Page 85 of Murder at the Seven Dials
The maid froze in place.
“I could scream for help,” the marchioness said.
“But you won’t. You know it’s only a matter of minutes before Bow Street arrives. I’m here to make a bargain.”
She canted her head. “A bargain?”
“You don’t want your son’s private life put on display and dragged through the mud, and I am here to see the same is done for Fournier.”
He needed to appeal to her to get her to speak; justice was required for Miss Lovejoy’s death but that didn’t mean two other men needed ruination.
“State your business,” she finally commanded.
“Was it laudanum in the scotch? I didn’t find a bottle at Fournier’s rooms at Jewell House. I presume you had your hired man take that with him after he finished with his bloody task.”
“I’ve told you—I have no idea what you are talking about,” she insisted, and this time, the annoyance on her tone rang true. But there was something else there as well. Something harsh, bitter.
“You arranged for the duke to be incapacitated enough for Fellows to make it appearhehad stabbed Miss Lovejoy to death,” Hugh pressed on, thinking of the blood found on the duke’s hands, his face, his clothes. The boning knife next to him on the floor.
How easy it must have been for the real murderer to drag Fournier across the room, into the slain singer’s pooling blood, and then position him back on the floor.
“But the risk,” Hugh said, the accusation unfurling as he put it together in his mind. “The risk was great. Dear Auggie was there; he’d had some of the tainted scotch. How did you know he would leave in time? Before Belladora arrived. Before Fellows did.”
There was no chance the marchioness would have allowed her son, the heir to the marquessate, to be implicated in a murder so gruesome. Her entire world, her family name and legacy, would be ruined.
A sixth sense warned him, but too late. Cold metal pressed against the back of Hugh’s skull. He knew the shape.
“Unlike you, Marsden, I am thorough in my actions. I find peace in order, in precision. Lift your hands.”
Hugh exhaled through his nostrils. “Wimbly.”
The marquess stood behind him, in the shadowy corner of the carriage house exterior. The nose of a pistol nudged Hugh a little more insistently.
He raised his hands. “I underestimated you.”
“You lost your focus,” the marquess said. The steady weight of his flintlock in his hip sheath disappeared as Wimbly claimed it, though after the jump in the Thames, the powder would be useless anyhow.
Much like Hugh right then.
After that evening at the Seven Sins, he had written off Lord Wimbly as a clueless ingrate. He didn’t care about the death of his own mistress, but he also didn’t care enough to be jealous of her supposed connection with Fournier. He would have had no motive to kill her when he could find another woman to replace her so easily.
Porter had been wrong. Wimblyhadknown about his son and Miss Lovejoy. And he had known something more.
“Belladora told you about Auggie and the duke, didn’t she?” Hugh asked.
“Augustus!” the marchioness hissed to her husband. “What are you going to do?”
Within a minute, the carriage that the grooms were preparing would be ready and emerge into the courtyard.
“Was she blackmailing you?” Hugh mused aloud. “Did she ask for more money, hinting that she might otherwise let the knowledge slip? You needed to be rid of her, and you also wanted to be rid of your son’s lover.”
Two birds, one stone, as it were.
“I’m thankful for Belladora, actually.” Wimbly sounded far too calm for a man who was holding a gun to another person’s head. “Learning of my son’s transgressions from the likes of her was far better than learning of it from one of my own set. No, she didn’t blackmail me. She knew her place.”
“Then why kill her?”
Lady Wimbly’s maid clapped a hand over her mouth and made a soft yelp. She and the marchioness huddled, uncertainly, together in the courtyard. Lady Wimbly, however, didn’t act as surprised as her maid. She knew of her husband’s actions, though how involved she’d been remained unclear.
