Outrageous Confessions of Lady Deborah Read online

  Deborah flinched, annoyed at having exposed herself for, cruel as the remarks were, there was a deep-rooted part of her, quite resistant to all her attempts to eradicate it, which believed them to be true. She had made Jeremy about as bad a wife as it was possible to make. Which did not, however, mean that she had to accept Jacob’s condemnation—she was more than capable of condemning herself. And she was damned if she was going to apologise for her remark about the clock!

  ‘Don’t let me hold you back any further, Jacob,’ she said with a prim smile.

  Lord Kinsail glowered, making a point of turning his back on her and clearing his throat noisily before addressing the staff. ‘As you know by now, we have suffered a break-in at Kinsail Manor,’ he said. ‘A most valuable item has been taken from this safe. A safe which, I might add, has one of the most complex of new locks. This was no ordinary robbery. The brazen rogue, a menace to polite society and a plague upon those better off than himself, was no ordinary thief.’

  With a flourish, His Lordship produced an object and waved it theatrically in front of his audience. There was a gasp of surprise. Several of the male servants muttered under their breath with relief, for now there could be no question of blame attaching itself to them.

  At first Deborah failed to understand the import of the item. A feather. But it was a most distinctive feather—long with a blue-and-green eye. A peacock feather. The man who had dropped from the sky on top of her last night must have been the notorious Peacock!

  Good grief! She had encountered the Peacock—or, more accurately, the Peacock had encountered her! Deborah listened with half an ear to Jacob’s diatribe against the man’s crimes, barely able to assimilate the fact. She watched without surprise as in turn every one of the servants denied hearing or seeing anything out of the ordinary, just as the servants in every one of the Peacock’s other scenes of crime had done. No one had ever disturbed him in the act. No one had ever caught so much as a fleeting glance of him leaving. Private investigators, Bow Street Runners—all were completely flummoxed by him. He came and went like a cat in the night. For nigh on two years now, the Peacock had eluded all attempts to capture him. No lock was too complex for the man, no house too secure.

  With the room finally empty of staff, Lord Kinsail turned his attentions back to Deborah. ‘And you?’ he demanded. ‘Did you see anything of the rogue?’

  She felt herself flushing. Though God knew she’d had opportunity aplenty, she had never grown accustomed to prevarication. ‘Why would I have seen anything?’

  ‘I know all about your midnight rambles,’ Lord Kinsail said, making her start. ‘Aye, and well might you look guilty. I am not the fool you take me for, Cousin Deborah.’ He permitted himself a small smile before continuing. ‘My head groom has seen you wandering about the park like a ghost.’

  ‘I have never taken you for a fool, Jacob,’ Deborah replied, ‘merely as unfeeling. I take the air at night because I have difficulty sleeping in this house.’

  ‘Conscience keeps you awake, no doubt.’

  ‘Memories.’

  ‘Spectres, more like,’ Lord Kinsail replied darkly. ‘You have not answered my question.’

  Deborah bit her lip. She ought to tell him, but she simply could not bring herself to. All her pent-up resentment at his quite unjustified and utterly biased opinion of her, combined with her anger at herself for lacking the willpower to enlighten his ignorance, served to engender a gust of rebelliousness. ‘I saw nothing at all.’

  ‘You are positive?’

  ‘Quite. You have not said what was stolen, Jacob.’

  ‘An item of considerable value.’

  Alerted by his decidedly cagey look, Deborah raised an enquiring brow. ‘Why so close-mouthed? Was it government papers? Goodness, Jacob,’ she said in mock horror, ‘don’t tell me you have you lost some important state secret?’

  ‘The item stolen was of a personal nature. A recent acquisition. I do not care to elaborate,’ Lord Kinsail blustered.

  ‘You will have to disclose it to the Bow Street Runners.’

  ‘I intend to have the matter investigated privately. I have no desire at all to have the Kinsail name splashed across the scandal sheets.’

  Deborah was intrigued. Jacob was looking acutely uncomfortable. A glance at Margaret told her that Her Ladyship was as much in the dark as she was. She was tempted—extremely tempted—to probe, but her instinct for caution kept her silent. That and the fact that she doubted she would be able to sustain her lie if interrogated further.

