Lady Rogue

by Theresa Romain

  Callum knew exactly how the sentence ought to finish. “He was not always gracious to his wife? His ward?”

  “As you say.”

  The breeze whipped up again, forcing Callum to clap a hand atop his head to hold his hat on. “There was no inquest, no postmortem for Mr. Morrow. His death was determined to be an accident.”

  An inclination of the butler’s head.

  “Would you tell me,” Callum asked, “if you knew how he had died?”

  Selby turned toward the door. Taking a handkerchief from a pocket, he rubbed at a smudge on the brass doorknocker. “I do not know.”

  “You don’t know how he died, or whether you would tell me?”

  “Both,” said Selby, and his usually blank face took on a troubled expression. “Either. I do not know the answer to either one.”

  Callum squinted up at the first story, as if a memory of Isabel, or of Andrew Morrow, might be made visible in the windows.

  There was nothing there, of course.

  “That’s all right. You’ve told me enough for now.” Before he left, he took a bit of pencil from his pocket, scribbled a reply on Isabel’s note, and left it with the butler.

  It was a bit of a test. For her, or for himself, he didn’t know. There was something about this Lombard Street house that inspired questions but never granted answers.

  Chapter Fifteen

  At home in my rooms on James Street today. Seven o’clock. Wanted to see if you’d like to call upon me.

  —C

  This was the note Callum had left with Selby for Isabel. He hadn’t been able to resist aping her own breezy style. Nor had he been able to keep from looking out of the window every few minutes beginning at half six, when he returned to his rooms. Until the landaulet pulled up in front of the house in which Callum rented rooms, he hadn’t known if she’d come.

  But here she was, sharp at seven o’clock. He thundered down the stairs to meet her, pulling up only at the entryway to open the door in a dignified manner. She smiled up at him, her feathered hat drizzle-draggled and cloak beaded with dew, and he had never seen a lovelier sight in his life.

  “Shall I tell Jacoby to wait? Is this call to be a proper fifteen minutes?”

  Callum suppressed a smile. “As you’re visiting a bachelor in his lodgings, there’s not much that’s proper about this call.”

  “Why do you think I came?” She grinned, then ran down the steps to put a word in the ear of her coachman. He nodded, and as she mounted the steps again, clucked at the pair of bays drawing the landaulet.

  “I’ll find my way home somehow,” Isabel confided when she reached Callum’s side again. “I’ve a purse, so I can hire a hackney. Or you can walk me home in the moonlight as if we’re courting.”

  She didn’t quite look at him as she said this. Shy? Teasing? He wasn’t sure. “I’ll see you home safely,” he said. “Come on inside.”

  Once the door was closed and they stood on the landing, he asked, “Why did you come? I wasn’t sure you would.”

  “I tried to get you to attend a dinner party at my house, and you wouldn’t do it. I thought maybe you would feed me if I came over here.”

  “But Lady Isabel Morrow doesn’t eat between meals,” he teased. “She told me so herself.”

  She shrugged. “I can always make an exception. And . . . well, I wanted to see you. Where you live, and—and all that.”

  He took her cloak; she apologized for the rain shaken onto the floor of the entryway. “It only just started spitting when we were a street or two away, and I decided to hurry here instead of putting up the cover of the landaulet.”

  “Not to worry.” Once she unpinned her hat, he took it from her in his other hand. “My landlady is the cleanest and thriftiest sort you’ll ever meet. She’ll use the water to scrub the floor.”

  “Resourceful,” Isabel commented. “I’m glad she won’t fault me.”

  As if Mrs. Sockett, a widow who had worked almost all her six decades, would cast blame on a noblewoman for dripping a bit of rain on the floor. Isabel took for granted her noble birth; no one without it would do the same.

  But all he said was: “Come and have some tea. It’s the sort you liked before.” He kept Mrs. Sockett supplied with tea leaves, and she brewed it whenever someone came to call.

  Callum led the way into the room his landlady used as a parlor. Despite her pinched financial state, she had a soft spot for bright things. Shawls to cover shabby spots on the chintz furniture, bowls of glass beads to cover a worn place on a table—or just an empty one.

