Chapter Eleven

Jacob entered his study and pulled up short. His heart stopped in his chest.

Charlotte was standing by the bookcase, perusing the titles on the shelves, but for a small moment he didn’t see Charlotte. He saw Cora. Cora when they had first been married, before she became with child, before the fever had whittled her away to nothing.

In that moment he thought that it had all been a horrible, terrible nightmare and she really hadn’t died. That she was alive and looking at his books, waiting for him to go into dinner.

But then Charlotte turned her head, and the spell was broken and the grief came raging back, consuming him like it hadn’t in a long time. It was the gown. Only the gown that brought it all back.

The woman looking back at him was not Cora. Cora had had dark brown hair, long and shining, and hazel eyes. Cora had been quiet, introspective. She’d listened, watched, and drew conclusions that she’d discussed with him later.

Charlotte was a doer. Charlotte took life by the horns, and if she didn’t like the way things were going, she changed it. Charlotte took control and wrestled a problem to the ground.

“By the shocked expression on your face I imagine you never thought you would see me clean.” She held out her arms. “And in a gown, no less.”

Jacob licked dry lips and pushed the image of Cora away. “You could say that.”

“Mrs. Smith burned my other clothes. She said you wouldn’t mind if I wore this.”

By the concern in her eyes he guessed that Mrs. Smith had told Charlotte far more than that. “There is a trunk full of gowns that you may wear.”

“You don’t mind?”

He hesitated. “They’re just moldering away.”

“Mrs. Smith told me—”

“I can imagine what Mrs. Smith told you.”

Charlotte blinked at his curt tone. “If it’s too uncomfortable for you—”

“It’s fine. Truly.”

She nodded. “Very well. Thank you.”

“Yellow looks good on you.”

She pulled at the short ends of her hair. “It’s strange being in a gown again. Stranger still to be wearing such a bright color. Aunt Martha didn’t allow color.”

“Well, that’s depressing.”

“To say the least.”

“Is your room to your liking?” He felt like he was removed from the conversation and watching from a distance. Definitely not like he’d just kissed her.

“I slept on an uncomfortable pallet for weeks. It’s quite luxurious compared to what I’m used to.”

“If you need anything, let me know.”

She considered him for a moment. “This is awkward.”

He looked down at his toes and realized that he was still standing in the doorway. The sight of Charlotte had stopped him in his tracks. “You just look so different.”

“And I’m wearing your wife’s gown.” She held up her hand to stop what he was about to say. “I know you don’t want to talk about it. I’ll say no more.”

In the hallway, when he was showing her the rest of his home, he’d acted on instinct, something he rarely, if ever, did. He’d wanted to kiss her and so he had. She’d been right there. And he’d been right in front of her, hemmed in by the narrow hallway. She’d looked up at him with those large, luminous eyes, and he’d kissed her. And it had been fantastic.

But now, seeing her in Cora’s gown, he felt guilty.

Armbruster kept telling him it was time to move on, but Armbruster didn’t understand the grief that still overtook him at times—although less frequently now. Oliver didn’t understand the love that Cora and Jacob had shared. Jacob knew that he would never find another woman like his Cora.

“Dinner should be soon,” he said to break the awkward silence and to distract his mind from kissing Charlotte.

She drew in a deep breath and pressed her hand to her stomach and looked at the bookcase that she had been perusing.

“They’re not exactly entertaining,” he said.

She looked back at him. “What?”

He nodded toward the bookcase. “The books. They’re not light reading. Mostly law books.”

She ran a finger over the spine of one. In the firelight her skin was like alabaster, glowing from the scrubbing that she’d given it. “For the past few years, the only book I was allowed to read was the Bible, so anything else is a nice change.”

“Well, you’re welcome to read them, but they’ll put you to sleep. They even put me to sleep. If you’d like, we can go to the bookstore, and you can buy something more to your liking.”

She looked longingly at the books one last time and let her hand drop to her side. “Thank you, but I don’t think I’ll be around long enough to read a book.”

The thought of her leaving left his heart heavy, and he wanted to curse himself. One moment he was mourning Cora, and the next he was mourning the imminent loss of Charlotte.

He confused himself.

…

The next morning Charlotte made it downstairs rather early only to discover that Jacob was already gone.

“Meetings with important people,” Mrs. Smith had said as she’d hurried about, waving her dust cloth.

The night had not gone as well as Charlotte hoped. One would think that sleeping in a comfortable bed would have meant a dreamless sleep, but that had been far from the case. She’d tossed and turned, thoughts of Jacob filling her mind. Jacob in the hallway. Kissing Jacob. Jacob in his study, looking at her as if he were seeing a ghost.

She’d seen the hope, then the grief flood his eyes when he’d seen her in his wife’s gown and realized it was Charlotte.

Just Charlotte.

The way Jacob had looked at her when he thought she was his dead wife had done something to her. She wanted someone to look at her that way, so full of love that he could barely contain it.

Mrs. Smith had given her another gown, this one a pale peach, and it fit much better.

“Mrs. Smith, please tell me you didn’t stay up half the night taking this gown in for me?”

