Harriet’s heart leapt. He really did understand the nature of his offence. That was why he’d brought all his friends here. He could tell how badly he’d hurt her—how they’d all hurt her by treating her so lightly—and was genuinely sorry for doing something that had left her feeling humiliated. He also knew she needed to hear them all apologise.
And cared enough about her to make them do it.
He had broken the invisible bonds of male camaraderie that had made her feel so excluded when she’d seen them together before. To put her feelings first. To put her first.
‘Just tell her,’ Lord Rawcliffe insisted.
Lord Becconsall turned to her, looking shamefaced. ‘You have to understand, we were all rather castaway. And I was trying to…’
She pulled herself up as tall as she could and looked down her nose at him, the way Mama was in the habit of looking at Uncle Hugo. She might be on the verge of forgiving him, but she had no intention of letting him off easily. He deserved to squirm, for the misery he’d put her through. ‘You were trying to?’
‘Well, never mind what I was trying to do. The point is, that night was the first time all four of us had been together since our schooldays. And we…well…’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I think it was because we all started using the nicknames we had for each other at school. It made us all sort of slip back into the roles we had then. Zeus ordering us all around as though he was a god.’ He shot Lord Rawcliffe a look of resentment. ‘Atlas taking the burdens of the world on his shoulders…’ He glanced over to where Atlas had just slumped into one of the chairs he’d uncovered, looking like the last man able to shoulder any kind of burden. ‘And Archie…’
‘They called me Archimedes because they all thought I was so much cleverer than them,’ said Mr Kellett mournfully. And subsided into the other chair, next to Atlas, even though she was still standing and hadn’t given anyone permission to sit down. In other men, she would consider this a display of rank bad manners. And it was. But in the case of Atlas, he looked as though, if he hadn’t sat down when he did, he might have fallen down. And Archie was just typical of the sort of men Mama often consorted with, who frequently forgot about inconsequential matters like etiquette when they were all fired up with weightier matters.
‘Anyway, we argued about you,’ Lord Becconsall continued, having shot Archie one exasperated glance. ‘I maintained you were an innocent, who had no idea you were behaving improperly. Zeus swore you were no such thing. I wanted to clear your name,’ he said, holding out his hands to her again, in that gesture of appeal for understanding.
And in a way, she did understand. After all, hadn’t she infuriated Uncle Hugo, by the way she’d gone about trying to clear Aunt Susan’s name? She’d been clumsy, and trampled all over lots of people’s feelings. With the best of intentions.
‘But at the same time, I’d only just found these fellows again, after years abroad, and…and other things, and it was so…’ He spread his hands wide, as though lacking the words to explain himself properly. ‘I didn’t want to risk losing them again by letting it descend into a real quarrel. And so…’
‘He turned it into a joke,’ put in Lord Rawcliffe, giving Lord Becconsall a thoughtful look. ‘The way he always did when he found himself in a tight corner.’
‘A joke? I was a joke, then?’
‘No! Not you. The wager. The wager was the joke. I declared that the stake should be what it always had been between us. It was an attempt to remind…all of us that we shared…well…’ He floundered to a halt.
‘Tell her what the stake was,’ Lord Rawcliffe, insisted.
‘It was a cream bun,’ said Lord Becconsall in a voice barely above a whisper. ‘That was what we always used to stake, at school.’
‘You…made my reputation the topic of a wager? The winner to be bought a cream bun?’
‘Yes.’ Lord Becconsall hung his head.
For a moment Harriet stared at the four of them. Lord Rawcliffe somewhat defiant, his hands clasped tightly over the silver handle of his cane. Atlas slumped on one chair, looking too fragile to get up. Archie looking at her like a spaniel who’d been threatened with a bath after rolling in the midden. And Lord Becconsall, flushed, and staring at her with a mixture of defiance and embarrassment.
‘Actually, if you want the whole truth,’ said Lord Rawcliffe, ‘by this stage we already had one wager behind us. Regarding Lucifer, my stallion, which he’d lost spectacularly.’
