Fortune Favors the Wicked (3 page)

She knew the type well.

And it wasn't because of the half-drunk beefwit that she strode away so quickly. She wanted to breathe fresh air, nothing more. This was not so unusual, the speed of her pace. She had always been a fast walker.

As she walked along the too-familiar main street of Strawfield, brushing past slower-moving villagers, her eyes watered. The sun shone at a pale distance, and a chill wind teased her veil.

This was why her eyes were teary. It was only the sharp air. Not some excess of stupid feeling. She was far too jaded to mind being treated as that man had treated her. She was not bothered by using her knife.

Ducking into a space between two buildings, she tugged free her veil and bonnet, tucked them under her arm, and covered her head instead with the light wool shawl that had hung about her elbows.

Thus freed from the unwelcome film of the veil, she blinked into a world of sudden color. The sky was a painful blue, the trees in full leaf. The buildings were gritstone-dark and the deep red of old brick, with roofs of slate or thatch or split-wood shingle that made them look as though they'd popped from the living ground. On the village green, tents had sprung up like mushrooms. The Pig and Blanket was full to bursting, and some villagers were renting out rooms in their houses. Every day there were more and more treasure seekers.

The edge of the village was not far; from there, she'd cross the corner of the Selwyn lands. The rough land of the Northern Peak was at its greenest right now, before sheep cropped the grass to its roots and the remnants scorched in late-summer heat.

Somewhere, in the worn stone crevices of the moors, there had to be more coins. Six trunks full.

None for the master, none for the dame. Six for the little girl who lived in the vicarage—if Charlotte had her way.

She clambered over the stone wall that divided off the Selwyn lands, cutting a corner that shaved ten minutes from her walk. It seemed foolish to hurry when the situation she'd left also awaited her at her destination: a veiled expression, a careful silence. Bland food and lonely corners.

Though for a few moments, when speaking with Frost, she hadn't been lonely. She hadn't even needed to be harsh. She'd just . . . been.

That hadn't happened to her often since she was Nance's age, or maybe even younger. The life of Charlotte Pearl was, for all its luxuries, not one that permitted relaxation.

She squinted into the distance. Was that a party of treasure seekers on Selwyn land? Surely it was; the faraway figures carried picks and spades. Much luck to them. If Edward or Lady Helena or one of their servants caught them trespassing, they'd be hauled before the magistrate.

Charlotte presumed upon Edward's good graces by crossing his land. But then, she was a very old acquaintance. A few footsteps across his grass was the least of what he owed her, not that she wanted anything of him. Not now.

The trio had drawn a bit closer, close enough for their forms to become more distinct than blobs carrying hand tools. The way the man in front moved was so familiar. Of whom did he remind her?

Randolph
.

She moved without thought, hauling herself over the second waist-high stone wall. Breaths swift and hitching, she slid to the ground behind the shield of the old wall. Her hands trembled, and she clenched them into fists with a reproof to herself.
Stupid
. It could not be Randolph. Not here, not with a spade slung over one shoulder. A marquess, with all his vast resources, would not be bothered hunting gold coins. Or even pretending to hunt, while he searched instead for the woman on whom he felt he had a claim.

Right. That was right. Of course it was not Randolph. No shout had followed her over the stone barrier.

Gritting her teeth, she ventured a peek over the wall. The men had drawn closer now, and the one she'd mistaken for Randolph looked nothing like him. They shared a brawny build, but this laughing man was as pale as the marquess was dark.

She slid back to her hiding place.
Steady, Charlotte,
she murmured to herself, over and over, until she no longer needed the stone wall at her back to keep herself upright.

It was perfectly natural to think one saw familiar faces at every pass. In one's birthplace, one expected it.

Even if the faces one saw, or feared seeing, had been left far behind with a great deal of secrecy, expense, and effort.

She allowed several minutes to pass, along with the trio of laughing men, before standing and continuing on her path. Another minute's walk brought her to the garden behind the vicarage, across which a maid had strung lines and was pinning up sheets.

