Chapter 21

Living with two highly spirited sisters had left Emily with an abiding appreciation for the merits of minding one's own business when appropriate. In the case of her sisters, this had sadly not been appropriate most of the time, which had led Emily to deliver such lectures as "Do not try to put a saddle on the cat," (twins: age six), "You cannot poke through other people's homes while they are not there, no, not even if those homes seem highly interesting to you," (twins: age nine), and "Lord help me, if the two of you jump out of a dark place again, I am going to suffer a heart attack and die, and then where will you be, did you ever think of that?" (twins: age sixteen, which was, in Emily's opinion, far too late for such a discussion).

In the case of Priscilla, however, who was storming around somewhere upstairs, the stamping of her feet interspersed with the occasional shriek of frustration, Emily was perfectly entitled to look at the ceiling, say, "Hm. Poor thing seems to be having a hard day," and return to her book.

And so, she did, enjoying an interesting description of the clothing worn in Ancient Egypt instead of wondering or worrying over whatever nonsense her mother-in-law was up to.

Or at least she did so right up until the Dowager appeared, like an angry specter, in the doorway of what was now Emily's own parlor.

"Goodness," Emily said, jumping a bit. "Are you all right?"

For all the that the Dowager was a sharp-tongued harridan, she generally at least looked the part of a genteel aristocratic woman. This was no longer the case. The older woman looked frazzled, wisps of hair escaping her coiffure and threatening the entire structure of her updo, spots of bright red on her cheeks.

"You," she seethed, pointing an accusatory finger at Emily. "You did this."

Emily barely resisted the urge to look around the room, as if there might be someone else nearby who knew what on Earth was going on.

"I'm not sure what you're talking about," she said, finding it uncommonly difficult to maintain her composure. Usually, she was well-practiced in remaining calm even when faced with someone in dramatically high spirits. Now, however, faced with Priscilla's apparent fury instead of the chaotic but ultimately well-meaning incidents her sisters tended to cause, she found herself feeling remarkably shaken.

"No," sneered Priscilla viciously. "No, I'm so certain you don't. After all, women like you never do, do you? You think yourselves eternal, don't you, young and whorish like you are."

Emily gasped at the insult which only made Priscilla's expression twist more violently.

"No, I suppose you aren't that young, though, are you? Just a plain, boring harlot, too old and bland to attract a man with anything besides what's between your legs." Priscilla laughed bitterly. "You'll see soon enough. And you'll be worse off than me. At least I've beauty and charms, the kind you could only ever dream about." She gave Emily a long look. "Although you managed to snatch yourself a wealthy man, I suppose. No accounting for taste."

It took Emily a moment to move beyond the shock of being so addressed—and by a woman! And in her own home! But once she did, the rage rose swift and hot inside her. She pushed to her feet; she towered over Priscilla, and, in this moment, she was darkly pleased by it.

"How dare you?" she spat. Her hands were shaking so she clenched them into fists. "You awful, awful wretch of a woman." Priscilla opened her mouth to speak again, but Emily was unstoppable. "You are repulsive. I have given you no reason—no reason at all—to behave like this. You don't like that I married Benedict? Well, too bad; it's done. I am finished making allowances for you. You will speak to me respectfully."

Priscilla tossed her head dramatically. "This is my house. I don't have to?—"

"This is my house," Emily interjected, voice strong and furious. "You may rail and whine, but it changes nothing. I am the Countess now. And as my husband, the Earl, has pointed out to you more than once, if you cannot behave properly, you will be asked to leave. Since I daresay that this little spectacle is unlikely to fit his definition of ‘proper behavior,' I would suggest you cease these insults at once—before I am tempted to tell him what has occurred here."

Emily was, frankly, shocked at herself. Shocked, but not sorry. This was, without a doubt, the harshest she'd ever been with a person—and yet she could not help but believe her reaction fair, given the vicious insults that the Dowager Countess had thrown, entirely unprovoked, in her direction.

