Jasper met Madelina’s gaze, a flash of joy lighting his eyes. “You would run away with me?”
“Yes. I love you.”
“I said come away from her,” Miss White screeched.
Madelina looked past Jasper to see his new wife standing in the street beside the carriage. A gaggle of people gathered about. Conveyances stopped in the street, occupants leaning out their windows. People murmured, pointed, stared, but none of them mattered. Only Jasper mattered, and the gun Miss White pointed at his back.
Madelina stepped to his side, then around him, firmly between him and the gun. He caught her arm and pulled her behind him. She yanked free and came to his side. He clasped her hand.
Miss White’s full lips curled down in disgust. “Heaven above, you two sicken me.”
“Let us go, Clementine,” Jasper said. “You’ll never make me stop loving her. Keep my name. Keep this life you wished for so much and let us go.”
“I don’t think so.” Miss White’s gaze narrowed.
The pistol swayed from side to side, pointing at Jasper, then Madelina, then Jasper again. William came to stand on Madelina’s other side.
“Someone is going to die today,” Miss White hissed. “If I can’t have Jasper, no one will get what they want.”
William lunged forward. Madelina dove for Miss White, Jasper alongside her. A sound like thunder rent the air.
Epilogue
Jasper stared at the headstone before his feet. Seven months ago, he and Clementine had wed, an act that once would have fulfilled him. There’d been a time, before his father died, when Jasper’s greatest dream was a life with Clementine beside him. He took in the headstone sadly, recalling the Clementine of those days. A woman who’d never been more than a dream.
His life changed the day he’d married her. Unintentionally, he’d made himself an exceedingly wealthy man. He wasn’t the only one she’d spent years bleeding of coin. She’d made a very successful Madam Dequenne. Not only through her abductions and auctions. It turned out, she also owned over a dozen brothels throughout London.
They were all closed now, the women in them sent to Second Hope, which Jasper had expanded. He’d also joined Greydrake in rehabilitating several streets at the edge of Lefthook’s borough. Not so the gentry could move in, but so the residents could live better, could cultivate hope. If the change proved successful, they would expand their efforts.
Then there was the Aspen. Jasper had converted it into a gentlemen’s club. No more women. Less gambling. So far as he could ascertain, a similar amount of drinking. The rooms above were rented to club members now. They were for business, or sleeping off a night of too much excess, not gilded cages for women with nowhere else to turn.
He’d thought he’d lose money. He didn’t. A whole new sort of gentleman was on the rise in London. The nouveau riche, as the French dubbed them. Men fortunate enough in business to reach the ranks of the wealthy, but without the lineage to gain membership to clubs like White’s. They flocked to The Black Aspen, where Jasper cared only for the quality of a man’s actions, not the prestige of his forefathers.
“Mister,” a voice said behind him.
Jasper turned to find Dodger, hat in hand, as he looked about the cemetery.
“Yes?”
“Her ladyship asked me to fetch you.”
“How did you know where to find me?” Jasper asked, bemused. He was due at church soon. He’d stopped on his way to say one final goodbye to a woman he once loved. Ultimately, not in the way she wished, and not the true her, but still, for a time, he’d cared for Miss Clementine White more than anyone else in the world.
Dodger shrugged. “I always know where to find people, ‘cept when they took her ladyship.” He pointed. “She’s in that carriage.”
Jasper followed the boy’s outstretched arm. A carriage with the Westlock emblem waited in the street outside the cemetery, behind his own.
“That one doesn’t deserve to be buried here,” Dodger muttered, glaring at Clementine’s headstone.
“She wanted to be part of respectable society,” Jasper said. “Now, she’s among them, and no one will ever know she doesn’t belong.” He cast a quick look at the boy. “Any new information about who shot her?”
Dodger shook his head. “Only the same. Someone rented one of those rooms near your house and shot her from the window. Was a fine shot,” he added.
Jasper nodded. A very fine shot. The ball had taken Clementine through the heart. Jasper, Madelina and Greydrake had strong suspicions as to who’d wielded the gun, but no proof whatsoever.
And if they couldn’t find anything, the watch certainly couldn’t.
Jasper shook his head. It didn’t matter now. The time had come to put the past well and truly behind him. Leaving Clementine where she lay, he headed for the waiting carriage. Dodger fell in step at his side and shoved his misshapen hat down on his head.
