A Little Scandal (28 page)

But the earl had only been dissembling unconsciousness. He swung round his right fist and caught Burke in the jaw with it, a full, roundhouse punch that sent the marquis staggering backward, into a sideboard filled with porcelain shepherdesses, all of which slid to the parquet with a crash.

“She isn’t here, you bastard,” Bishop said. “And even if she were, you would be the last person I’d admit it to.”

Burke, rising up from the wreckage of the Dresden shepherdesses, threw a solid punch to the younger man’s nose. It hit home, and blood flew, in a bright red arc, from the middle of Bishop’s face, and onto the pale blue sofa.

“She is here,” Burke said. He was breathing heavily by now, but he was by no means through. He might have ten years on the earl, but he was still in top fighting form. “My housekeeper had a letter from you this morning, directing that her things be shipped to this address.”

“Certainly,” Bishop said. He circled the marquis warily. “Because just this morning, I got a letter from Kate, asking me if I’d be so good as to allow her to keep her things here for a bit—”

“A likely story,” Burke said. There was an ottoman separating him from the earl, so he kicked it out of the way. It landed in the fireplace. Fortunately, as the weather was warm, there was no fire burning in the hearth. “I imagine you’d say just about anything, wouldn’t you, to keep her to yourself.”

Bishop was still backing up, holding the ends of his cravat to his streaming nose. “I would,” he said. “In fact, I’d say anything, if I thought it would keep a brute like you from her.”

This assertion earned the earl another wallop to the head that sent him tumbling back over the pale blue sofa already spattered with his blood. Burke followed, but wished he hadn’t when Bishop kicked his legs out from under him, and he landed, with a thunderous crash, on his back beside the earl.

“The truth of the matter,” Bishop said, scrambling to throw himself astride Burke’s prone body, and then wrap his hands around the marquis’s neck, “is that she isn’t here. You’re mad to think it. My mother would sooner allow Attila the Hun to spoil her guest linens than Kate Mayhew.”

Burke, struggling to break the slighter man’s grip, paused in his efforts to ask, “Why?”

“Why?” Bishop was gritting his teeth as he tried to choke the marquis to death. “How can you ask why? You know why.”

Burke, tired of the game, clubbed Bishop in the temple with his fist, knocking him against the wall, where Bishop collapsed, bleeding profusely, and breathing rather noisily. Burke, less injured, but still sore, crawled toward him, and eventually sank down to lean upon the wall beside him.

It was while the two men were slumped there, attempting to catch their breaths, that a side door was flung open, and a butler, followed by two enormous footmen, entered the room.

“My lord,” the butler said, after he’d taken in the wreckage that had once been his mistress’s morning room. “Are you in need of assistance?”

Bishop looked at Burke. “Whiskey?” he asked. Burke nodded. “Whiskey, Jacobs,” Bishop said.

The butler nodded and, with one last glance at the broken shepherdesses, heaved a shudder, then withdrew, the footmen following him with the dowager’s unconscious body cradled between them.

“Why,” Burke asked, when his breathing had grown more regular, “does your mother hate Kate?”

“You are such a fool,” Bishop said disgustedly, as he dabbed at his nose with his coat sleeve. “Do you even know Kate at all?”

“Of course I know her.” Burke was tempted to tell the younger man just how very well indeed he knew Kate, but decided that would be ignoble. And so he only said, “I know all I need to know about her.”

“Well, I would have thought you’d look into her background a little more before you hired her.”

Burke blinked at the younger man. “If you are going to tell me that Kate is a thief,” he said, feeling anger, white-hot and liquid, course through his veins again, “then all I can say is, you’re the one who doesn’t know her at all.”

“Of course she isn’t a thief,” Bishop said. “Her father’s the thief.”

Burke stared at him. “Her father?”

The door opened again, and this time the butler entered alone, carrying a silver tray on which rested a cut-crystal decanter filled with amber liquid, and two glasses. Observing that, in their tussle, they had overturned all the tables in the room, the butler knelt down upon one knee, and placed the tray on the floor beside the earl. Then he unstopped the decanter, and carefully poured out two fingers of whiskey in each glass, handing one to Bishop, and one to Burke.

“Thank you, Jacobs,” Bishop said. “Is my mother all right?”

