“Yes, of course it is.” His father turned to face him at last, his face pale with shock and barely restrained fury. “A symbol of this family. And as such, I would think you would handle it with more care. In 1601, when a young London merchant helped to finance the first voyage of the East India Company, he was rewarded with these gems and the rank of Baron Lyn.” St. John recognized the name as one of his father’s lesser titles. “These gems represent the daring, the determination it took to raise this family above its origins, to raise us above—”
“People like the Pevenseys?” St. John finished snidely. For whatever the first Baron Lyn had accomplished in lifting himself above the masses, his descendants had managed to cast them down once again, and now the only thing that would save them was an infusion of cold, hard cash. Cash from a Bristol merchant’s coffers. When his father had put those jewels around Sarah’s neck, the family journey had come full circle.
His stepmother gave a self-satisfied little snort, but his father looked abashed.
“You saddled me with the burden of cleaning up your messes. Well, now I’m returning the favor,” St. John said, jerking his chin disdainfully in the direction of the hearth. “Lynscombe is the bit of our history that matters to me, and Sarah can help me save it.”
“Her father’s money can help you, you mean.”
“No,” he insisted. “I mean my wife. And I won’t allow an old piece of jewelry to dictate my future with her.”
“Your mother hated it, too.”
His father’s voice had fallen to a mournful whisper—a sound so uncharacteristic St. John felt certain he must have misheard what the man had said. But the quiet words kept coming.
“I tried many times to persuade her to wear it. But she never would. She said it felt like death around her neck.” His father’s gaze had fallen back to the floor, but he was no longer looking at the broken necklace. Instead, his focus was somewhere much further in the past. “I thought perhaps if I—if I had the gems reset, something in a modern style, she would relent. She was otherwise always so eager to please.”
Out of the corner of his eye, St. John saw his stepmother rise unsteadily from her chair. He was not surprised. She had always detested any mention of his mother.
“So, one day,” his father continued, speaking mostly to himself, “I took it from the safe here and set out for London. I did not tell her where I was going. I was almost to the jeweler’s when the messenger found me, told me she had had—an accident . . .”
The silence that fell was broken only by the scuff of his stepmother’s slippers against the floor.
Your father’s grief must have been terrible.
St. John tried to shake off the memory of Sarah’s words. His father did not feel grief. Or guilt. His father was incapable of feeling. St. John had learned from the master.
Hadn’t he?
“Father,” he whispered, taking a step toward him, seeing for the first time a brokenhearted man who had loved his wife, the mother of his child.
Without Sarah, St. John might never have understood how much.
“If I had been closer,” his father murmured, still studying the floor. “Been here, as I should have been, then perhaps . . .”
“It was no one’s fault, Father,” St. John insisted, laying a hand on his shoulder. “And there was nothing anyone could have done to save her.”
When his words of consolation seemed to have no effect, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and crouched beside the fireplace, collecting the broken pieces of the necklace on the square of linen. “Forgive me, Father. I had no idea. I will, of course, see the necklace repaired.”
No sooner had the promise passed his lips when he saw a large chip in one of the stones. His stomach clenched. Then, as he examined the wreckage scattered on the floor around him, he spied another broken piece, and still another, and finally shards of gemstone that were little more than blue dust.
He studied the ruined stones on his palm, nudging one of the pieces with his fingertip. Priceless sapphires reduced to powder? Almost as if they were made of—
“What is it?” His father leaned forward to examine what St. John held in his hand. “Why, those aren’t the Sutliffe sapphires! That is nothing but a worthless bit of pinchbeck and paste.” He whirled about. “Do you hear that, Amelia?”
His stepmother froze just a few steps from the door. “Paste?” she echoed, turning back to face them, her eyes wide. “How can that be? Why, that sneaking little thief must have had a copy made. She’s probably been living well on the money from the sale of the original and now planned to worm her way into this family’s good graces by passing that off as real.”
“It looks that way,” agreed his father reluctantly as he stood.
It might have sounded like a reasonable explanation, but it did not sit well with St. John. For one thing, he had seen Haverhythe.
“No.”
His stepmother jumped when he spoke, jerking her hand from the doorknob as if the metal were hot.
“Where are you going, Amelia?” his father asked her.
“Why, I—I am really not needed here, and the air in this room is just stifling. I thought I would join Eliza.”
“Eliza is on the terrace.” St. John darted a glance toward the doors through which she had passed moments ago, but the curtains obscured his view.
She tittered. “Of course—how silly of me!” But she made no move in that direction.
He paused to consider. “When Father announced that Sarah would wear the Sutliffe sapphires at our nuptial ball, did you not have to fetch them for him?”
“I, er—I do not recall. So long ago . . .”
But his father’s memory suffered no such impairment. “She did. I had always stored them in my private safe in years past, but eventually I allowed Amelia to keep them with the rest of her jewels. She had such a fondness for wearing them.”
“I did,” his stepmother agreed, straightening her spine in a show of dignity. “Unlike some, I was proud to do so. I understood their true value, all that they represent.”
