Lord Langley Is Back in Town (29 page)

Langley tried to tamp down his rising cheer. This was better than he could have imagined. Still, he reined in his passions and said with a more detached air, “Would you mind if I were to look through it . . . and the others as well?” He paused for a second. “There is a particular piece I would like to retrieve as a wedding present for my bride. And then we will bother you no further and be on our way.”

At this point he reached over and caught Minerva’s hand, and to his amazement, she played her part of surprised and grateful fiancée with amazing believability, by smiling graciously at him.

Mr. Harrow glanced over at his wife and then back at the baron. “You aren’t here to inspect the house?”

“Well, if you would like me to—”

“You aren’t here to show Lady Standon the residence?” Mrs. Harrow asked.

“You haven’t come to put us out?” one of the younger lads ventured.

Langley glanced at Mrs. Harrow’s strained face and realized that for all their happy manners, beneath their hospitality was a greater worry.

That they were, as the younger Harrow had said, about to be put out of the house.

It was, to his amazement, Minerva who put the lady at ease.

“Mrs. Harrow, you haven’t anything to worry about on that account. Langley and I wouldn’t think of asking you and your happy family to leave Langley Hall. You have a good lease, and from every indication, you are excellent tenants of the estate.” She leaned toward the woman and whispered loudly. “Men! They just bluster in and don’t understand our fears, do they?”

Both the older Harrows sighed and then Mrs. Harrow smiled warmly. “Oh, but I must warn, my lord,” she said. “Your boxes are not all that organized. It is rather a tumble up there.”

“Does he mean to go up and look at those shameful paintings and sinful pieces of pottery?” one of the lads piped up.

“Joshua!” Mrs. Harrow scolded, blushing a deep pink.

“But Maman, that is what you called them,” he protested. “Before you forbid us from looking at them.” The irrepressible boy wasn’t done yet. “Lord Langley, did you really steal all those things from ol’ Boney?”

Langley wanted to laugh at the curious light in the boy’s eyes, for he well remembered when an uncle of his—his mother’s brother who’d gone to sea—would come to visit with tales of exploring with Cook. Well-embellished and lacking all the realities of a long sea voyage—the dreadful food, the boredom, the wretched conditions—he’d lived to hear about the odd native customs, the exotic creatures and the strange markings, the sort of tales he could regale his friends with for weeks to come.

“Aye, lad. And if you can find me a bar to open up the boxes with, I’ll tell you about the night I snuck into Versailles and snatched them right off ol’ Boney’s walls.”

“Gar!” the boy whispered, wide-eyed and thunderstruck with awe. “Will you also tell me about when you were captured by the sultan and locked in his palace?”

“Oh, aye,” he agreed, his arm over the boy’s shoulder as they walked out of the room, Minerva and Mrs. Harrow in their wake. “But he didn’t lock me in just his palace, but in his harem.”

“Langley!” Minerva protested.

And when he turned around to gauge her expression, he found her eyes alight and her lips pressed tightly together—to keep from laughing aloud.

Oh, yes, she’d come to her decision on which she desired more.

And it had nothing to do with boxing his ears.

M
inerva looked around the attic space at the line of paintings stacked against the wall, alongside vases and statues lined up all in a row. They were as Mrs. Harrow had told her son, a shameful lot.

Truly, here she had always heard Lord Langley described as a connoisseur, but there was only one word to describe his art collection.

Dreadful
.

Langley stood studying his collection, a metal bar in his hand. They were all alone, for though he’d promised to regal the Harrow children with tales, Mrs. Harrow had announced that despite Lord Langley’s generous offer—or because of it, Minerva suspected—the children needed to rejoin their nanny in the nursery.

“You won’t need that,” she told Langley, nodding at the pry bar in his hand. “Apparently young Joshua has made it a habit to enjoy your collection.” She nodded at the open boxes and the scattered pieces sitting atop the crates and chests that made up the attic storage.

“Oh, I need it,” he said, walking up to a statue of a shepherdess. The painting beneath the glaze was shoddy, leaving the poor miss cross-eyed as she searched for her lost lambs.

But she wasn’t so for long.

Suddenly, Langley raised his arm and swung the bar atop the girl’s head, shattering the pottery.

“Langley? Are you mad?” Minerva gasped.

Ignoring her, he picked through the shards as if searching for something, and when he found nothing, turned to the nymph beside her and smashed her to smithereens.

Minerva caught his arm. “What are you doing?”

“If you must know,” he said as he picked though the pieces, “occasionally, I would send home sensitive information inside pieces of art.”

“So you weren’t just a diplomat,” she said, nudging him for information.

“No, not always,” he confessed, already eyeing another statue.

Minerva took another glance around the attic, with a new understanding of what she was looking at. They hadn’t been chosen for their beauty or their rarity, and certainly not for their value, rather quite the opposite. “Oh, thank God.”

“For what?” he asked as he broke apart a pair of lovers.

“I thought I was marrying a mushroom,” she said with a giggle.

“Had visions of the morning room decorated with that lot?” he asked, waving his hand at a line of cross-eyed milkmaids.

“Yes, or worse.” She shuddered, picking up one of the paintings. “Dear heavens, this is as bad as the painting hanging in my room.”

“Next time I am in your bedchamber, Minerva, I shall have to be the judge of that. I took great pains in choosing pieces no one would covet.”

He handed her the bar. “Go ahead. I know you want nothing more than to consign that sea nymph to an untimely end.”

“Gads, is every one of these pieces cross-eyed?”

“I fear the man I bought these from used his daughter as his model.”

