Heiress for Hire (Duke's Heiress #1) - Madeline Hunter Page 0,3
warren of buildings on the western edge of Whitehall.
Robert Peel had written, asking him to meet at nine o’clock. No one else was about yet. Chase wondered if that had been the plan, or if as an industrialist’s son the home secretary always started the day at this hour.
Had the request come from the last home secretary, Chase would have declined. He did not like Sidmouth, or approve of how he had used the power of the office. There had been too many poorly supervised agents making too much trouble throughout the land for his taste. Peel, however, had proven adept at finding other ways to hold down unrest, and had already shepherded a reform of the criminal laws through Parliament.
A good man, from the evidence so far. His father had accumulated tremendous wealth in his textile factories and other ventures, and the son had been raised and educated to have a place in government and society. The next Pitt the Younger, it was said. Home secretary already, and a protégé of Wellington’s, eventually he would probably be a prime minister, and inherit not only that wealth but also the title of baronet his father had received.
As he turned into the Treasury passage and walked beneath its stone vaults, he spied a figure at the end. Of middling height and size, the man had fashionably cropped hair and a face with regular features except for a prominent aquiline nose. Peel was meeting him halfway, and wore his greatcoat. It seemed they would not talk in the office. Chase decided the early hour had been to avoid witnesses after all.
After greeting him, Peel eyed the poultice on his head. “I trust the other fellow fared worse.”
No, the woman who did this is both unharmed and unrepentant. He had considered Minerva Hepplewhite long into the night, wrestling with the way she both annoyed him and . . . fascinated him. If he was correct about his uncle’s death, however, she remained the most likely culprit. Not only her sudden good fortune said as much, but also the very self-possession that impressed him. She was not one to be underestimated.
“It is a small wound—it looks worse than it is.”
“Walk with me,” Peel said.
They fell into step together and began slowly retracing Chase’s path.
“It is my hope that you can solve a conundrum for me,” Peel said. “It has to do with your uncle’s death.”
Peel had been among the many at the funeral. As had Peel’s father, with whom the late duke had some business dealings.
“Had things progressed as they usually do, if his heir received everything, everyone would say what a shame he fell, and that would be that,” Peel said. “That will of his has got tongues wagging, I’m afraid. So much money, and yet so little to the family.”
“That is common knowledge already, is it?”
“Your aunts and a few cousins have not been quiet about their disappointment.”
“It was his personal fortune, to bequeath as he chose.”
“Of course. Of course. And yet, so many angry relatives. Ambiguous circumstances. Mystery legatees. It begs explanation.”
The mystery legatees certainly did. Three names. Three women. No one in the family had ever heard of any of them, and Chase had only tracked down one in the past week. In the fury that greeted the reading of the will, a variety of characterizations of these women had been cast down by family members, none of them flattering.
What were these women to Uncle Frederick? Minerva claimed she was not a mistress; perhaps the others weren’t either. They may have never met the duke, just as she said she had not. They could be dead, for all anyone knew. Some relatives rather counted on that.
Would Uncle Frederick be so eccentric, so perverse, as to give a sizeable portion of his personal estate to three women he had nothing to do with? Chase did not reject the notion out of hand, but if that had happened, how had his uncle come up with these particular women?
“If you say it all begs explanation, I am not going to disagree with you.”
“It is not I who says so. My inclination is to leave it all be. The king, however, says so. The prime minister agrees. Other ministers and several other dukes have called on me. My own father, heaven preserve us—I have been getting many earfuls all week. ‘No way in hell he fell.’ That sort of thing.”
They continued their slow stroll out onto the street.