Ashton: Lord of Truth (Lonely Lords Book 13) (26 page)

“The warrant can be reinstated?
Even after I’m dead
?”

“Your in-laws might be planning on that very course.”

Drexel was that devious, and Stephen that tenacious. The gnawing terror that had gripped Matilda immediately after Althorpe’s death threatened to
claim her. Fear once again became a physical misery, destroying her ability to concentrate, making her weak and queasy.

She wanted to run, but honestly could not think of where or how. “I’ll go to the Albany with you and give you time to do what you can without
making the situation worse, but you must promise me one thing.”

“Name it.”

“No matter what happens to me, you must promise me that you’ll look after Kitty. God knows what Drexel has planned for her when she comes of
age, and if anything happens to Drexel, then her care falls to Stephen. Girls can be legally betrothed long before they reach their majority. Stephen is
greedy enough to marry her for the fortune she might inherit from me.”

Matilda waited to hear Ashton’s assurances that Kitty would be well provided for, that Kitty should be the least of her worries.

He put an arm around Matilda’s shoulders. “I’ll do my best, but your safety comes first. I can’t marry a dead woman.”

“I was told you’re the best, Samuels.” Stephen had been assured Samuels wasn’t too particular about how he caught a fugitive.

“I am the best,” Samuels replied, blowing the foam off a tankard of ale and making an urchin at the end of the bar hop away. “For six
years, nobody has seen hide nor hatpin of your fine lady. Now you want me to find her overnight on the basis of old gossip and an older miniature. If she
was so precious to her family, why hasn’t she turned to them for help?”

Samuels belonged in the Goose, an establishment that exploited its proximity to the theaters in one direction and thriving shops in the other. Sometime in
the last two hundred years, the Goose had acquired venerability, which to most of the populace counted for more than respectability. Not all of the women
who patronized the place were for sale, for example, and the ale was decent.

Stephen considered himself a connoisseur of ale, as every good Englishman ought to be.

“I’m offering you considerable coin to locate this woman,” Stephen said. “Matilda is in London. She’d not go far from the
girl.”

Samuels took a considering sip of his ale. “That narrows it down considerably, doesn’t it? All I need to do is line up a hundred thousand blond
women and ask them if they killed somebody six years ago. Who did you say her victim was?”

“Her husband.”

“Not very original, guv.”

The publican took a few coins from the urchin and disappeared into the kitchen. Stephen had agreed to meet Samuels at the Goose because the activity at a
commercial venue allowed a certain privacy that a club or park bench did not—and some safety.

“She killed him,” Stephen said quietly. “Saw it with my own eyes. Bashed my poor father repeatedly about the head when the dear man was
in his cups and unable to defend himself. A woman with a temper like that will kill again.”

Samuels studied his ale as if a fine summer brew was more interesting than Stephen’s eyewitness account of a killing.

The magistrate had believed Stephen, and that was what mattered. Why would Matilda have run off if she hadn’t been guilty? 

“You ever been bashed with a poker?” Samuels asked.

“Certainly not.”

“Takes a prodigious lot of bashing to even put out a man’s lights. Makes me wonder what you were about to let her have at him that way while
you stood by and did nothing.”

Samuels apparently spoke from experience when it came to delivering fatal bludgeonings, and this conversation had gone on too long.

“I’m paying you ten pounds to find the woman, Samuels, and that’s in addition to the fifty my uncle has promised upon conviction.
I’m not paying you to make a Gothic novel out of a family tragedy.”

Samuels wasn’t overly large, and he dressed respectably, but he had a stillness Stephen distrusted. In the clubs, men talked, laughed, played cards,
ate, and drank. If a fellow sat unmoving, he was dozing off over his last glass of port.

Or he was dead. Old Baron Shanahan had expired in his club’s reading room, the day’s paper clutched in his hand. The staff had considerately
folded a lap robe over his knees, and nobody had realized he’d stuck his spoon in the wall until morning.

