Chapter Four

P eyton stood on the first-floor landing and watched through the large fanlight over the front door as the approaching dawn chased away the night. It felt as if the world was frozen in place, the whole city pausing to catch its breath before the sun rose and the day started.

Sleep had proven impossible last night after her encounter with Dartmoor. So she'd rolled out of bed and was making her way down to the kitchens when the view from the fanlight stopped her. The rest of the house was still asleep, including the scullery maid who would be rising soon to start the fires, so she paused on the landing and let the quiet moment have her.

A key scraped in the lock, and the front door opened.

Peyton froze, every muscle tensing instantly like a coil ready to spring. She held her breath as the door opened and watched the slant of light fall across the marble checkerboard tile of the entry hall floor, waiting for the first glimpse—

"Sweet heavens!" Betty Proctor glanced up and gave a startled cry to find Peyton standing there. The older woman's hand went straight to her chest. "You scared the daylights out of me!"

Peyton bit back the urge to tell Proctor that she'd done the same to her. Instead, she leaned against the wall in her satin dressing robe and waited for the older woman to catch back her breath.

Then she frowned to see Proctor in her coat and hat. "What were you doing out so early? It's not even dawn."

Closing the door, Proctor waved a hand in front of her face to fan air at herself and subdue her fluster at being surprised. "Oh, you know me." Another wave of her hand, although this one was half-dismissive. "I'm used to being up early. All those years as a lady's maid when I had to get up early to make certain the fires were lit, the breakfast tray ready, the mistress's clothes tended to."

Perhaps, but… "Where were you at this hour?"

"Just went for a little walk to stretch my old legs." She rubbed her hip with a smile. "Feels good to get them moving, especially on cold mornings like these."

"Please don't go out alone next time. The city is dangerous. Take one of the footmen with you." Peyton hadn't felt safe herself since they'd disembarked from the ship nearly two months ago. She added quietly, "I couldn't bear it if anything happened to you."

Another dismissive wave. "No one bothers with an old woman like me." Then she crooked her head and looked sternly up at Peyton. "But why are you awake? You should still be in bed after the late night you had."

"I couldn't sleep." She forced a weak smile. "You caught me on my way down to the kitchen to see if there was any hot water for coffee."

"Well, we'll do better than that!" Proctor stripped off her hat and coat and laid them across a chair in the entry hall. "We'll go down together and make breakfast ourselves."

Peyton blinked. " We'll make breakfast?"

Proctor paused when she realized what she'd said, then nodded fiercely. "Cook makes it every day. Can't be that difficult."

Fighting back a smile, Peyton looped her arm through Proctor's. The two women walked through the house to the servants' stairs in the rear and down into the kitchens.

As they went, Proctor related what she'd seen that morning on her walk down the street to the park and back, how the flower seller was putting out his baskets and the butcher most likely shorting orders of beef.

Peyton listened with affection. She owed this woman everything.

Ever since Peyton could remember, Proctor had been her mother's maid, and not much difference in age from Mama, which was most likely why Peyton now saw her as a second mother, one who had sacrificed her own life for an adopted child. In their years of self-exile in France, she'd taught Peyton how to be a proper woman—how to take care of her hair and skin, how to choose dresses and accessories, how to deport herself—all the things she should have learned from her own mother and from her own lady's maid when she was old enough to have one. How could she have survived all those years without Proctor, to say nothing of those first few dark days after the attack? Proctor had nursed her back from the edge of death and dragged her back into the light.

Peyton had repaid her the best she could by elevating her to the status of an aunt and giving her a separate set of rooms within her home, her own maid to attend her, and a generous allowance. She'd given the same kind of luxuries to Wilkins. The two had become her family.

"And then the butcher said, ‘My! That's the finest rump I e'er seen!'" Proctor stopped just as they reached the kitchen, placed her hand on her hips, and shook her finger, re-enacting the moment. "So I said, "Mr. Butcher, you'd best be talking about a roast!'"

