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by Mary Balogh
Her eyes found his and held them. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright. But even as she looked and he began to smile at her, her expression changed and he saw anxiety and panic in her face. She came rushing across the room to him, her eyes on his, completely ignoring Christopher, and hurried straight into his arms.
“John,” she said, burying her face among the careful folds of his neckcloth. “Oh, John, it has happened again and it is all my fault.”
John, his arms coming protectively about her, met Christopher’s eyes over the top of her head. Both men raised their eyebrows.
Chapter 24
CHRISTOPHER was inclined to slip from the room. He had already been delayed from the outing he intended for that morning.
But he stayed where he was when he saw how distraught his sister was.
John closed his eyes briefly and hugged her tight. He seemed to understand what she was talking about despite his raised eyebrows when she had first spoken.
“What has happened?” he asked.
She struggled out of his’arms and seemed to notice her brother’s presence for the first time. “He h-hurt my maid a fews weeks ago,” she said. “He beat her and ravished her.”
“Martin?” John said.
Christopher could feel himself turning cold.
Nancy nodded. “And it is all my fault,” she said. “I could have prevented it and perhaps other attacks I do not even know of if I had had the courage to speak out sooner. I have been very selfish.”
“No,” John said. “You cannot blame yourself for someone else’s evil.”
“Martin raped Winnie?” Christopher asked. “And beat her? Why in heaven’s name did she not speak up at the time, Nance? I would have horsewhipped him. I’ll still do it.” His hands clenched into fists at his sides. Though he might well do more than take a horsewhip to Martin Honywood’s hide.
“It is not easy to report such a thing, Christopher,” Nancy said gravely. “It is almost impossible to tell another person about such shame and degradation and guilt.”
“Guilt?” Christopher looked at her blankly.
“When you have been raped,” she said, “you feel guilty, as if somehow you must have been asking for it.”
He felt as if the blood were draining from his head. Nancy leaving Kingston Park quite inexplicably when his wedding was only one week in the future and when she had seemed to be enjoying herself and perhaps even falling in love with John. And Nancy staying at Penhallow ever since and refusing to consider marriage despite her beauty and vitality.
“It sounds as if you are talking from personal experience,” he said.
He could scarcely get the words past his lips.
“I am.”
He was looking at her as if down a long tunnel. John, he noticed, had an arm about her shoulders.
“It was Martin,” John said. “A beating and rape. The day before Nancy left Kingston. I did not know of it myself until two days ago. If I had, I would have killed Martin.”
“Why have you not done so during the past two days?”
Christopher asked. He was surprised at the calmness of his voice. His eyes were on the pale face of his sister.
“Because I wanted no trouble,” Nancy said. “I wanted it all left in the past. Although I have always understandably hated Martin, I have also thought that perhaps he was overwrought to be losing Elizabeth, who had been almost like a twin to him all his life. I have considered the fact that he was only eighteen and had not learned how to control his impulses. I have never excused him in my mind, but I have always assumed that it was something he did once only in his life—to me.”
Christopher turned away and sat down rather heavily on a chair.
He rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands.
“I have begun to see in the last few days,” he said, “that he is a demon straight from hell. But this is worse than anything else I have yet uncovered about him.”
John drew Nancy down onto a sofa. He kept an arm about her shoulders. “Uncovered?” he said. “What do you mean?”
Christopher looked up at him with weary eyes. “Elizabeth and I,” he said, “Nancy, you—he has ruined all our lives. Coldly, methodically, and ruthlessly. And he has remained smiling and charming the whole time.”
John and Nancy were looking intently at him.
“The dancer who was beaten and died,” he said. “Nigel Rhodes has admitted to me that he was paid to report that he saw me leave the theater with her. Paid by Martin. She was beaten, poor girl, before she died. Having heard what I just have, I would have to say that it has rather the stamp of Martin on it, doesn’t it?”
John’s head was down. “I have been inclined to think as Nancy did,” he said, “that Martin gave in to a boyish impulse, looking for love himself or an approximation of love because Elizabeth had found it with you.”
“And Winston Rawlings,” Christopher said, “who was present with me and a few others at that notorious card party in Oxford when Morrison was stripped of his fortune, can testify to two truths. The first is that I was a mere spectator of the game, guilty as I felt afterward for not doing something to stop it since Morrison was so drunk that he did not know what he was doing. The second is that Martin wormed the whole story out of Raw-lings seven years ago, a few days before Rawlings was to leave to take up a government appointment in Ireland.”
“Oh, Christopher,” Nancy said.
John’s head was still down. “Christ!” he said. “And I merely laughed and told my father and Martin and Elizabeth that it was all nonsense. I did not do anything positive to disprove either charge. Did Martin count on that? Did he know us that well? And did we know him that little? It is appalling.”
“But why would he do it?” Nancy asked. “How can anyone be so diabolical? It was so obvious that you and Elizabeth loved each other deeply, Christopher.”
“Because he had an obsession with her,” Christopher said. “Has an obsession. No one else can have her if he cannot. Did he ever try to have her for himself, John?”
