More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (10 page)

His failure did not please him. He hated assignments like this one. Had he been summoned to Cornwall to investigate the murder attempt on Sidney Jardine, he could have used all his skills of detection to discover the identity of the would-be murderer and to apprehend the villain. But there was no mystery about this crime. The lady had been in the process of robbing the absent earl when Jardine had come upon her. She had hit him over the head with some hard object, doubtless taking him by surprise because he knew her and did not fully realize what she was up to, and then she had made off with the spoils of the robbery. Jardine's valet had witnessed the whole scene—a singularly cowardly individual in Mick's estimation since the thief had been a mere girl with nothing more lethal than a hard object to swing at him.

“If she is in London, we will find her, sir,” he said now.

“If she is in London?
If
?” The earl fumed. “Of course she is in London, man. Where else would she be?”

Mick could have listed a score of places without even
taxing his brain, but he merely pulled on his earlobe. “Probably nowhere,” he admitted. “And if she did not leave here a week or more ago, she will find it harder now, sir. We have questioned every coaching innkeeper and coachman in town. None remember a woman of her description except the one who brought her here. And now we are keeping a careful watch.”

“All of which is laudable,” his lordship said with heavy irony. “But what are you doing to find her within London? A week should have been time enough and to spare even if you put your feet up and slept for the first five or six days.”

“She has not returned to Lady Webb's, sir,” Mick told the earl. “We have checked. We have found the hotel where she stayed for two nights after her arrival, but no one knows where she went from there. According to your account, sir, she knows no one else in town. If she has a fortune on her, though, I would have expected her to take another hotel room or lodgings in a respectable district. We have found no trace of either yet.”

“It has not occurred to you, I suppose,” the earl said, going to stand in front of the window and drumming his fingernails on the sill, “that she may not wish to draw attention to herself by spending lavishly?”

It would strike Mick Boden as decidedly odd to steal a fortune and then neglect to spend any of it. Why would the young lady even have stolen it, if she was living at Candleford in the lap of luxury as the daughter of the former earl and relative to this present one? And if she was twenty years old and as lovely as the earl had described her, would she not be looking forward to making an advantageous match with a wealthy young nob?

There was more to this whole business than met the eye, Mick thought, not for the first time.

“Do you mean she might have taken employment?” he asked.

“It has crossed my mind.” His lordship continued the finger-drumming while he frowned out through the window.

How much money had been taken? Mick wondered. Surely it must have been a great deal if the girl had been willing to kill for it. But of course there had been jewels too, and it was time he explored that possible means of tracing the girl.

“I and my assistants will start asking at the employment agencies, then,” he said. “That will be a start. And at all the pawnbrokers and jewelers who might have bought the jewelry from her. I will need a description of each piece, sir.”

“Do not waste your time,” the earl said coldly. “She would not pawn any of it. Try the agencies. Try all likely employers.
Find
her.”

“We certainly would not want a dangerous criminal let loose on any unsuspecting employer, sir,” Mick agreed. “What name might she be using?”

The earl turned to face the Bow Street Runner. “What name?”

“She used her real name at Lady Webb's,” Mick explained, “and at the hotel those first two nights. After that she disappeared. It has struck me, sir, that she has realized the wisdom of concealing her identity. What name might she use apart from her own? Does she have any middle names? Do you know her mother's maiden name? Her maid's name? Her old nurse's? Any that I
might try at the agencies, sir, if there is no record of a Sara Illingsworth.”

“Her parents always called her Jane.” The earl scratched his head and frowned. “Let me think. Her mother was a Donningsford. Her maid …”

Mick jotted down the names he was given.

“We will find her, sir,” he assured the Earl of Durbury again as he took his leave a few minutes later.

Though it was a strange business. A man's only son was in a coma, one foot in the grave, the other on an icy patch. He might even be dead at this very moment. And yet his father had left him in order to search for the woman who had tried to kill him. But the man never left his hotel suite, as far as Mick knew. The would-be murderess had stolen a fortune, yet the earl suspected she might be seeking employment. She had stolen jewels, but his lordship was unwilling to describe them or to have them hunted for in the pawnshops.

A very strange business indeed.

A
FTER ONE WEEK OF
moving between his bed upstairs, the sofa in the drawing room, and the chaise longue in the library, Jocelyn was colossally bored. Which was probably the understatement of the decade. His friends called frequently—every day, in fact—and brought him all the latest news and gossip. His brother called and talked about little else except the curricle race that Jocelyn would have given a fortune to be running himself. His sister called and talked incessantly on such scintillating topics as bonnets and her nerves. His brother-in-law made a few courtesy calls and discussed politics.

The days were long, the evenings longer, the nights endless.

Jane Ingleby became his almost constant companion. The realization could both amuse and irritate him. He began to feel like an old lady with a paid companion to run and fetch and hold the emptiness at bay.

She changed his bandage once a day. He had her massage his thigh once, an experiment he did not repeat despite the fact that her touch was magically soothing. It was also alarmingly arousing, and so he rebuked her for being so prudish as to blush and told her to sit down. She ran errands for him. She sorted his mail as he read it and returned it to Quincy with his instructions. She read to him and played cards with him.

He had Quincy in to play chess with him one evening and instructed her to sit and watch. Playing chess with Michael was about as exciting as playing cricket with a three-year-old. Though his secretary was a competent player, it never took great ingenuity to defeat him. Winning, of course, was always gratifying, but it was not particularly exhilarating when one could see the victory coming at least ten moves in advance.

After that Jocelyn played chess with Jane. She was so abysmally awful the first time that it was a measure of his boredom that he made her try it again the next day. She was almost ready that time to have given Michael a marginally competitive game, though certainly not him. The fifth time they played, she won.

