Linda Needham (10 page)

Why the devil he cared now baffled him completely. Except that his own name would be attached to the report, and it suddenly seemed vastly important that he know exactly what he would be signing.

“Well, then, my lord Everingham, I’ll do just that.”

“And you’ll report back to me immediately.”

“Of course.” Watford tented his fingertips together in a light, entirely unnecessary bow.

But it brought Charles a sense of order again, of everything in its place. Except Miss Finch—who had behaved herself remarkably well, considering.

“Then we’d best be leaving, Everingham,” Bowles said, then held out an envelope to him. “Oh, yes, Sidmouth wanted you to look at these.”

The writing on the outside of the envelope blurred, anger and dread stirring the ink together into a whirlpool.

Charles snatched the envelope from the man. “What is this?”

“Sidmouth didn’t say. Only that he wanted you to see them before you met with him next week.”

Charles dreaded these unguarded moments: documents presented to him without preamble or explanation, reminding him of the full measure of his paucity.

He had an office full of papers that he couldn’t read, files and boxes packed with decades of reports and estate records and tax assessments—and yet the papers might as well have been blank.

No matter, he would trick Bavidge into reading Sidmouth’s papers for him, bluster and bruise his way through the ordinary business of the day, as he always did.

Just read it, damn you, boy!
His father’s insults still clung to every letter, to his every effort to make sense of the ordinary.

The word is cat, Charles.

Yes, Father.

It’s a bloody three-letter word, you stupid clot.

It wasn’t his father’s blows on his back that had hurt so much as the disdain that had always dripped from his father’s curses—he’d failed the man who ought to be proud of him.

But he’d learned later that the heir to the earldom of Everingham could do as he pleased in school. He could taunt and terrorize and buy his way into academic success. He hadn’t taken an exam on his own since leaving the nursery. And even there he’d made it difficult for his teachers to catch him long enough to instruct him. Because instruction meant testing and writing, and that was a terrifying world that he didn’t understand.

He’d transformed himself into an utter hellion at home, gone through governesses and tutors like wine through a sieve until on his ninth birthday his father packed him off to school for good. The old man had died twelve years later to the day, and Charles gained his majority and the earldom with his infamous reputation intact.

But that wasn’t him at all, the rakehell and the bounder. He longed for quiet and softness and home. A wife who wouldn’t notice that he couldn’t read. Or a wife whom he could trust with his secret shame.

And a son to make it all up to one day.

He’d eventually learned that he wasn’t stupid. On the contrary, his mind was quicker than most.
He’d developed an unfailing memory for everything he’d ever heard. But still the doubts remained and could rob him of his confidence in an instant.

Worst of all, he was forced to trust people who couldn’t always be trusted. As he’d relied on Watford and Bowles and the other commissioners to do his reading for him regarding St. Peter’s Fields, to bring the information to him already digested and ready to act upon.

They never had a clue that he was using them in this way, and he’d convinced himself that this method wasn’t unusual for men of his station: that popes and government ministers, heads of state, kings, busy men everywhere, used their clerks and colleagues in the same way.

But what if it wasn’t good enough? What if it had never been?

“Now, if you’ll excuse us, gentlemen.” Charles walked to the door and motioned to Mumberton, who was standing just outside in the hallway. He was obviously not minding the boy; where was the child?

“Napping, my lord,” Mumberton said when Charles hissed the question at him, and Charles felt an out-of-proportion sense of relief.

Bowles and Watford both pledged their efforts to Charles’s list of casualties and gave their best wishes for the capture of Captain Spindleshanks, even as the young Bowles bowed again over Miss Finch’s hand.

Charles waited while Watford clucked over the woman as well, waited even longer while Mumberton led them from the room, waited through the end of his patience before finally turning to Miss Finch with every intention of setting the complicated matter of her husband’s capture in motion.

But she was standing at the tall bay window, bathed in the late afternoon brightness, far more a homeless waif than the wife of a radical reformer.

A radical herself, and so very proud of it.

“It’s no wonder, my lord, that your commission is in such a tattered state. If those are the best men you could find for the job, then we’re all in trouble.”

Bloody hell, if the man’s wife had only been bitter and foul-breathed, disgruntled or scoffing. He could have managed that quite well.

