“I am certainly going to see him tomorrow. I only hope he’ll be willing to speak with me.”
Lottie scoffed. “We’ll go with you, of course.”
“Yes, absolutely.” Victoria’s musical laugh broke the tension. “You’d be surprised at what people are willing to tell a duke’s daughter.”
Fletcher was watching a bird. A mottled brown with a gray head, it looked like it would fit nicely in his hand. It hopped along the sooty ledge outside the window and bobbed its head, avid curiosity gleaming in its black eyes. None of this was remarkable.
The remarkable part was that he was watching a bird while ignoring his attorney.
Richard Jenkins worked hard for Fletcher. He needed to in order to prevent the collapse of the precarious house of cards Fletcher called his business interests. Despite years of trying to take things aboveboard, Fletcher remained deeply immersed in the dirty empire his father had created.
Jenkins was one vital layer in Fletcher’s shield of propriety, helping to advance his position to a more respectable degree. Fletcher couldn’t afford to ignore him.
But he couldn’t rip his mind away from replaying his encounter with Seraphina.
She’d been a shining example of English womanhood, in a striped dress and pinned collar that gleamed white even in the cloud of a London fog. The honest truth was she’d grown into a beautiful woman. Fully matured and fine-featured in a way that appealed to his basest levels. She awoke in him a hungry animal with the impulse to claim. To take.
But he needed to be patient a little while yet. He couldn’t risk her footing in society, not when he was so close to claiming her as his proper wife. Though she’d be perfectly educated and gracefully elegant, she’d be sympathetic toward his striving for a better life—without holding him responsible for his early years.
The gnawing impatience would be easily assuaged with a bottle or two of brandy.
“Tell me about Miss Miller,” he said abruptly.
Jenkins floundered. His watery eyes went wide, and he skimmed a hand over his nearly bald pate. His collar wiggled when he swallowed. “Excuse me?”
“Miss Miller.” Fletcher hitched an ankle over his knee. “I’d like a report on her status.”
The attorney shuffled through a stack of papers. “Did you not receive the quarterly report?”
“I did.” He pinched the crease of his trousers. The finely spun wool was smooth to the touch. He’d come quite a long way from the days when a length of rope had held up his breeches. “You were tasked with ensuring the acceptability of her position. Are you saying you have nothing beyond that to report?”
Jenkins visibly blanched, his lips moving without sound. But then he shook it off and leaned forward in his seat. That determination to hold his ground was what made him invaluable. Fletcher had perfected his quelling look over the years. The man who could withstand it was worth his weight in gold.
“The most recent quarterly payment has been seen to.” Jenkins consulted a sheet of paper, tracing the lines. “Miss Miller is coming to the end of her acceptable tenure. At this point only she and two other ladies of the same age remain.”
Fletcher was entirely aware of that. It was the sole reason he’d given in to the desire to wander down her street on a flimsy pretense. Soon she’d move on, and he’d be driven to more extreme lengths to keep her within his influence.
“Have you looked into a way to pay her?”
“The funds with which you wished to endow her?”
That was another reason Jenkins was a necessary cog in his life. Fletcher had spent long hours striving to better his speech and shed the traces of the gutter that still clung to his heels. It didn’t always work, not when he spent every day down in the muck. Jenkins reminded him of the intricacies of the law and pulled him back when he dipped into a more shaded aspect.
“Yes,” he said with a nod. “The endowment.”
Jenkins’s brow knitted with consideration. “It will be difficult if you don’t wish to be revealed. Miss Miller knows herself to be without family. Creating a great-aunt to do us the favor of passing on in order to solve the situation will not be sufficient.”
“Indeed.”
Perhaps he should give in to the temptation. Bestow the money upon her personally. Few things in his life actually posed such a temptation. If he wanted liquor, he drank it. If he wanted women, he took them. If he needed money, he made it—by fair means or foul.
The idea that there was something he could not touch petted his fur the wrong direction.
More than that, letting Seraphina wander the world flush with funds carried an element of risk. Unscrupulous suitors would sniff her out, and Fletcher would be forced to similarly unscrupulous means to drive them away.
A quiet scratching heralded the opening of the door. A clerk poked in a head adorned by a shockingly red swath of hair. “Your pardon, sir, but you’ve a visitor.”
Irritation pinched Jenkins’s features. “I told you I would tolerate no disturbances so long as Mr. Thomas was here.”
The clerk’s pale skin colored almost as red as his hair. “I know, sir. But she won’t be put off. More particularly, her friend won’t. She says if you refuse to see them, she’ll express her displeasure to her father, the Duke of Faircroft.”
The boy wouldn’t last long with the way he shook under Jenkins’s thunderous look.
“Did you at least ask the lady her name?”
“It’s a Miss Sera Miller.”
Jenkins flattened his hands on the desk. His jaw dropped a fraction, and his gaze slid to Fletcher. Caterpillar-like eyebrows rose in inquiry.
Fletcher found himself surprisingly gratified that Seraphina hadn’t lost all of her resourcefulness in that school, not if she’d found his attorney’s office. For there was no other conceivable reason she could be there.
He flicked through the possible results and repercussions of such a meeting. Circumstances were too rushed, by far. Despite the fact that Seraphina had come looking for answers, she might not adjust well to being provided all of them at once.
He snagged a piece of paper from Jenkins’s desk and held his hand out. A pen dropped into his palm. Good man.
A few short sentences later, Fletcher folded the sheet and handed it to Jenkins. “Give her this. Answer no questions.”
“As you wish, sir.” Jenkins nodded.
With that, Fletcher slipped through the rear exit of Jenkins’s office, a door he had come to know well throughout the early years of taking over his dear departed father’s gambling halls and drinking dens. He’d been headstrong and rough-necked as he tried to conquer an entire underworld operation by sheer youthful determination. Quite a few scrapes with the law forced him to figure out how the cogs fit together. Jenkins had provided quiet support and, on occasion, a place to lay low.
