Almost a Princess (14 page)

“You think he may try to blow up Twickenham House?”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“Well, you’re right. That’s exactly what he’s up to.”

“How do you know?”

“Gunpowder. We found it in the wine cellar, the coal cellar, and even under the floor of the picture gallery.” Waldo’s gaze was still trained on Case and Jane.

Robert’s jaw was slack. “G-gunpowder?” he stammered.

“Oh, don’t worry. It’s not there now. Case wants to talk to all of us after everyone goes home. He’ll bring you up to date.”

“But what made you think in the first place that Piers would attack Twickenham House?”

“It was the delay.”

“What delay?”

“After Collier was murdered. We all thought Bow Street was incompetent. And they were, of course. But if Piers wanted to, he would have found a way to let Case know he had risen from the ashes. Something must have happened to make him hold off.”

“And what was it?”

“Our speaker fell deathly ill and the reunion had to be postponed.”

“That’s circumstantial evidence and very flimsy, if you want my view.”

“That’s what we thought, but we changed our minds when we found the gunpowder.”

With elbows on the table, he leaned toward his companion. “Tell me frankly, Robert,” he said. “What do you think my chances are with Miss Mayberry?”

“Nonexistent,” snapped Robert, who was still reeling from the shock of Waldo’s words. “Case wants her for himself.”

Waldo sighed theatrically. “Yes, that’s what I think, too.”

As Jane opened the door to her chamber, Lance brushed by her and entered first. He had the run of the house, as Case had promised, but Lance wasn’t comfortable with crowds, so mostly he found a quiet spot where he would not be disturbed. He smelled of wind and rain, and Jane knew that Harper must have taken him out for his nightly ramble.

When she was ready for bed, Jane did not blow out the candle. She donned her robe and sat at the window, listening to the sounds of the house settling in for the night. Her room had a view of the front of the house, and she could see lights in the gatehouse at the entrance to Marylebone. Lance sat beside her, alert, sensing that something was going on, but betraying no impatience.

When Jane’s head lifted, so did his. The soft thud of footsteps passed, going along the corridor. Jane picked up the candle and made for the door. Lance followed.

In the corridor, she found Ruggles, the red-haired, freckle-faced footman. Although he was obviously surprised to see her, she wasn’t surprised to see him.

“Miss Mayberry,” he said, “is something wrong?”

She had her pretext ready. “No, no. I could not sleep and thought I’d go to the library and find a book to read.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“That isn’t necessary. I can find my own way.”

For a moment, he seemed nonplussed, then he said easily, “It’s no trouble, and I doubt that Lady Sophy would be pleased if she knew I’d allowed you to wander around the house in the dark.”

Jane smiled at this and allowed a moment or two of silence to fall as they navigated the stairs. “It’s Mr. Ruggles, is it not?” When he nodded, she continued, “I thought I recognized you. You’re Lord Castleton’s man.”

There was only the briefest hesitation before he acknowledged that he was, indeed, Lord Castleton’s man. “You might say I’m on loan to Lady Sophy for as long as she needs me.”

He was good. Very smooth. He should have been an actor.

Having discovered what she wished to know, that she was, indeed, under guard, she lost no time in choosing a book and returning to her room. “Is everybody in Castleton’s pay?” she demanded of Lance, tossing her book on the bed.

As soon as the word
Castleton
was out of her mouth, Lance pricked up his ears and began to sniff the air. “Castleton,” she repeated, testing him, and his tail began to wag. He looked hopefully at the door.

“Not you as well!” She shook her head. “So that’s why he’s given you the run of the house. You’re guarding me too.”

She threw off her robe and picked up the book she’d thrown down.
“Pride and Prejudice,”
she said aloud. “Elizabeth Bennet is my favorite character of all time. But as for Darcy,” she made a face. “I shall never understand what she saw in him.”

She put the book down and scratched Lance’s ears. “She would have been better off with a dog, just like me, don’t you think?”

The familiar joke had lost its savor. Her shoulders sagged.

Suddenly straightening, she blew out the candle and climbed into bed.

