by KJ Charles
That was a gross understatement. Alec followed him, floating on a cloud of champagne and conversation, through to the restaurant. There Crozier recommended the rognons de veau and the sole, which was a relief since, between the small type, lack of spectacles, and the alcohol, Alec found the menu somewhat challenging to interpret. He gulped about half a bottle of Vichy water, and found himself more able to keep up his end of the rambling conversation. This soon veered into theatrical tastes.
“Are you a great lover of the music hall?” Alec asked.
“Not much.” Crozier caught his blink, and shrugged. “My interest in Miss Christiana lies entirely in the fact that she’s a friend’s sweetheart so I was required to tell him she was wonderful in convincing detail. As an artist, you’re doubtless familiar with the obligation.”
“Oh.” Alec assimilated a friend’s sweetheart and him. “Yes, indeed, with exhibitions and so on.”
“What I do enjoy, and I dare say I should be ashamed of this, is the melodrama,” Crozier said, eyebrows sliding up to indicate his own absurdity. “I like nothing more than a thoroughly idiotic hero, a vapid heroine, a lost will, a stalwart comic man to find it, and a villain with a proper blood-chilling laugh. All of that accompanied by a suitably dramatic scene in which someone leaps off a cliff or a train is trundled across the stage to the heroine’s peril.”
Alec clapped his hands. “Yes! So long as the villain expires with suitable drama. Staggering, with a hand pressed to his brow, and a speech of repentance that explains all his machinations and tells the hero where the treasure is hidden.”
“Oh, no, not repentance. I like the villain to be villainous to the end. He should curse the hero’s goodness with his last breath and die seething in his own frustrated criminality. It’s only fair.”
“You wouldn’t consider a change of heart on your deathbed?”
“No decent villain dies in bed,” Crozier pointed out. “He expires in the toils of his own plot, on the steps of his grand house or run through by the hero’s blade. And no, certainly not. If I were inclined to repentance, and I’m not, I’d want to start now. To do it on one’s deathbed is to be sorry because one has been caught, and that surely doesn’t count.”
“You’re not inclined to repentance?” Alec repeated. “What, ever?”
“Never.” Crozier’s eyes glimmered dark in the electric light and the glitter of glass and silverware and mirrors. “I’m not sorry.”
“For what?”
“Anything.” Crozier tilted his head, eyes hooding slightly, gaze roaming over Alec’s face. “Except missed opportunities. I regret those, but that’s a different matter, isn’t it?”
“Mmm.” Alec didn’t want to think about his own missed opportunities now, the what-ifs and if-onlies. “I don’t suppose you have many of those, do you?”
Crozier’s smile widened a fraction. It looked a little bit dangerous, and it made Alec’s toes curl delightfully. “Not many. They’re such a waste. And so often what one wants is there for the taking, if one only makes the effort to reach for it.”
Alec swallowed. He wondered, very much wondered, if he dared inch his foot forward and nudge Crozier’s shoe with his own, to see how he reacted. He had an idea that he oughtn’t, and for a moment couldn’t quite remember why.
Oh, yes. It was because Crozier was a thief, and this—this dinner, this companionship, the smile in his eyes—was all a lie.
The thought struck harder than it should have. He didn’t say anything, but something changed in Crozier’s expression, his eyes losing their laughter, as if he’d read something on Alec’s face that he didn’t like. It occurred to Alec that his companion might in fact look rather ugly in some lights, or in some moods.
“In any case,” Crozier said. “We’ve gone on rather late, haven’t we?” He summoned the bill, again with that magical flick of his fingers, and they sat in a silence that was all the more notable because conversation had been so easy. Alec had a heavy feeling in his stomach that wasn't only the drink. He was unpleasantly aware that he’d be in a serious hole if he’d somehow failed a test and was asked to pay his share.
He wasn’t. Crozier pulled out a well-stuffed wallet as the bill was produced, left what must have been a generous pourboire given the waiter’s bow, and nodded to Alec. “Come on, old chap, let’s see you home. I think you’re ready to call it a night, aren’t you?”
