The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes Read online

  She knew those facts and a good many besides, but she still didn’t know his surname. “We haven’t been introduced. I don’t know what to call you.”

  “In my circles, being an accessory to a murder counts as a proper introduction.” And then he shook his head and carried on walking. “Rob,” he said, not looking back at her.

  “Rob,” she repeated. It was an unwanted intimacy, and she felt guilty shaping her mouth around the syllable. She would prefer to call him sir, as she had addressed him in her letters, but she couldn’t think about those letters, because then she’d have to think about what had happened when the duke had found them, and then—

  Besides, she could hardly call him sir while he—of all the vulgarity—called her darling and sweetheart. “Surely you have a surname.”

  “Brooks,” he said with a faint frown, as if answering a question so personal that Marian ought to be ashamed of herself.

  She would call him Mr. Brooks, then, however little he liked it. But when she tried to think of him as Mr. Brooks, it felt absurd. It didn’t fit him in the least. It was like when people referred to Eliza as Lady Elizabeth, even though she wore nappies and spent most of the day with her thumb in her mouth. It was no good. In her mind, she would have to think of him as Rob, and she held him fully responsible for not being a person one could think of in a sensible way.

  Rob stopped before a collection of buildings that looked and smelled like stables and rapped on the door, even though it had to be well past midnight. The door was answered by a boy who was still rubbing sleep from his eyes.

  “Go fetch your da,” Rob said, giving the boy a halfpenny. They stood in the meager shelter of the doorway while waiting for the boy or his father to return. They were so close together that she had nowhere to look if she didn’t want to look at Rob, his features so near that they could be understood only separately: the straight line of his nose, the perpetually amused curve of his mouth, the freckles that concentrated on the bridge of his nose before scattering everywhere. She closed her eyes.

  The sound of heavy footsteps was followed by the appearance of a man who was hastily shoving the tails of his shirt into breeches. He carried a lantern, which he held up to examine Rob’s face. “It’s you,” he said. “Figures. Come on, then.” He led the way to the stableyard. “Been a while.”

  “Would you believe me if I told you I had little need for horses this past year?”

  The stable keeper snorted. “We all reckoned you were in prison.”

  “Come now, that was only for a little while. And it was in France, so it hardly counts.”

  “Also heard you were dead.”

  “What are things coming to when you can’t even believe gossip.”

  “What’ll you need, then? Two horses?”

  “Yes, for a week, I’d say. They need to be sturdy.”

  The stable keeper opened a stall door, revealing a chestnut gelding. “Bertie’ll do for you,” he told Rob. “And for your friend . . .” He eyed Marian up and down. She knew he was trying to figure out what she weighed, an entirely sensible means of suiting rider to horse, but still her skin crawled. He opened another door, a few stalls down. Inside was a bay mare. “Gwen. Short for Guinevere.” When Rob raised an eyebrow, the man shrugged sheepishly. “I let the girls name her,” he added by way of explanation.

  Then the man asked for a sum so princely that Marian decided that in her next life she ought to run a stable. Perhaps that was what she should have done a little over a year ago when faced with the problem of an estate in ruins and a father whose mind seemed to occasionally take its leave. She could have turned Chiltern Hall into a stable and hired out the horses, and thereby avoided marrying and murdering any dukes whatsoever.

  Without making any attempt to bargain, Rob withdrew his coin purse and put the requisite number of coins into the stableman’s palm, adding another for good measure—and, Marian supposed, silence.

  “Give the girls my love,” Rob said.

  “Come back soon and give it to them yourself,” the man grumbled as he returned indoors, but he seemed, if anything, pleased to have seen Rob, pleased to have been dragged from his bed and into what could only be trouble.

  The boy who had answered the door returned, carrying a lantern and a parcel. “Da said to give you these,” he said, following his words with a yawn. Rob thanked the lad with a wink and another halfpenny, then took the lantern and parcel.

