Page 40 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
He could piss out the window, just on the principle of the thing, Jack told himself. Why should the housemaid have to empty a chamber pot when instead there was a perfectly serviceable window? The fact that this sounded both highly reasonable and politically necessary was why he did his best to avoid dealing with aristocrats on any terms but his own. Simply being near them was enough to rattle his brains.
After he and Oliver arrived late last night, a footman brought Jack to a small bedchamber at the end of the family wing, decently furnished and quite comfortable but with no traces of the opulence that characterized the rest of the house. This was the sort of room you’d give a visiting solicitor or a physician who had been forced to stay the night. Ridiculous that Alder Court was grand enough to have rooms dedicated exclusively to recognizing the gap between master and servant. As if anyone who occupied that void could ever forget it. Jack didn’t need second-rate bed hangings to know that he didn’t belong at Alder Court.
It was, he understood, the people at Alder Court who needed that reassurance. The aristocracy and gentry did whatever they could to keep power and money to themselves. You were either Quality or you were not, and if you weren’t, it hardly mattered whether you were a surgeon or a street sweeper. Only look at the treatment Mrs. Wraxhall, with all her money, had received. By the looks of things, Wraxhall’s family had cast him off entirely for having married beneath him.
The existence of that gap between servant and master made the entire structure unsteady. It implied a fluidity that those at the top of the heap didn’t like to think about. Worse, it suggested that the difference between the aristocracy and those who emptied their chamber pots wasn’t as clear cut as they might prefer.
He dressed even more sloppily than usual and didn’t bother shaving, a totally unsatisfactory thumbing of the nose at this entire place. He had his hand on the doorknob when he realized that his careless appearance would reflect poorly on Oliver. It was no comfort to remember that the simple fact of Jack’s presence—a former servant and sometime criminal—reflected poorly on Oliver.
“Bugger and fuck,” Jack muttered. He took off his coat and cravat and proceeded to shave. When he got dressed again he paid a bit more attention than usual to the tying of his cravat. Never had Jack tied a cravat more resentfully and with more confusion than he did that day.
He was almost presentable when a servant came to inform him that the Earl of Rutland would be willing to grant him an audience.
The earl was sitting in a dark and stuffy parlor. A fire was blazing in the hearth despite it being a tolerably warm June day, and the old man had rugs on his lap. Even with his white hair and crepey skin, he looked disconcertingly like Oliver; it was the way the firmness of his jaw contrasted with the fineness of his nose, Jack thought. He had to remind himself that the earl was nothing more to him than an animate pile of money with useful friends in Whitehall.
“I need to dispose of your son-in-law,” Jack said without preamble, as soon as the door shut behind him. “Again.”
After Jack had gotten Montbray out of the country two years ago, he had been unceremoniously frog-marched to Lord Rutland’s carriage by a pair of knife-wielding ruffians. Rutland had asked questions that Jack refused to answer, offered money that Jack refused to take, and then deposited Jack inconveniently far from his lodgings. Jack hadn’t seen the man since.
“Then why are you here instead of wherever that blackguard is?” For all the man’s age, his voice was unaffected.
“I have a man watching him and a pair of men watching the house where your daughter and grandson are staying.” Jack had not been offered a seat but he sat down anyway, another hollow protest.
“Do you need money?” The older man managed to make it sound like an insult.
“Lady Montbray will pay my fee. However, if I need to resort to any services beyond what I rendered last time, it may be best for the lady to be kept in the dark. In that case, if your lordship would oblige—”
“Yes, yes.” He sounded impatient. “Send word and you’ll have whatever you need. But I don’t want to hear the specifics, and for God’s sake don’t put any details about it on paper.”
Did the man think Jack was a fool? He most certainly thought Jack was a murderer. That much was obvious. “I don’t intend to do anything . . . irrevocable to Lord Montbray.” Not that Jack didn’t think Montbray belonged at the bottom of a river. It was just that he wasn’t going to be the man to do it. He drew his own lines, and taking money for ending another man’s life was on the wrong side of that line, no matter how much the other man deserved to die. But he couldn’t expect the earl to understand that. As far as Lord Rutland knew, Jack was a man whose extra-legal services were for hire, full stop.
“Then what good are you, Turner?” the earl barked. “My understanding,” he said, his voice taking on an insinuating tone, “is that you’ll do damn near anything for money.”
Rutland wanted bloodshed, Jack realized. He didn’t want the man who had mistreated his only daughter to be sent to live out the rest of his days luxuriating in a tropical paradise. He wanted the man dead and he thought Jack would do it.
Jack took a steadying breath. “If you want the man to die while cleaning his gun, or to fall into the river while in his cups, there are people who specialize in those accidents. I am not one of them.”
The earl made a sound of frustration and fixed Jack with a hard stare. Here in his overheated sitting room with hunting dogs lounging at his feet, Lord Rutland looked like a pleasant, elderly country gentleman. But in an earlier era he would have been one of those fellows who spent his days murdering political rivals and poisoning the hell out of anyone who got in his way. Jack suddenly wanted to back slowly out of the room. He rose to his feet and prepared to take his leave, when the earl spoke.
“What do you want with my son?”
The question shouldn’t have unnerved Jack, but it did.
“I don’t want anything with him.” A week ago that might even have been the truth.
“Then you won’t object to taking two hundred pounds in exchange for staying away from him.”
Jack forced himself to appear calm. Rutland was trying to offend him, to punish him for having refused to do the earl’s bidding. This had nothing to do with Oliver. He would never tell Oliver that his father had put so low a price on keeping his youngest son safely away from an unseemly acquaintance.
“I’ll double whatever he’s paying you. Triple, even.”
Jack shook his head, wishing he could protest that he had never accepted money for that sort of thing, but he knew it wasn’t true. And evidently so did the earl. How long would it be before Lord Rutland told his son about Jack’s past?
Jack turned on his heel and left the room, his fists clenched, his face hot with anger and shame. The worst part was that he agreed with Oliver’s father. It was unsuitable in every way for the Earl of Rutland’s son to have anything to do with Jack Turner, criminal, scoundrel, and general reprobate. Their names being spoken in the same sentence would be enough to tarnish Oliver’s name.
As he closed the door behind him, he nearly ran into Oliver, whose eyes were opened wide with surprise and something like betrayal.
Oliver stumbled down the stairs, his father’s overheard words ringing in his ears. He wasn’t surprised that his father had tried to pay Jack to stay away from Oliver—that was precisely the sort of controlling maneuver the Earl of Rutland delighted in. But Jack’s total lack of refusal stung Oliver worse than any insult he had ever received.