Lord Becconsall sighed. ‘Yes. So we raised the stakes to double or quits.’
She stared at the defiant way Lord Rawcliffe was standing, the silver-topped cane clutched in his elegant fingers. And imagined him sitting down and happily devouring not one, but two cream buns. Like a greedy little schoolboy. The image was so incongruous that she started to giggle.
‘C-cream b-buns. Oh, oh, lord!’
Well, she need no longer fear any of these four men would spill her family secrets. If it ever got out that Lord Rawcliffe, who, according to Aunt Susan, was just about the most elegant, hardened, philandering, sophisticated male of his generation, had taken part in a wager to win a cream bun, at the advanced age of thirty-five or whatever he was, he would never live it down.
And he knew it.
‘So, now you know my deepest, darkest shame, Lady Harriet,’ said Lord Rawcliffe, ‘you can have no fear of trusting us with whatever it is that Ulysses wishes us to help you with. Our lips are, perforce, sealed.’
It was as though he’d been reading her mind.
‘Yes. I qu-quite see th-that.’ She giggled.
‘Then you will let us help you?’ Lord Becconsall took a pace towards her. ‘You can see that they are men you can trust, can you not? After all, they never spoke a word about what you got up to in the park.’
‘How ungentlemanly of you to remind me of that,’ she said, pretending to be cross.
‘Lady Harriet,’ he said in a pleading tone.
‘Well,’ she said, pretending to think about it. ‘I suppose…if they can keep the scandalous affair of the cream buns a secret, then they might very well be the type of men to entrust with the solving of the mystery of the fake rubies.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘Fake rubies?’ Archie sprang to his feet as though he’d been jerked by invisible strings. ‘Someone in your family has discovered they’ve g-got fake rubies, instead of the genuine article?’
‘Yes,’ said Harriet.
‘By G-G-G…’ He shook his head and swallowed. ‘S-Same thing happened to us. That is m-my mother. That is, when she inherited g-g…’ He swallowed again.
Lord Becconsall went to his side. ‘Take a deep breath, Archie,’ he said soothingly. ‘No need to get so agitated,’ he continued while Archie breathed in deeply a couple of times. ‘I recall you telling us that your grandmother died recently and that you then discovered something disturbing about her that none of you had ever dreamed. Is this connected to Lady Harriet’s case?’
‘M-might be coincidence. B-but, see, her j-jewels—at least the rubies—t-turned out to be p-paste. C-Couldn’t understand why she’d want to have them c-copied. No gaming habits. No d-debts my father c-could discover.’
‘Oh!’ Harriet sat down on a sofa that was still covered by a dusty dustsheet. ‘And now everyone in your family is trying to keep it a secret, to protect her reputation.’
‘That’s ab-bout the size of it.’
‘That is just what has happened to my aunt. At least…’ she rubbed her brow with one finger as she tried to assemble the facts in an intelligible order ‘…it was Lord Tarbrook who discovered the rubies had been copied. When he took them to the jewellers for cleaning and re-setting against the day when Kitty would wear them at her betrothal ball. It’s a sort of family tradition, apparently. And they were in such a horridly old-fashioned s
etting, Kitty said, that she wasn’t surprised nobody wore them except when tradition demanded it. Anyway, when the jeweller told my uncle that the rubies were paste, he immediately assumed that my aunt had got into debt and raised the money to pay it off by having the rubies secretly copied, rather than owning up. And he still believes it, even though she swears she did no such thing.’
‘And he didn’t try to find out the truth?’ Lord Becconsall came to sit beside her on the sofa. Lord Rawcliffe chose to remain standing.
‘No. He was determined to blame Aunt Susan,’ she said indignantly. ‘He was as mad as fire when I started to question the servants. Although, Aunt Susan said she could understand his attitude, because, you see, when he was a boy, his mother had accused a servant of stealing some of her jewellery, falsely, as it turned out, because the missing jewels turned up. But only after the servant had been condemned and hanged.’
Captain Bretherton and Archie both muttered imprecations. Lord Rawcliffe looked grim. Lord Becconsall shook his head.
