When Gemma awoke the next morning, feeling sated and a little sore, she was disappointed to find herself in the bed alone. But, much as she would like to remain here forever, there were still important things to be done outside of their cocoon of bliss. So when the maid scratched on the bedchamber door and entered with hot water for washing, she welcomed the girl in and set about putting herself to rights.
By some miracle they’d managed to brush out her gown and pelisse and she’d be able to wear it to Lord Crutchley’s without fear of disgracing herself.
She was putting the final pins into the simple chignon she’d managed with her hair—thanks to pins borrowed from the maid since she couldn’t find where hers had gone the night before—when Cam returned. He too had had his waterlogged coats from the day before brushed and dried out and his cravat was even snowy white again.
“I thought we’d set out after breakfast,” he said, clearly mindful of the maid’s presence.
When the girl was gone, and Gemma had turned to face him, he stepped forward and kissed her properly.
“Good morning,” he said, pulling away, though he did take her hands in his.
“I missed you,” she said simply. It was the truth, and if she were going to be in this with him she wouldn’t suppress her feelings.
“I wanted to let you sleep for as long as you could,” he said with a smile. Then, ruefully, he added, “And I wasn’t sure I could keep myself from reaching for you again.”
“But I wouldn’t have minded,” she told him, her heart beating faster at the thought.
“That’s precisely why I had to leave,” he told her firmly. “You might not care about your poor, ill-used body, but I do.”
“Your being the sensible one is very tedious,” she complained. “Though I will admit to some soreness, so perhaps you were right.”
He pulled her arm through his, but not before kissing her hand. “If we are to find your lizard then you need to be in fighting shape.”
At the mention of the Beauchamp Lizard, Gemma sighed. “Right again. So let’s be off.”
It took nearly an hour for them to breakfast in a private dining room, and by the time Cam lifted her into his curricle, it was almost mid-morning.
They made good time, however, and since yesterday’s rain had all but passed, leaving in its wake the same cloudy skies and brisk winds that had come before it, they remained dry if chilled.
The innkeeper had given Cam the direction of the Crutchley estate, and when the curricle turned into the evergreen-lined drive, Gemma sent up a tiny prayer that he’d have the information they needed.
Grooms were at the ready to take the reins from Cam and when he helped Gemma down, they were greeted by a dour-looking butler flanked by bewigged, liveried footmen.
“You’re expected, Lord Cameron, Lady Cameron,” said the butler as he gestured them into the imposing wide doors of the sandstone manor house.
Gemma’s eyes widened at the words, and a glance at Cam revealed him to be as surprised as she was.
How did anyone at Lord Crutchley’s estate know about their ruse at the inn? Besides the innkeeper and his staff, only Lord Paley had …
As if conjured by her thought, that gentleman himself stepped forward and took her hand. “Lady Cameron,” he said with a silky smile, “How good to see you again.”
“Paley,” said Cam from beside her. She hadn’t noticed the way he held her against his side, as if to protect her from the urbane gentleman before them. “What a surprise.”
“Only if you think it a surprise to find me at my godfather’s estate,” said Lord Paley with a charming smile that didn’t meet his eyes.
“Godfather?” Gemma shook her head. The possibility of a connection between the men hadn’t even occurred to her.
“But let’s not discuss it in the hallway,” said Paley with a welcoming gesture. “Come into the drawing room. Lord Crutchley is quite eager to meet you both.”
Not as eager, Gemma guessed, as she was to meet him. There were many things she wished to question the man about, not least of which was more about what Lord Paley might have told him about the goings-on at Pearson Close and Beauchamp House.
Feeling Cam’s strong hand at her lower back, she followed the viscount up the double-sided staircase and into a lushly carpeted hallway.
The drawing room was a lavish chamber with brightly colored wall hangings and floor to ceiling windows that looked out over what was, at this time of year, a rather dour landscape.
Before the fire sat an elderly gentleman, who rose upon their entrance.
“Miss Hastings,” he said as they neared him. “What a delight to finally make your acquaintance.”
She curtseyed before him, then offered him her hand, which he kissed.
Behind her, she heard Cam clear his throat before saying, “I’m afraid she is no longer Miss Hastings, Crutchley, but Lady Cameron Lisle.”
.
And as Cam stepped forward to exchange bows with the older gentleman, Crutchley laughed. “Too right, my boy. If this were my lady I’d be quick to claim her as my own as well. Especially if, as Paley has told me, she’s the gift of knowing wheat from chaff.”
