A Dangerous Madness (2 page)

“He’s from Liverpool, apparently. Involved in the shipping trade to Russia.”

“Hmm.” James and Dervish exchanged a look. “So looking into the young hot-bloods is really just being thorough. If he’s from Liverpool—”

“He’s most likely working for the slavers or the shipping trade.” Dervish gave a nod of agreement. “But it’s almost too obvious.”

“Sometimes,” James opened the door to Dervish and waited for him to step out the room, “a thing is exactly what it seems.”

* * *

“I have heard the most unbelievable news from Mrs. Jenkins.” Aunt Dorothy stripped off her gloves with hands that trembled, and Phoebe paused in the act of pulling the tea tray toward her and looked up at her aunt.

“Something bad, I take it?” She looked down at her hands, suddenly unable to pick up the teapot in case she dropped it. Someone must have found out about Sheldrake and told her aunt.

“The worst news I’ve ever heard. The Prime Minister has been shot.”

Phoebe lifted her head to stare at her aunt’s angular, beautiful face for a long moment. “When?”

“No more than a few hours ago. Shot down like a dog in the lobby of the Houses of Parliament.”

“Surely that can’t be right?” Phoebe picked the pot up at last and poured them both a cup of tea with steady hands.

She should have told her aunt right away about Sheldrake’s abandonment of the engagement that had been both their fathers’ dying wish. But the shame of it, the humiliation, still stung; an inflamed, pulsing bite out of her pride.

“It’s right, all right. Mr. Jenkins was there. Still is there, by the sounds of it. He got a note out to his wife, but as a witness, he’s had to stay on while they charge the assassin.” Aunt Dorothy lifted the delicate cup to her lips and took a deep gulp.

“They have someone in custody? It wasn’t an accident or something?” Phoebe couldn’t imagine anyone actually shooting the diminutive, cherub-faced man.

Dorothy shrugged. “So Mrs. Jenkins understood from her husband’s note. The details will no doubt come out soon. Something about him being like a puppet with its strings cut after he did the deed. Just collapsed onto a bench and waited for the inevitable.”

“That’s terrible. Who would shoot a man in cold blood?” She didn’t know why she was suddenly thinking about what Sheldrake had said last night, each word burned into her memory in charred, ugly letters.

The word ‘puppet’, that was it.

An icy drop of unease snaked down her back and made her shiver.

“More than one person of my acquaintance has threatened to do away with him,” her aunt said, eyes avid. “Ruining the country, my dear husband says, almost every morning when he reads the paper. Single-handedly ruining the country.” She settled back in her chair and took a piece of Madeira cake. “It’s been one of the few things I’ve not missed about him, being in Town with you for a few weeks. What does dear Sheldrake say about it?”

“Sheldrake?” Phoebe had to force herself to breathe so her voice wouldn’t squeak. “He’s never seemed to have much of an opinion when it comes to politics.”

“Lucky you. Mr. Patterson drives me almost ’round the bend going on about how Mr. Perceval is trying to throw England into a pit of economic ruin and despair.”

“Not any more,” Phoebe said, and gripped her teacup a little tighter. “By the sounds of it, not any more.”

Chapter Three

“H
aven’t seen you before, luv.” An arm came around James’s waist, and a soft, well-endowed body pressed up against his back and rubbed. He smelled rose water and powder, with just a musky hint of old sex.

James turned slightly and stepped away, removing the woman’s arm as he did.

Behind him, a room full of well-dressed men shouted and laughed as they played Hazard. The pungent aroma of cigar smoke, along with the sharp-sweet stink of spilled drinks, layered over with sweat, washed over him.

He hadn’t missed this.

It amazed him that at one time, he hadn’t even noticed the smell.

“I can keep you company, if you like.” The woman gave him a saucy wink.

He looked her over. She was dressed in a peacock blue dress, cut so low her nipples were just visible above the neckline. It was nipped in tight at her waist, and she had a peacock feather dressed into her up-swept hair.

“You must be new here.” She looked no more than eighteen or nineteen, but he couldn’t accuse Jillie Bellows of breaking her deal with him. Her new girl was of age—just—and did not seem to be coerced or afraid.

Of course, coercion was a tricky line to walk. How many of these girls really felt they had a choice in entering this life?

“Your Grace.” Jillie stepped into the hall from her little office, the old parlor, James guessed, from when this smart West End house had been a family home, rather than The Scarlet Rose, one of the most profitable gaming hells and brothels in London.

“Madame Rouge.” James gave a nod. He called her the name she went by here, although she was well aware he knew all there was to know about her.

“Bessie, don’t bother the Duke. He’s here strictly for the gaming.” Her voice was sharp, gilded with a little fear, and Bessie blushed, curtseyed, and fled down the passage and through a white and gold door.

“A little harsh. She couldn’t have known my…rules.”

“No. You haven’t been by for more than a month, and she’s only been here two weeks.” Her tone was almost as fierce with him as it had been with Bessie, and she looked away, her shoulders stiff.

He didn’t respond. He wasn’t prepared to answer to her.

“Well, nice to have you back.” On that lie, she gave a nod, still not meeting his eyes, and stepped back into her office.

Jillie Bellows hadn’t been pleased to see him since the day he’d threatened to close her down for selling a child into sexual slavery, and that had been two years ago.

Since then they’d reached a strange truce. She didn’t send any of her girls out to him, and swore never to deal in children again, and he, by the cachet that came with being a duke, lent her establishment an air of high-class sin.

It appeared to be doing quite well without him, though, if the crowd in the gaming room was anything to go by.

