The Wedding Night Affair--An Historical Mystery, L.C. Sharp [beach books .TXT] 📗

distinct possibility. If her father sent her abroad, she could elude justice. “So this case could include a prominent scandal and a lawbreaking attempt?”

The case was growing slightly more interesting.

“She is reported to be deeply distressed, but her father will allow her to speak to no one. I sent a man to question her, but he would not let him in the house.”

“Who told you she was distressed?” Ash shot back.

“Servants,” Fielding answered. “They are not particularly loyal to the earl and countess. My man had no problem persuading them to gossip. But the earl sent him away from the front door.” His flat grin turned wry. “He wishes for a man of his sort, as he puts it, to undertake the investigation. I immediately thought of you.”

“I am hardly of his sort,” Ash protested with a grin. “I’m gentry at best. I’m a baronet, which is not an aristocratic rank. We’re commoners through and through.”

Something about this case nagged at him, but he couldn’t put his finger on the reason. “What was he stabbed with? A weapon easily to hand, so it could be snatched up and deployed in a moment of passion?”

Fielding shrugged. “I have no idea, but it is something I wish to know. There could be a lucrative case here for you. At the least, I can offer you a small fee to go to the earl’s house and arrest the woman.”

The money meant nothing next to the merits of the case. Ash could not deny his interest had been piqued, and Fielding knew him well enough to do that. Except, what was there to investigate?

Something... There was something there.

“I need Lady Uppingham arrested and brought here.” Fielding leaned forward, resting his large hands on the scarred, polished oak before him. “However exalted, a murderer must not evade justice.”

Ash started. Ah, now he had it. Ash had dedicated himself to Lady Justice in all her glory. He would ensure that Lady Uppingham did not slip away because of her exalted position in society. Justice was nothing if it did not treat everyone equally.

“You will give me the written authority to act on your behalf?”

Fielding pushed a document over to him with one finger. “Here it is. I need a quick decision, sir, a report, and the woman in safe hands. I have sessions to judge in ten minutes.” He glanced up at the clock. “Eight.”

It wasn’t as if Ash had anything else to do. “Very well.” The matter would not take long, after all.

Fielding scraped back his chair and stood to take his hand. “I’m obliged to you, sir. I will not forget this. By the way, I would change before you go to the West End.”

Ash grinned, pulling at the skirts of the shabby brown wool coat he used for his attendance at Bow Street. “It’s my court dress.” But not the kind of court most of the inhabitants of the gracious squares of Mayfair would be used to.

The sound of Fielding’s gruff laughter followed him out of the room.

On the other side of London, a woman sat, her hands folded neatly in her lap, considering her future, or how much there would be of it.

Juliana’s bedroom appeared much as it was when she’d left it the day before. Deceptively so. Wood was sent to sit with her, and food was brought, before her father opened the door and came inside.

“Your mother is beside herself,” he said. “When we heard the news I sent her to the Thames villa.”

Juliana shuddered as memories flashed back. When Lady Hawksworth was angry, everyone knew it. She didn’t imagine for one moment that her mother was anything but furious with her daughter’s failure, or that she had not taken herself off to the villa. She cared more about her husband’s family than he did, and that was saying something. “Did she not wish to see me?”

“She says she would kill you herself if she did.”

Juliana bowed her head. A spike of hurt pushed through her numbness. Her mother always knew where to strike. She regarded her daughter as a constant reminder of her failure to provide the estate with a son. If Juliana had a cousin, or an uncle, anyone who could have inherited the title, the chances were that she would have been married to him, if the laws of consanguinity allowed. Like Spanish royalty, whose bodies and minds were so distorted by the practice of intermarriage that they had died out.

Her father continued, his voice steady, without emotion. “What you did was unfortunate.”

She reeled at the words. That word would have been appropriate if she had dropped a piece of her mother’s precious china, rather than woken up next to a dead man. “Unfortunate?”

“Indeed.”

“So she assumes I did it?”

Her father sent her a scornful glare. “What else? Lord, girl, did your mother not tell you what to expect on your wedding night?”

“Yes.” She lifted her arms, shaking back the lace to show her father the fingerprint bruises on her pale flesh. “But not that.”

He examined the marks dispassionately. “I told your mother to warn you about him.”

Shock made her rigid, his last words arcing through her like a thunderbolt. “You knew what—Godfrey was like?”

And they’d still married her to him?

She’d had no idea that violence could be part of the marriage bed. Her upbringing had sheltered her from such gossip, and she had no friends, nobody to warn her about Lord Uppingham.

Her mother went through all Juliana’s correspondence, all the reading matter she was allowed, to ensure nothing vulgar should touch her. If she’d known, she’d have refused him and taken the consequences. Anything would have been better than last night.

“His affairs go before him. He was not good to the women in his keeping.” He shrugged. “But nobody else suited my purposes as well as his father.”

Juliana’s marriage had meant a link with a powerful family and the continuation of the title that would otherwise die with her father. It meant her father could form