Chapter 13

Evidently, it was Harper’s turn to watch over her, for when she descended the front steps with Lance and climbed into the waiting hackney, he held the door then climbed in right after them. They were on their way to Letty’s house in Hans Town. So much had happened in the last little while that it seemed easier to tell Letty about it face-to-face than write it all down in a letter. Besides, she hoped to find out something about Gideon Piers that would give them a clue to his whereabouts, though it didn’t seem likely that she would succeed where others had failed.

“We should have taken the coach,” said Harper.

“Nonsense,” said Jane. “We’ll only be gone for about an hour or so, and why put the grooms to the bother of hitching the horses when they’ll only have to stand outside Mrs. Gray’s house while I visit with her? It’s too much of an imposition, Harper.”

That was the crux of the matter. She didn’t want to impose any more than she had to. If Lady Rosamund had been her friend, she wouldn’t have minded borrowing her carriage. At least she didn’t have to borrow her clothes. Nan, the maid, had aired out a box of garments that she’d kept in the attic of her house in Highgate, garments that she’d taken with her when she’d left Edinburgh all those years ago, and she was now fitted out in a pink velvet coat with matching bonnet and reticule.

The air was crisp, the sun was shining, and just for a little while her time was her own. In the afternoon, an outing was planned to Twickenham House, where His Grace would entertain Lady Sophy and her guests.

Neither of her companions seemed to share her enjoyment of the moment. Harper’s brows were down as he scanned vehicles on the Marylebone road before their hackney crossed it, and Lance was sulking because she’d made him wear the loathsome coat again, and no amount of gnashing of teeth on his part, or baring of fangs had persuaded her to change her mind.

“Good dog,” she said now, and patted him on the head.

His response was to growl and curl his lip, but she only laughed at him.

When they came to Letty’s house, Harper paid off the hackney driver. They’d soon find another, he told Jane, when her visit with her friend was over. Meanwhile, he and Lance would take a little walk, to exercise their stiff joints. She smiled and nodded, knowing they wouldn’t go far.

The maid opened the door to her. Peggy’s bright smile faded. “Oh, Miss Mayberry,” she said, “the mistress took the children to Green Park because it’s such a fine day. They’ve only been gone about ten minutes.”

“I must have passed them on my way.”

“Mr. Gray is home. Shall I tell him you’re here?”

Before Jane could reply, Oliver Gray himself came out of a door at the foot of the staircase. “Jane,” he said, “I thought I recognized your voice. You look different. What have you done to yourself?”

It was the pink coat. She never wore pink now because she thought it was too girlish for her. “I hope that’s a compliment, Oliver,” she said.

He laughed. “Of course it’s a compliment. You’ve never looked better. Come in, come in. I suppose Peggy has told you that you’ve missed Letty and the children? Will I do instead?”

Oliver Gray was about forty, and looked as though he could have stepped out of the pages of a Gothic novel. He would have had to be the hero, because he was the soul of courtesy and grace. Courtesy and grace, in Jane’s experience, were not true indications of what might lie below the surface, but in Oliver’s case, they went bone deep. He really cared for people. It was no wonder that all the ladies’ groups in his little church were flourishing. She liked him immensely.

The study he showed her into was comfortable though a little shabby. It reminded her of her father’s study and that was another mark in Oliver’s favor. His desk was strewn with tightly written pages of text, some of them smudged, others with lines scored out or blotted. The wastebasket was overflowing with screwed up balls of paper. She remembered that he was writing a commentary on one of the gospels.

“I see,” she said, “you’ve hit a dry patch.”

He laughed and motioned her to the chair on the other side of his desk. “As a writer, you would recognize the signs. I was hoping for an interruption, and here you are, a godsend! You couldn’t have come at a better time. Peggy, Miss Mayberry and I will have a cup of tea.”

When they were seated, Oliver said, “What brings you to town?”

Without wasting words, Jane gave him an account of the events at Highgate and her subsequent invitation from Lady Sophy to stay at Woodlands.

“Lady Sophy,” he said, frowning. “Not Lady Sophy Devere?”

“Yes. Do you know her?”

