Page 21 of Murder at the Seven Dials
“Dash the gossip and scandal. You are myhusband. I will not stay out of this.”
He had to know that. It might have been why he looked at her from his heavily lidded eyes with such sadness. But he said no more.
“Michael and Mr. Potridge will visit you soon, I’m sure, and please consider a story—any story—that might get you freed from this place,” she said, standing. The sour odor of the room was beginning to make her head ache and her stomach twist.
“There is no excuse for the way they found me, my love. That Runner has his case made.”
“There is an excuse—there is thetruth.” She hesitated by the cot. If he would only tell her who he was leasing those rooms to meet…perhaps whoever it was had something to do with this sordid business.
He knew things that he was refusing to share with her. Information that could help him. Why would he wish to hurt himself? Unless he thought he was protecting her. Or someone else. His lover, perhaps.
“Your Grace.” The constable stood within the threshold. He’d given her the allotted five minutes and wanted her to leave. Staying any longer would get her nowhere anyhow.
Philip turned his head toward the wall, refusing to meet her eyes. Audrey breathed in deeply when she left the room and watched as the constable locked the door again. It was an unnecessary precaution. Philip had no wish to leave that room. Part of her believed he wanted to rot in there for the rest of eternity. But he wouldn’t. If the grand jury sent his case to the House of Lords, and they convicted him of murder, Philip could very well be shunted off to Newgate. Or to the gallows.
Audrey had to find that mysterious benefactor. Not just for her husband’s sake, but for Miss Lovejoy. The man who murdered her was still walking around London somewhere and could very well commit the same brutal act again.
“Will that be all, Your Grace?” the man asked once he had hooked his keys to his belt again.
“For now,” she replied, and then turned to leave.
ChapterSix
The duchess’s slim gray brougham had been winding down every street for the last half hour. Traveling at a slow clip, it meandered from Long Acre to Floral, to Covent Garden to the Strand, and every court and side alley along its circuitous route.
“Where in hell is she going?” Hugh muttered as the hired hack he’d flagged outside the magistrate’s offices trailed her from a safe distance. He sat up in the box with the driver, much to the man’s obvious discomfort.
“Not used to passengers ridin’ up with me,” he’d told Hugh, who’d then slipped the man an extra shilling.
“Just follow the gray brougham.”
Constable Davis had shown the duchess into her husband’s holding room and had then quietly flagged another constable on the street outside from the tavern’s corridor window. Hugh had suspected she would return, and so he’d asked all the patrolmen present to fetch him if she showed. If he wasn’t available, he’d instructed them to follow her themselves as soon as she left. Thankfully, Hugh had been speaking to Chief Magistrate Gabriel Poston about another arrest, this one a man accused of hitting his friend in the temple with a grappling hook and nearly plucking out his eye. A bloody mess, but one the accused had confessed to doing.
It was so much simpler when they confessed.
Hugh had been waiting with the hired hack when the duchess left the Brown Bear. After brief instruction to her driver, she disappeared into the stylish brougham.
And now, he’d followed her on a protracted tour of every street and passage and corner within ten blocks of the magistrate’s court. Hugh was about to give up and turn back when the brougham came to a stop on Yarrow Street. He nudged the jarvey next to him, who pulled to the curb as well. Hugh watched as the duchess’s driver handed her down in front of a row of terraced homes.
She stood outside one of the homes, looking at the door, and yet not moving toward it. Her driver stayed by her side, as though awaiting her command. Hugh ground his molars, his senses sharpened to pin pricks. Finally, she walked up to the door and knocked pertly, rather than sending her driver to announce her as would normally be done. She stood close to the door. Too close. And was it just his perspective or were her hands hovering near the knob?
Hugh suddenly didn’t know whether to laugh or growl—she was picking the bloody lock! What sort of duchess knew such a skill? A moment later, the door opened, and she slipped inside.
Hugh held up another shilling. “Distract her driver for a few seconds.”
The jarvey took the coin and turned it over between his fingers before it disappeared into his coat. “Aye, guv.”
Hugh hopped to the pavements and walked toward the terrace house, waiting for the jarvey’s diversion. He heard the wheels of the hack rumbling past, drawing to a stop by the fine brougham.
“Oi there, guv!” the jarvey shouted. “Are ye familiar with these roads? Looking for Clarendon.”
The duchess’s driver turned away, toward the hackney, and Hugh darted up the small stoop and inside, saying a silent thank you to the duchess for not locking the door behind her.
The jarvey’s voice grew muffled as Hugh entered the foyer and closed the door. The silk wallpaper was a cool shade of blue touched with mint green. He listened carefully, but the house was still as a tomb. In the sitting room, the furniture had been draped and the curtains closed to prevent the paper and paintings from fading. The house had been closed up, though there wasn’t any dust gathered on the polished hand railing as Hugh made his way to the upper floors. He followed the lady’s scent of rosewater.
He peered into rooms as he passed, his footfalls absorbed by thick, blue carpet. Not a masculine Prussian blue, but pale robin’s egg. Everything, from the carpet to the paper to the paintings…all of it was feminine.
He heard the creak of a floorboard on the second level, and he climbed the curve in the stairwell. What the duchess was doing breaking into this closed up home was beyond his grasp. He came around the newel post and traveled down the corridor, toward the next room with its door open wide—and heard an errant floorboard creak beneath his own weight.
