The woman let out a snorting laugh. “You’re new to service, then, aren’t you? Don’t you know what it means when the knocker’s down? It means the family ain’t in residence. You’ll either have to leave your message or take it back to your Sir James and tell him the Marquis ain’t expected till nightfall.”
Tom blew out a long breath and lifted his page’s cap to swipe one forearm across his brow. He didn’t need to pretend to sweat: the velvet was fiendishly heavy and the sun was out in earnest now, blazing down unnaturally hot for a June day. “Oh, Lordy,” he said, making his voice pregnant with weariness. “I was hopin’ to be able to sit a spell and maybe get somethin’ to drink while his lordship was writin’ his answer.”
The woman’s pleasant face puckered with motherly concern. “Oh, poor ducky. It is mortal hot today, isn’t it?” She hesitated a moment, then said, “Why don’t you come down here and have yourself a nice glass of lemonade before going back?”
Tom made a show of hesitating. “Well, I don’t know….”
“Come on, then.” She swung the door in wide and beckoned him with one hand. “I got a son just about your age, in service with Lord McGowan. I’d hope if he were standing all hot and thirsty on some gentleman’s doorstep, that cook’d be kind enough to bring him in and give him somethin’ and let him sit a spell.”
Tom figured it wouldn’t do to give her a chance to change her mind, and clambered quickly down the steps.
He found himself in a white-tiled room with stone flagged floors and big old wooden dressers laden with massive copper pots. Mrs. Long—as she identified herself—led him to a bench beside the kitchen table and sent one of the scullery maids scurrying to bring him a tall, frosty glass of lemonade. Mindful of Miss Kat’s dire warning, Tom thrust his neck out and drank very, very carefully.
“You said the Marquis won’t be in till nightfall?” he said, eyeing her over the lip of his glass.
“That’s what we’re expecting.” She heaved a great sigh and swiped at one eye with the corner of her apron. “He’s coming to bury that beautiful young wife of his, poor man.”
Lined up along the stone windowsill to cool stood three freshly baked pies. Cherry, Tom figured, sniffing longingly at the afternoon breeze, and maybe apple. He jerked his attention back to Mrs. Long’s plump face. “She died, did she?”
“You mean to say you haven’t heard?” She came to slip onto the bench opposite him, her voice hushed as she leaned forward conspiratorially. “Murdered, she was.”
Tom led his mouth go slack with shock. “No!”
“That’s a fact. They found her all the way down in Brighton—in the Pavilion, no less—with a dagger sticking out her back. Although what she was doing there is more than I can understand.”
“But I thought you just said his lordship was in Brighton?”
“Aye, so he was. But
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Mrs. Long propped her elbows on the table, her chin sinking onto her fists as she thought about it. “Why, must have been just an hour or two after that. One of the footmen called her a hackney and she went off.”
“A hackney?” Tom had to work excessively hard to keep the thrill of triumphant excitement off his face. Here was exactly the sort of information Devlin needed. “Just goes to show, don’t it?” Tom said, keeping his voice slow and casual. “I mean, who’d have thought a lady what lived in a swell establishment like this couldn’t afford to keep her own carriage?”
Mrs. Long let out a peel of laughter that rocked her back in her seat. “Get away with you. Lord Anglessey’s warm enough he could set up a hundred carriages, if’n he had a mind. Don’t you know nothing, lad?” She leaned forward suddenly and dropped her voice to a whisper, as if imparting a secret. “A lady takes a hackney when she don’t want her lord to know where she’s going.”
“Oh.” Tom nodded with wide-eyed comprehension, as if this were all new to him. “Did she do that often?”
“Often enough these last few months, that’s for sure.” Spreading her palms flat on the table, she pushed up from the bench as if she suddenly regretted having said so much. “Now, then, ducky, how about a piece of pie to go with your lemonade?”
Tom wanted that pie so badly his mouth was watering. But he dutifully swallowed and shook his head. “Oh, no, thank you, ma’am.”
Reaching down, she patted his cheek with one plump hand. “Your mama taught you real good, ducky. But there’s no use you trying to pretend you don’t want it, because I seen you eyeing them pies, sure enough. Now, what kind you want? Apple or cherry?”
Sebastian spent what was left of the afternoon at the Inns of Court and the seedy gambling establishments around Pickering Place.
It didn’t take him long to discover that Bevan Ellsworth had indeed put in a rare appearance in the legal district on Wednesday. But his activities that day had been erratic, culminating in an evening spent at a hell just off Pickering Place.
In the end Sebastian decided the man could, conceivably, have slipped away from Grey’s Court long enough to have killed Guinevere Anglessey somewhere in London. But there was no way he could have hauled her body down to Brighton and still made it back to Pickering Place by ten o’clock, at which time he was deep in a game of faro from which he had not arisen until four the next morning.
SEBASTIAN ARRIVED at his own neatly stuccoed town house at Number 41 Brook Street just as the last streaks of orange and pink were slowly leaching from the sky and the lamplighters were beginning to make their rounds. Changing into evening dress, he directed his carriage to an imposing mansion on Park Street that belonged to his only surviving aunt, the Dowager Duchess of Claiborne. Technically, the house was owned by the eldest of Aunt Henrietta’s three sons, the current Duke of Claiborne. But she had the poor sod so thoroughly terrified that he had meekly left her in possession of the place and moved his own growing family into a small house on Half Moon Street.