  The sensible thing to do would be to make good her escape while Jacob was distracted, and Deborah had learned that doing the sensible thing was most often the best.

  Getting to her feet, she addressed herself to Lady Kinsail. ‘Such a shocking thing to have happened, Cousin Margaret, you must be quite overset and wishing to take to your bed. In the circumstances, I could not bear to be a further burden to you. I think it best that I curtail my visit. I will leave this morning, as soon as it can be arranged.’

  ‘Oh, but Cousin Deborah, there is no need—’

  Lord Kinsail interrupted his wife. ‘I trust you are not expecting me to foot the bill if you decide to travel post?’

  ‘I shall go on the afternoon stage,’ Deborah replied coldly. ‘If you can but extend your generosity to providing me with transport to the coaching inn…’

  ‘Cousin Deborah, really, there is no need…’ Lady Kinsail said, sounding just a little desperate.

  ‘If that is what Cousin Deborah wants, my dear, then we shall not dissuade her. I shall order the gig.’ Lord Kinsail tugged the bell. ‘In one hour. I trust you will not keep my horses waiting?’

  ‘I shall make my farewells now to ensure that I do not,’ Deborah replied, trying to hide her relief. ‘Cousin Margaret.’ She pressed Her Ladyship’s hand. ‘Jacob.’ She dropped the most marginal of curtsies. ‘I wish you luck with recovering your property. Thank you for your hospitality. I must make haste now if I am to complete my packing in time. Goodbye.’

  ‘Until next year,’ Lady Kinsail said faintly.

  Deborah paused on the brink of gainsaying her, but once again caution intervened. If there was one thing the Earl loathed more than having his cousin’s widow as a house guest, she suspected it would be having his cousin’s widow turn down his hospitality.

  ‘So much can happen in a year,’ she said enigmatically, and left, closing the door of the long drawing room behind her for what was, she fervently hoped, the very last time.

  Chapter Two

  London, three weeks later

  Elliot stifled a yawn and fished in his waistcoat pocket for his watch. Five minutes off two in the morning and his friend Cunningham was showing no inclination to leave. The atmosphere in the gambling salon of Brooks’s was one of intense concentration disturbed only by the chink of coin, the glug of a decanter emptying, the snap of cards and soft murmurings as the stakes were raised. The gamblers were much too hardened to betray anything so crass as emotion as the stack of

  guineas and promissory notes shifted across the baize from one punter to another.

  Some of the cardplayers wore hats to shield their faces. Others tucked the ruffles of their shirt sleeves up under leather cuffs. Elliot, who had been used to gambling with his life for far higher stakes, could not help finding the whole scene slightly risible. He had placed a few desultory bets at faro earlier, more for form’s sake than anything, but the last hour and a half had been spent as a spectator.

  Restlessly pacing the long room, with its ornately corniced concave ceiling from which a heavy chandelier hung, the candles in it guttering, he called to mind the many similar reception rooms across Europe he had visited. Cards were not the game which had attracted him to such places. In the midst of war, cards were a means for his men to while away the long hours between battles. Civilians didn’t understand the boredom of war any more than they understood its visceral thrill. He had no idea why Cunningham could ever have thought he would be
amused by a night such as the one they had just spent. Carousing and gambling left Elliot cold. No doubt when Cunningham rose from the tables he would be expecting to indulge in that third most gentlemanly pursuit, whoring—another pastime which held no interest for Elliot. He was a gentleman now, perforce, but he was, first and foremost his own man, and always had been—even in the confines of his uniform. Elliot had had enough.

  ‘I find I have had a surfeit of excitement, my dear Cunningham,’ he said, tapping his friend lightly on the shoulder. ‘I wish you luck with the cards. And with the ladies.’

  ‘Luck doesn’t come into it, Elliot. You of all people should know that. Never met a devil more fortunate with the fairer sex than you.’

  ‘Never confuse success with good fortune, my friend,’ Elliot replied with a thin smile. ‘I bid you goodnight.’

