An Agent for Clara

by Nerys Leigh

Her lips twitched. “Well what?” He fixed her with a look and she laughed. “I knew you wanted to know really. You are six feet and two inches tall.”

  He nodded. “So now we know.”

  Strangely, the knowledge did bring him a certain satisfaction. Perhaps she was right that every man needed to know how tall he was.

  Not that it pleased him to find out he was taller than most men. He already knew that.

  The ability to quantify just how much taller didn’t satisfy him in the slightest. That would be silly.

  “Admit it,” she said, “you’re glad you know.”

  He turned away from her so she couldn’t read his face. “I’m admitting nothing.”

  ~ ~ ~

  With the restaurant where they were to meet their client only a few blocks from the hotel, they decided to walk.

  Tobias’ carefully crafted regimen of physical training had been disrupted far too much in the past few days, so he felt as if he needed to do something, even if it was just a short stroll. He’d tried walking up and down the length of the train several times every day, but it wasn’t the same as getting out. Maybe he’d head over to the park later and go for a run.

  Ten feet or so from the hotel door, Clara’s arm wrapped around his. It startled him so much he almost walked into a lamppost.

  Dodging around the post, he looked down at her. Her attention was on the other side of the street where a woman was walking five tiny dogs on leads. He moved his eyes to her hand where it held his arm just above his elbow.

  It wasn’t as if he’d never had a woman on his arm before, but it was a sufficiently rare occurrence that it felt strange. Although not unpleasant, he found as he analyzed the sensation.

  He bent his elbow so her hand could settle into the crook of his arm and she looked up at him and smiled.

  Yes, not at all unpleasant.

  They reached the restaurant in good time, even though Tobias hadn’t been in any hurry to end the walk. The host approached as they entered.

  “We’re here to meet Mr. Aaron Wetherington.” Tobias told him.

  “Certainly, sir. Right this way.”

  He escorted them to a table in a corner away from the windows where a man rose to greet them.

  “Mr. Campbell?”

  Tobias held out his hand and they shook. “Mr. Wetherington.”

  “Please, just call me Aaron.” He glanced around as if afraid someone would overhear. “Then everyone will think we’re simply friends meeting for dinner.”

  Clara extended her hand, accompanying it with her usual smile. “Mrs. Clara Campbell, but you can call me Clara, since we’re friends already.”

  Chuckling, Wetherington took her hand. “Thank you, Clara.”

  An odd, thick feeling bloomed at the top of Tobias’ chest. Probably indigestion, although he hadn’t eaten anything since lunch on the train.

  A waiter brought them menus as they took their seats.

  Tobias surreptitiously studied their client as they surveyed their culinary options. Details about Aaron Wetherington had been sparse in the case file. From his accent, he was obviously English, and Tobias would have guessed the blond-haired, blue-eyed man at in his mid-twenties, with the kind of regular, open features that women seemed to favor.

  He wondered if the woman they’d been hired to find was a romantic interest. If that was the case, he wasn’t sure why Archie had even taken the case. They didn’t usually get mixed up in affairs of the heart.

  “Do Pinkerton agents usually bring their wives along with them while working?” Wetherington asked, after they’d ordered their meals.

  “Clara is in training to become an agent herself,” Tobias replied. “We’re only married for propriety’s sake. Temporarily.”

  “That’s an interesting arrangement.”

  “Only if you’re not sleeping on the settee,” he mumbled.

  Clara stared at him for a moment and then smiled. He’d meant it as a joke, so he was relieved she’d recognized it as such. People didn’t always understand his humor, which tended to be extremely dry and somewhat rare.

  “I imagine so,” Wetherington said, grinning.

  “We’ve read the details you provided, but I’d like to hear it from you,” Tobias said, withdrawing a pencil and paper from his pocket ready to take notes. “Sometimes people remember things when they speak about something that they don’t when they’re writing it down.”

  Wetherington nodded. “That makes sense. I suppose I should start at the beginning. Last year, in January, I met a woman.” He glanced at Clara. “Let’s just say my life was a lot wilder back then. Most of my time was spent either carousing or suffering the morning aftereffects. I don’t even remember where I met her, at some party somewhere, no doubt, but I do remember how beautiful I thought she was. The most incredible amber colored eyes I’d ever seen. Josephine Chamberlain, her name was. She was intelligent and witty and I was foolish and, as I said, mostly pickled.

  “Anyway, we spent quite a bit of time together and one thing led to another and… I don’t need to spell it out for you.” He snorted a humorless laugh. “The irony is, I don’t even remember the actual deed, I was so drunk. Neither time. Just woke up the next morning and she was there in my bed. Not the first time that happened, I’m ashamed to say.

  “But one day late last March she just disappeared. After a while I began to get worried, so I spoke to my father about her. I hoped he’d know someone who could find her for me. He has a lot of contacts. Being a member of British nobility attracts a lot of hangers on. It was then that he told me what he’d done.” His face darkened. “Josephine had gone to him telling him she was with child and I was the father, and he gave her money to keep quiet about it and get rid of the baby.”

