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“I needed Lord Petteril—and her ladyship—to identify certain items, namely these clothes, this gold quizzing glass, this bag, and this money.”

“Bah!” Cauldwell exploded. “The bag is cheap rubbish, available at any market. The money? She cannot pretend it is hers! It’s like any other money”

Knott pulled out a handful of notes and fanned them out, showing something other than the printing had been scribbled on them. “I never saw a whole bagful before inscribed with the letter P.”

Lady Petteril smiled proudly at her husband. “I spent all afternoon doing that, even while I was feeding the baby.”

“Very clever of you,” Petteril said admiringly.

“I thought so.”

“It’s all nonsense,” Cauldwell insisted. To his horror, he heard the desperation in his own voice and tried to calm it. He still held the most important card in this game. He caught Petteril’s gaze, for when it came down to it, only Petteril could charge and convict him. “You can truly swear without doubt, that I did this to you?”

“Yes,” said Petteril.

“I have his lordship’s description of the men who held him prisoner in Seven Dials,” said the Bow Street runner.

“No, you haven’t! If he gives you it now while he is looking at me—”

“He didn’t,” said the other runner. “He had it all written down and handed it to us quite five minutes before you came in. Shall I read it, Mr. Knott? First fellow. Short, light brown hair, longer at the front—that’s right. Almond-shaped eyes with crow’s feet, aquiline nose—yes and yes. Nails well cut, knuckles slightly scraped—which they are—long, slender thumbs—why, look at them, Mr. Knott, they are pretty long. Good teeth but one missing molar on the upper right. Shall I read the description of the second cove, too?”

Cauldwell snapped his mouth shut, staring at Petteril.

“I’m not blind,” his lordship said mildly. “You dressed the same, like a pair of very badly turned-out footmen, but I always knew there were two of you. And the man I tied up and who is now in the custody of Bow Street, is most definitely one Jem Stagger.”

“But your description of me could fit thousands of men!” Cauldwell burst out.

“I have evidence too,” Petteril said, delving into his coat pockets. When he held his fingers up, he seemed at first to be showing nothing at all. And Cauldwell began to hope for madness.

Then he saw that each hand held a small, fine hair.

“In my left, a hair plucked from Stagger’s head. In my right, one left by you, Cauldwell, on my coat, when you so thoughtfully bathed my wounded head.”

“Shall we match it?” asked Knott, carelessly setting down the money so that he could take the hair from Petteril’s fingers and advance on Cauldwell.

“Get away from me,” Cauldwell said between his teeth. But Knott did not stop. It took both runners in the end, but they matched the hair to Cauldwell’s, and even, humiliatingly, as though he were a horse, wrenched open his mouth to inspect his missing tooth.

“You’re under arrest,” Knott said happily. “Two in one night.”

“It’ll all come out, Petteril!” Cauldwell screamed, furious at what felt like betrayal. “I’ll make damned sure of it! How you were held snivelling in your drawers, out of your head on laudanum, how you didn’t know who the hell I was! You don’t know who anyone is!”

“Don’t mistake choice for ignorance,” Lady Petteril said icily. Contempt dripped from her lips, and yet she was a low-born nobody. Everyone said so. And she kept talking under his deliberately intimidating glare. “And don’t mistake the man who could have left your pathetic prison at any time through the window he broke open, were it not for his determination to convict you. Which he has.”

He lunged at her, but the runners had him by both arms and hauled him, helpless, to the door. As they wrestled him down the stairs, sheer panic lent him the strength to roar and hurl himself free, half-tripping down the stairs to the street door which he wrenched open.

He wasted one precious instant on astonishment, for Sir Peter Haggard stood before him, bathed in the glow of a streetlamp. Then Haggard’s fist drove into his jaw, and he reeled back into the arms of the runners.

And a young lady whom he recognized through the pain as Miss Augusta Withan exclaimed with delight, “Oh well done, Sir Peter! Hit him again!”

Chapter Twelve

Striking the man responsible for Withy’s disappearance on the very night his wife gave birth lent Haggs a fierce, if brief, rush of satisfaction. But a gentleman did not allow, let alone commit, violence in the vicinity of ladies. And both Lady Petteril and Gussie were witness to his brutish behaviour.

He had reason to suppose his action would not disturb April unduly—although it was still unforgivably disrespectful of him—but Gussie’s presence...

She should not have been there, of course. She had appeared in a hackney just as he had rushed down the front steps of his house. Apparently, April had written that Piers was home and she had rushed around to tell Haggs. Inevitably, Haggs had accepted the seat in her hackney to Piccadilly—without considering until later how the devil she had come by such a conveyance, alone, at this time of night—and explained Withy’s question about Sir Hugo Cauldwell.

“Then Sir Hugo is responsible for Piers’s vanishing?” she had exclaimed.