Three Weeks With Lady X

  She flinched as if he’d hit her. He felt exhaustion coming over him like a shroud. India was . . . what she was. And he the same. That brief dream he’d had—of loving and marrying a woman like her—would count as the greatest of his life’s stupidities. No more.

  India seemed frozen, her face white.

  “I bid you goodbye, Lady Xenobia,” he said, falling back and bowing with a flourish. “I think we have both said more than we would wish to and more than we ought. I was insane to think of marrying a woman of the titled class. I have no intention of considering it ever again, and I imagine our paths will not cross.”

  Caught in a storm of madness, he couldn’t stop himself. He stepped toward her again and cradled her face in his hands. His soul wrenched with the time he’d wasted, the ass he’d been.

  He bent, brushed his lips across hers with the respect that a lord would give a lady.

  Then he bowed and turned away again without meeting her eyes. There was no point.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Thorn had barely entered his front door before he started to curse himself for being a fool.

  Despite everything he’d said, he wanted India more than he wanted his dignity. She wouldn’t lie to him again. Though he didn’t give a damn if she did—as long as she was in his house and bed, at his side.

  Fred was manning the entry. “Good morning, sir!”

  Thorn nodded, unable to summon a greeting.

  “Miss Rose’s carriage arrived an hour or so ago,” Fred said cheerfully. “I believe that Clara plans to take her on a visit to Kensington Gardens this afternoon.”

  “Excellent,” Thorn managed, handing over his greatcoat.

  “A Mr. Marley is waiting to see you, sir, accompanied by a Mr. Farthingale. Shall I send them into the library?”

  At first Thorn had no idea who Fred was talking about, but then he remembered: Marley was the Bow Street Runner he’d hired to investigate the deaths of India’s parents. Farthingale was presumably his partner.

  It was bitterly ironic that the man had shown up at this particular moment. It hardly mattered now, but Thorn might as well hear what the man had uncovered.

  Mr. Marley was an energetic young fellow, positively trembling with suppressed glee. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, sir,” he said to Thorn, giving him a brisk bow. He gestured to the elderly gentleman at his side, whose spindly legs and long nose gave him a distinct resemblance to a stork. “This is Mr. Farthingale, the proprietor of a jewelry shop in the Blackfriars.”

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Thorn said, bowing. “Won’t you both sit down?”

  “You engaged me to make inquiries on behalf of Lady Xenobia St. Clair regarding her father’s death,” Marley burst out.

  “I did,” Thorn said, ushering Mr. Farthingale to a settee.

  “The Marquess of Renwick drove his curricle off the Blackfriars Bridge eleven years ago, in early 1788,” Marley said once they were all seated. “That bit of reckless driving resulted in the untimely deaths of himself and the marchioness, though the horse was better able to fight the current, and kept his head above water until two lads on the bank were able to cut the reins.”

  Thorn remembered the Blackfriars current well; the marquess couldn’t have picked a worse bridge to pitch over in all London.

  “You asked me to attempt to locate a valuable article of jewelry that the marquess may have had on his person,” Marley continued. “The intervening years between the accident and your query made my investigation extremely difficult, but I decided to visit all the jewelry shops in the vicinity of the bridge. Mr. Farthingale’s shop is just outside the liberty of Blackfriars.”

  The elderly jeweler cleared his throat and adjusted his old-fashioned pantaloons. “I’m afraid that my news will not cheer Lady Xenobia,” he said apologetically. “The marquess and his wife apparently died within minutes of their visit to my establishment, a fact that virtually guarantees that the jewels are at the bottom of the Thames. I am not a great reader of the papers, and unfortunately I entirely missed the announcement of their death.”

  Thorn cursed under his breath. “Am I to understand that the marquess had the jewels in his possession when he departed your shop?”

  This prompted an avalanche of detail; Mr. Farthingale had the sort of memory that a historian would envy. “His lordship placed the pouch containing the jewels in his coat pocket as he left,” he concluded. “I remember thinking that it was cavalier treatment of such valuable pieces.”

