Fortune Favors the Wicked

by Theresa Romain

  “Let me carry the basket, Papa. You are tired.” She took it from him and knocked at the final door, in a lodging-house at the far end of the village’s main street.

  This was the residence of Miss Day, an invalid who had once served as governess to the Selwyn children. Miss Day’s maid-of-all-work let Charlotte and the reverend into a single room with bedstead, table, and a hearth full of ashes. Everything was poor but clean, yet the room stank of the smoke and grease from the other chambers in the house.

  “Oh, what a comfort to see you.” Miss Day tried to push herself upright. “You have brought my medicine?”

  Charlotte looked questioningly at her father.

  “Yes, Miss Day. Exactly what your doctor ordered. One spoonful three times daily.”

  Rummaging through the odds and ends left in the basket, Charlotte found the stoppered bottle. She handed it to the maid, who curtsied her thanks and began to prepare a dose.

  “And how much do I owe the doctor? I am afraid it must be very dear.” Miss Day’s thin hands picked at the stitches on her quilt—which, Charlotte noticed, was much better pieced than her own work on the quilts at the vicarage.

  “Not so much as a farthing,” said Charlotte’s father. “He did not want you to go to any worry, but just to recover your health.”

  If this was the same doctor who had seen to Charlotte when she was a child, he was not the sort to bother himself about a patient’s feelings. She thought she knew who, instead, had paid for the treatment.

  “How kind,” said the invalid, and she swallowed a dutiful dose of the medicine. “Will you convey him my thanks?”

  “I will.”

  She coughed feebly. “Lady Helena—at the great house, you know—she had promised to send some arrowroot and beef tea. So kind and generous ever since I had to leave her service. Although I suppose she forgot to send it over. The distraction of her husband’s return home.” Cough cough.

  Cold raced over Charlotte’s scalp. “Lady Helena’s husband is returned?”

  “Oh, yes. Last night, maybe, or today. He traveled in a crested carriage. It was before the house this morning, and you know how quickly word travels through the village.” Another feeble cough. “Reverend, you mustn’t be angry at him if he traveled on a Sunday. Who could resist returning to those little dear lambs sooner?”

  By this, Charlotte assumed, Miss Day referred to her former charges. Edward’s children. Edward’s other children.

  She wondered if they looked anything like Maggie. She supposed she’d rather not know.

  Dimly, she stood by and tried to look proper and dull as her father said a few prayers with the bed-bound Miss Day and then bade her farewell.

  And then came the walk back to the vicarage, long and thirsty, the basket heavy in the crook of her arm. Footsteps made ridges in the mud at the edges of the road. Here there was no pavement such as in London.

  Her father was the first to break the silence. “Thank you for coming along today, Charlotte. It—it was good to have your help.”

  This seemed not to be quite how he’d meant to finish, but he fell silent again.

  “I should have helped more,” she said. “Not today, but for the past years. Papa. I had no idea all that you—” Her throat caught, and for a moment she was trapped between silence and sound.

  “I should have helped more,” she said again.

  Her father looked down at her with eyes that were green like her own, and somehow sad. “I should have allowed you to,” he said.

  Chapter Twelve

  The next morning, the weather was fine, and Charlotte wanted to feel pretty—a woman’s best armor, even if she were a spinster vicar’s daughter, against social trespass.

  Which she and Benedict were going to commit.

  They had agreed upon this at breakfast, which they ate at a lazy hour of the morning. She told him of her plan. “We cannot hunt the gold. We’ve got to hunt the person who knows where it’s hidden.”

  “I notice a lot of ‘we’ about this business. Not a foe anymore, am I?”

  “You were never that.” She swallowed tea, black and overbrewed, and choked a little. Ever since she had taken her pleasure of him—or since he had given her pleasure?—she had developed a strange softness about the heart where he was concerned. “Yes, we. I know you want to find the sovereigns, too, and I’ve come to think we need each other to do so.”

  “Tell me more.” He clunked one elbow onto the table, rested his chin on it, and raised one brow.