Before Gemma could respond to that, Paley gestured for them to all be seated and once he was also in a chair, he said, “I wish you’d confided in me when we met yesterday that you intended to visit my godfather. But I suppose you had other things on your mind.”
The insinuation hung in the air between them for a moment before Lord Crutchley spoke up, apparently oblivious to his nephew’s gaffe. “I must admit, I have wished to make your acquaintance, Lady Cameron, ever since I learned Lady Celeste had chosen you to be one of her heiresses. That lady had as good an eye for fossils as anyone I’ve ever known and it wounded me dreadfully to know she was taken from this world so prematurely.”
“But I don’t understand,” Gemma said with a frown. “How did you even know who I was?”
“Oh I didn’t, I didn’t,” he assured her with a wave of a gnarled hand. “But I did know Celeste, and if she chose you to be the keeper of her collection, well, then that was endorsement enough for me. I may not move about in local society much anymore but I do have my ways of learning about the goings-on in the area. Paley, for instance, has been most informative about the goings-on at Beauchamp House and of course the gathering of fossil hunters at Pearson Close.”
“Imagine my surprise,” Lord Paley said before Gemma could respond, “when I learned that the collection at Beauchamp House I’d so recently toured was one which he’d played a role in shaping with Lady Celeste.”
“You’re overstating it, boy,” said the older man with a frown. “I merely accompanied Celeste on a few of her fossil-hunting expeditions. That collection was all Celeste’s doing. Especially once we had our falling-out.”
This was the first Gemma had heard of a rift, and she risked a glance at Cam to see if he too was surprised. His answering nod told her he was.
“I had seen some mention of you in her collection notebooks,” Gemma said, trying not to appear too eager for information lest Lord Crutchley should regret his confidences. “But nothing about an argument.”
“Oh it wasn’t really an argument, my dear,” said the old man. “It was really more wounded pride on my part.”
He shook his head at the memory, then continued, “You see, she found a fossil skull that she was convinced held the key to some major understanding of the way that animal life developed on the Sussex coast. Found it right there on the bit of shore beneath Beauchamp House. And despite her trying to keep quiet about it until she was able to do some investigation into it, word spread among the collecting circles. Well, since I was there with her when she found the blasted thing, she thought I’d been the one to spread the news. It wasn’t me, of course, and she even went so far as to take measures to hide the thing away because she became convinced someone would try to steal it from her.”
“And did you know where she hid it?” Gemma asked, her breath catching.
“No,” Lord Crutchley said with a mournful shake of his head. “And what’s more, I didn’t ever talk to her again after that dustup between us. I was stubborn in those days, and that bit of doubt on her part was enough to make me storm off in a huff and never go back. But I always regretted it. Always.”
To Gemma’s surprise, he wiped away a tear. “I’m a sentimental old fool, you see, and I thought we’d make it up again some way. But she was gone before someday ever came.”
“I feel sure she would have liked to see you again,” Gemma said quietly. Having read her benefactress’s journals and other writings, she knew that while proud, Lady Celeste had been a loving person and she didn’t doubt that if Lord Crutchley had initiated contact with her, Lady Celeste would have welcomed him with open arms.
“So you have no idea where she might have hidden the fossilized skull?” Cam asked, changing the subject back to the fossil.
“I don’t,” said Lord Crutchley. “Though we did have a mad conversation once about the best place to hide one’s valuables. I thought of it because Paley, here, mentioned that you’d found a particularly impressive skull on that same stretch of shore, Miss H—er, Lady Cameron.”
“And what was that?” Gemma held her breath, not quite daring to hope what he was about to say. They’d come here to ask the man about his dealings with Lady Celeste, but if he could give them some way to secure the provenance of the skull, they’d be that much closer to finding the person who stole it.
“Well,” Crutchley said with a laugh, “we decided the best place to hide a thing was in plain sight, and for a thing dug up from the earth, that would be back in the same place where you’d found it.”
* * *
At Lord Crutchley’s confirmation that Gemma’s fossil and the Beauchamp Lizard were one and the same, Cam saw Gemma’s eyes light with triumph for a split second before she shuttered her gaze.
