And then she shoved him, hard, making him stumble back into the room. She slipped away from him and eased the door shut while he still reeled. Yes. The key was in the lock, and she turned it.
For a moment, she hesitated outside the closed door, hand outstretched toward the key.
She had kissed him first, and now she could not remember whether she had meant it as a distraction or whether she had simply not been able to help herself. It had not ended as a trick, though; Benedict Frost was far too intoxicating. He left her, as did all the best spirits, with a pounding head and a desire to act wanton.
Within the bedchamber, all was suspiciously silent. She clenched her fists, pulling them back from the key, and returned to the stairs. The first step, and this time she skipped the creaking second one. Silence, silence.
And then from behind her came the clunk of metal onto a wood floor, the creak of hinges as the locked bedchamber door swung open. She turned to see Frost in the doorway, shoulder against the frame, one booted foot planted toe-down in a pose of ultimate nonchalance.
“Ought I to have mentioned I carry a knife, too? Though I suppose it’s more of a stiletto.” He held up the small daggerlike blade in his right hand, gave it a little toss in the air, and caught it by its bone-colored hilt. “Just the right size for pushing a key from the lock.”
The sleek movement of his hands as he tucked the neat blade back into his boot was enough to make her lick her lips. He felt about on the floor and scooped up the door key, then straightened.
“Now, Miss Perry. Are we to search for stolen coins together or shall we shove each other about some more first? I’m perfectly happy either way.”
I might be, too, Charlotte thought. For what seemed the thousandth time, she remounted the few steps she’d managed to descend. “I intend to leave alone.”
She faced him—looked up at him, really—expecting further protest. Instead, he caught her about the upper arms and swung her neatly about, like the step of a country dance.
And then he shut the bedchamber door with himself on the outside and her within.
She slapped the door hard with the flat of her hand. “Damn you, Frost. Let me out!”
His voice sounded through the wooden barrier, low and resonant. “Just because you locked the door doesn’t mean I did. The only person keeping you in there is yourself.”
Chastened, she pressed at the handle and let the door swing open. The vicarage was old and not quite level, and doors moved as they wanted to.
This one wanted to get out of the way, to let Charlotte look upon Benedict Frost.
Not at his eyes, where one usually looked for the seat of a person’s true feelings. His were distant and blank, though they remained as dark and lovely as they had doubtless always been. No, instead, she had to pick out signs from about his person, just as he picked his way through the world. That crimp of his lip; the arch of his brow; a tightness in the strong line of his jaw. Again, too, he had folded his arms.
“You are angry,” she realized. “You are quite good at not showing it, but you are angry indeed. Am I the cause?”
“It wouldn’t be gracious of me to say so.”
“In other words, yes.”
The stern mouth relaxed just enough to allow the lips to curve. “Yes, then. I’m not sure why you won’t agree to let me accompany you, Miss Perry, or what you think of me. Do you fear I’ll steal your secrets, though I cannot see my hand before my face? Or are you simply certain I’ll slow you down?”
She shook her head, not realizing until too late that this gesture would go unobserved. Each of his questions made her feel lower, until speech was impossible.
His arms relaxed, and he braced one hand against the white trim about the door. “Before I lost my sight, I saw a great deal of the world in His Majesty’s Royal Navy. Some of it was lovely. War was terrible. And much of it was dull, days of nothing but sky and water and the same tasks over and over.”
He turned the key in his fingers. “No matter the setting, I never met anyone who thought little of me once he really knew me. Maybe one day you’ll be the same.” Unerringly, he reached for her hand and pressed the key into it. “I’m fit to go where you do, Miss Perry. Don’t forget that, please.”
He turned to go downstairs, leaving her with those parting words.
“How dare you.” The sentence issued from her throat like a growl.
He paused in the same spot where she had halted twice.
She muscled her voice under control—barely. “How dare you assume that I wish to leave alone because I think you unfit to walk out with me. How dare you assume that my reasons have anything to do with you at all, Mr. Frost. You and I met yesterday. I was born here. Derbyshire has claims on me you can never imagine.”
