The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes Page 4

  Well. That all aligned nicely with Rob’s own interests, if she were being honest, which was very much an open question. “Did anyone see you shoot the duke?”

  “No,” she said, but with a thread of doubt in her voice. “We were inside the carriage, so nobody ought to have been able to see, but I can’t be certain. I told everyone—the coachman and the outriders and so forth—that the highwayman shot the duke, and I think they believed me. I also told them that the duke shot the highwayman, and I think they believed that, too, but that’s no credit to me, as it’s only the truth.”

  Rob took a moment to untangle this. “Who did the duke shoot?”

  “Percy. It was only his leg, and he was able to walk afterward. I must say, one does not enjoy seeing one’s friends shot, however minor the injury.”

  Rob could not disagree. If Lord Holland had been hurt, that would explain both Kit’s failure to return to London and the scout’s flustered state. “The duke shot Lord Holland first, and then you shot the duke?”

  “Precisely.”

  So far, she was answering questions rather more coherently than he might have expected. Most people found that being recently doused in blood was not compatible with retaining one’s faculties. “Did the duke keep two pistols?” She wouldn’t have had the opportunity to reload the pistol.

  She hesitated at that. “I used Percy’s pistol. I took it from his hand and shot the duke with it.”

  “Where is it now?”

  She gestured at the pile of dirty clothes. “In my pocket, somewhere in there.”

  Now, that was very good. It wouldn’t do for a strange pistol to be found in the carriage. He reached into his coat and produced a flask, which he offered to her. She looked like she could use a drink.

  She looked skeptically at the flask, which was mighty rich. He took a drink himself, made an expression that he hoped conveyed that he, at least, didn’t go about poisoning people, and again offered it to her. This time she drank, wincing at what he could only assume was the unfamiliar taste of gin.

  “What will you do now?” he asked.

  “My—” She narrowed her eyes, as if suddenly realizing who she was talking to. “What business is it of yours?”

  He could have told her that everything she did was his business until he knew that Kit wasn’t in danger. Instead he shrugged. “Call me a Good Samaritan.”

  She made a noise that told him precisely what she thought of that suggestion. “I mean to go to my father’s house in Kent.”

  He knew that her father was the Earl of Eynsham. Perhaps she thought that her father would be able to protect her from arrest. “It makes far more sense for you to go home, play the grieving widow, and repeat your tale about the highwayman to anyone who asks. Fleeing only looks suspicious.”

  Her gaze shifted from withering to glacial. He was impressed. “This is none of your concern,” she said, crisply enunciating each syllable.

  He tried a different tack, because he felt it was his duty to discourage this harebrained scheme. “Haven’t you got a daughter? She’s nothing but a baby. Who’s looking after her while you gallivant up and down the London road?”

  If the look she gave him a moment earlier was cold, the one she gave him now was outright pestilential. It took some doing to summon up that level of sneery contempt while wearing shabby breeches and an untucked shirt, but Marian managed it. “I hardly need you to remind me of my responsibilities.” She unpinned her hair and shook it out, then set about plaiting it. It fell like black silk over her shoulder. Rob looked away. “I’ll need to take you with me, of course,” she went on.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Is that so?”

  “I can’t just leave you here, free to stir up whatever trouble strikes your fancy.”

  “Now, what trouble could I possibly stir up?” he asked, mainly to see if her glare could get even more severe.

  “You’ve been blackmailing me,” she said with exaggerated patience. “Now you have even more to blackmail me about. Not to mention, this would be an extremely inconvenient time for the invalidity of my marriage to become public knowledge.”

  He considered pointing out that this made no sense. It was hardly worth his trouble to blackmail her if she were on the gallows. Surely she was clever enough to have figured that out.

  But if she wanted to take him with her, he hardly objected—he had no intention of letting her out of his sight until he had satisfied himself that she wasn’t going to do anything to bring Kit’s name into this disaster. Going along with her to Kent would be much easier than attempting to follow her. And besides, she needed someone with an intact set of wits to accompany her because hers were plainly in shambles.

  There was also the fact that he longed to follow her about like a dog on a lead, just for the pleasure of finally being near her after months of thinking about her, but this was a trifling matter.

  “What’s in it for me?” he asked, because not to ask would be suspicious.

  “I have little to offer.”

  “Now, that’s a lie. I daresay your father’s house is filled to the rafters with things you could offer me. But that’s not what I want from you.” As he watched, her back stiffened and he realized his error. “No, not that, for Christ’s sake. What a very boring thing to negotiate for.” Now she looked offended and he almost laughed. “What I want is for the duke’s legitimate heir not to inherit.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You know him?”

  “He isn’t the sort of man who ought to be a duke.” That wasn’t even a lie: Rob was indeed not the sort of man who ought to be a duke, primarily because he didn’t think dukes ought to exist.

  “I’ll forbear from pointing out that if you were so worried about this man inheriting, you could have left well enough alone and simply not blackmailed me. You could have kept the duke’s bigamy to yourself.”

  He ground his teeth. “It was complicated.”