  Marian saddled the mare, aware that Rob’s eyes were on her. Likely he didn’t believe that she knew how to ride and was waiting for her to make a false step. But she had been saddling her own mounts since she could be trusted not to either fall off a horse or get kicked in the head by one, and a year of inactivity was hardly going to rob her of a lifetime’s worth of experience. She adjusted the mare’s bridle and set the stirrups at a length that looked suitable, then swung herself into the saddle.

  Meanwhile, Rob began whispering to his own horse. Of course he was one of those people who insisted on talking to animals. Marian preferred to communicate with horses in their own language: she rode them well and not too hard and made sure they were fed and watered. That was what horses cared about; everything else was mere self-indulgence.

  She took the opportunity to adjust the folds of her cloak and retrieve her coin purse, removing slightly more than Rob had paid for the horses.

  “This is yours,” she said, holding out her hand.

  He took the coins and counted them, as if Marian meant to cheat him, the insufferable man.

  “This is too much,” he said.

  “I didn’t have smaller coins.”

  “Christ,” he muttered. “Of course she doesn’t.” He dropped the coins into his own money pouch and mounted the horse. “When we get out of the city, you ride close by me, you hear?”

  With that, he rode out of the stableyard and Marian was left to follow behind.

  Chapter 6

  By the time they reached Dartford, a pitiable distance south of the Thames, Rob decided he’d call this a smashing success if neither of them fell asleep in the saddle. There was a time when he could have stayed awake and alert for two solid days and then been fresh as a daisy after a few hours of sleep. But that was long in the past—before a string of injuries and misadventures, and when he was closer to fifteen than thirty. Now he was increasingly drawn to the charms of a soft mattress and clean sheets, and wasn’t that a depressing thought.

  “Where exactly in Kent are you going?” he asked.

  “Little Hinton,” Marian said. “It’s near Canterbury.”

  Rob sighed and inwardly cursed Kent for being inconveniently large. Of course Marian wouldn’t need to go somewhere easy to reach, like Blackheath or Sevenoaks—nothing about her was ever easy. Canterbury would mean at least two days in the saddle. But it would also mean that she was close enough to the sea to get to France without much fuss, if that was what things came to. He wondered if she had thought of that, and decided that it was highly unlikely that Marian, however addled, hadn’t thought of everything.

  He started to flag before the first rays of dawn pinkened the sky. They really had to keep riding until it was full daylight, because by then any inn they stopped at would be busy enough that two strangers would pass unnoticed.

  Until they knew whether Marian was suspected of the duke’s murder, they needed to keep their heads down and avoid the more well-traveled roads. Glancing at Marian, he decided that nobody with any brains at all would see the unkempt, disheveled person beside him and think they were looking at the Duchess of Clare. The moon was full and the night was cloudless, so he could see her profile clearly. She sat straight in the saddle, and she plainly hadn’t been lying about knowing how to ride. She didn’t ride like someone who was only used to the manicured paths of Hyde Park: he saw her looking out for rabbit holes and roots, as if it were second nature.

  A strange melody drifted to him on the breeze and he frowned. This was maybe the fourth time he had heard it that night, and now he was beyond frustrated that he couldn’t identify it. “What are you humming?” he asked.

  She drew herself up straight, and he was surprised to see that her back could go any straighter than it already had been. “I apologize,” she said, managing to make it sound nothing like an apology at all. “I don’t mean to annoy you.”

  “It was a question, not a complaint. What is it? I can’t place it.”

  “Oh. It’s the song about the churches.”

  That didn’t help in the least. “Sing me a line.”

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort,” she snapped, as if he had asked her to take all her clothes off. In fact, she had done exactly that a few hours earlier, without so much as asking him to turn his back or look away. He had kept his eyes averted anyway, in a fit of modesty on his own part that he didn’t quite know what to think of.

