“If you kill anybody, Lady Clara,” he said, “I shall be only too happy to offer my services.”
“If I kill anybody,” she said, “I shall be far too discreetly ladylike about it to get caught. But I thank you for the offer.”
He looked into her unusually attractive face and believed her. “May one ask—”
“One may not,” she said. “That would spoil the fun. In the meantime, I ought to point out to you that a nobleman’s daughter may not hire detectives or post rewards for missing children. If we were permitted to do such useful things, why, where would it stop? Why should we not hire detectives to help us find husbands? Or post rewards for same? I daresay we should have a better chance of finding our soul mates in that manner than you seem to think I shall have in finding Toby Coppy.”
“I should think advertising would save a deal of bother,” he said. “All those nonsensical social rituals—”
“My lady, as my colleague has indicated, the chances of finding this boy are truly not at all good, especially in our present harassed circumstances,” Westcott said.
Radford looked at him. Westcott made the small, quick gesture of cutting his throat, meaning don’t. Now he signaled? Just when the conversation finally took an educational and entertaining turn?
“Even if our docket were not full,” the solicitor went on, “we should not advise attempting it. In our experience—”
“However,” Radford cut in before his fool friend could launch into the gory particulars, “in the event your efforts, with or without a detective, prove futile, you’re welcome to return to us. When the boy is arrested, that is. Then we might be of real use.”
The odds were strongly against Toby Coppy’s staying alive long enough to get arrested, but she seemed to have some noble notion of Saving Him, and Radford recognized fatal obstinacy when he saw it.
She studied him for a time, in the way she’d done before.
Nothing in the searching blue gaze told him she remembered him from that long-ago time.
And why, pray, should she? A lifetime had passed since then. They’d spent together perhaps an hour in total. She’d been a child and he’d been merely one of her brother’s many schoolmates. She’d seen him only the once. Radfords were common enough in England—or had been. Very likely, she hadn’t even known his name. Longmore never called him anything but “Professor.” Except for that hour, Radford and she had lived worlds apart. Even when she was in London with the rest of Fashionable Society, she might as well live on the moon.
Not to mention that even he, with his famous memory and exceptional powers of observation, wouldn’t have known her if he hadn’t had a glimpse of her tooth. The one she’d chipped trying to save him from his idiot cousin.
She said, “Thank you, Mr. Radford, I’ll bear that offer in mind as well.”
“We do greatly regret that we can’t offer your ladyship more help,” Westcott said.
Of course he regretted. He couldn’t get enough of gawking at her.
She gave a little wave. “I quite understand. My foolish mistake.” She started for the door, and Westcott hurried to open it. She paused there and smiled, and a ray of light seemed to brighten the somber room. “Well, then, no injuries, gentlemen?” she said. “No swooning? No tears? Excellent. Good day, Mr. Westcott.”
“Good day, my lady.”
“Good day . . . Professor,” she said. She gave a little laugh, and left.
Professor?
“Professor?” Westcott said.
Radford was staring at the closed door.
He started toward it, then stopped.
“What did she mean?” Westcott said. “About the injuries and swooning? That sounded like you.”
“It was me.” Radford brought his attention back—from Vauxhall and wherever else it had wandered to—to his friend. “The other day in Charing Cross, when Freame tried to run me down, the lady stepped in the way. Even he could see she was quality. Murdering annoying barristers is one thing, but an aristocratic female is an altogether different article. He swerved away, no doubt cursing vehemently, and plotting future violence.”
Radford had been instrumental in sending six of Freame’s favorite minions to permanent residence in penal colonies and two to eternity.
“Freame tried to kill you again?” Westcott said. “And you did not see fit to mention it to me? Attempted murder?”
“Good luck proving he aimed for me.” Radford faced a more difficult problem of proof in the Grumley case, one the defense was taking full advantage of, with the lackwit judge’s eager assistance.
“You did not see fit to mention the lady, either, I notice,” Westcott said.
“The incident did not strike me as important.”
Westcott’s eyes widened.
“Had she been injured, naturally, I should have had him taken up,” Radford said. “The swine killed a cur on its last legs, but the world regards stray mongrels as a nuisance. Scavengers collected it in no time, and the excitement was soon over. The lady and I did not introduce ourselves. She went her way and I went mine.”
Westcott gave him one of his looks. It wasn’t altogether unlike Lady Clara’s—the one of mingled exasperation and patience and perhaps, yes, there was an element of wonder in it, too. On Lady Clara’s face, however, the expression was more arresting.
Of course, he was used to Westcott.
And she was prettier. By a factor of six hundred.
“At first, she seemed surprised to see you,” Westcott said.
“She came to see us,” Radford said. “Why should she associate the fellow in Trafalgar Square with the pedant who wastes the court’s time with tiresome pauper children? But it happened only the other day. Small wonder she remembered. Clearly it amused her to quote my own words back to me.”
“I should like to know how anyone who’d met you would forget,” Westcott said. “Unless you kept silent, which I am certain is a physical impossibility. And Professor?” Westcott’s eyebrows rose in a most annoying manner.
“A nickname her eldest brother gave me when we were at Eton. She must have put two and two together and concluded I was the Radford he and Clevedon called Professor.”
He’d been positive she hadn’t remembered him from Vauxhall. He was deeply, painfully curious how she’d worked it out and how she’d contrived to do so without offering the smallest clue she was doing it.
A most intriguing veil or screen.
He couldn’t remember encountering such outside the criminal classes, and even there it was rare. Most criminals were not intelligent. They could be sly, yes, and they lied splendidly, but they were by no means difficult for a practiced eye to read.
She was intelligent and . . .
He became aware of himself following this path of thought and stopped. He hadn’t time for pointless speculation, especially about women who belonged to another universe. The Grumley trial was in its very last stages, and matters looked extremely unpromising.
She’d known that, too. How did she—
No, he did not have time to think about her.
He had windmills to tilt at.
The Old Bailey
Three days later
Not guilty.
Radford glanced up at the visitors’ gallery, where Lady Clara Fairfax sat, in disguise once more, the bulldog maid in attendance. Her ladyship had appeared there every day since their encounter in Westcott’s office.
She wore more or less what she’d worn that day. But for court, she’d done something to make her silken skin appear rough and dull, and she’d perched spectacles on her perfect nose. Still, he had no trouble recognizing her or the signs she gave of dismay. When the verdict was read, her mouth sagged, and she put her gloved hand up to her eye. Only a moment passed before the invisible screen came down, but that was more than enough time for him.
He became distantly aware of having failed her, and images rose in his mind of tearing the wig from his head and stomping on it, leaping into the dock and throttling Grumley, grabbing the judge and dashing his head against the bench.
That was his other, irrational self.
The rational Raven Radford would have been astounded had the verdict gone the other way.
All the same, it bothered him. He detached himself in the usual way, but the method didn’t work in the usual way. Even detached, he saw her mischievous smile when she’d exited his chambers the other day, and heard the short, light laugh she’d given at the startled expression he must have worn.
He did not understand how she’d found him out then and he did not understand why she’d appeared in court. Her disguise told him she oughtn’t to be there, and must have come at some risk. Why?
St. James’s Street
Monday 7 September