Dinner Most Deadly Read online

  “I’m not asking you to do anything,” Pickett objected. “I’m merely pointing out that there might be a simple solution to both your problem and Miss Braunton’s. If you find the idea interests you, it might be worth discussing the matter with Lord Edwin.”

  “I feel for Miss Braunton, truly I do. And yet—Sir Reginald’s bastard—” The Irishman shook his head. “What sort of father would I be to the child if I couldn’t look at him without seeing his sire?”

  “The babe might be a girl who looks like her mama—who, between you and me and the lamppost, most men would consider it no hardship to face over the breakfast table for the rest of their lives,” Pickett observed, and received an answering grin from Mr. Kenney. “Either way, it seems to me there might be a certain satisfaction—a kind of revenge, if you will—to be gained in raising Sir Reginald’s child to be a better person than his father was—and for you and Miss Braunton to be happy together in spite of him.”

  “There might, at that,” conceded Mr. Kenney. “And one hates to see an innocent child suffer for the sins of its father; after all, the poor little blighter never asked to be conceived. Tell me, do you happen to know Miss Braunton’s feelings on the subject?”

  “I confess, I did take the liberty of mentioning the matter to her, and it seems she remembers you kindly. I do not think I presume too much in saying that if you were to come to her assistance at such a time, you could be sure of commanding her admiration as well as her gratitude.”

  “And mighty oaks from such little acorns grow,” concluded Mr. Kenney, drying his hands on a towel. “Thank you for stopping by, Mr. Pickett. Now, I do not wish to appear rude, but if you will excuse me, I believe I shall look in on Lord Edwin Braunton.”

  “Not at all, sir, and I wish you every success, with both Lord Edwin and his daughter,” said Mr. Pickett, and took his leave.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Seduction of John Pickett

  As Pickett left the unsavory environs of St. Giles, Lady Fieldhurst undertook a conciliatory call of her own. She feared Lady Dunnington had not yet forgiven her for confiding in Mr. Pickett regarding Lord Dunnington’s presence in Audley Street on the night of Sir Reginald’s death. And yet how could she have done otherwise, when Mr. Pickett was doing so very much for her?

  Upon arriving at the countess’s town house, she was not admitted by the maid Dulcie, but by Jack, the footman. She congratulated him on his return to good health and was soon ushered into the drawing room.

  “Julia, my dear, do come in,” urged Lady Dunnington, who seemed, Julia was relieved to note, happy enough to see her. “I’ll ring for tea, shall I?” the countess offered, reaching for the bell pull.

  “Tea sounds lovely,” Lady Fieldhurst assured her, taking her usual chair before the fire. “But tell me, Emily, have you heard any word from Lord Dunnington?”

  “No, and truth to tell, I hardly know whether to be sorry or glad,” Emily confided. “On the one hand, I am agog to know what is going on. And yet if he had been arrested, Dunnington would have sent word to me—I think,” she added doubtfully.

  “I am genuinely sorry to have given you cause to worry so,” said Lady Fieldhurst, knowing all the while that, had she been forced to make the decision again, she must have done exactly the same thing. It was perfectly dreadful, being pulled between two dear friends with diametrically opposed agendas. “In fact, I had no notion you were so concerned for Lord Dunnington’s sake. If you will forgive me for asking, Emily, how—how did things between the two of you come to such a pass?”

  Lady Dunnington shrugged. “How do these things ever happen? Shortly after Kit’s birth, I discovered quite by accident that Dunnington had taken a mistress. I was distraught at first, but when I confided in my mother, she told me I was making a great to-do over nothing. She said I had fulfilled my obligation to Dunnington by giving him two sons, and now we were both free to follow our own inclinations, just as she and my father had done for the past two decades—which was news to me, I assure you! So I took a lover of my own, although I confess it was less a matter of inclination than it was an attempt to give Dunnington a little of his own back.” Overcome with restless energy, she leaped up from her chair and grabbed the poker from the hearth, then began jabbing at the coals. “I might have saved myself the trouble. If he noticed at all, he never let on.”

  “Emily, how old is Kit now?”

