Chapter Eight
Mr Drake returned the next day, promptly at ten.
It was a relief to see him because Hope had awoken feeling something rather like optimism. Given the reality of circumstances, the feeling was totally misplaced. But she could not help the contents of her dreams, which had been illogically happy.
The same man who was now walking up to her front door had figured prominently in them. They had been dancing together at the ball. And as he had last night, he had told her the horrible news about the Earl. But then, just as her future seemed darkest, he had smiled at her and taken her hand, pulling her out of the set to the gasps of those around her.
‘Do not be afraid. You shall want for nothing. I have a big house with servants and room for your sister.’
He had actually said most of those things last night. But he had not taken her in his arms and kissed her, as he did in the dream.
It had been a wonderful dream. But she was awake now. No matter how handsome he was, with the sun shining on the fringe of his gold hair, he was not going to stick one of his immaculate gloves into his pocket and produce the Comstock diamonds. They were doomed. All three of them.
At least, she suspected so. She knew what happened to thieves. But what happened to their granddaughters? And was the punishment any less for dowager countesses? It might simply be disgrace and public ostracism. That would be bad enough, but it was better than Newgate.
Mr Drake had reached the door and she opened it as he reached for the knocker, startling him. ‘You were watching at the window,’ he said with a surprised smile that she could not manage to return.
‘Soonest started, soonest done,’ she said, hurrying out to the carriage where a groom was pulling down the step for her.
‘I am glad you are feeling better,’ he said, his smile flattening to an upward quirk at the corners of his mouth, and offered a hand to help her up into her seat.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Last night. When you left me, you said you were ill.’
‘Oh,’ she said softly. She’d had no idea what excuses she had made for leaving. After he had finished destroying her hope for the future, the evening had devolved into a miserable blur.
‘We both knew you were not sick,’ he reminded her. ‘I upset you with my talk of the heir.’
‘It is all right,’ she said quickly, feeling her stomach lurch as the carriage began to roll.
‘No, it is not,’ he said. ‘Last night...’ he started to say, then paused to wet his lips.
His hesitance was unusual for he was rarely at a loss for words. She raised her veil so they might talk face to face, since whatever he wished to say must be important.
‘Last night, the things I said to you were not true.’
‘You received conflicting information?’ she said, surprised to feel more uneasy than relieved by the reversal of fortune.
‘I lied,’ he said with a resigned sigh. ‘It was cruel of me to taunt you and I never would have done so had I known how it would upset you.’
‘You lied,’ she repeated. ‘But why?’
Again, he paused. Again, he wet his lips before speaking. ‘It bothered me that you seemed to prefer the help of the Earl to anything I might offer.’
‘You were jealous.’ Now she was not just surprised. She was amazed.
‘Yes,’ he said. Then he added, ‘Professionally speaking, of course.’
‘Of course,’ she repeated.
‘I do not know any more about Miles Strickland than I did on the first day. He might be exactly as you hope him to be, single and eager to help you.’
The prospect should have made her feel much better about the future. Instead she felt a vague disappointment. ‘He might also be exactly as you described him,’ she replied.
‘But we will not know for sure until he arrives.’ He reached a hand out and covered hers in a gesture of reassurance.
She stared down at it. It was a nice hand. She had never been conscious of male anatomy before, especially not the extremities. When she thought of them at all, she imagined her father’s hands, which she could remember as pale and gentle, or her grandfather’s, which were thin and knotted. When she attended balls, the hands of the men she danced with seemed to have no weight to them at all, barely grazing hers as they danced.
But Mr Drake’s gloved hand was solid and strong. It did not tremble as it lifted her into carriages. It had been faintly possessive as it had led her through the dance at the ball and it had not hesitated when forced to take her reticule and return her stolen goods.
She had seen the bare skin briefly, when he had removed his gloves to root through the chest of candlesticks with her on the first day. They had been darkened by sun with a smattering of freckles across the knuckles. The nails had been clean and neatly trimmed, but there was something about them that made her suspect he was not afraid to get dirt under them, if a task required it.
All in all, she’d have described his hands as ‘capable’. Much like the rest of him, really. He met problems without flinching and dealt with them. It was what he’d been hired to do. He was not helping her by choice. He was doing it for money. No matter what she had dreamed, she must not expect anything more than that from him.