Instead, she was a handful of sunlight, and he hadn’t the slightest idea what to do with it, with her. Or with the memory of the perfect fit of her waist against his hands, the buoyant shape of her breast. The gentleness in her eyes when she looked at the boy.

He’d set a perfect trap. Now he hoped to hell he wouldn’t catch more than he’d bargained for.

“I
have no intention of standing here defending my commission to you, Miss Finch”—though he’d certainly found a gaping hole in his process of sifting through information.

A bloody chasm.

But she was shaking her head at him as though she’d gained a sudden insight, her laughter a rueful yet sumptuous sound.

“That’s because your commission is completely indefensible. If your files are as sloppy as your investigation, my lord, then you haven’t a chance of justice. And neither have I.”

“You?”

She sniffed. “My husband, of course. If you catch him.”

“
When
I catch him, madam. And it matters not
what you heard in here; my commission is not threatened in the least and not a subject for debate. Are you listening to me, Miss Finch?”

“Oh, yes, my lord.” Hollie had been listening very carefully to Everingham and his commissioners. To the carelessness and the disregard for the unforgivable consequences of not tending to the details.

What do you know of the children, gentlemen?

She’d listened in awe to that question too. So simple in the asking, yet fundamentally powerful and rife with hope, if it was truly the way Everingham’s mind worked. A concern for the innocent children. A sense that a parent wouldn’t endanger a child.

No matter that he had completely ignored his own.

Are you a good man, my wicked earl, in the guise of a heartless villain?

Are you irretrievable?

Or reformable?

She dearly hoped so. For Chip’s sake. For the other children. Even the worst calamities had opportunities within them, like the chance to change the man’s thinking, like finding herself living here among the wolves.

Like Sidmouth’s letter to Everingham. He’d tucked it unopened into the inside pocket of his coat. A tricky spot to steal it from while he was wearing it, but not impossible. She needed to discover its contents and to use them.

But how? She couldn’t very well seduce the man, to strip him of his coat and rifle his pockets. He believed that she was married and seemed bound by an admirable code of honor.

The letter would doubtless end up in Everingham’s office or library—perfect places for a careful spy to plumb the secret files of the Home Office. Then she would make them public and find public justice for her father.

And to guarantee an impartial review of the massacre to prove that she had been spreading the truth, not sedition.

There was so much work to do.

Hoping Everingham would follow her, Hollie brushed past him and started for the door. He was after her in a shot, hooked her arm to stop her, and turned her.

“Where the devil do you think you’re going?”

“I want to be absolutely sure that the so-called evidence you have collected from my dear Adam’s alleged crime is catalogued by me and then sealed, not left exposed in the middle of your library.”

“For what possible reason?”

“To keep the evidence from being tampered with by spies, informers, thugs. Ask Lord Bowles. Now
there’s
an upright man of honor.”

“I can assure you, madam, that the evidence is safe with me and my commission.”

“Ha! My marketing list isn’t safe with the likes of you, sir.” Hollie shrugged off his grip
and started down the corridor toward the library. “I insist that it all be catalogued and sealed, then given over to a third party, so that the evidence can’t be added to or subtracted from or the text altered to implicate my husband—or me—in crimes trumped up for the sake of the Home Office.”

The man followed and then beat her stride and met her in the doorway. “You’re in no position to be giving orders to me, madam. Least of all in the disposition of evidence. You obviously know nothing about the workings of a trial.”

“Oh, I’ve sat through enough trials for sedition and high treason to know that nothing is safe or sacred in the hands of the government. Least of all evidence that might prove my dear Adam innocent.”

“Whether you care to believe it or not, I am conducting an honest inquiry into a very serious matter.”

“Ballocks.”

“Are you calling me a liar, madam?”

“Only if you’re of a mind to take it that way, my lord.”

He began that growling sound in his throat, which made her stop and listen instead of dashing past him. “Let’s get one thing straight, madam. You may question my politics and even my title if you wish, but never question my integrity. Ever. For you will find me dangerously short-tempered on the matter.”

“I shouldn’t worry about it, my lord. I don’t think any the worse of you for your shortcomings.”

“And what exactly are my shortcomings?”

Not your eyes, my lord.
He had very fine eyes, dark as midnight and always questing where they shouldn’t. But she couldn’t very well say that.

Or mention that he had possibilities.