  As soon as Isabel had seated herself in a chair, Mrs. Sockett bustled in with a tea tray. She was a sturdy woman, her skin lined and rough. Only since Mr. Sockett’s death in a brewery accident five years ago had his widow achieved both peace and financial stability. Callum took three rooms on the second story of her house, a poet lived in the attics, and a trio of day maids shared the servant quarters.

  Callum had told her he might have a visitor, and judging from her speed with the tea tray, he had not been the only one looking out the window. His landlady was as curious as she was thrifty.

  There was no place to set down a tea tray unless one moved a porcelain doll, a vase holding dried flowers that gave the room a powdery scent, a crocheted sort of star-looking thing that went under the vase, and a gilded tin snuffbox. So Callum did, promising—as he did every time—to replace them exactly where they had been.

  Isabel introduced herself to the older woman, then added, “He has a talent for remembering where items go. He has tidied up in my house more than once.”

  Had he? He had, at that. One time, he’d replaced the fripperies atop her pianoforte. The night before last, he had removed all signs of his presence from her bedchamber. She wouldn’t want anyone to know he’d been there, he assumed. They didn’t belong in each other’s spaces.

  But Callum had seen Isabel in an elegant drawing room, in a stony Vauxhall grotto, the prosaic Bow Street courtroom, and now a modest parlor on James Street. As she chatted with Callum’s landlady as if they were acquaintances of long standing, he could only conclude: Lady Isabel Morrow had the gift of fitting perfectly into her surroundings no matter where she was.

  “Shall I pour out, Officer?” Isabel addressed him formally. “Mrs. Sockett, thank you for providing the tray.”

  “As if I can’t find a few niceties for such a caller! Now, I’ll leave you alone, even though it’s my parlor, for an Officer of the Police always has business to discuss.”

  “He does.” Isabel’s eye held a mischievous twinkle. “And he is always so chatty about it. I cannot think when we’ll conclude our talk.”

  “Ha.” Callum sat on the one remaining chair, which had a hard wooden seat and a back that would jab one in the spine unless one sat perfectly straight. So he did.

  “It is quite true,” Isabel said. “Chatter, chatter, chatter, it is all he does. But never mind my woes. I cannot thank you enough for the loan of your parlor, Mrs. Sockett.”

  With a blush and a bow and a curtsy and . . . a step from a country dance? . . . their hostess departed, shutting the parlor door behind her.

  “She’s going to listen at the door,” Callum said.

  “Then what shall we talk about?”

  He arched a brow. “Eager as you were to put words in my mouth, you didn’t think of something?”

  “I’m your guest. You invited me. You should entertain me.”

  “Well. We don’t have to talk at all. We could do . . . something else.”

  She dropped the sugar tongs. “Surely she would overhear that.”

  “Just making a suggestion,” he said.

  Since she didn’t seem inclined to serve the tea after all, he slid from the chair to sit on the floor before the tea tray and serve himself. Black and strong and almost boiling, the tea poured out just as he liked it into a cup that didn’t match its saucer.

  “Here’s something you might want to know,” he offered, and told her of Butl
er’s time in the courtroom. “With your statement about the duke still having La Primavera, Butler was certain he’d be released.”

  She leaned forward, propping her elbows atop her thighs. The angle permitted him a fine view of the tops of her breasts, rounding over the edge of her bodice. “I wish he’d burned the thing,” she said in a low tone, to avoid being overheard. “Though perhaps he couldn’t bear to. He was proud of his work.”

  “He’s earned his living copying the art of others. I can’t fault him for trying to get a bit of notice now. A first step to being recognized in his own right.”

  “I didn’t care for the way the Royal Academy recognized him.” Isabel laid heavy scorn on the verb. “But he was canny. Ardmore can’t admit publicly that he lost the painting. Unfortunately, Ardmore isn’t grateful that he gained one of greater value.”

  She told Callum of the note summoning her to Ardmore House, her conversation with the duke. Callum whistled. “So Ardmore knew he had a fake, and he wants it back—so he can defraud Angelus?” He shook his head. “The idea makes a man need a stiff drink. I wish I had some whisky for this tea.”