‘I know, it must have been terrible for him. But—’ she turned to Lord Becconsall ‘—that would have given him the perfect reason for claiming he didn’t want any sort of investigation if he’d been the one to have them copied, wouldn’t it?’
‘What makes you think he might have done that?’
‘Well, he did cut up rough about some of the expenses Aunt Susan was running up this Season. And complained bitterly about bringing me out alongside her own daughter. So when he went all…medieval about the whole affair, I wondered if some of the bluster wasn’t a sort of smokescreen to cover up his own guilt.’
‘No, I don’t think that’s it,’ said Lord Becconsall at once. ‘For one thing, if he was the one who’d had the jewels copied, he wouldn’t have needed to say anything about it, would he?’
‘Oh,’ said Harriet, crestfallen. ‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Besides, now we know of a similar thing happening within Archie’s family, it sounds much more like the work of a very sophisticated, highly organised, criminal gang.’
‘Does it?’
‘Yes—it’s almost a perfect crime, isn’t it?’ His face took on a tinge of admiration. ‘If jewels are just stolen, someone will raise a hue and cry at once. But stealing them this way, replacing them with good copies so that the crime isn’t even noticed for some considerable time, makes tracing the people responsible almost impossible.’
‘Oh.’ Her spirits sank. ‘You mean we are not going to be able to find out who took the rubies? And clear Aunt Susan’s name?’
‘I didn’t say it was impossible. I said almost impossible. But look about you, Lady Harriet. We have here in this room four of the most capable men in England, each in their own way. If anyone can unmask the criminals, we can.’
Lady Harriet looked at his three friends in turn, trying to see what he could see in them. He’d kept insisting that Captain Bretherton was strong, but his sallow complexion and slightly shaky hands told a different tale. Likewise, Mr Kellett was supposed to be the cleverest man in England, but when agitated he could scarcely utter one intelligible word. And then there was Lord Rawcliffe, who believed in himself to such a degree that his friends referred to him as Zeus.
‘Well, Ulysses, where do you suggest we start?’
To Harriet’s surprise, it was Lord Rawcliffe who had spoken. He’d actually asked Lord Becconsall’s opinion. She glanced from Lord Rawcliffe, to Lord Becconsall, who grinned at her expression of amazement. Lord Rawcliffe sniffed.
‘I didn’t give him the name of Ulysses for nothing. He has the kind of quick brain just suited to this kind of task. Even at school I could tell that most of his antics were designed to disguise his real nature. So that people would underestimate him.’
At her side, Lord Becconsall shifted in his seat, as though embarrassed.
‘More to the point,’ said Lord Becconsall, ‘I have learned a lot about the habits of criminals from the men under my command. Not all of them, but rather a lot of them had cheated the gallows by joining up. And hardly a one of them reformed. Instead, they recreated the kind of network they’d been involved with in whatever town they’d come from. And set about flouting every rule ever devised by their superiors. They would have one man doing the thieving, another one watching out, another passing the goods to a fence—that is a receiver and handler of stolen goods. There were forgers and coiners, and confidence tricksters…’
‘Oh! Forgers! Do you think that reference…?’
Lord Becconsall smiled at her. ‘It is possible. Very possible.’
Lord Rawcliffe coughed. ‘I hate to interrupt you, but the rest of us in this room have no idea what you are talking about.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Harriet. ‘It is just that the girl suspected of being the jewel thief in our household was given a reference by an elderly lady who never sets foot from her home in Dorset. And the girl herself came from Norfolk. So how could they possibly have met?’
‘Not in itself conclusive evidence a forgery has been employed.’
‘No, but…’ She sighed in exasperation. ‘I am not explaining this very clearly. You see, at first, when I started asking the servants what they knew, they all got very annoyed with me. But then, when Lord Tarbrook had me shut in my room, they began to relent.’