Peyton laughed, her hand flying up to her lips to keep back her laughter. Only Betty Proctor could be that audacious on her morning walk.

Useless in the kitchen, Peyton sat on a little stool pulled up to the long worktable and let Proctor scurry about the space, looking into all the cabinets and pantries, to make them breakfast. Learning to cook was most definitely not a skill Peyton's schooling had prepared her for. But then, her girlhood hadn't prepared her for a lot of skills that she later found necessary, such as shooting pistols and wielding knives. Her chest tightened. How much different would her life be if she'd remained that same girl who needed to know nothing more dangerous than how to watercolor, play the pianoforte, and dance without stepping on her partner's feet? It was impossible to even contemplate that now.

"We'll have ourselves a right fine breakfast." Proctor fetched a bowl of strawberries from the cold pantry and set them on the table in front of Peyton, along with a hunk of cheese and a knife. "And prove to Cook we're capable of taking care of ourselves! How about some eggs?"

She reached for the metal basket of eggs on the wall shelf with a smile. Then she halted and frowned at the eggs, realizing she would have to cook them.

"Maybe not eggs," she mumbled as she put them back.

Peyton stifled another laugh.

Proctor set a plate of croissants from the breadbox on the table and then plopped onto a stool across from Peyton just as the young kitchen maid came back inside from the service yard in the rear. Surprised to see them, she nodded her good morning greetings, then busied herself with putting a pot of milk over the fire to heat to make chocolate.

"Now then." Proctor reached for the knife to cut off some cheese. "What's so wrong that you can't sleep?"

Peyton lowered her eyes to the croissant as she broke it in two with her fingers. "I met Dartmoor last night, face-to-face…and he wasn't the monster I thought he would be."

For a long moment, Proctor didn't move, didn't speak. Then she gestured at the kitchen maid and ordered, "Go down to the butcher and tell him that I've changed my mind. I want that roast after all."

The girl frowned. "But Cook's planning to—

"Go on! Be away with you then—shoo!"

With an irritated twist of her lips, the maid grabbed her coat and hat from the hooks beside the door, then slipped out the rear door.

"What happened?" Proctor pressed quietly once they were alone. "Did he recognize you?"

Peyton shook her head with a frown. "Not at all."

Proctor set down the knife, and her fingers pulled idly at a piece of cheese, crumbling it without realizing it. "Then your plan didn't go well?"

Her frown deepened. "The evening went exactly as planned."

"Then why aren't you happy about it?"

"Because it doesn't feel at all the way I thought it would. I thought I would hate him, that I would recoil and be sick from being near him. But I wasn't." No. The exact opposite, in fact. There had been times during the evening when the years had seemed to disappear, and she'd forgotten the events of that night, if only momentarily. And that bothered her more than she wanted to admit, as did the swirling doubts about him that gnawed at her belly.

"Tell me," Proctor insisted.

As she slowly ate the croissant, one nibbling bite at a time despite not having an appetite, Peyton related what happened last night, about meeting Devlin at Barton's and besting him at cards. Exactly as planned.

Proctor listened intently, nodding her head and urging her to continue with each new detail she shared…except the part about the attempted seduction, at which Proctor said nothing because Peyton conveniently excluded it. After all, Proctor was too much like her own mother to discuss subjects like that.

"That's wonderful," Proctor said when Peyton finished the story with a description of making a clean exit. She slipped off the stool and removed the milk from the fire, then set about making an urn of chocolate for Peyton exactly as she liked it, including a pinch of cinnamon in the layer of butter cream on top. "It's what you wanted—to make him pay for what he did."

"Not as much as I'd thought," she admitted. "It felt…wrong, somehow, taking his money like that."

Measuring out the cocoa powder, Proctor paused to send Peyton a pointed glance. "That man murdered your parents."

