Thieves Break In

by Cristina Sumners

  Knowing very well why this man attracted her so devastatingly didn’t lessen the effect.

  So she further established herself as one of the Oxford cognoscenti (and therefore worthy of his full attention) by asking simply, “What college?”

  “I’m from a long line of Nosemen,” Kit informed her solemnly.

  If he thought he might stump her with this bit of insider vocabulary, he was very much mistaken. “And I,” Kathryn answered with equal solemnity, “I am one of the very first Nosewomen.”

  Thus they had informed each other that they had both been students at Brasenose College, universally acknowledged as having the silliest name among all the Oxford colleges.

  Kit was regarding Kathryn with nothing less than delight, but suddenly he seemed to remember Will, whom he had effectively ousted from the conversation. He waved a hand at his friend. “Will was at B.N.C. too. We were there together.”

  Kathryn took her eyes away from the object of her growing desire and turned again to his companion. “Really? When was that?”

  It emerged that they had just managed to miss each other, Kathryn having been in the H.C.R. (Hulme Common Room; i.e., she had been a graduate student) two years after the men had left the J.C.R. (Junior Common Room; i.e., they had been undergraduates).

  They swapped anecdotes about the more colorful members of the Senior Common Room (the faculty), the martinet in the Porter’s Lodge (their college having been widely reputed to have the rudest Head Porter in Oxford), and the terminally grumpy groundskeeper who rejoiced in the incredibly Dickensian name of Doggerel.

  Other college stories inevitably followed. Will had Kathryn in stitches with the lurid tale of his and Kit’s twenty-first birthday party (their birthdays being only eleven days apart, they had celebrated them together since they were schoolboys); the two of them, accompanied by several other drunken “Nose” friends, had spectacularly failed to duplicate a legendary Brasenose College stunt involving the theft of a deer from Magdalen College deer park.

  Kit hardly let him finish before he said, “That reminds me. What we were doing in London today, actually, was having a late-ish birthday party for ourselves. Will was inconsiderately in New York last April so we couldn’t do the thing at the proper time, so we figured we could do it this month and call it our long-play vinyl birthday.”

  Kathryn looked at Kit’s mischievous little smile and informed him that he was a rat and that she hated riddles.

  “You’re right,” he admitted, “not very gentlemanly, is it, testing people like that? I do beg your pardon. I mean that we are—”

  “Thirty-three and a third,” she said.

  Will chuckled and pronounced judiciously, “Alpha plus.”

  Kit protested, “I thought you said you hated riddles.”

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t solve them, does it?”

  Will asked Kit if he needed a towel to staunch the bleeding, but Kit just laughed and moaned, “I grovel, I grovel!”

  Kathryn was wondering if Kit would be at all bothered if he knew she was thirty-five; she decided she would keep that information to herself for a while unless directly asked for it. As a card-carrying feminist she was ashamed of this decision, and felt the need for a change of subject.

  “What keeps you fellows busy,” she asked, “when you’re not celebrating birthdays?”

  Will started to say something but Kit interrupted him to say, “We’re farmers.”

  “Pull the other one,” said Kathryn, using the British version of “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “No, really,” Kit assured her, “although we are flattered by your skepticism. One would hate to think one looked like a farmer.” The last part of this speech was directed, with an assumed shudder, at Will.

  There was a private joke there, Kathryn realized, as Will grinned and riposted, “Better a farmer than a—”

  “Shut up!” Kit commanded, as Will simultaneously said, “Mockie!” Or at least, that’s what it sounded like to Kathryn. She started to ask what a Mockie was, but Kit was speaking to her again.

  “Truth is, I was going to be a secret agent or a stunt pilot or perhaps a professional gambler, but fate intervened by summoning my uncle to his eternal reward and leaving my entirely useless aunt—”

  “Almost entirely useless aunt,” Will interrupted in a spirit of fairness.