“Aww. Get on with you.” The housekeeper had blushed and scrunched her eyes in pleasure. “It only took me a few hours in the evening.”

Charlotte turned this way and that in front of the mirror. It was styled essentially the same as the yellow gown—too much lace and too many ribbons—but it was pretty, and it was well made, and better than that, it was clean.

“Truly,” Charlotte said. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do this.”

Charlotte took her coffee in Jacob’s office, sitting by the window as the weak sunlight filtered in. It seemed so normal to sit here and drink coffee and look at the street and the people passing by.

Normal had been missing from her life for a long, long time.

She spied a stack of newspapers on a corner table and fetched them to settle back in the window seat and enjoy her morning as she hadn’t enjoyed it since her papa had died.

But the headline screaming at her made her heart flutter, and she put down her coffee, her stomach churning.

She quickly scanned the story, her breath coming faster, her brain unable to keep up with how fast her eyes were moving across the page.

Four women dead.

Beheaded.

Two with their hands cut off.

All found in the Thames.

She grabbed the next newspaper, but there was no mention of it. Two more newspapers into the stack she found another article, but it seemed that Scotland Yard had no real clues and no direction in which to go. They assumed the dead girls were servants, but that’s all they knew.

Charlotte let the paper drop to her lap, and she closed her eyes, thinking of a dismembered head and sightless, glassy eyes.

She pressed her fist to her mouth to keep the coffee from coming back up and thought of the dark basement at Aunt Martha’s house and how Charlotte had refused to go down there, even if it had meant a beating for disobedience.

…

Jacob didn’t want to miss his longstanding appointment with Armbruster that afternoon, but neither did he want to leave Charlotte alone for much longer. He’d already left her to her devices for the better part of the day, and he was uneasy. Who knew what mischief she could get herself into?

He told himself he missed her because she was vulnerable and needed his help. Not because she was easy to talk to and he enjoyed her company or that he wanted to kiss her again.

“April fifteenth,” Armbruster said.

Jacob paused, halfway to sitting down, and frowned at his friend. “Is that date supposed to mean something?”

“Put it in your book. Mother has organized a get-together, just a few hundred of her closest friends. You’re invited. In fact, it’s in your honor.”

“A few hundred friends is not a get-together. That is a ball.” His honor?

Armbruster shrugged. “Call it want you want, but you better be there.”

“I don’t go to those things. You know that. I know nothing about balls. What do I do? How do I act?”

“Like you do and act now. No different.”

“So not show up?” Jacob asked, perking up.

“Except that.”

He did not like parties. Even small parties. Intimate dinners, maybe, but large affairs made him nervous. He wasn’t very good at small talk, and he always felt like the biggest fool.

Armbruster leaned forward. “I have information on the dead women.”

It took a moment for Jacob’s mind to switch topics. “The women found in the Thames?” he asked.

“Yes. I spoke to Detective O’Leary.”

Detective O’Leary had been an unexpected boon to Jacob and Oliver. Jacob had met O’Leary while trying to run down a witness to a case that he’d been working on. He and O’Leary had had a drink at a local pub, and Jacob had asked him a question that had been vexing him and Armbruster regarding a murder at a local boarding house. O’Leary had supplied some information, and after that he had become somewhat of a friend of Jacob and Oliver’s. They were a strange trio—the earl, the solicitor, and the detective. Although now Jacob supposed there were two earls and a detective.

“All of them were stabbed repeatedly,” Armbruster said.

“Stabbed?” This was not something Jacob had heard before, but he was going by the newspaper articles which were deliberately holding information back per the request of Scotland Yard. “Is that how they were killed?”

Armbruster shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Interesting,” Jacob murmured.

What a strange, macabre mystery. Who was killing these women and why? None of them seem to be related in any way other than that they were of the serving class.

“It seems that removing the heads and hands means he doesn’t want them identified. The first two were missing only their heads so they couldn’t be identified. Then Scotland Yard reasoned they were servants by their worn and cracked hands, so he started cutting off their hands, too.”

“Why should the killer care if we know he’s killing servants? Killing is killing no matter the class of the person.”

“Because it narrows his hunting ground,” Oliver said. “Wherever it is that he’s hunting has to be a place where serving girls congregate. If they’re scared, they won’t go there.”

“Whoever is killing them has to be someone stronger. More likely a man. He’d subdue them quickly. Make sure they can’t fight. I can see stabbing them once to kill them. Maybe twice, if you didn’t do the job correctly the first time. But repeatedly?”

Armbruster shrugged. “Maybe he’s angry and he can’t control himself.”

They both thought about that for a moment but realized that they weren’t going to solve this one.

“Tell me about your investigation into Miss Morris,” Oliver said. “Have you had any luck?”

Jacob’s thoughts instantly changed course. “Not only have I had luck, I have her living in my home.”

Armbruster’s eyes widened. It wasn’t often that Jacob could surprise his friend.

“How did this happen?”

“She came to me. Do you remember the lad I saved from being trampled by the horse?” Jacob explained the entire story of how Charlotte had found him and how he’d convinced her to move in with him.

“It’s temporary?” Oliver didn’t seem convinced.

“Of course. She wants to create a new identity and go to America to teach American heiresses how to catch an English lord.”

