Cora (Virtue & Vice #4)

Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

HAWKE

H awke strode the halls of Buckingham Palace with the familiarity of a man who knew each nook and cranny like the back of his own hand.

Queen Victoria did not summon him idly. Theirs was a curious relationship. Not a friendship, precisely. She was too stroppy for such. She reserved her patience for her children and grandchildren.

Yet there were times when the grand dame of the realm sent for him with no discernible purpose other than to offload her darkest thoughts. She trusted him to be a sounding board who would never repeat her secrets to another soul, and for fifteen long years, Hawke had served as her personal spy, her errand boy, her confidant, and, yes, something akin to a friend.

God knew he couldn’t claim anyone else as one. He and the Queen were two lonely souls who had found a strange kinship in spite of their differences in age, station, fortune…and height.

Although he was not a giant of a man, he towered over the Queen by a full foot. The top of her head did not reach his shoulder. At just under five feet tall, Victoria was accustomed to commanding the room despite being the most diminutive person in it.

“You have kept us waiting for far too long, Hawke. We are displeased.”

“I beg pardon, Your Majesty. I have been searching for someone.”

Three long weeks of tracing every step Bella had taken late last December before disappearing into thin air. He had tracked down a man who’d witnessed a woman of Bella’s description speaking with a woman at the train station. This witness, discovered purely by luck, had observed the women switch clothing. An intelligent move for a woman who had reason to believe she was being trailed. Not subtle enough to avoid notice, but a respectable attempt at evasion.

From there, the trail had gone dead. Based on the timetables, the other woman could either have gone southwest to Cornwall, or northwest in the direction of Birmingham. Bella had continued on to France. That was all he knew.

A hollow spot opened near his heart ached.

She couldn’t be dead. A force of nature like Bella came along rarely. He had expected her to be there, drifting along in her self-constructed prison, until he was ready to leave spying for the crown behind. Yet that day never came, for Victoria always needed him.

Until last Christmas, when she hadn’t shown up at her Parisian flat as expected. Ever since, Hawke had been consumed by the fear that Bella was in grave trouble. She was lucky to be alive, considering the trouble she’d stirred up the summer before.

“That dreadful countess.” Victoria sniffed as though she detected malodorous air. “We pray she is indefinitely detained and that awful charity house she runs is shut down.”

He refrained from informing his sovereign that The House of Virtue was naught but an elaborate cover for a clandestine brothel specializing in any vice the wealthy aspired to. Years ago, when rumors about its true nature were beginning to circulate—no secret ever remained secret for long, a fact essential to Hawke’s work—Victoria had tasked him with finding out the truth. She had been worried about her husband’s relation, a Prussian prince, getting mixed up with the wrong crowd.

He’d confirmed her suspicions about her relation, but withheld one small detail from her. If Victoria knew with certainty, she would demand he find a way to hinder operations. No one in the aristocracy was going to inform their sovereign. Anyone with direct knowledge was also a client, and Bella was a ruthless blackmailer. One had to admire Countess Oreste’s strategy of mutually assured social destruction.

The former courtesan had clawed her way into the aristocracy by pure force of will. Hawke had come to respect the woman with one foot planted in high Society and the other in London’s underbelly.

At first, he’d been curious. Then fascinated. The deeper he dug into her private affairs the more he was impressed with the way her mind worked.

But it was her heart that had won him in the end. Her soft, beating, human heart that her formidable mind and iron will protected behind thick walls. Had she been merely ambitious, only beautiful, or simply crass, he wouldn’t have thought twice about turning her over to the Queen for a harsh comeuppance. Bella was all of those things and so much more.

Now, after years of shielding her, he had failed her utterly.

If he was right about what had happened to Bella, then the Queen was also in grave danger. The only way anyone could have known about her departure was if a counter-spy had overheard Victoria’s private conversations with him.

“Do you wish Countess Oreste gone, despite not answering for her role in the late Opposition Leader’s demise?” he asked. Bella had not played any role in Erskine’s demise, but she had intended to. Furthermore, she had been the one to track down the murderer. Hawke had been trying to shield her from Victoria in that sense, too, ever since last fall.

Victoria waved on hand. “As long as she is gone, and stays gone, We do not care a farthing as to what happens to her.”

Hawke did, though. A great deal.

“The Erskine matter has died down, now that his daughter-in-law is distracted with Mr. de Lucey,” Victoria paced. “Through him, Mrs. Erskine is a touch closer to the aristocracy than We would like, but there is nothing to be gained by attempting to ruin the match. He does intend to make an honest woman out of her, does he not?”

“Once the formal mourning period for her father-in-law is concluded, I understand they have set a date for a wedding in April.”

This was the sort of picayune nonsense the Queen of England and Empress of India oughtn’t concern herself with, but did, when it came to matters of the aristocracy and their frequently immoral behavior. While Mr. de Lucey was not a lord, his eldest brother was the Earl de Lucey and therefore within the Queen’s self-appointed purview. She heaved a sigh.

“We suppose their temporary licentiousness can’t be helped. The lady is a widow, after all.”

She had no word of censure for the male half of the supposedly licentious couple.

“The couple is caught between dueling expectations for honoring family. They will undoubtedly make things right in due time. I presume Your Majesty has other business to discuss than the private amusements of adults?”

