She’d been angry with him all day for not being persistent, but it looked as though his notion of persistency merely differed from hers. Which shouldn’t have surprised her, given the complicated way his mind seemed to work.
‘Very well,’ she said. Because there was just the chance that he’d come here to plead for forgiveness. And more to the point, she’d have no peace if she turned him away without a hearing. ‘Say what you have to say,’ she said and folded her arms across her chest.
‘Could we not sit somewhere where there is a fire? It is like an icehouse in here.’
He glanced at Atlas, then back at her, with a pleading expression.
‘It is entirely your own fault. You would insist on coming in here.’
‘Then it is clearly up to us to make the place more habitable,’ said Lord Becconsall, going over to the fireplace, kneeling down, pulling a tinder box from a pocket and setting about lighting the fire.
‘May I?’ Captain Bretherton didn’t await her reply before yanking the covers off a couple of chairs, rolling them up and tossing them into a corner.
Lord Rawcliffe prodded the upholstery of one of the uncovered chairs with the silver ferrule of his cane.
‘Lord Becconsall informs us that we owe you an apology,’ he said, turning to the other chair that Captain Bretherton had uncovered and giving it similar treatment. ‘Over the matter of the wager.’
‘Oh.’ So that was why he’d brought them here.
‘Yes. He is very angry with us. We have all, naturally, sworn that none of us have spoken out of turn, but he has remained adamant that we must all tender our apologies.’ He shot Lord Becconsall’s back a look of resentment.
‘I don’t see it is the slightest bit necessary for all of you to come here,’ she said, becoming aware, suddenly, that there was a good deal of tension flickering between all four men.
‘No, Ulysses is right,’ said Captain Bretherton, his face creasing in concern. ‘If you feel we have insulted you, then we do owe you an apology.’
‘If?’ She took a couple of paces into the room. ‘You jolly well did insult me. Mocked me. I overheard you laughing about me. At Miss Roke—I think it was—her ball.’
‘There, you see, Becconsall?’ Lord Rawcliffe turned to where he was crouched on the hearthrug, blowing on to the wisps of kindling he’d managed so far to coax into sputtering out smoke. ‘It was not one of us who spoke out of turn.’
‘I never said it was,’ said Lord Becconsall, between puffs. ‘Can’t you see, that’s not the point,’ he said, getting to his feet and wiping his hands on his coat tails.
‘Then, what is the p-point?’ asked Archie, looking totally bewildered.
‘The point is,’ said Lord Becconsall, approaching her with his hands held out as though in supplication, ‘I need you to trust them all, Lady Harriet. You need help and I have no truer, finer friends than these three men.’
‘Is that some kind of joke?’ She took a step back. How dare he bring them here and practically demand she spill confidential family information to them, when he’d just confirmed the fact that they’d made a joke of the last predicament they’d found her in?
‘The very last people I would trust with confidential family information is a bunch of men who make sport of defenceless females...’
‘Hardly defenceless,’ put in Lord Rawcliffe. ‘I seem to recall you gave a very good account of yourself with that riding crop.’
‘Nevertheless, you none of you behaved like gentlemen.’
‘I helped you remount your horse,’ Captain Bretherton objected.
‘And then you made me the topic of a wager!’
‘You know,’ Lord Rawcliffe drawled, ‘I believe Ulysses only did so as a pretext for tracking you down. He has been smitten from the very first.’
‘Smitten? Hah!’ Harriet tossed her head. Though even as she did so, she wondered if the gesture might be lacking in conviction. Because Lord Becconsall had already told her the very same thing, in the coffee house. ‘A man who is smitten,’ she continued, putting every ounce of indignation into her voice that she could muster, ‘does not...hold the threat of exposure over a lady’s head. And torment her with her less than exemplary conduct every time he meets her.’
‘He does if he is behaving with the finesse of a boy of the age of twelve, who thinks the best way to attract the attention of a girl he likes is to pull her pigtails,’ said Lord Becconsall, ruefully.
