Death, Diamonds, and Deception Read online

  Books by Rosemary Simpson

  WHAT THE DEAD LEAVE BEHIND

  LIES THAT COMFORT AND BETRAY

  LET THE DEAD KEEP THEIR SECRETS

  DEATH BRINGS A SHADOW

  DEATH, DIAMONDS, AND DECEPTOIN

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  DEATH, DIAMONDS, AND DECEPTION

  ROSEMARY SIMPSON

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 by Rosemary Simpson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2020939650

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-2212-6

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: December 2020

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2214-0 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-2214-0 (e-book)

  There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.

  —William Makepeace Thackeray

  CHAPTER 1

  “Oh, Miss Prudence, it’s the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen!”

  “It’s House of Worth,” Prudence MacKenzie said, which should have been sufficient explanation had Colleen Riordan been a properly trained lady’s maid. Which she was not.

  Most lady’s maids were hired through exclusive employment agencies that demanded impeccable references and proof of extensive experience before referring them to their clients. But the late Judge MacKenzie’s daughter wasn’t like most society employers. She’d simply asked Colleen one day if she thought she would like to become her personal maid, and when the startled Irish parlor maid nodded yes, informed the housekeeper of the change. That was it.

  She’d had to learn the fine points of cleaning and polishing jewelry, especially pearls, but her mother had taught Colleen early on how to sew a fine seam and press the wrinkles out of delicate fabrics without burning them. She could lace a corset tight enough to ensure it wouldn’t come loose no matter how long her lady wore it, and she had a natural talent when it came to doing hair. Prudence thought she never looked as fine as when Colleen Riordan arranged her light brown hair into gleaming coils that accentuated the slender length of her mistress’s neck.

  Most important to her employer was Colleen’s proven loyalty during one of the most difficult periods of Prudence’s life. Judge MacKenzie had taught his only child that every human being was worthy of respect and should be rewarded for services rendered. In choosing to raise Colleen’s status within the household, his daughter had both honored the judge’s memory and paid a moral debt.

  Prudence smiled as the still self-conscious and overawed maid ran a white-cotton-gloved hand over the shimmering fall of ivory satin hanging from the mirrored wardrobe. Its tight, V-shaped bodice shone with hundreds of tiny, pearlescent beads stitched in intricate swirling shapes that danced in the flickering gaslight before spiraling down into the bias cut skirt and looped train. Every stitch had been done by hand in Paris, where the gown had its own velvet-covered wooden mannequin sized to match exactly the proportions of the fortunate young woman who would wear it.

  As Prudence had explained to a wide-eyed Colleen, the Paris fashion house of Charles Frederick Worth had clothed the likes of the French Empress Eugénie and the Empress Elizabeth of Austria. More to the point, Lillie Langtry, onetime mistress of the Prince of Wales and known the world over as the Jersey Lily, would wear nothing but Worth creations. New York City’s own redoubtable Alice Vanderbilt had stunned society with the master couturier’s electric light dress created for her never-to-be forgotten fancy-dress ball six years before. Prudence herself had been whisked to the French capital last year to be measured in Monsieur Worth’s salon during a memorable visit to her titled and formidable British aunt. Lady Rotherton had decreed that it was inconceivable for her niece to appear socially in anything but the latest Worth sensation.

  “I suppose I can’t put it off any longer,” Prudence sighed. She hated wearing the whale-boned corset that reduced her waist to an absurdly unnatural size and made it impossible to take a deep breath. But tonight was the first Assembly Ball of the New York season, and the elegant Worth gown had been sized for the fashionable wasp-waist silhouette that could only be achieved by cruelly constricted lacing. “You might as well get started, Colleen.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  Colleen removed the cotton gloves she’d put on to ensure that no trace of human skin oil or perspiration marred the perfection of the Worth evening gown, then helped Miss Prudence step into the garment that would reshape the natural curves of her already slightly built figure.

  “Hold your breath, Miss Prudence.”

  “I’ll be lucky if I can breathe at all,” Prudence complained.

  She’d tossed her corset onto the floor of her wardrobe and dared to ride astride during a recent and ill-fated trip to one of Georgia’s beautiful and deadly coastal islands, but such conduct in staid New York would not be tolerated. Society condemned as unbecomingly careless and indiscreet any such relaxation on the part of its young women, especially those who were as yet unmarried.