“I know she’s Castleton’s aunt, and I know Castleton came here to question Letty about her brother. He questioned you, too. What’s going on, Jane?”

He had the knack of seeing through evasions and half-truths to the heart of a matter. She thought it was an excellent trait for a vicar, but not very comfortable for the person who was sitting on the other side of his desk. She considered her choices for a moment, heaved a sigh, then told him as much as she knew.

“So you see,” she said finally, “no one knows anything for sure. It might be Letty’s brother who is behind these attacks, but there’s no real proof.”

“If it
is
true,” he said, “Letty will be devastated. She’s taken some comfort from believing that her brother turned himself around and died for a noble cause. I hope Castleton is wrong.”

He looked so grave that she was moved to say, “You don’t think Letty is in any danger, I mean, from her own brother?”

“No.”

He lapsed into a reflective silence. After a moment or two, she said quietly. “You don’t like Gideon Piers, do you, Oliver?”

He looked up with a smile. “I never met him.”

“Neither did I, but I formed an opinion from what Letty told me, and he sounds like a thoroughly unpleasant character. Oh, not that Letty said very much, and nothing to his discredit. But . . . I can’t put my finger on it, except to say that it’s hard to believe they were brother and sister.”

“Half-brother and sister,” he said. “He was born out of wedlock. It’s a common story. His mother was in service and was turned off when it became known that she was with child. A year after Gideon was born, she married Letty’s father who gave the boy his own name. Then Letty came along. A few years later, when the father died, they all ended up in the poorhouse.”

This part of the story Jane knew well. In the poorhouse, children were separated from their parents. It was traumatic, of course. Letty had had the good fortune to be sent to a Charity School. But not Gideon. And when the mother died, all she got was a pauper’s grave. It said a lot for Gideon that this so weighed on his conscience that he’d scrimped and saved to have his mother’s remains removed from her unmarked grave to her final resting place in the parish where she was born.

“Why didn’t Gideon go to the Charity School?” she asked.

“There aren’t too many places available, for one thing. They depend on the generosity of wealthy benefactors. However, he had the chance, but he wouldn’t take it. He’d become used to the poorhouse and that’s where he wanted to stay.”

She was feeling it again, this ambivalence toward Gideon. If he’d turned out bad, who was to blame? And did it matter? He couldn’t be allowed to run amok. She supposed, if he were her brother, she would see things differently.

Oliver sat back in his chair and studied her. “What are you thinking, Jane?”

“What I think is that if a dog turns rabid, it should be put down.”

“If Lance turned rabid, would you put him down?”

“It would break my heart, but yes, I would do it.”

“That’s the difference between you and Letty. She never could.”

Peggy arrived with tea and cakes at that moment and the conversation moved on to other things.

On the way home, they stopped off at Green Park, but there was no sign of Letty, so Jane ordered the hackney driver to take her to her bank in Bond Street. Harper’s brows climbed. He had never heard of a lady of quality doing her own banking. When the hackney stopped, Harper made to go with her, but Jane wouldn’t allow it.

“I’m quite capable of doing my own banking,” she said in a voice Harper was coming to know only too well.

Resigned, he sank back against the banquette and held onto Lance’s collar while Jane stepped down and walked back the few steps that took her to the bank’s entrance.

She had very little business to transact, only a withdrawal to keep her in stockings and gloves with something left over for gratuities for the servants when she finally went home to Hillcrest. Five minutes later, she left the bank, but she didn’t go straight back to the hackney. Next to the bank was a bootmaker, and her eye was caught by a pair of flimsy pumps in lavender kidskin with ribbons to match. Next door to the bootmaker was a milliner’s, and next door to that was a draper’s with bolts of muslins, silks, and satins laid out in the window to tempt ladies of fashion to enter the shop.

And there were many ladies of fashion doing just that. This was Bond Street, the most expensive and luxurious shopping district in London. The street was lined with carriages on both sides of the street, and elegant ladies and their escorts were promenading, admiring the displays in all the shop windows.

Bond Street was just around the corner from the Albany on Piccadilly, where Case had his rooms, but Jane didn’t expect to run into Case. He was at Twickenham House, planning some school reunion or other.

