Emma applauded his innovative approach to gossip squashing. “The dowager did not mention any of that, but I’m wildly impressed. I don’t think I could have done better myself.”
Now the flush deepened and swept to the tips of his ears. “Just did what I could,” he mumbled, delighted by the light of admiration he saw in her eye. “It’s not right, everyone talking about Vinnie as if she did something wrong. How is the old girl today? Still refusing to marry Huntly?”
Emma slowed the horses as they approached a corner. “I don’t know how she is because she snuck out of the town house before I even came down. According to Caruthers, she went to pay a morning call on Lady Agatha Bolingbroke.”
Philip would not have been more surprised if Emma said Vinnie had paid a morning call on the prince regent himself. “Lady Agatha? What does Vinnie have to do with that sad sack?”
“You remember our dossiers, of course, and the various agreements we made with members of the horticultural society to ensure their votes?” she asked. “Our agreement with Lord Bolingbroke was that we would try to bring his daughter into fashion.”
“But Vinnie abandoned that route in favor of a more honest approach,” he said.
The duchess nodded. “She did, but Lady Bolingbroke refused to acknowledge our revised agreement with her husband and insisted we honor our obligation. That is why Lady Agatha and her mother joined us at the theater last week.”
“I thought that was queer, your going to the theater with the Bolingbroke chit,” Philip said.
“It
was
queer,” Emma said. “She made very few comments and spent almost the entire evening glowering at me. I don’t think she likes me.”
Philip shrugged. “Lady Agatha doesn’t like anyone.”
“No, and yet she paid us a social call two days ago,” she explained, remembering her surprise when she discovered with whom Vinnie was bracketed in the drawing room. “Out of nowhere, she appeared on our doorstep to visit with Vinnie. Is that not strange? And then she ended the visit by turning Vinnie’s hose on Lord Addleson and soaking him thoroughly.”
His eyes widened with disbelief. “She didn’t!”
Emma giggled. “She did. Right there in the conservatory. Naturally we all broke out into peals of laughter, for it was remarkable that Addleson would get the same treatment as Huntly, though, obviously, this time the drenching was intentional and not the result of a malfunctioning prototype. After spraying the viscount, Lady Agatha made a very clever remark about his cravat—I don’t recall it exactly but something about the effects of the falling water on his waterfall—and in that moment I found her entirely likable. But then our laughter made her realize the glaring impropriety of her actions and she immediately left. The whole episode was vastly amusing from beginning to end, and I would have congratulated her on her audacity if she hadn’t run off.”
“What does the gel have against Addleson?”
“I have no idea. But perhaps Vinnie will find out today. Presumably, she went over there to apologize for our behavior and to avoid further conversation with me or Trent or Huntly. She is determined to martyr herself and won’t listen to anyone. If only events had unfolded differently,” Emma said, recalling the terrifying moment when she had woken in her bed to find Windbourne’s hands around her throat. In the ensuing struggle, she’d managed to grab a heavy candlestick, but before she could disable him with it, he’d pressed a knife, cold and sharp, against her neck. The terror she had felt was as sharp as the knife, but before Windbourne could do her lasting harm, Vinnie was there, a gun at his back. With chilling calmness, she’d ordered him to release her sister, and promptly he’d complied. But it was a trick, for no sooner had he lowered the knife than he spun around, pushing the knife toward Vinnie’s stomach, and Vinnie, her blood hot while her head stayed cool, pulled the trigger and the nightmare was over.
But of course it was not over, for Vinnie continued to live in fear of the repercussions of her singular act of heroism, thanks to small-minded little toads such as Mr. Holyroodhouse.
Well aware that the present was ill served by regretting the past, Emma swallowed a sigh and maneuvered the horses around a bend.
As if suddenly alert to his surroundings, Philip looked at the road behind the curricle and then at the stretch in front of it. “I say, where are you going?”
Emma gave him a sideways glance. “Where are
you
going?”