“My father would surely not have allowed it,” John said, looking up at last. “Though I never heard of any such thing happening. Poor Elizabeth. But, yes, Christopher is right. It is an obsession Martin has for her. A sick obsession.”
“I was on my way out this morning,” Christopher said, “to try to find out if I can what involvement Martin had with getting that woman to send for me and arranging matters that Elizabeth walked into the house a few minutes after me and drew all the wrong conclusions. She had Martin with her, of course. He was almost as upset as she.”
“Christopher,” Nancy said, “it happened seven years ago.”
“I know,” he said. “I have remembered the address, but I have no hope that the woman will still be there. I just hope that somehow I can track her down.”
“Maybe we will just pry the information out of Martin instead,” John said through his teeth. “I learned a thing or two about torture in Spain from looking at the bodies of some of its victims.”
“I’ll try my way first,” Christopher said.
“That was the one charge I did not even scorn at the time,” John said. “All I did argue in your defense was that I was sure you must have ended the affair before your marriage. I did not believe you had been unfaithful to Elizabeth. I certainly ridiculed the idea that you had married her only so that you could support that doxy and her child. But it never occurred to me to probe into the woman’s story. I blame myself now.”
“Don’t,” Christopher said. “I might have checked it too. I ran instead. I think Martin did know us all rather well, didn’t he? Did he plot for the divorce too, do you suppose? Divorce is so very rare, especially with the husband cited as the partner at fault.”
“Perhaps the devil helped his own,” John said, “using my father’s pride. I’ll come with you, Christopher.”
“Oh, yes, do, please,” Nancy said. “Thank you, John.”
Christopher looked a
t them both. “You had other business this morning,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to spoil that.”
John took Nancy’s hand in his and kissed it before drawing her to her feet. “It will wait,” he said, smiling at her rather wanly. “This seems the wrong moment, doesn’t it, Nancy?”
“Yes,” she said.
Christopher got to his feet. “We had better go, then,” he said. “Is Winnie going to be all right, Nance? Does she need a physician?”
“I believe she already has one,” she said. “Antoine Bouchard has been very good to her, Christopher.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, “the romance. Or the apparent romance.” He crossed the room and kissed her cheek. “Nance, I am so sorry that you had to go through that all alone. Somehow I am going to avenge what happened to you. And what was done to Elizabeth’s life.”
“You look after Elizabeth,” John said grimly. “I’ll settle the score for Nancy.”
John kissed her briefly on the lips before the two men left the room.
Lucy Fenwick was not living in the rooming house where Christopher had once been summoned to her. Neither he nor John had expected to find her there. It was a neighborhood, they found, where tenants came and went with fair frequency. None of the other occupants of the house whom they talked with and none of the closest neighbors remembered her.
But there were a couple of tenants from home. One of them returned while the two gentlemen were still interviewing neighbors. And that one did remember Mrs. Fenwick, or claimed to do so. Not a whore, she was not. Oh, no. Kept very much to herself, she did. Put on airs. Inherited money, she did, from an old aunt and went to America. As far as the informant could remember, anyway. It was a long time ago.
The returned tenant was gratified by the close attention the two gentlemen paid her story. She was disappointed when they continued with questions she could not answer. Had Mrs.
Fenwick entertained any visitors? Was there any particular gentleman who visited her regularly? The tenant could not recall.
Christopher and John turned away eventually. It seemed obvious that they would obtain no really important information from this particular woman. And if it was true that Lucy Fenwick had gone to America, her passage there doubtless paid by Martin, then it seemed that the trail had come to an end. Not that it had been anything of a trail to start with.
“If I were you, sir,” the informative neighbor said, “I’d talk to the landlord. ‘E’s been ‘ere forever and a day, ‘e ‘as.”
John nodded. The landlord had been next on their list of people to call on for possible information. It was encouraging to think that a man who had been at the job “forever and a day” must have been there seven years ago.
The landlord, unshaven and unwashed and scratching at flea bites through the frayed fabric of his clothing, did not look to be a reliable witness to anything. His eyes were glazed from the effects of gin consumed already that morning. But he remembered Lucy Fenwick.
“A cut above your ordinary tenant, guv,” he told Christopher.
“Could talk genteel. Went to America, she did after all the ‘ow-d’ye-do.”
“The how do you do?” Christopher raised his eyebrows and looked interested.
“Called to testify in a divorce case, she were, guv,” the landlord said, pausing for the ecstasy of a good scratch. “Some nobs. Then off to America she goes as fast as you please. Money came from ‘er old aunt or grandmother or someone, she said, guv. But those of us with some’at upstairs”—he leered and tapped his right temple—”knows different.”
“Indeed?” Christopher said. “The money came from another source, you think?”
The landlord nodded and yawned loudly. “Come from the same source wot started paying the rent when it got in arrears despite ‘er genteel airs, guv,” the man said. “Bet a pint of good gin on it, I would. Not that it were my business, of course.”
“Of course not,” Christopher agreed, exchanging a glance with John. “And who was it who paid the rent, may I ask?”
The landlord scratched and pursed his lips in thought. His eyes darted once to Christopher and once to John.
