but accurate caricature of Lord Sidmouth as a hot-air balloon. The other showed a posse of dragoons trampling men, women and children beneath the hooves of their horses. The banner overhead read Freedom is Not Free. Owen grimaced at the sheer visceral shock and power of the picture. Something in it seemed to grab him by the throat. In the corner of each drawing was the signature of the cartoonist, a loopy black scrawl that simply read Jupiter. He let his breath out on a soundless whistle. “So Jupiter was hiding here,” he said slowly.
Garrick nodded. “It would seem so. Powerful propaganda, these cartoons,” he added. “It is no wonder that Sidmouth hates them.”
Owen nodded. “They are dangerous,” he said. “An incitement to violence.”
He pushed the cartoons into his pocket. The pile of clothes on the floor caught his attention and he stirred it with one booted foot. An evocative scent hung for a moment on the air, crisp and fresh, with a perfume he recognised. He squatted down and picked up the shirt, feeling the fine quality of the linen against his fingers.
So now he knew what Tess had been wearing when she arrived at the brothel. Had she come there incognito because she did not want the ton to hear that she disported herself in a bawdy house? Or was her choice of clothing all part of a sensual game? Did she enjoy having a lover peel off those layers of masculine attire before he made love to her?
Owen thought of Tess Darent’s body beneath his hands as he had lifted her down from the rope, the flare of her hips and the delicate curve of her waist. He thought of the heat of her skin through the slippery silk of the lavender gown, then he thought of what she might look like with those curves confined within the stark lines of the jacket and trousers, the thin cotton of the shirt pressing against her breasts. He raised the shirt to his nose, inhaled a long, deep breath and felt his senses fill with Tess, with her scent and her essence. Once again he was impaled by a jolt of lust that was hot and fierce and utterly uncomplicated.
“If you have an imagination, Lord Rothbury, now would be the time to use it….”
Owen, who had had no notion before tonight that he was such an imaginative man, found that imagination positively running riot.
“I met your sister-in-law just now,” he said abruptly to Garrick.
Garrick, unsurprisingly, looked completely floored for a moment by the apparent non sequitur. “Joanna—Lady Grant—is here?”
“Is that likely?” Owen said. “No. I was referring to Lady Darent. I found her out in the street, shinning down a makeshift rope from one of the bedrooms upstairs.”
Garrick’s face spilt into a grin. “Oh, I see. Yes, that sounds exactly the sort of thing Tess would do. She is thoroughly scandalous. She had probably been enjoying an orgy.”
Owen grimaced. He had only just managed to force his imagination away from the vision of Tess naked beneath the thin cotton shirt and now he found his mind had filled with an entirely new and darker set of imagery representing the way she might have disported herself here in the brothel tonight. Tess, pale limbs spread in abandoned wantonness, her cloud of red-gold hair fanning over her shoulders, Tess tied naked across a bed … He swallowed hard and fixed his gaze on the middle distance in an attempt to distract his mind. Unfortunately the middle distance consisted of a painting of a nude nymph and a group of lavishly endowed gentlemen indulging in a riotous orgy. Owen raised a hand to ease the constriction of his neckcloth. Evidently the lewd atmosphere of the bawdy house was turning his mind.
He wrenched his thoughts away from wayward visions of Tess and turned to find Garrick watching him closely, his gaze narrowed, perceptive. “Do you have an interest there?” Garrick asked.
Owen ran a distracted hand through his hair. “In Lady Darent? I’d be a fool if I had.”
“Which,” Garrick said, smiling faintly, “doesn’t quite answer the question, does it? Those Fenner girls,” he added, shaking his head, “could make a fool of any man.”
“I know,” Owen said. “Born to drive a man to perdition.” He cast a last glance around the hallway. “I have to get out of here,” he said. “It’s doing strange things to my mind.”
“Or you could stay,” Garrick said, with an expressive lift of the brows.
Owen gestured towards where Mrs. Tong was leaning over the wrought-iron balcony on the first floor and watching them with a great deal of venom in her dark, disillusioned eyes.
“I think we have already outstayed our welcome,” he murmured. “That basilisk stare would be sufficient to wither the most ardent man.”
“White’s, then,” Garrick said, “and the brandy bottle?”
“Capital,” Owen said. He bent to pick up the pile of clothing from the floor. Tess’s scent was growing fainter now. He remembered Garrick saying that the knife had been found in the jacket pocket. So Tess carried both a knife and a pistol. That was interesting. He wondered why she carried them and what she was afraid of. He wondered if she knew how to use them.
Then there were the cartoons, found hidden in a chamber on the second floor, Garrick had said. Tess’s resourceful escape down the sheet rope had been from just such a room….
Owen felt the strange prickle of sensation again, an instinct, stronger this time, that he had missed something obvious, something that had been right beneath his nose. A thought slid into his mind, a thought that was so outrageous, so unbelievable, that it stole his breath. It told him that he had been played by a master hand, that he had been misdirected and fooled. He had believed what was before his eyes. He had not questioned it. He had met a notorious widow climbing out of a brothel window and he had believed her when she had pretended to be running away to avoid scandal.
Owen recalled Tess Darent claiming not to know who Lord Sidmouth was and professing pretty ignorance of the radical movement. She had claimed to be in a hurry to get home and sleep off her sexual excesses.
In truth she had been in a hurry to escape.
He let the clothes slip through his fingers and instead took the cartoons from his pocket once more and scanned them. There was nothing, he thought, to say that Jupiter, the witty and dangerous caricaturist, had to be a man. Sidmouth had simply made that assumption, assumed also that the members of the Jupiter Club were exclusively male. But Jupiter could well be a pseudonym for a woman, the type of woman who carried a pistol in her reticule and attended radical meetings dressed in masculine attire. A woman who hid behind her reputation for scandal and pretended to be as light and superficial as a butterfly….
It seemed impossible. And yet …
Owen let out a long breath. No one would believe him, of course. Lord Sidmouth would laugh him out of town if he suggested that Jupiter was the infamous Dowager Marchioness of Darent. The evidence was no more than circumstantial. Even so, Owen was sure that his instinct was right. He had wondered what it was that Teresa Darent was hiding. Now he knew. All he had to do was to prove it.
LADY EMMA BRADSHAW HAD just returned from the meeting of the Jupiter Club and was standing with one hand on the latch of her tiny cottage, listening to the fading sound of her brother’s carriage as it rumbled away down the hill towards the city, when a man materialised out of the darkness beside her, flung open the door and bundled her over the threshold. He had one arm locked tight about her waist and his hand over her mouth. It was so sudden and so shocking that Emma had no time to cry out. She struggled and fought, necessarily in silence, kicked him and