At her side, on the sofa, she was aware of Lord Becconsall stiffening. If it was because she’d just said Lord Tarbrook had shut her in her room, then he wasn’t as bright as everyone thought, for she’d told him, by way of her story, about being shut in. She glanced at him to see he was gazing at her with what looked like admiration, though why on earth he should do any such thing, at this point in her narrative, she couldn’t imagine.
‘Anyway,’ she continued informing the others, ‘by the time he threw us out—me and Mama, that is—they were beginning to see that all I wanted was to clear Aunt Susan’s name, not send one of them, wrongfully, to the gallows. And they’d all been talking amongst themselves, and remembered this girl who’d worked for Lady Tarbrook for only a few weeks, a couple of years ago.’
‘Two years ago? Then…the criminals must have been running this rig—which is what they call deceiving their victims,’ Lord Becconsall explained, ‘for some considerable time.’
‘My grandmother,’ put in Archie, ‘died six months ago.’
‘I wonder how many other thefts there have been in the interim,’ Lord Becconsall pondered. ‘Because I cannot see them leaving a great gap between one operation and the next, not if the method had such a successful outcome.’
‘You are assuming the theft of the Kellett rubies took place only six months ago,’ pointed out Lord Rawcliffe. ‘Your jewel thief may have taken them at the same time as she took the Tarbrook parure. Each theft was only discovered upon the event of an impending betrothal, or burial,’ he said, as though either fate was an equally horrid one.
‘Well, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know,’ Harriet answered. ‘Because nobody will talk about the copying of jewels, will they? Because they will think that it means someone in their family is concealing debts.’
‘My word, but whoever thought this up must be brilliant,’ said Lord Becconsall. ‘First they have the jewels copied, to delay discovery, and then they relied on the people concerned bickering amongst themselves about who may be responsible, rather than reporting it as theft at all. Hiding their crime under two layers of concealment.’
‘They might have been doing this for years…’ breathed Harriet.
‘Until you believed in the innocence of one of their victims,’ said Lord Becconsall with a look in his eyes that she could not mistake this time. He really did look as though he admired her.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘Tell us everything you have managed to discover.’
‘Well, not much more than I’ve already told you. Maud only had the time it took
us to pack my things to tell me what the servants suspected, because Lord Tarbrook wanted us out of his house almost as quickly as Mama wished to leave. Maud only managed to tell me that they became suspicious about this one particular girl because although she said she was leaving because she’d got a better place, to their knowledge she wasn’t actually in service anywhere any longer.’
‘The better offer might have come from a man,’ Lord Rawcliffe put in.
‘I suppose it might,’ Harriet conceded. ‘Except that even in that case, somebody would have caught sight of her, wouldn’t they? Parading about the park in her new finery? And also, she wasn’t very attractive. Nor flirtatious. A little mouse, was the way Maud described her. Which makes her sound like the perfect person to creep into my aunt’s house and sneak out again as soon as she’d accomplished what she’d set out to do. Oh, dear,’ she added. ‘I sound as if I’ve found her guilty already. Just because she didn’t fit in with the other servants and she didn’t bother to tell any of them where she intended to go when she left. For whatever reason.’
‘Well, isn’t that another reason not to employ Bow Street Runners? They would be more concerned about appearing to apprehend a culprit, than finding out the truth.’
Harriet sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose so. I certainly want to find her and make her answer a few questions. Even if she isn’t involved, directly, she might know something…’
‘We shall find her, Lady Harriet,’ said Lord Becconsall gently. ‘But we won’t apprehend her unless we are sure she is guilty. You have my word.’
‘And how are we to find her,’ said Lord Rawcliffe witheringly, ‘when the servants claim to have no idea where she has gone?’
‘Well, we could start looking in the village where she came from. It’s called Bogholt—’
Lord Rawcliffe let out a bark of laughter. ‘If there is really any such place I shall be very surprised.’
‘Well, be surprised then,’ Harriet retorted, ‘because I found it on a map. Somebody there is bound to know of her, if she really came from there, because it is only a tiny hamlet. In the Forest of Thetford.’
Convenient Bride for the Soldier & the Major Meets His Match & Secret Lessons With the Rake (9781488021718) Page 42