Alec very much was. The drink caught up with him as he stood, and he felt Crozier’s steadying hand under his elbow, firm and warm. “Let’s get you in a cab. I shall pop in and see how you’re getting on tomorrow.”
He steered Alec outside as he spoke, past the doorman. The cool night air felt like a bucket of water to the face, clearing his head as Crozier summoned a hansom cab and gave the man the address, then held the door open for Alec. “An absolute pleasure making your acquaintance. I’ll see you later.”
“Yes, see you tomorrow, old man,” Alec managed, and clambered in. The door slammed, the cab lurched off, and he shut his eyes and concentrated on his breathing.
Dammit, dammit, dammit. How had he managed to forget what he was there for? What sort of bloody fool was he? Suppose he’d actually nudged Crozier’s foot or made his interest clear? Christ, suppose Crozier had detected it anyway, and had been tempting him to reveal himself? The jewel thief, the unrepentant criminal would have had Alec in the palm of his hand from then on.
Or suppose Crozier had actually been flirting with him. Suppose he’d decided Alec was there for the taking, and he’d been the one to nudge Alec’s foot, and they’d finished the night in one of Piccadilly’s dark alleys, as could so very nearly have happened. Alec put his hands over his face and groaned aloud.
When he arrived home, the cabbie told him the fare had been paid already, at which point Alec realised that he’d never told Crozier his address, but the man had known it anyway.
He did not sleep well that night.
CHAPTER TWO
The next day, Alec went to the Turkish bath. It seemed like the only possible solution to a rotten bad head and a stomach filled with a sour stew of fear. He soaked and steamed and was impersonally pummelled by powerful hands, until both the worries and the alcohol had been temporarily driven away. He dozed afterwards for an hour, and woke feeling hungry, human, and newly determined.
He’d made his deal with the devil and there was no point fretting now. Last night had been about striking up a friendship with a charming and plausible man in public. Crozier was, it transpired, very good at being charming and plausible; Alec had been charmed. He surely didn’t need to worry about that hint of possible flirtation: the way Crozier had spoken of the music-hall travesty singer didn’t suggest a man who feared or hated effeminacy. He’d probably ended the night simply because he’d seen Alec was drunk enough to forget his role. There was no need to worry.
He told himself all that until he nearly believed it, then went back home to try to get some work done. He had the top floor room, with a skylight; it was a very decent space that allowed for a good-sized table and a folding screen to hide his bed. It wasn’t a grand house or a fashionable location—Mincing Lane, on the wrong side of Eastcheap—but it was clean, and he could afford it on his earnings with no help from his brother, let alone his father. Sometimes he felt proud of that achievement and his independence; sometimes he remembered that he was Lord Alexander Pyne-ffoulkes, slaving with inky fingers to keep the rent paid and his editors happy, and he felt like overturning the table and sending his pens and pots flying to the floor.
Not today. He had plenty of work to do, including providing a sample for a collection of fairy-tales. The publisher had given him a list of the stories to be included; when he saw “The Town Musicians of Bremen”, with its dastardly gang of thieves, he laughed out loud. He sketched out a very nice composition—a dark rustic hovel with a low fire; a sinister robber recoiling in terror from the snapping dog and hissing cat as a cock crowed on the rafters—and was fiddling with the robb
er’s eyebrows to achieve an impression of movement when there was a knock on the door.
“Mr Pyne, sir?” It was his landlady. “Visitor for you. A Mr. Jerry, he says.”
“Oh. Please send him up. Thank you, Mrs. Barzowski, you’re very kind.”
Mrs. Barzowski knew he was a lord in disguise, and it had taken all the charm of which he was capable, plus dire warnings about speculative burglary, to persuade her not to spread the news throughout the house and to all her neighbours. She insisted on the sir and on bringing messages in person, and called him “Lord Alexander” in private as though to do so was a great privilege. She believed him to have been wrongly done out of an inheritance, which was true in its way, and that he would one day come into a title of his own, which wasn’t. Alec had tried to disabuse her of that conviction, but it hadn’t taken, so he accepted the advantages it brought and made sure his rent was always paid on time.