“You like good gin, do you?” John asked, drawing a coin from his pocket and bouncing it tantalizingly on his palm. “You must allow us to help you refill your almost empty bottle, sir. Was it a gentleman?”
“Not exactly, guv,” the landlord said, rubbing a dirty hand over the bristles on his chin and trying not to watch the bouncing coin. “A businessman, ‘e were. Let me see now. Perkins, were it? Prewett? Powell? Powers? That’s it.” He stopped and thought for a moment.
“That’s it, guvs. Powers were ‘is name. Like to think ‘e was a nob, but ‘e weren’t one no more nor I am for all ‘is fancy coats and fobs and canes.”
Mr. Powers, businessman. It was very little to go on, Christopher and John agreed when they were making their way back to more familiar areas of London. But the landlord had known no more.
Christopher was depressed. “It is far too little to go on,” he said.
“We do not know the man’s first name or what type of businessman he is or was. We do not know that he is still alive or still in London. Maybe he was sent to Africa or China. We do not even know that it was not a false name. Maybe it was Martin himself.”
“Men like our shrewd landlord,” John said, “can recognize a true nob, as he calls our kind, through any disguise. And he can recognize equally a fake nob. Lucy’s rent payer was a fake nob. Of that we can be sure. He was not Martin.”
Christopher sighed. “So we know we are not looking for a member of the ton,” he said. “That narrows the field considerably.”
John laughed. “Let’s not give up yet,” he said. “What we will do is pay a call on my man of business and pose the problem to him. Perhaps by some miracle he knows Powers. If he does not, maybe he has means of tracking him down. I believe we are going to have to exercise some patience. Remember that we will not reach a total dead end. If all else fails, there is still the Spanish torture.” It did not sound as if he was totally joking.
John’s man of business did not know a Powers in business in London. Neither did his partner nor any member of their staff.
But he quite cheerfully undertook the task of finding him.
“If he is in London, colonel,” he told John briskly, “I shall find him within a day or two.” He bowed to Christopher. “You may depend upon it, my lord.”
They had to be content to leave it at that.
Lord Poole was pacing his rooms in nervous excitement. He looked pleased to see Martin.
“Well,” he said, “everything is set for two evenings hence. The Princess of Wales has been persuaded that it will be in her best interests to appear at the opera while her husband and all his guests are there. Thus she will show them that she holds herself aloof not from choice but because she has been unjustly ordered to do so.”
“I applaud such a bold move,” Martin said. “And will you come out openly in support of her royal highness, Poole?”
“I shall pay my respects to her publicly in her box,” Lord Poole said, “taking Elizabeth with me. And then during the reception and presentation at Carlton House the following evening we will see how I am received. I am willing to gamble on the belief that the various visitors will applaud my move and that many of the other guests will look upon me with renewed respect.”
“Yes,” Martin said, “if only Lizzie can be counted upon to behave herself. But I do admire your courage, Poole. You must be looking forward to the coming days.”
Some of Lord Poole’s excitement had waned. He frowned. “You think she will not?” he asked. “What were you hinting last night, Honywood? I am beginning to wish that I had never set eyes on your stepsister.”
“She is not entirely to blame,” Martin said. “Indeed I do believe she is in no way to blame. But then I am partial. I am very fond of Lizzie.”
“The point, please,” Lord Poole said sharply. “To blame for what?”
> “Yes, I suppose she is to blame,” Martin said, slumping into the nearest chair and staring gloomily at the carpet. “I cannot continue to shield her, especially when her actions are about to affect someone who is totally innocent. Yourself, I mean.”
Lord Poole merely stared at him, one hand clenching and unclenching at his side.
“That kidnapping,” Martin said. “I was persuaded against my better judgment to tell a lie. But I must tell the truth now. Trevelyan was the kidnapper. He took Lizzie to Penhallow, where apparently she fell into his arms. She might still be there if I had not found her and jolted her conscience. You, Christina, her father, decency—all had been forgotten in her lust for Trevelyan.”
“The lost memory story?” Lord Poole asked, his voice tense.
Martin shrugged. “False, I’m afraid,” he said. “And yet now I think she wants you, Poole, and intends to have you. Trevelyan wants to take her off back to Devonshire, you see, but Lizzie likes the social life of London that you can offer. So all must be covered up.”
“The bitch!” Lord Poole said from between his teeth. “I’ll kill her.”
“And swing for it?” Martin said. “I could cry for her, Poole. But I have to think first of you since you are the innocent victim in all this.”
“The betrothal must be ended,” Lord Poole said. “Quickly and quietly. I shall call on Chicheley. I shall advise that she be returned to Kingston Park without delay. The whore is fortunate not to be exposed for what she is.”
Martin sighed and rested his face in his hands. “I should be rejoicing that you are prepared to let her off so lightly, Poole,” he said. “But I have to be fair about all this. Fair to you. You were to be my brother-in-law after all, or almost so. Have you considered carefully? If the real reason for the ending of your betrothal is not known, there will be rumor and gossip, almost all of it directed against you since you will appear to be the one jilted. You will be the laughingstock.”