A Talent for Trickery

by Alissa Johnson

  The silliness of that act, and the simple normalcy of reassuring him that no, it was not the size of Wayton’s chapel spire, had eased the worst of her nerves. But as the retreating carriage sent a plume of dust down the drive, those nerves came sliding back.

  She stood in the parlor with Owen. She, next to the oversized writing desk. He, leaning against the back of the settee. Both of them dead silent.

  Despite the tension in the air, she didn’t feel foolish. Not yet. There was still the possibility that Peter was mistaken, that there had been only a handful of broadsides and one bored and infatuated headmaster.

  She did, however, feel miserably conflicted.

  It was a distressing predicament to stand at the crossroads of justified fury and complete remorse with no clear sense of which direction one ought to step.

  In the end, she went with instinct. “Were you friends with my father?”

  Owen was slow to answer. “I…”

  “Don’t think; just answer.” People who had time to think had time to think of lies. “Were you ever friends with my father?”

  He stiffened, though whether it was in response to her question or his coming answer, she couldn’t say. “No. We worked together well enough, but we were not friends.”

  “Do you think my father became a better man?”

  “No.” A small sigh. “I’m sorry, no.”

  One thing at a time, she told herself and pushed disappointment aside. “If he had been, if he had changed, would you have given him credit for rescuing Lady Strale?”

  “No. Lottie—”

  “Why did you take credit for saving Lady Strale?”

  “To keep you safe,” he ground out, straightening from the settee. “Why else?”

  “For the viscountcy,” she replied and could not recall a time she had ever wished so much to be wrong.

  Owen’s expression darkened. “Let me be clear on this. I did not receive the viscountcy for rescuing Lady Strale. The Crown is aware of your father’s act. I received it for years of exceptional service to the Crown culminating in the capture of Horatio Gage and a dozen of his men. I’d not have accepted it otherwise.”

  “But you accepted the credit given to you by all of London.”

  “Yes, and I would do it again.” He stepped forward, impatience all but coming off him in waves. “For God’s sake, Lottie. Did you not stop and think what would happen to you if your father’s actions that day had become known?”

  “Of course I did. It is what I wanted, for people to know the truth. Only…” She grimaced and found something fascinating to stare at in the grain of a side table. “Only I did not think it would be of great interest to most.” Just sufficient interest to ensure her father’s legacy consisted of more than a long list of black-hearted deeds. “Lady Strale’s kidnapping received very little attention. I assume people spoke of it, but—”

  “No one spoke of it. Her disappearance from her own ball whilst wearing the Strale diamonds was a closely guarded secret. The ransom note we received demanded silence in exchange for her continued well-being.”

  “Gage. Of course.” Gage would not have wanted all of London searching for him. “I assumed that her family wished to keep it quiet and that Lady Strale would not care to become a spectacle after—”

  “Lady Strale has always been a spectacle, even when she’s sober. A more self-absorbed, melodramatic human being I’ve yet to meet, unless it is her stepson, the current Lord Strale. They run head-to-head. After her rescue, she related the tale of her abduction to anyone willing to listen and embellished it with the skill of a seasoned actress. She reveled in the attention, dining off the story for months. We could only count ourselves fortunate she was unconscious at the time of her rescue and unable to recognize your father.”

  “You told her it had been you.”

  “It was the Crown’s decision. I’d have chosen someone else, but it was insisted that as a baron…” He waved his hand in the air as his voice trailed off. “Neither here nor there. Had your father received the credit for Lady Strale’s rescue, he would have become a tremendous sensation, likely more so because of his death. That is what mattered.”

  “He was already well-known—”

  “But you weren’t,” Owen insisted with growing heat. “The name Will Walker might have been spoken in hushed whispers in thieves’ dens and ballrooms all across London, but scarcely a handful of those whispering could have picked the man out of a crowd. The details of his life were shrouded in mystery. Details like the names and location of his children. He made sure of that. I made sure that didn’t change.”

  “I wanted it to change,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. The conversation tied her in knots. It felt as if she was somehow both winning and losing, and though she knew which she preferred, it made her miserable all the same. “I wanted it to change for the better.”

  “It wasn’t possible. It still would have been necessary for you to leave London with a new name for your own safety.”

  “I know that.” One good act, however heroic, would not have appeased every man her father had duped nor every former associate he had betrayed in his work with Owen. “But I thought his legacy might be different. I thought—”

  “That legacy would have put you in harm’s way.”

  She nodded and risked a glance at him. “Peter said your sisters became the subject of talk as well.”

  Though she was no longer arguing with him, Owen appeared not to notice. The less resistance she offered, the more emphatic he became. “My sisters. My parents. My long-dead grandparents. My tutor when I’d been eight. They picked my life apart, Lottie. For months after Lady Strale’s rescue, every detail of my existence was fodder for the presses. Nothing was too small to omit. Where I went, what I ate, what sort of boots I wore, the brandy I preferred. That would have been you. With your father dead, his orphaned children would have been the focus of every gossipmonger in England.”

