Authors: My Wicked Earl
“Hunt and his cronies were preaching an end to the government. That is against the law.”
“That wasn’t the purpose of the meeting.”
“My God, woman, there were sixty thousand people on the Fields, looking to make mischief.”
“They merely wanted to petition the government by legal means to reform the election of members to the Parliament. How can merely discussing a subject ever be wrong, let alone illegal?”
“It will always be so when that discussion poses a danger to the peace of the community.”
“Ballocks, my lord. The men came to Manchester to hear the speakers. That’s all. They were purposely sober and orderly and dressed in their Sunday clothes, because they were tired of being called unkempt and unorganized.”
“They had been drilling like soldiers on their various village greens for weeks.”
“Unarmed, and ordered to remain so by their leaders.”
“Then they marched in columns into the city, exactly like a militia. And so they were met with the same.”
“Dear God, Everingham, they marched there with their children and their wives beside them, maintaining order all the way! Hardly the act of men intending mayhem. And for no reason but arrogance, the magistrates brought down the militia on them.”
Hollie suffered a familiar and sobering chill, a bell-clear memory of the screams of terror, that remorseless vision of the horror on the field littered with the wounded and the dying and the dead, the soft ribbons and the small shoes.
“Children were killed, my lord, and their mothers. How can you possibly excuse that?”
Everingham glanced away to the window, then found her eyes. “An unnecessary tragedy of the worst kind, madam. Made more so because the Riot Act was read and wasn’t obeyed.”
Hollie tried to match his steadiness, regretting her honesty, her temper most of all. She had to
act like a spy if she was going to be one. “It damn well wasn’t read, my lord.”
“It was indeed read, according to my sources—”
“Damn your sources and your spies and your informers, my lord commissioner!” So much for calm. “They are wrong. If the Riot Act was read, then nobody heard it. I know this for a fact, because I—”
I was there, she’d nearly said. But she didn’t know where that would take him in his barbaric logic. And her heart was still aching and too full of memories. She could feel his gaze on her, shifting impatiently along the bridge of her brow and settling on her mouth.
“Because you what, madam?”
She swallowed back the tears that clogged her throat and prayed that he wouldn’t suspect. “Because I know dozens of people who were there at the time, who saw everything.”
“Your husband among them, I imagine? Your dear Adam?”
“And others who were outraged that their government would send troops into a crowd of innocent citizens.” She grabbed for a breath that was meant to clear her head, but it came out a convulsing sob, which only made her angry. “But of course, you’ll never read a word of their testimony in your files, and so it will never make it into your official report.”
A shadow crossed his resolute features, and
for an instant she could almost believe that she’d made inroads into his thick skull. He straightened.
“You know nothing at all of the Home Office inquiry, madam, or the findings of the commission.”
“I know that what I’ve read so far in
The Times
is nothing more than a quick jig meant to distract the public from the real truth.”
“Whatever you have read, it can be speculation only. I’ve submitted nothing to the press, and I won’t until the inquiry is complete.”
“Don’t bother, my lord. Your information is but a mockery of justice, concocted by unscrupulous, mercenary spies who were hired by the Home Office and paid for their violence. Tainted testimony collected from informers and scallawags and the murderers themselves. Let’s not forget the commendations for bravery that Lord Liverpool and his lot made to the magistrates and the Manchester Yeoman Cavalry for courage under fire. Bah! For using swords against an unarmed crowd.”
“It takes far less force than a sword blade to deal a fatal blow. A stone. A cudgel.”
“Not a single stone was thrown, else there would have been a hail of them, and the soldiers would have surely reported such wounds by the dozen. But such injuries were impossible.”
“Why is that?”
“Because every stone and stick had been delib
erately gathered from off St. Peter’s Fields and from the streets for the two days before. The magistrates ordered their attack against a defenseless crowd. And when the field cleared, my lord, the dead and the dying were strewn about like the leavings of a market festival. There were bonnets and shoes and people and…my father—”
She stopped because she was sobbing, because he was lifting her chin and searching her face, his dark brows pulled together, an unfathomable look in his eyes.
