Too Hot to Handel

by Sheri Cobb South

  Julia listened to this disjointed speech in growing dismay. “Surely you cannot think I intend to let you go—not now, not after I came so close to losing you! No, my dear, I will not have it! The Fieldhursts may do their worst, but I will not give you up!”

  “You mean—you’re going to be my wife?”

  “I’m already your wife, my darling, and I intend to remain so.”

  “Really my wife?” he asked urgently, clutching at her sleeve.

  “If you want me.”

  “If I want you?” He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. “I don’t doubt I’ll leave you a widow again soon enough, but until then—my lady, if you’re really going to be my wife, can we—can I—I don’t want to die without making love to you, just once.”

  “You’re not going to die, my darling, I won’t let you,” she insisted, but shrugged out of her pink wrapper and let it fall, then leaned down to kiss him again.

  He was a rather more active participant this time, burying his fingers in her coiffure and returning her kiss with all the fervor of which he was capable.

  “My lady,” he murmured against her mouth, “may I take down your hair?”

  “If you like,” she answered softly, her words almost lost in their kiss.

  “Oh, I like,” he groaned, plucking out pins until the long curls spilled over her shoulders and onto his pillow, enclosing them both within a golden curtain.

  With a strength that surprised her (and an exertion for which he would certainly pay the next morning), he tightened his arm about her waist and rolled over in the bed, bearing her with him until she was pinned beneath his weight. The movement dislodged a square of folded cambric from her stays, and it fell out onto the mattress.

  “What—?” Pickett began, recognizing one of his own handkerchiefs.

  “A lock of your hair,” she explained, moving it out of harm’s way. “The doctor had to cut it, and I asked him if I might have it. Oh, John, I was so afraid it was all I would have left of you!”

  “My lady—” He had to ask, even though he might not like the answer. “—are you absolutely certain you want to do this? The annulment—there’ll be no turning back—”

  She silenced him by putting her fingers to his lips. “There has been no turning back for me for some time now.”

  It was all the reassurance he needed. “My lady,” he breathed. “My only love—my lady—”

  As the candle on the bedside table burned lower, he explored with reverence and wonder all the secret places to which it was his right as her husband to have access. And by the time the candle finally guttered in its socket, the thief-taker and the viscountess had become man and wife indeed.

  His fever rose in the night, and Julia castigated herself roundly for allowing him—no, encouraging him!—to exert himself. Reluctantly slipping out of the bed and away from the warmth of her sleeping husband, she scurried across the room to the bureau, snatched her night rail from the drawer, and pulled it over her head. She padded barefoot to the fireplace, then picked up the poker and set about effecting repairs to the fire. It flared back to life as she stirred the coals, and she turned to regard John Pickett—who was no longer a virgin—in the flickering light.

  It had been too hasty a coupling to be truly satisfying; apparently his fears of dying before consummating the marriage had not been exaggerated. Still, if this should prove to be his only opportunity, then he deserved the chance to conduct the exercise exactly as he wished; she would treasure it all the more, knowing it might be all they would ever have. On the other hand, if he were to recover . . .

  Her lips curved in a little smile of womanly wisdom. If he were to recover, they would have the rest of their lives to do the thing properly. She set aside the poker, slipped back into bed, and curled up against his side. She was still smiling when she fell asleep.

  Mr. Colquhoun reached the Bow Street Public Office the next morning to find William Foote pacing back and forth before the magistrate’s bench.

  “Good morning, Mr. Foote. Have you been waiting for me? Dare I hope for news on the theft of the Princess Olga’s diamonds?”

  The senior Runner inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Yes, sir. In fact, I am in need of an arrest warrant.”

  The magistrate’s eyebrows arched toward his hairline. “Excellent work! I confess, I had not hoped for success so soon.” He took his place at the bench and reached for parchment and quill. “Your meeting with His Excellency Vladimir Gregorovich must have been most productive. Who are we arresting? Is it he, or someone else?”

  “Someone else entirely, I’m afraid,” Mr. Foote confessed, his gaze sliding away from that of the magistrate.

  “Who, then?”

  “You won’t like it, sir,” cautioned Mr. Foote.

