The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes Page 3

  With a great deal of fidgeting, he managed to get his index finger and thumb onto the knot, and from there it was simply a matter of time before he was able to loosen it. He shut his eyes so he wouldn’t sense the nearness of the walls or imagine that they were drawing closer and worked by touch alone. And then, just like that, he had his hand out.

  He was absolutely going to tell Marian that the next time she saw fit to attempt any abductions, she must first practice her knots. And she was never ever again to use what appeared to be the sash to a dressing gown, for heaven’s sake. She had done remarkably well, though, for an amateur. He hadn’t recognized her until he had downed enough laudanum to put him out for half the night.

  His head still felt full of cotton wool, but he had the uneasy sense that something was wrong—something other than having been kidnapped and held prisoner, that was. He untied his other wrist and shook out his hands, then got shakily to his feet. He felt at his hip for his dagger, only to find that it was missing. That was sensible; he should have expected nothing less of Marian. He reached into his boot and found that the smaller dagger he hid in the lining was still present and accounted for. That was convenient for him, but clearly Marian needed to be educated in the art of concealed weaponry.

  Then, his heart in his throat, he traced a finger along the inner lining of his coat, felt the familiar crinkle of papers, and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Judging by the light that made its way through the grimy windowpane, it was already midmorning, which meant—dammit to hell. Today was the day of the robbery. He ought to already be at the inn in Oxfordshire, making sure the duke’s outriders were appropriately liquored up and their pistols conveniently missing. Now it would be too late to get there in time, and Kit would think Rob had left him high and dry.

  He rapidly went through what he knew, willing the laudanum haze to clear from his mind. The duke’s son—the one who had, until about a month ago, believed himself to be the duke’s legitimate heir—had enlisted the help of Rob’s oldest friend, Kit, in holding up his father’s carriage. Rob had no idea what the devil the fellow thought he was going to get in this robbery, and he certainly didn’t know how the Duke of bloody Clare’s son had got his hands on Kit’s name as someone who might commit highway robbery for hire.

  He also didn’t know what had possessed Kit to (1) agree to this madness and (2) fall in love with the man. Rob was the one who fell in love indiscriminately; Kit was the one who told him he was an idiot and grimly patted his shoulder when things fell apart. Rob was entirely unsure how to operate now that the boot was on the other foot.

  Rob had agreed to help with the robbery but decided not to tell Kit his own relation to the Duke of Clare or that he had been engaged in a bit of light blackmail.

  But now Rob regretted his silence. If Marian had decided to put Rob out of commission for the robbery—and there could be no other explanation for her actions—that meant that she knew not only that he was blackmailing her, but that he was Kit’s partner in crime. And so she had, apparently, done what she had to in order to make sure Kit had to go through with the robbery without Rob’s help. That was not good. It almost made him mistrustful of her motives.

  There would be time later on to think about that. Right now he had to get out before Marian returned.

  Chapter 3

  There had been a time when Marian would have described herself as an intelligent woman, or at least not an idiot. Or, if an idiot, certainly not the most benighted fool in the kingdom. Now she was quite certain that even the greatest simpleton in all the world could not have bungled things to the extent that she had done. She was coming to believe that she had an unprecedented talent for catastrophe, a rare and legendary gift.

  When she and her daughter found themselves destitute and friendless, perhaps Marian could earn her living by penning her memoirs, a cautionary tale for young ladies who might think themselves clever enough to solve all their family’s problems through the simple expedient of marrying up in the world. Marriage: Far More Trouble Than You Might Think would be the title of her treatise. Although, even that probably wouldn’t be of much use to anybody, as she had to believe that marrying bigamous dukes was not a problem that afflicted too many women. At least, she hoped it wasn’t, because she wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemy. Not that she knew who her worst enemy was anymore—at this point one could people a village with contenders to that title.

  No, that was inaccurate, and even in desperate times one must resist the urge to resort to self-deception: her worst enemy was the duke, second was herself, and third was her blackmailer.

  Now, that was a fortifying thought, and one she would be sure to include in her next letter. “Dear Sir, Under ordinary circumstances you might congratulate yourself on having achieved the rank of my chief enemy, but as things stand, you’re only third on the list, quite possibly lower if we consider the rightful claims of my eldest brother and several members of Parliament.”

  She absently flicked some of the dried blood off the sleeve of her traveling costume and abruptly remembered that there would be no more letters. The robbery had been—she glanced at the body beside her—not a success. Instead of stealing a book of secrets from the duke and holding it ransom for enough money that she and Percy wouldn’t have to live as paupers, she had killed the duke, or near enough so as not to matter. The man was still breathing, but he was also still bleeding, and as the carriage raced along the London road, he was doing rather more of the latter and less of the former. By morning, Percy would be the new duke.

  Except—no. Percy would not be the duke. The plan had been to expose the duke’s bigamy to the world; that had been the worst punishment they had been able to devise and had the added benefit of freeing both Percy and Marian from his control. The fact of the duke’s bigamy would transform Percy into a worthless illegitimate son and Marian into a former mistress. And it would transform the son of a harlot into the duke’s heir, but Marian didn’t care about that poor fool; what mattered was that she and Percy would be rid of the duke. But if the duke was dead, Marian didn’t know where that left them.

