He saw her emerge and stepped up to where she had paused. His presence made an exquisite, sad yearning flutter inside her.

He looked down at her, his blue eyes dark like lapis lazuli, his rough features refined by the patrician angles they formed. His gaze demanded her entire attention.

“I do not think you had anything to do with the duke’s death,” he said. “I know this as surely as I know I’m standing here.”

“Yet you have no proof of it, and some evidence that disagrees.”

“I know, Minerva. I have no doubts about it.”

He did know. She saw the truth of that in him. Her throat tightened. To be believed by anyone was not something she ever counted on.

“Come with me,” he said, offering his hand. “I would like to talk with you if you will permit it.”

They strolled along the City’s streets until they arrived at Lincoln’s Inn. The gardens there offered some privacy and they sat on a bench. Barristers walked by in their robes and clerks hurried back and forth.

He took her hand, discreetly, so anyone walking by would not see. Glove on glove their interwoven fingers nestled between their hips on the bench.

“Beth spoke with me.”

“I wish she had not.”

“I am glad she did. Everything she told me fit with what you had already let me know. I was just too stupid to see it.” He squeezed her hand. Again that frown, and a troubled expression. “Beth said he hurt you badly.”

To speak of it, to give particulars, would revive memories she had learned to forget. All the same a chill ran down her back, like the old days. “We both feared one day he would go too far. It seemed a high price to pay for the satisfaction of knowing he would hang.”

“I am grateful that he did not have that chance. Relieved and grateful.”

“He didn’t have the chance because I found a way to leave him.”

“Was that when you came here?”

“I left before he died.” She lined up what she needed to explain, and what she might avoid. “I left Algernon and went to live on my own, with Beth and her son. He kept trying to force me back. He began some court proceeding that would obligate me to do so. I decided I could not accept that. So I found the information that would stop him.”

“You conducted an inquiry.”

“My first. Beth helped. Even Jeremy helped, boy though he was. We learned that Algernon was not always impotent. On occasion he could be most potent. With another woman, who played peculiar games with him.”

“Did that stop him?”

“He laughed at me when I threw it at him. He wasn’t even ashamed that his lover was a relative. An aunt, for goodness’ sake. A blood relative at that. So I arranged to catch them at it.”