He dropped his hands and turned toward the door.
“One week,” he said. “If the renovations are not complete by then, Jane, a few heads are going to roll. You will warn all the workmen involved?”
“Yes, your grace,” she said. “Jocelyn.”
He looked over his shoulder at her and opened his mouth to speak. But he changed his mind and strode from the room without saying another word.
13
ANY OF MICK BODEN’S ACQUAINTANCES ENVIEDhim his job. There was a certain glamour about being one of the famed Bow Street Runners. The common fallacy was that he spent his working days literally running to earth all of London’s and half of England’s most desperate criminals and hauling them off to the nearest magistrate and the just reward for their dastardly deeds. They saw his life as one of endless adventure and danger and action—and success.
Most of the time his job was routine and rather dull. Sometimes he wondered why he was not a dockyard worker or a crossing sweeper. This was one of those times. Lady Sara Illingsworth, a lady of a mere twenty years who had grown up in the country and presumably had no town bronze, was proving to be unexpectedly elusive. In almost a month of searching he had discovered no trace of her beyond those first few days.
The Earl of Durbury still stubbornly insisted she was in London. There was nowhere else she could have gone, he claimed, since she had no friends or relatives elsewhere apart from an old neighbor now living with her husband in Somersetshire. But she was not there.
Something told Mick that the earl was right. She was here somewhere. But she had not returned to Lady Webb’s, even though the baroness was now back in town. She had not contacted either her late father’s man of business or the present earl’s. If she had been spending lavishly, she had not been doing it in any of the more fashionable shops. If she had been trying to sell or pawn any of the stolen jewels, she had not done it at any of the places Mick knew about—and he prided himself on knowing them all. If she had tried to secure respectable lodgings in a decent neighborhood, she had not done so at any of the houses on whose doors he and his assistants had tirelessly knocked. She had not sought employment in any of the houses at which he inquired—and he had asked at all the likely possibilities except the grandest mansions in Mayfair. She would not have been foolhardy enough to apply at one of those, he had concluded. None of the agencies had been applied to by anyone bearing any of the names Mick thought she might be using. None remembered a tall, slim, blond beauty.
And so he found himself yet again with nothing to report to the Earl of Durbury. It was lowering. It was enough to make a man think seriously about changing his line of work. It was also enough to arouse all a man’s stubborn determination not to be thwarted by a mere slip of a girl.
“She has not gone into service, sir,” he said with conviction to an exasperated, red-faced earl, who was doubtless thinking of the hefty bill he had run up at the Pulteney in a month. “She would not have sought employment as a governess or lady’s companion—too public. For the same reason she would not have taken work as a shop clerk. She would have to work somewhere she would not be seen. Some workshop. A dressmaker’s or a milliner’s, perhaps.”
If she was working at all. The earl had never told him exactly how much money the girl had stolen. Mick was beginning to suspect it could not have been much. Not enough to enable her to live in style, anyway. Surely such a young, inexperienced woman would have made mistakes by now if she had had a vast fortune to tempt her into the open.
“What are you waiting for, then?” his lordship asked coldly. “Why are you not out searching every workshop in London? Are the illustrious Bow Street Runners to be outsmarted by a mere girl?” His voice was heavy with sarcasm.
“Am I searching for a murderess?” Mick Boden asked. “How is your son, sir?”
“My son,” the earl said irritably, “is at death’s door. You are searching for a murderess. I suggest you find her before she repeats her crime.”
And so Mick began his search anew. London, of course, had more than its fair share of workshops. He just wished he knew for sure what name the girl was using. And he wished that she had not somehow managed to hide her blond hair, apparently her most distinctive feature.
IT WAS A LONGweek. Jocelyn spent far too much of it drinking and gaming by night and trying to whip himself into shape during the day by spending long hours honing his fencing skills and building his stamina in the boxing ring at Gentleman Jackson’s. His leg was responding well to exercise.
Ferdinand was incensed when he learned what had happened to his curricle and was determined to ferret out the Forbes brothers, who had dropped out of sight the day after the duel, and slap a glove in all their separate faces. At first he would not agree that it was his brother’s quarrel. It was his life, after all, that had been threatened. But Jocelyn was insistent.
Angeline had had a fit of the vapors at the news of the broken axle, had summoned Heyward from the House, and then, to divert her shaken nerves, had bought a new bonnet.
“I wonder that there is any fruit left on any of the stalls at Covent Garden, Angeline,” Jocelyn observed, viewing it with a pained expression through his quizzing glass as he rode through Hyde Park at the fashionable hour one day and came across her sporting it as she drove in an open barouche with her mother-in-law. “I daresay it is all decorating that monstrosity on your head.”
“It is all the crack,” she replied, preening, “no matter what you say, Tresham. You simply must promise not to drive a curricle again. You or Ferdie. You will kill yourselves and I will never recover my nerves. But Heyward said it was no accident. I daresay it was one of the Forbeses. If you do not discover which one and call him to account, I shall be ashamed to call myself a Dudley.”
“You do not now,” he reminded her dryly before tipping his hat to the Dowager Lady Heyward and riding on. “You took your husband’s name when you married him, Angeline.”
He was not as impatient as his brother and sister to find the Forbeses and punish them. The time would come. They must know it as surely as he did. In the meantime, let them remain in their hiding place, imagining what would happen when they finally came face-to-face with him. Let them sweat it out.
Several people asked about Jane Ingleby. She had created even more of a stir with her singing than he had expected. He was asked who she was, if she was still employed at Dudley House, if she was to sing anywhere else, who her voice teacher had been. Viscount Kimble even asked him outright one evening at White’s if she was his mistress—a question that won for himself a cool stare through the ducal quizzing glass.
Strange, that. Jocelyn had never before been secretive about his mistresses. Indeed, he had often used the house for dinners and parties when he wished them to be a little less formal than such occasions at Dudley House inevitably were. His mistresses had always also been his hostesses—a role that would fit Jane admirably.
But he did not want his friends to know she was in his keeping. It seemed somehow unfair to her, though he would not have been able to explain if he had tried. He told them she had had temporary employment with him and was now gone, he knew not where.
“A devilish shame, Tresham,” Conan Brougham said. “That voice ought to be brought to the attention of Raymore. She could earn a more than decent living with it.”
“I would have offered her employment myself, Tresh,” Kimble said, “on her back, that is, not with her voice. But I feared I might be trespassing on your preserves. If you hear where she is, you might drop a word in my ear.”
Jocelyn, feeling unaccustomedly hostile to one of his closest friends, changed the subject.
He walked home alone later that same night despite the danger of attack by footpads. He had never feared them. He carried a stout cane and he was handy with his fives. He would rather enjoy a scuffle with two or three ruffians, he had often thought. Perhaps any ruffians who had ever spotted him had been intelligent enough to estimate correctly their chances against him. He had never been attacked.