She laughed and clapped her hands. “That is what comes, you see,” she told him, “of being bored and toplofty and looking down your nose at me as if I were a speck on your boot and yawning behind your hand. You were not concentrating.”

All of which was true. “You will concede, then,” he asked, “that I would have won if I had been concentrating, Jane?”

“Oh, assuredly,” she admitted. “But you were not and so you lost. Quite ignominiously, I might add.”

He concentrated after that.

Sometimes they merely talked. It was strange to him to
talk
to a woman. He was adept at chitchatting socially with ladies. He was skilled at wordplay with courtesans. But he could not recall simply talking with any woman.

One evening she was reading to him and he was amusing himself with the observation that with her hair ruthlessly scraped back from her face, her eyes were slanted upward at the corners. It was her little rebellion, of course, to make her head as unattractive as possible even without the aid of the cap, and he hoped uncharitably that it gave her a headache.

“Miss Ingleby,” he said with a sigh, interrupting her in the middle of a sentence, “I can listen no longer.” Not that he had been doing much listening anyway. “In my opinion, with which you may feel free to disagree, Gulliver is an ass.”

As he had expected, her lips tightened into a thin line. One of his few amusements during the past week had been provoking her. She closed the book.

“I suppose,” she said, “you believe he should have trodden those little people into the ground because he was bigger and stronger than they.”

“You are such a restful companion, Miss Ingleby,” he said. “You put words into my mouth and thereby release me from the necessity of having to think and speak for myself.”

“Shall I choose another book?” she asked.

“You would probably select a collection of sermons,” he retorted. “No, we will talk instead.”

“What about?” she asked after a short silence.

“Tell me about the orphanage,” he said. “What sort of life did you have there?”

She shrugged. “There is not a great deal to tell.”

It must certainly have been a superior sort of orphanage. But even so, an orphanage was an orphanage.

“Were you lonely there?” he asked. “Are you lonely?”

“No.” She was not going to be very forthcoming with her personal history, he could see. She was not like many women—and men too, to be fair—who needed only the smallest encouragement to talk with great enthusiasm and at greater length about themselves.

“Why not?” he asked, narrowing his gaze on her. “You grew up without mother or father, brother or sister. You have come to London at the age of twenty or so, if my guess is correct, doubtless with the dream of making your fortune, but knowing no one. How can you not be lonely?”

She set the book down on the small table beside her and clasped her hands in her lap. “Aloneness is not always the same thing as loneliness,” she said. “Not if one learns to like oneself and one's own company. It is possible, I suppose, to feel lonely even with mother and father and brothers and sisters if one basically does not like oneself. If one has been given the impression that one is not worthy of love.”

“How right you are!” he snapped, instantly irritated.

He was being regarded from very steady, very blue eyes, he noticed suddenly.

“Is that what happened to you?” she asked.

When he realized just what it was she was asking, the
intimately personal nature of the question, he felt such fury that it was on the tip of his tongue to dismiss her for the night. Her impertinence knew no bounds. But a conversation, of course, was a two-way thing, and he was the one who had tried to get a conversation going.

He never had conversations, even with his male friends. Not on personal matters. He never talked about himself.

Was
that what had happened to him?

“I was always rather fond of Angeline and Ferdinand,” he said with a shrug. “We fought constantly, as I suppose most brothers and sisters do, though the fact that we were Dudleys doubtless made us a little more boisterous and quarrelsome than most. We also played and got into mischief together. Ferdinand and I were even gallant enough on occasion to take the thrashing for what Angeline had done, though I suppose we punished her for it in our own way.”

“Why does being a Dudley mean that you must be more unruly, more vicious, more dangerous than anyone else?” she asked.

He thought about it, about his family, about the vision of themselves and their place in the scheme of things that had been bred into them from birth onward, and even perhaps before then.

“If you had known my father and my grandfather,” he replied, “you would not even ask the question.”

“And you feel you must live up to their reputations?” she asked. “Is it from personal choice that you do so? Or did you become trapped in your role as eldest son and heir and eventually the Duke of Tresham yourself?”

He chuckled softly. “If you knew my full reputation, Miss Ingleby,” he said, “you would not need to ask that
question either. I have not rested on the laurels of my forebears, I assure you. I have sufficient of my own.”

“I know,” she said, “that you are considered more proficient than any other gentleman with a wide range of weapons. I know that you have fought more than one duel. I suppose they were all over women?”

He inclined his head.

“I know,” she said, “that you consort with married ladies without any regard to the sanctity of marriage or the feelings of the spouse you wrong.”

“You presume to know a great deal about me,” he said mockingly.

“I would have to be both blind and deaf not to,” she said. “I know that you look upon everyone who is beneath you socially—and that is almost everyone—as scions to run and fetch for you and to obey your every command without question.”

“And without even a please or thank you,” he added.

“You engage in the most foolhardy wagers, I daresay,” she said. “You have shown no concern this week over Lord Ferdinand's impending curricle race to Brighton. He could break his neck.”

“Not Ferdinand,” he said. “Like me, he has a neck made of steel.”

“All that matters to you,” she said, “is that he win the race. Indeed, I do believe that you wish you could take his place so that you could break yours instead.”

“There is little point in entering a race,” he explained, “unless one means to win it, Miss Ingleby, though one also must know how to behave like a gentleman when one loses, of course. Are you scolding me, by any chance? Is this a gentle tirade against my manners and morals?”

“They are not my concern, your grace,” she said. “I am merely commenting upon what I have observed.”

“You have a low opinion of me,” he said.