by Joan Smith
She had not thought to meet Kenelm alone, but as a part of the family group, and felt foolish to be sitting in state, obviously awaiting his call, when he came, but he found no fault in the arrangement.
“Good girl,” he said when the butler showed him in. “Did you bring Charlie?”
“Yes, he is upstairs with Malone and Mimi. I ought to call Malone.”
“I have some Indian toys I want to give him—a carved set of animals in ivory. But if I do it now it will reveal clearly to Mama that I was here. I collect you don’t mean to bring him down to meet me?”
“I would rather not, if you don’t mind. But I ought to fetch Malone.”
“What for?” he asked.
She looked down primly. “We ought not to be alone,” she said.
“Oh lord, am I a menace to you, too? Is the fact of our being connections not sufficient chaperonage?”
That this irrelevancy added any propriety to the situation was news to Miss Falkner, but she had no real desire to have Malone on her hands and pretended to consider the matter settled.
“Did anything of interest occur this morning?” he asked her.
“No, Malone is disappointed in me. Thought I would have the receipt of the emeralds for her.”
“They weren’t sold. They probably are there, hidden somewhere around the house.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I didn’t steal them; poor old Horace is cold in his grave, or out of it at the moment, with no more than my two rings to his name. They must be there. I wonder where she hid them.”
“Have you any suggestions?” Rorie enquired. She was coming to think that she might do the unthinkable and have a look around in a surreptitious manner.
“Not the obvious places—the safe, under the mattress and so on. They might be hidden in any nook or cranny.”
“They wouldn’t be in any of the public rooms. They would probably be in Clare’s own chamber, don’t you think? I mean, the servants are more about the rest of the house than she is. And she wouldn’t have them in Charlie’s room. They must be in her own.”
“Yes, but that is not why I wanted to see you, to bludgeon you into helping me.”
She heard this with satisfaction, accompanied by an urge to render her services, as they were not being sought. Had he asked it of her, she might well have refused. “As Malone says, we might not get into the ‘liar’s den’ again. It is an excellent opportunity.”
Kenelm regarded her levelly. “Don’t put me in a corner like this,” he said, and changed the subject. “Sally McBain is twisting old Dougall’s arm to have a party. You will be coming, I trust? She tells me Hanley always insists on asking Miss Falkner.”
She was surprised at his not leaping at any chance to prove his case; not so surprised, however, that she failed to remark Alice’s trick in intimating she and Hanley were good friends. “Marnie and I are usually invited to Lord Dougall’s parties,” she said. “Kenelm, I was saying—do you have any idea where I might look for the emeralds?”
“Persistent creature. I am not uninterested enough to refuse your help if you are offering it freely, Aurora. Are you?”
“Yes, I’ll have a look around. I don’t suppose I’ll find anything.”
“Probably not. They might be anywhere from attics to cellars. Clare used to be a great one for the attics, now I come to think of it. It’s full of old lumber. She had a spree of dragging down broken chairs and whatnot and having them gilded.”
“I can’t say I relish going to the attics, especially as it will be dark before I have got Charlie home and fed. Nighttime would be the best for secret rummaging. The servants have a habit of sneaking up behind me. I suppose she told them to.”
“Your criminal bent is coming on rapidly. I wonder if it is her influence or my own. Yes, night would be best. And there is her studio—that might yield something. She had a room renovated and turned into a studio. She still paints, I know. There were several pictures of Charlie in the saloon. I wonder what she did with the good Canalettos that were there.”
“I don’t know, but I’ll try the studio and bedroom. Her woman went with her to London, so I should have easy access. If she didn’t lock them,” Rorie added with a wry smile.
“One of us is fast making you an expert. She will most certainly have locked them if there is anything worth seeing. Do you know how to pick a lock?”
“Good gracious no! How should I know that?” she asked.