  He collected his hat and gloves and headed out into St James’s, doubting he’d be making much use of his new club membership in the future. It was a cold night, dank and foggy, with only a sliver of moon. A housebreaker’s kind of night, though it was much too soon to be thinking about that.

  Kinsail’s diamond had proved rather difficult to dispose of. Elliot’s usual fence had refused to have anything to do with such a distinctive stone, forcing him into an unplanned trip to the Low Countries where he had, reluctantly, had it cut and re-faceted before selling it on. The resultant three diamonds had garnered far short, collectively, of what Lord Kinsail was rumoured to have paid for the parent. But then, Kinsail had paid the inflated premium such contraband goods commanded, so Elliot’s thief-taker had informed him. More important—far more important—was the price Kinsail was now paying for his dereliction of duty to the British army.

  Not that he knew that, of course, any more than he really understood the price paid by that army for his neglect. Men such as Kinsail saw lists demanding horses, mules, surgeons. Other lists requiring field guns, cannons, rifles, vied for their attention, and more often won. But what use was one of the new howitzers when there were no horses to haul it into battle? What use were muskets, Baker rifles, bayonets, when the men who would wield them lay dying on the battlefields for want of a horse and cart to carry them to a field hospital? For want of a surgeon with any experience to tend to them when they got there? What did Kinsail and his like know of the pain and suffering caused by their penny-pinching. The ignorance which led them to put guns before boots and water and bandages?

  Elliot cursed, forced his fists to uncurl. Even now, six years later, Henry’s face, rigid with pain, haunted him. But what did Kinsail and his like know of that? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And even if he could, by some miracle, paint the picture for them, it would give them but a moment’s pain. Far better to hit them where it hurt—to take from them what they valued and use it to fund what really mattered. Those diamonds, even in their cut-down form, would make an enormous difference. That miserly bastard Kinsail would never know that his jewel had, by the most dubious and complex route, gone some way to make reparation for his war crimes.

  As ever, following what he liked to think of as a successful mission, he had scoured the newspapers for word of the robbery, but Lord Kinsail had, unsurprisingly, declined to make public his loss. For perhaps the hundredth time since that night Elliot wondered what, if anything, Lady Kinsail had said about their encounter. For what seemed like the thousandth time the memory of her pressed beneath him flitted unbidden into his mind. The feel of her mouth on his. The soft, husky note to her voice. That face—the haughty, questioning look, the big eyes which had shown not one whit of fear.

  He should not have kissed her. He had thought, as he fled the scene of his crime, that she had kissed him back, but had come to believe that mere wish fulfilment. She had simply been too startled to resist. After all, as far as she was concerned he was a thief. But why had she not cried foul?

  The bright gas lighting of Pall Mall gave way to the dimmer and appropriately shadier braziers around Covent Garden. Thin as London was of company this early in the year, there seemed to be no shortage of customers for the wretches forced to earn their living on the streets. A scuffle, a loud cry, then a cackle of laughter rent the air as a man was dumped unceremoniously on to the steps of a brothel. Shaking his head at a questioning pock-marked street walker, Elliot pressed a shilling into her filthy hand and made haste across the market square, ignoring her astonished thanks.

  The stark contrast between the homes of the gentlemen who frequented the privileged clubs of St James’s and the hovels and rookeries which were home to London’s whores, whom those same gentlemen would visit later, made him furious. He had seen poorer and he had seen sicker people abroad, but this—this was home, the country he had served for nigh on sixteen years. It shouldn’t be like this. Was this what twenty-odd years of war had won them?

  In the far corner of the square he spied something which never failed to make him heartsick. Just a man asleep in a doorway, huddled under a worn grey blanket, but the empty, flapping ends of his trousers told their story all too well. The low wooden trolley against which he rested merely confirmed it. To the callused, scarred legacy of guns and gunpowder on his hands would be added the scraping sores caused from having to propel himself about on his makeshift invalid cart. He stank, the perfume of the streets overlaid with gin, but to Elliot what he smelled most of was betrayal.