  “Breathing is highly overrated. I haven’t breathed naturally except in my bed for more than twenty years,” announced the dowager Viscountess Rotherton, former American socialite and heiress Gillian Vandergrift, from the doorway of her niece’s bedroom. She wore a midnight-blue silk Worth evening gown studded lavishly with clusters of tiny diamonds. A diamond and sapphire tiara was anchored firmly atop high-piled hair unmarred by a single strand of gray. More diamonds and sapphires dripped from her ears and cascaded down a beautifully rounded bosom. “Get on with it, girl. We haven’t got all night.”

  “Yes, my lady.” Colleen gave an involuntarily hard jerk to her mistress’s laces, whispering an apology under her breath as Prudence took a small, stumbling step bac
kward. Lady Rotherton frightened Colleen to death. Except for Mr. Cameron, the butler, every servant in the Fifth Avenue mansion was firmly under Her Ladyship’s exacting thumb, cowed into impeccable service and not a whisper of complaint except in the safe confines of the servants’ hall or an attic bedroom.

  The dowager viscountess had been in New York for only two months, but Prudence’s aunt had picked up the reins of her niece’s everyday life the moment she walked through her late brother-in-law’s front door. And never for a moment slackened her hold. Lady Rotherton had sailed from London and endured seven days of rough Atlantic seas to chaperone her unmarried niece through a New York social season, and chaperone she would. The matter of finding a suitable husband for her sister’s only child was never far from her mind, although Prudence was proving to be annoyingly uncooperative.

  “You can’t wear diamonds until you’re married, of course, but your mother’s pearls will do very nicely,” Lady Rotherton continued, running one slender forefinger over the earrings and necklace that Sarah Vandergrift MacKenzie had worn at her debut many years ago. The sisters had been so close in age and looks that people often mistook them for twins, but Gillian had been ambitious for a title and far more adventuresome than the quiet Sarah. She’d been one of the first American dollar princesses, as the tabloid press called them. So eager to see the world and experience life that she’d jumped without a second thought into a loveless, childless union that was fortunately both brief and, thanks to her father’s deft and farseeing hand with the marriage contract, lucrative.

  In her more introspective and occasionally tender moments, Gillian wanted something better for Prudence. But for tonight’s ball, the devilishly handsome and wholly inappropriate Geoffrey Hunter would have to do. Prudence had refused to consider any other escort, and although Lady Rotherton was far from approving her niece’s choice, she had deemed it a battle not worth fighting. The main thing was to get Prudence back into society again.

  Lady Rotherton didn’t doubt that Hunter would dance like a prince; men like him always did. Which, if nothing else, would draw all eyes to the vision of Prudence whirling across the ballroom floor in her devastatingly gorgeous Worth gown.

  Catching her aunt’s approving nod, Prudence realized that she hardly recognized the sedate and serenely beautiful young woman looking back at her from the long, wood-framed cheval mirror. The Worth gown shimmered in the pale yellow gaslight and the pearls Colleen had fastened into Prudence’s ears and around her neck shone like dappled beams of moonlight. Pale gray eyes that usually flashed piercingly intelligent defiance looked back at her with wistful softness. The everyday Prudence she was accustomed to seeing had fled elsewhere for this one night.

  That young woman had determinedly forged a new existence for herself during the past year and a half. She had gradually replaced the black dresses and heavy veils of mourning with plainly cut dark gowns and businesslike suits more suited for a secretary than a wealthy heiress. But it had always been for a purpose: to achieve something of the individual independence society denied a woman of her social standing but her father’s ambitious tutoring had taught her to yearn for and seek to attain.

  With Lady Rotherton’s arrival, Prudence had been forced to balance on a tightrope where the footing was anything but sure and familiar. Nothing had brought it home to her as convincingly as seeing the exquisitely gowned and bejeweled figure in her bedroom mirror. Definitely Lady Rotherton’s Prudence. Unequivocally not the woman Judge MacKenzie’s daughter had been working so hard to become.

  It was probably past time that aunt and niece had the potentially combative marriage discussion Prudence had been avoiding.

  Tomorrow. Once the first Assembly Ball was over. It was too late now to back out of one of the premier social events of the season.

  * * *

  About one thing, Prudence had been adamant. The expensive Worth gown would remain in the wardrobe, unseen, unappreciated, unworn, unless Geoffrey agreed to be her escort. And if he didn’t, she would personally call down Lady Rotherton’s wrath on his handsome head.

  He had bowed over her hand with all the innate gallantry of his Southern gentleman’s soul and vowed he would not want to be anywhere else except at her side on the night of the first Assembly Ball.

  “I know it’s not an event to your liking,” she’d told him. “But I don’t think I could stand all the vapid conversations and the insincere flirtations if I didn’t have someone with whom I could occasionally exchange a few choice words. Or a growl.”