  “We can stop up ahead by that stile and have a bite to eat but only if you’ll sing a line for me.” He had been about to suggest that they rest the horses anyway, but she didn’t need to know that.

  She pressed her lips together into what might have been the snootiest expression he had ever seen in twenty-five years on this planet, and then sighed. “Fine,” she said, in a tone that made it clear she was humoring him and was far above things like food and rest and human weakness. “When I am rich, ring the bells of Fleet Ditch,” she sang.

  He frowned. She had been humming off key, and her singing voice was even further from the mark, but he’d know that rhyme anywhere. “You mean—” He cleared his throat. “When I am rich, ring the bells of Shoreditch.”

  “No, I mean Fleet Ditch.”

  “That makes no sense. Fleet Ditch isn’t even a—for Christ’s sake, it’s Shoreditch, because that’s where the rich merchants live.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” she said, dismissing rhyme, merchants, and possibly all of East London.

  Of course she hadn’t heard of Shoreditch, though. She was raised in the country—riding horses, by the looks of things. “I’d like to know where an earl’s daughter learned ‘Oranges and Lemons.’”

  There came that pinched expression again. “One of the maids in my daughter’s nursery sings it to her. And she says Fleet Ditch.”

  Something happened to her voice when she said my daughter, as if a cold wind had just blown in. “Where is she from?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  What a trick it was to be able to say I beg your pardon in a way that meant fuck off and die, and to look serene and saintly while saying it. “The maid,” he clarified.

  “London.”

  “I gathered as much, but where in London?”

  She sniffed. “I haven’t the faintest notion.”

  They arrived at the stile and dismounted. She was moving stiffly; it had been a while since she had been on horseback, he guessed. Without needing to be told, she led her horse to a stream that ran alongside the road. Definitely country born and bred, then. He took his horse and followed her.

  “Fleet Ditch is nothing more than a sewer,” he said. He felt better, as if he had won a very important point.

  “I can’t possibly express to you how little I care.”

  With a reckless little thrill, he realized that this was the caustic, acerbic woman who had written him all those letters. She had disappeared for a few hours under the weight of shock, but that tart little reply was familiar in a way that plucked at something in his heart.

  And, really, his heart needed to shut up about it. There was a time and a place for that silly business and now was not it. He had got a bit carried away with the letters, that was all, and perhaps let himself become overfond of a person he knew only as words on a sheet of costly paper. His hand went automatically to the parcel in his coat.

  After the horses had drunk their fill, he tied both bridles to the stile and sat on the wall. After a moment, Marian followed. He unwrapped the bundle of food, revealing a loaf of brown bread and a wedge of cheese. He broke the bread in half and held out both portions for Marian to take her pick.

  She reached out with an ungloved hand. Her fingers had to be stiff with cold. Hell, she had to be chilled to the bone, but she wasn’t even shivering. Even Rob was feeling it, and he had more experience and more meat on his bones. He had never seen her up close until tonight, but from across the street, when she was all trussed up in a bodice and skirts, it always looked like there was more of her.

  “When was the last time you ate?” he asked. She was eating with a speed that Rob knew from experience meant the kind of hunger that gnawed at your bones.

  She hesitated for a long, troubling minute. “Breakfast,” she finally said, sounding utterly unconvincing.

  Nearly a full day, then, if not more. And she hadn’t said a word about it. He cut the cheese into four pieces and offered her three.

  “I’ll take only what’s mine,” she said, and took two pieces.

  As far as life philosophies went, that was a piss poor one, but he decided to spare her his thoughts on the topic since she had had a trying day and was half frozen, thoroughly starved, and probably still a little bit mad with shock. He unscrewed the cap of his flask and held it out to her. “We don’t have anything to drink except gin, unless you want to take your chances with that stream.”

