How to Master Your Marquis (38 page)

“Sir.” The guard’s voice was laden with respect for the dead. “A message for you, express.”

Hatherfield took the paper from his outstretched hand, and waited until the door closed again before opening it.

He read the few scrawled lines. For a moment, in the prison of his shock, their meaning was lost on him.

And then, as if charged by electricity, his brain burst back into life.

“Good news, I hope,” said Wright.

Hatherfield looked up and turned. The blood was shooting in his veins, but it was a familiar sensation, the brilliant heightened awareness of purpose. The way he had once felt, in another lifetime, when steadying his boat at the start of a race. When a summons arrived in a plain envelope from the Duke of Olympia. “The opposite, I’m afraid.”

“I am at your service.”

Hatherfield refolded the paper while his thoughts assembled and resolved into clarity. He considered Wright’s figure against the wall, his height and breadth and stance.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “have you a taste for subterfuge?”

Wright crossed his arms and smiled, white toothed in the dimness. “Subterfuge? I am not opposed to it.”

“In that case, I would be very much obliged if you would be so good as to lend me your hat.”

TWENTY-NINE

T
he wide silver moon flashed on the cobbles ahead. Stefanie gripped the frame of the hansom in anticipation of the curve around Trafalgar Square. The Nelson Column gleamed whitely above her for an instant, and then it was gone.

Victoria Embankment, the note had said. Near the Temple Underground station.

Miss Dingleby would help. Miss Dingleby would know what to do. The wildest possibilities swung about her brain, tantalizing her with hope. With Miss Dingleby’s help, she could perhaps spring Hatherfield from prison. Together they could hide him, they could even spirit him back to Germany, and bring her father’s murderers to justice at last. He’d be safe from prosecution behind the familiar old walls of Holstein Castle. With Hatherfield by her side, she could face her old life again. They could marry, they could heal the wounds brought about by all the upheaval. A royal wedding, a new little prince or princess. She put her hand protectively over the small swell of her abdomen.

And perhaps, one day, they could clear Hatherfield’s name.

The driver brought them expertly down the approach to the Embankment. She hadn’t had time to find Nelson and tell him where she was going, but that didn’t matter. Miss Dingleby could be trusted.

She peered ahead, between the horse’s swiveling ears. In the distance, to the left, between the trees of the Embankment, she could make out the hulking box of the Tube station. She rapped on the roof. “Just there!” she said.

“I don’t like it, sir,” said the driver. “I don’t think the master’d like it, neither.”

“I’m meeting a friend, Smith,” she said. “It’s quite all right. And there’s plenty of moon, at least.” Thank God it was August; no cold miasma of fog and coal smoke. Only a clear night, a three-quarters moon, a few clouds drifting in a silver daze across the warm, dark sky.

“I don’t like it.” He slowed the horse to a walk.

Stefanie stood up on the floorboards and craned her neck. “Do you see anyone, Smith?”

“No one, sir.”

“Keep going, then.”

Her heart crashed in her ears. This couldn’t be some sort of deception, could it? She knew Miss Dingleby’s handwriting like she knew her own, and the passcode had been written at the top, exactly as they’d been instructed. No, it was Dingleby, all right.

It had to be.

Her palms were growing damp, making her hands slip against the black paint of the hansom doors. A movement caught her eye, a short figure in a bowler hat, weaving his way along the railing. He looked up as they passed him. “You’re a fine lad!” he shouted. “Don’t let them bugger you, them fine gentlemen what . . .” The rest was lost.

A cold shudder passed through her body, a vague presentiment. As if the bowler-hatted man had been a warning of some kind.

The horse walked briskly on. Another hansom passed them at a smart trot, and just as the driver’s tall hat whisked out of sight, Stefanie spotted the familiar dark silhouette near the railing.

She thumped the roof. “Stop!”

Instantly, the horse wheeled to a halt.

“Let me out!” she said, and the doors sprang open.

“Wait, sir!” called the driver, but she was already jumping down to the pavement and running across the road to the railing, to the shape of Miss Dingleby against the rippling moonlit riverscape of the Thames.

