Page 2 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“Lady Rosalynd. You were watching for her.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You have a window.” He pointed to it. “From it, you can see the front of her house. I saw you standing by it when my carriage pulled up.”

I poured myself a whiskey from the decanter on the sideboard.

“You might have offered me some,” Nicky said, pointing to my glass.

“You wanted something refreshing. Whiskey is not that.”

Just then Milford returned with a pitcher of lemonade and filled one which Nicky drank down in one gulp. “That’s better. It’s hot as blazes out there.”

“July tends to do that.” I paused. “What brings you? You did not come all this way on a hot summer day to quench your thirst.”

“You’re right.” He poured another glass and drank half of it. “Mother thinks you should attend the Liddell ball,” he said.

“It’s on my calendar.”

“Lady Constance will be in attendance. Mother thinks you should dance with her.”

“Then Mother shall be disappointed.”

“Mother has gone so far as to write her mother, Lady Pembury, to that effect.”

I set the whiskey down with more force than was necessary. “She has done what?”

“It was a friendly note. Mother is incapable of writing any other kind. Lady Pembury will receive it in the spirit in which it was meant, which is to say ruthlessly. Constance is twenty-two, disengaged from one suitor through no fault of her own, and considered the most eligible match in London for a man in want of an heir.”

“I am not going to dance with Lady Constance. And I am not in want of a bloody heir.” The words came out harsher than I intended. I scrubbed a hand across my jaw. It was not the prospect of an heir that angered me. It was the assumption that one woman might be exchanged for another as neatly as changing partners in a quadrille.

“Then I will counsel you, gently, to be seen dancing with someone.”

“Why?”

The look he directed at me held an unhappiness I was unaccustomed to seeing on his face.

“Because if you do not, Warwick, every matchmaking mother in London will do as Mother is doing—writing notes and making calls—and you will spend what’s left of the season batting them off. Is that what you wish?”

“I wish very little. That is the difficulty.”

Nicky refilled his glass and drank slowly. “I saw her. Lady Rosalynd.”

Desperate to know more, I asked, “Where?”

“At Lady Winthrop’s recital on Tuesday evening. I was there for my friend Gerald. He is courting the Winthrop girl. Lady Rosalynd is a close friend of the family.”

I picked up the whiskey, swirled it around the glass. “Was she well?”

“She looked precisely as you do. Miserable.”

I did not speak. I couldn’t. Misery may love company, but I would never wish it on her.

“Warwick,” Nicky said, “I do not pretend to know what happened between you. I know only that after the Opera investigation ended, you have not been the same man. I know you visited Windsor. Did the Queen say anything about your association with Rosalynd? Did she counsel you against⁠—”

“She did not counsel us against marriage.”

“What did she counsel you against?”