  “What were they, exactly?”

  Mr. Farthingale launched into a description of the pieces as if he’d examined them only yesterday, rather than more than a decade earlier. “A diamond demi-parure, consisting of a necklace and earrings set in engraved silver mounts with gold embellishment. The pieces constituted a substantial set, with hundreds of foil back rose-, table-, and Indian face-cut diamonds of various carats, shaped in flower heads and foliate spray motifs. I dated the pieces to the mid-1600s. I was prepared to pay a generous sum for the set.”

  “So he meant to sell it?”

  “As I informed the marquess, I would have been most happy to have it in my possession. But his lordship merely asked for a valuation. He never returned, and I put it completely out of my mind.”

  After the two men left, Thorn sank back into his chair.

  The Duke of Villiers had bought Eleanor a ring. But India could buy her own jewelry. What she needed was the faith that the man she married wouldn’t leave her, as she believed her parents had done.

  She would never have enough faith in him: he could imagine that she would test him over and over and he would fail every time, because, damn it, he was as blind as the next man.

  India was brilliant and subtle. Her brain darted ahead, planning for eventualities only she could see. In that, he was her opposite. He dealt with problems of the moment, and never bothered to look much further.

  He wouldn’t even know he was failing her. Yet India’s conviction that she was unlovable —and that Thorn didn’t love her—had far more to do with her parents than with him. Perhaps if he made love to her every—

  He stood up again, his mind reeling. He had just told himself that he planned to make love to India.

  It was common terminology, after all. Though he never thought of sex that way: he used a rougher term for bedding a woman. Or more jovial ones. He shagged, pumped, screwed, jousted.

  He never said anything about love, and he never thought it, either.

  Until now.

  Finally he identified the emotion that gripped him the night he’d thought India was on the point of marrying Vander. It wasn’t possession or lust—or at least, it wasn’t only those emotions.

  It was love. He loved her.

  And yet India didn’t believe he loved her. She never would . . . unless he took action.

  He had to find those jewels and bring them to her.

  He had to prove not only his own love for her, but her parents’ love.

  It wasn’t easy to gather the remaining lads together. Dusso was now a senior driver with the Royal Mail, and Thorn had to bribe the office handsomely to give their driver a week’s leave. He ran down Geordie in the East End, wretchedly thin and evidently without a job. Bink had a family and lived in Kent on a tenant farm, but he didn’t seem to be earning much; Thorn promptly offered him one of the farms attached to Starberry Court.

  When at last the four of them were together, Thorn explained what he wanted. “A number of years ago, a carriage went off Blackfriars Bridge, and its two passengers drowned. A leather pouch holding jewels went missing. I want to find that pouch. You three are the only ones I would trust. Hell, I think we’re probably the only men in London who have a chance of dragging it back up.”

  “Yer mugging us!” Dusso exclaimed.

  “Giving us the piss,” Geordie chimed in.

  “I assure you that I am not.”

  “Bloody hell,” Dusso said. “Iffen I’d known you was talking about
the river, I wouldn’t have come. I’d rather be winding that bloody horn on the coach day and night than that.”

  “One hundred guineas for each of you,” Thorn said, “and five hundred for the man who finds the jewels.”

  “It’d be like finding a pea,” Geordie said, slumping in his chair. “I dream about it at night, you know. Swimming down into the black, stinking water and fearing a dead man’s claw is going to pull me down.”

  Bink scowled at him. “It’s no wonder you have the collywobbles if you’re letting yourself think about it. I’ll do it,” he said, squaring his shoulders. “I’m not looking forward to it, mind. The wife complains because I work all day in the fields and still I don’t want a drop of water near me after. But I’ll do it for my girls.”

  “I can’t possibly do it alone,” Thorn said. “I need a team, same as we used to do. Two to dive, and one person above to spot, make sure they both come up. One on the shore in case of trouble.”

  “I’ll be on the shore,” Dusso said instantly. “Them boats have no concern for who might be bobbing about in the stream.”