  He swallowed, his eyes lowering to the table in front of him. “I don’t know why she went to him instead of me. Maybe she didn’t trust me. I couldn’t blame her for that. I was the last person who should have been a father back then. But if she had, I would have…” He shook his head, raising his gaze again. “I tried to find her, but she’d disappeared. I searched for months, but there was no trace of her.

  “Please understand, I don’t want anything from Josephine. All I want to know is if she’s all right and what happened to the baby. I know there’s a good chance she did what my father paid her to do, but I can’t help thinking that maybe, somewhere out there, I have a son or daughter. I’ve changed a lot in the past year and a half since I knew Josephine. I wasn’t in love with her; I wasn’t capable of it back then, but if I am a father I want to know my child, in whatever way she’ll let me. I want to take responsibility for what I did. That’s all.”

  There were a few seconds of silence while Tobias finished scribbling it all down. Much of what he’d told them was in the case file, but some details had been left out.

  “Did you go to the police?” Clara asked.

  “Not at first. When I did, after a month or so, I gave them another name. My father was extremely unhappy about me risking having a child out of wedlock. Not that it’s uncommon amongst the upper class, but he didn’t want to pay for the child to be raised. If he knew I was looking for her, he’d cut me off and I’d have no funds to find her. But the police all but laughed at me. She’d been gone for a couple of months by then and they said there was no way they could find her. And since there was no evidence of any kind of crime, they had no reason to try.”

  “What about your friends?” Tobias said. “Didn’t any of them know her?”

  “I asked around, at first. They all knew who she was, but none of them knew where she’d gone.”

  “So, you’re English nobility?” Clara said, with far too much awe in her tone.

  What did it matter if he had a title or not?

  “My father is a marquess. His official title is the Marquess of Ipswich. That means I have the courtesy title of ‘Lord’. I won’t ever be a marquess though. Thankfully, my oldest brother gets that particular millstone.”

  �
�Goodness,” she murmured, her eyes round. “I’ve never met a lord before. Or anyone with a title, really.”

  Wetherington gave her a rueful smile. “It’s not as good as it sounds, believe me. Bunch of stuck up, conceited ne’er-do-wells, with a few exceptions. And I include myself in that description.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I think you seem like an honorable man, the way you want to help Miss Chamberlain and take responsibility for your child.”

  Honorable was taking it too far, Tobias felt. Any decent man would do as much, and without his father’s money to help him.

  “If I was honorable, there wouldn’t have been a child to take responsibility for in the first place.”

  Clara reached out to touch his arm. “We’ll do everything we can to find her, I promise.”

  Tobias’ indigestion seemed to be back. He cleared his throat. “What about her home? Where did she live?”

  Wetherington looked embarrassed. “The truth is, she always came to visit me. She told me she was living in a hotel while her parents were traveling and their home was being redecorated, but when I went there they said they had no record of her ever having stayed there. There’s a chance I got the place wrong though. Over the past year I’ve been to every hotel in the city, but none of them had a record of her ever being a guest.”

  A suspicion was growing in Tobias’ mind and he almost voiced it out loud, but that wouldn’t have been professional. It was his job to explore all the possibilities and obtain proof before he made any judgments.

  Besides, Clara seemed so enthralled by the story that he’d just seem like a heartless oaf if he mentioned his thoughts now. For reasons he wasn’t quite clear on, he very much didn’t want her to think of him that way.

  So instead he said, “We’ll need details about Miss Chamberlain, everything you can think of. Anything might give us a clue as to what happened to her.”

  “Mr. Gordon said as much in the letter he sent to say you’d be coming.” He pulled a thick envelope from a pocket inside his jacket and handed it to Tobias. “I wrote down everything I could remember. The advance on expenses Mr. Gordon said you’d need is in there too.”

  He sighed, his gaze moving to Clara. “I know I may seem foolish to you, but before this happened, my life was an empty, endless cycle of parties and indulgence. I’m not like that anymore. The idea that I may be a father has changed me in ways I couldn’t even have imagined possible. I’m the third son of a marquess; no one expected anything much of me and I lived up to those expectations very well. But now I have a purpose. If Josephine has my child, I need to find her. I need to know they’re safe. If I am a father, I want to be one.”

  “I don’t think you’re foolish at all,” she replied. “I think it’s admirable, what you’re doing. And we’ll help in any way we can.”

  She glanced at Tobias and he nodded his agreement and looked around for the waiter. He needed a glass of water for his indigestion.

  ~ ~ ~

  They left the restaurant and Aaron Wetherington an hour later, which wasn’t a moment too soon for Tobias.

  Clara and Wetherington had chatted through the entire meal and were becoming far too friendly, as far as he was concerned. You didn’t become friends with clients. It could too easily cloud your judgment.

  He should have added that to the teaching notes he’d written out for her.

  After a few paces of hesitation, he held out his elbow to her as they walked along the road away from the restaurant. “So what do you think?”

