The Deception of the Emerald Ring (3 page)

But something had woken her.

Letty struggled reluctantly up on her elbows; the movement unleashed a nagging ache behind her temples, which agreed with her eyelids that she really was not supposed to be awake yet. Yanking her unraveling braid out from under her left shoulder, she peered blearily around the room. There was little to peer at. The narrow room contained nothing but the armoire, a wobbly night table, and one chair that had previously belonged to the drawing room, but had been banished due to a poorly repaired crack in the frame. When the owner advertised the house as "furnished," he intended the word in its most minimal sense. Between her mother's and sister's excesses among the bonnets and ribbons of Bond Street, and her father's inability to pass a book without buying it, Letty had been in no position to argue. As it was, they were fortunate to be able to eke out another Season in London. Letty had learned to pinch a penny until it screamed for mercy, but there wasn't much more left to pinch.

In the hall, the crooked grandfather clock emitted the high-pitched whine that passed for a ping. Beneath its nasal wheezings, Letty heard a strange rustle and rattle, followed by a click.

Letty froze, suspended awkwardly on her elbows.

That click had not come from the clock. In the stillness that followed the twelfth chime, Letty heard it again, this time accompanied by a scramble and a shuffle, like movement hastily muffled. Someone was scurrying about in the room next door.

Burglars? If they were, they were going to be very disappointed burglars. Her mother's jewels sparkled nicely by candlelight, but they were nothing more than paste. Anything real had long since disappeared into the gaping maw of household expenses. Her sister Mary had one pair of genuine pearl earbobs left, and Letty had a rather pretty pair of enamel bracelets—at least, until the next butcher's bill came due.

On the other hand, burglars might turn vicious if they didn't find what they were looking for. And that was Mary's room they were in. Mary was not likely to submit docilely to the extraction of her last pair of genuine pearls.

Folding the sheet carefully back, Letty lowered herself to the ground. Her toes curled as they touched the cold boards, but luck was with her. There was no telltale squeak.

Letty groped for her candle, and then thought better of it. There was no need to advertise her presence. As a weapon, the candleholder was too short and stubby to be of any use. It was more likely to irritate than stun. Instead, Letty gently eased a poker from the iron stand beside the fireplace. The slight clink as the tip caught on the edge of the stand reverberated like a dozen crypt doors clanging. She froze, both hands on the shaft of the poker. Deadly silence assaulted her ears, a listening sort of silence. And then the scrambling started again. Letty's breath released in a low sigh of relief. Thank goodness.

With her weapon clenched close to her side, Letty crept out into the corridor. Like everything else in the house, the hallway was small and narrow, papered a serviceable brown that trapped the shadows and turned them to mud. A triangle of light, like a large wedge of cheese, extended into the hallway from Mary's half-open door.

"Put that there." A woman crossed the room in a swish of blue skirt. From somewhere behind the door, a rustle of fabric followed, and the chink of the wardrobe door being shut. "No, not that green. The other green."

Letty's grip on the poker relaxed. That wasn't a burglar; that was Mary.

What Mary was doing wearing her best driving dress at midnight was another matter entirely. As Letty watched, Mary turned and deposited a pile of scarves in the arms of her maid, filmy creations of gauze designed more to entice than warm. Their purchase had set Letty's housekeeping accounts back at least two months.

"Pack these," Mary directed. "Leave the wool."

Clutching the pile of scarves, Mary's maid looked anxiously at her mistress. "It's past midnight, miss. His lordship—"

"Will wait. He does it so well." Bending over her dressing table, Mary opened the lid of her jewel box and contemplated the contents. Closing it with a decisive click, she thrust the box out to the maid. "I won't be needing these anymore. See that Miss Letty gets this. With my love, of course."

There was only one possible reason for Mary to bequeath her bagatelles. And it wasn't love.

Taking care not to let the poker scrape against the floor, Letty tiptoed back into her own room, leaning the unwanted weapon carefully against the wall. She wouldn't be needing it. At least, she didn't think she would. In the course of her long career as de facto keeper of the Alsworthy ménage, Letty had confronted all manner of domestic disruption, from exploding Christmas puddings to indignant tradesmen, and even, on one memorable occasion, escaped livestock. Letty had bandaged burns, coaxed her little brother's budgie out of a tree, and stage-managed her family's yearly remove to a rented town house in London.