  “Faugh! I’m not here to administer justice only when it suits me,” Mr. Colquhoun growled. “Let’s have it with no round-aboutation, Mr. Foote. For whose arrest am I to issue a warrant?”

  “I should like you to write out a warrant for the arrest of Mr. John Pickett of Drury Lane.”

  Mr. Colquhoun’s face grew quite purple, and he threw down his quill. “You, sir, may go to the devil!”

  “I assure you, I would not make such a request without sufficient evidence to back it up,” said Mr. Foote, reaching into the pocket of his coat. He withdrew a necklace of sparkling white stones the size of wrens’ eggs, and laid it on the bench. “I discovered this in a pawnshop in Feathers Court, and took the liberty of redeeming it for the sum of two shillings and six pence. I trust the department will reimburse me for expenses?”

  “Never mind that,” said the magistrate impatiently. “I should like to know what the devil made you think Mr. Pickett was the one doing the pawning!”

  “May I remind you, sir, that Feathers Court opens onto Drury Lane only a stone’s throw from Mr. Pickett’s hired lodgings?”

  “And may I remind you, Mr. Foote, that Mr. Pickett has been lying insensible in his bed ever since the night of the fire? He is at present in no condition to pawn anything, stolen or no!”

  “He must have had a confederate, of course. No doubt the plans were in place long before the fire.” Seeing Mr. Colquhoun fairly quivering with fury, he added, “You must admit, sir, the proximity of the pawnshop to Mr. Pickett’s residence cannot be ignored.”

  “I’ll admit no such thing, sirrah! Mr. Pickett is far from the only person living in Drury Lane. Furthermore, one is not obliged to live in a particular street to avail oneself of its pawnshops. Oh, and perhaps you will explain why the devil Mr. Pickett should go to the trouble of stealing jewels worth a king’s ransom only to pawn them for such a paltry sum. Pray tell me that, since you appear to have thought it all out.”

  Mr. Foote nodded in sympathetic understanding. “You are upset, sir, and I’m sure I don’t wonder at it. But I spoke to the proprietor of the pawnshop, a fellow called Baumgarten, and he was able to identify the person who brought the jewels in.” He paused a moment. “The seller was a young prostitute well known in the area, one Lucy Higgins by name.”

  Mr. Colquhoun groped behind him for his chair, and sat down heavily. Mr. Foote’s so-called evidence was purely circumstantial, he told himself with more than a trace of desperation. It would never stand up in court. And yet . . . and yet he knew himself that John Pickett occasionally enlisted Lucy Higgins’s aid, and he would be compelled to admit as much in court, should he be called upon to testify. He also knew of the boy’s disreputable past, and that, too, would certainly come to light during any trial.

  If it were anyone else, he would say it was his duty to write out the arrest warrant and let the truth, whatever it was, come out in court. He could do no less now. The cause of Justice, to which he had devoted so many years of his life, now demanded that he sacrifice a young man who stood in the place of a son to him. Strange how Justice did not seem nearly as noble a mistress as she had only half an hour ago. Well, he would hire the boy’s defense counsel himself, he determined,
and if his own testimony was requested as a character witness, then by God he would be eager to take the stand.

  “Sir?” prompted Mr. Foote, clearly waiting.

  Mr. Colquhoun snatched up parchment and quill, then wrote out the warrant and signed his name with a flourish.

  “There is your warrant, Mr. Foote,” he said, thrusting the still-wet paper at him. “And may you rot in hell with it!”

  “I realize how hard this is for you—” the senior Runner began, and although his tone was conciliating, it seemed to Mr. Colquhoun that there was something smug, even gloating, in his expression.

  “Aye, you’re enjoying this, aren’t you? You wanted a warrant, you’ve got it, damn you!” bellowed the magistrate. “Now, get out of my sight!”

  “Yes, sir.” Mr. Foote rolled up the paper and tucked it into the hollow end of his black tipstaff, then made an apologetic little bow before turning and leaving the Bow Street Public Office with his tipstaff tucked beneath his arm.

  His tipstaff, thought Mr. Colquhoun, watching him go. His tipstaff, made of wood and painted black . . .

  No, it wasn’t possible. Mr. Foote made no secret of his dislike for John Pickett, and he was certainly envious of the younger man’s success. Still, from professional jealousy to attempted murder required quite a leap, and surely one no officer of the King’s peace would be capable of making.

