Every difference of opinion they’d had thus far had played out in the same manner. She might disagree, debate, or explain, but, in the end, he walked away the victor. Even when the disagreement had led him to issue an apology of some kind, he still had his way in the end.
“You chased off the intruder,” he reminded her. “That was not what I wanted.”
“But I stayed upstairs whilst you ran off with a gun. You insisted on the trip to the ruins, and the trip was taken. You insisted on Peter’s involvement, and Peter became involved. The gun, the stew, the—”
“Is there a point to this?”
Mostly the point had been to change the point, but it was worth pursuing nonetheless. “Only that you can’t always have your way.”
His expression shifted suddenly, his handsome features hardening with anger. “If I had my way, you would stay locked in this room and chained to that bed until I found the man responsible for hurting you and peeled the skin and muscle from his bones in quarter-inch strips.”
“Oh. Well. That is…really quite gruesome.” And rather creative, she had to admit. “But I’ve no objection to the sentiment.”
Something like a laugh escaped him, softening his countenance once more. “You’ll not object to any of it.”
“I’ll not be put under lock and key.”
“No, but you’ll rest for a day or two.”
“If it suits me, yes. I imagine it will,” she added when he looked a bit exasperated. “That’s not a capitulation, mind you. Merely a reasonable assumption given the circumstances.”
“Noted,” he said dryly.
Lottie drummed her fingers against the sheets. “I suppose there’s no chance at all that what happened in the stable was an accident.”
She took some satisfaction in setting him off balance with the unexpected change of subject. It wasn’t quite so bold as demanding he cross the room and kiss her, but it was gratifying all the same.
“None,” Owen supplied.
“I thought not. He took a risk, coming out of the woods to lead Mr. Nips into the stable, wedging the door shut, starting the fire. That took time.”
“He’s growing desperate.”
“He’s cruel. Why would anyone do such a thing? How could someone seek to hurt a helpless old pony?”
Owen shook his head and abandoned his pacing to take a seat at the end of the bed. “To attract our attention.”
“That couldn’t be his only reason. He already had our attention.”
“To make a point, then, or deliver a message.” Frowning thoughtfully, he tucked the edge of the blanket under her foot. “Would the Ferret have known what Mr. Nips means to Esther?”
“I cannot imagine how. Esther was a child when she met him. She’d not have acquired Mr. Nips yet. He was simply convenient, I think. Pastured right up against the stable, wasn’t he? On the side away from the house?” She waited for his nod. “That’s likely why he was chosen. He’s a crabby old fellow but docile on a lead.” She cocked her head and smiled. “Rather like you.”
He barked out a laugh and rose from the bed to peek out the drapes. He was impatient again, Lottie realized. He wanted to work, to be in the woods with his men, but there was one more matter they needed to discuss first.
“Owen? If you catch this man—”
He flicked a glance over his shoulder. “When I catch him.”
“Very well. When you catch him, it will be necessary to turn him over to the police for his crimes.” And once he did, the existence of the Walker-Bales family in England would no longer be a secret.
“I can arrange for his quiet removal out of the country.”
“Without a trial?”
He turned to face her, his brows drawn together. “He nearly killed you, and your sister, and you would worry over his fate?”
“No,” she replied, wincing a little at the admission. She’d always loathed the idea of vigilante justice. Funny how quickly the loss of objectivity could turn one into a hypocrite. “Perhaps I should be, but my concern is for you, not him. The law says he must have a trial. You’re a man of the law, Owen, not a criminal.”
She wouldn’t have him change that, not for her, not for any price.
“Ah. You needn’t worry on that score. When you disappeared eight years ago, it was with her majesty’s blessing, and when I send the bastard off in chains, it will be with all the proper permissions.”
Lottie didn’t see how it could be that easy, but a soft knock on the door barred additional questions. Esther padded inside, looking pale and small in her flowing white dressing gown. “May I speak with you, Lottie?”
“Of course.” Recalling his earlier threats, Lottie tensed as her gaze flew to Owen.
He took a step toward Esther, brow furrowed. “What are you doing out of bed? You should be resting.”
Relieved, Lottie relaxed again. Concern before anger, she thought. Was it any wonder she’d once been half in love with the man? Was it any wonder she was more than three-quarters of the way there now?
She shot straight up in the bed.
Was she? Was she, really? That didn’t seem the sort of thing that should sneak up on a woman. She’d been infatuated with him once, and she was attracted to him now. She respected him, liked and admired him, but—
Esther took a step closer to the bed. “Is something wrong, Lottie?”
“What? No.”
“What is it?” Owen demanded. He was at her side in two steps. “It’s the pain, isn’t it? I knew it. You need to take the laudanum.”
“No, it isn’t.” Reaching out, she slapped his hand away from the laudanum bottle. “Don’t touch that. I was only stretching a bit.”
“It didn’t look as if you were stretching.”
“Well I can’t help what it looked like, can I? Put that away. Better yet, take it away. I would like a private word with my sister.”
“You need rest.” He threw a look over his shoulder at Esther. “Both of you.”