  “Growl all you want, Prudence. I’ll inveigle Ned Hayes into coming with us. He rarely replies to the invitations that come his way, but his name still shows up on all the best guest lists. He’ll drive Lady Rotherton into teeth-grinding fury, but with so much charm that she won’t be able to do a thing about it.”

  “That’s very much her style also.”

  Although he would never admit it to his endearing and always fascinating business partner, ex-Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter was a far more social being than he chose to let on. Mastering chivalrous manners with effortless ease had been an important part of growing up a gentleman in the South, even after the war ravaged so much of what had once been hauntingly beautiful and undeniably cruel.

  Over the years, even as Geoffrey rejected slavery and the world it had created, he came to treasure the remembered moments of grace, the sway of women’s skirts in candlelit ballrooms, the light touch of a lace-gloved hand on his arm. Even more contradictory, he understood the convoluted reasoning behind Bible-sanctioned ownership of fellow human beings, and while he repudiated it for himself, he could not hate the men whose way of life it once was. They were his people. Since his conscience would not allow him to join them, he had had to leave. The life he carved out for himself in exile in the North would always be marked by pangs of loss.

  Tonight, though, he would put aside everything but pleasing Prudence. And for the first time, he would be able to hold her in his arms. As they danced.

  * * *

  “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this,” Ned Hayes said, leaning forward to peer out the side window of the carriage that was about to make the turn onto Fifth Avenue to the front entrance of the MacKenzie mansion. “I haven’t had a pair of dancing shoes on since college days.”

  “I know for a fact that isn’t true,” Geoffrey said.

  He caught a glimpse of Ned’s face as they passed a gas streetlight. His friend looked good, better than he had in years. Thoroughly dried out, off the white powder, bulked up with the food his man Tyrus cajoled him to eat and daily boxing sessions in an improvised basement gym where a coal furnace drove away the damp of a New York winter.

  Ned had survived scandal, the two worst addictions to which a man could fall victim, and the police department that had made him its scapegoat and nearly destroyed him. At one time, not so very long ago, fellow cops who had known him and newspaper reporters who’d followed his story had been taking bets on how long Ned would last. No more. He’d outfoxed them all and crawled his way back from the brink.

  Like Geoffrey, Ned was a reluctant Southerner. His Rebel mother had coerced him into the Confederate Army at the age of sixteen, carrying him off with her when she fled her Yankee husband and returned to the plantation she’d never ceased to regret leaving. For love. Which hadn’t lasted.

  Ned had fought because he’d had to. He hadn’t been given a choice, and more than once he’d prayed for death rather than the dishonor of what he was doing or the deeper shame of deserting. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. He lived alone now in the home his mother had created as a bride, amid his dead father’s books and her memories. With Tyrus, the ex-slave into whose arms she’d placed him as a newborn.

  “Tell me again about Prudence’s aunt,” he said.

  “What more do you need to know?” Geoffrey asked. “She’s a widow, the dowager Viscountess Rotherton, elder sister to Prudence’s late mother by two years, and a member of the Prince of Wales’s
Marlborough House Set.”

  “What made her decide to come back to America?”

  “She wants Prudence to make a suitable marriage.”

  “Which means someone with an impeccable family background and a fortune too enormous to calculate. Too bad there won’t be a title if the groom is American. What does Prudence say about it?”

  “She’s been remarkably silent on the subject.”

  And that’s what worried Geoffrey. It wasn’t like Prudence to keep her opinions to herself. If anything, they’d talked more frankly to one another during the journey back from Georgia than ever before. He’d felt hidden places within himself that hadn’t seen light in years beginning to open again. The expression in Prudence’s gray eyes had often seemed speculative, as though she were looking at him with fresh awareness of who he was now and who he had once been. He had felt her edging closer to where he wanted her to be when he posed the question whose answer he had to be sure of before he asked it.

  Then Lady Rotherton had swept down the gangplank of RMS Teutonic, the White Star Line’s newest, most luxurious, and fastest Atlantic steamship. And everything changed.

  “At least she inveigled the old bat into allowing you to be her escort tonight,” Ned said. “That’s something.”

  “I doubt you’ll think of Lady Rotherton as an old bat once you’ve met her,” Geoffrey said.

  * * *

  The sight of her took his breath away.

  And as Ned Hayes bent over her gloved hand, he wondered why Geoffrey hadn’t thought to tell him that Lady Gillian Rotherton, dollar princess and imposing dowager countess, was also one of the most beautiful women on either side of the Atlantic.