Jessica got to her feet, pushing her hands against the small of her back. One way or another, it had been a long night. Something to tell her grandchildren, she supposed, although she doubted she ever would. “She says she’s not going to sleep in that bed again, not until the entire thing has been stripped away, mattress, hangings, everything. She’s also quite drunk, Gideon. I imagine I would be, too.”
“Then we’ll learn nothing more here tonight, or should I say this morning. It will soon be dawn. Ladies?”
“Oh, yes,” Kate said, jumping up. “I’m more than ready to get back to Portman Square. Tomorrow is soon enough for you all to tell me more about whatever the devil is going on here.”
“There’s nothing going on here.”
“So you say, Gideon. Silly me simply doesn’t believe that,” Kate announced as she headed for the foyer.
Gideon and Jessica exchanged looks as they followed her.
“Just before she nodded off, your grandmother asked me to lean down close so she could whisper in my ear. She said to tell you she’s learned a few things, and that you’ll soon have your murderer.”
Gideon waited for Kate to be handed into the coach. “And Kate overheard. The girl’s got ears like a bat. Wonderful. Now we’ll never be rid of her.”
“I heard that,” Kate warned from inside the coach. “But you’re probably right.”
“Damn it, Kate—”
“Not now, Gideon,” Jessica begged. “We’re all exhausted.”
He nodded his agreement, and helped her into the coach. They were halfway back to Portman Square when Kate asked about the commotion they’d heard outside the drawing room. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Gideon answered shortly. And then, a few moments later, his shoulders began to shake. “We dropped him.”
Jessica looked at him in the dim light of the false dawn. He was smiling. “You dropped him?”
“It wasn’t all that terrible. We’d tied him up in a sheet, and partway down the stairs Soames lost his grip on his end.”
“Oh, Gideon,” Jessica said, her own lips twitching in amusement. “How…um, how horrible.”
Gideon shrugged as if unconcerned, but the devil had crept into his eyes. “I suppose we could have apologized, but the marquis didn’t seem to mind.”
They were all three of them still laughing as the footman set down the coach steps in Portman Square, Jessica going off into new peals of exhausted mirth when she saw the clearly apprehensive look on the young man’s face. “My goodness, Waters,” she managed to choke out, “you look as if you’ve just seen a dead man.”
At that, she felt herself being swept up into Gideon’s arms as he climbed the steps to the mansion and headed for the stairs. “Bed now, for all of us,” he said, including Kate in this order.
“When do we go back to Cavendish Square?” Kate asked as she actually pulled on the railing to help propel herself up the stairs.
“We don’t. You’re returning to Redgrave Manor.”
“Giddy,” she said, very nearly whined, “don’t make me badger you. You know you’ll give in.”
“Not this time. Good night, Kate.”
Jessica gave the girl a quick wave as Gideon kicked open the door to their bedchamber. Once the door was closed again—and locked again—they both made short work of ridding themselves of their clothes and tumbling into the unmade bed. He kissed her, thanked her and then turned onto his stomach, clearly intending to sleep away what little remained of their wedding night.
Goodness! They were behaving like a long-married couple. Or at least like a long-married couple that had just disposed of a dead marquis.
She lay on her back while he lay on his belly. She lifted her hand and idly began stroking his bare back, more content than she could even imagine. Which, if she were to think about the entirety of her current situation, wouldn’t be very sensible of her. But it seemed sensible enough for now.
“Giddy? Really?” she asked him after a bit.
He mumbled something she probably shouldn’t have heard, and then sighed. “Good night, Jessica.”
She smiled up at the draperies. “Good night. Giddy.”
GIDEON LAID DOWN HIS FORK with extreme precision. Indeed, he’d kept his entire posture under careful control throughout the length of Jessica’s embarrassed recitation of the conversation she and Adam had shared in the modiste’s dressing room. He’d asked no questions. Until now, with her final admission.
“A journal? He was told to keep a journal?”
Jessica nodded, not meeting his eyes. “Or a diary, I suppose. In any event, he called it a journal, yes. But weren’t you listening? Adam’s…keeping a tally. As if the whole thing were some sort of twisted game. Even worse, if that’s possible, our father had been giving him lessons in assassination. You have to talk to him, Gideon. I certainly can’t. As it is, I can barely look at you, just telling you about it.”
“I need to see this journal.”
Jessica put the lie to her last statement as her eyelids flew up, and she stared at him. “Must you? I’d like to see it burnt. The point is, my father was training Adam to be just like him.”
“No, Jessica. The point is, we now know without a doubt the Society remains active. You confirmed it existed five years ago. Adam’s journal tells us it’s still going on. You see, we know they all kept journals, all the way back to the beginning, with my grandfather. Trixie told me about him, about the journals, just yesterday.”
Jessica put a fist to her mouth, closed her eyes. “I thought it was just something my father thought of, rather like keeping score of his kills at the hunt. They…they all wrote down what they did?”
“In great detail,” Gideon said, and then told her what Trixie had seen in his grandfather’s journals.
“Drawings? Charts? Are they all insane?”
Gideon pushed away his plate, his appetite gone. “One would think so. Either that, or terminally naive, considering the members all turned their yearly journals over to my grandfather for this business of verification, so their exalted leader or whatever they called him could verify the information and make the additions to their blasphemous bible. Once they’d done it, turned over a single journal, they were bound to him for life. There was no choice but to continue the practice, year after year.”
“Didn’t they realize what they were doing?”
“You mean, turning over their lives to their leader, their futures? They had to, surely. With those journals, the leader held them hostage to whatever demands he might make on them. And don’t forget, Jessica, there were guests at these so-called ceremonies. One person’s word might not inflict too much damage, but to be able to produce a dozen different journals, all naming the guest, all cataloguing the same depravities? If knowledge translates to power, and it always has, my grandfather, and my father after him, held the reputations of perhaps dozens of important men and, at least in my grandfather’s time, even some women in his hands.”
“And after them, whoever carries on with the Society even now. You think the journals are the reason the members are being killed?”
“I’m