The figure spread out its arms. “Stefanie, my dear!” called Miss Dingleby’s well-remembered voice.

In the tumultuous course of Stefanie’s adolescence, she and Miss Dingleby had not always been the best of friends. An incident rose to mind, even as she rushed to throw herself in those dark outstretched arms: Stefanie, forced on a dulcet summer’s day to copy out all ninety-five of Martin Luther’s theses, in the original Latin, while her sisters enjoyed a picnic expedition on the banks of the Holsteinsee, all because of some innocent prank involving a jar of paste, a pet ferret, and the visiting Prime Minister of Bohemia.

But all that was forgotten in the instant of Miss Dingleby’s wiry arms closing about her back.

“You came back!” she said. “You came back.”

“Of course I came back.” Miss Dingleby put her hands to Stefanie’s arms and set her away. “Of course I came back, my dear. How could you doubt me?”

“I didn’t hear a word from you. Not a word.”

“I was rather busy, investigating this matter of the anarchists.”

Stefanie’s eyes began to fill. “And all this time, the most terrible thing . . .”

“Yes, yes. This marquis of yours, getting himself in a dreadful pickle. I do hope it’s all sorted out.”

“It’s not, I’m afraid. It’s as bad as it could be. Today the court, the jury found him guilty of murdering his stepmother. Guilty! They’ll hang him, and he’s innocent, he’s innocent, and we’ve got to save him . . .”

Miss Dingleby’s hands gripped her arms with renewed strength. “What in heaven’s name is all this? These tears, Stefanie! What’s the matter with you?”

“They’ll hang him, Miss Dingleby! You’ve got to save him!”

“By heaven, you’re as flighty as a . . .” Miss Dingleby stopped. Her gaze moved downward. “Oh, by my old aunt Matilda. Not you, too.”

“You have to help me, Dingleby,” Stefanie whispered.

Dingleby rolled her eyes heavenward. “You, Stefanie? Even you? What the devil’s in the English air? All of you, falling in love, getting yourselves with child at the first opportunity. I taught you better than this, by God!”

Stefanie straightened her back proudly. “You taught us to pursue our convictions with energy, and so I have. I have defended him in a court of law. You’d be proud of me, Dingleby. Every day, I’ve devoted myself to his case, I’ve studied and analyzed every aspect of the law as it relates to . . .”

“And for what? For love?” As she might say,
For raspberry trifle?

“To save him. To save an innocent man from punishment, a good man, the best of men . . .”

Even in the haze of moonlight, Miss Dingleby’s face of disapproval could melt iron. “This is not why I brought you to England, Stefanie. This is not what you were put on this earth to do.”

For the first time, Stefanie heard the voices on the other side of the railing. The slap of water against surface.

“But you’ll help me, won’t you?” she asked.

Dingleby forced her face into sympathy. “My dear, of course I should very much like to help, but I’m afraid we haven’t time.”

“Haven’t time? But what’s going on?” Stefanie’s gaze shifted to the railing, where a figure was drawing up from the riverside, a large male figure, placing his hands on adjoining cast-iron posts in preparation to vault himself over. “Look out!” She lurched forward and shoved Miss Dingleby out of the way.

A gasp of outrage. “Stefanie! What’s the matter with you?”

“That man!” Stefanie pulled out the revolver from her jacket pocket, Hatherfield’s revolver, the one he’d taught her to use himself.

“Put that away!” Miss Dingleby snatched the revolver. “He’s ours, you fool. Always the impetuous one, Stefanie.”

Stefanie fell back a single pace. “Ours?”

“Yes, ours.” She motioned to the man, and he heaved himself over the railing and stepped toward Stefanie. His mouth, under the wide brim of his hat, was open in a large and familiar smile.

“Don’t you recognize me, Stefanie?” he said in German, and he took off his hat.

Shock paralyzed the muscles of Stefanie’s limbs. For an instant, she could only stare at him stupidly, not quite believing the evidence before her.

