The Iron Duke Read Online Free PDF Page A

violent impulses. Not everyone succeeded, and that was when Mina stepped in.
    With luck, this murder would be the same: an unchecked impulse, easily traceable—and the murderer easy to hold accountable.
    And with more luck, the murderer wouldn’t be the Iron Duke. No one would be held accountable then. He was too beloved—beloved enough that all of England ignored his history of raping, thieving, and murdering. Beloved enough that they tried to rewrite that history. And even if the evidence pointed to Trahaearn, he wouldn’t be ruined.
    But as the investigating officer who arrested him, Mina would be.

Chapter Two
    By the time she and Newberry reached the Isle of Dogs, the nip of the evening air had become a bite. Not a true island, the isle was surrounded on three sides by a bend in the river. The Horde had drained the marshland and built part of it into their commercial and trading center—all looted and burned during the revolution. Afterward, the Crown had granted Trahaearn tracts of land on the island along with his title, and he’d rebuilt the docks that now serviced his trading company’s ships and the merchants who paid for the space. At the center of the island, near the Marshwall dock, he’d razed the remains of the Horde’s holdings and built his fortress on the ashes.
    The high, wrought-iron fence that surrounded his park had earned him the nickname the Iron Duke—the iron kept the rest of London out, and whatever riches he hid inside, in. The spikes topping the fence prevented anyone in the surrounding slums from scaling it, and no one was invited to his house. At least, no one in Mina’s circle, or her mother’s.
    She was never certain if their circle was too high, or too low.
    Newberry stopped in front of the gate. When a face appeared at the small gatehouse window, he shouted, “Detective Inspector Wentworth, on police business! Open her up!”
    The gatekeeper appeared, a grizzled man with a long gray beard and a heavy clanking step that marked a prosthetic leg. A former pirate, Mina guessed. Though the Crown insisted that Trahaearn and his men had all been privateers, acting with the permission of the king, only a few children who didn’t know any better believed it. The rest of them knew the story was designed to bolster faith in the king and his ministers after the revolution. Bestowing a title on Trahaearn had been one of King Edward’s last cogent acts. The crew had been given naval commissions, and Marco’s Terror pressed into the service of the Royal Navy . . . where the ship had supposedly been all along.
    The Iron Duke had traded the Terror and the seas for a title and a fortress in the middle of a slum. Mina wondered if he felt that exchange had been worth it.
    The gatekeeper glanced at her. “And the jade?”
    At Mina’s side, Newberry bristled. “ She is Lady Wilhelmina Wentworth, the detective inspector.”
    Oh, Newberry. In Manhattan City, a title still meant something. In England, it only meant that Mina’s family hadn’t been subjected to the same horrors that the lower classes had suffered under the Horde. And when the gatekeeper looked at her again, she knew what he saw—and it wasn’t a lady. Nor was it the epaulettes declaring her rank, or the red band sewed into her sleeve, boasting that she’d spilled Horde blood in the revolution.
    No, he saw her face, calculated her age, and understood that she’d been conceived during a Frenzy. And that, because of her family’s status, her mother and father had been allowed to keep her rather than being taken by the Horde to be raised in a crèche.
    The gatekeeper looked at her assistant. “Then who are you?”
    “Constable Newberry.”
    Scratching his beard, the old man clanked back toward the gatehouse. “All right. I’ll be sending a gram up to the captain, then.”
    He still called the Iron Duke “captain”? Mina could not decide if that said more about Trahaearn’s opinion of his new rank, or the gatekeeper’s.