  “He is twelve, and Robin—Viscount Brey, I suppose I should call him, but he will always be Robin to me—Robin is fifteen.” Emily smiled as she thought of her sons, both of whom were in school at Eton. Whatever her failings as a wife, she was a doting mother, and had been so from the moment her husband’s tiny heir had been placed in her arms.

  Twelve years, thought Lady Fieldhurst. A dozen years of trying to break through the apathy of a husband she still cared for. It all seemed such a waste. Was that what her own future would have been had her husband lived, had she been able to give him the heir he had wanted so desperately?

  She was still struggling for something to say that might comfort Lady Dunnington when a light scratching on the door interrupted their conversation.

  “Lord Dunnington, my lady,” announced Jack Footman, and stepped back to allow Emily’s lord and master to enter the room.

  “Dunnington!” Emily exclaimed, dropping the poker. “Never say you have been arrested!”

  He blinked at her vehemence. “If I had been arrested, my dear, I doubt I would have been allowed to call on you to inform you of it in person.”

  She put a hand to her forehead. “No, of course not. What am I thinking? Do come in, Dunnington. I believe you are acquainted with Lady Fieldhurst?”

  The earl executed a bow in Julia’s direction, but addressed himself to his wife. “I have endured a visit from that Bow Street fellow. He had the gall to ask me if I believed you were capable of murdering a man in cold blood.”

  “Did he? And what did you say?”

  Lord Dunnington did not wait to be invited, but seated himself on the sofa. “What else? I told him that if you were capable of such a thing, I should have been dead these past ten years and more.”

  “Really, Dunnington!” chided Emily, choking back a laugh in spite of herself. “You will give him the oddest notion of me!”

  “He seems to have more than a few odd notions already,” remarked the earl, frowning at the memory of the interview. “But he said one thing that I found curious. He told me you attempted to withhold the information that I had interrupted your dinner party that night. I should like to know why.”

  Thus cornered like a fox at the hunt, Lady Dunnington fluttered one hand in agitation. “The scandal, you know—we must think of the boys.”

  “The boys. Of course,” drawled the earl.

  “My lord, I fear it was I who told Mr. Pickett of your presence on that night,” confessed Lady Fieldhurst. “I would not have done so, had I not the greatest confidence in Mr. Pickett’s discernment.”

  “No, no, you did quite right, my lady,” Lord Dunnington assured her, then turned back to his wife. “Emily, as much as I appreciate your attempt to protect—the boys—I believe it is usually best in these matters to be truthful, insofar as one is able. Nevertheless—” He broke off and sat frowning into the fire.

  “Nevertheless what?” prompted Lady Dunnington.

  “If that fellow comes around harassing you and suggesting you might have had a hand in Sir Reginald’s death, you have only to send for me and I shall lodge a complaint against him with his magistrate.”

  Emily nodded. “Thank you, Dunnington.”

  “Surely such a thing will not be necessary,” protested Lady Fieldhurst.

  He bent what Julia felt was a rather fierce scowl in her direction. “I am not surprised that you would come to his defense, my lady. You appear to have a rather ardent champion in young Mr. Pickett.”

  She would have given much to know what Mr. Pickett had said to inspire such a remark, but she could hardly ask. Inste
ad, she merely nodded. “He—he has been a very good friend to me.”

  In fact, he had been much more than that—and was being very shabbily repaid for his many kindnesses to her. Perhaps she should have fought harder for him, should have demanded that Mr. Crumpton find a solution to their dilemma that did not require the humiliation of an innocent and honorable man. Just what that solution might be, she did not know, but surely the solicitor could have thought of something, given the lavish retainer he was paid out of the Fieldhurst estate. She should have insisted upon it.

  At that moment the door opened to admit Dulcie with the tea tray. “Oh your ladyship, I’ve only brought two cups!” she exclaimed in dismay upon seeing Lord Dunnington. “I’ll run downstairs and fetch another, shall I?”

  “No, no, that won’t be necessary,” the earl objected, rising to his feet. “I shan’t intrude on your tea party, Emily, but you will send for me if you should need me?”

