A Talent for Trickery

by Alissa Johnson

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Do you really think he might?”

  She really couldn’t say. Peter was fourteen. He still secretly (he thought) slept with the small embroidered blanket she’d purchased during his infancy, and he ogled girls like a randy old man. He was a good boy. He truly was. But sometimes he raged over nothing or seemed to become indignant over everything, and he still insisted that the time the vicar tripped on the hem of his cassock and spilled the Eucharistic wine atop Mrs. Cooper’s bent head was the funniest damned thing he would ever see.

  The mind and motives of a fourteen-year-old boy were, in many ways, inscrutable.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Owen heaved a sigh. “Very well.”

  Taking that as capitulation, she expected Owen to put out the lamp. Instead, he went to the bed, pulled off the counterpane, and stuffed it up against the bottom of the door. “Will that do?”

  She thought about it. “If we keep our voices down, yes.”

  Owen nodded and resumed his seat, and Lottie returned her attention to the letters.

  She noted that the contents were of similar length and style. It was likely the same encryption on every page. Without doubt, they were constructed by a single author. “You took them to someone else first, I imagine?”

  “Mr. Bradley,” he confirmed.

  “He’s still alive?” A picture of a wizened face flashed in her mind. Mr. Bradley had been ancient when she’d known him. By now he had to be…practically eternal.

  “Yes,” Owen replied. “And still fond of you.”

  What rot, she thought. “Not so fond as to write a word in the last eight years.”

  He gave her a chiding expression. “He doesn’t know where you are.” Owen shrugged when she glanced at him. “There were very few people made aware of your relocation to Norfolk. I thought it best at the time.”

  “He could have given a letter to you.”

  “And you would have returned any letter from me unopened.”

  He had a point. And because he did, she dropped the subject and went back to studying the letters. In the parlor, the long list of letters and numbers had initially looked to be a simple substitution cipher, something like a Caesar shift. But at second glance, she’d realized the code was nothing of the sort.

  Simple substitution ciphers were the most basic forms of encryption, the patterns they created obvious. In any given correspondence, certain letters like e and a would always be used with the greatest frequency. Disguising them as z and q or even the number four didn’t change that. The repetition of the most common letters remained. The pattern was more or less unchanged.

  Lottie didn’t recognize the pattern in the code before her. She couldn’t even find it, no matter how many times she flipped through the pages.

  It was there. She knew it was there. She caught hints and glimpses of it, like intriguing flashes of light in her peripheral vision. But pinning it down was akin to studying a faint star in the night sky. She could see it twinkling out of the corner of her eye, but the second she turned her head to get a proper look, it disappeared.

  She wondered if it was a particularly involved polyalphabetic cipher. Her father had been fond of using the Vigenère cipher, manipulating it a bit to give it his own personal touch. In that way, she supposed the encryption rather did look like something he might have created. The numeric values might represent stops, or punctuation. Perhaps they were included merely as a distraction, or as nulls or traps.

  But that didn’t fit. Without a keyword that sort of encryption might take months, even years, to decipher, if it could be done at all. A man who wrote four lengthy letters clearly felt he had something important to say. He didn’t want to wait to be heard or take the chance he might never be heard.

  Then again, if he’d designed the keyword to be easily guessed, he wouldn’t have to wait. It could be the name of one of the artists or one of the victims. She should make a list of the possibilities. Obviously, she’d need a Vigenère table.

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Hmm?” She glanced up to find Owen watching her with a curious expression. “Miss what?”

  “This. You used to help your father. Used to help us. And you enjoyed it, as I recall.”

  “I did.” At the time, she’d thought she was doing something worthwhile for someone worthwhile. “No, I don’t miss it.”

  “Liar,” he accused softly. “You like the challenge.”

  He was right. She had missed the challenge, along with the knowledge that she was doing something important, something noble.

  Above and beyond that…she had missed Owen. It was a difficult admission to make, even to herself, but she had missed him. Or at least the Owen she’d once imagined him to be. The stalwart guardian. The trustworthy hero. The man she could laugh with, confide in, lean on. Her friend.

  She had missed that Owen. Desperately.

  “I might have missed it a little,” she whispered and told herself there was no shame in missing an old lie. Believing it—that would be both shameful and dangerous. But missing it was mostly harmless.

  “More than a little, I should think.” Owen gestured to a clock on the mantel. “You’ve been at it for nearly an hour, and I’d wager you had no idea more than five minutes had passed.”

  She lifted a shoulder, secretly annoyed at herself for losing track of time, and a little perturbed that he might have been staring at her the whole time, and quite a lot perturbed that the thought made her heart race just a little faster. “I don’t like leaving a puzzle undone; that’s all. I’m stubborn.”

  “You are the single most obstinate human being I have ever known,” he agreed readily. “You’re also one of the cleverest.” He leaned forward in his chair and reached out to tap the letters on her lap. “Can you decipher it?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “My father employed a variety of techniques and styles. Sometimes the codes he made or acquired were relatively simple, because they were designed to be used by relatively simple men as a means to communicate with other, ofttimes even simpler, men. Other times, an advanced understanding of the mathematics was required.”