He said simply, softly, “You were there.”
Hollie stopped breathing, tried to look away from him. But the terror had already dropped into her stomach, churning her thoughts into useless circles. He’d come so close to the truth in so little time. She’d just handed it to him.
Some kind of spy.
Charles could see the truth of it plainly in her eyes, in her sorrow, and in her panic, as well as in the denial that perched on the glistening bow of her mouth. The truth shifted his world, tilted his balance, because there was more than this inside her, probably more than he was prepared to know.
“And if I was there, my lord? What then?”
Bloody hell, she was one of them: an improbable radical. Her plots and schemes, her impossible opinions that she shared with her hero husband, were treacherous currents that would swamp her.
“Is that where you met him?” Feeling a thorough cad, he gave her a handkerchief from his pocket. “Your husband?”
Confusion crumpled her brow, then she heaved a huge sigh and dipped her head as she wiped at her prim little nose. “No, not then. He came along afterward.”
He could imagine that scene. Adam MacGillnock riding up on his white horse, scooping the innocent maid onto his saddle and riding off with her.
“Your whirlwind romance,” he said.
“Of sorts.”
For no reason at all, Charles’s heart gave a mad leap.
Of sorts.
Hardly an overwhelming passion. Merely admiration, perhaps. Gratitude born of her grief and the unscrupulous man’s ready shoulder to cry on.
Not that her private affairs mattered to him in the least. And yet he felt the loss of her heat when she unfolded herself from him and slipped away to the wall of boxes, the leavings of her life.
“Will you arrest me now just because I was there?” She grabbed a piece of green flagging from the box, shook it out, and pretended to study it.
“Where exactly were you when the rioting began?”
She huffed and the banner fell open to a scramble of letters. A single undulating unintelligible word. As jumbled as his pulse and his in
tentions, as the things she’d told him that he’d never heard before.
“If you mean when the cavalry charged, then I was standing below the hustings alongside my father, listening to Henry Hunt orating about the importance of reforming the House of Commons. I saw as much as anyone.”
He’d committed the map of the event to memory, knew exactly where she had been. In the thick of it, the little fool, near the path of the hussars. The thought made his stomach reel. “What were you doing there?”
“What I always did for my father. I was taking down the speeches, Hunt’s commentary on the absurdity that a large town like Manchester, with its huge population and all its factories and industry, hasn’t a single member of parliament to represent its interests.”
“That was your job—collecting speeches? From where?”
“Anywhere: petition meetings, rallies, debates, Parliament.”
“You collected speeches from the press gallery in Parliament?”
“Regularly.”
“Since when?”
She shrugged. “I was eight or so when I started in the Commons. Twelve or so in the Lords.”
And he’d never noticed her?
“And your father allowed you to do this? To
record Parliament in session? I can’t imagine a worse occupation for a child.”
“He encouraged me while I sat beside him. Afterward we compared notes, and Father would write the speech, and I would set the type. Just like the press corp from
The Times
, only a much smaller operation.”
“So you were one of the reporters in the gallery?” He could imagine her leaning over the railing, scribbling madly, doubtless wanting to leap down and lead the debating herself.
“And I will be there again, sir, as soon as I’m free of this nonsense and back to my newspaper.”
“And to your husband.”
She lifted her gaze to him for a brief time and then dropped it. “If he lives.”
He hadn’t the slightest idea how to reply to that. The subject had gotten off track. And he had a dozen places he needed to take it.
He was almost relieved when a tap came on the door, then Mumberton’s voice. “My lord.”
Charles opened the door to the man’s incessant bowing. “What is it, Mumberton?”
“There are two gentlemen here to see you, sir. Are you in to them?”
He was expecting no one and damn well didn’t need to be entertaining guests just now. Not with the wife of the dangerous, elusive Captain Spindleshanks standing in the middle of his library, a witness to the rioting, a victim of its
tragedy, and chockful of her own radical notions.
“Who the hell is it, Mumberton?”
“Sir John Watford and Lord Bowles.”
“Blast it all.” Two of the commissioners.
“They indicated that they weren’t expected.”
