Page 3 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
“Don’t get too excited.” Jack tried to sound bored. “It’s just that it would be a bloody inconvenience for the Earl of Rutland’s son to die in my office.”
Those blue eyes were now plainly shining with amusement. “I’ll endeavor to keep body and soul together until I reach the street.”
Jack bent in a slight, ironic bow. God’s balls, was Rivington flirting with him? Was he flirting with Rivington? Before Jack could decide, his client appeared in the doorway.
She was dark, pretty enough, and expensively dressed. Neither plump nor thin, neither tall nor short. There were probably five hundred women like her within two miles of where they stood. About five-and-twenty years old, maybe a bit less. She had circles under her eyes that suggested weeks of insufficient sleep.
She handed Jack a card—ladies always did, as if they had come to take tea. He nearly felt bad for them, so at sea were they in these circumstances. The women of a lower station got right to business, but ladies were at a loss. He gave the card a cursory glance.
“Mrs. Wraxhall, please take a seat,” he said with exaggerated courtliness, entirely for the purpose of letting Rivington know that he hadn’t merited Jack’s best manners. He drew his own chair closer to hers to preserve the illusion of this being a social visit. “I have an associate with me today,” he said, gesturing dismissively to Rivington, “but you can pretend he isn’t here.” Out of the corner of his eye he watched for Rivington’s reaction—a fraction of a smile. Not that Jack cared in the slightest. “How may I help you?”
“I . . . well.” Her gaze flickered between Jack and her own lap, where she fiddled with the edge of a glove. “Mary said you see all manner of things and nothing I could possibly say would surprise you.”
“She was right.” He’d ask who this Mary was in due course. “It’s best if you just come out with it.”
“I lost some letters.” She hesitated before continuing, her gaze darting around the room. “They were stolen, rather.” Another pause, this one longer. “And in their place I found a note threatening to expose the letters to my husband unless I followed instructions.”
Ah, blackmail. That was Jack’s favorite. It warmed the very cockles of his heart.
To be fair, he liked any reminder that he was entirely middling when it came to sin and nastiness. He was a veritable baby in a cradle compared to blackmailers. The best part was that very often all it took was a bit of sniffing around and you could turn the situation on its head, blackmailing the would-be blackmailer into silence. And you needn’t feel the slightest bit ashamed of it either.
Jack felt like a regular Robin Hood when he could manage that kind of trick.
“Mrs. Wraxhall,” he said. “You’ve come to the right man. Now tell me everything.”
Oliver hadn’t known what to expect when he arrived at this address, but it certainly wasn’t an utterly ordinary man posing questions in the manner of a family solicitor or a country doctor, as if blackmail were no more distressing than a case of chilblains.
He had feared that the mysterious Mr. Turner would turn out to be a money lender of some sort. That would almost have made sense—one did hear stories of ladies with gaming debts, although he would have thought Charlotte had too much money for her ship to run aground in precisely that way.
If Charlotte was in some kind of distress, why had she not turned to their father or elder brother? Ideally she would have gone to her husband, but Montbray had been overseas in recent years. As had Oliver himself, for that matter, which he had to assume was why his sister had not come to him for aid. For Charlotte to find herself in a predicament that drove her to give two hundred pounds to a man who conducted business out of a room above a dressmaker’s shop, and then never breathe a word of it to anyone? That was beyond astonishing.
This Turner fellow looked vaguely familiar, but Oliver couldn’t quite put his finger on why. Had he been a soldier? He didn’t look like it. Could they have gone to school together? Certainly not. Oliver couldn’t have said why, but he would have bet good money that Turner had not been to Eton. But why was he so sure of that, now? There was nothing about Turner’s demeanor that seemed common, precisely. His accent was unremarkable, which likely meant that it was close to Oliver’s own. But why on earth would a man with a good accent have an office with mismatched furniture and threadbare carpets? Why would he have any office at all, for that matter? It didn’t add up.
He was absolutely ordinary-looking. There was nothing remarkable whatsoever in his appearance. His hair was dark, his eyes could have been any color at all in this badly lit room. Not handsome in any traditional sense of the word—his nose was rather too much of a good thing, to be honest. He was broad in the shoulders and chest. His clothes, Oliver noticed, were scrupulously clean, but there was something about the way Turner wore them that suggested insolence. His cravat was tied in a haphazard knot. His coat was of a cut that could easily be shrugged off; it was unbuttoned, giving Oliver an impression of muscles working beneath the linen shirt.
At the thought of what else might lie beneath those not-quite-gentlemanly clothes, Oliver felt a familiar ripple of awareness course through his body. He crushed it, as usual. This was hardly the place for that, for God’s sake.
There was no place for that. Not anymore. He was finally home, and he was so damned grateful to be in a place with rules and laws that he was going to follow them, come hell or high water. He had come here to get to the bottom of whatever hold, if any, this fellow had over Charlotte, not to mentally undress criminals.
He forced himself to attend to Mrs. Wraxhall—and why did that name sound so familiar? There was certainly a Wraxhall at his club. Could there be a connection? The lady was now giving Turner the story of her life, it would seem, with Turner occasionally pausing to scribble something on a sheet of paper.
Before her marriage, Mrs. Wraxhall had evidently indulged in a youthful escapade with a man from the Yorkshire village where they’d both grown up. They had, stupidly, exchanged letters. At the conclusion of the affair she had requested that her paramour return her missives, and he had complied. Of that, Oliver approved. He would like to think that if he ever had an affair with a lady—and he had to concede that the likelihood of that ever coming to pass was precisely zero, thank God—he would promptly return any letters she had been foolish enough to send him.
But why had she not burned them? Oliver found that troubling.
In any event, she had kept both sets—those she had written and those she had received—in her jewel box until, about a month ago, she noticed that they had disappeared.
“Tell me more about the blackmail letter you found. Did you bring it with you today?” Turner asked.
“No.” The lady twisted her handkerchief into knots. “I threw it immediately into the fire.”
Oh, she managed to burn that, did she? Oliver was beyond exasperated. Perhaps Turner was too, because he let out a long breath before speaking again. “Do you recall what it said? What were the demands?”
“The letter said that further instructions would be forthcoming.” That handkerchief would not be long for the world if the lady kept on abusing it.
“But this was a month ago, and you have received no further word?” Turner’s voice had the same too-patient tone Oliver had heard from the dozen surgeons who explained that there was nothing left to be done for his leg.
The lady nodded her assent. Oliver gave it five minutes before she worried a hole into the cambric of her handkerchief.
