Almost Heaven Read online

  “He ought to be shot!” Bentner said with blazing contempt.

  Berta nodded timidly and clutched her dressing robe closer about her. “He’s a frightening man, to be sure, Mr. Bentner.”

  33

  When Elizabeth hadn’t arrived at the town house in Upper Brook Street by Tuesday night, all the misgivings Ian had been trying to stifle came back with a vengeance. At eleven o’clock that night he sent two footmen to Havenhurst to ask if they knew where she was, and two others to Montmayne to see if she was there.

  At ten-thirty the next morning he was apprised of the fact that the Havenhurst servants thought she’d gone to Montmayne five days ago, while his servants believed her to have been at Havenhurst the entire time. Elizabeth had vanished five days ago, and no one had thought to sound an alarm.

  At one o’clock that afternoon Ian met with the head of Bow Street, and by four o’clock he’d hired a private team of one hundred investigators to search for her. There was little he could tell them. All anyone knew for certain was that Elizabeth had vanished from Havenhurst, where she had last been seen that night with him; that she had apparently taken nothing with her except whatever clothes she was wearing; and no one yet knew what clothes they were.

  There was one other thing Ian knew, but he wasn’t yet ready to reveal it unless he absolutely had to, and it was the sole reason he was desperately trying to keep her disappearance a secret: He knew his wife had been terrified of something, or someone, the last night she was with him. Blackmail was the only thing Ian could think of, but blackmailers didn’t kidnap their victims, and for the life of him he couldn’t imagine what in Elizabeth’s innocent young life she might have done to attract a blackmailer. Without blackmail as a motive, no criminal would be demented enough to abduct a marchioness and set the entire English justice system on his heels.

  Beyond all that, he could not bear to consider the one remaining possibility. He wouldn’t let himself even imagine that she might have run away with some unknown lover. But as hour merged into day and day followed night, it became harder to banish the ugly, tormenting thought He prowled around the house, he stood in her room to be closer to her, and then he drank. He drank to still the ache of her loss and the unnamed terror inside him.

  On the sixth day the newspapers learned of the investigations into the disappearance of Lady Elizabeth Thornton, and the news was splashed across the front pages of the Times and the Gazette, along with a great deal of lurid speculation that included kidnapping, blackmail, and even broad hints that the Marchioness of Kensington might have decided to leave “for unknown reasons of her own.”

  After that, not even the combined power of the Thornton and Townsende families could keep the press from printing every word of truth, conjecture, or blatant falsehood they could discover or invent. They seemed to know, and to print every morsel of information that Bow Street and Ian’s investigators were discovering. Servants were questioned at all of Ian’s houses and at Havenhurst, and their statements were “quoted” by the avid press. Details of Ian and Elizabeth’s private life were fed to the insatiable public like shovelfuls of fodder.

  In fact, it was from an article in the Times that Ian first learned that he was now a suspect According to the Times, the butler at Havenhurst had supposedly witnessed a quarrel between Lord and Lady Thornton on the very night Lady Thornton was last seen. The cause of the quarrel, the butler said, had been Lord Thornton’s vicious attack on Lady Thornton’s moral character as it pertained to “certain things best left unsaid.”

  Lady Thornton’s maid, according to the paper, had broken down and wept as she related having peeked in on her mistress and heard her “weeping like her heart would break.” The maid had also said it was dark in the room, and so she could not see whether or not any physical abuse had been done to her mistress, “but she could not and would not say it wasn’t likely.”

  Only one of the Havenhurst servants gave testimony that didn’t incriminate Ian, and when he read it, it caused him more agony than anything they could have hinted about him: Four days before Lady Thornton’s disappearance, a newly hired gardener named William Stokey had seen her ladyship go into the arbor from the back door of the house at dusk, and Stokey had started after her, intending to ask her a question about the mulch being laid on the flower beds. He had not approached her, however, because he had seen her embracing “a man who weren’t her husband.”

  The papers promptly remarked that infidelity might cause a husband to do more than berate his wife, that it might provoke him into making her disappear . . . forever.

  The authorities were still hesitant to believe Ian had done away with his wife merely because she’d purportedly met an unknown man in the arbor, which was the only motive he appeared to have.

  At the end of the second week, however, a witness who had been away from England read the paper and reacted with instantaneous rage to the discovery that Lady Thornton had mysteriously disappeared. So damning, so shocking was the testimony of Mr. Wordsworth, a private investigator in the lady’s employ, against the Marquess of Kensington that it was given under the utmost secrecy, and not even the press could discover it.

  The following day the Times reported its most shocking and titillating piece of news yet: Ian Thornton, Marquess of Kensington, had been taken from his London town house and brought in for official questioning to ascertain his part in the disappearance of his wife.

  Although Ian was not formally charged with responsibility for her disappearance, or imprisoned while the investigation continued, he was ordered not to leave London until a tribunal had met behind closed doors to decide whether or not there was enough reason to try him either for his wife’s disappearance or on the new evidence provided by Wordsworth concerning his possible part in the disappearance of her brother two years before.

  “They won’t do it, Ian,” Jordan Townsende said the night after Ian was released on his own recognizance. Pacing back and forth across Ian’s drawing room, he said again, “They will not do it.”

  “They’ll do it,” Ian said dispassionately. The words were devoid of concern; not even his eyes showed interest Days ago Ian had passed the point of caring about the investigation. Elizabeth was gone; there had been no ransom note, nothing whatever—no reason in the world to continue believing that she’d been taken against her will. Since Ian knew damned well he hadn’t killed her or had her abducted, the only remaining conclusion was that Elizabeth had left him for someone else.

  The authorities were still vacillating about the other man she’d allegedly met in the arbor because the gardener’s eyesight had been proven to be extremely poor, and even he admitted that it “might have been tree limbs moving around her in the dim light, instead of a man’s arms.” Ian, however, did not doubt it The existence of a lover was the only thing that made sense; he had even suspected it the night before she disappeared. She hadn’t wanted him in her bed; if anything but a lover had been worrying her that night she’d have sought the protection of his arms, even if she didn’t confide in him. But he had been the last thing she’d wanted.

  No, he hadn’t actually suspected it—that would have been more pain than he could have endured then. Now, however, he not only suspected it he knew it and the pain was beyond anything he’d ever imagined existed.

  “I tell you they won’t bring you to trial,” Jordan repeated. “Do you honestly think they will?” he demanded, looking first to Duncan and then to the Duke of Stanhope, who were seated in the drawing room. In answer, both men raised dazed, pain-filled eyes to Jordan’s, shook their heads in an effort to seem decisive, then looked back down at their hands.

  Under English law Ian was entitled to a trial before his peers; since he was a British lord, that meant he could only be tried in the House of Lords, and Jordan was clinging to that as if it were Ian’s lifeline.

  “You aren’t the first man among us to have a spoiled wife turn missish on him and vanish for a while in hopes of bringing him to heel,” Jordan conti