He turned slowly, tilting his head. “I can imagine a great deal, Miss Perry.”
“Imagine, then, that it is not your business where I search, or how. Imagine that I am a grown woman, and if I place myself in danger, that is my affair. I shall save myself and be all right, or I shall not, and I will be hurt or killed. And that is my affair, too.”
As she spoke, her anger grew more powerful rather than dissipating. So long she had wanted to say these words, to so many people. “It is my affair,” she said in a voice so thick with feeling, she almost choked on the words, “where I live, and with whom. It is my affair if I choose to have company or walk out alone.”
It ought to have been true, all of it. But it was not for any woman, and certainly not for Charlotte Perry, who had never intended to become Charlotte Pearl. She had been born for a plain, everyday life in a Derbyshire vicarage. She had never intended to become notorious or infamous, but chance and fortune had made her both. Known for her caprice and frivolity, for the bare curves immortalized on canvas after canvas.
Her dress covered her too tightly, cutting at her breath. She had grown used to pale silks and red satins, the colors of elegance and lust. The plain blue serge gown she now wore, that she had worn again and again, was something she was not. But she could never again be what she’d been for so long.
She couldn’t bear it. And she was afraid she wouldn’t survive it.
At last, Frost spoke. “You are right. I am sorry. I should not have presumed. Since I lost my sight, I have often been dismissed or underestimated. I must be too ready to perceive a slight where none is intended.”
“I know the feeling of being underestimated,” said Charlotte. “But I do not know if such as we can ever be too ready to perceive a slight. We need our knives about us always.”
“Perhaps we do.” Patting the side of his boot where he’d sheathed the stiletto, he remounted the final step. “Though I’d be a fool to underestimate you, Miss Perry. Since you have kissed me senseless and locked me up, I consider you to be fully master of this situation.”
“Mistress,” she murmured.
“Right, yes. Mistress. I shall not impose upon you again. Of course you have the right to go forth without my company. Without any company, if you so choose.” His smile was a rueful twist, somehow faraway even as he stood before her. “I suppose I just want you to be safe.”
Reaching out, his fingertips brushed Charlotte’s shoulder. He trailed them down from her shoulder to her elbow, where he found the edge of the shawl she had bunched and mangled in her tight-folded arms. “Wrap yourself in this, Miss Perry, and be warm. Though we each seek the same reward, I shan’t be your foe.”
She turned her head away, unwilling to look at him even though he could not read her expression. And he went downstairs—away—somewhere. Leaving her standing within the doorway of his bedchamber, pulling her bonnet’s veil back over her face with hands that were not quite steady.
Maybe it was herself she couldn’t quite face. For she knew, as soon as he tucked her shawl about her with sensitive hands, that she was going to take him to bed.
The only question in her mind now, as she descended the stairs and slipped away on her errand, was how long she woul
d be able to wait.
Chapter Eight
Eyes like a cat.
As Charlotte’s steps ate the distance between the vicarage and the stone wall, she could not stop thinking of those four words.
Eyes like a cat. Nancy Goff had said this as she swanned about the Pig and Blanket’s common room, and she had said “cat eye” as her life slipped away.
Edward Selwyn’s eyes were tawny green. And Charlotte knew from experience that he would do anything for a bit of notoriety. Wearing a cloak for the devil of it; paying a serving girl with a coin he knew to be stolen—that sounded like Edward, who treated life as a masquerade ball.
But arranging a theft from the Royal Mint? Shooting four guards? Stabbing a healthy young woman, who would surely have fought him? No. No, that did not sound like his way. He wanted to charm the world, not control it. He’d be more likely to stab a woman to the heart figuratively than with a knife.
Still. Charlotte would feel more at ease once she checked the hiding-holes she knew to hold meaning for Edward. Not only because he was the father of her child and the artist who had made her infamous, but because . . . well, she hated to think of someone she knew proving she did not know him at all.