He cleared his throat and she started suddenly, aware that she had been staring at him.
He pretended that he had not noticed and removed his hand to pull the list from his pocket. ‘I thought today we might try to find the oddment.’ He gave her an expectant look.
She nodded in agreement, eager to turn her mind to a problem that might have a solution.
He offered an expectant wiggle of his fingers, staring at her in a much more forthright way. ‘I thought, perhaps, a description would be forthcoming by now.’
‘It would if I had one to offer,’ she replied. ‘Grandmama is mum on the subject, but assures me I will know it when I see it.’
‘Oddment implies that it is a remnant of something,’ he mused. ‘Or did she use the term in a more general manner? Could she have meant an oddity?’
‘I really have no idea,’ she said. ‘And if I cannot tell you what it is, then I cannot even tell you where to begin to look.’
‘Then, I will take the initiative.’
Despite herself, those words made her feel instantly better.
He thought for a moment. ‘There are several shops I can recommend that sell things no one else has. Let us assume that, whatever this thing is, there is not another like it in the whole of London.’ He looked at her sideways for a moment. ‘You may find these places rather unpleasant. They are not the sort that one normally takes gently bred young ladies.’
‘I find the whole experience rather unpleasant,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Why should this day be any different?’
He held up his hands in surrender. ‘You have made that clear. Just know that I am not doing this in an effort to upset you, again. You have been warned.’
Would it disappoint him, she wondered, if the more horrible he made it sound the more tantalising it became? Sometimes it seemed that the most interesting experiences were things that gently bred ladies were not supposed to do. Like kissing, for instance. No matter what Charity thought she knew on such subjects, it could not have been as satisfying as practical experience.
The shops they visited today were a different sort of revelation. Who knew there was a store in London that had an entire cupboard full of stuffed owls and the largest spider she had ever seen, preserved under a bell jar? Or that there was another place specialising in music boxes and clocks that had complicated animations on the hourly chimes? At that place, there were some cases he flatly refused to allow her to look into, insisting that though the mechanisms were clever, they would shock her worse than her grandmother’s painting had.
But since the Comstock heirlooms tended neither to taxidermy nor automatons, they could not help her. None of the many fascinating things she saw were the Dowager’s oddment.
But at the third shop, she felt a familiar rush of excitement. There were Roman coins and lapis scarabs, and fragments of Greek statues. There were so many fingers and ears and arms and legs that she wondered if it might be possible to put them together like a life-sized puzzle.
And suddenly, she knew what they were looking for. ‘Excuse me.’ She stepped forward to interrupt the conversation of the shopkeeper and Mr Drake. ‘Excuse me, sir. But do you have any more Egyptian artefacts?’
‘In the box.’ He pointed towards the marble.
‘Those are mostly Greek. The thing I am looking for will be in a wooden box. Ebony, I think. With a gold ankh inlaid on the cover.’
At his blank response, she traced the symbol in the dust on the counter. ‘And it is held shut by leather bindings.’
The man grinned at her. ‘I did not take you for a connoisseur, miss.’ He reached behind the counter and brought out a thing she had never expected to see again.
She smiled and held her breath as she opened it, fearing that the contents might have disintegrated with age.
Mr Drake leaned over her shoulder to look as she raised the lid and recoiled in disgust. ‘What the devil is it? And why would anyone want the thing back?’
‘My great-grandfather did not stop at the Grand Tour. He went all the way to Cairo!’ she said with pride.
‘And dismembered a mummy?’ The look of revulsion on the handsome face at her shoulder was properly impressive.
‘Do not be such a ninny.’ She waved it in his face and watched him jump. ‘It is not a real toe. It is a false one. Made of ebony with a gold nail.’ She ran a finger along the bindings. ‘It fit around the foot just so and strapped on with these.’
‘There are still bones,’ he said. ‘I can hear them rattling.’ His face was bloodless white and he was still backing up.
‘I do not know how you could. You are almost out into the street. And those are not bones rattling, they are the metal tips of the laces. Now come back here and pay the man.’
‘Put it away, you ghoul.’ He shuddered. ‘Or you will never see me again.’