It was not a gentle nudge, and he earned himself a sharp glance in rebuke.

“You do presume too much, Hawke. A marriage is no amusement but a solemn act.” She paused. “And generally, a sad one.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I really think people marry far too much.”

She had slipped from the royal We to I . He smiled inwardly. Almost fondly. For a woman who had been happily married herself, Victoria took a dim view of the institution.

“However, I understand that as a man approaches his middle years he often longs for domestic comforts. I therefore have decided to take the unusual step of elevating you to a knighthood.”

Hawke blinked. Rarely was he taken so off-guard.

“You are retiring me?” Putting him out to pasture like a broken nag? Shooting him like an old dog put out of its misery? He’d just turned thirty-seven. He had many years of service left in him.

Besides, what was he going to do with himself, if he couldn’t be a spy?

“I intend to relieve you of the more physically demanding aspects of your current role. You will be appointed to the Royal Victorian Order in recognition of your service. As few people know what you have done for me, we must spend the next several months setting the stage for your public honoring. These things tend to incite envy. I cannot abide the backstabbing.”

In other words, he was being put on notice. If he behaved himself, he would be rewarded with a title. Fat lot of good titles did anyone. He’d spent much of his adult life acting as Victoria’s eyes and ears in high Society. The aristocrats were no better, and were often worse, than the hoi polloi.

Especially the one Victoria had tasked him with keeping a close watch over. Prince Leopold.

“The knighthood comes with a baronetcy. You understand what that means, Hawke? Land. I have personally selected an estate for you in Essex.”

What in God’s name was he going to do with acreage? If he’d wanted to be a farmer, he would have stayed at home instead of joining the military as a youth.

That was how he had come to be appointed to Her Majesty’s personal guard, where he’d distinguished himself by thwarting a would-be assassin, a foreign diplomat. Had the man succeeded, the incident could easily have embroiled England in a ruinous war. For that reason, no one could ever know what happened. Hawke had kept this particular secret very well, but he was growing weary of carrying the accumulated weight of so many half-truths and burdensome knowledge.

Being put out to pasture with the memories of his work as a spy would be unbearable.

Where was Victoria’s impulse coming from? She needed him. Early in her reign, there had been Edward Oxford, who fired a dueling pistol at the pregnant Queen on a pleasant June day. Two years later, a man named John Francis had attempted to shoot her. In that instance, Victoria’s own stubbornness put her in danger. She had been warned of a gunman, but drove out anyway. Victoria had a tendency to brush off danger. In a man, it would be considered bravery, but she was a woman and therefore sometimes held in contempt for downplaying risks.

Only a few months after that, John William Bean made an attempt upon her life, but considering his pistol was loaded with tobacco instead of bullets, Hawke didn’t count this as a sincere attack.

Recently, things had been quiet, which set him on edge. An absence of danger required greater vigilance, not less.

He knew this, and yet he was torn between his sworn oath to protect his sovereign and his desire to shield the woman he…

He would call it admiration, for now. Fascination, definitely. Beyond that, Belladonna was a luxury he could not afford.

Could Bella have run off? Tired of her decadent life half in the shadows and taken the opportunity to walk away from it all?

Possible, yes. She had been distractible ever since her encounter with the Witch of St. Giles, Biddy Ross. A procuress of children with a black book of names nearly as long as Bella’s, but far worse in most respects.

Including one John Erskine, the late Opposition Leader, and father-in-law to Mrs. Justine Erskine. There was another name, one that behooved Victoria to keep out of the press. Hawke had laid his trap well, but the Witch had beaten him to the punch. He’d meant to catch her in the act of attempted murder that evening. Instead, he’d arrived too late to save Erskine or apprehend Ross, and nearly too late to save Bella from a cunning setup intended to frame her for the crime.

Was it likely that Bella had walked away from her life? No. And that meant these miserable weeks of separation had probably been a thousand times worse for her. A spike of fear lodged behind his breastbone.

“Hawke.”

He jerked his attention back to the here and now.

“I was saying that we will spend the next several months making it publicly clear why I am granting you such an honor.”

He bowed slightly.

“You will finish bringing Ross to justice. Quietly. When she is tried and judged for her crimes, you will be hailed as a hero. By Christmas next, if all goes well, you shall be a wealthy man.”

By this time next year—late January—he’d be clad in muddy boots wondering which end of the sheep to start shearing from. He’d be drowning his sorrows in treatises on land management. He’d have no excuse to haunt Bella’s House of Virtue anymore.

Hawke liked the stimulation of high Society. A knight and a baronet might gain access to the lower rungs, but he held more sway in his current ambiguous, untitled status. People knew he was affiliated with the Queen, but they weren’t sure how. They curried his favor. Prince Leopold knew he was being closely watched. He suspected. There was nothing he could do to stop Hawke from reporting back every unsavory detail of his life to his aunt-in-law.

“You have my sincere and immense gratitude for your generosity,” Hawke lied.

“You shall leave off searching for that troublesome countess if you want your knighthood.” His protest must have been etched on his face—an uncharacteristic lapse of control—for the Queen quickly added, “That’s an order. If she wanted to be found, she would be home by now.”

He had the sinking feeling that Victoria was right.