“Yes. I remember often seeing the gems around your neck,” St. John acknowledged. “Still, is it not possible that something might have happened to the necklace before that night? Was it never out of your possession? Taken for repair, perhaps? If so, the switch might have been made long ago. Did you notice anything unusual about the necklace when she brought it to you that night, Father?”
He shook his head. “I did not. But I confess I did not study it carefully.”
“You might not, even if you had,” St. John insisted, weighing the wreckage on his palm. “This appears to have been a quality copy. I think it would have been quite difficult to tell.” He paused to study his stepmother’s rather nervous expression. “Would it not, ma’am?”
His father looked from one to the other. “Would someone be so kind as to explain just what is going on here?”
“Ask your wife,” he said coldly, “if you trust her to be honest.”
“Fairfax,” gasped his stepmother, sounding hurt.
“Well, Amelia?” His father turned pale eyes toward his wife.
“I refuse to take all the blame for what happened,” piped his stepmother, leaving her post by the door and coming toward them.
“Amelia, what are you talking about?”
“Really, Marcus, it was mostly your fault.”
His father stiffened. “How so?”
“I understood the need for a quiet courtship, so I did not protest. You were still in mourning, after all, and with a young child to think of. How I longed for the whirl of parties and balls again, though. I imagined the figure I would cut as the Marchioness of Estley. The gowns, the gems.” She sighed. For the first time it struck St. John that the childish vacancy in her eyes was not entirely put on. “I never dreamed that even after your mourning ended you would refuse me those simple pleasures, even permission to decorate my own home in my own taste,” she continued with a shake of her head. �
�You were forever reminding me to be careful with money. And the parties to which we did go were so deadly dull. Until one night, someone—I don’t remember who—suggested I might amuse myself in the card room.”
“Did you—gamble?” his father rasped out.
She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “I had to do something to drive away the boredom. And to supplement that rather pitiful allowance you gave me. And, it turns out, I was quite good at it,” she explained with a nostalgic sort of sigh. “Too good for the sorts of games one comes across in the card room at a ball. Then one night, I was invited to a private party and the stakes were rather higher. I played deep, as the dandies say. Too deep, as it turned out. I did not think a gentleman would call in a lady’s vowels. But there it was.” She shrugged. “I needed money—and when I asked you, Marcus, you insisted there was no more to be had.”
“Let me understand,” his father said after a moment had passed. A dull, mottled flush had spread across his face. “You pawned the Sutliffe sapphires to pay a gaming debt?”
“But first I had that exquisite copy made,” she noted, as if that excused what she had done. “Worthless it may be, but it cost a pretty penny I do assure you. And you were none the wiser.”
“That explains why, when Sarah stole it, you were only too happy to help her disappear,” her husband said. “It covered up what you had done.”
“Sarah didn’t steal it,” St. John reminded him sharply. “So, what really happened that night?” he asked as he turned to his stepmother.
She rounded on him. “Between your wife and the officer? I’m sure I don’t know. Perhaps the clasp broke while they were . . . well, you know—and the thing got lost in the cushions of the chair.”
Her words roused an old specter: the image of Sarah in David Brice’s arms. But he found it was an image that no longer had the power to haunt him.
“Surely someone looked—”
“Oh yes.” She nodded, cutting across him. “Someone looked.”
“And someone found it, didn’t they? Who?”
“Miss Harrington.”
“Eliza?!”
“Yes, indeed. That very night. You had already gone after Brice,” she explained. “Your father had shut himself away. She came and showed it to me. But when I tried to take it from her hand, she said that perhaps she should give it to my husband instead. That’s when I realized she had discovered it was paste.”
The pieces of the past fell into place with startling rapidity: the crumpled memorandum he had dislodged from his stepmother’s desk; Sarah’s supposed demands for money; the discrepancy between the amount on that paper and the notes in Sarah’s trunk.
The fact that Eliza was never far from his stepmother’s side.
“Eliza has been blackmailing you—threatening to reveal the truth about the necklace if you did not pay for her silence.”
His stepmother nodded without meeting his eye.
The part of him that had clung with perhaps naïve desperation to the notion of Sarah’s innocence offered surprisingly little resistance to the suggestion of Eliza’s guilt.
The missing necklace had been in Eliza’s possession all along. And now his oldest friend—or so he had always imagined—had put it in Sarah’s trunk and then suggested someone fetch her shawl, intending it to be discovered.
He glanced toward the terrace, wondering why Eliza would have done such a terrible thing. He would find out. But first—
“You let me suffer—let Sarah suffer—all these years . . .”
“Suffer?” Shock propelled the word from his stepmother’s mouth. “You never wanted to marry the girl anyway. You were well out of it. It did not matter that the necklace wasn’t real,” she insisted. “Or even that she hadn’t stolen it. She was still a thief at heart, and I knew it. She wanted what ought never to have been hers. And if she had been truly innocent, she never would have been so willing to leave.”
“Amelia, what have you done?” His father’s voice was so soft that in another man, the tone might have been mistaken for gentleness.
“I am the one who suffered.” She pouted, sinking back into her chair. “Thanks to her, my home was ransacked by Bow Street Runners. Your darling Fairfax risked his life in a duel and then went into exile. I kept my silence through it all. But, like Sarah, I grow weary of keeping secrets. If you had not made me promise to begin to keep better track of my expenditures, Marcus,” she added with a bitter shake of her head, “your son would never have discovered where she went.”
