‘Good gracious me, what have you been doing to yourself?’ she demanded now as she lifted Isobel from his arm. ‘Your Grace.’ It was always an afterthought, his title. ‘Fighting?’
‘An encounter between a phaeton and a small child in Green Park,’ he admitted. ‘The child is fine, I dislocated my shoulder and lost my hat.’ Any proper employer would be outraged that she might suggest him capable of brawling in the middle of a Thursday afternoon. He was long since resigned to being an improper employer.
Prescott, his secretary, looked round the study door, studied his dusty, battered appearance and raised his eyebrows. ‘There is a considerable amount of business awaiting you, sir. However it will all keep until tomorrow.’ The door clicked shut behind him.
In the days before his twenty first birthday, when he had been finalising the plans for his escape, Cal had realised that he had to leave behind him a confidential secretary of the utmost respectability, intelligence and probity. If he could not, then there was no way he could square his conscience about abandoning his estates to be administered at arms’ length. George Prescott, the third son of Lord Warnley, a neighbour, was the soberest, most hard-working and conscientious man Cal had ever encountered, despite George’s youth. He had left university with honours and was choosing between the various flattering offers of work he had received, which included posts with a bishop, two lords and a leading member of the House of Commons, when Cal poached him.
He was one of only three men in whom he had confided his suspicions about his uncle and cousin. The second was Jared Hunt, originally employed as his fencing master, a taciturn man of lethal fighting ability whose past was a mystery. He was a year older than Cal, had presented himself in answer to an advertisement and appeared to have no background whatsoever, only excellent references from two French émigré sword masters.
His loyalty became apparent when he had taken Cal to one side a month before he put his plan of escape into action and warned him that he was suspicious about the accidents and ill-health that had plagued him. The relief at finding someone with whom he could discuss it, and the knowledge that he wasn’t losing his mind, had given him the strength he need to break free.
He left George behind him as his confidential secretary with powers of attorney, the only man who knew where he was going in advance and who received letters and orders from wherever Cal went. Jared travelled with him, at first while he was still weak from the last bout of illness, as his bodyguard. Then, as his health returned, as his friend and companion.
The third man in his confidence was his valet, Michael Flynn, a young Irishman whom Cal had rescued when he was being beaten up by a gang of toughs on a New York street. He had got the battered youth back to his dingy lodging room, tended his wounds and thought nothing of it until Flynn had turned up the next morning at the hotel, his smart appearance marred by two magnificent black eyes, and announced that Mr Thorne – as he was calling himself – needed a valet and that he was his man.
Cal had noticed his clean nails, his sharp shave, despite the bruises, his well-chosen clothes and agreed.
‘You know what I am,’ Flynn had blurted out. ‘You know why they were having a go at me?’
‘Because you’re a molly,’ Jared had growled as he squinted down the length of the fencing foil he was polishing.
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Lay one finger on my knee, lad, and you’re a spit roast,’ Jared drawled. ‘Otherwise you can be romancing the kitchen cat for all I care. But it’s not up to me, I’m not the one you’ll be helping into his small-clothes.’
In his innocence Cal had puzzled over how Jared had known. As far as he knew he’d never met a man who preferred to lie with his own sex, but he suspected he probably had and that it was his own inexperience showing. His uncle was intemperate on the subject, which seemed a good enough reason to take the opposite view. ‘You’re hired on a month’s trial,’ he said, waving towards the heap of portmanteaux that held his crumpled and unvaleted clothing. ‘See what you can do with that lot, and Mr Hunt’s while you’re at it.’
After a month Cal could not imagine how he had managed without Flynn. The valet moved from body servant to confidential servant to friend and Cal revealed his true identity, though not the reason for his travels. But Flynn was sharp, with an inbuilt level of wariness that a hard life had taught him. ‘What’s the danger in England then, sir?’ he’d asked one day when he was heaving off Cal’s boots. Cal told him and Flynn shrugged. ‘Bloody hell. Still, I suppose if you need a motive for murder, getting a dukedom is a pretty tempting one.’ In Cal’s opinion that summed things up nicely.
Now he trudged upstairs to find Flynn and a change of clothing, leaving Isobel telling Nanny all about the nice lady who had driven Papa home. Flynn, emerged from the dressing room and pursed his lips at the sight of Cal’s battered person.