Charlotte halted. “Barrett? Why are you hanging the washing? I thought my parents hired this out.”

A cap-covered head with a pair of dark eyes peered above the makeshift line. “Miss Perry! I didn't expect you back so soon.”

Not that Sarah Barrett had reason to expect Charlotte to act in any particular way, since this was Charlotte's first visit to Strawfield in four years. But she and Barrett were almost of an age, and the sturdy, frank maid had grown up alongside the two Perry sisters.

“Mrs. Fancot,” Barrett said in a tone of great scorn, her Yorkshire accent thick as pudding, “forgot to take down the vicarage washing before last night's rain shower. Sent it over t'us today all damp and said she'd charge for another week's washing if we wanted it done over.”

“How extortionate,” Charlotte said, as she was clearly expected to do.

“That's what I thought. So I tol' her never to mind, and that she wasn't the only washerwoman in Strawfield.”

“Isn't she?”

“No, she isn't.” Barrett sniffed. “And it's time she remembered. Mrs. Reverend, she gave me a free hand to see to these matters, and see to them I will.”

Charlotte took up a handful of wooden pegs, handing them to the maid as needed. Barrett wrestled sheets with an easy grace Charlotte could not achieve.

Now that she thought about it, she really didn't know how to do anything useful.

But Barrett had done well for herself. The vicarage and its living were too small to support a housekeeper, but Barrett was the nearest thing. She had the help of a lower housemaid and a few kitchen servants, and she had always known everything that passed in the vicarage.

“How is my father today?” Charlotte ventured.

Barrett dropped the clothes-peg she was holding. “Oh! Sorry, Miss Perry.” She disappeared behind a bath sheet. When she stood with the recovered peg, her cheeks were flushed. “His health is fine. He just worries; that's all. You know how he does.”

“Yes, I know.”

“It's this guest coming; he wants everything perfect.”

“He is doomed to disappointment, then.”

“And he's been horrid busy with all these new people about, looking for that gold. Someone tumbled over the Downfall this morning—”

“Good God.” The local waterfall was not large, but it threaded through crushed and scattered rock.

“—and his friends were all set to have dragged him into the front parlor for the vicar to pray over.”

“The doctor gets the cases with hope, and the church gets the hopeless ones,” Charlotte said. “I trust you did not allow a corpse to be dragged into the house.”

“Well, he weren't quite a corpse. But no, they took him into the stable and your father went out to 'im.”

This made sense. The vicar could afford to keep no carriage, no horses. The stable was nothing but a box for storage of all the oddments of vicarage life that fit nowhere else. The tools given to the church because they could no longer be sharpened; the cracked vases donated because they could hold no water. Each gift, no matter how useless, had to be accepted with thanks.

“Is . . . ah, the man still in the stable?”

“No, his friends dragged him off again. Might be that he'll live after all. Power of prayer and whatnot.”

“Right,” murmured Charlotte. “I don't suppose the friends gave the vicar so much as a shilling for his trouble?”

“They seem to have forgotten that part,” Barrett said through teeth clenched around a wooden peg.

The influx of reward hunters was a boon for those in Strawfield with something to sell. For those with something to give—like the vicar, like the church—it was nothing but a rip in an already threadbare life.

“I wish they'd take something from me,” Charlotte said. “My parents, I mean.” Not that she had much to give now. But for the past decade, the Reverend John Perry and Mrs. Perry had refused to accept so much as a coin from their daughter. Partly pride; partly duty; an even greater measure of shame.

Which made Charlotte just another of the locusts swarming the Strawfield vicarage, taking much, giving nothing.

For now. Not for long.

Before she could ask another question, Barrett said, “If you don't mind my saying so, Miss Perry, you oughtn't to cut across the Selwyn lands. Lady Helena will get in a powerful rage if she catches you.”

“Did you see me hiding, then? I thought I saw some of her groundskeepers.” A plausible excuse for cowering against the stone wall. “Silly of me. They were only a trio of reward seekers with digging tools.”

