Obviously, she could not remain in that place. Marlow was welcome to despise her and all women—she was not so brash and assertive that she would deny any man his right to cling to small-minded prejudices—but he was not allowed to scorn her aptitude for identifying murderers. Six years of social obscurity and failure had left her with few vanities, and she would permit no one to deride the one thing at which she excelled.
Thinking she overestimated her abilities!
She would show him who had an excessive valuation of their own skills.
How precisely she would do that, she could not say, but as soon as she was safely out of the basement, she would figure it out and then he would be in awe of her.
Chapter Three
Saying that Bea decided in a fit of pique to identify the villain who had chopped off the poor neighbor’s head was vastly understating the case.
Oh, no. It was nothing so tidy or tiny as a fit.
’Twas more like an orgy of pique or a massive bout of pique or even a gargantuan mountain of pique so commodious a village of trolls could live in its crevasses along with the four princesses they kidnapped from the nearby castle to mend their stockings.
It was an ever-expanding thing—the magnitude of her pique—and by the time Beatrice, Duchess of Kesgrave, sat down on the silk settee and pulled the bell cord in the drawing room, she felt consumed by it.
Curiously, she had not started off that way.
Climbing the stairs to return to the first floor, she had calmly and coolly reviewed the conversation between Marlow and the man he called Joseph. Well aware of the truism about eavesdroppers and kind words, she was determined not to take offense at slights offered in an exchange she had no business hearing.
It had been easy enough at first.
Marlow’s casual remark rejecting her investigative skill, for example, was in every way unexceptional. All men, even the most enlightened ones, assumed women to be inferior in some significant way—too weak, too emotional, too silly, too vain, too bookish, too selfish, too ugly, too capable—and she could hardly resent a Berkeley Square butler for holding the same opinion as every Bond Street beau who perused the wares on offer at the Western Exchange.
Likewise, his attribution of her deductive accomplishments to Kesgrave. As a longstanding member of the household, Marlow could not be expected to retain the youthful cynicism of a newly hired footman. A dozen years or so into his service, he subscribed wholly to the doctrine of the duke’s perfection, which, to be fair, was the only appropriate response to a coronet and a five-hundred-year-old name. After all, what was the purpose of the lavish munificence of the Matlock family tree if not to overwhelm the servants?
In the same vein, his observation about the Earl of Wem had only made her laugh. To describe eliciting a confession of murder as a stroke of luck—as if his lordship had been an apple that happened to fall while Bea was standing underneath the branch—required mental contortions so great she was surprised Marlow did not suffer spasms of pain from the effort.
Yes, Bea had remained calm and cool as she replayed the conversation in her head, but then she arrived at his description of the events on the terrace at Lord Larkwell’s ball and her composure deserted her. Hearing those words again almost stopped her heart. Her cheeks turned first to fire and then to ice. And her breath—it seemed to expel itself from her lungs all at once, making it impossible to breathe.
At the top of the staircase, her hand clutching the railing, Bea had feared she was about to faint.
What an extravagant reaction!
So much fuss over a minor thing, she had thought in disgust. All of London believed she had trapped the duke into marriage, her family included. Aunt Vera had been more delicate in her judgment, refraining from using harsh terms such as vulgar display and inevitable debacle, but the implication was exactly the same: A woman of Bea’s indifferent attributes could nab a man of Kesgrave’s only through trickery and deceit.
A widely held notion and yet somehow it had brought her to the brink of a swoon. That was troubling.
The heavy black brows were part of it. Aunt Vera’s countenance could express disapproval in myriad ways, but her eyebrows were thin and brown and rarely pulsated. Nor could she sneer convincingly. Her condemnation took the form of petty slights endlessly applied, like pinpricks to one’s soul.
But Marlow’s disgust was more like an arrow, sharp and true, and it struck her deeply. Like the lion with the thorn in his paw, she could not simply tug it out and nor could she ask Kesgrave to remove it. Appealing to her husband to soothe her hurt feelings was not only intolerable but impractical as well. He was already weighed down by responsibilities—his name, his coronet—and she would not add chastising the servants to appease his wife’s ego to the list.
Ah, but it wasn’t just vanity, Bea had thought. It was household management and domestic tranquility and her entire future. Securing the esteem of the staff was vital to her career as a duchess, for no woman who failed at home could have any hope of succeeding in society. Marlow, she knew from painful firsthand experience, was determined to undermine her. One by one, yes, she had been able to dismiss the harm of his statements, but taken together they represented a stunning lack of respect for her authority.
It would be one thing if he had kept his views to himself. Bea had no interest in regulating the thoughts and feelings of the people in her employ. But he had not held his own counsel. No, he had openly expressed his contempt, caring nothing for her dignity (“brash and assertive”) and for the position she was struggling to occupy with grace (“straining above