“We don’t know that it’s blood, you know. It might be any number of substances. Dirt, claret, even excrement,” she said, dipping her head to look at his face.
He turned to face her and Cecily was reminded of a painting she’d once seen of an avenging angel. His eyes were just as fierce and there was a beautiful darkness about him that seemed to elevate him from the realm of the everyday.
To her surprise, his gaze softened when he saw her. And he blinked as if waking from a nightmare.
“Don’t fret so,” he said with a rueful smile. “I don’t hold you responsible for anything your father might have done.”
His words sent a stab of panic through her. She’d assumed he’d taken Neddy’s details about her father’s behavior in Egypt in the same way Cecily had—as Neddy’s typical embellishment. But it belatedly occurred to her that Lucas had no idea what typical Neddy conversation was like.
She opened her mouth to tell him, but he raised a hand to stop her from speaking.
“Let’s not talk about it right now,” he said, his eyes still troubled, but no longer so bleak. She hoped he was not hiding his fears for her benefit. But men were often foolish about such things, so she did not press him.
“Thank you for driving with me,” Lucas continued, bowing over her hand. “I hope that I will see you tonight at the Cranston rout?”
“Yes,” Cecily said, her chest constricting at the look of genuine pleasure in his eyes.
“Then until tonight, Miss Hurston,” he said, stepping back to watch her ascend the steps.
She would have looked back once she reached the door, but the butler informed her that her cousins were waiting for her in the sitting room and, bursting to tell them everything about their visit to Neddy’s, she hurried to find them.
“Well?” Juliet demanded, having led the other two to a delicate inlaid table surrounded by three overstuffed chairs. “What did you learn?”
“Give her a moment to catch her breath, Jules,” Maddie admonished, pouring Cecily a cup of tea. “But really, dearest, we have been dying for you to return so you could tell us everything.”
Uncomfortable discussing what she and Winterson had learned from Lady Entwhistle in a room full of visitors, Cecily waved away the cup of tea and asked Juliet, “Is your carriage still here?”
At her cousin’s nod, Cecily rose. “Let’s go for a drive and I’ll tell you everything.”
All three ladies donned their hats and gloves and headed back outside to climb into the Essex carriage, where Cecily related what Neddy had said about her father and Will Dalton’s altercations.
“There you have it, I’m afraid,” she told her cousins, her fears beginning to wear on her. “It does sound, from Neddy’s story, as if Papa had something to do with Mr. Dalton’s disappearance. He was seen threatening Mr. Dalton in front of any number of people. And I, of all people, know how intense Papa can be about his work.”
Juliet’s eyes narrowed. “The blood is definitely suspicious. But who’s to say it was William’s blood at all? Perhaps someone planted the bag there to make your father look guilty.”
“But why?” Cecily demanded. “I realize he is not the most agreeable man, but surely he is not so hated that someone would wish him hanged for murder?”
“You’ve complained about his drive for success often enough, Cecily,” Madeline said kindly. “Perhaps he simply crossed the wrong person this time?” Staring out the carriage window, Cecily tried to imagine someone killing William Dalton and then framing her father for it. The very idea was enough to make her ill. As she spoke, she’d begun to understand just how damning her father’s threats against Mr. Dalton were. She would have sworn that her father’s passion for his work wasn’t so powerful that he’d be prepared to perpetrate violence on another man over it. The matter of the missing pistols did muddy the waters a bit. Her first thought when listening to Neddy’s tale was that Mr. Dalton had taken them in order to kill himself and lay the blame on Lord Hurston. But there was nothing to indicate that Mr. Dalton was so desperate as to take that sort of action. An alternate theory could be that her father had used the pistols to kill Mr. Dalton, but she had difficulty believing he’d make such a foolish mistake as letting Neddy find him with the pistols.