“Lady Helena won't like that either,” commented Barrett.

“And is her husband not in residence?” That would be Edward, who had married an earl's daughter and filled his house with sons. Charlotte saw him too often in London; she disliked seeing him here, too.

“No, he's visiting a friend. Some nobleman,” Barrett tossed off, as though dukes and barons and their like were all of equal unimportance.

“Very good. That's very good.” Handing the clothes-pegs back to Barrett, Charlotte continued around the vicarage to the battered front door. She knocked, waited, then turned the handle. There was never a servant at hand to answer the door. It would have been a family joke, had either of Charlotte's parents been possessed of a sense of humor.

Once inside the wood-paneled entryway that stretched into a narrow corridor, she called out. “Papa? It's I, Charlotte.”

The reply sounded from the small parlor to her left. “Of course it is. Only one person in the world calls me Papa since your sister's passing, God rest her precious soul.”

Always such a barrel of cheer, her father was.

Charlotte peeped in to greet him. The front parlor was the finest room in the house, and she tried not to see it with London eyes that would pick out every smudge and faded spot on the flowered wall-papers. The hooked rugs Charlotte and her older sister Margaret had made as children. Her father, faded and thin as those worn carpets.

The Reverend John Perry set aside his thick book and spectacles. “You must remember to keep silence in the corridor outside your mother's study. She so dislikes having her translation interrupted.” Before she could reply, he clucked with dismay and unfolded his lean figure from his favorite chair. “You must change your clothing, child. Make yourself respectable! Lord Hugo's friend is arriving today. Don't you recall?”

“Yes, Papa. Of course I do.” She could not help but fix it in her mind, having been told seventy-five times since her own arrival two days before. Lord Hugo Starling, younger son of a duke, was the most fashionable acquaintance her father had ever made—if one excepted Edward and Lady Helena Selwyn and Charlotte herself, which her parents always did.

One of England's most respected young scholars, Lord Hugo had written to the Reverend John Perry after admiring one of Mrs. Perry's classical translations. The resulting correspondence had ranged across many subjects; Charlotte had no idea of their scope. But when she had arrived at the vicarage, the reverend had informed her with no small pride that one of Lord Hugo's friends had written a manuscript, and that the friend required a place to stay in Derbyshire. As he was constitutionally unsuited to public houses, he would stay with Lord Hugo's trusted correspondents—nay,
friends
!

He had waited for Charlotte to collapse with delight, but she had little interest in this matter. She didn't plan to be in Derbyshire long enough to become acquainted with this likely eccentric.

“I recall everything you have told me,” Charlotte recited as her father's long, thin hands began to twist. “It will be fine, Papa. I shall behave.”

She only hoped this friend of Hugo's would behave himself, too. Just in case, she would continue to keep her penknife about her. Maybe she'd give one to Maggie as well.

“I don't like this plan of you sharing Maggie's room.” Twist, twist, went one hand about the other, as though wringing out wet laundry for Barrett. “It's not proper.”

Margaret's namesake and the reverend couple's sole grandchild, the ten-year-old occupied a sunny chamber on the upper floor of the vicarage. It was not considered as fine as the spare room kept for the rare guest, but Charlotte would be glad for the company. “Maybe not, but what's the alternative? It would be even less proper for Mr. Starling's friend to share my chamber.”

The reverend closed his eyes. “Do not speak of such things, child. You never know who could hear you.”

Right. Yes, that was the only problem: the risk of being overheard.

She could not share in her father's distress over propriety, yet it speared her. Her poor father; he looked so thin and gray. He ought to be settling into a sedate retirement in a seaside resort like Bath, not caring for a child. Or hosting his wayward daughter.

“You look tired, Papa. Do sit, and I'll make certain that all of my belongings are removed to Maggie's room, and that all is in readiness for your guest. What is his name, by the bye?” Her father had called him only
Lord Hugo's friend
for the past day, but this would hardly do once the man himself were present.