  “Well . . . someone always knows something. A driver took trunks into his carriage. A servant loaded coins into trunks. A person at the mint looked aside while an unfamiliar driver took a shipment into his carriage.”

  He lifted his head, frowning. “Where are these people? Dead or paid for their silence, if they’re in London.”

  “But they aren’t all in London—or they weren’t the night before last.” The night Edward Selwyn had returned to his grand house. Maybe. She really needed to find out when he’d arrived.

  “I understand,” said Benedict. “The person who attacked me is one of those people who knows something.”

  “I think so.”

  “And you think the person who stabbed Nance was—”

  “The same person who paid her the coin. I do not know whether he meant to, or why. But she must have noticed something—or heard him say something—he never intended to.”

  “Now I must have, too.” Benedict’s mouth was a stern slash. “Or so he thinks.”

  “This is why I want to keep you about,” said Charlotte. “You might be a target.”

  “Or bait.” He sounded cheerful about the prospect. “You still carry your knife, don’t you?”

  “I’ll find a way to do so,” she had promised, then went upstairs to finish dressing for their outing.

  Rather than the long-sleeved blue serge, she wore a lighter day dress of pale blue printed all over with black flowers and vines. A week after removing to Seven Dials, she had purchased this gown ready-made from a hopeful dressmaker. The fit was nothing like the bespoke silks Charlotte had sold off in secret, but the cloth was pretty, and she had become starved for prettiness almost as soon as she’d left Mayfair.

  One problem: the gown had short sleeves. Where was she to stow her knife? Remembering Benedict’s trick, she wiggled a small folding blade into her boot. It was not easy to reach, but it was better than being defenseless.

  At her throat, she fastened an old family cameo, then she pinned a lace cap over her coiled hair and covered it with a plain bonnet. Last of all, she plucked up the dagger Benedict had retrieved from his attacker and slipped it into her reticule. The little piecework bag bulged oddly, true, but who would assume the bulge was due to a knife? “You’re a spinster vicar’s daughter,” she told herself in the glass. “You spend your time in virtuous works.”

  Her cheeks were pink as she danced down the stairs.

  “You are ready to conquer the world today,” commented Benedict. “I can tell by the bounce in your step. I shan’t be elegant enough to accompany you, but I plan to take your arm all the same.”

  To replace his ruined lieutenant’s coat, he was wearing an ill-fitting coat that had belonged to Margaret’s husband. Ezrah Catlett had been shorter, though just as broad, and the sleeves hit Benedict several inches above his wrists. The blue of the coat was faded with age, the buttons tarnished.

  Her heart gave a squeeze. “You are as handsome as any fashion plate I ever saw,” she said, and meant it.

  He arched one of those wicked brows. “I like this mood of yours. I shall have to do my best to sustain it.”

  Before exiting the vicarage, he took up his hickory cane. He had not used it around the house since his arrival, and she had forgotten what a stern air it lent him. He seemed again the large stranger from the inn, one who had caught a roomful of people in a mystified web.

  Until he grinned at her and offered his free arm. And just as she had when he smiled at her f
or the first time across a table, when she could hardly see his features for her veil, she melted.

  Only this time she was far more melty than before.

  As they walked, they talked of everything and nothing, a lightness that belied their errand. Charlotte wondered if Benedict’s brain hummed as hers did beneath the light chatter. When they turned into Strawfield proper, she studied every face. The familiar ones—the miller’s wife and eldest daughter, now married and with a baby; the stationer; the poulterer, reeking of blood—they greeted her as Miss Perry and she provoked them into conversation.

  Each time, when they passed on, Benedict said, “Not the voice of the attacker.”

  “I hardly thought Mrs. Burton’s one-year-old had slashed you with a knife,” she said. “But I’m glad you remember the voice clearly enough to absolve the little fellow of wrongdoing.”

  “Stop. Just here.” He planted his feet and looked about. Or rather listened about, or took deeply of the air; Charlotte made herself as still and silent as she could.

  After a few breaths, he nodded. “This. This is nearly where it happened.”