“Yes, yes, I know.” No doubt they’d heard that he’d arrested Spindleshanks and wanted a report. Impeccable timing, as usual.
He wondered if she would know their names. Her husband certainly had reason to dread them, and nothing seemed to escape her notice. A paleness had gathered around the fine rose of her mouth, though it wasn’t fear; it was more like a determination that matched the fire blazing in her eyes.
Yet she said nothing, this chatterbox who could talk the salt out of the sea, who had his head spinning with her soft scent and her wayward sensibilities, and her unsettling, unexpected words.
Those gathered-up stones on the field.
And she had said something else that had struck him soundly in the breastbone—something about the children in St. Peter’s Fields.
They marched there with their children and their wives beside them.
He knew very little of children, but he couldn’t imagine parents putting their sons and daughters in harm’s way.
Which made him suddenly wonder where the boy was. Because Mumberton was here in the library and therefore not playing nursemaid.
And Christ, he wasn’t ready for this confrontation with Watford and Bowles, hadn’t formed a coherent strategy. The evidence was scattered and unread, Spindleshanks still on the loose, the man’s wife now his star witness.
No, not his witness. He was using her blatantly, a bewitching lure to draw out her worthless husband.
Mumberton waited in his overly patient way, fingers laced at their tips, rocking up on his toes and then down again.
He couldn’t very well send Watford and Bowles away without some word of Spindleshanks’s apprehension. They’d come the two hours from London in a jouncing coach. He had to meet with them. The news of the impending arrest must have spread through the Lords and Commons like a field afire.
There would be clamoring for blood and retribution once they knew he’d caught the radical’s wife; calls to punish her for the man’s crimes.
Charles scrubbed his fingers through his hair, wondering how this day—this entire bloody week—had gone so very wrong. “I’ll see them now, Mumberton.”
“In the east parlor, my lord? And a tray of tea?”
“Yes. I’ll be there in a few moments.”
Mumberton bowed his way out, closing the
door behind him, leaving Charles alone with Miss Finch.
She hadn’t moved a muscle, still held the folded banner across her arms as though awaiting his judgment.
He’d seen despicable things in the prisons where radicals were kept. He deplored the unlivable conditions and had spoken out in Parliament against prison abuse. The stories of women raped and degraded by the wardens were more than just rumor.
He couldn’t take the chance.
Despite her bravado and her cunning and that razor-sharp tongue of hers, she’d be no match for a lecherous jailor with a hungry cock. She was too marvelous a beauty—the sort that even wise men lost their judgment over.
Yet he sure as hell couldn’t trust her here on her own, with such powerful evidence against her damnable husband at her fingertips. He’d doubtless return to find the last scrap of sedition piled in the garden with the new-raked leaves, rising up in a great conflagration, and the woman fanning the flames with her skirt.
“Come, madam.” He motioned toward the door, but the woman didn’t move.
“You’re not taking me in there.”
“You’ll sit quietly, madam. Speak only when spoken to.”
“Not even then, my lord. You can’t do this to me.”
Hollie held her ground. Watford and Bowles were two of Everingham’s commissioners, enemies of the people. He was going to just hand her over to them on a platter. Maybe she’d said too much about the massacre after all, and he’d realized that Adam MacGillnock was nothing more than a figment of her imagination.
“You’ll come with me, madam, else I’ll carry you in.”
Certain that Everingham was willing to and capable of carrying her all the way to London if he had a mind to, that he would take great pleasure in dropping her in a heap before his fellow commissioners, Hollie shucked out of her apron and marched along behind him, her dignity intact but her world shattering to bits.
T
he east parlor was a long, ornately galleried hall with an archipelago of chairs and tables and settees, scattered islands of gilded mahogany and brocade, and to-the-ceiling windows richly draped in velvet.
She recognized the two men immediately. Sir John Watford, squinting at her past the billowy smoke from his pipe, the younger, Lord Bowles, rising from a settee and coming toward her with a predatory cast to his eyes, his voice oily.
“Well, I say, Charles! Who is this lovely young woman?”