  She waved away the flask and mounted her horse. He slid off the fence, dusting his trousers and rearranging his cuffs and in general taking his time about it, and out of the corner of his eye watched Marian pretend not to be steaming with impatience. The fact that she could manage irritation at a time when most people would have drowned in panic was a testament to her backbone. And the fact that Rob was ready to rhapsodize over such a thing as backbone was a testament to his own besottedness. He was fully disgusted with himself.

  Luck was truly on their side, because as the first hints of dawn appeared in the sky, there was a sharp increase in the number of conveyances on the road: carts carrying homespun and candles and great piles of potatoes. It had to be market day in Sevenoaks. He had hoped that they’d run into a market today, but to find one first thing was more than he could have asked for. The inns would be too full for anyone to pay much attention to them and they’d be able to pick up a change of clothes. They might even catch wind of any news from London about the Duke of Clare, his attackers, and whether Marian was wanted for his murder.

  “Tuck your plait into your shirt,” he said. He wasn’t worried about her being recognized as the possibly fugitive Duchess of Clare, but rather that she would stand out as a woman dressed in breeches. If she was going to blend into a crowd, she needed either a tricorn hat or a skirt, so as to make the pendulum swing decisively one way or the other.

  “You tuck your own plait into your shirt,” she retorted.

  “Your plait clearly belongs to a woman. It reaches your waist,” he said. “And it’s as thick as a mooring line.” Horrified, he realized that his tone was one of breathless fascination. “I don’t know how you stuff it all under those wigs you lot wear.”

  “If you hand me one of those daggers, I’ll cut it off.”

  “Like hell you will. You’ll ruin the blade.”

  She gave him a look that could have frozen the gin in his flask and withered the crops in the field, if it hadn’t been December and the landscape already quite barren. But she tucked her hair into her shirt nonetheless, acting extremely put upon. He removed his hat and held it out to her.

  “No thank you,” she said tartly.

  “It’s not a present, darling. It’s a disguise, until we can get you a better one.”

  She sighed and took the hat, as if it were a tremendous burden to her. He tipped the brim over her forehead at a rakish angle.

  When they reached the town, they first stopped at an inn. Inns on market day mornings were never at their best. The atmosphere was one of businesslike efficiency, which Rob disliked on principle. Nobody lingered over a pint or warmed their feet by the fire. There was no singing, no laughter, hardly even any conversation beyond essential questions and answers. Dismal. It was always better later on, when people had a bit of time on their hands and a word to spare for a fellow traveler, when stories were swapped across battered oak tables and bellies were full of supper and ale. Some of the happiest hours of his life had been spent in such a way, generally with Kit, and the memory made him feel both wistful and somehow homesick, in the way that happy memories too often did.

  Once the horses were being seen to, they made their way through the crowd into the taproom. There was an empty table in one of the corners, and maybe they spotted it at the same time, or maybe they both realized that a dark corner was just what they needed, but they both headed toward it. Rob made for the seat that would put his back to the wall, but Marian’s hand clasped the chair back before he could sit down.

  “Ah, no,” Rob said, making what he felt was a reasonably gallant gesture at the other chair.

  “Ah, yes,” Marian said, making what Rob was amused to realize was an even more gallant gesture.

  “I need to be able to see the room,” Rob said.

  “Why?”

  The truth was that, as a rule, he liked to keep his back to the wall. He wanted to know whether he was about to be confronted with thief takers or magistrates or any other old acquaintances he’d prefer never to meet again in this lifetime. Or, for that matter, acquaintances he’d be happy to see—one never knew. “Because we’re trying to avoid anyone recognizing you.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, then sat in the seat that put her back to the room. So, perhaps she didn’t want to quarrel with him at every opportunity. He was more than willing to quarrel with her, both because she was quite good at it—it was always wise to encourage excellence—and because it seemed to distract her from all the bad things that no doubt were churning around in her mind. Whenever he looked at her, she was either scowling at him or she appeared lost in a miserable reverie, and he much preferred the scowl.

  When the barmaid brought over a couple of pints of ale, they both drained their tankards in a single go.