The Duke’s Perfect Wife (MacKenzies & McBrides #4)(56)
Author: Jennifer Ashley

Darragh opened his mouth, but Eleanor held up her hand. All the men in the room, including Inspector Fellows, were hanging on Eleanor’s words, Hart saw, waiting for the end of the story.

“What Finella didn’t say—the secret she kept to her grave, telling only her son when he was old enough to understand—was that she’d felt the baby quicken in her after his father went off to war. He was her Scottish husband’s son, and Finella saw a way to save him by marrying the Englishman. She beguiled all the English into thinking that the child was the colonel’s, and so by English law should inherit Glenarden. The English never knew her son wasn’t the true child of the Englishman. But no, he was pure Highland Scots, of the Ramsay clan on his mother’s side, the McCain clan on his father’s. My father is the direct descendant of that brave woman and her little boy, and I am too. So, don’t lump me in with the bloody Sassenachs, Darragh Fitzgerald.”

Hart hadn’t heard that version of the tale, but if Eleanor’s great-great-grandmother had been anything like Eleanor, Hart believed it. Hart could imagine the woman—with her red gold hair and plaid skirts billowing in the wind—telling the English bastards that the land was hers and that was that. But, yes, I can be persuaded to do things your way if you like, she’d say, blinking those cornflower blue eyes at them, and then proceed to do whatever she pleased.

“Tell me,” Hart said to Eleanor. “How was it that the English colonel died so soon?”

“Oh, great-great-grandmother pushed him off the roof,” Eleanor said. “From that corner just above my bedroom. It’s a nasty drop there. He was simply awful to her, according to the stories, so I can hardly blame her.”

Chapter 16

Hart looked at Darragh, who was listening, openmouthed. “Remind me, Darragh, not to go up onto the roof with my wife.”

“Best not,” Eleanor agreed. “You can be rather aggravating.” She turned her smile on Darragh. “So you see, lad, I have no more love for the English than you do. That colonel muscled his way into Great-Great-Grandmother Finella’s home and had his way with her, which is why I do not blame her one whit for the roof. I myself would love to see England become detached from Scotland and drift off into the sea—except that two of my sisters-in-law are Sassenachs, and I’d want them safely here first. Along Lord Cameron’s Romany friends. And Mrs. Mayhew and Franklin and all the servants from Hart’s London house. Not to mention my English friends, and my father’s cronies at all those universities and the British Museum.” She made a helpless gesture with her good hand. “So, you see, it is not such a simple thing, is it? To say all people labeled this should live, and all labeled that should die? Neat and tidy, you don’t have to think about it. But alas, the world is much more complicated than that.”

Darragh was clearly out of his depth. He looked to Hart for support.

“She’s asking you to think about what you’re doing, lad,” Hart said. “To use your intellect, not your emotion.”

“I suppose he’s not been told he has an intellect,” Eleanor said sadly. “My father says that is the trouble with so many. They’re told they’ll never amount to much, and so they believe it, and so it becomes true. But the human mind is quite intricate, no matter what body it is born into.” Eleanor gently tapped Darragh above his left ear. “So many thoughts in there, all of them with great potential. They simply need to be pursued.”

There it was—Eleanor smiling at the lad, her fingertips soft on his hair. Darragh looked into her blue, blue eyes, and was smitten.

Eleanor smoothed Darragh’s hair, a motherly gesture. “What do you intend to do with him, Hart?”

“Send him to America to his sister,” Hart said.

Fellows came alert on the other end of the room. “No, you don’t. He shot at you and hit your wife. He needs to be arrested and stand trial for that.”

“His colleagues will never let him live that long,” Hart said. “He stays with me, I protect him, and he tells me every last detail about his friends and where I can find them.”

“I’ll not betray them,” Darragh said quickly.

Hart bent him a severe look. “You will. In exchange, you go to America and forget about secret organizations. Get an honest job and live a long and healthy life.”

Fellows strode to them. “Mackenzie, the law isn’t for you to take into your hands. I need to know these contacts. I can’t go back to my chief inspector and tell him that I let you send a violent criminal off to America with a slap on the hand.”

“You know that once he tells us what we need to know, his life won’t be worth anything,” Hart said. “If his colleagues don’t come for him, he’ll go to Newgate and be hung or shot for treason.”

“Rewarding him by sending him to America to live with his sister won’t exactly reform him, will it?”

Eleanor broke in before Hart could answer. “Neither will hanging him, Mr. Fellows. He’s only a boy. He’s nothing more than a trigger, like an extension of the pistol. I’m willing to give him a chance, if he helps you find those who want Hart dead.”

Darragh sat silently through the exchange, fear large in his eyes. It was beginning to dawn on him, Hart saw, how he’d been used. “I’m not a trigger,” he said in a small voice.

Eleanor smoothed his hair again. “Best you keep your head down and mouth shut, lad. Or Inspector Fellows will be driving you away in a cart with bars on it. Your only chance is to do what His Grace tells you.”

Darragh blinked back tears. “But I can’t… tell.”

“Mackenzie,” Fellows said, voice strained, “I understand your tactics. I even admire you for them, but you’ll cost me my job.”

“Hart will never let it come to that.” Eleanor smiled sweetly at Fellows, then Hart. “Will he?”

“No,” Hart said. “The Home Office will answer to me soon enough, Fellows. You’ll keep your job. Especially if you are instrumental in rooting out a cache of Fenians.”

“Then that’s settled,” Eleanor said. “Perhaps you should give Darragh some tea before you start with the questions. He looks all in.”

Hart put his hand under Eleanor’s arm and lifted her from the chair. “You are the one who is all in. The boy will be fine. You are going back to bed.”