  “It seems foolhardy,” Isabel agreed, “to pay one’s debts with something without value. I am gladder than ever that we switched the paintings, knowing how reckless Ardmore is. The fakery would be sure to be found out, and Morrow’s reputation would suffer, and Lucy through him.”

  “We can’t have that.” Callum sipped at his tea, enjoying the mellow heat across his tongue. “I believe all shall be well. You and Butler and Ardmore are in a circle of mutually assured silence.”

  “And so, on with everyday life?”

  “Such as it is.”

  She smiled, though she looked distracted. “About that, Callum. I am going to buy a new house. The one in Bedford Square that I mentioned.”

  “Congratulations. Yes?”

  “Yes, though before I move households I shall have to clear out the hidden room. I wonder if I could hide the stored items at Butler’s.”

  “Not secure enough.” Callum sipped again, thinking over the nooks in his rented rooms. Could he take all those costly paintings? No, no. He couldn’t store them here either, for reasons both of privacy and ethics. But maybe Cass could take charge of them, since she wasn’t truly an officer.

  No, Cass and Charles lodged together. And while Callum trusted to Cass’s discretion, Charles was loud as a bugle when he got a drink in him.

  “I will let you know,” he decided, “if I think of a place that might do.”

  “Thank you for that,” she said. “I envy you your resources.”

  “My resources? Do tell. I live in three rooms. You are about to own two houses.”

  She picked up the sugar tongs and snapped them at him like a crab’s claw. “I shouldn’t have to remind an investigator that there are many resources other than money.”

  “Such as?” He took another drink of tea, insolently long.

  “Information. Experience. Physical strength.” Dropping the tongs, she eyed him. “Being male.”

  He choked, rattling the cup into its saucer.

  “I feel I’ve lived a whole year in the past week,” she said. “And it is time. Past time. For I’ve passed almost eighteen months in which nothing much has happened at all, save for one time I went to Vauxhall.”

  Idly, he stretched out his legs. The effect would have been more sensual had his damaged boot not caught on the carpet. “You liked the fireworks, did you?”

  “You know I did.”

  It was clear that this was neither the time nor the place for yet more fireworks. Glad though he was that she’d called on him, this wasn’t a good place for private conversation either.

  But it was a good opportunity to see whether she could—or wanted to—fit into his life. And there was another such opportunity waiting, only a few doors down.

  He bounded to his feet, extending a hand. “Let’s go to the grocery instead.”

  She sat upright at once. “To your family’s grocery? You’re going to take me there?”

  So delighted did she look that he had to lower her expectations. “It’s only a shop. It’s not a trip to Paris.”

  “I know, but—you want me to go with you.” She put her hand in his, and his fingers closed around hers as if they belonged together. “Let’s be off.”

  Mrs. Sockett withdrew tactfully when they opened the parlor door, busying her hands with a dusting cloth. “Quiet as mice in there, you were! Didn’t hear a squeak out of you.” She sounded disappointed.

  “Officer Jenks is most refined,” said Isabel. “He speaks low, yet I am transfixed by his every word.”

  Callum rolled his eyes. “Lady Isabel is hilarious. That is all.”

  Mrs. Sockett looked mystified, but she bade them a cheerful farewell as Callum clapped on his hat and Isabel again donned her outerwear. The feathers in her hat were still damp and stringy, and she laughed as she pinned it into place.

  “I look like a wet hen. No help for it, though. If you’ll lead the way?”

  They went a very little distance before Isabel halted, squinting in the fading light of evening. “This shop is for sale. Look at this card in the window.”

  This was Morrison’s shop. The one Callum’s parents wanted to pillage; the one his brother Jamie wanted to own. The sign that hung above the door said simply TEA, white-painted letters deeply carved in wood stained a dark brown.

  Isabel had all but pressed her face against the window. Callum’s mouth twitched. “Do you want to go in?”

  Of course she did.

