”
“Better to go now,” Trent said with pleasant menace.
“I agree,” Jasper said, equally persuasive.
Upperton sighed. “Very well. I’ll go now.”
When he was gone, Jasper gave a sigh of his own. “And that’s the man to whom I have pledged to tie my family for the rest of my life.”
“Look at it this way,” Trent said, ordering a glass of ale. “If nothing else, it will make a charming story to tell your grandchildren.”
But Jasper was rather skeptical whether Lady Hermione would allow there to be any issue from their marriage at all. Especially when she heard how he’d happened to go about winning her father’s consent to the match.