  He complained of his feet hurting, Lady Fieldhurst had said. One of his feet, anyway, although he didn’t say which . . . And one of his feet, the magistrate realized with growing conviction, would have been “foot.” Was it possible that John Pickett, barely conscious, had not been complaining of pain as her ladyship had thought, but had been attempting to identify his attacker?

  “Excuse me, Mr. Colquhoun, may I have a moment—”

  “Later, Mr. Marshall,” said the magistrate, brushing off another Runner who had approached the bench requesting his attention. “There’s something I must do now.”

  He left the bench without a backward glance and set out for Drury Lane.

  CHAPTER 17

  AN END, AND A BEGINNING

  A knock on the door awakened Julia the next morning, and she realized that the sheets beneath her were clammy. Almost afraid to hope, she laid her hand against Pickett’s forehead, and found it cool and beaded with sweat; the fever had apparently broken while he slept.

  She had no time to ponder the significance of this discovery, however. The knock sounded again, more urgently this time, and she scrambled out of bed, eager to impart the good news to Mr. Colquhoun. She shrugged on her pink wrapper and tied its belt about her waist, then turned to regard her oblivious husband, still sunk in what she hoped was nothing more than a deep and satiated sleep.

  “That will be your magistrate,” she predicted, then added mischievously, “You needn’t be embarrassed, darling. He won’t be able to tell the difference by looking at you.”

  She dropped a light kiss on his forehead—which still didn’t wake him—and went to answer the door.

  “Good news, Mr. Colquhoun—”

  The words died a-borning. The man standing just outside was not the magistrate but a stranger who somehow looked vaguely familiar, a man in his mid-thirties with straw-colored hair, a beaky nose, and rather cold blue eyes.

  “I—I beg your pardon,” stammered Julia, although there was nothing in the visitor’s appearance to render her uncomfortable—unless, perhaps, it was his appearance at Mr. Pickett’s door while she was still in her wrapper with her hair trailing down her back. “I’m sorry, I was—expecting someone else.”

  The stranger nodded. “Mr. Colquhoun.”

  “You know him?” Even as she asked the question, Julia realized why he seemed familiar. This was one of Mr. Pickett’s colleagues, the Runner who had been summoned to the theatre at Drury Lane to investigate the theft of Lady Oversley’s emeralds. There was no reason, then, for her nagging sense of unease, much less her quite unreasonable urge to shut the door in his face.

  “Yes, I know Mr. Colquhoun very well. In fact, I’ve come on his orders.”

  “Of course.” To her disquiet was added disappointment. She had hoped to tell the magistrate the good news herself. “You may tell him that Mr. Pickett’s fever broke in the night, and although his physician has not yet confirmed it, there is every reason to believe he will make a full recovery.”

  “That is good to know. I trust Mr. Pickett is in?”

  Julia was not quite sure how it had happened, for she had not invited him in, but suddenly the stranger was inside the room, with the open door behind him. “He is, but he is sleeping, and I should not like to wake him. He has been very ill, you know.”

  “So I understand,” said the stranger, slapping his tipstaff against his open palm in a manner Julia found vaguely threatening.

  “I shall tell him you called, Mr.—?”

  “Foote. William Foote.”

  She recalled with sudden clarity Mr. Pickett’s first brush with consciousness. Foot . . . he’d muttered, tossing to and fro in the bed. Foot . . . Perhaps, thought Julia with mounting apprehension, she had not landed on his ankle, after all.

  “Yes, well, thank you for calling, Mr. Foote,” she said briskly, preparing to show him the door. “When Mr. Pickett awakens, I shall tell him you stopped by—”

  The visitor fumbled in the pocket of his greatcoat. “That won’t be necessary, my lady.”

  She heard a click, and was suddenly staring into the barrel of a pistol.

  “I’ll be seeing him now, if you please.”

  Every instinct urged her to shield her slumbering husband, for it was obvious that he, and not she herself, was Mr. Foote’s real target. She was frantically trying to think how she might accomplish this without getting them both shot when a noise from the direction of the bedroom drew her attention as well as the unwelcome visitor’s.

