The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(34)

In the bedroom that she was to use, she peeled off her wet clothing and began dressing in the clothes Hester left for her. They were Hester’s own clothes, and Hester was about twice her size and six inches shorter, but Marian was only happy to get out of her sodden buckskins. She hung her wet clothes before the weakly sputtering fire. She would need to do something about this predicament immediately; she couldn’t bear to think of her father in a cold house.

“Hester,” Marian said when the old woman arrived in the bedroom, carrying a stack of bed linens, “where are the other servants?” Marian sent more than enough to cover the wages of a pair of maids.

“Forgive me, Your Grace, but you asked us not to write unless it was urgent.”

Marian took one side of the sheet and helped drape it over the mattress. She had indeed asked Hester not to write, believing that the fewer people who knew where her father was, the better. “Whatever it is, you ought to tell me now.”

“I had to let the maids go. Sir John Fanshawe raised the rents this past quarter.”

“I see,” Marian said faintly. A chill passed over her, and it wasn’t entirely from the cold. “He must have raised it by quite a bit if the sum I sent didn’t cover it.”

Hester twisted her hands in her apron. “He knows the Duke of Clare has deep pockets. And . . . well. He said something about how you’d prefer for Lord Richard not to know about the decline in the earl’s health.”

Of course that would be it. Of course this Sir John would be friends with her eldest brother. One of the reasons Marian had moved her father clear across the country was that Richard had begun to drop hints about their father being safer in a place where he could be looked after, a nice private institution where he could be kept under lock and key—and where the estate would be safe from any of their father’s caprices. Marian had understood what he meant: a lunatic asylum.

Marian had already taken steps to ensure that the earl couldn’t touch any more of his capital, but she could hardly tell her brother that she had been forging their father’s signature for years. Besides, the damage was already done—the money was gone, the estate having long since dwindled to the acres around Chiltern Hall and a handful of investments that Marian kept out of her father’s reach. Locking the earl up would do nothing to improve the estate’s fortunes. Richard was living—quite comfortably, at that—off his wife’s fortune, and if the remnants of the estate were left untouched, it would recover in time for Richard’s son to have something to inherit. But she knew from experience that there was no reasoning with Richard; he was one of those men who greeted all attempts at argument with vitriolic disagreement, simply on principle.

So Marian married the duke, the duke paid off Marian’s father’s debts, and Marian moved her father across the country to a place where he would be out of Richard’s sight and, she hoped, out of Richard’s mind.

But now this Sir John Fanshawe, some man she knew only from the handful of letters in which she had arranged to hire this house, thought he could threaten Marian’s father’s safety simply to line his pockets. She didn’t know if Richard would care in the least what Sir John had to say about the earl’s mind. But it didn’t matter. A year of marriage to the duke had taught Marian to take seriously even the idlest of hints made by men who had the power to make good on their threats.

Something wilted inside her at the knowledge that after everything—after murder and bloodshed, after nights spent sneaking around and mornings spent plotting, after nearly losing her life—she was once again captive to the whims of a man who knew her to be powerless against him. She felt hard done by to be blackmailed twice in a single autumn. She felt hard done by in general, truth be told.

What she needed now was to get up and dust herself off. The past year may have been an unbroken string of catastrophes, but she was alive and Eliza was healthy. A year ago nobody would have given her odds on either outcome. Even now, months after Eliza’s birth, she sometimes hesitated to eat or drink lest it bring on another bout of sickness; sometimes she would smell peppermint or ginger and forcibly remember the noxious and useless decoctions prescribed by the duke’s physicians. Sometimes she woke up gasping, remembering the weeks of headache and inability to fill her lungs, the sense of drowning on dry land.

After Eliza was born, the wet nurse had seen to the baby, who at that point seemed as much a stranger as she had while still in the womb, the only thing they had in common their likely demise. This is my daughter, Marian would think to herself, trying to believe it. She would look at Eliza’s tiny red face and try to see the child as hers, as family.

When the first blackmail letter came, it somehow made more sense than daughter and mother and wife. Here was a mission, here was a task. It was a rope thrown to a castaway. And there was the man on the other side of the letters—by turns clever and dangerous, a shadow in the night, a person who seemed to see her as who she was. Marian had almost found her way back to the person she believed herself to be.

Well, she had almost done a good number of things, and none of them amounted to the slightest good. She had almost provided for Percy’s and Eliza’s futures but now the duke was dead and there would be no money from him. She had almost managed to care for her father but instead he was in a shabby little house and the threat of the asylum still hung over his head.

And over her dead body would she allow anyone else to threaten the safety of the people she loved. She simply would not stand for it. She had dealt with worse than Sir John Fanshawe and lived to tell the tale.