This is Captain Spindleshanks’s wife, gentlemen: shall we jail her or just hang her here from the chandelier?
No need to coddle the Stanhope, no need for
his staff to finish cleaning the gatehouse. Or for him to suffer her opinions on child rearing.
He stood like a storm cloud gathered behind her, the steamy heat of him collecting in the folds of her skirts, sifting between her buttons. He touched her there, at the small of her back, his broad, bracing hand slipping around the curve of her waist as he nudged her farther into the room. A lordly gentleman to the very last.
“Lord Bowles, Sir John, this is—”
Mrs. Captain Spindleshanks. Hollie nearly blurted out the name herself.
“Miss Finch, gentlemen. Miss Holliway Finch. She’s…”
Not MacGillnock? She waited for the man to denounce her as her husband’s proxy. She wanted to kick Everingham’s shin for putting her through this lingering torture, but then the rogue said, “Visiting for a short time.”
Visiting! Shackled and dragged here, imprisoned in his gatehouse.
“I say!” Bowles beamed at her, leered as he made a leg. “Who is she really, Everingham?”
“Miss Finch is my…ward. Temporarily.”
His ward? What the devil was the man thinking? She spared a quick glance up at him, but he just stood there glaring thunderously as Bowles took her hand in his and bent over her fingers.
“Delighted, Miss Finch,” Bowles said. “How very nice to meet you. Quite a pleasant surprise for once, eh, Watford?”
“Indeed.” Watford stuck his thumb into his waistcoat pocket and peered at Hollie across his slumping spectacles. “Good to meet you, Miss Finch. I pray you’ll enjoy your visit.”
“She will,” Everingham said.
Watford pulled on his pipe and lifted a brow. “Well, then, Everingham, you know what we’ve come for. You did catch him, didn’t you? That rotter Captain Spindleshanks.”
Hollie resisted the pressure of Everingham’s hand at her waist but moved forward into the room, his prisoner still.
“Where did you hear that his arrest was about to happen, Watford?”
“From Sidmouth himself, of course. Said you’d gotten a tip from a useful individual, that you had a fresh warrant and had sent out your bailiff to apprehend the bastard.” Watford smiled apologetically and bowed. “Begging your pardon, Miss Finch.”
Hollie wanted to clock the man on the head, but she curtsied slightly instead. “And given, my lord.”
“You’re visiting the earl from where, did you say?” Watford’s brows climbed precipitously, pumped to their arcing height by the working of his mouth.
“Lately of Lancashire.”
Bowles poured himself a cup of tea. “The deuce you say! Then you’ve no doubt heard of this Spindleshanks fellow. Perhaps you’ve even seen him or his handiwork.”
“What handiwork would that be, Lord Bowles?” Hollie bit the sides of her cheeks to keep from saying more.
Bowles snorted as he stirred his tea. “So you haven’t told the lady of the man’s crimes, Everingham. All that balderdash about our commission’s inquiry into that mess at Manchester being corrupt. Imagine.”
“Yes, imagine,” she said, ignoring Everingham’s growl behind her as he led her to a chair.
He bent to give her one of his threatening scowls. “Please, Miss Finch, do take a seat here.”
“Yes, but did you capture him, Everingham?” Watford asked, “Our informant was correct, wasn’t he? We’ve bloody well paid him well enough.”
Spies. Miscreant mercenaries. Though she was one of them now—but on the side of right and justice.
“My bailiff went to the right location, Watford.” She could feel Everingham’s gaze on her neck, at her ear, as though he were whispering there. “Unfortunately he was too late.”
“The devil you say.” Bowles sat on the nearest chair. “He got away, scot-free?”
Hardly. If she were free, she’d be standing at her press printing another editorial against Everingham and his bootless Peterloo Commission! But here she was, dangling from tenterhooks, wondering why Everingham hadn’t hauled her
up by the scruff of the neck and tossed her to these dogs.
The great earl merely said, “I suspect that he was warned off by someone. Escaped down the back stairs.”
“Damn those village types for their gossip. Tight-mouthed bastardy to the end. Did you get a name?”
Hollie chanced a look at Everingham’s unreadable profile.
