Page 9 of The Duke Decides

“Or perhaps the Grenays would pay for information on your whereabouts,” he went on.

The Grenays would gladly pay to see her hang. So might her husband’s cronies, whose hopes she had left a smoking ruin, reeking of horse dung and tar.

“What would it gain you to expose me?” she challenged, curling her trembling hands into fists.

He let a silence unfold again, and Louisa’s ears ached as she strained for an answer. The music of the hired quartet spilled from one corner of the room, a lively quadrille, and dancers rushed to form their lines. Louisa’s heart twisted in her chest. The gaiety and wealth of the room, the overabundance of everything, felt like a mockery when she teetered on the edge of losing all.

“What would I gain?” He repeated her question. “Not much, to be sure. But the question I think that concerns us both is, what do you stand to lose?”

She closed her eyes, hoping her mask hid her expression of pain. She could not let him see her despair.

“The reputation of your charming little charity would go first, of course,” he mused, laying out the lines of thought she did not want to follow. “The Sisters of Benevolence have always preserved the highest moral standards. I understand they’re well known for it. No selling of children, no trading in girls, no shady apprenticeships, and no back door callers for the women under the roof. But of course, all that would come into question once the character of the current headmistress is known.”

Louisa held back a moan. She didn’t want to face his next words—didn’t want to imagine them—but he forced her like a stubborn cow into a chute. “The patrons would stop their funding. I can’t imagine they would hear your claims or excuses. They couldn’t afford to be seen supporting a charity headed by someone infamous. Very few of those who have gone through your doors would want to keep the association, afraid they would be tainted. Fewer and fewer people would trust the Hospital to supply honest workers. Fewer would come for aid. Your doors would close.”

The doors could close for lack of funding, or for lack of workers, but the need would never be erased. There would always be orphans born of illness and accident. There would always be women who lost their protectors, or who found, as Louisa did, the men in their lives were no protectors at all.

And where would they go, the widows, the orphans, the desperate wives, if the Hospital were not there to support them? All those lines of girls and women she had observed at dinner, all the sleeping heads she had imagined at their cots—where would they find shelter if the Hospital came to a ruinous end?

She struggled for her fighting spirit. She had not given up and submitted to her husband when she found out what he was. She had not kept silent and let his crimes go on.

“Say what you like,” she challenged. “You have no proof of these claims. There is no evidence. I will call you a liar.”

“Madame la comtesse. You are the liar. And I will not be required to supply proof. All it will take is a word.” He leaned close and breathed it on her neck. “Murderer.”

The shiver shook her from head to toe, and she squeezed her eyes shut, holding her fan to her brow. With the greatest effort she held back a low cry. She felt as if he had stabbed her. How? How did this stranger know everything?

From somewhere she pulled at the last threads of her courage. She had lost everything but her life fifteen years ago. She could leave it all again if she must.

“I will go away,” she said in a low voice. “I will disappear.” She’d done it before. “You may say what you like about me. It won’t touch the Hospital. Or the Sisters.”

“You could leave.” He sounded thoughtful. “But your darling Hospital will disappear anyway. There is a developer who wants your land.”

“We have been approached before,” Louisa said instantly. “We have always declined.”

“My friend is willing to present you with a very reasonable proposal. He will not offer nearly so much if the Hospital is suddenly left headless. I doubt anyone else there knows its worth and can negotiate a fair price.”

“Blackmailing me to sell the Hospital hardly strikes me as fair,” Louisa snapped.

The thief chuckled. That strange thrill shot through her again, apprehension mixed with—she could not deny it—anticipation. The fear made her feel alive. She had not felt such a bolt of energy since the last fight for her life, when she rode a horse through a starry night, away from the stinking smell of smoke, into the darkness of the absolute nothing that her future had suddenly become.

The breathlessness of not knowing her next step made her feel she were walking a tightrope and at any moment could fall into the abyss. Awake, aware, every nerve humming at full capacity, and a strange exhilaration that came only when she faced complete annihilation.

There was something wrong with her, of course. She had always known that. She had confirmed it to herself when she took a lantern and a fuse into a building she knew was not empty, meaning to purge its filth, burn down its secrets.

And burn him right along with them. She was a murderer in her soul, and such a person was not meant to preside over an institution made to nurture and shelter and save.

She would fight for it anyway.

“We cannot sell our land and our buildings,” she said. “We have nowhere else to go. You are no better than I am, playing with lives.”

Again that deep near-laugh, a sound between amusement and threat. “The kitten has grown claws. La chat rouge. You and I are more alike than you know. But the difference is, I would take the money he offers and ask my patronesses to break ground on a new home.”

“This is our home,” Louisa said fiercely. Hers and theirs.

“Do not be so unwise as to reject his offer, comtesse. Think what you will forfeit if you make this difficult.”

“We are besieged with offers for our land and buildings, at the rate Knightsbridge is growing,” Louisa said grudgingly. “How will I know which emissary is yours?”