  “As far as my ability to ensure that Percy inherits, don’t you think I would have done so already if that were in my power? Do you think I’d have resorted to highway robbery and poisoning and kidnapping, not to mention a fair bit of larceny, if I had any other recourse?”

  “You have been busy,” he murmured, thinking of what a waste it was that in all the thousands of love poems written across the ages, nobody had ever thought to catalogue their beloved’s proficiency in crime. “In any event, I don’t care in the least whether Lord Holland inherits. I don’t care who inherits, in fact, as long as it isn’t the duke’s heir by his legal wife.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “I could try.”

  He held out his hand and she stared at it for the space of a few heartbeats before reaching out. He expected her hand to be cool, but it was almost hot to the touch. He shook it as he would the hand of anyone with whom he had made a bargain, then let it drop.

  “It’ll be too late to get a stagecoach,” Rob observed, stretching his legs out. She looked sharply at him. So, she had thought he’d demand more from her. “Don’t act so surprised,” he said. “You’ve already killed one man today. I don’t wish to be the second.”

  He heard her suck in a breath. “He was alive when I left him at Clare House.”

  “Well, you’d better hope he dies before he can tell anyone who shot him. That, in case you hadn’t noticed, would be a good reason for you to stay in London.”

  She looked aghast. “Are you suggesting I—”

  “I’m suggesting that it would be prudent to finish what you started.” He felt honor bound to at least point this out. “Barring that, either we wait until dawn for a coach, or we hire horses and leave now. Can you ride?”

  Another icy look came his way. “Yes, I can ride.”

  “Can you ride fast? Not sidesaddle.”

  “I can ride fast astride and sidesaddle.”

  The next time he found himself inside a church, he would light a candle for the patron saint of thieves and vagabonds, whoever that busy fellow might be, because he had not been looking forward to spending any time at all in a cramped coach. “And you have the money to hire horses, I hope. I’m not particularly keen on funding my own abduction.”

  “Of course I do,” she said. She retrieved a coin purse from the pile of garments on the floor and tucked it into her pocket. He followed it with his eyes. It was always good to know where the money was.

  “Excellent, then,” he said, getting to his feet and folding his newspaper. He watched as she ransacked a chest of drawers that he had hardly noticed.

  “I need to leave a note for my friend, to let her know what happened.”

  “Christ, no. Don’t leave it here. If you absolutely must, you can write a note at the first inn we pass and send it in the post.”

  “I’m not leaving a signed confession, you ridiculous man. I’m letting her know that I’m alive and so are you, so she doesn’t spend the next week worrying about getting arrested for murder. I feel keenly the unpleasantness of that position.”

  “Have it your way.” He rummaged through his haversack until he turned up a scrap of paper and a pencil. She scribbled something on the paper and tossed it on the bed.

  He picked it up, of course, ignoring anything he might be tempted to feel at the sight of that familiar handwriting. Both of us are well. Change of plans. No signature, no initial. He put it back where he had found it. “Now, gather up your clothes and the pistol.”

  She picked up a cloak but nudged the remainder of the pile with her boot. “I don’t need any of that. We can leave it behind.”

  “The point, my dear lady, is to leave as little evidence as possible connecting you with this place. Your story is going to be that you were in a state of extreme shock after your husband was viciously struck down by brigands, and in that vulnerable state you sought the protection and comfort of your father. You’ve never been to this place and neither have I.”

  She looked at him for a moment and seemed on the verge of arguing. Then she nodded and stooped to gather her clothes in a bundle.

  “The pistol as well,” he said. “Actually, give the pistol to me.”

  “I’m not giving you a weapon,” she scoffed.

  “Marian, darling,” he said. “Don’t be daft.” He opened his coat. He wasn’t sure whether she’d be able to see his own pistol in the dark but trusted that the candlelight at least illuminated the hilts of his knives. Her eyes went wide.

  “Naturally,” she said. “You needed to equip yourself to walk your dog.”

  “I thought we decided it was a cat. Now, give me the pistol. Unless you somehow managed to reload it, it won’t do you any good anyway. You said it was Lord Holland’s?”

  She handed him the pistol with obvious reluctance. He made sure it wasn’t loaded and tucked it into the waistband of his breeches.

  “After you,” he said, opening the door into the stairwell, and watched her sail out, the hood of her cloak up over her head, not sparing the room a backward glance over her shoulder.

  Chapter 5

  During her previous nighttime forays into the streets of London, Marian had primarily relied on stealth and shadow to keep safe.

  Tonight, this man attempted neither. He walked briskly down the middle of the street, boot heels clicking on cobblestone, his cape flying behind him. Marian was tall, but he was taller, and she had to strain to keep pace with him.

  They proceeded south and east, passing through narrow lanes lined with crooked houses out into wide avenues boasting great guildhalls, and then back again to narrow passages. The rank smell of the river met her nose, and when she looked around she was surprised to find that she knew where she was. Before her stood the monument to the Great Fire and beyond it the clock tower of St. Magnus. This was a part of town Marian knew only from having tailed the man who now led her, but it seemed that she had learned it well enough.