For the first time in what felt like ages, she laughed as she had when she was a child. Why had she ever stopped? Was there some rule that young ladies did not succumb to mirth? Or had she created one just for herself? No matter. She must remember to break it more often. She rolled her eyes at Mr Drake and put the prosthetic back in the box, closing the lid. ‘There. All better?’
‘Somewhat,’ he agreed, reaching for his purse. ‘We are taking that directly back to the town house, for Leggett is not paying me enough to ride around London with that abomination in the carriage with me.’
* * *
Once they’d returned home, she took the box to the library and left it beside the sofa that was Charity’s habitual place. ‘She will be so amused to see it again,’ she assured him with an evil grin. ‘I used to chase her around the house with it, when we were small. She retaliated by hiding it under my pillow one night. I did not sleep for a week.’
He stared at her, disgusted. ‘What sort of women are you?’
‘Ones that were moved suddenly as small girls to a house with few playthings,’ she said, patting the box with affection. ‘Until we settled in and Grandmama bought us proper toys, we had a most exciting time rummaging through the family heirlooms.’
‘Are there any others as ghastly as this?’ he asked.
‘None that you will be forced to retrieve. The last item on the list is a porcelain vase and it is really quite ordinary.’
‘That is a great relief,’ he said, with a half-smile.
‘And now I understand Grandmother’s cryptic description of it. She could not abide the thing. We agreed to have a funeral for it, if we could have a proper Egyptian one with a burning barge.’
‘Egyptians have pyramids,’ he supplied. ‘You are confusing them with Vikings.’
‘I know. But we wanted a fire,’ she said. ‘It was most disappointing. In the end, we settled for a hole in the ground and a tapered stack of stones on top.’
‘You were allowed to bury it?’ he said, surprised.
‘Grandmama encouraged it. She said it came from a grave and, as decent Christians, we should put it back in one. We recorded it in the family Bible so that future, less squeamish Comstocks could find it.’
‘And then she dug it up,’ he stated.
Hope shook her head in amazement. ‘She hated the thing. She must have been quite desperate for money, if she chose to retrieve this.’
‘Though it was not first on the list, I’ll wager that this was the first thing she took,’ he mused.
‘How can you tell?’
‘Because it was as good as gone already. No one would miss a thing that had been given a formal burial. Who was likely to go looking for it?’
‘When the Earl’s agents came to do the audit, I would have told them the family story and shown them the Bible,’ she said, surprised.
‘And they would likely have left well enough alone,’ he concluded. Then he added, ‘But I am glad she decided to include it in the list. It makes things so much easier when the people who hire me do not hold back important details.’
‘Oh,’ she said. He was probably referring to their conversation from the previous evening. She wished he would stop hinting about the matter since she doubted there was anything that could be done without the help of Comstock. She gave him the most innocent look she could muster. ‘Are people often less than forthcoming?’
‘By the time it is necessary to bring in an outsider to sort out the mess, you would think that there would be no energy left to cover things up.’ He shook his head. ‘But there is always some small hope that the situation, whatever it is, will resolve itself without my help.’
‘Or they know that it cannot be fixed,’ she replied. No matter how much money Mr Leggett had given him, he could not have enough to buy back the huge stones in the Comstock necklace.
‘Or they are ashamed,’ he added.
It certainly explained her grandmother’s behaviour.
‘They needn’t be,’ he said softly when she did not reply. ‘They have no reason to be so. If the mistake was someone else’s, then any guilt rests with that person and not the one trying to help.’
‘Thank you.’ Even this tiny bit of absolution was a comfort. How had Faith managed for so long, when she had been the only one to know of the family’s troubles? The money her marriage had brought made things easier. Yet, after less than a month of trying to rescue the Dowager, Hope felt near to exhaustion.
‘I think it is because they do not fully trust me,’ he said. ‘I am not of them. Had it been my father who was of noble birth and not my mother, I might have been an acknowledged member of a noble family. I would never have had an earldom, but at least I’d have been able to tell you my true name.’ His steely-grey eyes softened with sadness.
Was that what he thought the problem was? That she did not think a bastard was worthy of her secret? ‘That is not the problem at all,’ she insisted. ‘I think you are the most fascinating man I have ever met and I trust you with my life.’
‘Then prove it to me,’ he urged.
Before she could even think to speak, she had kissed him.