The Wedding Night Affair--An Historical Mystery by L.C. Sharp (i have read the book .TXT) 📗

Hawksworth’s fleshy lips curled. “You condescend to stay in this hovel?”

Now that was downright rude. “Hardly a hovel, my lord. After all, the Duke of Newcastle lives nearby.”

“And you’re on good terms with him, I presume?” The earl said, sneering.

His daughter did not get her looks from him, that was for sure. Not that Ash would be so rag-mannered as to voice his opinion aloud. “Tolerably,” he replied, preferring not to go into details.

From his research, Ash knew the earl supported the Tories, and generally took the opposite opinion to the duke and his brother. He could, perhaps, use that in the future. Knowing a man’s weak points exposed his pressure points. Exert pressure, and he broke more easily. Fault lines, one might say.

Ash had been careful never to cultivate any of those for himself. His family, yes, but that couldn’t be helped. He would not desert them. But politics? Not so much. His attitude occasionally infuriated the duke, but Newcastle’s more temperate, and brilliant brother, currently the Prime Minister, merely smiled and nodded. He knew Ash’s game, and it wasn’t in Whitehall.

The earl tilted his chin but said nothing.

Juliana tilted hers, a perfect echo of her father’s gesture. “Sir, I am a widow, with the rights of one. I have retained the services of Sir Edmund as my lawyer, and if necessary, my barrister. I am in his house by his invitation and by permission of the magistrates. It is what I want.”

“Widow,” the earl repeated with a curl of his lip. “A self-made one. Do you want me to cast you off entirely, girl? What do you think would become of you then? You are fit for nothing except as some man’s wife. We saw to that, your mother and I.”

Juliana did not respond to that, except to say, “I cannot influence your decision any more than you can influence mine. Sir Edmund told you the terms on which you and my mother may visit, if you wish. If you do not, I entirely understand.”

The earl switched his attention from her to Ash. Ash said nothing. He’d waited out better men than him. More patient, too. In his own time, he broke the fraught silence. “My lord, your daughter deserves a proper investigation. By the time I have done, she will not face the charge of murder. If she does not bear this trial now, she will carry the crime for the rest of her life.”

“Who else could have done it?” the earl demanded.

Quite something when her father didn’t believe her. Not until that moment had Ash understood exactly how alone Juliana was. He answered coolly, “The servants’ jib door was unlocked. Anyone could have entered that way. The house had been full of guests celebrating the wedding, so anyone could have hidden or posed as a servant from another establishment.”

“Then how could my daughter sleep through the murder?”

Ash sighed. The man had no imagination at all. “Have you seen the condition Uppingham left her in? She was sorely treated by her husband. She could have been unconscious rather than asleep when someone drove a dagger between his ribs.”

He paused, waiting to see his lordship’s reaction.

“Sir, have you no sensibility for a delicate female? I do not know how your sisters were reared, but my daughter is not used to such crude descriptions!”

The outrage was entirely false, meant, Ash concluded, to disconcert him. He did not respond to bluster. Before Ash could reply to the pompous ass, Juliana did it for herself.

“I was there, sir,” she said. “Sir Edmund is not telling you anything I did not see for myself.” His guest sat calmly, hands folded, head up. The tranquility of her expression was absolute, and her voice firm. “I have asked Sir Edmund to keep me fully informed. He is only conforming to my wishes.”

Conforming, was he? But he liked that she was facing her father like this. The old tyrant needed a setdown. His daughter had obeyed him right up to the last—and it had nearly been the end of her. He had no doubt that Uppingham would have killed her eventually, unless someone had intervened for her.

Horrible thought. Impossible to think of it without revulsion so strong it made his stomach churn. Ash turned his mind back to practicalities.

In that eventuality Ash and Bow Street would never have heard of it, because the aristocracy looked after its own. They would have found a story to keep the truth from the authorities. But a grisly murder witnessed by servants could not be concealed. The law was nothing if it didn’t apply to everyone equally.

“Such accounts are not suitable for a gently reared young female,” Hawksworth said.

“Even if the gently reared young female saw her husband’s body the day after his murder? Woke up covered in his blood?”

The earl made a sound that was half outrage, half pain. Like the bellow of a dying bull. Not that Ash had heard many dying bulls, but he’d passed by Smithfield meat market a time or two. The sound was similar.

He’d done with this vile man for today. He opened the door. “My lord, you are welcome to visit whenever you wish. But please arrive discreetly, and send word of your arrival before you come. We don’t want Lady Uppingham to spend her time in a cell in Newgate, do we?”

His lordship shuddered. “The scandal would spread even further. Very well, no fanfare.”

“I was thinking more about gaol fever,” Ash murmured as he ushered the earl out of his drawing room.

The man was a boor, but easily controlled. He had a modicum of intelligence, enough to understand that Ash was in the right at the moment.

As he bade a relieved farewell to the earl at the front door, Ash wondered what kind of life Juliana had suffered before her marriage. He had guessed at some, but perhaps he hadn’t heard the half of it.

His interest in the case of Lady Juliana Uppingham