Page 3 of A Problem Princess

Clayton didn’t slow his steps as he strode over the drizzle-drenched cobblestones toward the thick bank of fog rolling up from the river. He wouldn’t let Burton think he cared, even though the comment jarred him to his core.

“Oh, that’s right—you ain’t no nob.Yerpappy was a goddamned murderer!”

Clayton grabbed the knife he kept sheathed up his left sleeve, spun around, and threw it. It sailed past Burton’s head so closely that the blade nicked his ear.

Burton slammed his hand against his head with a curse, but he was smart enough not to attack.

“Nevercome back,” Clayton threatened in an icy snarl.

He continued to walk away into the dark and damp city. He knew he would never see Burton again.Good.Clayton might just kill him if he did.

He took measured breaths to calm himself as he strode south through the city, but the night air did little to ease the painful clenching of his chest. How dare that bastard Burton mention Clayton’s father like that!

But it wasn’t the insult that had wounded him. It was the reminder that he’d done little over the past year to uncover the truth about Charles Elliott’s arrest and execution.

Until Scepter disrupted Clayton’s plans, everything in his life had been focused on uncovering the truth—and proving the world wrong about his father. About himself. About the murders twenty-five years ago. Abouteverything.Hell, he’d even joined the Home Office after returning from the wars because the ministry held the resources he needed to investigate, and the position had given him the opportunity to prove his patriotism to a country that thought his father had forsaken it.

He’d been so close to putting the last pieces into place he could taste it. But then he’d had to put it all on hold to stop Scepter.

Yet if Scepter truly was dead and gone, then he could once more turn his attention to those old murders and his father’s role in them—if any—even if he succeeded in doing nothing more than exonerating Charles Elliott’s ghost.

Around him, the evening was transitioning into a rainy night, helped along by a thick fog that blanketed the streets in eerie white. In the distance, bells clanged from ships bobbing in the Thames, and shouts and laughs went up from the poor who filled the courtyards and derelict buildings in this section of the city.

Yet he didn’t dare slow down. Not that he was afraid of being targeted by some opportunistic footpad who would find himself on the wrong end of a pistol if he attempted it. No, tonight Clayton was being targeted by someone far worse.

The prince regent.

With a roll of his eyes, Clayton hurried toward the Thames and the fastest way through London. His boots clicked on the stone steps as he descended toward the black river and stepped into the waiting boat.

“Westminster.” He tossed a coin to the wherry man. “And hurry.”

“Aye, sir.”

The boatman used the Thames’s finicky currents to glide upstream toward the wide bend where the river turned south beneath the new Waterloo Bridge and then on to Westminster. Old hulks appeared like ghost ships from the wall of fog as the wherry passed, and the drizzle and darkness lay so thick across the city that no lights could be seen glowing from any of the buildings on the banks. Only muffled noise from waterside taverns broke the silence, along with the occasional clanging of a ship’s bell. Even the lamp that dangled from the wherry’s rear pole barely lit up a circle big enough for the boat.

“Charon,” Clayton called out over his shoulder to the wherry man. After all, there seemed little difference between this trip down the Thames tonight and one across the River Styx. Both would eventually take him to hell. “What rumors have you heard creeping around in the shadows tonight?”

“None.” The boatman snorted. “No one’s daft enough to be out in this damp ’cept for fools.”

“True enough,” Clayton muttered beneath his breath.Hewas certainly acting the fool. Tonight’s wild goose chase proved it. He prayed that Burton and his Home Office operatives were correct that Scepter was dead and buried along with Hawking.

His gut told him differently.

By the time the boat glided silently up to the steps at the base of Westminster Bridge and Clayton stepped out, he had convinced himself that Burton knew no more about Scepter’s tattered remains than his own Home Office agents and that any tales of a new leader emerging to replace Hawking were just that—fairy tales.

Besides, he had a bigger nightmare to deal with at that moment.

“To the front door of Carlton House,” he called out to the jarvey of a hackney stopped on the embankment.

The driver’s eyes grew large. “Where?”

“You heard me.” Clayton swung inside the compartment, rapped his knuckles against the roof to signal to the man to drive, and muttered, “Onward to hell.”

The jarvey cracked his whip over the heads of the horses and started the old rig down the street. He kept them clipping along at a quick pace, possibly because it was his first fare to a royal residence…or more likely because he was convinced Clayton was mad as a hatter and wanted to be rid of him as soon as possible.

“God knows I’d have to be mad to be going to Carlton House,” Clayton muttered to himself as he watched the gas lamps pass by in the thickening fog.

But did he have a choice? Since the incident last summer at Waterloo Bridge and Clayton’s well-coordinated cover-up that kept the public from learning how Scepter had nearly assassinated the prince regent, Clayton had become one of the regent’s favorites, much to Clayton’s chagrin and to the suspicions of the prime minister and Home Office secretary. He’d only been half teasing the prince when he’d claimed he wanted to be rewarded with a generalship.