After dinner, Mary went upstairs to check on Tommy. Mrs. Bridwell reported a good day, and Tommy slept through Mary’s visit, his fists curled above his head in the pose she had come to think of as surrender. She kissed his forehead and retired to her room.
She did not sleep.
At half past ten, she heard it.
Evander’s footsteps in the corridor, measured and purposeful. The creak of the staircase. The low murmur of Harding’s voice. The front door is opening and closing.
Mary sat up in bed. The house settled into its post-departure silence, and she stared at the ceiling and listened to her own breathing.
Tommy was asleep. Mrs. Bridwell’s room was right next door. He would not wake for hours, and if he did, the nursemaid would hear him before his first cry finished.
But she had never left him at night. The thought of the staircase, the stables, the dark road pulled at her, and the thought of Tommy’s crib, warm and close, pulled back.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed.
Where was he going? The same place he went every night? To the same person? She thought of the knife wound he had blamed on a fall, the lie so transparent it insulted them both. She thought of the distance, the locked study, the empty side of her bed. If her husband was keeping a mistress, Mary wanted to see it with her own eyes, because imagining it was destroying her more slowly than the truth ever could.
Mary dressed in the dark. She pulled on her riding habit, twisted her hair into a knot, and slipped down the servants’ staircase to the back entrance.
The night was cool, the sky overcast. The stables were unattended at this hour, but Mary had been riding since she was seven, and she saddled a mare in the dark.
She led the mare through the back gate, mounted, and followed the distant rattle of Evander’s carriage down the Mayfair streets and into the night.
CHAPTER 17
“What in God’s name are you doing here?”
Evander caught Mary’s arm two steps inside the entrance hall.
The red-tinted lamplight fell across her face, and she looked up at him with eyes blazing, her riding habit dusty from the road, her hair half-loose from the knot she had twisted it into.
The fury on her face so absolute that for a moment he forgot to be furious himself.
Then he remembered.
“You followed me.” He kept his voice low. Music drifted from somewhere deeper in the house, strings and a woman’s laughter, and the air smelled of perfume and warm wax. “You saddled a horse in the middle of the night and followed my carriage across London to a place you have no business being.”
“And what business do you have here, Your Grace?” Mary wrenched her arm free. Her voice was controlled, but her color was high, and the accusation landed before the words did. “Is this where you go? Every night, while I am upstairs with Tommy and the nursemaid, you come here? Tothis?”
She gestured down the hallway behind them.
Through an arched doorway, Evander could see the edge of the main salon, warm light spilling across polished floors, the shapes of women in gauze and silk moving through the room. A man’s laugh echoed from somewhere above.
“You think I come here frequently?” He said it flatly.
“What else am I supposed to conclude? You will not touch your wife. You will not come to my bed. You leave every night and return at hours I can only guess at, and now I find you walking into a pleasure house past Hampstead as though it were your second home.” Mary’s chin lifted. “Tell me I am wrong.”
“You are wrong.”
“Then explain yourself.”
Evander looked at the woman standing before him in the lamplight of a brothel’s entrance hall, demanding answers with the same ferocity she had brought to his parlor in a wedding dress five weeks ago, and something in him buckled.
“I came here to look for Richard.” He kept his voice low enough that only she could hear. “Whenever I can, I leave the house at night to chase leads. His debts, his contacts, the places he went before he disappeared. My brother lived a life I knew nothing about, Duchess. Boxing rings, gambling dens, establishments like this one. I have been pulling at every thread trying to find him.”
Mary stared at him. The fury did not vanish, but it shifted, making room for doubt.
“The cut on your arm,” she said, studying him closely.