Despite the forcefulness of her words—and the full-throated anger with which she'd hurled them—Emily had not really expected them to have much effect.

She was thus doubly shocked when the Dowager collapsed onto a settee, buried her face in her hands, and broke into noisy, wracking sobs.

Emily paused, feeling quite at a loss on how to handle this turn of events. She was nearly certain that she'd never seen someone of the Dowager's age cry. Really, this was the kind of thing Diana was poised to handle—Diana's mother was prone to this kind of histrionics.

"Um," she said. Was she meant to comfort her? Normally, Emily would say certainly…but she had been the one to cause these tears. Also, she thought stubbornly, the older woman had deserved it.

In the end, however, her sympathy wore out over her reluctance. Feeling entirely unequipped to manage this spectacle—which was really saying something as Emily had managed no shortage of spectacles in her day—she gingerly sat down next to the Dowager, reached out a hand to pat her on the shoulder, there, there already springing to her lips?—

Crack!

It all happened so quickly that the first thing Emily realized was that she was leaning back against the settee's cushions. Her hand was touching her cheek which smarted and stung.

The bloody woman had slapped her.

Another half instant and Emily was responding, entirely automatically. She took in the sneer on the Dowager's face and thrust out her arm to protect herself against another blow, should it come, and?—

"What the hell is going on here?"

Benedict's voice was a clap of thunder. And, like lightning, Priscilla's expression morphed from one of rage to one of terror.

"Oh, Benny!" she cried. "Thank goodness you're here! The little wretch attacked me!"

In horror, Emily took in the scene around her—the tears on the Dowager's cheeks, the way her own arm was extended as if in aggression—and realized that, no matter how fraudulent, the accusation was compelling.

But not even the tiniest flicker of doubt entered her husband's face.

"No," he said flatly. "She did not. I do not believe you, and I am sick of your lies. You are no longer welcome here. You are leaving this house, and you will not return. Gather your things; I'll give you an hour. After that, I shall have you removed—by force if necessary."

"But, Benny," the Dowager cried, reaching for her son, "you cannot cast me out into the streets?—"

Benedict knocked her hands aside, not roughly, but with clear intent, before his mother could grasp him.

"No," he agreed. "Though I'm not sure you wouldn't deserve it. You will live in the Dowager's property from now on—as is appropriate. I would hurry, though; your hour has already begun."

The calculation in Priscilla's face was evident, the way she paused to consider the merits of trying another sympathetic approach. Whether she decided against this by means of logic or by cause of emotional excess, Emily could not divine. Yet the transformation was clear. Gone was the sorrowful mother, begging for sympathy. Before them now stood a woman who felt herself unjustly scorned—and was spitting mad about it.

"Coward!" she screeched. "You're a coward—just like your worthless father before you! Just like all men." She grabbed a cushion from the settee and hurled it at Benedict, who deflected it easily. "You all think yourselves so powerful, so justified, when you are nothing but abandoners. Abandoners!"

"You are acting like a child," Benedict said coldly. This was true but had no effect.

"You will regret this!" Priscilla railed. Her face was red and splotchy and entirely unbecoming. "You don't think I have any power; I see it in your eyes. But just you wait. I know how to make men regret their sins against me. Just ask Theodore."

Priscilla shouldered roughly past where her son's broad frame took up most of the doorway, continuing to rant and rail as she stormed towards her rooms, presumably to pack her things.

A bitter, vindictive part of Emily almost hoped that her mother-in-law wasted her allotted hour though she recognized that this was a touch unfair. She wanted the woman out of the house, not wearing rags as she floated, alone through the house like a ghost from a story.

But Emily wouldn't shed a tear if Priscilla didn't get to keep all her favorite things. She felt that wasn't too spiteful.

"Jesus Christ." Benedict's muttered swear caught Emily's attention. In two long strides, he crossed the room to sit beside her. Careful fingers left the tiniest brush against her heated cheek. "God, Emily, you've a bloody handprint on your face. Are you all right? She didn't harm you too terribly, did she?"