“She wasn’t one of your conquests, was she?” Minerva teased, just before she took up the bar and smashed the little piece into bits. She glanced over at the wreckage. “Oh, you are perfectly correct! That is most satisfying. But what am I to look for?”

“In the potteries, it would be a slim piece of paper that was inserted through the potter’s slit in the bottom.”

“A piece of curled paper, I imagine,” she said as she picked up one of the pieces and peered inside the hole. “For it would unwind along the sides and remain unseen.”

Langley paused. “Minerva, you continue to surprise me! I avow you would make a most excellent agent. I would not want to cross paths with you.”

“Then keep that in mind when you are tempted to vex me,” she teased back. Then she turned serious. “Langley?”

“Um, yes?”

“What do you hope to find?”

“Answers,” he replied.

“Nothing more you’d like to share?” she prodded. “It might help me to know what I am searching for.”

“Your reputation,” he told her with a grin.

“My reputation? Sir, if this collection was to see the light of day, what little standing I have left in society would be in tatters.”

“Better that than engaged to a traitor,” he said.

“As important as that?” she whispered.

“Aye.”

Turning to the rest of the collection, Minerva’s determination to help only grew more resolute. “And the paintings? I don’t believe smashing them is in order—though probably most satisfying.”

“No, we cannot damage them—no more than necessary,” he said, reaching into the bag he’d brought up. “We’ll need to cut the canvas out of the frames. Some of them have an extra canvas beneath, and others might have a note or writings on the interior of the frames. We’ll have to take extra care with those.”

“Too bad,” she mused as she held up a poorly composed pair of lovers. “Good heavens, is that a third arm on that poor woman?”

He glanced at the painting. “If that fellow is lucky.”

L
angley’s optimism evaporated over the next few hours, as they discovered their search was in vain.

While he found the box that had been intended for George Ellyson, it also appeared that someone had beaten him to the contents, for there wasn’t a note to be had, not a single clue inside.

Only more questions.

And the boxes, the ones that arrived after he’d been confined in Abbaye Prison, held nothing but more conundrums.

“It appears that this crate had a rather rough voyage,” Minerva speculated as they gazed in at the ruined contents. She pulled one of the paintings out, a small landscape of a ruined castle. When she turned it over, her brow wrinkled and she handed it to him.

The frame had been oddly hollowed out, a narrow trough inside the sturdy wood.

“What is that?” Minerva reached inside and pulled out a bit of black velvet. She studied the frame closer. “It looks like there was velvet all along that groove. There are bits of it stuck in the wood.”

He shook his head and put it back down in the crate. None of it made sense, and worse, it appeared he wasn’t going to find any answers here.

So they made their way downstairs, thanked the Harrows for their hospitality, and returned to the carriage.

“Langley, what does this mean?” Minerva asked after they climbed in, having finally gained some distance from the Harrows.

Thomas-William glanced over his shoulder, most likely about to ask the same thing.

Langley shook his head at his old friend and then turned to Minerva. “It means I have to go back to the beginning.”

Thomas-William muttered a curse and started the horses toward London.

“Is it as bad as all that?” she asked.

He tried to smile for her sake. “It means you are most likely engaged to a traitor.”

To his surprise, she scoffed at such a thing. “Really, Langley. It hardly concerned me before, what makes you think I would change my mind now?”

Chapter 12

Sometimes there is naught you can do for a man, save stand silently beside him and believe.

Advice to Felicity Langley from her Nanny Rana

T
hey returned to Brook Street well after dark, and Langley let her out and escorted her to the door.

But he hadn’t come in with her. He silently sent her inside and then disappeared into the night.

Minerva spent much of the next day pacing about the house and peering out the windows, watching the crowds on Brook Street and the comings and goings of the servants in the mews behind the house in hopes of catching a glance of him.

Demmed man! Oh, she knew marchionesses were not supposed to use such words, or even know of them, but right now being Lady Standon was far too confining.

If she were mere Maggie Owens, perhaps then Langley wouldn’t be so reluctant to let her help.

And in her worried state, she even thought she’d spied the little flower girl from the theatre, milling about the lamppost across the way. Madly, she’d rushed outside to catch the child, for as impossible as it seemed, she suspected the urchin was somehow connected to the mystery behind Lord Langley’s return to London.

But when she flung the front door open, the girl caught up her basket of flowers and took off like a rabbit through the pedestrians, disappearing before Minerva could even cry out.

And when Minerva realized that everyone on the street was gaping at her, she’d beat an equally hasty retreat back inside her house.

Not that the inside offered much in the way of sanctuary. Her address was suddenly the most sought after one in London.

She’d never realized how many gossipy tabbies lived in Town, for suddenly there was a cream-lined trail leading straight to her door. No matter that it wasn’t her afternoon in, the curious and the gossips called anyway, delivering their cards to a vexed Mrs. Hutchinson in hopes that “Lady Standon might like some sympathetic company.”

Sympathetic, indeed! She’d instructed her housekeeper to send them all packing. There were some consolations in having a housekeeper who had been raised in Seven Dials. No one could get rid of unwanted guests better than Mrs. Hutchinson—save of course the foreign sorts who just moved in.

According to Aunt Bedelia, who had called in the afternoon, even those who weren’t at the Drury-Lane Theatre the night before had their own rendition of Chudley’s dramatic challenge and Lord Langley’s scandalous acceptance.

“Why I hardly knew London had such a collection of tattle tongues,” she avowed. “They are savaging my poor Chudley and ruining my standing! Such behavior! Such rash displays of ill-manners! What is society coming to when demure respectability is no longer the order of the day?”