  Marian’s mind wasn’t working very well at all, it seemed. She was not thinking, but she was also not feeling, which seemed like a fair enough exchange. Doubtless it was the shock. She could still hear the pistol shots, both of them—first the one the duke aimed at Percy, and then the one she aimed at the duke. Percy had been hit, but only in the leg, and not so badly he couldn’t walk. She couldn’t think about that. There was nothing she could do about Percy, other than make sure nobody ever knew he had anything to do with the duke’s injury. Which, of course, he hadn’t. It had been entirely Marian’s doing.

  The blood had soaked through her left sleeve and a fair amount of spatter covered the left side of her bodice, and, presumably, her face. She was vaguely aware that she was uncomfortable, but the discomfort of her body seemed to be taking place many miles away and possibly to somebody else.

  Somehow, they were already at the fringes of London. Marian must have spent most of the journey from Oxfordshire in a stupor. That, and the horses were traveling at a breakneck pace to get the dying duke back to town, where he could be attended by his physician. If he lived that long, that was.

  “The duke was shot by brigands,” Marian announced to the butler when the carriage arrived at Clare House. “Call for his physician at once. No, I’m unharmed.” She repeated it again to the housekeeper, and then, once the men were attempting to get the duke out of the carriage and the rest of the household milled about, trying to look as if they weren’t gawking, Marian slipped around the back of the house, grabbed an old cloak off a peg in the stables, and took off through the darkened streets.

  She did not fancy being hanged as a murderer. However certain she was that nobody had seen her use the pistol, there was always a chance that she would be exposed. And if she were hanged, she’d be of no use to Eliza, Percy, or her father, none of whom were capable of sensibly arranging their lives without her. Eliza was an infant; Marian’s father was elderly and infirm; and Percy, however reasonable she once thought him, had fallen in love with a highwayman and therefore plainly had taken leave of his faculties, the poor man.

  She would have to hide until she knew whether she was suspected of murder and then, if necessary, flee to the Continent. How she would arrange everybody’s affairs from—Venice, perhaps, as her Italian was more than passable and Percy had spoken highly of the climate—she did not yet know, but these were problems she could solve when she wasn’t quite so consumed with the pressing need to get the blood off her person.

  There was also something else she had to do: she had left a man tied to a bed, and she needed to make sure he was . . . well might not be entirely accurate. But if Dinah had been called away or something had happened to prevent her from checking on him, then he might be left there indefinitely, and Marian wasn’t going to be responsible for a man starving to death. Being responsible for one death a day was quite sufficiently iniquitous.

  In breeches and sensible boots, it was a fifteen-minute walk to the room she had hired to keep the blackmailer. In a traveling gown and dainty ankle boots, it took far longer. She was out of breath, more from nerves than exertion, when she climbed the final set of stairs, but her hands were almost steady when she removed the key from above the door frame and turned it in the lock.

  The room was empty and dark and the window stood wide open. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the shadows and another moment still for her thoughts to catch up to her eyes. The bed was empty. The man was gone.

  Well, it hardly mattered now, did it. She had only wanted to ensure that he was out of the way and didn’t jeopardize the robbery, but the robbery had already gone about as badly as it could have do
ne. Good riddance, then. One less thing to worry about.

  Marian tried to rummage through the buzzing chaos in her mind and figure out what to do. She was covered in blood, standing in a room she had hired for the express purpose of imprisoning a man, and she didn’t know what to do next. Well, whatever she did, she couldn’t do it in the dark, so she took the tinderbox from the chimneypiece and got to work. Her fingers were stiff, possibly with cold, possibly with whatever was making her brain not work, and only after what felt like an hour did she manage to light the splint.

  She took the letters from inside her cloak and set them on the grate, then touched the splint to them. They must have dried, or perhaps blood was more flammable than Marian had supposed, because they readily caught on fire. She prodded them with the splint until they were reduced to ash, troubled by the sense that she was bidding a last goodbye to the woman who had received those letters and who had responded to them in what had almost been a spirit of amusement, heaven help her.

  With the candles lit, she could see the empty bed, the cords she had used to bind the man’s wrists now dangling ineffectively from the bedposts. So, she had bungled the knots. It figured that she hadn’t even managed to get that much right.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a sound at the window. She spun around to see a man climbing in, one long leg after the other.

  It appeared that she was going to get murdered now, which was a fitting end to a miserable day. She ought to cry out, but she couldn’t even do that much. The only sound she managed to produce was a sharp inhalation. Not that screaming would have done much good—this was the sort of street where nobody paid much attention to the odd bout of hollering.

  Then the intruder rose to his full height. When the candlelight struck his face she saw that it was the blackmailer.

  And she was . . . relieved? Probably a clear sign that she wasn’t thinking straight.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, struggling to understand the picture before her. If he had freed himself, then why had he come back?

  “I’m afraid I had to step out,” the blackmailer said, dusting off his breeches. “I had to feed the dog.”

