The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(9)

Marian tried to rummage through the buzzing chaos in her mind and figure out what to do. She was covered in blood, standing in a room she had hired for the express purpose of imprisoning a man, and she didn’t know what to do next. Well, whatever she did, she couldn’t do it in the dark, so she took the tinderbox from the chimneypiece and got to work. Her fingers were stiff, possibly with cold, possibly with whatever was making her brain not work, and only after what felt like an hour did she manage to light the splint.

She took the letters from inside her cloak and set them on the grate, then touched the splint to them. They must have dried, or perhaps blood was more flammable than Marian had supposed, because they readily caught on fire. She prodded them with the splint until they were reduced to ash, troubled by the sense that she was bidding a last goodbye to the woman who had received those letters and who had responded to them in what had almost been a spirit of amusement, heaven help her.

With the candles lit, she could see the empty bed, the cords she had used to bind the man’s wrists now dangling ineffectively from the bedposts. So, she had bungled the knots. It figured that she hadn’t even managed to get that much right.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sound at the window. She spun around to see a man climbing in, one long leg after the other.

It appeared that she was going to get murdered now, which was a fitting end to a miserable day. She ought to cry out, but she couldn’t even do that much. The only sound she managed to produce was a sharp inhalation. Not that screaming would have done much good—this was the sort of street where nobody paid much attention to the odd bout of hollering.

Then the intruder rose to his full height. When the candlelight struck his face she saw that it was the blackmailer.

And she was . . . relieved? Probably a clear sign that she wasn’t thinking straight.

“What are you doing?” she asked, struggling to understand the picture before her. If he had freed himself, then why had he come back?

“I’m afraid I had to step out,” the blackmailer said, dusting off his breeches. “I had to feed the dog.”

“You don’t have a dog,” Marian said, latching onto the only part of his statement that made any sense. “I’ve been tailing you for weeks. You live in a hired room in an alarming neighborhood filled with writers. You don’t even have a spare pair of boots, let alone a dog.”

“The cat, then,” he said, waving a breezy hand.

Then her thoughts belatedly supplied the obvious reason for his return. “If you’ve come back in order to kill me, may I ask that you get it over with? It’s been a tedious day.”

“That wasn’t the plan at all.” Only then did he raise his eyes and look at her. “Not to be overly forward, but may I ask whose blood you’re covered in? It doesn’t appear to be yours, what with how you aren’t dead yet. Chiefly, I’m interested in whether it belongs to Kit.”

“It’s the duke’s blood, and it’s on my gown, rather than in his veins, because I shot him.” Saying it aloud made her feel that she was watching herself from a great height, as if the events of this day and this night were happening to some other unfortunate person.

“Ah,” he said, as if she had merely remarked on the weather.

“Unfasten this, will you?” She turned her back on him, which was not a wise idea, tactically, but all her cleverness had resulted in nothing but disaster, so perhaps she’d just settle for flailing ineptitude. Besides, if she didn’t get this blood-soaked gown off, she thought she might go raving mad.

She heard his footsteps approach her, then felt a light pressure at her waist. She flinched. “Only looking for your laces,” he said mildly. “And there we go.”

She felt him untie the tapes at her waist with deftness that suggested a fair bit of practice, but without taking any liberties or even letting his hands linger. The stiffening fabric released itself from her body and she held back a sigh of relief. She stepped out of the skirt and pulled the bodice over her head. They’d need to be burned. She glanced down at her petticoats and sighed. So would they. Her corset, too. Just as well. She took it all off and threw it into a pile, leaving her in nothing but an only moderately bloody shift.

Dimly, she was aware that she was stripping in front of a strange man, but she’d have stripped onstage in an opera house, she’d have stripped in a cathedral in the middle of Sunday services, if it meant getting out of those clothes.

In a small trunk at the foot of the bed, she kept breeches, a shirt, and a full complement of everything she had worn to tail the blackmailer night after night during these past weeks. It had seemed a reasonable precaution, keeping a change of clothes handy, just in case. And for once on this terrible day, her forethought was rewarded, because now she had a clean shirt, and nothing had ever looked as good to her as that piece of linen did at that moment.

“You don’t want to put that on,” said the man. He was now sitting at the table, lazily shuffling the deck of cards she had dealt the previous night before he succumbed to the laudanum. He did not appear to be watching Marian at all. “Trust me. First, get the blood off. And while you’re at it, make sure that none of it is coming from you. Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve hurt yourself until much later, and then you’ll have ruined another shirt.”

Marian experienced a rush of mad relief at the idea that she might be in the presence of someone who knew what to do when one had murdered one’s husband. Because Marian was at a loss, and she didn’t much care for being at a loss. She was not the sort of person who sailed through life without a plan, and even though all her plans had resulted in disaster didn’t mean she was suddenly averse to the idea of planning ahead, as long as she wasn’t the one doing the planning. If this man had the first idea of what to do, she’d take it.