  Thorn shook his head. “Geordie’s on shore.”

  Dusso looked at Geordie’s frail body and nodded. “How much are the joowels worth?”

  “I have no idea, and it doesn’t really matter. I want to give them to the woman I wish to marry. It was her parents who drowned. Their bodies were recovered but the jewels were not.”

  “Stolen,” Dusso said instantly. “Probably the men as fished out the carriage are sleeping on beds of roses right now.”

  But Marley had bribed his way into the constabulary records.

  “I believe not,” Thorn said. “The marquess visited a jeweler in the Blackfriars and went off the bridge minutes later. By the time they fished him out, the man was wearing only his breeches. The jewels were almost certainly lost in the river when his coat was dragged from his back.”

  “Bloody hell, you’s talking of marrying the daughter of a bloody marquess?” Dusso squawked.

  The three men stared at Thorn, jaws a-cock. They’d gotten used to the fact that Thorn had grown wealthy. They knew his father was a duke, and that he was always good for a sovereign or two. But this was different.

  “I am marrying her,” Thorn said shortly.

  “But is she marrying you?” Geordie asked.

  Dusso laughed. “Yeah, a lady agreeing to take on a by-blow? Not likely! No dog in a doublet for the likes of a lady!”

  “You always was a gundiguts,” Bink snapped. “Why shouldn’t she marry our lad? He’s as good as any other Englishman.”

  Thorn intervened. “She’ll marry me because I love her.” He wanted to believe it.

  “Well, aren’t you the cork-brained gay-lant,” Dusso shouted. “He lurves her. Does she have chicken breasts or a bushel bubby? Has she—”

  “Don’t speak of her in that manner,” Thorn growled, bending forward.

  Dusso nodded.

  “Iffen you find these here jewels, will she take you?” Geordie asked.

  Thorn didn’t answer. The truth was that he wasn’t sure.

  “She’ll like him better if he’s on his knees with a string of joowels in hand,” Bink said practically.

  Dusso put his elbows on the table. “I’ll help you. For old times’ sake.”

  “I want two hundred guineas,” Bink stated. “You said it was only if we went in the water. Geordie here gets a hundred as well, even he don’t put a pinkie in that river.”

  “Five hundred for each of you if we find the jewels,” Thorn said. “Two hundred each otherwise, and that includes Geordie. There’s many a time that the one on shore has saved everyone in the water.”

  “There ain’t no joowels other than a crown as is worth fifteen hundred guineas,” Dusso pointed out.

  “They’re worth it to me,” Thorn stated.

  “I remember the Blackfriars Bridge,” Geordie said. “It’s got a nasty fast current around the corner.”

  “I expect it was that current that ripped off the marquess’s clothing,” Thorn confirmed.

  “We’re not going to find it in an hour,” Bink said.

  “We’ll have it out within the week,” Thorn stated. “We could find anything in that damned river. We still can.”

  “Know it like the back of me hand,” Dusso bragged. “Reckon we can get it out today.”

  Bink looked nervous and cracked his knuckles. “I ain’t been in the river ever since.”

  Silence fell over the table.

  “I haven’t either,” Thorn said.

  “You?” Dusso looked astounded.

  Thorn shrugged. “I didn’t plan on ever going back in either.”

  “You’re a swell, ain’t that right,” Geordie said. “No need to swim.”

  Now there was a reason to swim. An hour later they were down by the water, all but Geordie stripped to their smalls.

  Thorn had avoided the river for years, and the smell—the fishy, murky odor of his childhood—came back like a blow.

  He’d forgotten the endless detritus of the river: branches, old clothes, dead rats, wine bottles . . . everything in London seemed to float down its largest tributary, swirling through eddies, scraping by rocks, floating alongside boats, dead goats, and mudlarks.

  They clustered on the bank hard by the bridge, as close as possible to where the marquess’s curricle had gone into the water. Thorn cast a critical eye at his gang. He’d give his right arm to have Will with them; it was as if there was a silent patch of air that should hold Rose’s father. Will would have made sure the marquess’s jewels came up from the depths. “You sure you want to go in, Bink?”