“What I need is a word.” She gave him a saccharine smile. “Owen, please. Don’t be obstinate.”
She watched amusement and frustration play across his features.
“Ten minutes,” he decreed. “You have ten minutes.”
She’d have as long as she bloody well liked. “Why thank you, Your Highness. Most generous of you.”
He eyed her through lowered lids, then eyed the laudanum bottle, then her again, then finally strode to the door and let himself out.
Esther took a seat on the bed, pulling up her stocking feet and scooting close to face Lottie. “How are you feeling?”
“Singed.” And confused and a little frightened. “You?”
“Much the same.” Esther’s gaze traveled to Lottie’s injured leg. “It would have been worse for me, if not for you. You should not have followed me into the stables.”
“We should not have been in the stables at all.”
Esther briefly closed her eyes and let out a shaky sigh. “I know. I wasn’t thinking. I saw Mr. Nips from my window, just a flash of his head as he reared in the stall, and then I was running. I didn’t stop to think. I just ran. I couldn’t let him die like that.”
“I understand, Esther.”
“But I should have. I should have let him go. I put him first.” Esther’s voice trembled, and Lottie knew she wasn’t speaking only of Mr. Nips. “I put him first, and that was wrong of me. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t even know why.”
“Because you love him.” Had loved their father, Lottie thought, and had never been certain that love was reciprocated.
“I love you more,” Esther whispered, a moment before a faint smile danced on her lips. “I love me more, come to that.”
“Oh, I know,” Lottie replied, with feeling. Humor lit her sister’s pale features, but all too soon, it was gone.<
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“I should have remembered that, instead of…other things.” Esther took her hand. “I am sorry, Lottie. I’m very sorry.”
“I know that too.”
“I have so many amends to make.”
“Not so very many,” Lottie replied in a bolstering tone. “You’ve already made things right with me. There’s only Owen and Sir Samuel.”
Esther curled her lip. “I don’t want to apologize to Samuel. He’s a brute.”
“Samuel?” She’d always thought him the most congenial of the three, if only by virtue of being the least likely to open his mouth.
“I tried to speak with him once already.” She snagged an extra pillow from the head of the bed and hugged it to her chest. “He called me a selfish imbecile and walked out of the room.”
“Samuel?” Now she was just echoing herself.
“He might be right about the selfishness,” Esther conceded in a quiet voice. “But I am not an imbecile. It was one stupid act. It doesn’t make me a stupid person entirely.”
“It certainly does not,” Lottie assured her. “But you need to find a way to make peace with him, all the same. He pulled you from a fire, Esther.”
“I know.” There was a wealth of bitterness in those two words. “I’d rather it had been Gabriel. He’s such a nice fellow.”
Lottie recalled the smile Gabriel had offered while informing her that he did not miss. Nice did not apply. “Sir Gabriel is many things, apparently.”
“So is Sir Samuel. All of them unappealing.”
“Well, you needn’t deal with any of them right now.” Lottie gave her sister’s hand a bolstering squeeze. “No one expects you to settle matters immediately. Go back to bed. Rest for a while. Things will look better later.”
“People always say that.” Esther sighed again and lightly tossed the pillow back with the others. “And they’re always wrong.”
Fifteen
Lottie remained confined to bed for three days. On the first day, she was unable to keep her eyes open for more than an hour or two at a time, rendering her a pleasant and compliant patient. On the second day, she grew restless despite the distraction provided by working on the encrypted letters.
By the middle of the third day, not even the threat of another dose of laudanum could convince her to remain tucked up in bed.
“I will personally force it down your throat,” Owen threatened at her bedside.
She didn’t believe his threat for a moment, but she met his threatening glare with one of her own. “You are welcome to try.”
“Let her alone.” This from the newly arrived Esther, fully dressed and looking like her old self.
“Why does she get to be out of bed?” Lottie demanded.
“I didn’t injure a leg,” Esther replied without rancor. “Let her up, Renderwell. She can rest dressed and on the settee in the library just as well as sitting about in here.”
“She can nap in here,” Owen replied.
Lottie’s fingers curled into the sheets beneath her. “I don’t want another damned—”
“She can nap on the settee,” Esther countered.
She was not going to nap on the settee, but if the possibility swayed Owen, she’d let him believe it.
“Besides,” Esther continued, “the healing process can be slowed by temper and quickened by fine spirits.”
Lottie had no idea if that was true, and neither did Owen by the looks of it, but she nodded vigorously all the same. “It’s true.”
“It’s rubbish,” Owen returned.
“It certainly won’t be aided by a physical altercation. I will get out of this bed.”
Even if it was only for the ten seconds she could manage before he dumped her back into it again.
“You’ll stay seated in the library?” His tone held both skepticism and demand. “You’ll stay where I put you?”
She took some offense to the phrase stay where I put you (she wasn’t a bloody doorstop), but she was willing to pick her battles. “I shall recline on the settee and work on the encrypted letters.” She wished she could bring some of the journals as well, but they couldn’t be as quickly or easily hidden under other paperwork should Peter come into the room. “It’s a fair compromise. Also, it will allow me the opportunity to speak with Samuel and Gabriel. I’ve questions.”