“To Mrs. Biddle’s shop,” he said, as if stating an obvious fact. “We must demand she halt publication of the offending illustration at once. We must also insist she never run anything like it ever again.”
Shifting the ribbons to one hand, Emma laughed and patted her cousin-in-law gently on the head. “I don’t care what Trent says, you are adorable.”
His face turned pink again, and he slid his head away from her touch. “Puppies are adorable,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster. “I am determined. Mrs. Biddle must be stopped.”
Emma rolled her eyes at the notion. “That heartless harpy would sooner run naked down St. James’s Street than give up a single penny of profit. No, we will not waste our time trying to convince Mrs. Biddle to act honorably. We are going right to the source.”
“The source?” he repeated, his eyebrows drawn in confusion. “You mean the artist?”
“Exactly,” she said with satisfaction. “But first we must find Mr. Holyroodhouse, so we are heading to the Rusty Plinth.”
At once, Philip bolted upright in his seat. “No.”
She spared him a glance as she maneuvered around a dip in the road. “Yes,” she said with deceptive mildness.
Philip shook his head and said no again. He reiterated it six more times, his resolution growing more firm with each repetition.
Emma smothered a laugh, for she did not want to seem amused by his distress—although she did think it was funny how thoroughly intimidated the young man was by his older cousin. “Yes.”
“No. I promised Trent I would never take you to the Rusty Plinth,” he explained, a pleading note entering his voice. “It’s a matter of honor. A man is only as good as his word. Surely, you understand that.”
“But
I
am taking
you,
” she pointed out with blithe assurance. “Honor is satisfied.”
Although her argument was well reasoned—after all, she did clutch the reins to the curricle in her hands—Philip knew it wouldn’t hold water with the duke and could already feel the weight of his cousin’s hand on the side of his head. For God’s sake, he was twenty, too old to have his ears boxed. “I must insist that you turn this carriage around immediately,” he said with what he hoped sounded like stern authority to Emma. His own ears heard a wheedling plea.
To his surprise, she complied, bringing the horses to a complete stop. “You may climb down here,” she announced.
Aghast, Philip looked at the shrubbery by the side of the road and then at his cousin-in-law. “What? Here?”
Emma was too impatient with her husband’s attempts to restrict her movements to have sympathy with the young man’s plight, which, she knew, was awkward. She didn’t doubt that he considered his oath to Trent to be a sacred thing. But as she was not consulted on the tendering of the oath, it had no bearing on her behavior.
“Yes, here,” she said matter-of-factly. “You have two choices, Mr. Keswick: Either accompany me to the Rusty Plinth, where I will confer with Mr. Squibbs on how to locate Mr. Holyroodhouse, or return to Grosvenor Square on your own. I will leave it to you to decide which option best suits your notion of honor.”
The duchess waited silently as he contemplated his situation, her cornflower blue eyes wide with curiosity and expectation. But his situation was such that there was nothing to contemplate. Trent would have his head if he let Emma travel to the docks alone.
“I shall go with you,” he announced graciously, as if the idea had been his all along.
“Good,” she said, tugging the reins to move the carriage back to the road. “Believe it or not, I’m grateful for your company, however reluctantly it is given. You did me a great service today when you strode into the room and insisted we do something to help Vinnie. Prior to that, I had been fuming uselessly in my study.”
“I would appreciate it if you did not describe our outing to the duke in quite those terms.”
“Very well,” Emma said with a laugh. “But you are being overly cautious. Surely by now Trent knows me well enough to apportion blame properly. If he didn’t, I never would have married him.”
This fond sentiment, though charmingly expressed, struck Philip as far too optimistic for the situation. The last time Emma visited the Rusty Plinth in the middle of the day, she wound up trailing Windbourne all the way to Dover and almost getting herself killed. Philip, who had the fortune—or misfortune, depending on one’s point of view—of catching her on her way out of town, had accompanied Emma on the mad pursuit and had gotten a bullet in the knee for his trouble. Knowing he had helped save England from a French invasion, however, compensated for much of the pain and several months of enforced inactivity.