  “You don’t have a dog,” Marian said, latching onto the only part of his statement that made any sense. “I’ve been tailing you for weeks. You live in a hired room in an alarming neighborhood filled with writers. You don’t even have a spare pair of boots, let alone a dog.”

  “The cat, then,” he said, waving a breezy hand.

  Then her thoughts belatedly supplied the obvious reason for his return. “If you’ve come back in order to kill me, may I ask that you get it over with? It’s been a tedious day.”

  “That wasn’t the plan at all.” Only then did he raise his eyes and look at her. “Not to be overly forward, but may I ask whose blood you’re covered in? It doesn’t appear to be yours, what with how you aren’t dead yet. Chiefly, I’m interested in whether it belongs to Kit.”

  “It’s the duke’s blood, and it’s on my gown, rather than in his veins, because I shot him.” Saying it aloud made her feel that she was watching herself from a great height, as if the events of this day and this night were happening to some other unfortunate person.

  “Ah,” he said, as if she had merely remarked on the weather.

  “Unfasten this, will you?” She turned her back on him, which was not a wise idea, tactically, but all her cleverness had resulted in nothing but disaster, so perhaps she’d just settle for flailing ineptitude. Besides, if she didn’t get this blood-soaked gown off, she thought she might go raving mad.

  She heard his footsteps approach her, then felt a light pressure at her waist. She flinched. “Only looking for your laces,” he said mildly. “And there we go.”

  She felt him untie the tapes at her waist with deftness that suggested a fair bit of practice, but without taking any liberties or even letting his hands linger. The stiffening fabric released itself from her body and she held back a sigh of relief. She stepped out of the skirt and pulled the bodice over her head. They’d need to be burned. She glanced down at her petticoats and sighed. So would they. Her corset, too. Just as well. She took it all off and threw it into a pile, leaving her in nothing but an only moderately bloody shift.

  Dimly, she was aware that she was stripping in front of a strange man, but she’d have stripped onstage in an opera house, she’d have stripped in a cathedral in the middle of Sunday services, if it meant getting out of those clothes.

  In a small trunk at the foot of the bed, she kept breeches, a shirt, and a full complement of everything she had worn to tail the blackmailer night after night during these past weeks. It had seemed a reasonable precaution, keeping a change of clothes handy, just in case. And for once on this terrible day, her forethought was rewarded, because now she had a clean shirt, and nothing had ever looked as good to her as that piece of linen did at that moment.

  “You don’t want to put that on,” said the man. He was now sitting at the table, lazily shuffling the deck of cards she had dealt the previous night before he succumbed to the laudanum. He did not appear to be watching Marian at all. “Trust me. First, get the blood off. And while you’re at it, make sure that none of it is coming from you. Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve hurt yourself until much later, and then you’ll have ruined another shirt.”

  Marian experienced a rush of mad relief at the idea that she might be in the presence of someone who knew what to do when one had murdered one’s husband. Because Marian was at a loss, and she didn’t much care for being at a loss. She was not the sort of person who sailed through life without a plan, and even though all her plans had resulted in disaster didn’t mean she was suddenly averse to the idea of planning ahead, as long as she wasn’t the one doing the planning. If this man had the first idea of what to do, she’d take it.

  There was an ewer of water on the washstand, but no cloth. She was going to have to rummage through her filthy clothes for a scrap of linen that was clean enough to wash herself, but she doubted there were three square inches of unbloodied fabric in that entire mess.

  The man held out a kerchief, almost absently, still not looking up from his cards.

  She took it and used it to clean herself as best as she could without a looking glass. Every swipe of the smooth linen against her skin was a relief, as if by scrubbing hard enough she might make it so this day had never happened.

  Chapter 4

  Rob had spent the evening watching the coffeehouse. The plan had been for Kit to return there after the robbery, but instead of Kit, the hired scout returned alone and in an obviously flustered state.

  Before that, Rob hadn’t borne Marian any ill will. He had been ready to let bygones be bygones. He blackmailed her; she kidnapped him. The slate was clean.

  But if she had kidnapped him in order to do something that harmed Kit, all bets were off. So he had gone back to that ghastly little room with the aim of lying in wait.

  And now, well, Rob knew what it looked like when a person was in shock. He had been there often enough for it to be as familiar as home. The only tried and true method of dealing with shock was time: you had to let it run its course, and then your mind settled over its new and troubling set of facts like a clean sheet draped over a body.

  This woman—covered in blood but still straight-backed and acid-tongued—was the same person who had written him all those letters. All his abominable instincts told him to get her a blanket and some tea. But first he had to take advantage of the way the shock had loosened her tongue and see what information he could extract from her.

  “Is your plan to have Kit hang for the duke’s murder?” Rob asked when Marian had finished washing and had on a layer of clothing.

  He wasn’t expecting an honest answer but he also wasn’t expecting her to look at him as if highly disappointed to discover how very stupid he was. “If you think I have a plan right now, you’ve badly misread this situation. I didn’t mean for the duke to be shot either by me or anybody else. My plan was for him to live and to give me money. Now that he’s dead, he can’t very well do that, can he? At the moment, all I want is for neither Percy nor myself to hang for it. And I’d rather your idiot friend not be hanged, either, as that would make Percy cross.”