Then Comes Murder

Rumor Has It (part one)

London, 1814

"Oh, Nora! I thought she might very well strangle me!" Caroline loosed a dainty laugh that she hid behind her gloved hand. The same gloved hand that now carried the very impressive diamond. Or shackle, if Eleanor Fane was to express her true opinion on the matter.

Caroline Howard, only daughter of the late Earl of Leighton, played the role of blushing fiancee with convincing charm. However, the one person in the world who knew her best sat opposite in their carriage, and Nora saw through her cousin's demure smile as easily as she had when they met five years ago. There was nothing in the world that Caroline could hide from her. Even if she had somehow learned the impossible and forced a pretty blush to her cheeks.

"Please," Nora said. She returned her cousin's smile and with the same wry humor she favored for Caroline's mischief. "As if you did not orchestrate that proposal to be entirely public."

Her cousin's grin turned a shade sly in her pale heart-shaped face, but her blue eyes remained demure beneath downcast lashes. Dressed in white muslin, her golden hair twisted in a coiled halo around her head, Caroline Howard was a fashionable portrait of angelic innocence. Nora, her dark mirrored opposite, rolled her eyes.

"I don't know what you mean, dear cousin." She blinked with a well-rehearsed nonchalance that might have fooled anyone else. "George and I were first acquainted at Hyde Park. It was the logical choice for his proposal."

Nora afforded her cousin a small nod in agreement, but the breath of sardonic laughter killed the tempered gesture. "The tactical choice, more likely," she said. For any other engagement, a respectable to-be-bride would have waited for the banns, or for the hot tongue of the scandal sheets to spread the news. "I'm sure you half-shouted your acceptance for the eavesdropping mamas. It's a wonder Lady Ingram didn't strangle you."

For securing an engagement to Lord George Simon Thornton-Spencer, the first-born son of the Duke of Ashurst and the most desired bachelor of the season, was a feat indeed. Handsome, wealthy, titled... there was no higher aspiration for the ton's eager ladies—or their ambitious mamas.

"Well, how else was I to signal my victory?" Caroline laughed, and the cheerful sound of it was wicked indeed. "Amelia Osborne nearly scalped Jane Aubrey at the Manslow Ball. I figured an unmistakable declaration of triumph would cease the bloodshed."

The battle of winning the next Duke of Ashurt's attention had been a bloody affair. It had started in the typical fashion. False swooning, competingly low necklines, manipulated chance-encounters... The game escalated within a week. Catherine Campbell had attempted to catch the future-duke in a compromising position (but for the unfortunate girl, it was the aging and widowed Baron Watford that walked in on her state of undress). Mary Twistleton had survived a rather unexpected entanglement with a rose bush, just as she might have won a duke's heart. Julia Dorner was forced to leave London in the wake of a hideous rumor—whispered to be spread by her younger sister, no less—that found its way to the scandal sheet. Miss Amelia Osborne likely hadn't meant to pull quite so hard on Jane's feathered headpiece (and how was she have to known the thing was tied into the poor girl's scalp?, she'd protested), but it did not change that the flock of husband-hungry women and their marriage-emaciated mamas had grown more and more desperate the longer Lord Thornton-Spencer remained unattached. Even Queen Charlotte was said to have commented on the viciousness of this season's marriageable ladies.

But it was Caroline—or love, if you believed her polite assertions on the matter—who won out in the end.

Not that Nora was surprised. The ton whispered that Caroline was a true diamond of the first water, the incomparable of the season. Beautiful, graceful, clever enough to hide exactly how clever she was, and with a flawless lineage that had only been interrupted by the unfortunate rigidity of primogeniture. Though as luck would have it—or rather a very sly and miserly father would have it—a sizable dowry more than made up for her lost claim to the peerage.