“You are paying me ten pounds to kill your wealthy step-mother,” Samuels said, as if discussing whether to put two bob on Exeter’s Folly
in the third race. “Or do I misapprehend your intentions?”

Stephen had read a minimum of law at university, but he knew conspiring to commit murder was frowned upon by the authorities. The idea rather unsettled the
ale in his belly too.

“I’m increasing the reward my uncle has already offered. We seek to ensure my step-mother’s safe return to the bosom of the family
who’ve been frantic with worry for her for too long.”

That bit about a single blow not being enough to kill a man was speculation on Samuel’s part. That Matilda had profited by Papa’s death was
fact, and she’d not only run, she’d hidden long and thoroughly.

What innocent, penniless female could manage that?

The publican emerged from the kitchen and passed a sack to the dirty child shifting from foot to foot at the end of the bar. The child darted for the door,
pausing long enough to pass food from the parcel to a skinny blond woman who’d apparently been waiting for a meal.

The blonde began eating a meat pie even as she departed the premises after the child.

“The fare here is good,” Samuels said, gaze on the blonde’s retreating figure. “You should try it.”

“I’ll leave the streetwalkers to those who can’t afford better,” Stephen said. “Find my step-mother, Samuels, or I’ll
set a more skilled man on her trail.”

Samuels lifted his tankard of ale. “Go right ahead, guv. Offer a hundred pounds while you’re at it, and you’ll doubtless see a parade of
guilty step-mothers apprehended by sundown. A violent lot, step-mothers.”

Stephen rose, resisted the urge to dust off his backside, and pulled on his gloves. “Mind your attitude, Samuels. This is serious business, and you
can easily be replaced.”

When reprimanding the lower orders, having the last word mattered. Stephen made a dignified, if purposeful, exit and wondered how much a pawnbroker might
give him for his second-best gold snuff box. Matilda Derrick needed finding, the sooner the better. 

Matilda made a credible secretary, to Ashton’s relief.

She stood about his apartment at the Albany, looking like a pale, academic young man who spent too much time hunched over a ledger and not enough time on a
cricket pitch.

“I ought to find something secretarial for you to do.” Ashton scooped up a pile of unopened correspondence from the escritoire by the window.

Matilda snatched them from his hand. “Give me those. A personal secretary opens your mail and sorts it by urgency and type.”

They were alone, Ashton having sent Helen off to fetch them a midday meal from the Goose, and Cherbourne to retrieve the latest batch of finery from Bond
Street.

Pippa had remained at Pastry Lane. She’d periodically scurry about the market in Matilda’s cloak and hat and otherwise support the fiction that
Matilda yet bided several streets away.

“You’ve had a personal secretary?” Ashton asked.

“Of course. You haven’t?”

Matilda was more qualified to be a countess than Ashton was to be an earl. She communicated easily with the French chef who cooked for the duke’s
heir lodging across the corridor. She’d directed Ashton’s footmen to rearrange the parlor furnishings to take better advantage of the warmth of
the hearth and the light from the windows. 

And damned if Ashton didn’t adore watching her take charge of his domicile, striding about in trousers, to all appearances a fussy young fellow with
airs above his station.

“I had a secretary,” Ashton said, moving a bud vase from the escritoire to the window. No daffodils for a lordly abode. Only a forced rose
would do. “Like many of the trappings of the title, I inherited my secretary from my brother, Ewan, and he’d inherited old MacFarland from our
papa, who’d inherited him from the previous earl.”

“You retired him,” Matilda said, taking up a nacre-handled letter opener and slitting the first seal. “Or perhaps he expired?”

Ashton had hoped that men’s attire would mute Matilda’s attractiveness, but no. Trousers made her more alluring, even with a proper swallowtail
coat hanging to the backs of her knees. The blade in her hand made her more alluring. The auburn wig that exposed the nape of her neck and the curve of her
jaw made her more alluring.