“You are coming on so rapidly I thought you might have taken it up. Your education as a ken nabs wants bringing up to date, my dear. Pity I hadn’t brought my passé-partout.” She looked a question at him. “My master key. Regulation issue for us resident bigwigs in India. You never know when you might want to do a little discreet breaking and entering.”
“Do you have one?”
“Most assuredly. Not that I would need it to open Mama’s door. If it is like the other bedroom doors in the house, and it is, or was, it can be jimmied with a piece of wire. Bernie showed me the trick. Papa used to lock our birthday presents in the gold guest bedroom. We usually went in to see if we approved his choice before the great day. I never cared much for surprises,” he explained.
“How odd. I adore them.”
“So do I, really,” he admitted, with a smile not so different from little Charlie’s. “But I was always impatient, and broke down the doors.”
“Too bad you couldn’t come and give me a hand,” she said, but in a joking spirit.
“I would be happy to. It’s my house, after all. She is the intruder. Shall I join you, after the servants are in bed?”
This went a long way beyond what she had had in mind. It was no more than rifling a drawer or two she had thought to do, and felt extremely criminal to be doing even that much. She looked up to see Kenelm observing her with a lazy smile.
“Frightened?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“It was a poor idea,” he said at once, but she took the meaning that he was disappointed at her lack of daring. She was disappointed with herself. Lady Alice, Marnie—the others were doing their best for him, and this was her one chance to help. She knew he was Kenelm now, knew Clare was a sneak. Why should she not help him? Might it not even be a duty?—Marnie’s favourite word. What could Clare do, if she found out? To raise a fuss would be tantamount to admitting she had something to hide.
“We’ll do it,” Rorie said, summoning all her courage.
His smile turned warm, approving. “Only if you want to. I put all the onus on your shoulders. A trick I learned from my nawab.”
“I draw the line at luring you into it.”
“I’m lured already. I was always susceptible to blond ladies. You talked me into it,” he said, and laughed recklessly. “Tell me, guru, how will it be best for me to enter the door of bliss? That’s probably a profanity against the Upanishads. One ought to respect other people’s religious beliefs.”
“What has bliss to do with religion or with Raiker Hall for that matter?” she asked in total confusion.
“I never got on to the bliss of the Hindu faith, but I begin to foresee glimmerings of it at Raiker Hall. But about the door, I have a key and am strongly tempted to use it, to enter like a gentleman.”
“No, I think you had better enter like a thief. The door has a chain, and Wilkins will have it put on. I’ll let you in at the library French windows.”
“The servants sleep downstairs. It would be better for me to go in by the upstairs. Make less of a furor. Open my bedroom window. The beech tree will let me slip in, unless someone has lobbed off my favourite branch.”
“Which was your room?”
“The far end of the east wing. A paneled room, adorned with a garish display of female pulchritude, if Mama has not had the walls stripped.”
“The walls are now adorned with a very proper display of military heroes,” she informed him. “Nelson, Wellington, et al.”
“I wonder what she did
with my gallery of beauties. I had an excellent set of Emma Hamilton I cherished. Copies of Romney’s series depicting her as Venus, Circe, Mary Magdalene and herself, all the more interesting varieties of seductress. She was gorgeous, don’t you think?”
“Yes, if you favour brunettes. We seem to keep hearing of your penchant for blondes.”
“It was the unrelieved company of dusky ladies in India that made me hanker for a blonde. You know the room I mean?”
“There’s only the one paneled room upstairs.”
Kenelm’s face took on a figuring look. “I wonder if she would have hidden the emeralds in my room—a nice incriminating touch if they should happen to turn up there. I’ll have a look around. A strip of panel behind my bed used to lift up. Many is the mouse and frog secreted there in days gone by.”
She was no longer surprised at the wealth of information he had about Raiker Hall. She knew now he was Kenelm and assured herself there was nothing wrong in the owner entering his own home, even if he chose to do so by a window.