"He wasn't one of the men who pulled us from the carriage." She knew that with certainty. She clearly remembered those men, having seen their faces. They were too physically different from how Dartmoor had been then, when he'd still been the young Marquess of Truro. He'd been taller than those men, not so broad, not so stocky. His muscles had been sinuous, not bulky hard—he'd possessed the muscles of a young man who spent lots of time riding and fencing. The men who killed her parents had been older and rounder, possessing more brute strength than Devlin's finesse. After all, in the weeks leading up to the attack, she'd spent hours watching him dance at balls when he hadn't been aware that she was even present, and he possessed a natural-born athletic grace those men lacked.

"You're splitting hairs now." Proctor shot her a chastising glance as she stirred in the dark powder. "He might not have pulled your parents and you from the carriage, but he was there. He was part of it."

Peyton frowned at the piece of croissant as she slowly shredded it with her fingers. Devlin had been there, and she'd fought against him; the button she'd ripped from his waistcoat proved that. She'd torn it from his waistcoat during the struggle when she'd nearly been raped, and the tailor on Bond Street confirmed that it was exactly like all the others he'd sewn onto Dartmoor's evening clothes. She'd remembered seeing those buttons herself earlier that same evening before everything changed, when he'd been staring at the opera singer and she'd been staring at him, so closely that she'd noticed every detail about him, right down to the shine of the silver buttons on his chest.

"Why was he there then," Proctor pressed as she poured the chocolate into a long-handled chocolate pot, almost as if reading Peyton's mind, "if not to hurt you and your parents?"

Peyton couldn't answer that. It was that same question that always stopped her in her tracks whenever she tried to sort through the events of that night. Why? Why Devlin? Even after all these years, even after all the evidence she'd gathered that pointed at Devlin and his father, she still had no motive. But it hadn't been a coincidence that he had been there that night. He knew their carriage was going to be attacked, most likely by hired porters from the docks or thugs from Seven Dials, and wanted to witness the carnage. Or worse—that he'd arranged the attack himself.

Yet even now, though, nagging doubts that had been growing inside her since her return to London rose in a chorus inside her head.

"I don't know," she whispered.

Her face dark with sympathy and grief, Proctor returned to the table and set down the now unwanted chocolate. She said quietly, "He tried to rape you."

Peyton also wasn't so certain of that any longer either, since seeing him again at Barton's. At different times during the evening, she'd felt a visceral pull toward him, a rekindling of the old attraction. How could she be attracted to the man who had tried to rape her? Impossible.

Yet she'd seen his face the night of the attack, clawed a bloody scratch into his neck, ripped off his button—

He had been there, had attempted to rape her…hadn't he?

Confusion swam inside her until she felt as if she might drown. Wilkins had been so adamant that Dartmoor was the one responsible for what had happened that night. Even the latest pair of investigators she'd insisted Wilkins hire to discover the last missing pieces of that night—and lay her final doubts to rest—had provided only more proof of Devlin's involvement. It had taken ten years to arrive here, but now, finally, she could claim her revenge. Ten years of fear, anger, and grief so terrible that it had nearly consumed her. Her only way forward from the darkness had been a dedication to bringing justice to the man responsible.

So why were her instincts whispering that maybe she was wrong?

Proctor took Peyton's hand in hers. "You know what kind of monster that man is. You cannot stop until he gets what's coming to him." Her eyes fixed on Peyton's. "Or do your parents' graves mean nothing to you?"

Grief struck her so fiercely she winced. "They mean everything." She slowly pulled her hand away, for once not taking any solace in Proctor's motherly gestures. Her chest burned, and she blinked hard. "Do they still—" She choked, then started again. "Are flowers still put on the graves?"

"Yes." Proctor poured two cups of chocolate, but neither wanted any now. "The woman we hired is still putting flowers there every week. I've been checking up on her since we've returned, and a new bouquet is placed there every Sunday. On all three graves."

On her grave. Perhaps that's why Peyton risked herself as she did. What more did she have to lose when she was already dead?

"When this is all over," Peyton promised, forcing herself to accept the cup of chocolate only because Proctor had gone to the trouble of making it, "that grave will be removed."

Not one day too soon.