Page 38 of His Wicked Secret
“Heavens no. A person’s station has little to do with who they really are. I thought you of all people would understand that.” She was surprised at him for assuming she would think like that. Did he not know her at all?
His brows rose. “Because I was a servant?”
“Exactly. And you are quite a fine gentleman now.”
His tone took on a dark edge. “So it’s money and a higher station that improved me?”
“What?” she hissed. “That is not at all what I meant. You were quite perfect before you discovered your connection to Godric.”
“And how would you know that? We never even met until last September.”
She bristled. “Because I asked about you after we met. I do check on these things, you know. Everyone spoke very highly of you. The worst that could be said was you were known for chasing skirts, but it seemed you stopped that once you found out you and Godric were brothers.”
So she had asked around about that, too. She was fine with letting a rogue court her so long as she could be assured that he could be reformed. And from all accounts, Jonathan had stopped pursuing women the moment he’d learned of his legitimate birth. She wondered if perhaps it was because he now saw himself trapped between the world he’d once had and the one he found himself in.
“Whydidyou stop chasing skirts?” she asked as they reached her chair in the dining room.
He blinked twice, startled by the question, but soon recovered himself.
“The answer is a private one. Keep showing promise in your lessons and I might tell you.”
That was not the answer she expected at all. He pulled her chair back, and she lifted her skirts to sit. As he carefully pushed her chair close to the table, his fingertips whispered over the bare skin of her shoulders before he dropped his hands and took a seat beside her. On her other side was Gillian, who seemed to be doing well talking with the gentleman on her left, a quiet but sweet vicar who lived nearby.
“About our lesson today- I’m sorry about hurting you,” she whispered to Jonathan. Their chairs were pressed close due to the number of guests, and their knees bumped under the table. Her body flushed as his booted foot lightly brushed her ankle.
“Don’t apologize.” His gruff reply didn’t assuage her guilt, however. “The goal is to teach, and what you did was an excellent example of applying your lessons.” His tone became warmer and his face more open. She took a chance to tease him.
“Should I apply for a membership at Jackson’s Saloon?”
Jonathan’s lips twitched as he reached for his wine goblet. “I think Gentleman Jackson would be terrified to face you in the ring.”
“Would he? I shall have to stop by. Prove my pugilistic skills to him.”
The servants brought in bowls of leek soup and a variety of meat and fish dishes. The guests engaged in lively discussions on the latest horse races or the scandals currently sweeping theton. Audrey was only half listening, but when a gentleman named Alfred Taylor spoke about someone who’d shot himself in the Temple Bar district, her focus turned on him.
“Mr. Taylor, who did you say they found? Did you say he shot himself?”
Mr. Taylor was an older man in his fifties, well known for his access to gossip, and he had a keen way of filtering out those stories that were wholly untrue. Some of Lady Society’s better leads had come through him, though the man had no idea of that fact. Audrey knew he thrived on a good captive audience, and he quickly returned to that role.
“Well, the matter has already been announced in the papers, but there is some disagreement, or so I’ve heard, as to whether it was a matter of suicide or murder. His sister is insistent that he would not have taken his own life, but given the man’s fall in reputation, I find it quite possible, though perhaps not entirely without encouragement. They found him at a townhouse notorious for hosting hellfire meetings.”
Her heart leapt into her throat. Audrey did not believe in coincidences. How many hellfire clubs met in the Temple Bar district? “Mr. Taylor, who was the gentleman that they found?” Jonathan went still beside her, his hand half extended toward a tureen of gravy.
“Gerald Langley. You didn’t know him, did you?”
Gerald Langley was dead? “No…but I am familiar with the name,” she found herself saying in a soft voice.
“It’s all very scandalous.” Mr. Taylor preened as he now had her undivided attention. “One has to ask, if it is murder, or, as I suspect, if the suicide was coerced, just who Langley might have had for an enemy.”
“When did they find him?”
“I believe it was a week ago now.”
That could have been the night of the hellfire club meeting. If there was one thing she was certain of, he was the sort of man to go after those he believed to have wronged him and take them down with him, rather than take his own life.
The temperature in the room seemed to rise, and she couldn’t breathe. Audrey shoved her chair back and rushed from the dining room without making any proper excuses. As she reached the main hall, she gripped the banister by the stairs and used it for support.
Lord, the man was dead. Possibly murdered. The man she’d been focused on ruining. It wasn’t that she felt guilty. Most of her was relieved. Langley was a wretched man, but his death could not be a coincidence. Perhaps he had seen no way out of his downward spiral once she had escaped. But what if Mr. Taylor’s insinuations of another force at play were accurate?
