“Tell Isabella to take you out,” Mac repeated. He yanked his brush from the jar and rubbed it clean on a rag. “A good ride in the park or something. Our grooms don’t need to be hanging about like loose ends. Give them something to do.”
In other words, go away and let me work.
“Isabella is busy,” Louisa said. “She’s frantically finishing preparations for the supper ball, as you know. I ought to be helping her.” She fixed Mac a look. “So should you.”
“I am helping her. I’m minding the children. A good husband knows when to stay out of the way of the whirling household.”
“A fine excuse,” Louisa said, feeling the first amusement she’d had in days.
“Papa likes to hide up here,” Aimee said. “Morton and Mama bully him if he goes downstairs.”
Mac grinned. “She’s not wrong. Driven away by my wife and my butler. What is a man to do?”
Enjoy himself with his art and his children. Louisa envied him, and Isabella. They were so happy together, exactly matching each other in spirit, love, and vigor. Louisa knew Isabella would prefer to be up here with him, watching her handsome husband paint, playing with the children she loved so well.
But Isabella was a hostess at heart as well, leading the ladies of the Season. She was also keeping up her social schedule, Louisa knew, to dare anyone to say that anything was wrong. Louisa would be at the supper ball tonight, by Isabella’s side, helping to greet guests, engage shy young ladies in conversation, or smooth ruffled feathers of older ladies. This gathering would be utterly respectable, for debutantes up to the most redoubtable matrons, and Louisa would be in the middle of it.
She’d go mad. Louisa gently set Aimee on her feet and sprang up. “You’re right, Mac. Staying in will only make me more irritable.” She went to him, lightly kissed his paint-streaked cheek, and left the room, not missing Mac’s grin or his look of relief.
It also did not help her that Mac looked much like the man she could not banish from her thoughts. The near-kiss she’d shared with Fellows in Mrs. Leigh-Waters’ drawing room burned her almost as much as the true kisses had. She kept feeling the heat of his body against her, his hard fingers on her cheek.
Out.A young lady couldn’t simply walk outside in London and charge alone down the street. It wasn’t done. Louisa had to play by every rule she possibly could until the true culprit was found. All eyes were on her, she knew.
She asked Morton to fetch Isabella’s carriage, convinced the housekeeper to release a maid to accompany her, and made her way to visit Eleanor, the Duchess of Kilmorgan.
***
Fellows’ investigations didn’t take him often to Mayfair. Murders in London were most likely to happen at the docks or in slums where gin and desperation overrode sense, and knives came out. Mayfair was for the polite crimes of embezzlement and fraud and, long ago now, dueling.
The death of the Bishop of Hargate was a crime of Mayfair. Though the event itself had taken place in Richmond, every single person at that garden party had a London residence for the Season, all of them in Mayfair.
Fellows knew Mayfair as well as he did the rest of London, because he was thorough. The people who walked these streets, though, were not the ladies and gentlemen who lived there, but the tradesmen and domestics who worked it. Those who reposed in the houses wouldn’t consider strolling more than three doors down without a carriage.
For the past three and a half years, Fellows had made use of a new base of operation in Mayfair, the Duke of Kilmorgan’s mansion on Grosvenor Square. Once Hart, the duke in question, had officially acknowledged Fellows as part of the family, he’d made it known that Fellows could walk into and out of the Grosvenor Square house anytime he chose.
Fellows mostly didn’t choose, but he’d relaxed enough in the last few years to realize that taking Hart up on his hospitality could be convenient. Since Hart’s marriage to Lady Eleanor Ramsay last April, it had become even more convenient.
Eleanor knew everyone. She not only knew them but knew everything about them. If anyone could tell Fellows about the people at the Richmond party, it was Eleanor.
Fellows took an omnibus to Hyde Park, then walked through the park to Park Lane and north. This took time, but Fellows liked to think as he walked, and he enjoyed the open green spaces of the park. For Fellows the boy, London’s city parks had been his idea of pristine countryside. He’d sneak away from home and play in Hyde Park, St. James’s Park, Green Park, or Holland Park, until someone reported an urchin in their garden spaces, and a constable chased him away.
On Park Lane, whose giant houses grew more ostentatious by the year, he noted a moving van outside the mansion formerly belonging to Sir Lyndon Mather. It must have been sold yet again—that made three times in the last three years. Unlucky, that house must be. Fellows had never liked Mather, though Mather had inadvertently guided Fellows to the right path to solving the High Holborn murders. Nothing about that case had ended up as Fellows had ever dreamed it would. It had led, indirectly, to him meeting Lady Louisa Scranton.
Fellows turned onto Upper Brook Street and walked to Grosvenor Square and Hart’s house. Hart’s first footman had the door open for Fellows before he reached it.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the footman said, reaching to relieve Fellows of his coat and hat as Fellows stepped into the wide front hall. A staircase wound up through the middle of the house, spring sunshine lighting it from windows at each landing. The balustrade was elegance itself, the airy space quiet, beautiful, and at peace.