No more. Never again, if Fletcher had anything to say about it.
He shouldn’t risk a meeting with her now. Long years of keeping her safe meant staying far away so she wouldn’t be tainted by the stain of his world.
But that simple prohibition was harder to enforce since beholding her as a grown woman. Her delicate features and wide-eyed fascination had roused a dangerous yearning. Perhaps seeing her once before he concluded his stratagem would be enough to get him through.
Chapter Three
Sera fingered the single slip of paper as the carriage rumbled deeper into London’s seedier boroughs. The roads narrowed with every quarter mile, and the buildings tipped in overhead, closing off all the air. Dark gray soot had settled on every flat surface and some that weren’t, such as the head of a tiny, wide-eyed chimney sweep. The poor creature stared at the fine carriage as if wondering what such a conveyance was doing in Whitechapel.
Sera wondered the same thing as she sank back against the leather bench of the carriage Lottie had hired.
The area was familiar. Too familiar. Every street they turned down made her heart thump a little faster. She knew this place.
She’d thought it a part of her distant past.
Sera hadn’t felt such an unabashed rush of excitement in years. The last time had probably been on her eleventh birthday, when she’d somehow developed the ridiculous supposition that her father would be coming for her. After all, it had been the first birthday after her mother’s death. Also the first time she’d thought of celebration since the six months she and her mother had lived with Mac Thomas and his son, Fletcher. So Sera tied her best pink ribbon around her waist, ensured her pinafore was sparkling clean and sat calmly in her tiny boarding school bedroom, to wait all by herself. Once dusk had come and she hadn’t eaten supper, both her roommates had filed in with eyes filled with sniffing disdain she hadn’t thought eleven year olds capable of.
How grateful Sera was that Victoria and Lottie had treated following through on the note as a matter of course. Victoria had even hornswoggled two of her father’s footmen to act as guards.
Sera rubbed a hand across the base of her throat, hoping to soothe her tumbling nerves as she opened the paper once again. In only two days the crease had become softened and worn from incessant folding and refolding. But the words of the cryptic note explained no more than they had on first examination.
Miss Miller,
Should you decide to continue investigating the origins of your bounty, come see me. Be aware you might not like what you discover. Come alone but for those necessary to your peace of mind and safety.
Unsigned, of course. The address had inspired no wonder beyond the fact that the lodgings were in a part of London most of the upper class pretended didn’t exist. While Sera had read the note over and over until she memorized the short sentences, Victoria and Lottie had debated allowing her to go unaccompanied. Finally, awakening from her stunned haze, Sera had allowed only Mary, Victoria’s maid, to ride with her in the carriage.
As the vehicle drew nearer to the destination, tension wrapped around Sera’s spine, locking every bone into alignment. Her corset felt as if it had been winched too tightly and cut off easy breath.
During those last years with her mother, when their small world descended even further into a sticky morass of ugliness, they’d lived here. On the corner was Old Maude’s home. They drove past the baker’s shop, where the owner had been quite willing to run a tab on their behalf, but only if eight-year-old Sera came to collect the day-old bread herself. When Mother had realized the way the man leered at her innocent daughter, she’d stormed in through the back entrance. Sera had heard the yelling three doors down. But he’d never dared cut them off.
The conveyance finally stopped in front of the one fine building in the area. Four stories high and narrow, it shone with a cleanliness distinctly lacking from everything around the neighborhood. Mullioned windows gleamed, and the front stairs were inlaid with creamy marble. The door had been painted bright red and adorned with a gold knocker in the shape of a lion’s head.
The carriage door swung open, and the footman lowered the step.
Sera placed her hand on his outstretched arm but couldn’t hold back the tremors that made her seem to pat his sleeve.
“Are you sure, miss?” To prompt such a breach of protocol, she must have looked awful indeed.
She wasn’t surprised, considering her heavy cheeks and how her troubled thoughts swam. She forced the smile she’d given when she’d been fourteen and suffered having her braids dipped in an inkpot by Lady Cordelia Hardy. Over years of confrontations with cruel girls who wished to remind her of her place, she’d perfected her cool façade. “Thank you for your concern, but I shall be fine.”
Despite her nervousness at returning to the neighborhood, she was fully convinced of her security and safety. There was no logical reason why someone would pay such amazing sums for years of education only to maintain nefarious intentions on her person. Gathering women for such salacious aims was possible through much less elaborate methods.
Stepping down, she craned her neck upward to see the top of the imposing edifice. The low-lying, never-ending London fog draped it in oblique shadows. The building simply…wasn’t right. Turning a half circle, she observed the rest of the street. Three sister buildings across the way nestled into each other in a slight tilt. To the right stood a once-grand place falling into disrepair as the violet-painted shutters wiggled free of their moorings.
Once more she faced the address of the appointment and tilted her head. It simply didn’t belong, no matter how she squinted. The fault lay in more than the fact it had been recently constructed, when everything around it barely clung to fractured foundations. Sera couldn’t shake the feeling that another building should stand in its place, but she couldn’t quite remember what that ought to be. Something smaller. Darker. More frightening.
The fear was easy to shake off. She’d been through much worse.
The footman helped Mary down from the carriage. The maid fell into step behind her as Sera mounted the grand stairs.
The door swung open before she had a chance to test the intimidating knocker. She was glad not to have needed to put her fingers in the lion’s maw.
The butler, while finely dressed, was young for his station. His swath of dark hair was in distinct disarray, and if she weren’t mistaken, the yellowish smudge at the corner of his eye was the remains of a bruise. “Yes?” he asked, without the slightest nod toward propriety.