“It’s MacGillnock,” he said finally, though he couldn’t possibly have imagined that her heart was slamming against her throat. “Adam MacGillnock.”
“What the devil kind of name is MacGillnock?”
“Scottish, it seems. My bailiff did collect a substantial amount of evidence at the scene. Which will be sorted through and analyzed.”
“At least there’s that much and a name. Worth the money, I’d say. Sidmouth will be pleased. But damned if I wasn’t hoping Spindleshanks would still be here and I could spit in the bastard’s eye.”
Try it, Watford. I’ll spit back.
The man jabbed the air with his pipe. “He needs to be stopped before he can print another word of sedition. Makes us all look like complete fools.”
“Mark me, Watford, I’ll catch him. It’s just a matter of time.”
And she had so little of that, so much to do before Everingham tied up his report and Parliament acted on it.
“I’m for jailing them all, starting with that bloody James Wroe at the
Observer.
Fair enough punishment for calling the damned incident Peterloo. A slap in the face of Wellington, a great warrior.”
“Fortunately this Spindleshanks fellow has put the noose around his own neck for you, Everingham. Couldn’t find a better confession than all those broadsides of his.”
“Was that his great crime, Lord Bowles?” Hollie asked, tucking her gaze well away from Everingham’s glower.
“Treasonable, in my opinion, Miss Finch. Printing inflammatory broadsides and other illegal and illicit materials is a crime against the king’s peace, as it should be.”
“Ah, you mean that charging the Home Office and the king, and even Lord Everingham here with corruption isn’t allowed in the press?”
Bowles blustered, “It damn well isn’t. But don’t worry your pretty head about it, my dear. They’re soon to be squashed for good and all, eh, Everingham?”
For one lunatic instant Hollie expected Everingham to pounce on Bowles, to show that he wouldn’t be a party to squashing innocents. But he only tightened that muscle in his jaw, and his eyes narrowed and darkened to coal.
“Make no mistake, Bowles, the man will soon be caught and tried on evidence he created himself.”
Bowles chortled and clapped his hands. “Why bother with the expense of the trial, I ask?”
Watford pounded a fist on the table. “Hang him straight away you find him, Everingham! Right there in the town square. Sidmouth would be grateful to have this Spindleshanks episode over and done with before the report comes out.”
“Due process, Watford. I don’t want to make a mistake that might acquit him.”
Watford leaned back and crossed his pudgy fingers across his girth. “Can’t have these damned reformers raising up the lower order with their outcries for a change of government. Voting rights for the masses! Ha! Makes them believe themselves better than they are, and we all know what that leads to.”
“Anarchy,” Bowles said, raising his cup of tea. “Bloodshed. Revolution. Nip it in the bud, I say. These are dangerous times.”
Hollie’s blood was at a full boil. She wanted to bolt out of her chair and scream and rail at their idiocy, but there was too much danger, too much to lose, too much to learn.
“What do you know of the children, gentlemen?” Everingham had been quiet, watching the two men as though he’d never seen them before.
Children? Had he said that? Her ears were still ringing with outrage.
Yes, he’d said something about the children in his dangerously quiet way.
She had often watched the man’s stalking power as he made his parliamentary speeches, as he breathed his fire and ice, imagining that he would smell of brimstone if she ever got close. And here she was, even closer now, as he touched the back of her chair for a thrilling instant and then moved away. But it wasn’t brimstone that beguiled her nose and made her sniff at him in secret, it was lime and laurel and soap. It was woodsmoke and autumn and the fog that still dampened his boots.
The man was imperious to everyone, quick to temper, readily frustrated, but ultimately reasonable. And try as she might to make herself believe otherwise, she had never once felt in danger from him, though he’d shackled her and stolen from her and made her want him to love his son.
His touch was ever emphatic and hot and too generous.
And now here he was, the great earl of Everingham, head of the Peterloo Commission, asking softly about the children.
“What children are these, Everingham?” Watford asked.
Charles had remembered this from Miss Finch’s tirade earlier, a new detail that had snagged on his thoughts and hadn’t settled right. Still didn’t.