With a smile, Emily reached out and took his hovering hand and placed it against her cheek. The skin there did still smart a bit, but the tiny sting was worth the pleasure of his caress.

"No," she reassured him. "More took me by surprise than anything. I'm quite all right."

Benedict did not look convinced. He held her chin as if he feared she might break, tilting her head to the side to get a better look.

"Perhaps you should lie down," he said doubtfully.

She laughed, suddenly struck by the absurd loveliness of his care—and by how effortlessly he'd believed in her when faced with his mother's lies.

"I'm fine," she said. "I don't need to?—"

Her words were cut off as he scooped her under her arms and knees and rose to his feet as if she weighed nothing at all.

"Benedict!" she exclaimed. She was no featherweight of a woman—she was tall and substantial. "Stop this! I can certainly walk."

"Hm," he grunted then kept walking towards the rear staircase without putting her down.

Emily, left with little other choice, clung laughingly to his neck as he began to carry her up the stairs, ducking her head bashfully when a housemaid passed them, clearly intent on not making anything resembling eye contact.

Benedict apparently suffered from no embarrassment regarding his outlandish overprotectiveness.

"Please fetch Her Ladyship a cool compress," he ordered the maid as they breezed past.

"Yes, My Lord," the girl squeaked.

Emily batted his shoulder, a sure sign of her faith in his strong grip.

"Benedict, that's for headaches," she chided. "I am fine."

"A compress won't make you any less fine," he grumbled as he kicked open the door to his bedchamber, bypassing her rooms entirely. He placed her down atop the counterpane with the utmost delicacy which Emily might have been tempted to find a promising event, except for how he immediately turned to fuss with the pillows behind her rather than, say, ravish her furiously.

She sighed. Life was so very full of disappointments, alas.

There was one thing she could say for Benedict's clucking and fussing, however: it cleared up her mind enough to fully process what the Dowager had said as she'd stalked away from the parlor.

She sat up with a gasp.

"Emily, I have something to tel—what are you doing?" Whatever her husband had been saying was lost in his panicked exclamation. Emily, however, was too caught up in her realization to pay him much mind.

"'Just ask Theodore,'" she said, then clarified as Benedict gave her a look that said he worried her head injury was even worse than he'd suspected. "That's what your mother said, I mean. She said she was good at getting revenge on men and said, ‘Just ask Theodore.'"

His motions stilled, a faraway look overtaking him as he thought through this.

"I don't—" he began, breaking off and then pausing. He blinked at Emily. "We know she paid Dowling for something."

She nodded. "And then blackmailed him for something—the same thing? Something different?"

"But the blackmail never came to fruition, did it?" Benedict mused. "My mother didn't reveal his perfidy to the world—the Duchess of Hawkins did, along with her husband. No, Dowling gave in to my mother's commands. Is that what he would regret?"

Emily scrunched her nose. "It seems plausible that he might regret giving in, but I'm not sure your mother would see it that way—I suspect she'd be blinded by the triumph of getting what she wanted."

"You're likely right about that," her husband agreed. "She would only see Dowling as regretting something she saw valuable. And he did end up losing his life."

A terrible, terrible idea was starting to grow within Emily. She didn't want to speak it aloud. Didn't want to make it real. But there was no use in burying her head in the sand—not for herself, nor for her husband.

"Losing his life," she echoed quietly, "and being known as a murderer."

The dreadful implication hung in the air. Was being known as a murderer the same as actually being one? Except the question was no question at all—from the late Duke of Hawkins, Andrew's father, they knew perfectly well that reputation was not the same as reality, not in his horrible, ever-unspooling tragedy.

Benedict looked sick. "I don't want to believe it," he said softly. "I never thought her violent, only dramatic and self-obsessed. But today…"

Today she'd struck Emily at the slightest provocation. What would a woman like that do if she felt there was a real slight against her?

"We don't know that she did it," she said, instinctively avoiding labelling the act as Benedict had done.