For the next several hours, she searched every place in which Edward had once hidden secrets. First, the stone-covered crannies along the vicarage’s side of the wall where she and her sister—and later, she and Edward—used to stash messages and treasures. She pried up rocks, cursing the softness of her hands, and confirmed that the spaces beneath were empty. Once, a brownish-yellow lizard, striated and spotted in black, put out a narrow tongue at her.
“Same to you,” she murmured and covered its home back over. Better to find a lizard than a hidden note confessing a crime. Or a stash of stolen coins.
Where next to check, then? The great hollow tree just outside of the village proper had shielded many notes and packages. It might be large enough to hide some of the coins; its obviousness might divert suspicion.
But when Charlotte, skirting the rare figure she caught sight of, reached the spot where the tree had stood for generations, it was gone. Nothing remained but a stump, with its cut edge gray-brown with age. The tree must have rotted out and fallen at last.
For a long moment, she stared at the stump, almost dizzy. She knew it was illogical to expect the village would remain the same every time she returned, yet indeed she did. Strawfield was not the sort of place where one changed the color of one’s shutters or converted a thatch roof to wooden shakes. It persisted unchanging—until it didn’t. Change, when it came, was large and swift. A centuries-old tree felled. A lover wed.
A young woman’s life ended, and all because of a bit of gold.
She turned away from the old stump, holding the hem of her veil down over her face. A breeze teased her, nipping her uncovered neck with a coolness that was not unpleasant.
Into her mind flashed Benedict Frost, stern but kind as he drew her shawl about her. Kissing her as deeply as a man drew breath, yet doing nothing Charlotte did not do to him first.
If she had met such a man ten years before, her life might have taken a very different path. But she hadn’t. She’d met Edward instead.
She was careful as she slipped onto his lands, watching out for some member of the grand house’s staff. She saw a man with a shovel once, but he was too far away for her to tell whether he was a gardener or whether he trespassed like Charlotte.
For a moment, she toyed with the notion of returning to the vicarage for a shovel of her own. There were several hiding spots on this side of the wall, too, and she must check them all. No; better to leave no trace or turned earth. She could pry free the stones with her hands. She always had in the past.
Empty. Empty. All of the nooks were empty. When she heaved the last stone back into place, her hands were raw, several fingers bruised.
This search had not set her mind at ease, though it was a necessary first step. As she had told Frost, there was an infinity of places to search in Strawfield and the surrounding land. No one would ever find the stolen sovereigns by chance.
This whole search had been ridiculous. Edward didn’t need to steal money. Lady Helena Selwyn, eldest daughter of the Earl of Mackerley, had brought a rich dowry to their marriage eight years before and transformed Selwyn House into a showplace.
Eyes like a cat, Nance had said. But she had also said demon eyes, red as fire. They glowed in the dark. Even to the last, the barmaid had stuck to her unlikely story, talking of cat eyes and a cloaked figure. Comforting herself, maybe, that what had happened to her made sense. That it wasn’t terrible and random and undeserved.
But it was terrible. And it made no sense.
Charlotte picked her way back to the vicarage, taking care no one should see her—not that she needed such caution today. That fellow with the shovel was the only possible reward seeker she’d seen. The formerly blithe visitors to Strawfield had retreated in the aftermath of Nance’s death. Maybe some of them had decided the promise of riches was not worth the newfound risk. Or maybe they were lurking about the Pig and Blanket, hoping for a glimpse of the dead girl or a chance to be chosen for the coroner’s jury.
She shuddered, wrapping her shawl more tightly about her with hands that were much less careful than Benedict Frost’s had been.
When she let herself into the vicarage, she hung up her veiled bonnet on a hook by the door. After a second’s thought, she added the shawl, too. Mrs. Perry’s study door was still closed, and Maggie’s voice could be heard through it faintly. “Stin pragmatikótita, eg o ídios, me ta diká mou mátia, eída tin Sívylla stin Kými krémetai se éna boukáli . . .”