Letting the matter of Trent’s reaction drop, Philip passed the rest of the journey in silence, for he had enough sense to admit Emma’s plan was better than his. The capable Mr. Squibbs was sure to locate the infamous cartoonist in a matter of hours. The gentleman was not only the finest lock pick in London, he was the linchpin of a well-honed network of scouts and spies who lurked in every corner of the city. What he or his associates could not discover in a twenty-four-hour period was not worth knowing.
Emma had first come into contact with Mr. Squibbs while she was investigating Windbourne and had required tutelage on how to open a locked safe. Unable to uncover proof of the baronet’s perfidy through conventional means, she’d resolved to break into his apartments, and although the illicit search turned up nothing of use, it had forged an unlikely friendship between the lock pick and the hoyden.
Several months later, when Emma needed help gathering data on the members of the British Horticultural Society to advance her sister’s cause, Mr. Squibbs and his team promptly supplied all the information she needed to compile useful dossiers on all twenty-six members, including her husband. It was that kind of ruthless thoroughness, as embarrassing as it had been for Trent to see his mistresses listed in chronological order for his wife’s perusal, that was necessary now.
They arrived at the Rusty Plinth a little before two, and although Philip felt an unexpected rumble in his stomach, he knew better than to request a meal at the dockside tavern. The establishment was large but crowded with battle-scarred tables at which its questionable clientele drank tankards of ale and grumbled among themselves. The door that admitted Emma and Philip also let in a large amount of sunlight, and the patrons nearest to the door groaned at the intrusive brightness.
As Emma’s gaze swept the room for the familiar figure of Mr. Squibbs, Philip warily eyed four gentlemen whose interest had not returned to their conversation at the shutting of the front door. He recognized the voracious look on their faces as they examined Emma, whose pretty blond curls and neat walking dress could not be a common sight in the rundown tavern.
He leaned over and whispered in Emma’s ear. “If Mr. Squibbs is not here, perhaps we should come back later.”
She waved off the suggestion with an annoyed shush, and Philip reminded himself that the Duchess of Trent was no helpless victim. He had watched her calmly point a gun at Windbourne and even shoot when the villain had failed to follow her command.
But that situation was vastly different from this one, for on that occasion Emma had been armed with a gun, and on this one she had no weapon at all, not even a spoon because he had been too impatient to let her visit the kitchens. Additionally, her standoff with Windbourne had been evenly matched, and now they were outnumbered four to two. And not just four to two but four large, brawny ruffians to one lady and one gentleman whose intention to train at Gentleman Jackson’s salon had never turned into reality.
One of the ruffians stood up and Philip gulped.
“Yer grace,” the man said, smiling to reveal two missing teeth. “We wasn’t expecting you today. Does Squibbs know yer about?”
To Philip’s horror, Emma not only recognized the gentleman but held her hand out in greeting. He watched as her fingers disappeared into the large man’s grasp and somehow reemerged unscathed.
“Mr. Horn,” she said warmly, “it’s a pleasure to see you again. I trust your mother is well?”
Amazingly, the large man’s cheeks turned dusky pink at this consideration. “Yes, yer grace. Very well. She’ll be complimented ye asked.”
Emma nodded and gestured to Philip. “Mr. Horn, I’m pleased to introduce you to my cousin-in-law Mr. Philip Keswick. Philip, Mr. Horn was one of the gentlemen who assisted Vinnie and me in our horticultural society endeavor. He discovered a particularly useful piece of information on the Earl of Moray.”
Mr. Horn shrugged and blushed more deeply. “’Twas nothing.”
Although Philip didn’t doubt that Emma could spend the rest of the afternoon making polite conversation with all the patrons of the Rusty Plinth, he thought it was better to move the process along. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” he said ingratiatingly, for there was no reason to alienate a man whose girth was twice his own. “I wonder if you could help us with Mr. Squibbs. Do you know where we could find him?”