Pinching the bridge of her nose, Cecily fought down panic as she realized their task had now increased tenfold. She’d begun this journey wishing to obtain her father’s journals simply to ensure that they were preserved for posterity. Now, with Neddy’s revelations of this afternoon, the journals had become a sort of Pandora’s box that held the key to proving her father’s guilt or innocence. And to her horror, she was no longer so sure which she expected to find. She even wondered if she ought to be looking for the journals at all.
Then the vision of Lucas’s worried expression when he left her earlier reminded her that she wasn’t the only one in this situation with a family member’s life at stake. What a coil.
* * *
When they’d climbed into the carriage, Juliet had instructed the coachman to drive them to the British Museum. It was one of the few places their mamas would allow them to go with only a footman for an escort. As the carriage slowed on the narrowing street, Cecily became aware of her surroundings and realized that they were already in Bloomsbury, on Lady Entwhistle’s street, in fact. Determined to speak to her godmother again, she rapped on the roof of the carriage to request the coachman to stop.
“What is it?” Madeline’s blond brows arched over the top of her spectacles.
“I need to see Neddy again,” Cecily said, her mouth set in determination. “I need to know more about Papa’s argument with Will Dalton.”
When the carriage came to a stop she waited impatiently for the footman to hand her down. When Madeline and Juliet started to follow her, she made a noise of impatience.
“There is no need for you to come with me. I will have Neddy send me home in her carriage.”
Juliet shook her auburn curls as she stepped down to the street. “If you think for one minute that we are staying behind, then you know nothing of us at all.”
“Besides,” Madeline added, “I need to ask Lady Entwhistle’s cook just what she uses to flavor her macaroons. There is a spice in them that I can’t quite place.”
Since Madeline had been known to go into the kitchens of some of England’s finest homes to confer with their chefs, it was quite possible that she was telling the truth. With Juliet, it was likely mere curiosity that motivated her. Either way, Cecily knew she had their company whether she wished it or not.
If he thought it odd to find Miss Cecily Hurston in his mistress’s entrance hall twice in one afternoon, Lady Entwhistle’s butler did not betray himself with so much as a twitching eyelid. Instead he asked the three young ladies to wait while he conveyed their cards to her.
Cecily felt a pang of guilt at having kept her relationship with Lady Entwhistle from Winterson. But she had been so nervous on the ride to her godmother’s home, she had found it difficult to speak of anything at all, much less divulge that yet another person she’d known from infancy had been present on the expedition from which his brother had disappeared. And on the ride back to Hurston House they had both been so lost in thought over Neddy’s revelations that Cecily had found herself being handed down before her father’s town house before she had a chance to say anything at all.
If she learned anything new from Neddy this afternoon, she would most certainly inform Winterson of it. And if he should learn from someone other than herself of her relationship with Lady Entwhistle, then so be it. She was under no obligation to divulge her every connection to the fellow, after all. Besides, she was quite certain that her godmother had nothing whatsoever to do with William Dalton’s disappearance.
Lady Entwhistle had been her mother’s dearest friend, and it was she who saw to it that in addition to the genteel upbringing Lord Hurston intended for his daughter, Cecily received instruction in everything her mother had studied, and more.
A notorious bluestocking, Lady Entwhistle was reputed to be as dedicated a scholar as the most educated dons at Oxford or Cambridge. When no London publisher would print her translations of the various writings she had obtained during her travels to the land of the pharaohs, Lady Entwhistle, whose late husband had left her a tidy fortune, had simply bought a small publisher and had them published herself.
It was at the behest of Lady Entwhistle that Cecily explored her affinity for cryptography, and under that lady’s tutelage, Cecily had become a scholar in her own right. She had always been good at working through puzzles. And when she’d begun to study Greek and stumbled onto the writings of Polybius, with his substitution cipher that used numbers in the place of letters, she’d found to her delight that she was quite good at working through the translations from numbers to letters. When she’d been inspired to create her own code systems, Cecily had soon found herself corresponding with some of the most brilliant minds in Europe. And from time to time, her colleagues had even asked for her help with their own puzzles.
