“You’re worried about Wick, aren’t you?” Violet said in an undertone.
Her insight surprised him. He wasn’t used to someone reading his thoughts—to having anyone care to do so. He cast a quick look at her siblings still engrossed in their conversation.
Quietly, he admitted, “Aye. I am.”
She nibbled on her lip. “Perhaps he and the others went on a jaunt to the village last night? It’d be just like them. Maybe they got three sheets to the wind and are just now waking up in some tavern.”
It was a heartening possibility. Much more so than the others rattling in Richard’s head.
“You ease my mind, lass,” he said.
A bemused look came over her. “I don’t think anyone haseversaid that to me before.”
Before he could reply, a knock sounded on the door.
“Come in,” Kent said, and Richard rose with the other men.
Josephine Ashe entered the room. She was dressed in a plain bombazine gown, her manner as watchful as that of a governess. With the exception of her daringly short coiffure, she appeared quite ordinary. Nothing suggested that she juggled fire for a living.
“Good morning,” the duchess said. “Thank you for coming.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Miss Ashe’s curtsy was diffident, her wary gaze circling the room’s occupants and lingering for an instant on Violet. “You, er, wished to see me?”
“Please have a seat.” Kent gestured to a chair. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”
Perching on the very edge of the chair, Ashe said, “About what, exactly?”
“Your relationship with Madame Monique.”
At Kent’s direct reply, Ashe’s eyes narrowed. “Why would you wish to know about that?”
“Because Monique is dead,” Kent said.
Richard wasn’t the best judge of women, but even he saw the surprise flash through Ashe’s eyes. “Dead...Monique? But how?”
“That is what we are trying to determine,” Kent said briskly. “To do so, we are interviewing those with connections to her.”
“You don’t thinkIhad something to do with it?” Ashe sounded aghast.
Violet spoke up. “I saw you and Madame Monique having an argument yesterday.”
Ashe ran a hand through her cropped blond locks. “That was nothing. Monique and I, we have never rubbed along—but that doesn’t mean that I would harm her.”
“What was the source of friction between the two of you?” Her Grace asked.
Color seeped into the juggler’s pale cheeks. “Monique wasn’t an easy person to get along with. She thought only of herself, never spared a thought for others. Sharing a stage with her was akin to sharing a bed with someone who hoards all the blankets.” An angry tremor entered her voice. “I was constantly left in the cold.”
Richard recalled yesterday’s performance. Monique’s dramatic entrance had cut short Ashe’s applause. Could professional jealousy be a motive for murder?
“I wasn’t the only one who felt that way,” Ashe added quickly. “Ask my colleague, Mr. Burns—or any of the other performers at Astley’s. Monique de Brouet was a selfish, unpleasant woman.”
“De Brouet is her true name?” Kent had removed a small notebook and was jotting into it.
“So she claimed.” Ashe’s eyes glittered with a hostility that she couldn’t hide. “Monique boasted that she came fromla noblesse, you see. Liked to lord her origins over me just because my father was a fisherman from Marseilles. As if any of that mattered.” Her arms folded over her thin chest. “Even if her family was aristocratic, they lost everything in The Terror before she was born. Monique might like to act all hoity-toity, but the fact was she was a performer at Astley’s just like me. No better, no worse.”
“What were you arguing about yesterday?” Violet said.
“I did not appreciate the way her entrée cut short my ovation. It was not the way we had practiced; she was always up to such tricks.”