  “This is the place where you were attacked?” At his affirmation, she asked, “How do you know? I do not doubt; I am simply curious.”

  “The emptiness of the village green compared to the shops that wall one in at other points on the street. The distant smell of the bakery. And here the road gets soft and dips downward, probably because puddles form every time there is rain. What do you see hereabouts? Anything unusual? Anything that might give us a clue?”

  As she skimmed over the scrubby grass, the gravel, the mud, and hard-packed dirt, she wished for some modicum of his focus, his ability to hone in on what was helpful. “I see trampled mud. There are prints of boots.”

  “What are their sizes? Or the direction? Are there prints going off like . . .” He made some complicated motion.

  “I am sorry. I cannot tell one set from another. So many feet have walked here since that the prints overlay one another.”

  “Any bloodstains?”

  “Good God, do you think you bled that much?” She strained her eyes for anything, anything that would make her useful. “If there were any, they have been trod into the mud. But let me look about for your stiletto.”

  He described how he had tossed it aside, desperate to hold fast to his cane as a barrier, and she toed aside every clump of grass in the way. To keep an innocent appearance for curious passersby, she maintained a steady stream of chatter about Strawfield, as though Frost were a tourist.

  At last her search came to an end. “I did not turn up your stiletto. But I found a penny, some hazelnut shells, and a horseshoe nail.”

  “Clearly the remnants of some diabolical scheme.”

  “Maybe you and your assailant traded blades. Or maybe it was picked up by someone walking along the road.”

  “Or eaten by a goat.”

  “Doubtful, though possible. I am sorry. I wish I could have found it for you.”

  “It’s all right. My boot is more comfortable without a knife in it.”

  She chuckled. “You’re trying to make me feel better.”

  “No, I’m trying to make myself feel better.”

  “Is it working?”

  He stepped closer and drew her hand onto his arm again. “Yes.”

  Before they had proceeded more than a dozen yards, Charlotte caught sight of the Bow Street Runner who had been hanging about in Strawfield ever since Nance received the gold sovereign. “I am going to hail Mr. Lilac,” she told Benedict. “I think we ought to give him your attacker’s dagger.”

  “Taking sensitive information to the proper authorities? Tosh, Miss Perry. One would think you’d never read a gothic novel. You ought to hold on to it and play at detection yourself.”

  “Thus putting myself into unnecessary danger? I think not. I am playing detective, but only for money. I will not play about with your life, Benedict.”

  “It was only a cut about the arm,” he murmured, but he smiled nonetheless as she called out to the Bow Street Runner.

  A slight man with plain clothing and a neatly trimmed beard, Lilac threaded his way between a bonneted woman carrying a basket of eggs and a portly man attempting to light a pipe, then greeted the pair.

  Charlotte realized too late that she had met Lilac only as the veiled stranger, not as herself. Benedict must have realized the same, for he thanked Miss Perry for summoning Lilac. “I was fortunate enough to meet the Bow Street Runner at Miss Goff’s inquest.”

  “Officer of the Police, if it pleases you,” replied Lilac in a lilting brogue at odds with the shrewdness of his hazel eyes. “And how can I help you this late morning?”

  “Mr. Lilac.” Charlotte hesitated. “Are you seeking Nancy Goff’s killer or the stolen gold sovereigns?”

  “Well, now that’s a good question. I wonder why you’re asking it.”

  “Typical,” murmured Benedict. “An answer that gives no information at all. Lilac, I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Practice, Frost, practice. ’Tis my line of work, the way learning new swear words over the waves is yours.”

  “That is not all that sailors do. Although the point is well taken. And the reason for the question is that we might be able to help you with one investigation, but probably not the other.”

  “Ah, now.” Lilac laid a finger aside of his nose. “I wouldn’t be too certain of that. What is it that you’d like to tell me?”

  “It’s something to show you, rather,” said Charlotte. “But—not in the street. Here, let us go to the bakery.”

  A few little tables had been squeezed in front of the bakery counter when Charlotte was about fifteen years of age, transforming the small, warm building into Strawfield’s first tea-shop.