Though her father had forbidden her to see Lady Entwhistle anymore when he learned of her role in introducing Cecily to the other scholars, Lady Entwhistle had always managed to convince him otherwise. What hold that lady had over her father Cecily could not say, but whatever it might be, she was grateful for it. Without Lady Entwhistle, Cecily very much suspected that her childhood would have been as empty as a plundered tomb.
Thoughts of Egypt brought her mind back to the topic of Mr. Dalton’s disappearance. What could possibly have happened to him? And what role had her father played in it? Though she had always had a troubled relationship with her remaining parent, it was difficult for Cecily to imagine him doing violence to anyone. True, he had a temper. She herself had borne the brunt of it on more than one occasion. But at heart Lord Hurston was a peaceable man, a scholar who had acted out of love for his family—even when he had been at his most adamant in his insistence that his daughter not be allowed to follow in her mother’s, and indeed his own, footsteps.
There must be some other explanation for the blood on Mr. Dalton’s pack. A shaving accident, perhaps? Or a flesh wound from handling a piece of broken pottery? Perhaps Juliet was right in her suggestion that the bloody bag had been placed in Lord Hurston’s tent to throw suspicion on him. But even to Cecily these sounded like what they were—thin excuses for what might very well have been violence perpetrated upon a man who had served at her father’s side for years. She felt a pang of alarm at the thought of what Winterson might believe now. The notion that he might blame her for her father’s actions affected her more than she cared to admit.
Her mood must have shown on her face, for as she and her cousins were shown into Lady Entwhistle’s drawing room, her godmother gasped upon seeing her and hurried forward to take Cecily in a firm hug.
“My dear, you look as if someone has been walking on your grave! Whatever is the matter?” Lady Entwhistle leaned back to look more closely at her goddaughter’s expression. “You father has not … the worst has not happened, surely?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” Cecily hastened to assure her, sinking gratefully into a plush settee—a scholar she might be, but Lady Entwhistle was also one who very much enjoyed material comforts, and every stick of furniture she owned was built for comfort as well as utility—a habit for which Cecily was grateful.
“My father’s condition has not changed,” she assured the older woman once her godmother had greeted Juliet and Madeline, who met the older woman with a mix of curiosity and fascination.
Lady Entwhistle had long been absent from respectable circles of the ton where the Featherstone sisters still held court. She had married the much older Lord Entwhistle the year before she was to make her debut, choosing to escape the restrictive confines of her father’s home instead of undergoing the rigors of a season. A star in the diplomatic corps, Lord Entwhistle had carried his young bride away first to India, then to Africa, where he succumbed to a lung fever. Rather than return to the country of her birth, the young widow had stayed in Cairo and dedicated herself to the thoroughly unladylike study of ancient languages.
Establishing herself as a hostess to the European community in Egypt, she befriended Lady Hurston, herself a young bride accompanying her husband on his first expedition to the desert pyramids. The two had formed a fast friendship, and when Lady Entwhistle accompanied the Hurstons back to England, she had established herself as a leader of the intellectual set, who cared little for the rules and restrictions of society but instead dedicated themselves to academic debate. It was the sort of life Cecily would have enjoyed had her father not kept her on such a short leash.
“Then what is it, my dear?” she asked her goddaughter. “Why are you so pale? Has something else happened?”
“No, it is nothing like that,” Cecily assured her. “But I did want to ask you, away from Winterson, I mean, if you know anything about Will Dalton’s disappearance? Something you perhaps didn’t want to say in front of the duke?”
Lady Enwhistle started, then glanced briefly from Cecily to Juliet and Madeline.
“Anything you say to me, you may say to my cousins as well,” Cecily assured her. “They know what you told us this morning about the bloody satchel in Papa’s tent.”
Still frowning, their hostess took a seat in a wing chair opposite the divan upon which the three younger ladies perched. “I do wish you would not involve yourself in this business, Cecily. Already one man is missing and another is bedridden.”