Armbruster snorted. “Buchanan fell for that. Has himself a rich heiress who is keeping his estate afloat. She’s a bohemian, I’ve heard. Knows nothing about our ways. Speaks too candidly.” Oliver shook his head. “Maybe Miss Morris is on to something.”

“I think she should try to reconnect with her mother’s family, instead,” Jacob said. Even though Charlotte was adamant that her mother’s family wanted nothing to do with her, Jacob thought she should at least try. Fleeing to America seemed so drastic when she could possibly have the might of a marquess at her disposal.

“Chadley?” Armbruster seemed to consider this. “It might work. The old man is dead. Charlotte’s uncle is now the marquess. Feelings might have softened.”

“What better way to get her out of the clutches of that horrid aunt than by putting her in the hands of a powerful marquess?”

“And what if he harbors the same ire as his father? What if he won’t accept Charlotte back into the fold?”

“Then I suppose I send her to America.” But every time he considered putting Charlotte on a ship to America, his mind veered from the thought, as if it were too horrid.

Armbruster sat back and contemplated Jacob for the longest time. The servant brought them their usual port, and Jacob sipped on it, barely tasting it. His mind bounced from the mystery of the dead girls to Charlotte sitting in his home. There were moments that he couldn’t believe that the picture of her had come alive.

He was pulled from his miasma of thoughts by Armbruster’s intense gaze. “Well, out with it, man. What are you thinking so deeply about?” Jacob asked.

“Your future.”

“My future?”

“Have you looked at your estate books?”

Jacob hesitated, and Oliver made a frustrated noise. “Have the books sent down here. I’ll have my man look at them.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“You have no idea what to look for. Do you even know what makes land profitable? What to do to make it earn you money?”

Jacob pulled in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Are you trying to make me feel like an imbecile?”

Armbruster waved his hand in the air. “You need to be taught all of this. I can teach you most of it.”

“Why are you doing this?” Oliver rarely did anything out of the goodness of his heart.

“Because you’ve helped me out of quite a few messes.”

Covering up his indiscretions and paying off a few whores did not warrant such a grandiose reimbursement from Oliver, but Jacob wasn’t going to question it. He needed help, and Armbruster was the best one to help him.

“Then, thank you,” he said.

“Don’t thank me yet. Wait until Mother’s ball. All of the matchmaking mamas and their eager daughters will be eyeing you like a hawk eyes a mouse. You are the newest, freshest meat on the market, my friend.”

Jacob shuddered. “That sounds horrifying.”

“You can fix it.”

Now Armbruster was looking shrewd, and Jacob felt uneasy. “Fix what?”

“Fix your marital status before the desperate mothers descend.”

“And how do you propose I do that? Hide in the country? Not attend this ball?”

“I have something better.” Armbruster grinned, but to Jacob it seemed evil. “Marry Miss Morris.”

Jacob stood so quickly and so violently that conversations around them stopped and people stared. “Are you mad?” he hissed.

“Sit down,” Armbruster said calmly. “I am not mad. Think of it objectively. It will solve all of your problems.”

“I will not listen to this…this tripe.” He practically spewed the word tripe. He’d never been this incensed with his friend.

“Just listen for a moment.” Armbruster was so damn calm that it only enraged Jacob more, but he sat because people were staring and even he knew the amount of tongue-wagging that happened in these places. One husband would go home to his wife and it would be all over London that the newest earl couldn’t control his temper.

“I’m listening,” he muttered.

“You are a new earl. We don’t know if you are a rich earl, yet, but to some of these mothers it doesn’t matter. Especially the American mothers.”

“American mothers?” Jacob whispered, appalled. Never did he think he would have anything to do with an American heiress.

“They’ll be all over you like flies on horse dung.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, it’s true, and you know it. For some, it’s all about the title and not so much about the money. There are families that made a fortune in trade in America that are dying to get their foot in the front door of an earl’s home. I know how you hate such attention, and I can’t believe that you haven’t received any callers yet. Mark my words, they will come. I’m sure they’re just waiting for some formal announcement.”

Jacob closed his eyes, feeling as if his world were tilting and spinning.

“Marriage will stop it all before it starts, and you get the added benefit of saving Miss Morris from the fire-breathing dragon of an aunt.”

“While I appreciate your concern, I am never marrying again.”

Oliver gave him such a pitying look that Jacob wanted to punch his friend in the face just to wipe it away. But, again, tongues would wag, and he didn’t need that right now.

“Cora would not want you rotting away in that dark townhouse of yours. She would want you to live the rest of your life.”

Jacob snorted. “You’re full of useless wisdom today. You don’t know what Cora would have wanted, and again you are spewing tripe.”

“You’re not thinking objectively.”

“It’s difficult to think objectively when you are talking about my future and being tied to a person I barely know.”

“Many marriages begin in such a way. It’s not unusual.”

“Well, it’s not for me, so you can forget this half-baked idea.”

“Obviously it is not a decision to make lightly or quickly. I advise you to think about it.”

“I would advise you to keep your nose out of it.”

Armbruster shook his head. “Marry Miss Morris, Jacob, and your troubles will go away.”