So, Maggie was learning to speak Greek. Yet another thing about her that Charlotte had not known. The precious infant had become a fat child in leading strings, then a darling curious girl. Now she was a half-grown mystery. The only constant was Captain, now gray-muzzled and slow, curled outside the study door.
Charlotte bent to pet the old hound. Captain raised her head with a whuff.
“Does that mean you’ll put in a good word for me with your young mistress?” She petted the graying brindled fur of the dog’s head, until Captain lowered her head again and fell into a doze.
Charlotte would have returned more often if she could have, if she dared. But each letter to her parents was met either with silence or with a not yet; maybe next year. And it was wise, she knew, to give Strawfield time to forget her face between each visit. Wise to keep Maggie from growing too attached to her.
Her own attachment, she could not help.
“If you are quite done lurking outside the study, Miss Perry,” came a low voice, “I should like your assistance sending a letter.”
Frost stood in the doorway of the small parlor. Of course he had heard her enter; his scrupulous ears noted every footfall.
“I shall be glad to help.” She straightened up, finding that she was not quite able to look at him. He was no longer just Mr. Frost, but someone she had kissed. Someone she had been unable to resist touching. Someone she had pushed, and who had pushed her right back.
Yet he called her Miss Perry, correct and proper as though she had never made him hard, as though he hadn’t shoved her into his bedchamber. The memory made her blush; she, who had lived in the naked world of sex for years.
How little it had to do with her own desire.
Thank heaven he could not see her burning cheeks. “What is the letter, Mr. Frost? Do you need to seal it, or only to address it?”
“It is to my sister, Georgette, in London. I have written the direction, but need a seal or wafer. And then if it could be placed with the other correspondence—”
“Yes, certainly.” She brushed past him, trusting him to follow her voice. “If you take your letter into Strawfield for posting when you attend the inquest, it ought to arrive in London the day after tomorrow. Oh—wait, tomorrow is Sunday. Well, perhaps two days from tomorrow, then. The mailing supplies are kept in the de
sk in the far corner of this parlor.”
“The southeast corner or the southwest corner?” He slapped the folded letter against one palm, his smile puckish.
“Why don’t you tell me?” Charlotte replied drily. “Five paces forward, and you’ll knock right into it.”
“Southwest, then.” And with as much grace as Charlotte possessed on her most swanlike days, he wound around the long sofa and stood before the writing desk.
She moved to his side, handed him a gummed wafer, and took the sealed letter from him when he was finished. “It’s past time I wrote to Georgette,” he admitted. “She is . . . not aware of my present whereabouts.”
“Is she usually? I thought you were busy poking your—”
“Miss Perry.”
“—nose into any bit of the world you could.”
“That’s one way of putting the matter.” He stepped around her, finding the back of the long sofa, and took up the noctograph he had laid upon the seat. “She usually doesn’t know where I am, no. But at present she probably thinks I am sailing on the Argent again. I intended to be in England for only a few days. Long enough to turn my manuscript over to a publisher and arrange payment to Georgette.”
Charlotte added his letter to the pile of outgoing post. “I presume nothing about your plan went as you expected, since you aren’t sailing the seven seas.”
“You are correct. Publishers are eager for accounts of travel abroad, but not those written by blind men. Not even if such a man pays the costs of publication.”
Charlotte blinked, bewildered. “How could that not be of interest?”
“Oh, they thought it of interest. But not as a memoir. They think I made the whole damned thing up.” His fingers clutched the wooden edges of the noctograph, the strength of his grip turning his knuckles bloodless white.
“How stupid of them. I am sorry.”
“Do you believe me to be truthful, then?” His gaze was unfixed as ever, but his brows had furrowed, head turned toward her.
“It had not occurred to me not to believe you.” She added, teasing, “Especially not with the illustrious Lord Hugo Starling vouching for you.”
Fortune Favors the Wicked Page 8