  “Almost entirely useless aunt,” Kit agreed with a gracious nod in Will’s direction, “squawking hysterically about having nobody to turn to and what oh what oh my deary me what was she going to do about the”—there was a tiny hesitation—“all the things she had to take care of, the house and the farm and all, and the long and short of it is, she twisted my arm into abandoning my plans for a life of adventure and going back to Hole-in-the-Wallwood to take care of the house and the farm.”

  “He’s lying through his teeth,” Will told Kathryn. “He loves it, and he would have made a terrible professional gambler anyway, a ten-year-old could beat him at cards—”

  “I beg your pardon! Precisely what ten-year-old do you fancy in that role?”

  “It’s true and you know it! If you get a good hand, everyone in the room can read it right off your freckled face as if it were—”

  But Kathryn ignored the jesting squabble and interjected pointedly, “Wallwood?”

  They looked at her in surprise.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve heard of it,” said Kit.

  The sparkle of the conversation died for Kathryn, as she felt the cloud come back over her spirits, felt the lead weight again.

  “Yes, I’m going there on Saturday. My cous—” She stopped, swallowed the last syllable of the word, got control of her voice, and continued, “My cousin was working there. He just, ah, died in an accident. Wait; if you live in Wallwood, do you know Sir Gregory St. John Hyphen-Something?”

  Both men stared at her for two seconds, then simultaneously burst into questions (“You’re Rob Hillman’s cousin? You’re Rob’s Cousin Katy?”) and exclamations (“How extraordinary! We’re invited to the Castle to meet you!”), while Kathryn endeavored not to cringe— or cry—at being referred to as “Katy,” which no one had called her since she was seventeen except for Rob, who had done it mostly to annoy her.

  They consoled her on her loss in such a frightfully English manner that she found herself hard put not to smile. Rob had been “a capital fellow,” “a jolly decent chap,” everyone had been “shocked, stunned really.” It appeared that their admiration for Rob had been genuine, and their grief, if moderate, was sincere; thus, although the conversation turned somber, the easy harmony that had charmed the miles from London remained intact. In fact, Kathryn’s heretofore joyless errand to Datchworth Castle became the vehicle for the formation of definite plans for the three of them to meet again. In the midst of this comforting process, Will glanced out the train window.

  “Good God, we’re there already.”

  “Dreaming Spires ahead?” Kit asked.

  “Hard upon us,” Will replied regretfully.

  Kit once more leaned toward Kathryn with an extended hand. “Shortest run from Paddington to Oxford in living memory,” he pronounced.

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Kathryn replied, placing her hand in his and finding his grip firmer than it had been before, and more reluctant to let go. She allowed herself to be held in that electric blue gaze for perhaps a second longer than was wise before turning to Will. “It was a pleasure to meet you,” she assured him, shaking his less significant hand.

  “Ring me,” Kit ordered, “the instant you get to the Castle.” He was holding out a card, which Kathryn took. “You must come for a meal. Oh!” there was touch of embarrassment, a hint of afterthought. “I mean to say, Will’s house is just down the road from mine; we, um, could meet there.” Then he made a quick recovery: “But the grub’s better at my place!”

  “He’s right,” Will admitted. “Let’s meet at Kit’s.”

  “It’s a date,” Kathryn promised, m
ustering a smile and sharing it equally (she hoped) between them as she rose and left the compartment. She made hastily for the door at the end of the carriage, descended to the platform, and received her bags from the sullen man in the guard’s van in exchange for a tip so exuberantly generous that he almost looked grateful.

  Back in the compartment, Kit was imploring his oldest and best friend to tell him the truth.

  “I am telling you the truth. I might as well have been your grandmother, for all the interest she showed in me.”

  “I didn’t imagine it, then? She really did—” Kit faltered.

  “Prefer you to me?” his sapient companion supplied.

  Kit, long acquainted with Will’s ability to read his thoughts as if they were indeed printed on his freckled face, was not discomfited. “Yes. Did she prefer me to you?”

  “I’m trying to tell you, she didn’t even see me. I’ve never been so humiliatingly ignored. I’ve half a mind to throw you off the train in a jealous rage.”

