Chapter Twenty-Three
Stoker said the next day that he would simply apply to the Duke of Wrest’s front door and ask for an audience. Sabine was resistant to a security detail or even Stoker himself hounding her every step. He would not feel easy about her safety until the strange, unexplained threat posed by the duke was solved.
And he simply wanted to know. He’d been casual about the attack when he thought the duke was a desperate old man, wasting money on a mercenary in the madcap murder of a stranger. But now there were deeply personal layers of complication that made the murder attempt not only dangerous, but haunting, as well.
Stoker had to know.
Sabine, not surprisingly, insisted upon accompanying him to the duke’s home in Chelsea. They waited until afternoon, when they felt the hungover duke might be the clearest-headed, pounding on his peeling front door at two o’clock. They were admitted by an unhappy female servant, a woman-of-all-work by the looks of it, and led through a dingy vestibule to a dank parlor with water-stained walls and threadbare furnishings.
For half an hour they waited with no tea and no word. Sabine sat formally beside Stoker, beautiful in her yellow day dress, a gloved hand on his knee. With her other hand she held a handkerchief to her nose. The odor in the parlor was an eye-watering mix of chamber pot and unaired mildew. Twice Stoker asked Sabine if she would like to be taken home. She refused, and it was impossible to hide his relief.
Six weeks ago he could not have imagined relying on anyone to help him interrogate the man responsible for his half-dead arrival in a morgue—but to rely on Sabine Noble Stoker? The woman he held apart from anything dark or mean or haunted? It was unthinkable. But Sabine had made it very clear that he should not think on her behalf. If she wished to accompany him, he should not tell her that it was not really her wish. The problem with spending any time at all with a living, breathing person (rather than the idealized refuge built in your own mind) is that they thought for themselves.
Oh but her thoughts. She had asked a million questions about his boyhood association with the duke. She had hypothesized and speculated and helped Stoker anticipate any number of things the man might say. It had been useful. It had made Wrest seem less like a phantom and more like a nuisance, a problem to be solved.
Stoker had the urge to pluck her hand from his knee and kiss the small circle of exposed wrist below the pearl button of her glove. But who would welcome a kiss in a room the color of a scab that smelled like Newgate Prison? He was trying so very hard to be civilized.
“I was waiting for you to lose heart and go,” said a voice at the door, and they looked up. Sabine removed the kerchief from her nose.
Stoker stood. He didn’t know why. The old duke studied him.
“Little Johnny Stoker, all grown up,” the duke mused. “Made good.”
“Why were you waiting for us to lose heart and go?” Stoker asked. He felt odd standing while Sabine sat, and he reclaimed his seat. The duke swayed drunkenly in the doorway. His clothes were a better fit than the terrible formal suit from the ball, although he was again wrinkled and smudged. His watery eyes suggested drink, even in the middle of the day.
“I’m a very busy man,” the duke said dryly, an obvious joke. He appeared, in every way, idle.
“Last night you wished to speak to me.”
“Yes,” he said, “and we spoke. I wanted you to know you were sired by a duke.”
“That remains to be seen,” said Stoker. He studied the man, looking for resemblances in his ruddy, hunched form. Sabine said she’d seen it now that she knew his claim might be true. The green eyes, the expanse of their shoulders. The duke was hunched and thick, but the shape was the same. His nose, his hairline.
“And you wish to... claim me as your bastard and challenge the law that forbids inheritance by an illegitimate son, is that it?”
“That depends,” said the duke, stepping into the parlor. “How inclined are you to rescue me from my most current run of bad luck?”
Stoker and Sabine looked around the sagging room.Bad luck?Sabine brought the kerchief back to her nose.
“There will be no bailout,” Stoker drawled. “Not from me.”
The duke slapped his knee. “The devil you say! Well, we have nothing to discuss.”
“On the contrary,” said Stoker. “There are several more things I wish to know.”
The duke ignored him and made a show of stepping to the side to gesture down the corridor. “The butler has the day off, but you may show yourselves out.”
“Sit down, Sauly,” Stoker commanded.
The duke’s watery eyes expanded. “I’ll not take orders from a whoreson. Not in my own home.”
“If you do not sit down and answer my questions,” Stoker said menacingly, “I will twist your arm behind your humped back, and we will learn how far the bone will bend until it snaps.”
“You wish to speak?” asked the duke. “Fine. Speak. I cannot see what more there is to say.” He backed into the wall and began inching to the side. “Perhaps that that mother of yours was a nutte—”
“You will not speak of my mother in unkind terms.”
“Ha! Would that she had neverspoken to mewith unkindness! I was her best customer. I was pleasant to her brat—that’s you, by the by. I set her up in a little room in Blackhall, remember? And yet she tossed me out, time and again. She’d move me along for the next bloke without a backward glance—”