  When London Bridge came into view, the man barely broke stride as he stooped to pick up what appeared to be a brick. She supposed that she ought to worry that she was about to be bludgeoned and summarily cast into the river, but he would hardly need a brick to do away with her when he was armed to the teeth with weapons that were more suited to the purpose. Come to that, he wouldn’t need any weapons at all if he simply pushed her into the Thames.

  She decided that at some point in the distant, unimaginable future she would think about why she was worried about none of those things. For now, she crossed the bridge.

  There was only one roadway along the bridge, hemmed in by looming houses. For all it was the middle of the night, it was far from quiet—there was the steady hum of the river below and muffled nighttime sounds from the buildings that surrounded them: a hissing cat, a crying baby, not to mention the usual rustling and scurrying that came from all darkened corners of London.

  At the sound of the baby she clenched her teeth. There was no sense in thinking about it. Eliza had a nice warm house and people to look after her. Marian’s feelings on the subject were of no consequence. What mattered was that Eliza was safe. In a few days, Marian would ensure that her father was safe, as well. She ought to have checked in on him months ago, but during her confinement she had been in no state to go so far as the dining room, let alone Canterbury. Surely, the housekeeper or nurse would have written if the earl’s condition had worsened. She couldn’t quite imagine what worse would look like: a year ago, he was unable to remember the names of most people around him, or whether he was at Chiltern Hall or Little Hinton. That was why, when she needed to get her father away from the gaze of her eldest brother, Richard, who boasted that he would send their father off to an institution at the slightest provocation, Marian seized on Little Hinton, the house where her father had spent the first fifty years of his life, as the solution to their problems. She ought to have asked her other brother, Marcus, to check on their father, but Marcus had been busy both with his own affairs and with investigating the duke’s bigamy. And, really, did it always have to fall to her to tell people what they ought to be doing?

  When they reached the drawbridge, the man held out his hand. For a moment she thought that he was offering comfort or understanding or something equally impertinent and irrelevant. But he only wanted the bundle of bloody clothing she carried under her cloak. When she handed it to him, he did something with the brick, swiftly knotting the remains of her petticoat around it, then dropped the parcel into the churning river below. She resisted the urge to watch the bundle fall. Somehow, she trusted that it would reach the water, rather than landing on one of the great island-like starlings that supported the bridge’s many arches. She had the distinct sense that this was not the first time this man had dropped something off this bridge, and also that he could be relied upon to dispose of incriminating evidence.

  Despite the roadway being closed in by houses and shielded from the worst of the wind, it was colder on the bridge than it had been on solid ground. The cold distracted her from the thoughts that had begun to pound at her mind like a bill collector at the door. She had killed a man, or near enough to it so as not to matter. And it hadn’t been in self-defense. It hadn’t even been in Percy’s defense, at least not in any kind of sense that would matter to a judge. She didn’t even know if it mattered in a moral sense, or an ethical sense, or whatever standard she was supposed to apply to her conscience.

  Whatever it was, she probably ought to feel something about it. Remorse would seem to be the bare minimum, and some sorrow or anger wouldn’t go amiss. But all of her emotions had deserted her, leaving her brain a scrubbed-out husk. On the one hand, this was tremendously convenient, as she doubted that any emotion her mind might see fit to generate presently would be one she enjoyed very much. On the other hand, the sensation was rather like standing up only to discover that her feet had gone numb.

  On the south side of the river, they passed one church and then another. So many churches. She tried to remember the song Eliza’s nursery maid sang to her, cheerfully listing out churches and ending, improbably, with a beheading. Or perhaps not so improbably—the main thrust of childrearing seemed to be to keep children from the gallows, and with good reason; she had a doting and indulgent parent and easily hoodwinked governesses and look what had become of her. The path to sin and ruination was much shorter than she might have guessed.

  The man looked back at her and she realized she had been humming the song about church bells. She stopped.

  “There’s no use dwelling on it,” he said, turning a corner. “It’s never an easy feeling, when you know you’ve sent a man out of the world. I’d tell you that it gets easier, but it doesn’t.”

  “That’s not—you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She supposed she ought to be more alarmed by the fact that he had just confessed to killing more than one person, but she no longer felt capable of alarm.

  “I wish I didn’t, sweetheart, but I’m a storehouse of information on the topic.”

  She sniffed and carried on following him through a neighborhood that seemed to consist entirely of taverns, graveyards, and still more churches.

  “I don’t know your name,” she said. “If we mean to travel together, I need to know what to call you.”

  For the first time since the drawbridge, he halted. “You know my name,” he said, turning toward her. “You’ve tailed me for how long now?”

  “A few weeks,” she admitted.

  “And obviously you figured out that I’m friends with Kit.”

  “I think you have a very high opinion of yourself to imagine that news of your celebrity precedes you,” she said, even though of course he was correct. She had seen him come and go from Mr. Webb’s coffeehouse at all hours. From that fact and Dinah’s gossip and the contents of his letters, she had identified him as the confederate of Mr. Webb who had evidently returned from the dead, a man everyone simply referred to as Rob.