  Bink was thin but sinewy. He set his jaw. “I ain’t looking forward to it, but I’ve got two daughters. I need that money.”

  “You all remember how the current fetches up against the bank and smashes into a rock,” Thorn said, pointing at the curve. “For God’s sake, don’t put your foot down in the mud, and watch your hands. Keep your gloves on. It’ll make it harder to swim, but I want no sliced fingers.”

  “Got me a nice teacup there once,” shouted the irrepressible Dusso.

  The sun was shining, but the Thames didn’t reflect the sky’s blue; it was liquid gray, the color of silt and debris.

  “Exactly where’d the currickle go in?” Bink asked.

  “See that newer length of brass there?” Thorn said, pointing to a spot along the bridge’s parapet.

  “If it went in there,” Bink said, his eyes darting from bridge to water, “she would have swung about this way, my guess.”

  “Driver was thrown out when it hit the water,” Dusso said. They were all focused now. They were, after all, the survivors of Grindel’s cruel games. He used to throw a shoe in and make them learn the currents by fetching it—or there’d be no dinner.

  They used to dive precisely into the spot where housemaids dumped the chamber pots and the kitchen staff dumped the scraps: you never knew when a silver spoon would end up in the mix.

  “I think the carriage landed here,” Thorn said, pointing.

  “Wife and he were caught in the current, along with the joowels. If he lost the bag around there, it would have fetched up on the curve,” Dusso concluded.

  “Into the shit,” Thorn began, but they all interrupted and shouted it together. “Into the shit and bring out the bloody pig!” It was Grindel’s old call.

  “Here’s hoping that hairy-arsed prigger is in a hot place,” Bink said, crossing himself.

  “He was an arse,” Dusso shouted, jumping off the bank, white belly flashing in the sun.

  A moment later they were all bobbing at the edge. Thorn knew the river, at least this part of it, like the back of his hand. The pouch’s weight would have sunk it in the silt, but not too deep, since the current was strong enough to keep the muck fairly shallow.

  “It’s too dangerous at the bend,” he told his men. “I don’t want anyone diving where the current cuts around that rock.” The water took o
n a low whistle as it swept around the curve.

  “There might be a pileup there,” Bink objected. “Will would have been down there first.”

  That was true: Rose’s father had been a daredevil who always wanted to win more than he’d cared to live. “It’s not worth your life,” Thorn said. “Your daughters need you. Respect the river, Bink.”

  They’d learned that lesson the hard way. Their master, Grindel, had been evil; the river itself wasn’t evil, but it was temperamental. One day it was tranquil and the next it was a demon dragging a man down to the bottom.

  Bink grunted.

  “Geordie, keep an eye out,” Thorn shouted, and Geordie nodded. “I’ll go down with Dusso; Bink, you stay above this time around.”

  Thorn took a deep breath, reckoned the exact spot on the bank he wanted to explore, and dove deep. The water roared past his ears, and the only reason he sensed the approaching bank was that a deeper dark loomed before him. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Bink’s legs waving above like pale fish.

  He felt along the muddy bank until he felt his lungs bursting, then kicked up and broke the surface. He got his bearings and realized that he hadn’t searched the exact area he wanted.

  Dusso surfaced just beside him. “I’ll be damned if I know where to go,” he said, gasping. “I’ve put it all out of my mind and I can’t seem to get too deep. My belly’s in the way.”

  “Look there,” Thorn said, pointing to the spot he’d picked out. “I’m going to swim over there. If you look up, you’ll see my legs.”

  “I’ll go down this time,” Bink shouted.

  Thorn fought his way through the current and caught the overhanging branch of an alder. “Below me,” he shouted.

  The two men disappeared, and for a moment the sun glinted on the surface of the water as if it were clean and serene.

  Bink came back up, shook his head, took a gulp of air, and kicked his way back down again.