  “You’ve a rare talent for the mathematics, as I recall.”

  “Not so very rare. My education was limited.” But something told her that an extensive education was not what she was missing. It was the damned pattern. “But I might be able to decipher this with time.”

  “How much time, precisely?”

  She gave him a sardonic look. “Two days, twelve hours, forty-three minutes, and six and three-quarters seconds.”

  Precisely? Honestly.

  Owen’s lips twitched, which made hers want to twitch, so she found something interesting to stare at on his collar. His open collar, unbuttoned almost to the center of his muscled chest. The familiar shiver returned.

  This was a terrible idea.

  Instinctively, she dropped her gaze, away from the sight of his golden skin…and straight to his lap.

  Infinitely worse.

  She tried his face again with the hope that his lips were done twitching.

  They were. In fact, Owen no longer appeared the least bit amused. He was watching her with a quiet intensity she found far more unnerving than the sight of his open shirt.

  She’d seen that look before. During their last year in London, she would catch him sometimes staring at her from across a room with the same determined look in his eyes.

  She’d liked it then. She’d liked the way his piercing gaze made her skin tingle and her breath catch.

  But tonight…tonight her skin tingled and her breath caught in her throat, just as before. But she didn’t like it. She couldn’t.

  “I’ve no idea how much time,” she said with more volume than was probably wise. It was worth it. Owen’s gaze had drifte
d down to her neck, but it snapped back up at the sound of her voice. “I can’t promise to decipher it at all.”

  He surprised her by shifting in his seat. She’d never known him to be a fidgeter.

  “Will you try?” he asked, his voice a bit hoarse. “We can’t look through the journals during the day, or when the room grows too warm, but you can work on this.”

  “While you do what, precisely?”

  “Help?” He smiled when she snorted. “We made a good team, once upon a time.”

  “We did, yes. Until you tossed my father to the wolves.”

  “Lottie—”

  She held up a hand, sorry she’d made the comment. Now wasn’t the time to have that fight. Never was the time to have that fight. The man hadn’t come to apologize. He wasn’t sorry for what he’d done. And no amount of berating on her part would change that.

  “I’ll do what I can,” she offered. She owed it to Mrs. Popple.

  “Excellent.”

  “Under my original condition,” she continued. “Peter is to know nothing of this. Nothing of what we are doing now nor what any member of this family has done in the past.”

  “Understood.”

  “Good.” She set the papers aside, sat up straight, and gave him her full attention. “Then we need to discuss how we are to proceed tomorrow.”

  “And by discuss, do you mean to say you will tell me and I shall agree?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.” He leaned back in his chair, stretched out his long legs, waved his hand in a prompting manner, and said, “Proceed.” Putting Lottie to mind of a royal granting audience to one of his subjects.

  It was tempting to issue a set-down, something to knock the imaginary jewels out of his imaginary crown, but she decided against it. At the moment, she needed Owen’s cooperation more than she wanted his humiliation.

  And so Lottie patiently explained her plan to the annoyingly regal Lord Renderwell and provided him with the information he needed to proceed without bringing down the lowly house of Walker-Bales.

  The entire process took far less time than she anticipated, primarily because Owen didn’t argue. He sat, listened, asked a few questions for clarification, then simply nodded and said, “It’s a sound plan. I’ll see Samuel and Gabriel follow it.”

  And that was that. He agreed to her scheme without an argument—without so much as a criticism.

  She’d forgotten that about him. She’d forgotten how well he listened and how comfortable he was incorporating the ideas of others into his own plans.

  “Do you intend to tell Peter the truth some day?” Owen asked in an offhand manner.

  “Hmm?” How was it possible she remembered the smell of his soap and not how well he listened? Listened in a way no one else had before. Or since. “Oh. Yes. I’ll tell him.”

  “Well, if you don’t want him to learn of it yet, you should return to your room and have a few hours’ sleep. It might look suspicious if we’re both exhausted tomorrow.”

  Peter was familiar with her nocturnal habits. But under the circumstances, it was probably wise not to invite complication.

  “Right. Well.” She rose from her chair, brushed a hand down her wrinkled skirts, and, for no discernible reason at all, suddenly felt rather awkward. “Good night, Renderwell.”

  Without waiting for a response, hoping there wouldn’t be one, she headed for the door. He was silent as she crossed the room and while she pushed away the counterpane. But the moment her fingers wrapped around the door handle…

  “I don’t think you dislike me at all,” he called out softly, and she froze. “I think you are angry.”

  She kept her back to him. For reasons she couldn’t name, she felt that if she turned round and looked at him, really looked at him, something inside her might break—or worse, melt. And she couldn’t allow that to happen.

  Anyone can be duped once, poppet. Anyone at all. There’s no shame in it.