  “No one knew us,” she pointed out. “No one ever knew our given names.”

  They’d not had live-in staff, and even Mrs. Popple had only known her as Walker Daughter the First. It had been that small act of care on her father’s part that had allowed them to keep their given names upon moving to Norfolk.

  “Mystery would have only fanned the flames,” Owen argued. “There would have been descriptions of you and Esther and Peter, even sketches, drawn from the memory of one of your father’s former accomplices or a servant or neighbor. Anyone who might have caught even a glimpse of the Walker children. Your likeness would have been printed in broadsides and papers all over England. No matter where you went, there would always be the risk of someone recognizing you. And it would have been only a matter of time before word of your location reached London. I couldn’t protect you from that. I could hide you from your enemies in London—I could not shield you from an entire nation.”

  She nodded again. There was nothing else she could do. In her visions of what might have been, her father’s act of courage had been a minor footnote in a larger tale. Worthy of mention, not dissection.

  “Your father understood all this,” Owen pressed, his voice lowered and insistent. “He understood and agreed to the risks and rewards of working with me. He never expected accolades. He never wanted them. Not for his sake. And certainly not for yours.”

  Needing something to do with her hands besides twist them, she picked up a glass paperweight from the table and ran her palm over the smooth surface. “It is…difficult to know what to believe.”

  Owen closed some of the distance between them. “Believe this. I am the one who told you how your father died. I came to your house, sat you down, and told you exactly what had happened. If my intentions had ever been to deceive you, I’d have done so that day. A lie would have served me far better than the truth.”

  “I know.” She remembered thinking
of that years ago. It had given her pause, before it disappeared under the weight of anger and grief. “I need to think.”

  “Think here,” he snapped when she stepped past him toward the door. He caught her arm and turned her round again. “I am tired of watching you walk away, Lottie.”

  “I’m not walking away.” Not like he meant. “I need a moment to think. Please.”

  “Think here.” His voice softened, and his grip gentled. “Lottie. Your revenge. Your cold shoulder… It was blistering to me.”

  She looked down. “I am sorry. I—”

  “Think here,” he repeated, quietly this time. His hand slid down her arm in an unmistakable caress.

  If he had continued to demand, to press, she might have found the will to leave, but his words were more plea than they were an order.

  “Yes. All right. A moment.”

  “A moment,” he agreed. He stepped back, studied her warily for a second, then nodded once and turned away to gaze out the window.

  Lottie let out a breath of relief. She needed that small distance between them. As much as she wanted to oblige him, she could not stay in the room if he insisted on watching her. No one could think while they were being watched by a man like Owen Renderwell.

  One could, however, think quite clearly while they watched someone else. Her gaze traveled up his long back, the wide breadth of his shoulders, the slight curl of hair at the nape of his neck. Everything about him was as familiar to her as it was foreign. How could she know someone so well and still be so wrong?

  She pulled her eyes away and frowned at the ribbons of color twisted through the paperweight in her hands. She wasn’t entirely in the wrong. Owen was mistaken on a fair number of points. Her father had changed and deserved some sort of recognition for that. And there had been options other than danger and immediate discovery in the aftermath of his death. The Walker family might have emigrated, for example.

  She didn’t want to emigrate, but that was beside the point.

  She stifled a sigh. The point was that she had been wrong about what mattered most right now. She had been wrong about Owen’s intentions. They hadn’t been greedy and selfish. They had been good.

  As far as she was concerned, the road to hell was not paved with good intentions. It was paved with bad deeds. Most of them her father’s. A few of them her own.

  Good intentions provided a light in the dark. It lit the spot for a new road, one that led up and out. All a body had to do was pave it.

  It was what she wanted most in the world—to build a new path forward for herself and her family, to be given a second chance and the benefit of the doubt.

  How could she deny Owen what amounted to the same thing?

  * * *

  Owen was accustomed to reading people. He could spot a shift in mood or a reversal of heart from the most subtle change in expression, the slightest adjustment in posture. It was an essential skill in his line of work. It was also one that required a clear head and a fair amount of concentration.

  He was concentrating, to be sure, but his mind was anything but clear. It rarely was when it came to Lottie.

  As she stared at the paperweight, turning it over in her hands, he studied her profile—the soft line of her jaw, the downcast eyes, the long sweep of lashes.

  He hadn’t the foggiest notion what she was thinking.

  If she’d been another woman, a different sort of woman, he could be sure how this scene would end. The truth was there, standing before her large as life. She only had to see and accept it.

  But it had been Owen’s experience that the more often one encountered lies, the less adept one became at recognizing the truth. A falsehood here and there could be disregarded as an aberration. A few more lies and a person began to wonder what could be believed and what could not. When there was more deceit than honesty, it became easier, safer, to assume everything was a lie.

  It is difficult to know what to believe.

  It was difficult for everyone, Owen thought, but immeasurably more so for a woman raised in a world where deceit overran honesty by leaps and bounds. Lottie’s excessively cautious nature was understandable, and heartbreaking.

