Trifling Favors (Redcakes Book 7)

by Heather Hiestand

  Her father put his hands to his bristly cheeks. “Child?”

  “Your grandchild,” she sniffed. “If there is one.”

  He blinked, scratched his balding pate. “You’re too clever a girl for this.”

  “G-Greggory said the police should just pick a murderer and string them up. Not even a trial. This baby won’t ever be innocent in his eyes. I can’t put my child through that. An orphanage is best. It will be a chance, a chance to grow up free of being my child.”

  “Greggory won’t see it that way.”

  “I’ll disappear. Start over somewhere,” she said. “He’ll consider it a blessing. You’d better pack your bags, because once I’m gone, you’ll have to go, too.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Betsy, you need to stop this silliness now and come inside and rest. Of course you are overset and half-starved and exhausted, but a good night’s sleep will set you to rights. You are a smart, sensible girl, and nothing like Prissy Weaver.”

  “Of course I am,” she mumbled.

  “Do not forget, her father was a violent drunk,” Her father said. “And she was raised differently from you, and never had your gifts.”

  “She looks just like me.”

  “But inside, she is very different. Why, she never attracted a good man like Mr. Redcake. Here you are, twenty-two and about to be a bride.” He cleared his throat. “And a mother.”

  Betsy couldn’t think about herself. “I don’t think men have treated her very well.”

  “She’s rotten on the inside, but you are not. You’ve never lied in your life, Betsy dear. You’re accomplished, trusted, and well-deserving of any praise. I’m so very proud of you.”

  Out of steam, Betsy sat on the front step. “Truly?”

  Her father sat next to her, nodding. For the first time in weeks, she allowed herself to touch him, leaning her head on his shoulder. His arm came around her.

  A little while later, she went inside and went to bed, heartsick and exhausted. She hoped the next day’s papers would hold the news of Simon and Prissy’s confessions to the murder of Manfred Cross, but she could take no joy in it. At least Redcake’s would go on. And she would too, somehow, somewhere.

  The next afternoon, Greggory sat at his desk and opened a telegram from his brother Dudley, inviting him to a theater benefit that night. He decided to agree to go because he’d wanted to speak to Dudley. Betsy might enjoy it, too. He wrote a response and gave it to Oscar, then went to Betsy’s desk.

  She didn’t smile when he approached, just looked quiet and serious. “I haven’t seen you since yesterday.”

  “I was over at the other Redcake’s all morning, discussing the advertising with Lord Judah after dinner with my cousin last night.”

  She frowned. “Did you speak to the police?”

  “About what?”

  “The capture of Prissy and Simon Hellman yesterday.”

  Greggory pushed a pile of ledgers off a stool and pulled it toward her desk. “What? I’ve heard nothing of this.”

  She explained her encounter to him. Greggory was aghast. “Why didn’t you tell me last night? Why haven’t I heard from the police?”

  “I went to bed right after I spoke to my father.”

  “I didn’t see him either.”

  “It was such a sad thing for us, to realize Prissy was so corrupt,” Betsy said, speaking much slower than usual. “I guess we were utterly heartsick.”

  “I can understand that,” he said, taking her hand across her desk. He frowned as she pulled it away.

  “I imagine you haven’t heard from the police since they tried to see you yesterday because they haven’t confessed to anything.”

  “I don’t understand what you think they did, precisely.”

  She didn’t argue with him, or raise her brows ironically, but just stayed blank, a cauldron bubbling beneath the surface. “What do you mean? Do you think I am Manfred Cross’s murderer? After all, I am a murderer’s daughter.”

  “Of course you are not. You were with me. Of anyone in the world, I know you did not do it. Why are you speaking such nonsense?”

  “One of the constables recognized Prissy as a known jewel thief.”

  Greggory had to plant one foot on the floor to keep his balance. “Prissy?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I had no idea of course. And Simon was with her. She tried to con me, said she was so excited that Victor had been captured and asked me for more money for my clothes, but the story unraveled when I saw Simon. So I called for help.”

  “I don’t know what to say. She or Simon obviously killed Manfred Cross. We know Prissy was nearby.”

  “And engaged to be married no less. You can see why I have to go.”

  “Yes, well, no, w-what?” Greggory stammered, stunned by her rapid change of topic.

  “My own sister responsible. I can’t stay at Redcake’s, I cannot marry a Redcake.” Her voice was shrill, so unlike her.

  Not this again. “You are having my child.”

  “If I have your child, I will find a proper home, where no one will know he or she is the grandchild and niece or nephew of a murderess. You know that is the child’s best hope.”

  His hands went cold. “No, I do not know that, Betsy. I do not know that at all. Any child needs to know their parents, and neither of us has an evil bone in our body. Nor does your father. The child will be fine.”

  “We aren’t wed yet, and this is my decision. I may not be a murderer, but I am too impulsive. The child needs a good, moral home.”

  He rubbed his hands together, trying to generate some warmth. He couldn’t touch his fragile, pregnant fiancée if he was a block of ice. “Now you are sounding like your father. Look at how properly he raised you. We can do the same for our child.”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m going to leave. I pray the police finish solving the matter soon, so that Redcake’s can survive. You’ll all be better off with me gone.”