“Fainted, my lord,” Jacobs replied. “We carried her to her room, where her maid is applying smelling salts.”

“Very good,” Bishop said. “That is all, Jacobs. You may leave the tray.”

“Certainly, sir.” The butler, climbing back to his feet, left the room, closing the door quietly behind him after a final glance at the headless shepherdesses.

“Kate’s father,” Burke prompted, after he’d swallowed most of the contents of his glass.

“Oh,” Bishop said. He sipped more cautiously than Burke, having, apparently, some loosened teeth. “Right. You mean to tell me you don’t know who her father was?”

Burke leaned his head back against the flowered wallpaper. They were sitting below a window, and outside it, he heard a bird begin to sing. “No,” he said.

“Well, does the name Peter Mayhew sound familiar?”

Burke said the name experimentally. “Peter Mayhew? Yes, actually. For some reason, it does.”

“For some reason.” Bishop rolled his eyes. “The reason it sounds familiar, Traherne, is because it was on everybody’s lips about seven years ago. At least as much as yours was, a decade before that.”

“Why?” Burke stared at the other man sarcastically. “Did he divorce his cheating wife and throw her lover out the window, as well?”

Bishop looked disgusted again. “Certainly not. Peter Mayhew was a prominent London banker. He lived with his wife and daughter in Mayfair.”

“Mayfair?” Burke said, his eyebrows raised.

“Yes. Mayfair.” Bishop looked a bit smug. Well, as smug as a man with a recently broken nose could look. “On Pall Mall. Right next door, as a matter of fact, to this house.”

“So,” Burke said. He tried to tamp down an unreasonable desire to take the earl’s face and grind it into the floor. “You and Kate really did grow up together.”

“Correct.” Bishop reached over, unstopped the decanter again, lifted it, and poured more whiskey into Burke’s glass. “Her father handled a number of substantial accounts, including my parents’. Eight years ago, Mayhew had the misfortune to meet a young man who claimed to own a diamond mine in Africa. The only reason, according to this young man, that he had not tapped this mine was that he lacked the financial backing to do so. I did not meet this gentleman—if he was one, which I very much doubt—but Mayhew seemed to believe in his claim, strongly enough to encourage his friends and neighbors to invest in his mine.”

“Which,” Burke said, “did not exist.”

“Of course not. Mr. Mayhew’s fine young gentleman took all of his clients’ money, which included most of Mayhew’s own fortune, and absconded with it. Or at least, that was Mayhew’s story.”

“There was reason to doubt it?”

“Let’s just say there was enough reason to doubt it that several of the men who’d lost money—including my own father—felt the appropriate course of action was to take Mayhew to court.”

Burke licked his lips. They tasted salty. He realized that was because one of them was bleeding. “And?”

Bishop looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, who won?”

Bishop blinked. “You don’t know? Kate didn’t tell you?”

Burke inhaled deeply. One one thousand, he counted. Two one thousand. Three—

“No,” he said, when he was certain he could keep himself from lunging at the younger man again. “Kate did not tell me.”

“Well,” Bishop said. “The case never went to trial. Because the person named in it—Peter Mayhew—died the day before it was to have begun—the trial, I mean.”

“Died?” Burke dabbed at his bloodied lip with his shirtsleeve. “In the fire, you mean?”

Bishop eyed him. “Kate told you about that, did she?”

He nodded. “She said both her parents died in it.”

“That’s right,” Bishop said with a nod. “They did. I wasn’t here that night, you know—I was away at university. But some of the servants here still speak of it. Flames shot twenty, thirty feet into the sky. It’s a wonder anyone lived, but everyone did, with the exception of Kate’s parents. Every single servant, and Kate herself, got out. Even that damned cat of hers survived it. The fire was contained to only one part of the house, you know—you can’t see it from the street, and the new owners have done wonders rebuilding. Just Kate’s parents’ bedroom was destroyed. Rather uncanny that, don’t you think?”

Burke knit his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“Well, a fire that hot, you’d expect it to take down the house, but it burned rather slowly after that initial explosion of flame. They were able to put out the flames rather handily—”

“What are you saying?” Burke glared at him. “I haven’t time for games, you know, Bishop. If there’s something you’re trying to say, just come out and—”

“All right.” Bishop made a face. “You always were a bit of a stick in the mud, Traherne. What I’m trying to say is that afterward, there was a certain amount of suspicion that the fire had been set deliberately. There was a strong smell of kerosene, more than if a simple lamp had been knocked over—”

“You’re saying,” Burke said slowly, “that someone murdered Kate’s parents?”