Was that what he’d been doing? Oh. Come to think of it, even when she’d warned him she would not admit him to her house, nor dance with him, he hadn’t given up that teasing. On the contrary, he’d shown every indication of stepping up his campaign to annoy her.
There was a beat of silence while everyone stared at him. In varying degrees of shock. Well, everyone except Lord Rawcliffe, who wore his usual knowing, and faintly mocking expression.
‘While you are setting the record straight, Ulysses,’ said Lord Rawcliffe in a sarcastic drawl, ‘why don’t you explain the nature of the wager? She may well feel differently about the whole episode if she hears what the stakes were.’
‘The stakes?’ Lord Becconsall frowned. ‘What difference will that make? It was not the stakes, but the fact that we were, apparently, bandying her name about as though we had no respect for her that she objected to.’
Harriet’s heart leapt. He really did understand the nature of his offence. That was why he’d brought all his friends here. He could tell how badly he’d hurt her—how they’d all hurt her by treating her so lightly—and was genuinely sorry for doing something that had left her feeling humiliated. He also knew she needed to hear them all apologise.
And cared enough about her to make them do it.
He had broken the invisible bonds of male camaraderie that had made her feel so excluded when she’d seen them together before. To put her feelings first. To put her first.
‘Just tell her,’ Lord Rawcliffe insisted.
Lord Becconsall turned to her, looking shamefaced. ‘You have to understand, we were all rather castaway. And I was trying to...’
She pulled herself up as tall as she could and looked down her nose at him, the way Mama was in the habit of looking at Uncle Hugo. She might be on the verge of forgiving him, but she had no intention of letting him off easily. He deserved to squirm, for the misery he’d put her through. ‘You were trying to?’
‘Well, never mind what I was trying to do. The point is, that night was the first time all four of us had been together since our schooldays. And we...well...’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I think it was because we all started using the nicknames we had for each other at school. It made us all sort of slip back into the roles we had then. Zeus ordering us all around as though he was a god.’ He shot Lord Rawcliffe a look of resentment. ‘Atlas taking the burdens of the world on his shoulders...’ He glanced over to where Atlas had just slumped into one of the chairs he’d uncovered, looking like the last man able to shoulder any kind of burden. ‘And Archie...’
‘They called me Archimedes because they all thought I was so much cleverer than them,’ said Mr Kellett mournfully. And subsided into the other chair, next to Atlas, even though she was still standing and hadn’t given anyone permission to sit down. In other men, she would consider this a display of rank bad manners. And it was. But in the case of Atlas, he looked as though, if he hadn’t sat down when he did, he might have fallen down. And Archie was just typical of the sort of men Mama often consorted with, who frequently forgot about inconsequential matters like etiquette when they were all fired up with weightier matters.
‘Anyway, we argued about you,’ Lord Becconsall continued, having shot Archie one exasperated glance. ‘I maintained you were an innocent, who had no idea you were behaving improperly. Zeus swore you were no such thing. I wanted to clear your name,’ he said, h
olding out his hands to her again, in that gesture of appeal for understanding.
And in a way, she did understand. After all, hadn’t she infuriated Uncle Hugo, by the way she’d gone about trying to clear Aunt Susan’s name? She’d been clumsy, and trampled all over lots of people’s feelings. With the best of intentions.
‘But at the same time, I’d only just found these fellows again, after years abroad, and...and other things, and it was so...’ He spread his hands wide, as though lacking the words to explain himself properly. ‘I didn’t want to risk losing them again by letting it descend into a real quarrel. And so...’
‘He turned it into a joke,’ put in Lord Rawcliffe, giving Lord Becconsall a thoughtful look. ‘The way he always did when he found himself in a tight corner.’
‘A joke? I was a joke, then?’
‘No! Not you. The wager. The wager was the joke. I declared that the stake should be what it always had been between us. It was an attempt to remind...all of us that we shared...well...’ He floundered to a halt.
‘Tell her what the stake was,’ Lord Rawcliffe, insisted.
