Kinbrook looked stubborn, yet wretched.
“Have you a favorite hunting dog, Lord Kinbrook?” Tristan asked lightly. “One who simply never gives up, and never disappoints you, and always finds its quarry?”
Kinbrook brightened cautiously at the change in topic. “Yes. Darby is his name. A spaniel. Raised him from a pup.”
“I am the king’s favorite hunting dog.”
Kinbrook’s face fell almost comically.
“No one but the king calls me to heel.” He didn’t add that the king hadn’t called him to heel yet, and that there was no certainty he would obey if that should happen. The arrangement had suited both of them thus far. This time both the king and Tristan had a far more personal interest in hunting down their quarry, for slightly different reasons. “Answer my question and we’ll be off. Clearly you know you’re in possession of contraband. If you don’t tell me how you happened to have those cigars, we’ll only try another way, and another way, each increasingly uncomfortable for you. It’s all I know how to do, and all I truly enjoy. I’m a simple man.”
He shrugged with one shoulder.
This wasn’t quite hyperbole. There wasn’t much Tristan hadn’t sampled or witnessed in his life, from violence to lust to humiliation to opium to triumph to heartbreak. It was all useful. It had all been distilled into a man singular, and perhaps deadly, of purpose.
Lord Kinbrook stared at him, loathing thinly veiled.
“Come,” he cajoled with a sort of menacing tenderness. “Look into my eyes. Do you think I ever say anything I don’t mean, Lord Kinbrook?”
Kinbrook looked.
Whatever he saw there made him quickly look away.
He swallowed.
Tristan heaved a sigh, and thunked his brandy glass down on the table.
“Derring,” Kinbrook muttered tersely.
“Is that a compliment? An epithet?”
“The Earl of Derring. He snuffed it in that chair over there two weeks ago.” He gestured with his chin. “Doubtless you’ve heard about it. Not every day an earl dies in public, surrounded by young loobies, without issue. I got the cigars from Derring. I don’t know where he got them.”
The chair in question was occupied now by a young man leaning forward and laughing, mouth wide open, hands on his knees, at another man who was pantomiming riding a horse, slapping his own arse and tossing his head.
Tristan stared at that. How on earth—whyon earth—was that amusing? Tristan was thirty-six years old. He sometimes felt he’d lived a thousand years and a thousand lives. If one started out life in St. Giles, you either grew old quickly or didn’t grow old at all. It would never occur to him to slap his own arse for any reason.
“Convenient to blame a dead man,” he said idly to Kinbrook. “Wouldn’t you say, Massey?”
“Seems a bit facile, guv,” he said regretfully, to Lord Kinbrook.
Tristan spared a single arced brow for the wordfacile.
The grim line of Kinbrook’s mouth suggested he did not like the wordguv.
But both he and Massey knew that most roads led to Derring.
“Nevertheless. I got the cigars from Derring. If you’re wondering what the Fourth Earl of Derring would be doing mixed up in such an affair, well, desperate men do desperate things.”
“In what way was a man like the Earl of Derring desperate?”
“He liked fine things, didn’t he? Rumor has it that he was up to his eyebrows in debt. I wasn’t privy to all of this. I do know his property has been snaffled up by creditors. Thought I might have a run at his widow. I always rather envied him his young, beautiful wife. Mine is getting on, you see.” He paused, as if waiting for some sign of approbation from either of the two men. “Derring’s widow... penniless, pretty, quiet, pliant, used to a certain lifestyle... doubtless she’s quite frightened right now.” He smiled as if this was a charming thing for a woman to be. “She should be easy pickings.”
Tristan stared at the man thoughtfully, idly imagining what it would be like to lean over and perhaps violently head butt Lord Kinbrook.
His own head was made of granite, both figuratively and literally.
But Tristan had not risen to Captain of the King’s Blockade though superfluous applications of violence to members of parliament. He was not a legend in certain circles for impulse.