The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife

Chapter Thirty-two

The woman’s screams tore right through Grim Jack Gardner’s vitals. He must be dead this time. Only a creature from hell could shriek to raise a body from its resting place. Which made him wonder what sort of coffin he had been laid in. He sniffed, his nostrils quivering in offense.

Criminy, the indignity he had been done-buried in a bleedin’ wheelbarrow, under a shroud of fetid straw, soggy turnips, and God only knew what else.

A miserable drizzling mist fell from above.

The screaming had stopped, but not before his gaze lifted to the white face in the attic window of the alley lodging house. The angel of death was beckoning him with her hand.

He shook his head, mouthing an apology for having to miss their appointment. If Mistress Hades wanted Jack that badly, she’d have to chase him down like everyone else.

In the blink of an eye she disappeared. Vanished, as if she’d decided his soul wasn’t worth the price of pursuit.

Perhaps she had been an angel of mercy. It was about time someone up above showed Grim Jack a little understanding. Whatever she was, he had no intention of waiting for her in a wheelbarrow.

He lurched to his feet and stumbled into the dark. Where was he? He thought he recognized an apothecary shop. There was a sign on the door.

Five Hundred Pounds

REWARD

FOR THE APPREHENSION

OF THE

MONSTER

Jack squinted to read the finer print before giving up and tearing the damned thing down to stick inside his begrimed coat. “Five ’undred pounds,” he mused. “Who’d ’ave thought it?” He could turn himself in, bribe ten magistrates and near every gaoler in Newgate, and still come out with enough cash to retire. He might have a bit of change for the grandson Grim Jack had been forbidden to visit. Or he could drink himself to death, a task half done according to the surgeon who had stitched him up like a spinster’s corset after his last run-in with the wrong end of a blade.

God, he ached. He stank. And he was still unconvinced he wasn’t wandering the crooked streets of hell. He had to have a drink. But he decided that the death angel in the window was as real as the voices wafting from the tavern from which he had been tossed by Nick Rydell a month or so ago.

He crossed the street as a whore came out from the pub with a drunken gent weaving circles around her. He ducked into a shadowed doorway of a harness shop before he could be noticed. The fog began to lift from his head, and as it did he realized with a sense of disappointment that no one in their right mind would pay a duke’s ransom to have his rotten carcass returned.

A duke’s ransom.

There was another poster.

Whitechapel, April 1818

WHEREAS AN ABDUCTION

Has Been Made of a

YOUNG LADY

FROM THE PRIVATE ACADEMY

IN WHICH SHE RESIDED

Pain shot through his eyes. His body shook with such violence that the words on the poster pranced up and down like puppets in a Punchinello show. Abduction? Private academy?

Damned if his own traitorous daughter hadn’t been working in a fancy school the last he’d heard of her. She was clever, Grim Jack’s girl, and even though she’d turned her back on her family, the day anyone abducted his little Harriet-who looked so like her dead mother, Jack couldn’t stand the sight of her-was the day he’d rise out of his grave and take revenge.

If not that fine reward.

There was no question of a proper wedding, not until Edlyn was found. No one had the heart for a celebration under these circumstances. But the news might help his aunt forget their troubles for a while.

He would tell her first thing in the morning.

She was standing in the middle of the hall in her frilly nightcap and flannel wrapper. He might have managed to fob her off with some excuse about hearing a noise in Harriet’s room had he not been carrying his boots and probably looking as guilty as he felt.

“I know you have a perfectly innocent reason for coming out of my companion’s bedchamber in this incriminating state of undress,” she said in a voice that could have frozen the entire Thames on an August afternoon.

“I do.” He nodded vigorously. “A perfectly good reason.”

It was remarkable how she could look so frail and helpless at one minute and rather like a storybook witch the next. “And that reason is?”

“I found the name of a woman written in Edlyn’s hand last night, and I-oh, what’s the bloody point?-I woke up Harriet to ask her if she was familiar with it.”

Her lips flattened. “And were you familiar with-you truly have a name?”

He nodded, leaning against the wall to put on his boots. “I’m out the door right now to catch her, if the inquisition can wait.”

She trailed him to the staircase. “What is this woman’s name?”

“Rosalie Porter, and if I miss Sir Daniel in passing, be sure that you or Harriet tell him.”

She hesitated, clearly not convinced his motives for spending the night in her companion’s bed were as innocent as he claimed. “I want you to know that this is not the end of the matter.”

“Of course it isn’t,” he muttered, grabbing his hat and gloves from the same spot on the floor where he’d dropped them last night. “It won’t be the end of it until Edlyn is a bridesmaid at my wedding. To Harriet.”

Having dropped that bombshell, he took advantage of his aunt’s astonished silence to slip out the front door. Coming up the steps as he started down was one of Sir Daniel’s young early-bird assistants, apparently with news of his own to impart.