"But we don't know that she didn't," he said, closing his eyes briefly, as if he needed a moment to himself, to reset and become ready for this world in which he had reason to suspect his mother a murderess.

When he opened his eyes, he looked resigned in a way that pained Emily to her core. She reached out and grasped his hand, needing to offer him some comfort, no matter how paltry.

"We need more information," she said, tending to the practical concerns because the emotional ones were too unruly to handle.

She also knew they would not be dismissed—the look in Benedict's face told her clearly enough that he could not rest easy until he had an answer. She knew that look all too well—it was one Diana had worn for years while she'd insisted, despite nobody believing her, that there was more to Grace's murder than they'd ever suspected.

Oh, Lord, Diana, she thought with a pang. How would her friend react to learning that the final incident with Dowling—which had led to her husband being shot—had possibly been due to the machinations of one horrible, scorned Dowager?

But Emily couldn't worry about that, not now. She needed to follow her own advice—she needed to gather more information.

Benedict, too, was nodding along to the suggestion. "My mother certainly won't tell us anything," he said grimly, and Emily's heart went out to the boy who had grown up with such a miserable force in his home, motherly love denied to him not by the force of death but merely because the woman seemed incapable of loving anyone besides herself.

"No," Emily agreed. "I think we shall—and trust me, I hear how absurd it sounds—have to look for clues."

He gave a humorless chuckle. "I fear we have gone far past ‘absurdity' today, my dear." Emily wanted to blush over the endearment, given at a time when no physical intimacy greater than held hands occurred between them, but Benedict continued speaking, a furrow creasing his brow. "But she's leaving—she's leaving now. Our window to learn more is rapidly closing."

"Blast!" she said with feeling. His mouth quirked in wry recognition.

Down the hall, a door slammed with undue force, and the Dowager's furious voice, muffled by the closed doors between them, echoed as she stormed toward the front stairs then descended.

Emily stared at Benedict; Benedict stared at Emily. And the same truly terrible idea lit in both of their eyes.

"We could," he said slowly, "preempt her."

This was obviously ludicrous, and Emily should say so. No matter how badly Priscilla had behaved, one did not go snooping through someone else's chambers. This was likely more true, not less, when that person was suspected of having taken part in a murder. The rationale shifted from simple decorum to self-preservation, to be sure, but it was still there.

Emily ought to chide her husband for his hypothetical recklessness and let him apply a cool compress to her forehead even though he was the one making insane suggestions.

"We could," she agreed instead.

And as those words passed her lips, Emily felt an instinctive and heretofore dormant identification with her sisters. There was a giddy sort of glee at doing something foolish, even when it was dangerous—perhaps even because it was dangerous.

"Right," Benedict said, nodding smartly. "Good. You stay here, and I'll?—"

"Not on your life," she interrupted, pushing to her feet. "We're in this together, Benedict Hoskins, or not at all."

She expected him to argue, to use her supposed frailty after being slapped as an excuse. Instead, he smiled, like this was precisely what he'd wished to hear but hadn't known as much until he'd heard it.

"Very well," he said, holding out his hand to her. "Together."

Hand in hand they crept down the hallway, which was silly, really, as it was their own house, and they were perfectly entitled to move around within it. But the action felt appropriate, made Emily feel as though this was just one more thread in the ever-growing web tying them together.

They could hear the various shouts and screeches from the Dowager as she moved about on the ground floor, likely trying to pilfer any number of household possessions before she was ejected from the building. Emily could not focus on this potential theft, nor on remaining silent, when Benedict pushed open the door to the Dowager Countess' now-former bedchamber.

Emily gasped. The room looked as though it had been looted—or perhaps struck by some sort of cyclone. There were articles of clothing strewn everywhere, papers scattered about, one shoe, lying upside down, only inches from the door.

"Is this from her packing in such a hurry," Emily asked her husband, who was looking just as gob smacked as she, "or does she merely always live like this?" It seemed an impossible level of mess for the short period the Dowager had been given to gather her belongings—and a highly inefficient way of finding what she wished to take as well.

