Tarnished Amongst the Ton

A waiter came at the crook of his finger. ‘Are there any boxing salons near here?’

‘Yes, my lord. Quite a few. Gentleman Jackson’s is the prime one, of course. I’ll give you the direction, shall I, my lord? Or any cabby will take you there.’

‘I’ll walk.’ Ashe took the slip of paper and gave the man a coin. ‘Thank you.’

He spent an hour pounding hell out of a punch bag, then sparred with one of Jackson’s assistants, the great man being booked for the day. It was some help, the ache of the bruises where punches had landed were a distraction from the internal ache. He ate a hot pie and drank porter in the Red Lion down an alleyway off Pall Mall, making himself focus on the taste and texture of the food as he had on the mechanics of the bout he had fought.

When he had finished he walked north with no fixed idea of where to go, just needing to move.

‘My lord!’

He stopped dead and turned. A woman in a plain gown and cloak was hailing him. A maid by the look of her. Then he saw it was Anna, Phyllida’s woman.

‘Oh, my lord, I was coming to find you.’ She panted to a halt beside him. ‘Then I saw you cross St James’s Square…’

Ashe looked around him and found he was almost in Haymarket. ‘What do you want?’ he asked curtly.

‘It’s Miss Phyllida. She came home this morning looking as if she’d been crying her eyes out, but she said it was just a cold coming on. Then she’d no sooner opened her post than she was casting up her accounts and shaking like a leaf.

‘I got her to bed, but she said she had to go out later and off she went, wearing those awful clothes she puts on to go down east. And she’d said she wasn’t doing that any more.’ Anna took a deep breath and looked him in the face with something very like accusation in her eyes. ‘Something’s wrong, my lord, and I’m betting it’s to do with you because she told me you wouldn’t be round any more and bit my head off when I asked why. So what have you done to her?’

‘Nothing. Your mistress has decided she wants nothing more to do with me.’ He turned on his heel and walked away. He’d be damned if he was going to be interrogated by some maidservant in the public street.

Two yards. Phyllida crying her eyes out. Well, she rejected me, not the other way round. Five yards. Sick, shaking. She deserves it. I feel sick. Ten yards. Going east. Into the slums, into the dangerous world of Harry Buck and his ilk.

Ashe looked back. Anna was standing where he had left her, but when she saw him stop she ran to him. ‘My lord?’

‘What post?’

‘Just one letter. She didn’t say who from.’

‘Where is it?’

Anna screwed up her face in concentrated thought. ‘Don’t know. She didn’t have it when I took her upstairs. I’ll be guessing she dropped it in the drawing room when she took ill.’ She put her hand on his arm. ‘Please, my lord, do you think there was something in the letter?’

‘I don’t know, but it is the only clue we have. Come on.’

Anna found the card under the sofa. Ashe read it, once in stunned disbelief, the second time in cold anger. Come back to work. She hadn’t been raped, she’d been a whore. Phyllida had lied to him, she had hidden this disgraceful secret and only the danger of exposure had forced her to break off their relationship. He could have ended up married to her—and then what would have happened when one of her former clients turned up?

To hell with her, she deserves everything she gets. Ashe ripped the card in half, then made himself look at it again, made himself start thinking with his head and his heart about the real woman, the woman he knew and not the one who had wounded his pride.

Phyllida had been genuinely inexperienced and nervous when he had made love to her. This creature Buck had most likely used her only once. And now he was blackmailing her to get her back to his brothel, into his power.

It would not just be money he’d be after. Phyllida might not realise it, but Ashe could read between the lines and the danger she was in made him cold with fear for her. How she had ended up in this mire could wait for later.

‘Have you heard of Harry Buck?’ he demanded.

‘Yes.’ The maid went pale. ‘He’s a dangerous thatch-gallows, is that one.’

‘Where’s his brothel?’

She gawped at him, then seemed to realise he was serious. ‘He’s got half a dozen of them, so I’ve heard, but I don’t know where they are.’

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nbsp; How long would it take him to scour the slums of the East End of London without help, without local knowledge? Even if he found her brother and explained all this, there was no guarantee Gregory would know where to go. He seemed to have visited the gaming houses, but there was no hint he habituated brothels in such a rough area.

Then he recalled Phyllida asking about his name and whether Ashe was the same as Ashok. She knew an Indian trader in the docks by that name and he, she’d said, was a rogue, but a good-hearted one.