  “Yes, Dunnington, I will. Thank you.” After he had gone, she sat staring at the door through which he had passed. “Well, well,” she murmured, her voice almost a purr. “What do you make of that?”

  As he left Mr. Kenney’s cheap lodgings, Pickett could not help but be satisfied with the interview, however little it might have achieved toward discovering the identity of Sir Reginald’s killer. Although his magistrate might beg to differ, Pickett considered it a morning well spent. But now the morning was far advanced, and he had an appointment to keep.

  Since Pickett had not expected to be obliged to actually undergo an examination, he had given little thought to what such an assessment might entail. But as he made his way on foot toward Harley Street, he began to wonder. How might one prove (or disprove, as the case might be) such a thing as Mr. Crumpton had suggested?

  Alas, he was soon to find out. Upon reaching the tall brick structure in which Dr. Humphrey both lived and practiced, he was met at the door by the physician himself, who smiled toothily at him. It should, Pickett reflected later, have been his first clue.

  “Ah, Mr. Pickett, is it?” the doctor greeted him cheerfully. “Yes, I’ve been expecting you. Come in, come in!”

  Once inside, he led Pickett to a small back room furnished much like a modest drawing room, with a sofa centered against one wall and a desk and chair in the corner.

  He gestured toward the sofa. “Have a seat, Mr. Pickett, and we will begin. Girls,” he called to someone apparently in another room, “Mr. Pickett is here.”

  Pickett sat on the sofa and watched with an increasing sense of foreboding as a side door opened to admit two women, one dark and one fair. Neither was in the first blush of youth—Pickett estimated them to be in the early thirties, at the least reckoning—but both were still remarkably attractive. As the women advanced into the room, sunlight from the windows filtered through their filmy, low-cut gowns, revealing the fact that they wore very little, if anything, underneath. He was very much afraid he was about to find out which.

  “These lovely ladies are Electra and Persephone,” the doctor explained. “They will be assisting with the examination.”

  Pickett looked from one woman to the other and tried hard not to let his gaze drop lower than the ladies’ chins. He wondered fleetingly if they were each being paid a consideration too. “Which—which one is Electra, and which is Persephone?”

  “I am,” they chorused in unison.

  The doctor seated himself at the desk, prepared to observe the proceedings with clinical detachment. The two women took places on the sofa, one on either side of Pickett, and each looped one hand through his arm while the other hand roamed at will.

  Pickett whimpered.

  The half-hour that followed was the most humiliating experience in a life already undistinguished by any great degree of dignity. Pickett managed to escape the ordeal with his virtue intact, but he took very little satisfaction in the doctor’s conclusion that, yes, it appeared the examination results must indeed be falsified. Crimson with mortification, utterly embarrassed and deeply ashamed, he left the Harley Street medical district, but he could not bring himself to return to Bow Street; he could not face his magistrate’s too-astute questioning or too-perceptive gaze. Instead, he turned his steps toward Audley Street, and was soon pounding on the below-ground servants’ door with a strength born of desperation.

  “Yes, yes, I’m coming!” called Dulcie impatiently as she opened the door. “What is the—John!”

  She had no idea why he had called or what had happened to him, but the look of utter devastation on his face told its own tale. She opened her arms to him, and he fell into her embrace.

  It was for comfort that he had sought her out, but comfort soon turned to desire, and desire to passion. Within minutes, he had pinned her against the wall and was kissing her with all the frustrated longing he felt for another. She returned his kiss with the same intensity (if for an entirely different reason), and it was several minutes before some slight noise from overhead penetrated his consciousness. He broke the kiss and looked up.

  Lady Fieldhurst stood on the pavement above, staring down at him through the black wrought iron railings.

  Lady Fieldhurst, leaving Lady Dunnington’s house some ten minutes after the earl’s departure, was not so much shocked as amused at a glimpse of one of the countess’s housemaids in a passionate embrace with her young swain. But in the next instant she recognized both the girl and her admirer, and all traces of amusement vanished. Her strangled cry was enough to alert the pair that they were no longer alone. The male half of the couple looked up, and her world tilted on its axis.