Crozier made it up the stairs a few minutes later. Alec heard him speaking to Mrs. Barzowski on the landing, smooth tone clear though the words were indistinguishable, and could imagine her bobbing in response. She doubtless thought him a gentleman, or perhaps a lawyer arriving with news of Alec’s elevation to a non-existent coronet.
Crozier rapped on the door and entered, taking off his hat. He wore a light tan coat with a waistcoat in a darker brown, and a gold watch chain. He looked like a gentleman about town, significantly superior to Alec in his shirtsleeves.
“Spectacles?” Crozier asked.
Alec hastily removed them. “I use them for close work.”
“Very reasonable. How’s your head?”
“Better for a Turkish bath. I don’t often drink much.”
“So I gathered.” Crozier’s tone had his usual light hint of something between amusement and mockery. “Best to be careful in the near future, then. Still, we achieved what we intended. May I sit?”
Alec had one armchair, by the small grate. He indicated it and dragged over the chair he used for work. “Would you like tea?”
“Let’s not trouble your landlady. That’s a lot of stairs.”
“It is. I need the light up here.”
“It must be cold in winter.”
Alec felt vaguely criticised. “Yes, and hot in summer. Do take your coat off if you’re warm.”
“I shall,” Crozier said, suiting the action to the word. “Why does Lord Alexander Pyne-ffoulkes live in an attic?”
Alec opened his mouth. Nothing came out for a moment. He wanted to say “None of your business”, knew he couldn’t, but didn’t have anything else to offer.
“Let me rephrase that,” Crozier went on. “Do you understand what we did last night and what we’ll be doing now?”
“Probably not.”
“I shall pursue your acquaintance, so that you will have good reason to invite your new best friend to a family party. Hence, if I am caught or even suspected when your stepmother’s jewels go missing, you will be seen as a dupe rather than an accomplice.”
“Why does that matter to you?” Alec demanded.
“Because if you’re arrested I’m quite sure you’ll give me up to the police. Therefore I don’t want you arrested. My presence in your life has to be plausible, and so does your attendance at a celebration of the Duke and Duchess of Ilvar’s marriage. Understand? You can’t just walk into your estranged father’s house with a stranger and have the jewels go missing.”
“I understand that very well. I was going to talk to my siblings tomorrow.”
“You’re going to talk to me first.” Crozier spoke quite pleasantly but Alec felt a prickle on his skin. “I want to know all about the Pyne-ffoulkes family, all about your charming father and delightful stepmother, and very much all about why you live in an attic working for your bread while your sister Lady Caroline lies in something near a pauper’s grave.”
Alec couldn’t breathe. He sat, mouth open, staring at this damned intrusive impertinent bastard with pure hate boiling up inside him, and Crozier shook his head. “Can you illustrate a book, or a story, without a brief? I need the brief. I need to know what not to say; I need to know how to tell your story and who is going to raise questions and how we answer them before they’re asked. I can’t help you if I don’t know the situation.”
“Of course your main interest lies in helping me,” Alec said bitterly.
Crozier gave him a look. “My interest lies in helping myself to the Duchess’s diamond parure and getting away clean. Is that not what you asked for?”
“Yes, well, that’s very sensible.” Alec knew he was being absurd, but shame and resentment were overwhelming all common sense. “I’m sure you’d be quite ready to give over your family history for profit. Forgive me if I’m not.”
“As if you’ve anything to tell me that’s worse than my history,” Crozier said. “Do you imagine I’ll be shocked by anything you have to say? Do you think I care?”
Alec snorted. “At least you’re honest.”
“That’s precisely what I’m not. Consider me the antithesis of a Romish priest. I take confession, I keep your silence, but instead of absolution I give you vengeance. That’s what you’re after, isn’t it? Some way to get through the armoury of wealth and title, to hit the Duke where it hurts.”
That was savagely accurate. Alec rose, needing to move, needing not to see Crozier’s face or anyone’s. He went to the skylight, staring out over the rooftops, took a few deep breaths.