  “She really liked me.” Kit closed his eyes and savored the unexpected blessing. “Liked me.”

  “Liked you? I’m surprised she didn’t jump you. Never saw a woman so besotted, so fast, in my life.”

  Because they were men, not women, and English, not American, they did not say, Will to Kit, “I’m so thrilled for you,” and Kit to Will, “Bless you for being so generous.” But they both understood exactly what the emotional score was.

  It was Kit who, as the train once more lurched into motion, expressed the other thing they were both thinking, and both gleeful about: “And she doesn’t know about either of the Beasts!”

  Christopher Mallowan, Seventh Marquis of Wallwood, regarded himself as afflicted by two beastly handicaps when it came to finding that elusive dream, True Love. “The Greater Beast” (greater only in the sense of being physically larger) was a combined package of wealth, title, and ancestral mansion so powerfully attractive to the opposite sex that he spent half his time trying to get rid of women who found him, plain Kit, only moderately attractive but who were nevertheless quite determined to marry the other him, Lord Wallwood.

  “The Lesser Beast” (again, the measure being purely of physical size) in and of itself was a minor problem. Initially devastating, over the years it had become something Kit simply coped with. But when it came to women and their feelings about him, it was a demon from Hell.

  Chapter 8

  FEBRUARY 1997

  Five Months Before Rob Hillman’s Death

  Meg Daventry had never liked having to wake up on winter mornings before it was light. But in February it wasn’t light until after eight, and since it was a good forty-five minutes’ drive from Datchworth back to Oxford, and she had a nine o’clock lecture at the St. Cross Building, she had resolutely set her alarm for an hour that would force her to fumble for it in the dark. She was dressed, if still yawning, when a soft tap at the door announced the arrival of her breakfast. Meg had discovered years ago that it was actually less trouble for the servants to bring a tray to her room than to serve a meal for one in the dining room at dawn. Still, it felt like an almost indecent luxury.

  “Oh, Jenny, that’s lovely. You are a sweetheart. Yes, this is all I’ll need; you go back to the kitchen and tell Mrs. Drundle she’s a sweetheart, too.”

  Jenny retired, giggling: in the opinion of the junior staff, Mrs. Drundle was far too fierce a figure to be anybody’s sweetheart.

  Meg hastened through her porridge, toast, and tea, donned her coat against the chill of the castle corridors, and set off on the two-minute walk from her bedroom to the front door. She carried nothing but her handbag, as there was never any need to bring luggage for an overnight stay at home; everything from pajamas to toothbrush to suitable dresses for dinner were all there waiting for her. It meant that popping home to see Uncle Greg was a doddle, which in turn meant she did it frequently, which suited both of them. She found Crumper in the entrance hall, holding her long woolen scarf and driving gloves.

  “You spoil me, you know,” she admonished him.

  “I do, don’t I?” he responded amiably, handing over her scarf and gloves one item at a time as she put them on. “Your car has been brought ’round. The motor’s been running, and the heater of course, for five minutes. I hope you will find it warm enough.”

  “Crumper, whatever would I do without you?”

  “I imagine, Miss Meg, that you would live in the squalor of student lodgings and entirely forget what civilized life is like.”

  One of the compensating factors in these early departures was that Crumper, alone with a single member of the Family and sure none of the other staff could overhear him, was likely to make quite unbutlerish remarks.

  Meg left the house with a smile and a wave, got into her car, and glanced at the dashboard clock as she drove out of the gates. She was in good time; she would make the lecture. The car was warm, the roads were dry, and the gas gauge, as always after a night at Datchworth, showed full. (Amazing staff Uncle Greg had, right out of Edwardian times.) But the reason Meg felt as though her cup was most agreeably running over was none of these comforts. It was what had happened the previous night at dinner.

  Dinner had been served early, of course, as it always was at the Castle, on account of Sir Gregory’s health. He talked jokingly of “country hours,” but the truth was that he had to be in bed by nine-thirty. So they had sat down in the State Dining Room, all ten of them, at seven. The original plan had been for delicious but informal fare to be served in the summer lunchroom for the three of the English Heritage team who preferred to eat before driving off into the night, plus a light invalid’s supper for Sir Gregory in the Family Dining Room. The kitchen staff had known by early afternoon that there might be one guest joining the Baronet. But dinner for ten?