  She had never expected him to be utterly without feminine companionship; after all, he was young and personable, and if she could see this, surely the females of his own class were equally aware of it. In fact, she had seen him once before in the company of a young woman, a dark-haired, sharp-faced girl wearing a ghastly purple bonnet. She had been dismayed by his choice at the time, knowing he deserved better than a female who was obviously Haymarket ware. But Dulcie! Dulcie was lovely and sweet and demure. And at that moment she hated the girl with an intensity she had never felt for the most brazen of Frederick’s mistresses.

  Breaking eye contact with Pickett, she whirled away from the embracing couple and burst through the front door without knocking, to the shocked disapproval of Jack Footman, who had returned to his post just that morning only to discover that the world as he knew it had fallen apart while he lay on his sickbed. First murder in the hall, and now visitors charging in and out of the house without so much as a by-your-leave!

  “Sick!” gasped her ladyship, clapping both hands to her mouth. “Sick!”

  Correctly interpreting this cryptic message and its accompanying gesture, Jack snatched a bouquet of autumn roses from the crystal bowl adorning a side table, and thrust the bowl under her ladyship’s nose. He was only just in time before she was violently ill.

  “Julia, is that you?” Lady Dunnington, having heard the commotion from the drawing room, came into the hall to investigate. “Good heavens! What is the matter? Here, Jack, give me that bowl. I shall tend to Lady Fieldhurst while you fetch a glass of water for her.”

  Having dispatched the footman on this errand, she steered the trembling viscountess to the drawing room and seated her on a chair, placing the bowl on her lap.

  “There, my dear, now you may be easy. Perhaps it was merely something you ate, and you will feel much more the thing for having got it off your stomach. Unless—” Her eyes widened as a new thought occurred to her, and she did a few rapid calculations on her fingers. “It is only six months since Frederick died. Julia, my dear, is it possible that at last you are—?”

  “Of course not!” Lady Fieldhurst said impatiently. “Do I look as if I were six months gone with child?”

  “No, but it often happens that one does not begin to show with one’s first until quite late, and with moderate lacing of the stays—but if not that, then what has happened to make you ill? Don’t tell me there
is another dead body lying about!”

  “No!” Lady Fieldhurst shook her head vehemently. “Worse!”

  “Worse than a dead body?” Lady Dunnington wracked her brain. “Two dead bodies?”

  “There were certainly two of them, but they were very much alive.”

  “What then, Julia? My dear, you are frightening me!”

  “My Mr. Pickett was kissing your Dulcie!” she cried, and burst into tears.

  “Your Mr. Pickett? When you have been telling me for this age that he is not yours!”

  “He isn’t,” sobbed Lady Fieldhurst. “He’s hers!”

  “Do you mean Mr. Pickett is the young man she is walking out with? Why, I’ll wager she didn’t even know him until the night Sir Reginald was killed. The shameless hussy! She certainly didn’t let any grass grow beneath her feet, did she? Shall I give her the sack?”

  Lady Fieldhurst fumbled in her reticule for a handkerchief. “No, you must not do so for my sake,” she said, controlling her tears with an effort. “I have no real claim on him, so he is free to pursue any female to whom he might take a fancy. Besides, if you dismiss her for encouraging his attentions, he might very well feel himself obligated to marry her, for that is just the sort of noble, unselfish—” Words failed her, and she succumbed to a fresh bout of tears.

  But at the sound of a light tapping upon the door, years of training came to the fore. She dried her eyes and dabbed at her nose, and when Pickett appeared in the doorway, she was able to meet him with some semblance of composure.

  “Your ladyship,” Pickett addressed himself to Lady Dunning-ton, “may I have a word with Lady Fieldhurst? In private, if you please.”

  Lady Dunnington’s eyebrows rose at this high-handed treatment. “Are you ordering me from my own house, Mr. Pickett?” Receiving a pleading glance from Lady Fieldhurst, however, she rose to her feet and whisked the bowl away. “Oh, very well, if you insist. Thank you for your assistance, Julia; I daresay I must have eaten something that disagreed with my stomach. I shall be in the next room, so if you should need me, you have only to call.”