Lady Maggie's Secret Scandal (5 page)

“I knew her younger brother in Rome, and we’ve kept in touch,” Portmaine said. “Man can do anything with the keyboard. He’s introduced me to his siblings as we’ve bumped into them. There’s an entire gaggle of pretty sisters in addition to the one your half brother married.”

“Is this like the old king’s problem with his princesses; no one is good enough for his womenfolk?”

“Wouldn’t know”—Portmaine got up to answer the tap on the door—“not having made His Majesty’s acquaintance.” He brought a tray to the desk and pulled up a chair before settling in with his meal. “Lord Val says Maggie’s the most retiring of his sisters. She’s had to be, given her antecedents. His Grace had her and the other one, the soldier, brought up under his own roof, though. By God, we aren’t paying the kitchen enough. This is delicious soup and piping hot.”

He slurped delicately, as if to underscore the point.

It was tempting, very, very tempting, to gently pry details from Portmaine. Here in their home, brandy warming his gut, Portmaine would prattle on the same as any other man on familiar turf.

But there were lines Benjamin Hazlit wouldn’t cross.

Though it would just be gossip, after all. They gossiped with each other, because really, there wasn’t anybody else with whom they could share all the society effluvia they came across in their work.

“So what else had Lord Val to say about his steadiest sister?”

***

Maggie’s head footman rapped on the open door of the breakfast parlor.

“Lord Valentine to see you, madam.”

“Thank you, Hobbs,” Val said, sauntering in still sporting his evening attire. “But since when do we announce family?”

“Since you’ve gone for a husband,” Maggie said, rising to kiss his cheek. “And your arrival twice in twenty-four hours has to be worth noting. Have some breakfast.”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

“Were you up all night playing?”

He filled a plate at the sideboard, while Maggie noted the signs of fatigue about his eyes. Val had been a gorgeous youth, sensuous, dreamy, and probably more sexually attractive than he knew. Having been parted from her for months though, Maggie saw him with new eyes, realizing he was making the transition from handsome young man to breathtaking maturity. She’d missed him and missed his music, too.

“I played some,” he said, taking a seat at her right hand. “I’m bunking in with Viscount Fairly, and I wanted you to have my direction. When was the last time your Broadwood was tuned?” He passed her a calling card with an address on the back. One of the better addresses, actually.

“You sent your fellows over at the first of the year. You always do if you aren’t here to see to it yourself.”

“Mags, are you happy?” He tucked into his eggs as if he hadn’t just asked a very personal, unusual question.

“What makes you ask?”

He looked up from his eggs, green eyes troubled. “That isn’t a yes.”

“You’ve been up all night, Valentine. Were you perhaps imbibing for much of the evening?”

“Right.” He smiled at her. “I’m knee-crawling drunk and in need of a good old-fashioned scolding. If you’re not happy, what would it take to make you happy?”

There was something behind his smile, something Maggie suspected a woman would call concern and a man wouldn’t deign to put a label on even under threat of torture.

“It’s just that until I married Ellen, there was something missing—a large something. Still, I wasn’t unhappy. You’re not unhappy, either, unless I miss my guess.”

Not unhappy. He was insightful, her baby brother. Inconveniently so.

“I have my charities,” she said, rising with the need to put some distance between them. A few beats of silence went by while Maggie stared out the window at her back gardens and Val said nothing.

Then, “You danced with Hazlit.”

“Gracious God.” Maggie turned and braced her hips on the windowsill. “I danced with Lord Fanshaw and Dudley Parrington, too. What of it?”

“The last two are His Grace’s cronies of long standing, and you danced a waltz with Hazlit. I can’t recall when you’ve waltzed with anybody but me or Dev or Gayle.”

Or Bart or Victor, their two deceased brothers.

“I waltz with His Grace.”

“At your come out, maybe, fifteen years ago.”

“It wasn’t fifteen years ago.” Though it soon would be.

“Mags, bickering won’t answer my question. Why Hazlit?”

“I wanted to speak to him, and the dance floor has a kind of privacy.”

“About?”

“Valentine.” She put as much of the Duchess of Moreland’s hauteur in her tone as she could, which was considerable.

“Gayle likes him,” Val said, clearly not the least cowed. “And not only because Sophie just married his half brother. I thought you should know.”

Which meant Gayle would be coming around to dispense his questions and advice as well. “You may go back to Oxfordshire if all you’re going to do is interrogate me about my dancing partners, Valentine.”

He studied her for a long moment, green eyes seeing far more than Maggie was comfortable with. “Dev and Emmie? Their Graces?” he said. “Their lives have
meaning
, Maggie, and they have somebody to love them. God willing, that’s what I’m building with Ellen, and Gayle with Anna.”

“I love you,” she said, her concern now for him. “I love all my siblings.”

“And we love you,” he replied, his smile sad, “but I’m not sure that’s enough, Mags. Not for you—it wasn’t for me, though I couldn’t have said as much to save myself. You’ll give Gayle my direction?”

“Of course. You left it with Their Graces?”

“I’m off to the mansion once I change, and yes, I’ll pass it along to them.”

Val stayed long enough to finish his breakfast, but for the second time, he left without even sitting down at Maggie’s piano. When he was gone, Maggie went upstairs, promising herself she would not panic. Methodically, she searched her rooms again—bedroom, sitting room, dressing room.

No reticule.

She searched her back hallway and the closet off the foyer. She traced her usual path from the kitchen to the mews and then wandered every inch of every walkway in her gardens.

No reticule.

She took a break and read the financial pages of the paper, something she’d been doing since the age of twelve, and then repeated her entire search.

Still no reticule.