  Mrs. Drundle had surpassed herself. How she had done it, God only knew. The table glittered with the postrestoration silver the Family had been accumulating ever since 1660, but that was to be expected; it was ready to hand, after all. Onto this elegant board, however, there appeared in all the proper stages a formal dinner from soup to nuts, and it tasted as good at it looked.

  All five of the English Heritage team had elected to stay; such an invitation, even for people in their line of work, was a rare opportunity and not to be passed by. Sir Gregory had persuaded both Kit and Will to dine with them as well, and with Meg and Derek, that had made a fuller table than Meg had seen at Datchworth in years.

  She was at the opposite end of the table from her uncle, being (for lack of any other) the Lady of the House on these occasions. Trained in courtesy from her cradle, she had concentrated on setting at their ease the two English Heritage employees who had been allotted places on either side of her. Both were nice enough chaps; one of them was lively and funny, and the other one was cute and smart if slightly ponderous in conversation, and neither was too terribly old for her. But Meg had felt no desire to stir the conversation in such a way as to give rise to sparks. Her eighteen-year-old fancy was elsewhere occupied.

  Still, she had enjoyed the party; it was lovely to see Uncle Greg in such good spirits, Derek wasn’t teasing her for a change, and Kit and Will were always great fun. And she had gotten to run the uncle joke, which she enjoyed. It was wonderful to watch people’s faces as they tried to decide whether or not she was pulling their legs.

  “So,” said Davey, on her right, “you live with your uncle when you’re not at Oxford.”

  “With one of my uncles. I have three uncles, and two and a half of them are sitting at this table.”

  Davey laughed and Bert looked dubious. Davey immediately threw himself into the puzzle.

  “Right, then, one of them is obviously Sir Gregory, since you were introduced as his niece.”

  Meg smiled mischievously. “That was the easy bit.” “Too right. Who else have we got? Hang on, that Derek bloke, they said he was Sir Gregory’s nephew?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “So Derek could be your
cousin, of course, but he could also be your uncle, couldn’t he?”

  Meg rewarded him with a grin. “Two down and one half to go.”

  But Davey couldn’t figure it out, and Bert didn’t seem to want to play. In the end Meg explained: “Sir Gregory is my great-grandmother’s brother. Derek is my grandmother’s brother. That’s two uncles. And Will Tandulkar”—she gestured toward the dark, handsome man who was making Miranda Roghaar laugh very loudly— “is my mother’s half brother, which makes him my half uncle, or so he tells me, and his twin brother is my other half uncle and between them they make a whole uncle. Total number of uncles, three.”

  Davey loved it, but Bert said pedantically that he didn’t think there was such a thing as a half uncle. Meg sighed. What a wet blanket! she thought.

  Oddly enough, however, it was Bert who had made the dinner party a source of lasting joy to Meg. He did it unwittingly, of course. He merely asked if her uncle Sir Gregory planned to hire anybody to catalog the manuscripts they’d found behind the wall. Not nearly so important as the silver, he admitted. But it should probably be done anyway. Might turn out to have some really interesting papers about the family and the Civil War. After all, somebody had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide them from Cromwell.

  There was a brief silence after these remarks while both men waited for Meg to respond. She was looking at Bert as if she were in a trance, but after two seconds she seemed to recover. She told him his suggestion was excellent, and she would see to it that Uncle Greg followed his advice.

  At the point in the evening when, in days gone by, the ladies would have left the table for the drawing room while the men remained to smoke and drink port, the custom at Datchworth was for everyone to rise and change places. Meg excused herself to Davey and Bert, maneuvered quickly around Kit and Derek, and plumped herself down next to her senior uncle. She put a hand on Sir Gregory’s shoulder and leaned close, excitedly putting forward her suggestion.