“I’ll be there around midnight. I’ll watch from the outside to see when the lights are extinguished in the servants’ quarters. We’d better give them an hour to settle into sleep. You’ll know when they retire. With her dresser gone, there will be only Charlie on that floor, and a child will sleep soundly, I trust. I am looking forward to our tryst. I always wanted to have a tryst with a lady at midnight.”
Aurora found that in spite of her lingering fears and doubts, she was looking forward to it too. He stayed an hour, discussing other things than the night’s activities. He was led to expand in more detail on his doings in India, of which she believed somewhat less than half, and if a quarter of them were true, the entire British population there ought to be behind bars. But still it sounded so very jolly that she could not think he had been entirely miserable. She thought he was the kind to find amusement wherever he went. She suspected he even enjoyed his little game with Clare.
“I’ve only been telling you the good parts,” he told her when she charged him with having liked it. “I have omitted the monsoons, the diseases, and much worse, the cures.” That a red-hot iron ring placed over the navel should cause the intestines to revolve and cure cholera she mistakenly assumed to be a joke, but believed that typhoid and malaria had no real cure and little treatment when she heard the number who had died of them.
“You were fortunate to leave there alive,” she congratulated him.
“Only the good die young. I’ll reach a hundred. Imagine, I survived all that, and Bernie died of an ear infection. I’ll take good care of my ears now I am home. So, we shall rendezvous at midnight or thereabouts in my bedroom. Sounds marvelous, doesn’t it? I trust you will be wearing your most dashing peignoir, Miss Falkner. And I shall be wearing my passe-partout and a piece of wire. And a shirt and cravat, of course. I mean to observe the formalities. I have suspected from time to time—just a certain way you have of looking at me askance—that you find me lacking in formality. You mustn’t feel because I masqueraded as a gypsy and attacked you and have embroiled you in this questionable spree that I am anything but a high stickler. I have already asked you to be my instructor in matters of form. Do let me know if you object to anything.”
He arose to take his leave, bowing formally, but uttering his usual offhand comments. “À bientôt. I can hardly wait. I haven’t had such fun since I caught my nawab’s favourite mistress, and mine too, with her hands in the diamond jar.” As her eyes widened in shock he rushed on with an explanation she doubted. “I mean, I favoured her for his mistress. She wasn’t nearly as bad as the others.”
“I see,” she said, still stunned.
“Yes, I’m afraid you do. Good day, Miss Falkner,” he took a hasty departure, muttering to himself some words that sounded like “damned fool.”
Rorie soon took Charles home, and while he had a bath—for he had managed to get well soiled crawling under the furniture with Mimi—she made a seemingly innocent trip to Clare’s studio, ostensibly to admire her paintings, but actually to go through cupboards, closet, boxes and paint chest for emeralds or clues. She found nothing of either, but did come across some sketchbooks that must have been over eleven years old, as they contained paintings of her husband, and one of Charles as an infant in his crib. In the same book, there were two sketches of young men, one she thought must be Kenelm. The man—boy, really—was fuller in the face, the nose less sculptured than now, but the eyes were similar, the shape of the head, and the mouth. She recognized the man in the picture of the boy, and wondered that Clare should deny it.
The other young man she did not recognize. He too was young, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a swarthy complexion denoted by shading. She wondered if it could be Horace Rutley. She thought not—there was a foreign look about him—but she would show it to Kenelm and ask him. She put the books back and went to dine with Charles, and wait for midnight.
* * *
Chapter 12
Aurora’s evening passed more quickly than her morning. She enjoyed dinner with Charles, a pleasant and conversable companion. A ceremonious round of the doors was made with the butler, who eyed her with scant approval; he had used to smile on her when he was only an upper footman and she a guest in the house. With the mistress away, the servants retired early.
Already at half past ten there was not a sound in the house but the ticking of the clock. Rorie tiptoed down the hall from her bedroom and surreptitiously tried Clare’s bedroom and sitting-room doors. Both were locked. This augured something worth hiding inside, but her hairpin proved an inadequate passe-partout, and she could not get in.