  Inside the tea shop, all was fragrant and dim. It was like being inside a teapot, minus the boiling water. Everywhere were leaves in barrels and bins and packets and parcels; one could buy leaves by the cup or the bushel depending on the depth of one’s pockets.

  Just now, the shop was empty of customers, and Morrison himself came forward to greet them. Tall and homely, his bald head was fringed by fluffy gray-blond hair. His long nose was almost as good as a hound’s, at least when it came to scenting the difference between teas from China and Bengal, tea picked too early or brewed too long.

  He had known the Jenks family since before Callum’s birth. After a familiar greeting between the neighbors, Morrison and Isabel were introduced as well.

  “I noticed the card in the window,” Isabel said. “Will you tell me about your shop?”

  “Considering a change of profession, is our officer?” Morrison’s eyes twinkled.

  “Not me,” said Callum. “Though I know someone who’s interested.”

  Isabel looked at him curiously, but Morrison was already replying. “Not much to tell, t’be sure. What you see here is what there is to the shop. It’s been a delight, but I’ve been alone since my wife died. Just came into a bit o’ money and thought I’d pick up stakes. Move to the seaside, get a cottage near where one o’ my daughters lives.”

  “That sounds lovely,” Isabel said warmly. “I am sorry for the loss of your wife, but so glad you will be able to live near family.”

  Was she flicking a barb in Callum’s direction? He didn’t know if she yet realized just how close he lived to his family, and how indifferent they were to his proximity.

  “It sounds like a happy retirement,” he told Morrison, “and I’m pleased for you. Never has there been such a neighbor as you.”

  “I’ll do my best to get a good one for you in my place,” beamed the old man.

  “About that. I wonder, would you sell the whole shop—lock, stock, barrel, and tea leaves as well as the building?”

  “To your mystery person who’s interested?” Morrison screwed up his face, then nodded. “Right-o. Tell him to come on by anytime, and we’ll talk it over. I’ve loved the work. Sure would like to see the shop go to someone who’d care for it.” He looked wistfully out the window at the carved-wood sign.

  “That,” Callum said, “I think I can promise you. He’ll contact you soon.”

  When they left the tea shop
only to turn into the next storefront, Isabel’s brows lifted. “So close?”

  “It’s farther than it seems,” Callum replied shortly. The jingle of the bell at the door alerted his mother, who looked up with a friendly smile of welcome. When she saw who had entered, her smile fell.

  “Callum! It’s not your day, then. Is something wrong?” Then the smile returned. “You’ve brought the pork I wanted!”

  Isabel looked over her shoulder, then down at herself. “I . . .”

  Despite the tension that always tugged at his shoulders when he entered the grocery, Callum fought not to smile. “No, I didn’t bring pork. I brought a friend.”

  Friend wasn’t the right word to refer to Isabel, but it wasn’t wrong either.

  Davina lifted the countertop gate and eased through, almost hiding her disappointment. “Ah, well, we can get along without the pork, right enough. So who’s this, then?”

  Yet again, there were introductions to be completed—this time, with everyone who worked at the shop, or lived above the shop, or happened to be in the shop, or was walking by the shop and happened to knock against the door. Or so it seemed to Callum.

  Jamie was there, flexing his arms as much as possible as he carried a not-very-heavy bag of dry beans past Celia. Yes, even Celia had come downstairs, drawn by the curious clamor. It was good to see her break her solitude.

  Callum pulled Jamie aside when he could, told him what Morrison had revealed in the tea shop. “He’s not going belly-up. He wants to be nearer family.”

  Jamie slung the sack of beans over his shoulder. The tips of his ears were red, his color high. “You’re sure about that? And he’ll take—”

  “I don’t know what he’ll take for it. If he knows how much you want it, he’ll probably take less.”

  Jamie scowled. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “He’s coming at the sale from a place of fondness, not of desperation. Keep that in mind, and the shop can be yours.”

  There. One errand done. He’d bring the pork on his usual Friday visit.

  He looked for Isabel, smiling at the memory of her confusion when his mother asked about pork. Slim and stylish in her gray, how could she have thought Davina referred to her?