“Of course,” Crutchley continued, “I would have no way of knowing if Celeste followed through on the scheme. For all I know, she locked the Beauchamp Lizard away in a safe place. But I must admit when Paley told me about the fossil you’d found, Lady Cameron, I did wonder.”
“The business with Sir Everard does make it seem even more likely that the fossil is one and the same,” Lord Paley added with a shrewd look. “Though I do wonder how he could possibly have known where to search for it. I only found out about my godfather’s involvement with Lady Celeste last evening, so it wasn’t me.”
“And you’ve never met Sir Everard yourself, Lord Crutchley?” Gemma asked, frowning. Cam could all but hear the theories spinning through her head.
Then, another possibility occurred to him.
“Was there anyone else who might have heard your discussion with Lady Celeste about possible hiding places, Crutchley?” Cam asked. While he thought it was more likely Sir Everard had merely stumbled upon Gemma’s work, there was something a bit too coincidental about the blackguard’s boasts that it might be the famed Beauchamp Lizard.
“Or,” Gemma added, “someone she might have confided in?”
Crutchley’s lined face twisted into an expression of distaste. “There was one person who spent a great deal of time around her that year, but I never thought she trusted him enough to confide something like that in him. And if she had told him, he’d have stolen it long ago.”
“Who was it, Lord Crutchley?” Gemma’s impatience was beginning to show, Cam thought, noting her white knuckles on the arms of her chair.
“I suppose there’s no harm in telling you,” the old man said with a frown. “Though I know she was dreadfully embarrassed about the whole matter at the time.”
Cam was beginning to understand Gemma’s impatience.
Finally, though, Crutchley continued.
“I always understood that Celeste had decided at a certain point that she would never marry,” he explained. “Especially as by that time she’d built up the estate at Beauchamp House on her own and was known as a scholar in her own right on many subjects including fossils. But there was a man who wanted desperately to marry her. I always suspected it was more because he wanted to own her, like a specimen in his collection.”
Cam saw Gemma shiver at the description. He’d certainly known men like that—who saw women not as their own persons but instead as objects to possess. He was glad, suddenly, that Lady Celeste, who by all accounts was an independent and strong woman, had managed to evade this scoundrel.
“You may be wondering why I am so slow to reveal who this man was,” Crutchley said with a rueful shake of his head. “But it’s because in the years since Lady Celeste discovered the Beauchamp Lizard, he’s come to be well known in the world of fossil collecting, though he himself has never once been the one to dig up his own specimens.”
Something about the description made the hair on the back of Cam’s neck stand on end.
It couldn’t be.
But Crutchley’s next words confirmed it.
“I believe you both are well acquainted with him,” he said, with a nod to both Cam and Paley. “I’m speaking, of course, of Maximillian Pearson.”
“Pearson?” Gemma asked, her shock evident. “But how is that possible? He cannot be old enough to have courted Lady Celeste twenty years ago, for one thing.”
“Oh he was a stripling at the time,” Crutchley assured her. “Barely twenty years old and yet he thought himself cock of the walk. He didn’t care if Celeste wanted him or not. He wanted her and that was what mattered.”
“But surely his parents,” Gemma protested. “I cannot imagine any young heir’s father being sanguine about his son marrying a lady so many years his senior.”
“His father died when young Max was barely fifteen,” Crutchley explained. “And his mother was no match for his strong will. Though Celeste did try to speak to her about the way he wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was no help, obviously.”
“Since she didn’t marry Pearson,” Cam said, “then I can only assume something managed to convince him to let her be.”
“I’m afraid, Lady Cameron, that it might be a tale too delicate for your ears.”
Cam almost laughed when Gemma tried to control her impulse to scoff at the notion.
Instead, however, she said simply, “I am a married lady, Lord Crutchley. I’m sure it will not scandalize me overmuch.”
When the elderly gentleman turned his beseeching gaze to Cam, he shrugged. “I will not make up my wife’s mind for her,” he said. Though it did amuse him to note how quickly he’d come to think of her as his wife in the twelve hours or so since their pretend marriage.
“If you insist, Lady Cameron,” said the elderly lord. “One afternoon, not long after Celeste found the lizard skull, we were … ah … behaving amorously on the shore below Beauchamp House when Pearson came looking for her. He had become suspicious of the amount of time we spent together, and made it his practice to simply show up without invitation at odd hours, in an effort to ensure that he had no serious rivals.”