“My father met Mrs. Clayton when I was six. Clayton was my father’s estate manager at Castle Speight. He came from a good family that had had a crash. His wife had no birth, a little money, not much beauty, or so I’m told. Apparently she had something, though, because my father was obsessed with her from their first meeting and their affair became public extremely quickly. My mother was unwell. She had had a terrible time when Annabel, my younger sister, was born, and never really recovered. So my father—it wasn’t surprising for him to take a mistress, but he didn’t even try to be discreet. And then, you see, Mother died, and my father told Clayton to petition for divorce so he could marry Mrs. Clayton. Ordered him to. Mother hadn’t been dead six months. Father was still wearing mourning.”
Crozier didn’t say anything. The glass of the skylight was grimy. Alec rubbed at it with his thumb but the muck was on the outside; he couldn’t reach it to clean it off.
“Clayton wouldn’t do it,” he went on. “The local story is, he told my father in the street, ‘You’ve made her your whore but you’ll never make her your wife.’ Everyone knew he was being cuckolded by his employer, and I suppose preventing them from marrying was his revenge. He didn’t keep his grievances private, though: he spoke quite wildly about my father ruining his marriage and destroying his happiness. They say he was drinking too much. And then he was found dead, in the grounds, some little way from his cottage, with his gun by his side.”
“Considerate of him to do it outside.”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t suicide,” Alec said sardonically. “The coroner said so, because of the missing ring.”
“What’s that?” Crozier enquired, perking up.
“A very fine antique emerald ring he always wore. It was a family heirloom, to be passed to his son or returned to the next heir, his brother, if he died without issue. The ring was about all the Claytons had left from their crash, and it wasn’t on his body when it was discovered. That allowed the coroner to float a theory of a poacher shooting him, whether by accident or on purpose, and robbing the corpse. So the verdict was death by misadventure.”
“What a remarkable conclusion.”
Alec snorted. “My father is the richest, most powerful man in three counties. Of course the inquest wasn’t going to accuse him of driving his mistress’s husband to self-murder. They’d have found for divine intervention if they could.”
“The march of justice,” Crozier murmured. “Go on.”
“Well, my father married Mrs. Clayton five months later. They should both still have b
een in blacks, but they held a full wedding, not even privately, but with all possible pomp and ceremony.”
“Attended by the great and the good, I suppose?”
“Fewer than you’d think, actually,” Alec said. “It was less than a year after Mother’s death, and a lot of people wanted nothing to do with the business. The Duke of Ilvar, and nobody from the Royal Family attended his wedding. The Duchess was furious. I remember her shouting.”
“Mmm. And how was she as a mother, afterwards?”
Alec laughed. There was nothing to do but laugh. “Oh, she loathed us. There was George—Earl of Hartington, you know—Cara, me, and Annabel, and she didn’t want four children. She was twenty-five when she married Father, and George was fifteen. A stepson only ten years younger? No, she hated us, and she made sure we all knew it. George because he was outspoken about the insult to Mother’s memory; Cara because she was sickly. The Duchess can’t bear sickliness, you know, it revolts her. I’m not worth her notice, and Annabel—one might have thought she’d want Annabel. She was so young; she could easily have come to love a new mother who cared for her at all. But the Duchess wanted her own children.”
“I don’t recall they have any?”
“No. She was expecting a couple of times. I used to lie awake at night wondering what would happen if she had a son, with George and me ahead of him in the line of inheritance. Just childish fears, you know,” he added hastily. “In any case, it never came about.”
“I don’t suppose that made her fonder of her stepchildren,” Crozier said. “It all sounds very unpleasant. I understand the Ilvars are not popular outside the home either.”
“In Society? No, not at all. My father isn’t the sort of man who’s liked, if you know what I mean. He’s invited for his title, not himself. And of course he’s entitled to pride because of his position, but once he started demanding, not just courtesy but humble deference to the mistress he married—well, the sort of people who like dukes don’t much like that. And she’s every bit as proud of her place as he is. She ranks above everyone but the Royal Family now, so she never tried to win friends, or good opinion. I don’t know if she thought she’d gain them by right or if she just doesn’t care.”