‘It was a cream bun,’ said Lord Becconsall in a voice barely above a whisper. ‘That was what we always used to stake, at school.’
‘You...made my reputation the topic of a wager? The winner to be bought a cream bun?’
‘Yes.’ Lord Becconsall hung his head.
For a moment Harriet stared at the four of them. Lord Rawcliffe somewhat defiant, his hands clasped tightly over the silver handle of his cane. Atlas slumped on one chair, looking too fragile to get up. Archie looking at her like a spaniel who’d been threatened with a bath after rolling in the midden. And Lord Becconsall, flushed, and staring at her with a mixture of defiance and embarrassment.
‘Actually, if you want the whole truth,’ said Lord Rawcliffe, ‘by this stage we already had one wager behind us. Regarding Lucifer, my stallion, which he’d lost spectacularly.’
Lord Becconsall sighed. ‘Yes. So we raised the stakes to double or quits.’
She stared at the defiant way Lord Rawcliffe was standing, the silver-topped cane clutched in his elegant fingers. And imagined him sitting down and happily devouring not one, but two cream buns. Like a greedy little schoolboy. The image was so incongruous that she started to giggle.
‘C-cream b-buns. Oh, oh, lord!’
Well, she need no longer fear any of these four men would spill her family secrets. If it ever got out that Lord Rawcliffe, who, according to Aunt Susan, was just about the most elegant, hardened, philandering, sophisticated male of his generation, had taken part in a wager to win a cream bun, at the advanced age of thirty-five or whatever he was, he would never live it down.
And he knew it.
‘So, now you know my deepest, darkest shame, Lady Harriet,’ said Lord Rawcliffe, ‘you can have no fear of trusting us with whatever it is that Ulysses wishes us to help you with. Our lips are, perforce, sealed.’
It was as though he’d been reading her mind.
‘Yes. I qu-quite see th-that.’ She giggled.
‘Then you will let us help you?’ Lord Becconsall took a pace towards her. ‘You can see that they are men you can trust, can you not? After all, they never spoke a word about what you got up to in the park.’
‘How ungentlemanly of you to remind me of that,’ she said, pretending to be cross.
‘Lady Harriet,’ he said in a pleading tone.
‘Well,’ she said, pretending to think about it. ‘I suppose...if they can keep the scandalous affair of the cream buns a secret, then they might very well be the type of men to entrust with the solving of the mystery of the fake rubies.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Fake rubies?’ Archie sprang to his feet as though he’d been jerked by invisible strings. ‘Someone in your family has discovered they’ve g-got fake rubies, instead of the genuine article?’
‘Yes,’ said Harriet.
‘By G-G-G...’ He shook his head and swallowed. ‘S-Same thing happened to us. That is m-my mother. That is, when she inherited g-g...’ He swallowed again.
Lord Becconsall went to his side. ‘Take a deep breath, Archie,’ he said soothingly. ‘No need to get so agitated,’ he continued while Archie breathed in deeply a couple of times. ‘I recall you telling us that your grandmother died recently and that you then discovered something disturbing about her that none of you had ever dreamed. Is this connected to Lady Harriet’s case?’
‘M-might be coincidence. B-but, see, her j-jewels—at least the rubies—t-turned out to be p-paste. C-Couldn’t understand why she’d want to have them c-copied. No gaming habits. No d-debts my father c-could discover.’
‘Oh!’ Harriet sat down on a sofa that was still covered by a dusty dustsheet. ‘And now everyone in your family is trying to keep it a secret, to protect her reputation.’
‘That’s ab-bout the size of it.’
‘That is just what has happened to my aunt. At least...’ she rubbed her brow with one finger as she tried to assemble the facts in an intelligible order ‘...it was Lord Tarbrook who discovered the rubies had been copied. When he took them to the jewellers for cleaning and re-setting against the day when Kitty would wear them at her betrothal ball. It’s a sort of family tradition, apparently. And they were in such a horridly old-fashioned setting, Kitty said, that she wasn’t surprised nobody wore them except when tradition demanded it. Anyway, when the jeweller told my uncle that the rubies were paste, he immediately assumed that my aunt had got into debt and raised the money to pay it off by having the rubies secretly copied, rather than owning up. And he still believes it, even though she swears she did no such thing.’