Gemma’s cheeks turned a bit pink, but other than that, she remained unfazed by the confession. “And what did he do?” she asked, frowning. “I cannot imagine how dreadful it must have been for Lady Celeste to be spied on in such a manner.”
“Oh, she was furious,” Crutchley confirmed. “As was I. I wanted to call him out but she wouldn’t let me. Pearson himself was more shocked than angry. He was, after all, little more than a lad. He’d put her on a pedestal and hadn’t considered that she might be, as a woman some two decades older, someone with desires that he knew nothing about.”
“And that ended things for him?” Cam asked. It was a bit difficult to believe that a man who was so covetous would simply give up at the first sign of difficulty.
“It was the beginning of the end,” Crutchley said. “He called on her the next day and informed her that he was disappointed, but would forgive her if she promised she would agree never to see me again. Of course she refused.”
“Of course she did,” Gemma said with a scowl. “The nerve of the man.”
“He took that badly, but he spent a few more weeks trying to bully her into accepting him. But gradually, he became more and more withdrawn. By the time she and I parted ways, he no longer left his estate. And, I’m quite sure it was the beginning of his hatred of all women. It wasn’t until his mother’s death some ten years later that he was able to eradicate all women from his life—even the servants. From what Paley has told me, he’s become a total recluse now.”
“You mentioned, Lord Crutchley,” Gemma said, bringing the conversation back to their reasons for being here, “that you thought Pearson might have known Lady Celeste had hidden the lizard skull where she found it. Why is that?”
“That day he spied on us,” Crutchley explained, “was the same day we discussed her fears that someone would steal the fossil. It was also not long afterward that Pearson became a fossil collector himself.”
That was a bit of news Cam hadn’t expected. “You mean to say Pearson had no interest in stones and fossils until Lady Celeste rejected him?”
“I think at first,” Crutchley said, “the boy considered it was a way to take something from her. She wanted to add to her collection, so he wanted to ensure that the fossils she most coveted she didn’t get.”
“That’s certainly mean-spirited,” said Lord Paley with a frown. “I must admit, I had no notion that Pearson knew Lady Celeste at all, much less that he’d once been fixated on her. He must be livid that Lady Celeste left her collection to you.”
It was news to Cam as well, and he couldn’t help but wonder if Pearson’s vendetta against Lady Celeste went beyond the lady’s death.
“But if he knew that she planned to rebury it,” Gemma asked, brows furrowed, “then why did he not go dig it up himself ages ago?”
“Perhaps he didn’t put two and two together,” Cam offered. “He was likely far more focused on the—happenings—on the beach. Remember it was Celeste he wanted then, not her fossils. It was only later that he decided to compete with her in that arena. And by then, the lizard had become an unseen legend. No one knew where it was. And after a time, it was forgotten.”
“For all that he began to fancy himself an expert,” Lord Crutchley offered, “it was always quite clear to me that Pearson wasn’t particularly gifted in the brain box. He was far more about spending his coin to acquire things than in learning about why they mattered.”
The visit had been even more illuminating than Cam could have imagined. He was about to rise and usher Gemma back out to his curricle when they all heard a disturbance downstairs.
“So many visitors,” said Lord Crutchley with ill-disguised excitement. It made Cam feel a pang of pity for the old gentleman, who clearly craved company.
But when the butler appeared at the door to the drawing room, his words made him switch his pity from Crutchley to himself.
“The Reverend Lord Benedick Lisle and Lady Benedick Lisle,” the servant said as Ben and Sophia entered looking travel-worn and somewhat harassed.
Well, perhaps only Ben. Sophia looked happy enough.
“What a relief it is to find you are both safe,” Sophia said with a smile. “You must forgive us, gentlemen. We were expecting them back—”
“Dear Sophia,” Gemma interrupted her, and Cam noticed that she was trying to communicate something to her sister with her eyes, “we did tell you that we would be paying a call at Lord Crutchley’s estate after our wedding night in Lyme.”
At the words “wedding night” Cam noticed a muscle in his brother’s jaw jump.
Still, to his relief, Benedick smiled indulgently and said, “You know how your sister worries about you, Gemma. I fear she is having a difficult time—and I admit, I am as well—believing that you and my brother have married. It seems only yesterday we were discussing the surprise of your betrothal.”
Cam was grateful for his brother’s going along with their ruse, but he knew with the surety of a lifetime as Ben’s younger brother that he would pay dearly for it later.