Benedict looked at her helplessly. "How would I know?" he asked. "I hardly spend much time poking around my mother's bedchambers. I'm not best pleased to be doing it now."

That was…a fair enough point and reminded them of their mission to boot.

"Right," she said briskly. "You take this side, and I'll take that one?"

He nodded, and they separated, the intermittent banging from the broader house useful in keeping them appraised of the Dowager's whereabouts. Emily began at the woman's dressing table—the rooms did not contain anything remotely resembling a writing table; no doubt that would have made things too easy—and almost immediately stuck her hand in spilled pot of some kind of cream.

"Ugh," she said in disgust, wiping her hand on a nearby handkerchief which she sincerely hoped was clean. She took considerably more caution as she returned to searching the table.

The top of the vanity was filled with detritus of cosmetics and hairpins, scattered so randomly that Emily felt compelled to send up a prayer for the Dowager's maid, who no doubt deserved triple her regular salary. The first set of drawers she checked were similar, filled to bursting with hairpins, several unpaired gloves, a loose handful of pennies.

It was the table's bottom drawer where Emily found the papers, loose and crumpled, clearly thrust inside with no regard for order. She pulled a crinkling stack into her lap and began to read.

Many were bills—the amount the woman spent at the milliners alone was honestly staggering—others clipped articles from gossip rags, frequently making oblique references to the Dowager Countess herself. Each time Emily came across a letter, her heart leapt, but skimming revealed them to be correspondence with Priscilla's small group of friends, each of whom worked to outdo the others in terms of cruel observations about other members of the ton.

Emily was just beginning to give up hope when she found a small, worn piece of paper far at the bottom of the drawer, lingering beneath the other discarded papers where it had no doubt sat for years.

The Dowager's handwriting, never the neatest, was cramped and scrawled in a way that seemed to indicate her rage during the writing. Several things were crossed out and amended, this particular paper evidently a draft of whatever letter would eventually be sent. Even so…

"Benedict," Emily called quietly. "I think I have something."

He was at her side in a moment and together they read the halting, incoherent missive.

G—

You are making a mistake. Please come back If you do not heed me, you will regret it. I know Believe me, If you do not listen, I can take everything from you. Everything you love, everything that matters. You have hurt Wait until you see what I can wreak. Your life will be a living hell. Your family, your career, it will all disappear, and then you will be left with no choice but to turn back to me. The truth will come out. I know you still love me. Let our love be known! My darling, we cannot hide in the darkness any longer. Your title Our reputations will recover, but my heart will not. Cast me aside, and I will ensure you suffer the same pain as I do. Nobody will ever

The paper cut off then, the frayed edges leaving the last few words illegible. Benedict swore.

"This doesn't give us any more information than we had," he gritted out in frustration.

Emily didn't answer, her eyes scanning over the page again and again. There was something—something there that niggled at the back of her mind, that she knew would burst into an idea, into understanding, if only she could grasp at it.

And then she did.

Your family, your career, the letter said. And then, crossed out, Your title. And, the final nail in the mental coffin, Our reputations.

After all, what did a man with a family have to fear of his reputation for dallying with a widow? Even if he was married, such a thing would make for little more than idle gossip though it might make the fellow's marriage uncomfortable. But fearing for one's reputation was a woman's burden…

Unless the career that was mentioned was one that relied upon reputation. A career that let a man—a titled man, a man called G—rely upon his good name, upon his reputation, upon the notion that he was a respectable man with a respectable family.

"Graham," she whispered in shock.

Benedict, who had been about to return to his own search, whipped around to look at her.

"What?"

"Graham," she said again, the pieces falling more firmly into place as she spoke. "This letter is threatening the Duke of Graham—a man with a family, a career, and a title whose reputation would be damaged by a scandalous affair."

Benedict's face was shocked then grim then resigned.

"And Grace Miller's father," he said with a quiet, horrible finality.