  And made him want to shake her until her teeth rattled.

  It was for this reason that he had insisted she stay in the room. He would give her the time and space to think things through, but not too much time nor too much space. He wouldn’t give her the opportunity to talk herself out of the truth.

  After another minute, Lottie set her paperweight aside and faced him. “It is not easy to alter one’s perspective of eight years over the course of a few minutes.”

  “I know.”

  “And I want…I want to say I am sorry.”

  He didn’t want another damned apology. Her feelings, or some of them, were clear now. Her expression was troubled, her voice uncertain. He hated seeing both, but she continued before he could argue. “I am not a stupid woman. I should have known your reasons for…for many things, I suppose, were valid.”

  “And I should have made my reasons clear from the start.” It simply hadn’t occurred to him that she was unaware of how things stood. An unforgivable error on his part. He should never have assumed that Will Walker would be forthright with his daughter or that Lottie, so often isolated in the Walker home, should have guessed the truth herself.

  “But I want you to understand…” She lifted her chin. “You are wrong about my father. He changed.”

  He swallowed an oath. “Lottie. You don’t—”

  “And you were wrong to disavow him completely. I understand why you did not, or could not, give him credit for rescuing Lady Strale. But you could have acknowledged some of the work he did for you. You should have.”

  He was tempted to agree for no other reason than it would prove expedient. If he gave her the words she wanted, they could put the whole unpleasant business behind them and move on. But it would be just another lie, he thought, just one more layer of deceit.

  Though it cost him, he shook his head and stood his ground. “We will not agree on this.”

  “I know.” She straightened her shoulders and took a breath. “I do not require absolute harmony of opinion complete—” She stopped mid-sentence and sighed, her shoulders drooping. “How ridiculously pompous,” she muttered, and he almost smiled. “What I mean to say is…” She caught and held his gaze. “Sometimes friends do not agree.”

  Though her words were a statement, he heard the question in her voice. More, he heard the offer.

  He reached for it with both hands. “Sometimes they do not.”

  A curious stillness fell over the room. There was no awkwardness or tension between them, but a sense of settling, as if they’d come up from a long underwater dive and needed the moment to catch their breath and find their bearings.

  When he felt certain they’d accomplished a little of both, he stepped close and brushed the backs of his fingers across the smooth skin of her cheek, letting the touch linger.

  “We should look through the journals,” he said at length. He could have stayed just as he was, lost in the thrill of seeing Lottie’s eyes free of anger and mistrust for the first time in eight years. But there was a job to do. Also, there was a limit to how long a man could stay lost in a woman’s eyes while he caught his breath. At some point, he was just staring and panting.

  He let his hand fall away.

  “The journals,” Lottie echoed. “Yes. I…” She gestured vaguely at the parlor door. “I sent Mrs. Lewis and Cook to the village for various supplies. Mary, the scullery maid, will be busy in the kitchen for most of the day. We can work without interruption.”

  “More supplies?”

  Humor danced across her pretty features. “They are astounded at the extent and variety of your demands.”

  “I am a trial,” he agreed solemnly.

 
She laughed lightly, and the sound of it was as thrilling to him as the sight of her clear eyes. I’ve missed this, he thought—the easy banter and teasing that had once come so naturally.

  When they were sure of themselves again, when the friendship was on solid ground once more, then he would decide what else he wanted. He would decide what came next.

  Seven

  Lottie refused to listen to the little voice in her head that insisted she was making a colossal mistake. It whispered in her ear, persistent and nasty. She believed too easily, capitulated too quickly, trusted too readily. She was the worst sort of dupe.

  The voice belonged to her father. The doubts were echoes of lessons she had learned at his knee. Years ago, she would have given credence to those echoes, but not now. She loved her father, and she was grateful for some of what he had taken the time to teach her. But she did not want to be her father nor govern her life according to his suspicious view of the world, believing the worst of everyone, seeking out their weaknesses and cataloging them away for future exploitation.

  It had been the right thing to admit her own error and to give Owen the benefit of the doubt. She knew it was right because it felt right. In fact, it felt marvelous. There was something uniquely liberating in letting go of old anger. And it was exciting, almost intoxicating, to take a chance on someone, to discover she still possessed the capacity to trust, even if it was a partial and rather cautious trust complicated by doubts, qualifications, and the existence of an ugly, nagging voice.

  It still felt marvelous.

  Smiling to herself, she waited for Owen to find another journal page requiring explanation. At his insistence, they had abandoned the small secret room for the comfort of the armchairs in the bedroom. Owen had placed the two side by side, forming a sort of miniature settee with a divider. It was an arrangement Lottie found quite comfortable, despite Owen’s propensity for throwing his elbow over both armrests.

  He had a tendency to sprawl like a big cat. She pursed her lips a little at the assessment. No, not a cat. Gabriel struck her as more the cat—smooth and a little sneaky. Samuel would be a bear, naturally—large, forbidding, surprisingly quick.