“I pensioned MacFarland off.” Ashton took a chair before the hearth, lest he perch himself on the desk, within sniffing distance of his
secretary. She still smelled of lemons, and the competence in her hands struck Ashton as unfairly attractive.

Matilda studied a single sheet of paper covered with Alyssa’s handwriting. “Why not replace him?”

“I had much to learn,” Ashton said. “How better to become acquainted with my own business than to read my correspondence firsthand and
reply in my own words? Ewan told me I was daft, but he’s my brother. He’s been telling me I’m daft since he was in dresses.”

Matilda set the letter aside and slit open the next seal. “Write to your sister-in-law and tell her you’re keeping well, but you miss her and
your brother.”

With a staggering ache, now that Matilda had said the words. “I
appreciate
Ewan, more than I could have five years ago. I miss the children,
I miss my sister-in-law.” And Scotland. Sweet Jesus at the wedding feast, did Ashton miss Scotland.

“This is from a tenant,” Matilda said. “Don’t you have a land steward?”

“I have three land stewards. One for the tenancies, one for the estate holdings, one for the villages and commercial undertakings.” The
recitation made Ashton tired. The sight of Matilda attired as a man but still every inch a female made him randy.

“So why does this…”—she turned the letter over—“Mr. Breckenridge write to you?”

“Because he’s one of my English tenants, and they are the whiniest damned lot of sluggards you ever met. They are eternally annoyed to have a
Scottish landlord when their holdings lie in England. I understand now why my uncle considered diverting the river, despite the expense and
the—”

Helen popped around the door from the antechamber. “A proper nob coming up the steps. Drives a coach and four complete with liveried footmen and
grooms.”

“Thank you, Helen,” Matilda said, rising from the escritoire. “I’ll admit him. You can’t, my lord. You’re the earl, and
the footmen are on half day.”

“If it’s Hazelton, I’m no’ home,” Ashton said.

“Don’t be a coward,” Matilda shot back, but she was smiling the same smile Helen wore when holding forth about the letter
b
—bum, backside, bosom.

“What should I do with the meat pies?” Helen asked, holding up an aromatic sack.

“Take yours upstairs,” Matilda said. “His lordship will eat when his guest has departed.”

Helen helped herself to a pastry and nipped up the back steps while a knock sounded at the front door.

“His lordship,” Ashton said, brushing a kiss to Matilda’s cheek, “will eat with his secretary while we plow through that lot of
drudgery.”

He patted her backside as she bustled off to the door and braced himself for a recitation from Hazelton about every scandal to plague London in years past.

Except that the guest Matilda admitted was one Hannibal Shearing, late of Northumberland. Shearing was as rich as he was plainspoken, though his clothes
were the finest money could buy.

“Mr. Shearing,” Ashton said, bowing with a sense of futility. “You will please excuse the household’s disarray. I am only newly
come to London.”

“Been keeping an eye out for you,” Shearing said, passing Matilda his walking stick and hat. “Birds of a feather and all, you being from
the north. Hear you’re going to the levee on Tuesday.”

Matilda silently left the room and would probably wait in the porter’s nook while Ashton expired from the demands of lordly hospitality.

“A friend has asked me to accompany him. I can have tea brought up from the kitchen if you’re so inclined?”

“Cat lap—bah. The missus makes a great to-do over her tea service. I prefer more gentlemanly libation.” Shearing produced a flask, held
it aloft as if Ashton was supposed to admire the sunlight winking on the silver, then downed a portion.

“Shall we have a seat?” Ashton asked.

Shearing had the brawn of a yeoman—broad shoulders, barrel chest, and oddly trim legs and waist. He stood with that chest thrust forward, a
caricature of military posture, and his white hair bristled in all directions, despite obvious use of pomade.

 “I won’t take up much of your time, Kilkenney. All I mean to say is this: If I return to the north without a barony to my name, the
missus will bar me from my own premises. Both of her sisters married baronial heirs, and she settled for me.”