  She slipped her hand around his arm. “I think Aaron’s motives are entirely genuine. He wasn’t lying, he truly does want to find Miss Chamberlain and do the right thing.”

  He’d have to take her word on that. He was no good at reading people’s deeper emotions.

  “Some things he told us don’t make sense though,” she went on.

  “Oh? Such as?”

  “I can’t quite understand why she would have gone to his father instead of him when she found out she was expecting. Even if, as he said, he was the last person who should have been a father, I would have thought she’d still tell him first. Why go to his father, of all people? And the fact that he couldn’t find the hotel she was staying in seems strange. The kind of woman who would be attending the same events as the son of a marquess would surely be living in the very best hotel. And then there’s the fact that she disappeared after his father gave her money.”

  An unexpected feeling of pride came over him. She really had been paying attention. It seemed he’d been wrong about her becoming so taken with Wetherington that she’d lost any ability to judge the situation without bias.

  “So what’s your conclusion from all that?”

  “I hate to say this, but I suspect Miss Chamberlain might not have been what she seemed.” A small frown creased her brow. “I hope it’s not true though. Aaron would be devastated if he’d been the victim of some kind of confidence game.”

  He nodded in approval. “You came up with the same conclusions I did. Very good.”

  She grinned up at him. “Told you I was a good investigator.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ve only just started on the case.”

  She patted his arm. “Oh, I’m even better than this. Just you wait.”

  Looking ahead of them, he pressed his lips together against his smile.

  Chapter Seven

  Clara jerked awake with a start. The knocking on her bedroom door was unnecessarily loud.

  “I’m coming,” she called out, her voice rough with sleep.

  Groaning softly, she dragged herself from the warm, comfortable bed, pulled on her robe, and plodded to the door.

  Toby stood outside in the living room. She squinted up at him blearily.

  If she hadn’t just been woken from a blissfully deep slumber, she might have been mortified at her just-out-of-bed appearance. But she was too sleepy to care.

  “What?”

  His eyes darted down to her bare feet and back up again. “We need to get started.”

  She groaned again, rubbing one hand down her face. “This early? We just spent four days on a train. I’m exhausted.”

  “It’s almost nine. I’ve been up for two hours. I’ve already been for a run in the park and had breakfast.”

  She fixed him with a withering stare. “You’re insane.”

  For a moment, she thought she would get her wish to see him laugh. But he simply said, “Get ready. We have work to do.”

  And then he shut the door.

  She stuck her tongue out at the wooden surface and trudged away to begin the day.

  It was still far too early, no matter what the time was.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Where are we going?” Clara asked as they left the hotel.

  “You’re the expert investigator. You tell me.”

  She looked at him sideways. “Are you mocking me?”

  “No. This is how you learn, by thinking up your own plans of action. You won’t learn anything if I tell you what to do all the time.” He was silent for a few paces. “All right, maybe I was mocking you, just a bit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it unkindly.”

  “I know you didn’t. And you may playfully mock me whenever you wish.”

  “Duly noted.”

  Was he joking with her? She couldn’t yet tell, but she hoped he was. He was at least talking to her now, after four days together on the train journey, but she suspected there were depths to his personality she had yet to witness. She very much wanted to find out what they were.

  “I’ve been thinking about this, and the way I see it, we need to find out three things – where Miss Chamberlain was living, if she was actually pregnant, and if she had the baby aborted.”

  He nodded. “And how do you propose we do that?”

  That was where she’d been struggling, much as she hated to admit it to him. But he was there to teach her, after all. “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s formulate a p
lan for each of them, then we can decide which we should complete first to help us with the others.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “It’s almost like I’ve done this before.”

  She giggled. That one had definitely been a joke, and a good one.

  He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “While I was out earlier, I purchased a directory to all the hotels and boarding houses in the city, and I checked it against the list of hotels Lord Wetherington gave us that he’d already visited. Any in the directory he hadn’t been to, I wrote down.” He handed her the piece of paper.

  He’d done all that while she slept? Maybe she should start rising earlier after all. Not that she regretted a single moment of her time in the wonderfully comfortable bed.

  She unfolded the paper to reveal a disturbingly long list of addresses. “That’s a lot of hotels.”

  “They’re all boarding houses. I assume he thought her too refined to stay in any of those, but we aren’t blinkered by those preconceptions. If she wasn’t the lady he thought her, it’s likely she was residing somewhere cheaper.”

  “Are we going to have to visit all of them? That will take us forever.” There had to be at least a hundred addresses, if not more.

  “Which is why I believe we should first investigate if she had the abortion. If she did and we can find out where, we can begin with the boarding houses in that locale.”

  She wouldn’t have thought of that. While she was very good at reading people, and logic came easily to her, planning a course of action wasn’t her strength. Maybe being paired with Tobias had been the best thing that could have happened. She was going to learn a lot from him.

  “So how do we find out if she had the abortion?” she said, eager to get started.

  “We find the places that offer such a procedure.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “We ask someone who’d know.”

  Chapter Eight

  They found someone who’d know in a neighborhood Clara really didn’t want to know.