“But I did,” St. John murmured. “I found her.”
He folded the handkerchief around the broken bits of glass and passed the bundle to his father. “You will excuse me. I must go to her,” he said as he strode across the room.
“St. John.”
He paused, almost to the door.
He did not think he had ever heard his given name pass his father’s lips—he had, after all, been “Fairfax” from the moment of his birth. No, that had been an intimacy reserved for his mother. Lately, oddly, for his daughter. And perhaps someday, if he were lucky, for his wife.
“I have made mistakes where you were concerned,” his father acknowledged with a downward glance at St. John’s stepmother. “But Sarah, I think, was never one of them.”
St. John nodded. He understood, at last. He looked forward to the opportunity to build a different relationship with his father.
But first he had to stop his bride before she ran out of his life forever. He made it only a few steps beyond the threshold before he broke into a run himself.
* * *
When he did not find her at the pianoforte, as he had hoped, he knew where she must have gone. Pushing aside his trepidation, he followed her. As he had feared, ascending the steep steps to the nursery was like climbing into his past. Every step, every shadow was familiar to him. But this time he did not try to cast off those memories. He let them pour over him, their healing power blending with the hurt. When he burst through the door moments later, his eyes fell first on Clarissa sitting on the floor with her doll, and his heart lurched. In his fear, he had never stopped to consider how wonderful it would feel to see a child—his child—playing in the place where he himself had played, long years ago.
But there was no sign of his wife.
“She’s gone, then.” He had wasted precious moments—years—because he had been afraid to face his feelings, afraid to face the truth.
Emily started and jerked to her feet, her needlework spilling from her lap and onto the floor. “Lawks, sir. What a fright you gave us. I thought you were Mrs. F.”
Clarissa toddled over and tugged at his hand. “Play wi’ me, Papa.”
He ran a hand over her curls. “I can’t now, little one. But I will. Did she say where she was going, Miss Dawlish? Did she say anything at all before she left?”
“I could see somethin’ had happened to upset her. But she wouldn’t say what. I asked if she was going to leave, and she swore she meant to stay.” Emily shook her head. “Said runnin’ was for guilty folk.”
Deflated, he asked, “What happened to change her mind?”
“I dunno,” Emily replied with a shrug. “She was pacing about and stopped at that window.”
Lifting his daughter into his arms, he walked to the place Emily had indicated, and looked out, though he knew what he would see. The back garden, the cliffs, the Channel. The surest route of escape from Lynscombe—of whatever kind Sarah meant to effect.
“Did she take anything with her?”
“Why, no. She just—Mercy me, Lieutenant!” Emily shrieked, patting her breast and withdrawing a folded sheet of paper. “I forgot. She wrote this.”
With a gentle hug, he put Clarissa back on the floor with her doll before snatching the note from Emily’s grasp. She brought her candle closer, and his thumb smudged a childish sketch of a cat as he unfolded the paper and read:
Papa—
Whatever happens, I ask you to grant my husband the entirety o
f my dowry at once, for the sake of our daughter and the village of Lynscombe.
Her dowry. Of course. She believed that was the only part of her he needed.
His gaze returned to the note and he repeated the phrase, “Whatever happens.” He could not like the implication of those words. And then he saw that at the bottom of the page, in a shakier hand, she had added:
I believe Miss Harrington had a hand in the theft of that necklace, and I intend to prove it.
Jerking his gaze back to the window, he scanned the terrace for any sign of Eliza. But she was nowhere to be seen. Then his eyes traveled the unkempt path that wound down to the sea.
“Thank you, Miss Dawlish,” he said, folding the note and tucking it into his coat pocket. “I believe I know where to look.”
He only hoped he was not too late.
Chapter 24
A way from the shelter of the house, the breeze grew stronger, its summer warmth replaced by autumn’s chill. It whipped Sarah’s hair free of its pins and sent it twisting and tangling about her face. She clutched her silk shawl tightly around her shoulders; every moment the wind threatened to snatch it free of her grasp and whirl it away.
Eliza did not glance behind her, but Sarah maintained a careful distance between them nonetheless. When Eliza paused to clutch a stitch in her side, Sarah stopped. When Eliza slipped out of sight on a turn of the path, Sarah sped up.
Soon the sea stretched before them, the Channel’s gray water whipped into snowy froth by the wind. Scrubby sea grass snagged Sarah’s stockings; even her sturdy shoes—for she owned no dancing slippers—were no match for the rough ground. But she pressed on, to the spot where St. John had revealed why he had left Lynscombe, and perhaps had first begun to realize why he needed at last to come home.
Eliza paused at the cliff’s edge to scan the horizon, her red hair streaming behind her.
And then she jumped.
The wind ripped a scream from Sarah’s throat before she realized that Eliza had merely dropped onto a ledge that formed part of the trail down to the strand. As she peered cautiously over the cliff, expecting to see Eliza’s body on the rocks below, the other woman looked up at her from just a few feet away and laughed.
To Kiss a Thief Page 24