Her brother Gayle, Earl of Westhaven and the Moreland heir, chose to stop by and share luncheon with her. All the while she was smiling and nodding at his conversation, Maggie was also trying not to panic.

Where in all of perishing creation could that reticule be?

William the Conqueror had been a bastard.

King Charles II had sired twelve bastards at least, raising three of them to dukedoms with a flourish of the royal pen.

More recently, the Duke of Devonshire had raised two—or was it three bastards?—in the miscellany sharing a roof with him, his duchess, and his mistress.

One of the royal princesses was more than rumored to have a bastard son being raised by the boy’s father, and the royal dukes had propagated bastards at a great rate in response to their dear papa’s Royal Marriages Act.

These facts and more like them had been imparted to Maggie at her first private tea with Esther, Duchess of Moreland. Maggie had been thirteen, a year into the ordeal of having her courses among a houseful of brothers over whom she towered, a year into the mortification of needing a corset before any of her friends had confessed to same.

With almost two decades of hindsight, Maggie could see Her Grace had been trying to impart reassurance, but what had come across to a young girl floundering for confidence was something on the order of: “Sit up straight, quit feeling sorry for yourself, and stop tapping your spoon on your teacup.”

Private teas could still be harrowing to her and her sisters both.

Maggie had only recently begun to suspect private teas were just as harrowing for Her Grace, except that good lady had raised ten children and survived three decades of marriage to Percival Windham. When Esther Windham took a notion to see a thing done, Wellington’s determination paled by comparison.

So it was to Esther’s example Maggie turned when her reticule remained missing for a third day.

***

The life of an investigator wasn’t easy. Gathering information in the ballrooms kept a man up late of an evening, and meeting clients at breakfast or while riding at dawn had him out of bed before first light.

Hazlit often solved the dilemma by spending the waning hours of the night at his desk, reading reports and getting the bulk of his sleep in the daylight hours. He was no different from many of his peers in this regard, at least during the spring Season.

Lady Norcross had gone to ground, and Hazlit had a sneaking suspicion he knew why. A word whispered in Helene Ander’s ear by a certain presuming, statuesque redhead, a little warning between Helene and her sister-in-law, and that would be that. He tried to feel some stirring of regret for Lord Norcross, but taking on the man as a client had been a mistake.

Hazlit made his way back to his chambers, only to find some servant had pulled back all the drapery, leaving his sitting room flooded with sunlight.

Spring was trying to advance, but it was heavy going. Hazlit considered spending the morning loitering at the coffee shops rather than catching forty winks, and his eyes fell on the jacket he’d worn to Moreland’s meeting earlier in the week.

A little glint of fiery gold at the cuff had him examining the sleeve.

And damned if there weren’t three long, reddish-gold strands of hair caught on the button. Very long. So long that when he coiled them around and around and around his finger, they made a band as thick as a wedding ring.

A token of a well-fought skirmish. He rummaged in his wardrobe for the sewing kit, bit off a length of silk thread, and tied it around his prize.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Hazlit’s butler, Morse, stood in the doorway, attired in sufficient dignity to grace the Regent’s residence.

“What is it?”

“A lady to see you. I put her in the small parlor and ordered her tea and cakes.”

“A lady?” As opposed to a female, since Hazlit employed women as eyes and ears at many levels of society. They generally came in through the mews, after dark, cloaks pulled up over their hair, or they suffered his wrath.

Morse extended a calling card on a silver salver, the salver held in a gloved hand. Hazlit read the card.

Well, well, well.

Another skirmish. His fatigue fell away. He shrugged into a morning coat, gave his cravat a last-minute inspection, and headed downstairs. His only detour on the way to the small parlor was to tuck his little token into the pages of Wordsworth, several poems away from the drying rose.

“Miss Windham, a pleasure.” He bowed over her hand, automatically taking in the details.

She was pretty in the morning sunshine, though that wasn’t a detail. He put her age around thirty, which by his lights was the start of a woman’s prime or her decline, depending on how she lived her life. Too often late nights, excessive food and drink, and moral laxity aged a lady before her time. She might catch a man’s eye by the light of the evening’s candles, but morning sun was a brutal mirror of truth.

And the truth was, Maggie Windham was lovely. She had none of the lines of incipient dissipation creeping up around her full mouth. Her eyes were clear and limpid green, the same shade as her beautifully tailored walking dress. Her hair had the healthy luster of a lady who enjoyed fresh air and proper nutrition.

That hair…

She half rose to offer him a little curtsy, then subsided onto the sofa. “Will you be seated, Mr. Hazlit?”

He took a place next to her, just to watch her eyes widen in surprise, though that was her only reaction—no nervous shifting away or popping out of her seat.

“It is a pleasure to see you, Miss Windham, as stated, but an unexpected pleasure. Particularly as you’ve come calling all on your lonesome, no lady’s maid trailing about, no younger sister at your side.”

A question dangled on the end of his observation, but his guest was saved responding by the arrival of the tea tray.

“Shall I pour, Mr. Hazlit? And I assure you, my footman is flirting with your scullery maid as we speak.”

“Please. It isn’t often my tea tray is graced by such a pretty lady.”

She drew off her crocheted gloves and set them beside her on the sofa, revealing, of course,
pretty
hands. Not small, but slim, long-fingered, and ringless. Her nails were short and unpainted, which surprised him a little. Practical hands, not ornamental.

“How do you like your tea?”

“Sweet, nearly white.”

She served him, prepared a cup for herself, and only then met his gaze. “I need your help.”

He nearly sputtered his tea all over them both, so effectively had she surprised him. He took a deliberative sip, letting a silence stretch until he was good and ready to offer return fire.