“You, sir, have inherited the natural penchant of your class for lying to suit your politics and your purse. Though I doubt you can help it from your lofty height.”

“Meaning?”

“Just that you project your own changeable ethics onto the heart and soul of the average working man, and thereby believe him as lacking as yourself.”

“Lacking what, exactly?” He folded his arms across his chest, scoffing.

“Certainly lacking interest in discovering the absolute truth. Any truth will do, if it closes the books on a thorny matter of justice.”

He laughed his derision, as she’d so often heard him in Parliament. “Your gall is boundless, madam.”

“And you, sir, wouldn’t know the truth about the Peterloo Massacre if it was clinging to the end of your watch fob. Because you don’t want to know. If you did, you’d keep the inquiry open until you were thoroughly satisfied.” She crossed
her arms, taunting him for his own good. “And you’re not satisfied, are you?”

It took him too long to recover from the question, and he dodged it badly. “That’s quite enough, Miss Finch. My investigation is nearly complete.”

“It can’t possibly be.” She’d just have to work on him, wear him down, one drop at a time. “You haven’t interviewed
me
, my lord.”

His brows drew together for an instant, and then he laughed again. “Ah, and your account of the day’s events would be unbiased? From your viewpoint below the hustings, where you must have nearly been trampled.”

“I’m an eyewitness. A trained journalist. A very good and impartial one. I was there, my lord.”

“So was your husband, madam.”

“I didn’t know him then.”

“And your father.”

God, the memories were fresh and raw. And hit her like a blow to the heart.

Everingham paused, then expelled a weary breath that made his broad shoulders droop, as though he was ashamed of pressing that particular advantage. “I mean only that your testimony would be tarnished by your loss.”

“Not tarnished, my lord, just made sharper. I lost my father, not my objectivity.” At least she hoped she hadn’t lost it, hoped she wasn’t losing more than that—the gapingly safe distance she’d
felt between herself and Charles Stirling. “Show me your evidence, sir. Let me read the depositions and the interviews and study the maps and the statistics, and I shall gauge your integrity then.”

He paused, as though he were actually considering it. “Not possible.”

“Afraid of what I’ll find, my lord?”

“Madam, the information is confidential and must remain so. This is a matter for the Home Secretary and the Chancellor and me. Not for common knowledge, to be broadcast to the public by the press or by some radical scoundrel in a moth-eaten costume.”

“Secret information compiled by your secret committee from secret witnesses. Of course.”

“As it should be. The facts in a case like this are easily distorted.”

“By which side?” Hollie crossed her arms. “Go ahead, sir, ask me a question. Any question at all.”

He studied her for a long time, then leaned back against the desk, folded his arms across that massive chest, and asked the only question she couldn’t possibly answer.

“Where is your husband, Miss Finch?”

Charles loved watching the woman: the play of hot emotions on her mouth and in her breathing, the crackling fire of her independence, the impertinent arc of an eyebrow.

“You’ll have to look around you, my lord. He
could be anywhere. Anywhere at all.”

She spun on her heel and left him for her precious sea of placards and handbills and song birds.

His life had been changed irrevocably in the last hour. For good or ill, the woman and her opinions had altered him.

Because on top of all the rest, she’d brought him face to face with the disquieting conclusion that he might be completely in the dark, his position of power threatened by his greatest fear: that there might be more in the commission’s files than he had been told about and much less than was necessary. Whether purposely or not, the men who reported to him filtered every fact and statistic through their own prejudices before he learned of it, leaving him with a suddenly prickling conscience and the very real menace of having the report found to contain false and misleading facts, convenient logic.

When he finally signed and submitted the report on the debacle at St. Peter’s Fields to the Cabinet and then to Parliament, the official record of the events and the results of the findings would bear his name. He couldn’t risk not knowing the facts, all of them, from every side, whether overlooked or deliberately hidden or merely misinterpreted.

Though how he was going to master the problem without revealing his inability to read was another matter.

For the moment he would employ the tactics he’d always used: wholesale intimidation and imperious bluster. He stood beside the bulwark of his desk and watched Miss Finch pick a piece of paper out of a small box.

“Read it, madam.”

“Are you sure, my lord?”

“Read!”

She flicked him a wry smile and read unabashedly, “One pair of ladies drawers…”

What the bloody hell was he going to do with a woman like that?