The Virgin Who Ruined Lord Gray - Anna Bradley Page 0,48

she understood his desperate need to see someone pay for the crime. Such grief as his couldn’t go unanswered. Sophia understood that sort of grief. She’d suffered it herself when her mother died. As young as she’d been at the time, she’d never forgotten the pain of that loss, the burning need for justice, the paralyzing helplessness of not having been able to stop it.

The shame of surviving.

“Jeremy wasn’t Sharpe’s target,” Lord Gray muttered to Sophia. “He mistook Jeremy for someone else.”

“Yes, but who?” They had more questions than they did answers.

Jeremy had simply happened to wander through St. Clement Dane’s at the wrong time. Sharpe had been lying in wait for someone else to pass through the churchyard, with the intention of leaping out at them and accusing them of theft. He’d seen Jeremy coming from the direction of the Turk’s Head, and he’d thought Jeremy was his man.

But why would Sharpe want to frame an innocent man for a crime, and at whose bidding had he done it? Sharpe wasn’t clever enough to come up with such a scheme himself. No, he was a mere pawn in something far, far bigger than a random theft.

And how was the Turk’s Head involved in this mess? Who was the fourth man? Of all the information they’d learned from Jeremy, the presence of a fourth man at the scene of the crime was the most shocking.

Whoever he was, he was a murderer, and Jeremy was going to hang for his crime.

* * * *

Neither Sophia Monmouth nor Jeremy Ives seemed to remember Tristan was there.

He watched, his chest tight, as she held Jeremy’s head to her shoulder, stroking his hair. Tristan could hardly believe this lady with her low, sweet voice and soft eyes was the same sharp-tongued hellion who’d defied him in St. Clement Dane’s churchyard—the same calculating thief who’d slipped her locket into Peter Sharpe’s pocket as coolly as if she sent innocent men to prison every day.

Except that wasn’t what she’d been doing. Peter Sharpe wasn’t innocent, but Jeremy Ives was. Miss Monmouth hadn’t been trying to send an innocent man away. She’d been trying to set an innocent man free.

Tristan hadn’t gotten a good look at Ives’s face at the trial. When they’d entered his cell today, he’d been stunned to find Ives was hardly more than a boy, seventeen at most. He looked to have been a hearty enough lad at one point, but now his flesh hung loose on his wasted frame, and Tristan could see by his stooped shoulders and the tinge of gray in his skin the weeks he’d spent in Newgate had taken a dreadful toll on him.

Before he came here today, Tristan had thought nothing could change his mind about Jeremy Ives’s guilt, but he’d been mistaken. There was simply no way Ives could have committed the theft Peter Sharpe had accused him of, much less a murder. Not just because he was simple, although that alone was reason enough to question his guilt. He’d looked at Tristan with that same slack-jawed misery and confusion Tristan had noticed in the courtroom the other day. It wasn’t the look of a murderer.

One only had to look at the boy to see he didn’t have the viciousness to commit a crime. Ives didn’t even know why he was here, or understand in any meaningful way what he’d been accused of. He couldn’t make sense of the concept of guilt or innocence. The judge had told him he was a bad man, and so he believed it to be true, even if it contradicted what he also knew to be true—that he wasn’t a thief, or a murderer.

Or a liar. The account he’d given of the night at St. Clement Dane’s, the tussle with Peter Sharpe, the existence of the fourth man…there wasn’t a chance Jeremy Ives could have invented such an extravagant lie.

Tristan dragged a hand down his face. Jeremy’s agitation had calmed when he described the last moments of Henry’s life, when Henry had been gazing up at the spire. It had comforted Jeremy to know for those few fleeting moments before he died, Henry had been at peace. That said more about the boy’s heart than words ever could.

Jeremy Ives didn’t know it, but he’d given Tristan a gift today—a single tiny, precious drop of peace in an ocean of rage and despair.

Tristan was grateful to him, so unbearably grateful—

“Time’s up, milord.” There was a harsh jangling of keys, then Hogg