“Wittaker. There you are! Thought you’d abandoned this place. I even started enquiring where you’d moved on to.” Banford was slumped in a chair near the door, his face flushed with the close heat of the room and the whisky in his glass.

So that was the reason behind Jillie’s sharp tongue. She sensed the sheep were getting ready to follow him to what they thought were greener pastures.

“Busy with other things, is all,” he said to Banford, slurring his words just a little. He wondered if he’d ever get drunk again—risk actually sounding like this.

Somehow, he doubted it.

“Oh?” Banford sat a little straighter, his eyes lighting at the possibility of something even more dissolute than what was on offer at The Scarlet Rose.

Wittaker didn’t hide his contempt at Banford’s reaction, flicking him a look before turning his attention to the room without making a reply.

It made him even more popular, even more respected among this lot, he’d found. The more contemptuous, the more dismissive he was of them, the more they tried to please him and follow his style.

“Like that, eh? Keeping all the best secrets for yourself.” Banford narrowed his eyes. “What’s a fellow got to do to get an invitation?”

James looked back at him. “You hear about Perceval?”

“You’d have to be living under a rock not to hear.” Banford got unsteadily to his feet. “Damn disgrace. Shot down in the one place he should have been safe.” He tipped slightly to one side and stumbled a little as he steadied himself on the chair.

“Worried about your own neck next time you’re at Westminster?” James didn’t look at him as he spoke, his eyes on the raucous game of Hazard happening in the middle of the room.

Banford laughed. “Not in the House often enough for that to be likely. Still, some places should be sacred.”

James gave him a cool look. “As you say.”

It was a hard line to walk. To play aggrieved enough by Perceval’s policies to let a possible conspirator know he would lend a sympathetic ear, but also suitably outraged enough that a man, any man, had lost his life by murder.

Almost as hard a line as to know how he genuinely felt about the prime minister. He’d approved of Perceval’s practical support of the abolition of the slave trade, but found the man himself objectionable. When facing off against his political opponents, Perceval attacked the individual, not their policies, leading James to think he didn’t have the intelligence to argue against them.

Perceval used his obviously genuine love for his family and the Church to garner himself more support, and further his political agenda, thereby sullying any moral high ground he would otherwise have had.

Perceval was a thorny problem of a man.

Unbending, unable to see any opinion other than his own, wholly annoying, and yet, no matter what, he did not deserve to be killed.

James rubbed the back of his neck.

He was on a wild goose chase here.

No one would say anything different to Banford. Certainly not a few hours after the murder itself had been done.

The breech of the sanctity of the Houses of Parliament, the way murder had slipped into a place where all thought they were safe but for a tongue-lashing from a political opponent—that would shock all of them, no matter if they hated Perceval or not.

Nevertheless…

He stepped toward the Hazard table, and was surprised to find himself tensing, as if for a blow.

It wasn’t so far off.

Forcing a sardonic smile on his face, he waded into the crowd, listening for anything unusual.

By the time he waded back out again, 2000 pounds richer, he had a name.

Sheldrake.

Chapter Four

Tuesday, 12 May, 1812

E
veryone with any sense was at home this morning.

Phoebe had the paper open in front of her, but her eyes were on the street. Empty in a way she’d never seen it before. The only person in sight was a gardener in Portman Square’s fenced park, raking a bed.

According to the news, Bellingham had been moved to Newgate prison sometime in the night, after the crowds outside parliament had been dispersed. There had still been some people waiting for him outside the prison entrance, though, to cheer and wave him on.

She folded the paper with a snap and pushed it aside, stared down at the letter lying beside her plate, delivered early this morning.

Sheldrake’s unkempt script scrawled across the front. She wondered if she would even be able to make out what the note said. She rarely could.

It had been the cause of a number of missed engagements, and more than a few arguments between them.

Only, they weren’t arguments, as such. More teeth-gritting conversations with no satisfactory conclusion.

Relief at never having to have such conversations again made her a trifle light-headed. Her mother had often talked about silver linings. The silver lining on the storm cloud of Sheldrake’s betrayal was…Sheldrake’s betrayal.

She smiled, the first one she’d been capable of since Sunday evening, and lifted the note, brushing the paper with her fingertips. It was expensive and smooth, and she marveled that he’d remembered to pack his stationary when he took to the road.

She wouldn’t have expected that of him.

She lifted her letter opener, slid the blade carefully into the flap and gave a vicious upward swipe to break the seal.

A thick letter fell out, landing on the table.

Phoebe lifted it, and saw it was an official document, a petition for compensation, addressed to the Prince Regent and dated 21 January.

There was nothing else inside but a piece of notepaper, on which was written what looked like an address, an inn called The King’s Arms in Kent. She could barely make it out.

But she recognized the hand who had written it. No one could scrawl as illegibly as Sheldrake.

She looked at the document he had enclosed again. A petition for compensation for 8,000 pounds for loss of income resulting from the failure of the British government to aid a British citizen in the Russian port of Archangel. The language was formal and careful, and she was sure drawn up by a lawyer.

She wondered why on earth Sheldrake had sent her this.

And then her gaze fell on the name of the claimant, and a terrible chill stole over her, freezing her in place.

John Bellingham.

The man who had just assassinated the prime minister.

* * *

“His lordship is not at home.” The butler who answered Sheldrake’s door had wary eyes and held the door mostly closed, for ease of slamming it in his face, James realized.

“He will be at home for me.” He gave a smile, and handed the man his card. The late spring afternoon sun warmed the back of his neck, and he angled his body to get a little more of it.

The butler looked down at the card and straightened. Opened the door wider.