Murder on Cold Street (Lady Sherlock #5) - Sherry Thomas Page 0,74

then immediately went to speak to my husband. Nearly gave me an apoplectic attack, thinking of what he might have said to Mr. Cousins.

“As far as I could tell, he didn’t say anything. And then my husband passed away and his solicitors had to tell me that he left me a very small dower portion, not wanting me to have a bigger dower—and then go on to marry some other rich man.”

She lifted and lowered the piano’s lid, lifted and lowered it, the chagrin on her face changing to bewilderment, then resignation. Walking slowly, she returned to her chair and took a seat. “After the reading of Mr. Cousins’s will, I received an unsigned typed note that said, Do you not wish that you had cuckolded him when I gave you the chance? I am laughing at you both.

Her eyes flashed with anger. “I hated him for that, his gleeful pleasure at my pain. When I realized Mrs. Treadles would be working with him, I begged her to beware of him. I was beginning to be very grateful to her, but we weren’t close yet, and it was such a personal and deeply humiliating story that I couldn’t bring myself to give the details. Perhaps if I had told her everything in full, she would have been more careful. But you can see it, can’t you, how he would have done it? Pretending to understand her difficulties to gain her trust, but only so that he could better prey on her.”

She drained the rest of the cherry brandy and drew a shaky breath. “I shouldn’t say this, but I’m not at all sorry that Mr. Sullivan is dead. Whoever killed him did us all a service.”

* * *

As Charlotte came out of Mrs. Cousins’s house, Lord Ingram descended from their waiting carriage.

She did not blush or otherwise react, but in her throat and chest she felt the heat of the same embarrassment. It certainly didn’t help that he was smiling. The brim of his hat cast a shadow on his face, which only made the curvature of his lips more striking.

She was not accustomed to such full, unguarded smiles from him. Or the undisguised pleasure in his expression.

Perhaps the heat she felt, which seemed to expand everywhere, wasn’t only embarrassment.

As he handed her up, his hand held hers a moment longer than necessary.

For two people who had been lovers, and who had kissed rather lavishly only the day before, a slightly prolonged handhold, with both parties sturdily gloved, really shouldn’t matter all that much. But a new scalding heat surged up from her fingers directly into the socket of her shoulder.

“I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” she said in a rush, before he had even sat down across from her.

“I was at the home of some party guests not far from here,” he said, knocking on the roof of the vehicle to signal the coachman to start. “And Mrs. Cousins’s is on the way to the next house I need to call on. So it’s no inconvenience at all.”

“Still—”

“And I’m happy to see you again.”

It wasn’t so much the words—he’d said similar things to her before—but the ease in his voice, the unreserved candor.

And she had no idea how to respond, either in speech or in sentiment. He did not compel her but he had changed, and that change . . . it was as if she were a seed of many winters set in warm soil and generously watered. Something swelled and burgeoned inside her. And that put stress on her, a great pressure from within.

She gave him an account of what Mrs. Treadles had told Mrs. Watson in the morning, as well as what she’d learned from Mrs. Cousins just now.

He was silent, a grave silence. “I have met such men in my life. But that I am a man of a certain station in life makes me nearly immune from the worst they can do. Not so much the Mrs. Cousins and Mrs. Treadles of the world. And it pains me to think of all the women who have far less wealth and standing than they do, and all the Mr. Sullivans they must face.”

She gazed at him. To him, power was synonymous not with the subjugation of others, but with care and responsibility. He looked after those in his life, sometimes to the detriment of himself.

“You don’t think of Mrs. Cousins as having encouraged Mr. Sullivan?”

He shook his head firmly. “She is human and displayed