  “You’re hysterical,” he stated, feeling as worn as if he’d aged a decade in the past minute. Why couldn’t he get warm? “Not precisely that, but so very sad. You were betrayed by your sister yet again yesterday. It is a hard thing. The specter of your mother colors your every thought. You need to rest, to think of the baby.”

  “I need to go.” Her paleness troubled him.

  “I wanted you to go to Bristol and you refused. Now, all of our tormentors except Violet are in police custody, and I want you to stay. But not here at Redcake’s. You need to rest.”

  “I’m not sure Violet was that involved.” She pressed her lips together.

  “Victor seemed to be looking for her,” he mused, wishing she would touch him.

  “Violet is practical. I expect she is very happy to escape her current situation and start over again, which I understand.” She changed the subject abruptly, a symptom of her disordered thinking. “I need to pack.”

  “You haven’t enough money to go anywhere. What have you? A couple of weeks’ pay?”

  Her gaze moved rapidly around the room. “You cannot prevent me from going. We aren’t married.”

  “I can terminate your employment,” he said.

  For a moment, she did look at him, her expression unchanging. “Very well. I needed to go.”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” Greggory said, his voice rising as panic set in. “I didn’t mean it. Let us solve this together, please, Betsy.”

  She stood up and took her coat from the peg. “I told my father to pack. I hope we can leave your house tomorrow.”

  “I’ll speak to him,” he protested. “Persuade him otherwise.”

  “I think you’ll find he takes my side in the end.” She walked away.

  He dropped his face into his cold hands, feeling utterly impotent. They couldn’t fight at the shop; they couldn’t fight at all. He needed to have a care for her emotional state and her delicate condition. What he needed to do was to speak to Ralph Popham. A telephone call to her father, that was just the th
ing.

  The last thing Greggory wanted to do was leave the Pophams to their packing and meet his brother at a theater that was doing a benefit for a woman whose theater manager husband had recently died, leaving her two small children to support, but he had agreed to do so, after Ralph had barred him from their floor of the house, counseling patience. He probably could use the company.

  The theater was small and a bit out of date, focused on providing entertainment to the working classes. Dudley met him outside and handed him his ticket.

  “You look like a proper theatergoer for a murder mystery,” his brother said.

  “What?”

  “They are reviving the old The Red Barn play tonight. It’s about the 1827 murder of Maria Marten? You know the story, where her lover kills her, then tells her aged parents he took her off and married her, but then her old mother sees her in a dream three nights in a row, and then her old father finds her buried in the barn?”

  “That suits my mood,” Greggory said sourly. “I’ve spent the afternoon at Redcake’s.”

  “What do you mean?” Dudley said, allowing an usher to escort them into the lobby.

  “It’s like a tomb, we have so few customers. The advertising did no good. Victor’s vandalism seems to have done us in completely.”

  “What are you going to do?” Dudley glanced at their tickets, then led them to their seats.

  “I fired Betsy. She’s the employee with the highest salary.” His stomach lurched as he said it.

  “Your fiancée?”

  He rubbed his temples. “She’s refusing to marry me now.”

  “Oh. Women. What are you going to do?”

  “Watch this play, I suppose. I feel like we’re waiting, just waiting, for life to go back to normal, but it can’t.” Betsy had lost her home, her position, gained and lost a sister, was expecting his baby. He’d lost his best friend.

  Dudley had responded to him, but he hadn’t heard. He grabbed his brother’s arm. “She’s my best friend, you know. Betsy is my closest companion.”

  “Of course. You’ve seen her more than anyone else since Letty died, and now she’s living in your home.”

  “How can she be all that to me and yet I don’t understand her at all?”

  “I expect you do understand her; you just don’t agree with her. It isn’t the same thing.” Dudley pointed. “Look, the curtain is going up.”

  Greggory watched the melodrama play out on the stage. Maria fell in love with her murderous swain, had his baby, her third by three men, then was ignominiously murdered by the man, who thereafter proceeded to advertise for a wife and become the owner of a girl’s school before being caught and strung up. He wondered what became of her three children. The play didn’t reflect on any of that.

  Three babies with a murdered mother, and one of them with a murderer father. At least Betsy had had Ralph, however beset by his own demons he might be.

  He didn’t speak to Dudley as they left the theater afterward.

  “What should we do now?” Dudley asked.

  Greggory’s laugh was dark. “I don’t know why I’m even here. I need to go home before it is too late.”

  “Are you sure? I could come with you.”

  “No, but I’ll tell you, I think I’m going to go back to Bristol for a while, clear my head.”

  “You could use a break from London and the tea shop.”

  Greggory nodded. “Cable me the updates on the hotel business, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  Less than an hour later, a hansom pulled up in front of Greggory’s house and he descended. He was afraid he’d find the Pophams already gone, but Ralph was sitting in the parlor, reading a book of sermons. Greggory sat down next to him.

  “Been at the shop all evening?”

  “No, with my brother, watching a murder play.”

  Ralph closed his book over his finger. “Oh?”

  “How did you get it right? Raising Betsy, I mean. You did a wonderful job with her, after everything you went through.”