To pass the time till Kenelm came, she took her branch of candles into some unlocked guest rooms to rummage through drawers and under mattresses, but discovered nothing. She did some preparatory exploring in Kenelm’s room too, curious to see where he had passed his youth, but the chamber, stripped of personal effects, was uninteresting, gave no secret clue to his character. A paneled room with indifferent window hangings and rather nice campaign dressers, cornered in brass. Wellington and Nelson surveyed her with cold, haughty eyes from the walls. In a cupboard she found Kenelm’s cherished copies of the paintings of Emma Hamilton, the frames stripped away. Horace Rutley would not have known about these, she thought with satisfaction. How pretty the girl was. And how typical of Kenelm, that prodigious flirt, that his only belonging should relate to women. Marnie, Lady Alice, Ghizlaine, Millie and herself—he had made up to them all. Every female in the place except Clare.
As she looked at the pictures, she was startled to hear a tap at the window, and looking toward it she saw a form crouching in the branches beyond. In an instant she knew it must be Kenelm, come early, but for that fraction of a moment she was terrified. A frisson ran down her spine, but soon she was hurrying to the window, unlocking it and throwing it open. The branch was not so close to the window as she had thought it would be. In fact, it would take something of an acrobat to negotiate the leap, but Raiker proved up to it. He pounced unhesitatingly forward and landed on the windowsill with only a soft thump. She grabbed his arm lest he fall, but he was in no danger of it.
“Did I frighten you?” he asked in a low voice. “I have been there this half hour. The lights have been out since then, so we might as well get on with it. I have Mr. Passe-partout here, but I see you decided against your peignoir,” he said, with a glance at her gown.
“I have been looking around here,” she said, disregarding the mention of the peignoir.
“I’ve been watching you. You’ll make Emma Hamilton jealous, flirting with her Admiral Nelson.”
“Oh, yes, I found your pictures.” She handed them to him, but he barely glanced at them. “Where is the loose panel?” she asked.
“Right here,” he said, and climbed on the bed carefully, making a grimace as it let out a little squawk beneath his weight. “It always did that,” he said, laughing. He slid his hand down between the bed and wall to pry up
a loose board. He felt around with his fingers, but they came up empty and dusty. “No—not there,” he told her, and hopped off the bed. Though his movements were rapid, brisk, he made very little sound. He went to the clothespress, felt the jacket pockets, top shelf, in the toes of boots and other likely hiding places, but found only a couple of fish hooks and a bill for a pair of boots.
“Go through those drawers, will you?” he said over his shoulder while he searched the clothespress. The drawers were empty. Clare had done away with his shirts and linens. The room searched, they looked into the hallway and walked stealthily to Clare’s room, down the shadowed way with only a brace of candles. The master key did the trick, and they were soon in a lavish room, done up in white gilded furniture, with opulent appointings.
“This has been redone since Marnie lived here,” Rorie mentioned, looking with distaste on yards of swathed satin on the canopied bed.
“Bordello,” Kenelm muttered in disgust, then became more businesslike. “Start on the dresser; I’ll take the desk.” They both whisked quickly through the drawers, taking care to disturb nothing. There were so many possible hiding places—any jacket or hat or shoe might hold the gems—that it was really a hopeless task, and there was still the sitting room to go. After half an hour they had done what could be done without ripping open the mattress and pulling up the floorboards, which Ken considered more likely places, and stopped to discuss the next move. Other than the natural curiosity of examining another’s personal effects, Rorie found the evening actually close to boring. She had expected more of it.
“I’ve been through the studio,” she told him. “There is nothing much, but one picture I would like you to look at. I think it might be Rutley. I never saw him, but it is a young dark-haired man. If she knew him well enough to sketch him—well, then they were sort of friends, I assume. There is one of you too.”