Ives would have liked to reassure him that soon the current burden would be lifted, but in truth he saw no end in sight. When he left, Lance had begun cleaning his dueling pistols, should eloquence not avert the duel after all.
Ives had planned to go riding this morning, but bythe time he left his brother, there was not enough time to go out of town and return in time for the meeting. He instead returned home to complete the grooming barely begun, then rode back to Mayfair in the afternoon.
The Duke of Middleburrow’s second appeared relieved when Ives explained that Lance felt an indiscretion blurted while drunk should not lead to a man’s death. They spent an hour negotiating the language of the apology that Middleburrow would make. Knowing Lance’s mind, Ives insisted it not be so qualified as to edge into ambiguity.
Lest Middleburrow balk, they also made arrangements for a duel should that be needed. Ives trusted those details would encourage Middleburrow to swallow his pride, claim incapacity due to spirits, and back out with grace.
The entire endeavor took most of the day. The intrusion on his time left Ives irritated. He returned home, determined to spend the morrow out of doors, on horseback, free of all obligations.
As he sat down with his book that evening, the paper with his list of mistress qualifications caught his attention again. He read it, too aware that abstinence was becoming a nuisance. With each item on the list, a face took clearer form in his mind. Dark hair. Sparkling eyes. Determined expression. Uncompromising loyalty.
Hell.
He tucked the paper away again.
CHAPTER4
Ives entered the Home Office in Whitehall, too aware that this was the third day of his precious respite that he would spend on what he had come to call Miss Belvoir’s Dilemma. Pride prevented him from including yesterday, too, even though while finally enjoying a good country gallop, he found himself mulling over Hadrian Belvoir’s case. One thought had led to another, and soon he was imagining Miss Belvoir’s dark eyes alight with pleasure and her tall, lithe body naked and bending to his erotic lessons.
The fantasy had been so engaging that he had not relinquished it easily, and suffered last night from its insistent presence.
He had been involved in enough dealings with the Home Office that almost everyone he passed greetedhim. More than once in his career he had undertaken tasks for the Crown that might best be described as extralegal. A friendship with the prince regent had first brought one of these little investigations his way, as a favor. Success at that turned him into the man the royal family called on when an awkward problem arose that needed someone to ferret out a few facts discreetly, and perhaps bend a few ears. Or arms.
That he might on occasion do such favors did not mean that he approved of an entire government apparatus doing the same thing. That was what the Home Office had become under Viscount Sidmouth, the secretary of state for the Home Department.
As the political situation grew more tense in the country, this branch of the government had resorted to domestic spying and even agents to infiltrate and disrupt what its leaders considered potentially treasonous activity. The French excesses of thirty years earlier were never far from the minds of some of Ives’s social equals, and the calls for reform and other radical notions sounded far too dangerous to them.
And so while he walked the halls of the Home Office as a friend, there were those within who knew he fully expected to one day serve as prosecutor when they themselves stood trial.
That was not the case with Ivan Strickland, whose office door he opened. Strickland remained a sane voice that argued against the more serious invasions of old-fashioned British liberty. Ives believed he could trust Strickland if he could trust anyone at the HomeOffice. They sometimes did favors for each other, so they shared a history of mutual debt.
Strickland was a hearty, fair-haired fellow who possessed the kind of strength that could turn soft if not kept in check with regular exercise. He greeted Ives enthusiastically, and they enjoyed catching up. Strickland of course wanted to know whatever Ives would share about the untimely death of Ives’s eldest brother Percival the prior spring, and the suspicions still surrounding his other brother Lance, who had now inherited.
It was not until a good half hour into the visit that Ives broached his reason for coming.
“I received a letter from the prince regent a month ago,” he said. “You were not in town then, I think.”
“Up north,” Strickland said. “That business in Manchester. What a hellish mess. Try as we might, we will not be able to make it what we want. History will damn us.”
He referred to the deaths at a large demonstration of workers in Manchester, a disaster now popularly called Peterloo.
“In that letter he made reference to a case I would be asked to prosecute. A man named Hadrian Belvoir.”
“Belvoir?” Strickland’s brow furrowed in thought. “Ah, now I remember. Coining, it is. Have you found it interesting?”
“It never went beyond that letter. He has not been brought to trial yet. Nor does it appear he will be soon.”
“I know how you feel about men not getting speedy trials. Don’t lecture me on it. I seem to remember themagistrate said they intended to use this fellow as fish bait to catch a whale.”
“The gaoler at the prison said counterfeit money was found in his home. Anything else?”
“Printing press and such? No. Just bad money.”
“Who laid down information on him?”
“Some thief who with an eye to burglary broke in and saw enough to bargain for his lover’s reprieve from the gallows, as I remember it.”
It all made sense, yet Ives’s instincts kept waving at his mind.