An attempted elopement was something new.

The whole situation was straight out of the comic stage: the daughter of the house hastily packing in the middle of the night with the help of her trusty (and soon to be unemployed) maid, the faithful lover waiting downstairs with a speedy carriage, ready to whisk them away to Gretna Green. All that was needed was a rope ladder and an irate guardian in hot pursuit.

That role, Letty realized, fell to her. It didn't seem quite fair, but there it was. She had to stop Mary.

But how? Remonstrating with Mary wouldn't be any use. Over the past few years, Mary had made it quite clear that she didn't care to take advice from a sister, and a younger sister, at that. She responded to Letty's well-meaning suggestions with the unblinking disdain perfected by cats in their dealings with their humans. Letty knew just how Mary would react. She would hear Letty out without saying a word, and then calmly go on to do whatever it was she had intended to do in the first place.

Rousing her parents would be worse than useless. Her father would simply blink at her over his spectacles and comment mildly that if Mary wished to make a spectacle of herself, it would be best to let her get on with it as quickly as possible and with as little trouble to themselves as could be had. As for her mother Letty's face twisted in a terrible grimace that would undoubtedly lead to all sorts of unattractive wrinkles later in life. There was certainly no help to be found from that quarter. Her mother would probably help Mary into his lordship's carriage.

Letty looked longingly at the poker. She couldn't, though. She really couldn't.

That left his lordship. London was crammed with men answering to that title at this time of year, but Letty had no doubt which lordship it was. Mary had never lacked for admirers, but only one man was besotted enough to agree to an elopement.

Letty conjured Lord Pinchingdale in her mind as she had seen him last week, dancing attendance on Mary at the Middlethorpes' ball. Discounting the doting expression that appeared whenever he encountered Mary, Lord Pinchingdale's had always struck her as an uncommonly intelligent face, the sort of face that wouldn't have looked amiss on a Renaissance cardinal or a seventeenth-century academician, quiet and thoughtful with just a hint of something cynical about the mouth. A long, thin nose; a lean, flexible mouth that was quick to quirk with amusement; and a pair of keen gray eyes that seemed to regard the world's foibles for what they were.

Which just went to show that physiognomy was never an exact science.

Take Mary, for example. She had the sort of serene expression generally associated with halos and chubby infants in mangers, but her porcelain calm hid a calculating mind and an indomitable will to make Machiavelli blush.

I should have seen it coming, Letty scolded herself, as she jammed her feet into a pair of inappropriate dancing slippers. The signs had all been there, if only she had been looking for them. They had been there in the reckless glitter in Mary's dark blue eyes, in the increasingly brittle quality of her laugh—and in the way she had pleaded a headache after dinner that night, as an excuse to slip away to her room.

Letty had a fair inkling of what Mary had been thinking. Letty's older sister had passed three Seasons as society's reigning incomparable. Three Seasons of amassing accolades, bouquets, even the odd sonnet, but shockingly few marriage proposals. Of the offers that had come in, three had been from younger sons, four from titles without wealth, and an even larger number from wealth without title. One by one, she had watched her more eligible suitors, the first sons, with coronets on their coaches and country estates to spare, contract matches with the chinless daughters of dukes, or bustling city heiresses. The Alsworthys were an old family—there had been Alsworthys in Hertford-shire when the first bemused Norman had galloped through, demanding to know the way to the nearest vineyard—but by no means a great one. They had never distinguished themselves in battle or ingratiated themselves into a monarch's favor. Instead, they had sat placidly on their estate, overseeing their land and adding extra wings onto the house as fancy and fashion demanded. They were comfortable enough in their own way, but there was no fortune or title to sweeten the marriage settlements or to shield them from the mocking murmurs of the ton.

Surely even Mary must realize the disgrace that a runaway marriage would bring, not only on her, but on the entire family. Heaven only knew, thought Letty grimly, their family didn't need any extra help when it came to making themselves ridiculous.

She would have to prevail upon Lord Pinchingdale's better judgment—assuming he had any. Up until tonight, Letty had always thought he had.