  But there is nothing more pitiful on God’s green earth than the dupe who comes back for seconds.

  “Does it matter?” she asked softly. It shouldn’t matter. Anger or dislike—either way, she wanted nothing to do with him.

  “It does.” A long pause followed. “Good night, Lottie.”

  Five

  Owen worked out the stiffness of a sleepless night with an early morning walk about the grounds.

  There were, in his estimation, few things capable of putting a man at his ease quite so well as a solitary walk in the country. There was something uniquely calming about the openness of the land, the rustle of the trees, and being the only person for…well, not that far, really. He was still in plain view of the house. But it was more distance from humanity than could generally be had in London, unless one cared to take one’s walks through Hyde Park in the dead of night.

  Even then, it wouldn’t be the same. In London, vigilance was required the moment one stepped foot out the door. A man needed to be constantly alert, keenly aware of who and what was around him. There were pickpockets, footpads, ruffians, and cutthroats about—he rubbed absently at a healing bruise across his ribs—some of them waiting in dark alleys, eager to express their displeasure at having spent six weeks in gaol.

  But out here, a man could relax.

  He dropped his hand and considered the various weapons currently attached to his person.

  A man could probably learn to relax.

  He thought of Lottie last night, standing in front of his knife.

  God Almighty, he needed to learn how to relax.

  He rolled the painful tension out of his shoulders. He wouldn’t have hurt her. He knew that and, clearly, she’d known that too. But it had been a terrible thing to find Lottie positioned at the wrong end of his blade.

  Which was one reason his mistresses, when he had one, slept in their own beds. And why he would keep his knife out of arm’s reach of his bed for the remainder of his stay at Willowbend.

  Satisfied, if not completely soothed by that decision, Owen forced his mind back to his peaceful surroundings. Lottie had chosen a fine home for her family, he decided. The old stone house, with its lightly weathered green shutters and low-pitched roof, had a comfortable and settled air about it he found appealing. A small turret, no doubt a recent addition designed to hide a water tank, added a disarming whimsy.

  And the grounds were superb. The front lawn was extensive, lightly dotted with trees, but otherwise open to the road. The back lawn, he soon discovered, was quite a bit smaller, hemmed in by the woods after only sixty yards or so, but that was more than adequate space for an extensive flower garden complete with meandering paths and what appeared from a distance to be a sizable fountain.

  Owen stopped at the edge of the garden. It was tempting to wander on, to take a few more minutes for himself, but there wasn’t time.

  He turned round and headed back to the house. By now, Lottie would be awake. He wanted a private word with her before the rest of the family arose and the charade began.

  A minor alteration of plans had occurred. Very well, a significant alteration had occurred, and it would be best if she learned it from him and not one of his men. Owen supposed there was slim chance she’d take the news well. Then again, slim chance did afford the possibility of some chance. More, certainly, than he might have expected twelve hours ago.

  Last night, Lottie had softened. Somewhat. The change had been so subtle, it could easily have gone unnoticed.

  But he had noticed.

  He’d noticed when she’d cast furtive glances his way over the top of her journal and when her lips had twitched with suppressed laughter. He recognized that sometime during the night her eyes had gone from sharp to wary, and her words from caustic to merely sarcastic. He sure as hell noticed when she’d looked at his lap.

  Which led him to an unsettling observation about himself.


  He wanted her. Or, more accurately, he still wanted her.

  Eight years ago, Lottie had been forbidden fruit, a torturous little itch he couldn’t scratch. To scratch would be to take advantage, and not the sort of advantage wherein a gentleman convinces his bride-to-be to anticipate their wedding night. It was really more of a your family’s future lives and dies at my pleasure, but don’t let that sway your decision kind of advantage.

  There were words for men who made advances toward women in no position to rebuff them. All of them insufficiently foul.

  Owen sidestepped a series of jutting tree roots and frowned. There were also words for men who bedded a countrywoman one day and left for London the next.

  He traded frowning for scowling at his boots. Probably, there were also words for a man who tried to seduce a woman who had recently threatened to set him ablaze, throat first. But those were just embarrassing.

  “Renderwell!”

  Owen lifted his head to discover Lottie already halfway across the lawn. He waved at her.

  She did not wave back.

  Still, she made a lovely picture. He stopped where he was and let her come to him, for no other reason than to draw out the pleasure of watching her.

  The morning sunlight was behind her, illuminating her lithe form with a soft glow, while a gentle breeze fluttered the skirts of her forest-green gown and caught a small lock of ebony hair, releasing it from its pins. That was sure to annoy her, Owen thought with a smile. Lottie was careful how she presented herself. She didn’t like to appear undone.

  “Care for a morning stroll, Miss Bales?” he inquired when she drew near.

  “No,” she said without heat, but also without hesitation. “Peter will be up soon. Have you spoken with Samuel and Gabriel?”

  “After you left last night,” he assured her. “They understand what’s to be done.” She wasn’t going to like what was to be done, but they would get to that in a minute. “Did you sleep?”