  As soon as she stepped through the doorway and breathed the sweet, bready smell, she recalled how badly her younger self had wanted to sit at one of those tables. Had wanted to be asked to share a plate of cakes with a friend.

  “I’m not meant to pop in for cakes while I’m in the midst of an investigation, Miss Perry,” mumbled Lilac.

  “Then we won’t order cakes,” she decided. She was past that stage of wanting, surely. “Have you tried the tart, Mr. Lilac? One can always think better when one is full of cake and jam.”

  “If that’s so, the Officers will have to change their diet.”

  The three of them each ordered a slice of tart, and Charlotte arranged a pot of tea for the trio and directed Benedict to a small table. They squeezed into the tiny chairs around it, the only customers in the shop for the moment. After the baker’s daughter brought by their confections on little white plates, she then disappeared into the rear of the bakery, leaving the three entirely alone.

  “Tart before business,” said Benedict.

  “That’s not the way I’ve usually conducted my affairs,” Charlotte murmured in his ear. It was always so gratifying to make someone choke on unexpected laughter. More loudly, she added, “This is a local specialty, Mr. Lilac. The tart shell is filled with jam and almond sponge-cake.”

  “Jam?” Lilac sounded dubious, but he cut free a slab with the side of his fork and shoveled it into his mouth. “Mawwaghhha.” An incoherent sound of delight issued from his lips; his eyes bugged open wide.

  “Fwuhhhhuhhh,” agreed Benedict.

  Charlotte bit into her own slice. “Mmmmmm.” Perfection. The almonds crunching, the cake soft and heavy, the jam a pop of plum-tartness. When Charlotte was a child, she’d received it as a rare treat—on her birthday each year, and once when she had correctly held fifty Bible verses in memory for as long as it took to recite them for her father.

  She had tried to guide her cook in London through the recipe, but it was nothing but guesswork on both sides. “You asked me what I liked about this part of the world, Mr. Frost,” she mumbled around a mouthful of tart. “This. I should have said this.”

  Heedless of her poor manners, the men were already scraping
up the final crumbs of their sweet.

  “All right,” said Lilac with a satisfied sigh. “You’ve fed me, Miss Perry, and I do thank you. That was a real treat. Now, shall we get to the heart of why you’ve asked me to meet with you?”

  Charlotte slung her reticule onto the table with a metallic clunk.

  “That’s no common lady’s gewgaw inside, I’m guessing,” noted the Runner. “Mind if I take a look?”

  “Please do, but carefully.”

  Lilac teased open the drawstring of the piecework bag, peered inside—and whistled. “That’s a pretty little toy you’ve got there, Miss Perry.”

  “It’s not hers,” said Benedict. “Though it’s not mine either.” Briefly, he told the officer about the attack upon his person after the inquest, the way he’d fought off the attacker and accidentally switched blades.

  “And have you any evidence of this attack other than your own word?” Lilac asked.

  “I saw him arrive at the vicarage in a panic, and I saw the bleeding wound,” said Charlotte. The Runner studied her closely, and she lifted her chin and tried to remember what it was like to look innocent.

  “I was not in a panic,” grumbled Benedict. “I was moving with an understandable amount of speed, considering the circumstances.”

  “I also saw Mr. Frost’s stiletto,” Charlotte said, setting Benedict to choking again. “This is not the blade he was accustomed to keeping about his person.”

  “I should say not,” he murmured, and she had to elbow him and hide her smile.

  As Lilac pulled free the dagger, though, the trio became entirely sober. It was a pretty weapon, she supposed, looking at it for the first time in daylight. She described its detail for Benedict. The pearl handle held an emerald, the stone’s color split in two with an inclusion. The blade was slanted and sharp and unpleasantly speckled dark.

  “Good God.” Her fingers went clammy. “Benedict, it’s got blood on the blade.”

  She realized at once she had blundered. “Mr. Frost, I mean.” She shook her head. “Forgive my informality. I was—I think I may swoon.”