‘And he didn’t try to find out the truth?’ Lord Becconsall came to sit beside her on the sofa. Lord Rawcliffe chose to remain standing.
‘No. He was determined to blame Aunt Susan,’ she said indignantly. ‘He was as mad as fire when I started to question the servants. Although, Aunt Susan said she could understand his attitude, because, you see, when he was a boy, his mother had accused a servant of stealing some of her jewellery, falsely, as it turned out, because the missing jewels turned up. But only after the servant had been condemned and hanged.’
Captain Bretherton and Archie both muttered imprecations. Lord Rawcliffe looked grim. Lord Becconsall shook his head.
‘I know, it must have been terrible for him. But—’ she turned to Lord Becconsall ‘—that would have given him the perfect reason for claiming he didn’t want any sort of investigation if he’d been the one to have them copied, wouldn’t it?’
‘What makes you think he might have done that?’
‘Well, he did cut up rough about some of the expenses Aunt Susan was running up this Season. And complained bitterly about bringing me out alongside her own daughter. So when he went all...medieval about the whole affair, I wondered if some of the bluster wasn’t a sort of smokescreen to cover up his own guilt.’
‘No, I don’t think that’s it,’ said Lord Becconsall at once. ‘For one thing, if he was the one who’d had the jewels copied, he wouldn’t have needed to say anything about it, would he?’
‘Oh,’ said Harriet, crestfallen. ‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Besides, now we know of a similar thing happening within Archie’s family, it sounds much more like the work of a very sophisticated, highly organised, criminal gang.’
‘Does it?’
‘Yes—it’s almost a perfect crime, isn’t it?’ His face took on a tinge of admiration. ‘If jewels are just stolen, someone will raise a hue and cry at once. But stealing them this way, replacing them with good copies so that the crime isn’t even noticed for some considerable time, makes tracing the people responsible almost impossible.’
‘Oh.’ Her spirits sank. ‘You mean we are not going to be able to find out who took
the rubies? And clear Aunt Susan’s name?’
‘I didn’t say it was impossible. I said almost impossible. But look about you, Lady Harriet. We have here in this room four of the most capable men in England, each in their own way. If anyone can unmask the criminals, we can.’
Lady Harriet looked at his three friends in turn, trying to see what he could see in them. He’d kept insisting that Captain Bretherton was strong, but his sallow complexion and slightly shaky hands told a different tale. Likewise, Mr Kellett was supposed to be the cleverest man in England, but when agitated he could scarcely utter one intelligible word. And then there was Lord Rawcliffe, who believed in himself to such a degree that his friends referred to him as Zeus.
‘Well, Ulysses, where do you suggest we start?’
To Harriet’s surprise, it was Lord Rawcliffe who had spoken. He’d actually asked Lord Becconsall’s opinion. She glanced from Lord Rawcliffe, to Lord Becconsall, who grinned at her expression of amazement. Lord Rawcliffe sniffed.
‘I didn’t give him the name of Ulysses for nothing. He has the kind of quick brain just suited to this kind of task. Even at school I could tell that most of his antics were designed to disguise his real nature. So that people would underestimate him.’
At her side, Lord Becconsall shifted in his seat, as though embarrassed.
‘More to the point,’ said Lord Becconsall, ‘I have learned a lot about the habits of criminals from the men under my command. Not all of them, but rather a lot of them had cheated the gallows by joining up. And hardly a one of them reformed. Instead, they recreated the kind of network they’d been involved with in whatever town they’d come from. And set about flouting every rule ever devised by their superiors. They would have one man doing the thieving, another one watching out, another passing the goods to a fence—that is a receiver and handler of stolen goods. There were forgers and coiners, and confidence tricksters...’
The Major Meets His Match Page 20