“The children in St. Peter’s Fields that morning. What do we know about them?”
Watford tapped his finger on the edge of his saucer as he pursed his lips in thought. “Two dead, I believe.”
“Two.” Charles’s stomach clenched. He turned away from Watford’s sterile accounting and found Miss Finch staring open-eyed at him, on the brink of admiration, it seemed, her eyes as bright as emeralds, her lips damp from her worry and so intimately inviting.
“Why is that, Watford?” he asked.
“What do you mean, Everingham? Why are they dead? I suppose because they got in the way of the rioters. Happens with a mob like that. Illiterate, unwashed.”
Bastard.
Charles’s anger flared sharply, fueled by Miss Finch’s gasp and a deep outrage he’d never felt before, that made him wonder again where the boy was and whether Mumberton knew.
“No, Watford, it doesn’t just happen. What I want to know is why there were any children at all on the field that day.”
Watford shook his head, casually threw out his hand. “Who knows?”
“What are the ages of the dead?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Charles had memorized every detail of the day in question, at least those details that he’d been informed of. But he hadn’t heard a single
statistic on the dead or the wounded or the children, hadn’t considered their numbers of any importance until now.
Until Hollie Finch had stuck her nose into his life.
“What about the women who were killed, Watford?”
The man shook his head. “Whores and prostitutes, I imagine—”
“Damn it, Watford.” The man started backward a step, but Charles gripped the back of a chair rather than wrap his hands around Watford’s thick neck. “Don’t imagine anything about anyone or anything until you know for certain. That’s why we’re here: to find out. How many of the women who were killed were wives of the men in the crowd?”
Watford blinked and sputtered, “Damned if I know.”
“Someone knows, Watford. But there’s nothing of this in the official file. I want you to find out why there were children on the field that day.”
“I don’t know that it matters, does it?”
Charles dug his fingers deeper into the back of the chair. “And I want to see a full accounting of the dead and the wounded. A casualty list. Have either of you come across such a document?”
“I haven’t.” Watford shared a shrug with Bowles, setting Charles’s teeth on edge in that momentary exclusion from their exchange. How often had he missed just that sort of communication?
Bowles answered with another shrug and fiddled at the lace edge of his neck cloth. “I surely haven’t seen anything like that either, Everingham.”
He’d been a lax commissioner, uninterested in the outcome. He’d learned from long experience that questions begat answers in many different forms, some that he couldn’t control when the papers flew and the ink flowed.
But Miss Finch had asked, and he hadn’t a good enough answer to give her. He had more questions now than he’d had only this morning. There was a dark danger lurking here in the not knowing.
“Then find out why,” Charles said. What else hadn’t he been told, what other detail had slipped past him?
“Yes, but…” Bowles bristled as though Charles had demanded that he swim the Thames beneath Tower Bridge. “Where the devil would we get this information from, Everingham? The estimates say there were more than four hundred wounded. They’re probably scattered to the four winds, hiding out from the law.”
“I suggest you begin your search with the authorities in Manchester.”
Miss Finch snorted lightly and then coughed quietly into her fist to cover up her dissension. He regretted her being privy to the shortcomings of his inquiry. It was more ammunition for her husband, if the man ever managed to slip past him. But it was too late now.
“Try the hospitals nearby, Bowles. The doctors. The magistrates, the locals. Ask Nadin or that Major Trafford!”
“Who?” Bowles stood, shaking his head, both the Deputy Constable and the commander of the Manchester Yeomanry forgotten or dismissed long ago. “And to what end, Everingham? We’re nearly finished with the incident. Why stir up more work at this late date?”
Charles stared at the man and wondered at the unfamiliar taste of disgust on his tongue and why he’d never noticed it before. “You’ll do it, Watford, because I’m telling you to.”
Watford’s face went crimson to match his waistcoat, a newly-minted baronet yearning to sputter his objections at an earl. Yet Charles knew the man would remain silent; the ranks between them were too great. He and Bowles had both been pleased to be seated on Charles’s commission, chosen by Sidmouth because Charles hadn’t cared at the time who sat.