The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(8)

No, that was inaccurate, and even in desperate times one must resist the urge to resort to self-deception: her worst enemy was the duke, second was herself, and third was her blackmailer.

Now, that was a fortifying thought, and one she would be sure to include in her next letter. “Dear Sir, Under ordinary circumstances you might congratulate yourself on having achieved the rank of my chief enemy, but as things stand, you’re only third on the list, quite possibly lower if we consider the rightful claims of my eldest brother and several members of Parliament.”

She absently flicked some of the dried blood off the sleeve of her traveling costume and abruptly remembered that there would be no more letters. The robbery had been—she glanced at the body beside her—not a success. Instead of stealing a book of secrets from the duke and holding it ransom for enough money that she and Percy wouldn’t have to live as paupers, she had killed the duke, or near enough so as not to matter. The man was still breathing, but he was also still bleeding, and as the carriage raced along the London road, he was doing rather more of the latter and less of the former. By morning, Percy would be the new duke.

Except—no. Percy would not be the duke. The plan had been to expose the duke’s bigamy to the world; that had been the worst punishment they had been able to devise and had the added benefit of freeing both Percy and Marian from his control. The fact of the duke’s bigamy would transform Percy into a worthless illegitimate son and Marian into a former mistress. And it would transform the son of a harlot into the duke’s heir, but Marian didn’t care about that poor fool; what mattered was that she and Percy would be rid of the duke. But if the duke was dead, Marian didn’t know where that left them.

Marian’s mind wasn’t working very well at all, it seemed. She was not thinking, but she was also not feeling, which seemed like a fair enough exchange. Doubtless it was the shock. She could still hear the pistol shots, both of them—first the one the duke aimed at Percy, and then the one she aimed at the duke. Percy had been hit, but only in the leg, and not so badly he couldn’t walk. She couldn’t think about that. There was nothing she could do about Percy, other than make sure nobody ever knew he had anything to do with the duke’s injury. Which, of course, he hadn’t. It had been entirely Marian’s doing.

The blood had soaked through her left sleeve and a fair amount of spatter covered the left side of her bodice, and, presumably, her face. She was vaguely aware that she was uncomfortable, but the discomfort of her body seemed to be taking place many miles away and possibly to somebody else.

Somehow, they were already at the fringes of London. Marian must have spent most of the journey from Oxfordshire in a stupor. That, and the horses were traveling at a breakneck pace to get the dying duke back to town, where he could be attended by his physician. If he lived that long, that was.

“The duke was shot by brigands,” Marian announced to the butler when the carriage arrived at Clare House. “Call for his physician at once. No, I’m unharmed.” She repeated it again to the housekeeper, and then, once the men were attempting to get the duke out of the carriage and the rest of the household milled about, trying to look as if they weren’t gawking, Marian slipped around the back of the house, grabbed an old cloak off a peg in the stables, and took off through the darkened streets.

She did not fancy being hanged as a murderer. However certain she was that nobody had seen her use the pistol, there was always a chance that she would be exposed. And if she were hanged, she’d be of no use to Eliza, Percy, or her father, none of whom were capable of sensibly arranging their lives without her. Eliza was an infant; Marian’s father was elderly and infirm; and Percy, however reasonable she once thought him, had fallen in love with a highwayman and therefore plainly had taken leave of his faculties, the poor man.

She would have to hide until she knew whether she was suspected of murder and then, if necessary, flee to the Continent. How she would arrange everybody’s affairs from—Venice, perhaps, as her Italian was more than passable and Percy had spoken highly of the climate—she did not yet know, but these were problems she could solve when she wasn’t quite so consumed with the pressing need to get the blood off her person.

There was also something else she had to do: she had left a man tied to a bed, and she needed to make sure he was . . . well might not be entirely accurate. But if Dinah had been called away or something had happened to prevent her from checking on him, then he might be left there indefinitely, and Marian wasn’t going to be responsible for a man starving to death. Being responsible for one death a day was quite sufficiently iniquitous.

In breeches and sensible boots, it was a fifteen-minute walk to the room she had hired to keep the blackmailer. In a traveling gown and dainty ankle boots, it took far longer. She was out of breath, more from nerves than exertion, when she climbed the final set of stairs, but her hands were almost steady when she removed the key from above the door frame and turned it in the lock.

The room was empty and dark and the window stood wide open. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the shadows and another moment still for her thoughts to catch up to her eyes. The bed was empty. The man was gone.

Well, it hardly mattered now, did it. She had only wanted to ensure that he was out of the way and didn’t jeopardize the robbery, but the robbery had already gone about as badly as it could have done. Good riddance, then. One less thing to worry about.