She was enjoying herself enormously and was seriously considering parting with some of her hard-earned money to buy something frivolous, just for the fun of it. She found what she was looking for in the shop next door to the draper’s—a perfumery with a display of fine English and French soaps in its front window. She couldn’t afford the lavender pumps, but lavender soap wouldn’t bankrupt her.

She looked over her shoulder toward the hackney with Harper inside and was surprised to see how far she’d wandered from it. She was debating whether she should go back and tell him where she was when a gentleman in the height of fashion stepped in front of her, obscuring her view of the hackney. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and the fair hair showing beneath his curly brimmed beaver looked as though it had been carefully combed to frame his handsome face. His look of shock was quickly congealing into a mask of pure dislike.

It was a face she’d hoped never to see again, the face of her long absent husband, James Campbell. Though she kept her face impassive, her heart was racing as though she’d just seen a ghost.

He spoke first. “How does one greet one’s errant wife?”

There was a time when the deliberately controlled voice would have sent shivers of dread along her spine. She still feared him, but she wasn’t the defenseless, lonely girl she had been when she was in his power with no one to turn to. She had friends now, powerful friends. She had Harper and Lance in a hackney not far away, and most reassuring of all, she had her pistol in her reticule.

More than anything, she wanted to reach in her reticule for that pistol, but he was too close for her to even attempt it. Besides, in spite of the little lecture she’d given herself, her hand was shaking so badly, she didn’t think she could handle a pistol. The thought that he could still make her cower made her angry with herself.

She tried to keep her voice level. “Hello, Jack. What are you doing here? I thought you’d be in Edinburgh for Christmas and New Year.”

He laughed. “I’ll just bet you did. Doesn’t this remind you of something? The first time we met? It must be fate.”

The first time they met, she’d been shopping in Edinburgh’s Princes’ Street. Jack had taken one look at her and followed her home. What a romantic fool she’d been then!

He was studying her face so she was careful not to let her fear show. “Do you know,” he went on, “I’d given up hope of ever finding you again? I lost your trail in the Highlands of Scotland. But that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it, Jane, to lay a false trail so that you’d never have to answer to your husband for the wrong you did him?”

“How did you find me?”

“I didn’t. You found me. A book, Jane, with my name and direction in it. That was careless of you. A kind gentlemen found it on the banks of the Thames and sent it on to me. So I knew you were in London. I’ve been looking for you everywhere these last few weeks to no avail.”

She remembered losing the book. It was a biography of Sir Thomas More, and she’d spent an afternoon in Chelsea trying to visualize how the village must have looked when Sir Thomas lived there. But that was months ago.

All the books she’d taken with her from Edinburgh had Jack’s name stamped in them, though the books were hers. He liked owning things. She knew she’d pasted her own bookplate over his name to obliterate all reference to him. Somehow, it must have become detached.

He was edging closer and she couldn’t keep her fear in check. Her voice was hoarse. “I’m not going anywhere with you, Jack. Let me pass.”

He laughed and shook his head. “Jane, Jane, you have no say in the matter.”

He had a way of hovering just before he struck, mesmerizing her like a cobra with the intensity of his gaze. She was prepared and dodged out of his way just as he reached for her.

She was going the wrong way! Jack was between her and Harper and Lance. A quick look around showed her that pedestrians were looking at them askance and keeping their distance. And if anyone tried to help her, all Jack need say was that she was his wife and they would turn her over to him. It had happened before.

When he reached for her again, she darted into the road, meaning to go around a stationary carriage and race back to her own hackney, but he was too close. Without looking to the right or left, she hared across the street and, at the last moment, threw herself clear of the flailing hooves of horses that had been suddenly reined in by their cursing drivers. Jack was not so reckless as she and that gave her a head start. Picking herself off the pavement, she raced into the narrow street behind Burlington House.

Harper could stand it no longer. Because the hackney was stationed on the left side of the road, he was forced to look out the little window in the back of the vehicle to keep his eye on the bank. He was getting a crick in his neck. Telling Lance to stay, he opened the door and stepped down.