  ‘May God, if God there be, look down on you, old comrade,’ he whispered.

  Careful not to disturb the man’s gin-fuelled slumber, he slipped a gold coin into the veteran’s pocket, along with a card bearing a message and an address. To many, charity was the ultimate insult, but to some—well, it was worth trying. Elliot never gave up trying.

  Weary now, he made his way towards Bloomsbury, where he had taken a house. ‘The fringes of society,’ Cunningham called it, ‘full of Cits.’ He could not understand Elliot’s reluctance to take a house in Mayfair, or even a gentleman’s rooms in Albemarle Street, but Elliot had no desire to rub shoulders with the ton any more than he desired to settle down, as his sister Elizabeth said he ought. Said so regularly and forcefully, Elliot thought with a smile as he passed through Drury Lane.

  They were surprisingly alike, he and his sister. Almost twelve years his junior, Lizzie had been a mere child when Elliot joined the army. He had known her mostly through her letters to him as she was growing up. As their father’s health had declined and war kept Elliot abroad, Lizzie had shouldered much of the responsibility for the overseeing of the estate as well as the care of her fast-failing parent. Knowing full well how much her brother’s career meant to him, she had refrained from informing him of the true nature of affairs back home until their father’s demise had become imminent. Touched by her devotion, Elliot had been impressed and also a little guilt-ridden, though Lizzie herself would have none of that, when he had finally returned for good after Waterloo.

  ‘I have merely done my duty as you did yours. Now you are home the estates are yours, and since Papa has left me more than adequately provided for I intend to enjoy myself,’ she’d told him.

  She had done so by marrying a rather dour Scot,

  Alexander Murray, with rather indecent haste, after just three months of mourning. The attachment was of long standing, she had informed her astonished brother, and while her dearest Alex had agreed that she could not marry while her papa was ailing, she’d seen no reason for him to wait now that Papa had no further need of her. Lizzie had emerged from her blacks like a butterfly from a chrysalis—an elegant matron with a sharp mind and a witty tongue, which made her a popular hostess and an adored wife. Matrimony, she informed her brother at regular intervals, was the happiest of states. He must try it for himself.

  Russell Square was quiet. Bolting the door behind him, Elliot climbed wearily up to his bedchamber. After tugging off his neckcloth, neatly folding his clothes—an old military habit, impossible to shake—Elliot yawned and climbed thankfully between the cool sheets of his bed. Another hangover from his milita
ry days: to have neither warming pan nor fire in the room.

  He had no wish to be manacled in wedlock. It was not that he didn’t like women. He liked women a lot, and he’d liked a lot of women. But never too much, and never for too long. In the courts of Europe loyalty to one’s country came before loyalty to one’s spouse. In the courts of Europe the thrill of intrigue and adventure, legitimised by the uncertainty of war, made fidelity of rather less import than variety.

  ‘Living in the moment,’ one of his paramours, an Italian countess, had called it. Voluptuous Elena, whose pillow talk had been most enlightening, and whose penchant for making love in the most public of places had added an enticing element of danger to their coupling. That time in the coach, coming back from the Ambassador’s party…Elliot laughed softly into the darkness at the memory. It had been later, in another country, in another coach and with another woman—this one rather less inclined to court public exposure—that he had realised how practised had been Elena’s manoeuvres. Her ingenious use of the coach straps, for example. He had obviously not been the first and he was without a doubt that he had not been her last.

  He wondered what Elena was doing now. And

  Cecily. And Carmela. And Gisela. And Julieanne. And—what was her name?—oh, yes, Nicolette. He could not forget Nicolette.

  Except he could hardly remember what she looked like. And the others, too, seemed to merge and coalesce into one indistinct figure. He missed them all, but did not miss any one in particular. What he really missed was the life, the camaraderie. Not the battles, for the thrill of the charge was paid for in gore and blood. Nor the pitiless reality of war either—the long marches, the endless waiting for supplies which did not come, his men stoically starving, clad in threadbare uniforms, footwear which was more patches than boot. Killing and suffering. Suffering which continued still.