“Gunther?” she whispered.

I
n the early hours of the morning, before the verdict, when the Marquess of Hatherfield had risen and dressed, he had imagined walking out of the Old Bailey later that day, a free man, to join Stefanie in some private and predetermined location.

He had not, however, imagined doing so wearing the hat and jacket of Mr. Nathaniel Wright, natural half brother of Lady Charlotte Harlowe.

Astonishing how easy it had been. Men saw what they expected to see, he supposed, and as he and Wright were of roughly the same build, and wore the same hat, and flashed the same pass in the dim prison corridors to the dim prison guards, he found himself whisked through the front gates in surprisingly short order, a free man.

But not so free. He had to return before the guards discovered the deception. More imperatively, he had to find Stefanie on the Victoria Embankment before disaster struck.

And yet he couldn’t deny the thrill of breathing in the warm night air. The loose and unfettered sensation of independence, no guard at his back, no company at all. A free man.

He struck off down the street, as hastily as he could without seeming suspicious. A hansom trotted by, passing like a ghost under the gaslight. “Need a taxi, mate?” asked the driver.

Hatherfield hesitated, and then remembered he hadn’t any money. “Thanks, I’ll walk,” he said. It wasn’t far, after all. Victoria Embankment, near Temple Tube station. Nelson would join him there.
Walking into a trap
, the note had said. How had Nelson discovered this? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was reaching her in time.

He’d been given one last chance to secure her safety for good. He prayed he could succeed, for her sake. For their child’s sake.

He turned the corner of Ludgate Hill and increased his pace, a man in a spot of hurry, nothing too remarkable. The Embankment wasn’t too far away, a few hundred yards. He rounded down New Bridge Street and broke into a jog.

The moon came into view, a flattened orb, not quite full. His heart ached at the beauty of it. The buildings rose silent around him, commonplace London buildings, and while the front part of his mind was calculating the speed at which Nelson would have reached the Embankment, the relative distance there from Belgravia versus Old Bailey, the angles of vision and the height of the river tide and the degree of likely traffic, the rear portion of his brain followed each roofline, each column and grimy doorway with a loving eye.

How many times had he walked around London, never seeing its particular teeming beauty, never stopping to
treasure
that hour as he hurried to some appointment or another, some errand or task that had to be accomplished?

And now the hour had fled, his life had fled, and he had never loved London so much.

The Embankment trees lay ahead, silvered with moonlight. Hatherfield inhaled the brown brackish scent of the river, the pumping femoral artery of London.

He moved quietly in the lee of the buildings, down the approach, until the shadows of the Temple gardens massed to his right. He let out a low whistle.

A shape materialized out of the darkness. “Sir.”

“Nelson.”

A metal shape nudged at his hand. He accepted the revolver into his palm, a perfect fit, cold and familiar and reassuring.

“They’re just ahead, sir. You can make them out by the railing.”

Hatherfield narrowed his eyes. Two figures. No, three. Two men and a woman, except that one of the men was slighter than the other, carrying his head and shoulders in such a way that it could only be Stefanie.

Stefanie.

Hatherfield took an instinctive step forward.

Nelson held out his arm. “Wait, sir.”

Hatherfield stilled himself by sheer force of will. The other man was opening his arms, and Stefanie—by God!—Stefanie was stepping forward, she was allowing herself into his embrace.

A wave of primal fury swept across his chest.

“What the devil?” he hissed.

“Sir! There they are, sir!”

A cluster of shadows emerged from the gloom of Temple Tube station.

Hatherfield broke into a run. Nelson panted at his heels, but Hatherfield was honed and fit from the rowing apparatus in his prison cell. His legs stretched out and flew, driven by fear and fury, as the shapes from the station resolved into men, and the men pounced on the three figures by the railing.

He cocked the gun as he went, as his legs pumped faster and faster and his lungs burned and flooded with oxygen. A man had grabbed Stefanie and yanked her arms behind her back. Fifty yards away, forty. Stefanie’s scream carried through the air, and he roared from deep in his throat.