“Good God, no.” Bishop shook his head. “No, the feeling at the time was that Peter Mayhew set the fire himself. To avoid the humiliation of a trial.”

Burke stared at the younger man. “Suicide?”

“Well, murder-suicide, to be technical about it. I mean, I doubt his wife had any say in the matter. They found her still abed—well, what was left of the bed, anyway. It’s doubtful she ever woke ….”

“Good God,” Burke said, through lips that had gone numb, but due to neither Bishop’s knuckles nor his whiskey. “I … I had no idea.”

“No.” Bishop, apparently tired of sipping his whiskey from a glass whose rim kept interfering with the cravat he was holding to his nose, chose instead to unstop the decanter, and drink directly from it. “You wouldn’t, I suppose. It was in all the papers, but ….”

“I read only the sporting section,” Burke confessed.

“Ah. Well, then, you’d have no way of knowing. And Kate wouldn’t have told you. She never speaks of it … understandably, I suppose. But also … well, I think she’d prefer to forget it. And who wouldn’t? I doubt a single one of her employers—and she’s had a few—know who she is, or that there was a time when she enjoyed the very same privileges as a good many of her charges.”

Burke took the decanter from him, and poured a generous amount of whiskey into his mouth.

“She was never the same afterward, really. The servants found her, quite unconscious, in a stairwell, and someone carried her to safety. What Kate was never able to say was how she got into that stairwell. There are those who believe her father put her there, before even starting the fire, in order to ensure she got out. But Kate …”

Burke eyed him. “Yes?”

“Kate has always insisted it happened a bit differently. Well, you can’t blame her, really. It can’t be pleasant, the thought that your own father would kill himself and his wife simply in order to avoid some prison time—and public humiliation, of course. So Kate concocted this story that I believe, to this day, she still considers the truth of what happened that night”

“Which is?” Burke asked, though he thought he knew the answer already.

“Well, that the young man—the one who invented the diamond mine—came back in the dead of night, and set the blaze himself in order to keep Peter Mayhew from testifying. Because of course Mayhew and his attorneys were determined that they could prove his innocence, if only they could find that young man who’d run off with all the money ….”

Daniel Craven. Who else could it have been? What had Kate said, when he’d asked her why she seemed so discomfited by Mr. Craven? That she was put out with him for having skipped out on her parents’ funeral? Lord, what a fool he’d been. She suspected him of having killed her parents. No wonder she went so pale every time he came near ….

And he, the great, dunderheaded fool that he was, had accused her, that night in the garden, of fraternizing—a polite word for what he’d thought she’d been doing—with such a man. The man she thought had burned her parents alive.

Burke stared at the earl. He was, he knew, quite drunk by now—it was, after all, only just noon, and he had consumed most of a quart of whiskey. Still, that could not explain the maudlin thought that kept creeping, uninvited, into his brain.

“So,” he said, enunciating carefully, since he knew he had a tendency to slur his words when he was this besotted. “Strictly speaking, Kate’s father was not, in fact, a thief.”

“No,” Bishop said. “Just a fool.”

“A fool,” Burke said. “But also a gentleman.”

“A foolish gentleman.”

“But still,” Burke persisted. “He was a gentleman. Which would make Kate a gentleman’s daughter.”

“Yes,” Bishop said, after some consideration. But the word came out sounding like “yesh.” “But what difference does it make? Gentleman’s daughter or not, a man’s got an obligation to treat a woman honorably.”

Burke eyed him. “Are you saying I did not? Treat Kate honorably, I mean? Is that what she told you, in her letter?”

“No. Only that she couldn’t stay in London anymore, and would I be so kind as to forward her things to her.” He snatched the decanter from Burke, and took a long pull at it. “That’s all I am to her, you know. An address, at which she can store her things.” Then the earl narrowed his eyes. “And what, precisely, do you mean by calling her Kate? It should be Miss Mayhew to you, Traherne. Unless there’s a reason I don’t know about for why she quit your place so suddenly.”

“And where,” Burke asked, in a tone he fancied was slyly without emphasis, “does she require you to send her things?”