  John Pickett stood framed in the doorway, looking thoroughly disreputable. Beneath the bandage wrapped around his head, his curly brown hair hung in tangles to his shoulders, and his jaw bore almost a week’s worth of fine dark beard. He was clad in nothing but his smallclothes, and he held a pistol, which dipped and swayed in his shaky hand. But there was steel in his eye, and Julia wondered how she had ever doubted his ability to kill a man.

  “Ah, there you are, Mr. Pickett. I’m pleased to see you up and about.” Foote’s sidelong glance took in Julia’s unbound tresses and déshabillé. “It looks like you’ve been making good use of your time away from Bow Street, but I’m afraid the jig is up. I have a warrant for your arrest for the theft of the Princess Olga Fyodorovna’s diamonds, signed by Mr. Colquhoun himself.”

  Stunned silence greeted this announcement, broken almost at once by Julia.

  “Liar!”

  “My lady, no—!”

  Heedless of Pickett’s half-formed protest, she kicked Mr. Foote sharply in the shin. He threw down his tipstaff and seized her wrist, wrenching her arm as he twisted it behind her back and pulled her to himself, holding her before him as a human shield.

  “That was a stupid thing to do, your ladyship, but then I suppose our Mr. Pickett’s interest in you doesn’t involve your brains.” He pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the side of her head. “It’s a pity I won’t be able to see you hang for your crimes, Mr. Pickett, as you should have done ten years ago, but I’m afraid I’ll have to shoot you instead. How much easier it would have been for us all if you had died in the fire as you were supposed to, or from the blow I dealt you immediately afterward! It seems you have a hard head.”

  “Your quarrel is with me, Foote, not her ladyship,” said Pickett, and although he could not hold the pistol steady, his gaze, at least, never wavered. “Let her go, and we’ll settle this between the two of us.”

  Foote gave a snort of derision. “And allow her to go running for Colquhoun? Oh yes, he had to sign the warrant after I presented him with the evidence, but he didn’t like it one bit. I’ll wager it wouldn’t take much persuasio
n to bring him running to rescue his darling.”

  “Wait,” objected Pickett. “What ‘evidence’?”

  “Why, the Princess Olga’s diamonds, of course, discovered at a shop in Feathers Court, where they’d been pawned by Miss Lucy Higgins, who is known to be a friend of yours.”

  “Lucy?”

  “She took them from your bureau drawer,” Julia explained. “I’d hidden them there after finding them in your coat pocket.”

  “But they weren’t in my coat pocket,” Pickett insisted. “I never had them.”

  Julia dared not move her head, but she bent a scathing look at her captor out of the corner of her eye. “You put them there, didn’t you?” It was an accusation, not a question. “That was you outside the theatre, supposedly offering to help!” And he matched in every particular the description given by the young mother who had come in response to her advertisement, but she had been so enthralled with the idea of Vladimir Gregorovich as the guilty party that she had never considered the possibility that the woman’s account, and not Mr. Bartlesby’s, was the accurate one. Had Mr. Bartlesby seen the Russian leaving the theatre and decided that Monsieur Dombrowsky, as an obvious foreigner, would be a likely scapegoat, or had he invented a description out of whole cloth, only to have it fit a real person by the merest mischance? She supposed it hardly mattered now.

  Foote chuckled. “You’re finally catching on, aren’t you? Yes, I sent you off to fetch a sedan chair while I stayed with Mr. Pickett. It would have been very awkward for me if a certain diamond necklace was discovered on my person, you see. And when I reached inside your coat to plant the diamonds, Mr. Pickett, I could feel your heart still beating and realized I hadn’t killed you after all.”

  “I wonder you didn’t finish the job while you had the chance,” Pickett said bitterly.

  “Oh, I intended to. But a crowd of well-meaning busybodies interrupted, and I was obliged to give up the plan and trust that the blow I’d already struck would eventually do for you. I was reasonably certain that someone would discover the diamonds in your pocket and leap to the obvious conclusion. I never expected her ladyship to interfere, much less Lucy Higgins. Of course, Miss Higgins had no way of knowing that Mr. Baumgarten, the proprietor of that particular pawnshop, has been working hand in glove with me since Christmas. She was hardly out the door before he sent a message to me, informing me that the diamonds had come into his possession after all, just as we’d intended from the first.”