Suzanne Robinson Read Online Free PDF Page B

pomade to complete her Miss Gamp disguise. What if the viscount had dislodged her cap!
    Liza pulled a fresh gown from the locked trunk at the foot of her bed and stepped into it. Drawing it up to her waist, she found that her hands were still shaking. She’d been careless to let him hear her, but she’d wanted so badly to see if he was leaving.
    She’d searched the house everywhere except his rooms. This morning she’d been able to examine the last of the unoccupied bedrooms. What miserable luck that he’d returned sooner than expected.
    Her fingers were cold and trembled so, it wasdifficult to button the gown. Not for the first time she was grateful for the lining that made the bodice warmer than it should have been. Her fingers slipped on a button, and she sank down on the bed to take several deep breaths.
    If only the Metropolitan Police had believed her, but they’d sent her away with condescending smiles and secret laughter. She didn’t care. Men had laughed at her before, and she’d lived.
    She didn’t care what they said. William Edward hadn’t been the kind of man to skulk about the brothels and gin shops of Whitechapel and get himself garroted. She remembered thinking exactly that thought when the police came to her to identify him upon finding her card in his vest pocket. In her grief it had taken her months to make herself face the truth of her suspicions. More time had been wasted trying to get the Metropolitan Police to see her views. They never had. It would have been useless as well to try to convince Papa, since he’d taken the same opinion as the police. Finally she’d begun to inquire into the circumstances of William Edward’s death herself—late, but determined.
    Liza closed her eyes as she remembered her brother’s bloated face. His tongue had been—no. No, she wouldn’t see his face anymore. She’d promised herself.
    Instead she thought back to that night last February, the night William Edward had been killed. He’d called on her unexpectedly. After leaving home, she’d kept in touch with him and her mother—secretly, because of her father. Papa would have nothing to do with a daughter he’d disowned for her stubborn unmaidenliness and quarrelsome nature. He hated it that she hadn’t come back to him on her knees afterhe’d cast her out of his house. He was furious that she’d made herself independent in a trade. So William Edward had visited her secretly at her house, which doubled as her place of business, Pennant’s Domestic Agency.
    He’d been agitated that evening, and William Edward was never agitated. Part of his excitement had been on account of being admitted into Asher Fox’s political committee.
    “He’ll get things done, Liza,” William had said. “You should have seen him in the Crimea. He was the best lieutenant colonel in all the regiments. He saved bloody Marshall’s life, and mine too. God, that idiot Raglan had us charging artillery.”
    “But your letters,” Liza said. “You wrote that Marshall hated you.”
    William Edward flushed. “He wanted us to dress like savages. We’re officers, her majesty’s own cavalry officers, not bloody Indians. He wanted us to wear muddy buckskin, I tell you, and crawl around on our bellies—spying! But …”
    “You changed your mind?”
    William Edward traced the pattern on a lace curtain in her parlor-office, then cleared his throat. “I was with him when he took a vedette out one day shortly before Balaklava, and we came on a Russian troop unexpectedly. We were cut off, ripped to pieces. That fool Cardigan hadn’t been where he was supposed to be with his men. Marshall and I and Sergeant Pawkins got away. But only because he made us take off our red coats and gold braid and roll in the mud. He’d spent too much time in Texas and California, and acquired a most ungentlemanly attitude toward war. You should have seen us, Liza. He made us clingto our horses along their sides and ride through the Russians. You