The Virgin Who Ruined Lord Gray - Anna Bradley Page 0,24

plenty to say about murderers wandering the streets of London with us virtuous folks—”

Mr. Beddows cleared his throat. “Anything factual relating to the crime, I mean?”

Sharpe deflated. “Nay.”

Mr. Beddows did what he could to call Sharpe’s testimony into question, but Sophia could see it was hopeless. Peter Sharpe was the trustworthy servant of a well-respected peer. As far as anyone knew, he didn’t stand to gain a thing from accusing Jeremy of murder, and Sampson Willis, the Bow Street magistrate, corroborated every word of Sharpe’s testimony.

There was little Sophia could now do but wait, her heart in her throat, for Jeremy to be pronounced guilty. As for what she might do later, once she left the courtroom, well…that was a different matter entirely.

She waited at the back of the gallery, as unmoving as the column beside her. No one paid her any attention. If they had—if they’d happened to catch a glimpse under the wide brim of her hat—the cold malevolence with which she gazed at Peter Sharpe would have turned their blood to ice.

* * * *

The back row of the gallery smelled like flowers.

It was faint, just a hint of the sweet, honeyed scent wafting in the stale air. At any other time, Tristan wouldn’t have noticed it, but given the circumstances in which he’d first inhaled that scent, it was imprinted on his senses.

She was here.

Sophia Monmouth, the dark-haired, green-eyed ghost who’d led him on a merry chase through every alleyway in Westminster, was in the gallery. He’d found out her name easily enough, but surprisingly, he hadn’t been able to discover much else about her.

Lady Clifford’s students enjoyed a certain notoriety among a select group of people in London, but none of them seemed to know anything about Sophia Monmouth’s past, other than she’d become the Clifford School’s first pupil a few months after Lady Clifford had secured the building at No. 26 Maddox Street. Miss Monmouth had been a child then, not more than six or seven years old, and she’d been with Lady Clifford ever since.

It wasn’t much to go on, but Tristan had only just begun to dig into the mystery that was Sophia Monmouth, who’d sacrificed any claim she had to privacy when she climbed onto Lord Everly’s pediment.

She hadn’t been back to Great Marlborough Street since, nor had he caught her out in any other suspicious behavior in the week he’d been following her. No, since then Miss Monmouth had been a model of good citizenry, a veritable paragon of exemplary behavior. He might have grown bored of following her if he hadn’t known it was only a matter of time before she slipped. No woman who’d gone to the trouble of scaling the front of a townhouse would give up so easily, especially not one of Lady Clifford’s students.

Tenacity was their distinguishing characteristic.

Still, he hadn’t expected he’d find her here. Criminals tended to avoid courthouses in general, but then Lady Clifford had likely directed Miss Monmouth to discover what fate awaited Jeremy Ives. Not that the outcome of the trial was much of a mystery. Ives was going to be found guilty, and he’d be sentenced to swing.

Simple enough.

Tristan cast a subtle glance over the spectators in the gallery. There weren’t many ladies here, and none with the dainty features Tristan remembered so well, but then she was skilled at disguising herself—

Ah. There.

A few paces to his left was a lady with a bowed head. Her face was hidden under the wide brim of the ugliest hat he’d ever seen, but he could just make out a curl of dark hair at her nape, the tip of a pointed chin. She was partially concealed behind one of the gallery’s columns—Miss Monmouth seemed to be fond of columns—but as luck would have it, he wasn’t more than five or six paces away from her.

Slippery as she was, there was no way she could sneak from the courtroom without him seeing her, but Tristan suspected Sophia Monmouth would remain right where she was until Ives’s trial concluded.

As it happened, Jeremy Ives was the first to come before the bench.

Tristan kept an eye on Sophia Monmouth as Ives was brought into the courtroom. She didn’t move or make a sound, but her entire body went rigid as Ives was dragged, blinking, to stand at the bar before the court.

Ives was a big man with broad shoulders, and hands so massive he could snap a man’s neck as easily as snapping a twig, but