  “I tried to live day to day without reflecting too much on the past or the future,” Ralph said. “We left Bristol when we could and simply looked forward. I raised her to be a lady as much as possible. Working for the Redcakes worked out wonderfully. I knew what a good influence the shop and people were for her.”

  “She was raised in the business.”

  “Yes. You Redcakes as a tribe are a most unusual lot, but we fit in.”

  “I know you did. And Betsy is going to be a wonderful mother, just like my cousins. Cousin Rose is expecting her first child next month, you know. Now everyone on that side will have offspring.”

  “That’s good to hear. Everyone has always expressed such concern about her health.”

  “She is stronger than my Letty,” Greggory said. “Ralph, did any news come from the police while I was gone this evening?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “I think I’ll leave the tea shop closed until they wrestle a confession out of someone,” Greggory said. “There is a sad air about the place. I’ll take the twins to Bristol for a few days, visit family.”

  “Betsy has told me she is going to move into one of those ladies’ lodgings.”

  “We’ll stay gone until you move out,” Greggory said. “That way she will not have the stress of seeing me.”

  “I don’t understand what went wrong. Aren’t you still engaged?”

  “She doesn’t think I know her for who she really is, that fine, strong young lady. But I do, you know. I do not confuse her with her mother. I cannot do so. You raised her to be something so different. She is nothing like Prissy either.”

  “Her mother was not all bad,” Ralph reflected. “But she always wanted the easy way. And I think, once you murder a first time, it must be easier to do it again.”

  “Am I taking the easy way out by shutting down the teashop?”

  “It depends on how much money you want to lose,” Ralph said.

  “I’ll have to spend tomorrow in meetings, talking to all the staff.”

  “If you close for more than a few days, you’ll lose your best employees to other shops.”

  Greggory nodded. “At this rate, I think the bloody shop needs an exorcism.”

  Ralph shook his head. “It is astounding how quickly you’ve lost business.”

  Greggory forced a smile. An evil breeze. “I will say good-bye tomorrow.”

  “Do not give up on my daughter,” Ralph said. “I understand how bleak life seems to you right now, but it will get better.”

  “The only thing that allows me to continue is the belief she’ll relent and marry me if I give her a little space, as you counseled.”

  “I know my Betsy better than anyone. She loves you or she wouldn’t have panicked like this. She’s a girl who bucks up and gets on with the hard parts of life untroubled, normally. It’s only love that would have her doing this to-ing and fro-ing. You’ll have her back.”

  Greggory nodded and went upstairs for a few hours’ rest. He rose at four A.M. so he could properly letter a sign for the Redcake’s door, then speak to Mr. Soeur. When it came time for the other staff to arrive, he spoke to each person as they entered, telling them to return Friday at ten A.M. for their wages and an update. Then he went to work with his accounting clerks, tallying up payroll a day early. He hoped the next forty-eight hours would give them what they needed from the police, but meanwhile, he would go home and pack up the twins. His last task for Oscar before he left was handing him a telegram form to send to his father in Bristol, to have space made for him and the twins in the sprawling family home there.

  Betsy woke later than she had in years. She had nowhere to go on a Wednesday. In the dining room, she found a discarded newspaper and looked for rooms to rent. It would be hard without a position. She wondered if she should ask Mrs. Fair if she could have Prissy’s job, but she didn’t know how to run a sewing machine and it would be very little money.

  Midm
orning, she went to the ladies’ lodging she had almost rented before but found the room was no longer available. Without meaning to, she found herself walking up the High Street toward Redcake’s. Not surprisingly, the pavement in front of the shop looked deserted, but she didn’t expect the display window to be empty. It made her feel as nauseated as any part of early pregnancy. She went right up to the window and found a sign announcing Redcake’s was closed for renovations for the rest of the week and an announcement of future hours would be posted on Sunday.

  Oh, Greggory, she thought with a sigh. He’d given up. It wasn’t just she who had lost her position. It was everyone, from Grace Fair to Winnie Baxter, even Oscar.

  She went home to confront Greggory. When Mrs. Roach said he was in his suite, she didn’t demur, simply went upstairs and walked into his dressing room, where he was folding shirts into a valise.

  He glanced up, and she saw his expression brighten, then dim into neutrality in the space of a second. “The nursery maid is packing the twins’ things.” He looked back to his shirts.

  She clasped her hands together, to keep herself from throwing her arms around him. To shake him or hug him, she wasn’t sure. “I had a note from my father, saying you were leaving until we found rooms.”

  “I have to be in London on Friday, to hand out payroll and update the employees, but the twins will stay in Bristol. I won’t spend the night here.”

  She ignored his meaning. “I hope you try to reopen Redcake’s in a couple of months, after some new scandal has diluted ours. While Prissy and Simon haven’t yet confessed to murdering Manfred Cross, the public will consider the case closed by then. Customers will eventually return to Redcake’s. It is still the same high-class establishment, and Victor won’t be around to terrorize people with broken windows anymore.”

  The corner of his mouth curled up. “I hope to reopen as soon as the police announce the murderer’s confession. Our customers need to know that Cross’s death was a squabble between jewel thieves.”