Page 61 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
“Tell me what?”
“We’ve parted company, darling. That is—thatsort of company.” She gave a light laugh of amusement. “He is not particularly miserly, as you said. But neither is he likely to purchase a carriage for a woman who is no longer his mistress. But the sapphires”—she paused to roll her fingers over the large stones—“I suppose they’ll buy me the carriage and the team besides.”
With quite a lot leftover, if the deep, rich hue and lack of any visible inclusions were anything to judge by. “He did not tell me,” Phoebe said. “When was this?”
“A few days past,” Charity said. “He came to his office with Mr. Brooks. I suppose he must have decided to come up rather spur of the moment, since he’d sent not advance notice nor even brought his key.” Something of Phoebe’s disquiet must have shown upon her face, for Charity reached out to touch her hand. “It wasn’t a surprise,” she said. “The timing perhaps, but the end was always inevitable. I’ll not be left out in the cold.”
Strangely, an odd flutter of laughter rose in Phoebe’s throat.“Because you got the flat?”
“Just so,” Charity said, with a satisfied smile. “And now it is only mine. He’s sent his key back to me already.”
Because he no longer owned it, and Charity was no longer his mistress. She hadn’t been for some days, since—
Phoebe swallowed back a shocked exhale. The absolute cad! He’d let her make an utter fool of herself, when he had already broken off his arrangement with Charity!
“Of course, I shall always think of him fondly,” Charity said. “But I am enjoying my freedom presently. I’ve been quite lonely these last few months. His knee, you know—I imagine the stairs were a little much for him to manage. Ah, well.” She gave an elegant shrug. “I’ve enough money saved that I can afford to be selective with my next patron, should I choose to take one. And if I do not…well, then, perhaps you could come visit me for tea.”
“I suppose I could,” Phoebe said. And Kit could hardly object to it. After all, Charity wasn’t his mistress any longer. “Yes. That would be lovely.”
“The flat is just above his office,” Charity said. “Perhaps you could bring Chris, and he could show it to you. It’s just in Cheapside; quite a fashionable part of town, really. There should be no danger to your reputation even if you were to come alone.” She hesitated just briefly. “Although…”
Phoebe canted her head. “Although?”
“Well, it’s probably nothing,” Charity demurred. “A man came banging at the door just yesterday looking for him.”
“Your door?”
“No, no—the office below,” Charity said. “But he made such a dreadful racket that I had to poke my head out the window to see for myself. He was shouting fit to wake the dead. He said—well, he said some rather nasty things which I won’t repeat,” Charity said primly, patting at her rouged lips with the corner of a napkin. “At any rate, I gathered that he was sent by a man calledRussell, who has some business with Chris.”
“What sort of business?” Phoebe inquired.
“Haven’t the faintest. But the man was rather insistent. I didn’t care much for the look of him. Truth to tell, it’s hardly the first time that someone has come pounding upon Chris’ door. It’s just that usually he’s been there to—to take out the rubbish, so to speak.”
Probably a polite way of saying he’d been only too happy to take his fists to whomever had dared disturb him. “You should tell him,” Phoebe said slowly. It might be nothing—or at least nothingunusualfor him—but if there was even the slightest chance that it might be connected to the attempt made upon his life…
Charity smothered a laugh behind the tips of her fingers, her eyes sparkling with merriment. “I shall do no such thing,” she said. “You’re his wife, darling.Youmay tell him.”
∞∞∞
Chris had been buried in papers all afternoon; the sum of his various misdeeds laid out before him in the neat stacks that had been made of everything hidden away within his office. He wasn’t sorry to see it go, exactly, but it did represent a sort of death, in a way. The death of the boy who had clawed his way out of the gutter, the young man who had eschewed every principle in the service of carving out a scrap of the world only for himself.
What he’d not had the means to purchase for himself, he’d begged, borrowed, and stolen.
Mostly stolen.
But that time had passed. Em had been saying it for years,though he’d long since stopped listening. He didn’t flatter himself that going to such lengths would make him respectable in one fell swoop—he’d enjoyed dangling the promise of ruin before the worst of his victims a little too much for that—but at least it would pacify Phoebe. And perhaps quiet the worst of the gossip that had surrounded him for years.
“Mr. Dereham,” Brooks said, separating one stack from the rest.
“Return,” Chris said. It was just a bundle of old love letters alluding to a passionate, if brief, affair. But the lady involved had a brother who was known as something of a hothead, and who would not have hesitated to call the man out. “And the same with these.” He shoved another few stacks nearer to Brooks.
Brooks gave a little sniff. Probably he was offended at having been called to sort through such sordid stuff. “How about Kettering?”
“Return.” An affair with an opera singer, and everyone knew the man’s wife held the purse strings, owing to the terms of her marriage settlement.
“Mrs. Balfour?”
“Return.” The woman had married her second husband some eight years ago, but Chris had discovered that her first husband had not been quite so deceased as she had claimed. Then again, her first husband had married again as well and was living quite happily with his current wife and their children in Wales. With the difficulties they would have encountered applying for a divorce, he supposed a little bigamy was forgivable.