“Questions you can’t ask me?”
“I shall ask you as well, if you sit with me in the parlor. Otherwise I will speak to everyone in here.” She waved her hands down her prone form, indicating the nightgown, the loose hair, and her injured leg sticking out from the blanket, exposed from the knee down. “Like this.”
Twenty minutes later, she was up and dressed. Though a few testing steps indicated she could walk without significant discomfort, Lottie made no protest when Owen lifted her in his arms and carried her down the stairs. There was no sense in risking further aggravation of her injury nor in denying herself the pleasure of feeling weightless in Owen’s arms.
Owen settled her on the settee and brought her the letters and a small lap desk on which to work until Gabriel and Samuel returned from their excursions outside.
It was the first time all four of them had been able to meet for more than a passing exchange of information, and it came with a cost. She heard Samuel in the hall before he entered the parlor, grumbling about getting back to the hunt.
“This will only take a few minutes,” she promised as Gabriel appropriated the open chair next to Owen, leaving Samuel to haul over a wooden chair from a nearby table.
“Where’s the lad?” Samuel asked.
“Keeping watch over the west woods from the attic. Esther is with him.” And would keep him there, Lottie thought.
“You’ve questions?” Gabriel prompted.
“I do.” She shifted to sit a little higher against the arm of the settee. She didn’t care to look a complete invalid, even in front of men she more or less trusted. Invalids were vulnerable. “I’ve been unable to make heads or tails of these letters. I’m missing something.” Or everything, if one wished to be precise. “I’d like you to tell me more about the crimes.”
She knew names, dates, and times, but that was very nearly all. If the key to deciphering the letters wasn’t to be found in the letters themselves, then it had to be someplace else. Someplace she’d not yet looked.
Owen’s face turned wary. “Such as?”
“What was the value of the stolen items? Was the intruder tidy in his thefts, or did he leave a mess? Were the occupants home at the time? Where did he leave the letters, exactly? What was the weather like? What—”
“The weather?” Gabriel smiled, amused by the notion. “Why should that matter?”
“I don’t know that any of it matters. Humor me, if you will.”
Both men looked to Owen.
“The value ranged between six hundred and four thousand pounds,” he supplied. “The occupants were away during two thefts, in bed for the last. The letters were left in the open near the missing art. One on a small table, one on the floor, and one on the bare nail left in the wall. Mostly, he did the jobs neat, but he did break a window at Mr. Landie’s town house.”
“Is that how he got in?”
“Presumably.”
“How did he get in the other homes?”
“Picked the locks on terrace doors leading into a study and drawing room, respectively. I don’t recall the weather. Samuel?”
Samuel tipped his head back and closed his eyes for a moment. “Rained two nights out of the three.”
Good Lord, he actually remembered the weather? She’d not been serious about that. “I see. And Mrs. Popple?”
Owen shook his head. “Nothing was stolen at Mrs. Popple’s.”
“Yes, I know. How was she murdered?”
“We don’t need to discuss it.”
“We do.” She huffed impatiently when all three men remained tight-lipped. “I can’t help if I haven’t even the basic facts with which to work. Owen, please.”
He hesitated a beat longer before answering. “She was strangled.”
Though Lottie’s heart squeezed painfully, she kept her expression void of emotion. No sense in giving Owen an excuse to end the conversation before it had really begun. “And?”
“And what?”
“How did he get inside? Did she still keep rooms at the brothel? Was he tidy? Where was the note? Et cetera.”
He considered her questions and seemed to relax at the realization that she wasn’t asking him to paint a picture of the death scene. “Mrs. Popple had a private house. The staff were off for the night save a pair of grooms in the mews and a maid sleeping in the kitchen two floors below on the opposite end of the house. It looked to us as if he gained entry through an unlocked window in a sitting room. He was not tidy. There was a struggle. The letter was left next to her on the floor in her bedroom.”
“No rain.”
“Thank you, Samuel.”
“What does all this tell you?” Gabriel asked. “That he is inconsistent?”
She hitched up a shoulder. “Yes, or that he is intelligent and imaginative and wishes to appear inconsistent.”
Gabriel folded his arms across his chest and smiled. “In other words, it tells you nothing.”
“It provides no immediate answers,” she admitted. “But it may be of use later. Either something will lead us to a keyword, or I am wrong about the nature of this encryption and it’s… I don’t know. Gibberish, or entirely mathematical, or—”
Gabriel looked to Owen. “You’re skilled in the mathematics.”
“Not so much as Lottie. And I’ve no talent for this sort of thing. Encryptions and such.” He tapped his finger against the armchair in a thoughtful manner. “I wonder why that is.”
“Poverty of imagination,” Lottie offered, and she answered his annoyed expression with a teasing smile. “Unlike our murderer, you seek consistency. You demand control. How can you see what is different when you are forever endeavoring to make everything the same?”
A Talent for Trickery Page 19