Snagging her cloak from the wardrobe, Letty settled it firmly around her shoulders, yanking the hood down over her flushed face and frazzled braid. There was no time to twist her gingery hair up. Instead, she shoved everything back behind her ears and hoped it would stay there. Although she had no personal experience in the matter, from what Letty had heard of eloping lovers, they were a fairly impatient breed, and she had no confidence that Lord Pinchingdale would wait patiently by his carriage until Mary deigned to come traipsing down. Letty grimaced at the image of Lord Pinchingdale attempting to scale the skinny branches of the tree outside Mary's window in time-honored heroic fashion. That was all they needed, a peer with two broken knees sprawled on the pavement outside their house. Letty couldn't even begin to imagine the captions in the scandal sheets. "Viscount Laid Low by Love" would be the least of it.

Would it be too much to hope that the French would do something truly, truly awful in the next few hours so that there would be no room left in the papers for frivolities?

Dealing with a thwarted lover in a dark alleyway wasn't the sort of escapade that lent luster to a debutante's reputation. But, Letty reasoned, as she picked her way carefully down the back stairs, she didn't see what else she was to do. She couldn't let Mary elope with Lord Pinchingdale and bring down scandal and ruin on all of their heads. Once she had sent Lord Pinchingdale packing, Letty promised herself, she was going straight back to bed. She was going to climb beneath the covers and pull the eiderdown up to her neck, and let her head sink into the pillow .

Letty hastily clamped her hand over a mammoth yawn.

Emerging from the service entrance into the dark little area at the back of the house that substituted for a garden, Letty took stock of the situation. If she squinted, she could make out the dark form of a carriage hulking among the shadows at the end of the narrow alley behind the house, black against black. Drat. She had so hoped that it would all turn out to be a false alarm, a moment of midnight misapprehension. But that carriage was far too large and solid to be a figment of anyone's imagination. Letty cast a quick look up at the neighbors' windows. All were dark, swathed in Sunday calm.

Holding her breath against the stench of a recently emptied chamber pot, Letty ventured tentatively down the alley, following the soft snuffle of equine breath in what she hoped must be the direction of the carriage. Whoever thought a midnight elopement was a glamorous thing? wondered Letty sourly. Perhaps she would feel differently if it were her own elopement, but Letty rather doubted it. Love went only so far. Some smells were too strong to be ignored, even by the most ardent of Juliets.

"Lord Pinchingdale?" Letty stumbled her way to the coach. Bumping up against one of the rear wheels, she felt her way forward. "Lord Pinchingdale?"

There was no response from the shadowy interior.

Which meant, Letty admitted, that he probably wasn't there.

She didn't much like the alternatives. Lord Pinchingdale might have gotten bored and decided to scale the ivy—but wouldn't she have heard the thud? A new and terrifying possibility struck Letty. What if he and Mary had already fled, leaving the carriage standing outside as a decoy? They would lose precious time searching while the lovers were already tearing up the miles to Gretna Green in a well-sprung traveling chaise, smaller and lighter than the cumbersome coach.

Letty groped along the door, looking for the latch. "Lord Pinchingdale?" she whispered sharply. The restless scrape of the horses' hooves on the cobbles and the sound of the coachman shifting on the box above blotted out her words. Letty twisted the latch sharply, stumbling backwards as the stiff door unexpectedly gave. Catching her balance by dint of grabbing on to the door frame, she leaned head and shoulders inside the cavernous interior, which stretched before her like one of the bottomless caves of fairy tale, so dark she couldn't make out the difference between seats and floor, window or wall.

"You aren't here, are you?"

She realized it wasn't quite the done thing to talk to inanimate objects—or to people who weren't there—but if she didn't say something, she was quite likely to kick something instead.

If they were already gone, there was nothing she could do. She could send a groom after them, in the hopes of arresting their flight and hauling Mary back—but she couldn't see much point to it. The odds of not being seen, or of the groom not telling a friend who would tell a friend, were so slim as to pose no temptation to even the most hardened and reckless of gamblers. The story would be all over London by the time the maids opened the curtains and brought in the morning chocolate.