“I find it hard to believe that you, ma’am, would warn Cecily to let the gentlemen handle the matter,” Juliet said from her position at Cecily’s side. Though she often kept her own counsel, Juliet was loyal to a fault. And like Cecily, she did not take kindly to the notion that ladies should be seen and not heard.
Lady Entwhistle smiled. “You are right about that, Miss Shelby,” she said. “I have never been one to leave things to the men. More often than not they make a muddle of things.” Her expression sobered. “However, in this instance, when my goddaughter’s well-being is at stake, I have every reason to wish for her to stay far away from whoever has stirred up this trouble. And before you ask, no, I do not believe in that ridiculous curse that is being bandied about.”
“Godmama, I promise you,” Cecily said, “I will not do anything to put myself in jeopardy. But you must know that your story earlier today of what you found in Papa’s tent would have roused my curiosity. And my fear that Papa may have had something to do with Mr. Dalton’s disappearance.”
“I regret how my words must have seemed to you, Cecily,” Lady Entwhistle assured her. “Your father and Mr. Dalton were quarreling, as I told you and Winterson earlier. But you will remember that I did not make any claim that the presence of either William Dalton’s luggage, or his traveling bag, in your father’s tent meant that he must then be guilty of killing him.”
“But Winterson believed it,” Cecily told her. “How can you have expected otherwise?”
“My dear,” Lady Entwhistle said, with a shake of her head. “Your father is a great many things—a stubborn lout, for one—but I cannot imagine him killing a man, a friend, in cold blood and then refusing to allow the poor man’s family to know what happened to him. There must be some other explanation.”
“That is what I thought as well,” Cecily said, accepting a cup of green tea from Madeline, who had taken up a position at the tea tray. “But there is something amiss here. Perhaps Mr. Dalton asked Papa to look after his luggage. If thefts were occurring with such frequency, it would stand to reason that William would not wish to leave his bags unattended. But that doesn’t explain the blood. Or Papa’s illness.”
“I have heard it said that an apoplexy might be brought on by an emotional upset,” Juliet suggested. “Papa’s uncle Fenwick suffered an attack in the middle of a roaring argument with his … um … lady friend. One minute he was shouting at her about the modiste bills and the next he was in
comprehensible and paralyzed down his entire right side.”
Cecily stared at Juliet. “Why did you not tell us this before? What’s more, why didn’t your mama tell Violet?”
Juliet shrugged. “I didn’t think of it before. And you know very well that Mama would never speak of anything so tawdry. She likes to pretend that Papa’s side of the family is everything that the Featherstones are not.”
“But what if Juliet is right, Cecily?” Lady Entwhistle said. “What if your father argued with someone on the voyage home? I admit that I was the one to find him, but it was the morning before we reached France. He might well have had an altercation the evening before with no one the wiser until I came to see why he had not come up on deck as was his habit.”
“It need not have been an argument, though,” Cecily said. “What if the knowledge that he’d killed his assistant preyed so heavily upon his mind that it caused his brain to simply … shut down?”
Lady Entwhistle reached for Cecily’s hand. “My dear, you know as well as I do that your father has a temper. Recall for a moment the time he caught me sneaking you from Hurston House so that we might attend the exhibition of those naughty marbles at the British Museum? I thought he would evaporate in a flash of fire. But I cannot believe that he killed Mr. Dalton in cold blood.”
Cecily shook her head sadly. “When it comes to Papa’s work he has no patience for anyone who stands in his way. He cannot have taken kindly to William’s attack of conscience regarding the disposition of the artifacts. Papa put months of work into locating that particular tomb. For his own assistant to change his loyalties midway through the excavation must have been infuriating.”
Though Cecily herself was more inclined to think the artifacts should remain in the nation where they were discovered, she did understand her father’s reasons for removing them to England. If they weren’t taken to England for further study, the French, or worse, simple treasure hunters, would remove them sooner or later. And whatever educational or historical value might have been gleaned from them would be lost.
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