“No! Don’t. Don’t help me leave. Don’t ask me to bear that, too.”
His temper flared. “Well, then don’t leave me before you have to!”
“Benedict, stop.” She had gone still behind some barrier, something solid as furniture. Her voice was quiet and low. From the first time he’d heard her speak, he had taken a little thrill from her every word. “If you know you must be done with me, then be done with me. Don’t drag out this pain. Don’t make me lose you bit by bit.”
As he had lost his sight.
The realization rooted him, lost amidst unseen trash or treasure. She was right. It was worse, losing something or someone bit by bit. Knowing the end would come, being tortured by the anticipation of what must happen and the hope that it would somehow pass one by.
His heart was a hard pit, knowing that he had added to her sadness. That the family she’d hoped to form was now being wrecked. But she wanted it for Maggie, and he wanted to stand on his own two feet, and so they just didn’t fit, no matter how sweetly Charlotte’s head tucked, in quiet moments, into the hollow of his shoulder.
Voting, she had made mock of. Who would vote that a blind explorer and a lapsed courtesan would be able to make a go of... anything?
He would have liked to, for a while. But he wasn’t a landowner, and she was a woman, and neither of them had a vote. The question fell dead to the floor.
“All right,” he agreed. “You’re right.”
He turned to make his way back to the stable door, but there were so many things over which to stumble. His eyes, never any help now, were bleared and wet, and somehow his ears weren’t quite working right, and his cane was a dead stick in his hand. Then someone was talking to him—a man’s voice, from right before him, and he shook his head, not listening, not understanding.
Dimly, he heard the clean snick of a blade, and the wetness of blood slid down his right arm and he dropped his cane.
Blood.
Not much, but still. It snapped him rudely back to the present. “What the hell! Who is there?”
“What are you doing here, blind man?” The growl was familiar.
Benedict grimaced. “Let me guess. My little friend from the street. And how are you?” He talked loudly, willing Charlotte to hear and hide and be silent.
“What are you doing in here?”
Benedict held up a quelling hand. “Wait. Did you just cut me with my own knife?”
“You took mine,” came the growl.
“Likewise. Isn’t that delightful? We have a tradition.” Damn. He had neither knife nor, at the moment, cane. Where was it? He couldn’t feel it with his boot; it must have rolled. At this close distance, he could smell the assailant, all beer and sweat. The man was no taller than Benedict, but he had the stiletto. He might have a gun. Who the devil was he?
Mind reeling, Benedict stomped as hard as he could, willing the world to vibrate into order. About him was a tangle of unknown objects.
Oh. But nearby was that pitchfork. Yes. “Don’t cut me again.” He sidled to one side, hoping he’d made it look like a stumble. “This is a borrowed coat. Friend, you are hell on coats.”
Aha. He closed his hand around the handle and hefted it, then gave it a toss in the direction of the assailant.
It hit nothing. Thumped to the hard-packed dirt floor.
But where was the man? Wasn’t he here to hurt Benedict?
Crash. A tumble of heavy items that seemed to fall and echo forever. Benedict clapped a hand over his mouth to keep from calling Charlotte’s name. Was she hidden? Would she stay that way? Stay safe?
“Do you have a gun?” Benedict called. “I think it’s been so sweet of you not to shoot it.”
“I don’t use a gun,” growled the voice.
Aha. Benedict got an idea of where he was. He shifted closer, a cautious quarter step at a time.
His foot bumped against something—that flat thing, that screen or picture or whatever it was. He bent, picked it up, and whipped it in the direction from which he’d heard the voice.
The guttural curse told him he’d hit his mark, but the man didn’t come after him again. Instead, he shifted something heavy. Then something more.
“Friend of mine,” Benedict called. “What are you doing here?”
Another heavy piece went scraping and sliding, hitting the fallen items knocked free by Charlotte.
“You’re searching,” Benedict realized. “Aren’t you? What did you hide in here?”
He remembered the Bow Street Runner’s words. Stephen Lilac thought the attack on Nance was connected to the gold sovereigns. And Benedict was sure the attack on himself was connected to that on Nance.
Which meant . . . “You hid . . . what’s the word? Evidence? You hid some evidence in here, didn’t you, friend from the street?” Hear me, Charlotte. Go for help.
“Shut up, blind man.”
“Not that we have been introduced, or that I wish us to be, but the name is Frost.” Benedict found the nearest thing that he could sit on—it turned out to be a saddle—and sat with seeming unconcern. “I’ll just sit here and keep you company. If you feel like cutting me again, you can try, but I don’t intend to let you. Anyway, it seems you’re busy right now.”
More shifting. More cursing. The man had an impressive vocabulary.
A grunt as if he was pulling something heavy—and then came a dull thump, a groan, and the thud of something falling to the floor.
“This is the loudest building,” Benedict muttered. “Hullo there? Friend from the street?”
“No, it’s Charlotte,” came her voice, a little breathless from exertion. “Nicely done. He must have sneaked in after we stopped talking. With all your distractions, he didn’t realize I was in here.”
He stood up, craning his neck to find the source of her voice. “And you hit him with something?”
“In the back of the head. A cricket bat. Broken, of course.”
He managed a tiny smile. “It seems to have done the job.”
“Are you bleeding?”
Oh. His arm. He toyed with the rip in the coat sleeve. “Are you?”
“No. He didn’t hurt me, but I cut myself on some broken glass. I’m not bleeding anymore.”
“I’ll be able to say the same soon enough. What do we need to do now? Tie him up in case he wakes?”
“Right. Yes.” She directed Benedict around a few fallen items so he could reach them: cricket-batter and former assailant. “You ought to have his knife.”
“My knife,” he said with covetous glee. When Charlotte placed it in his palm, he ran his fingertips over it, cataloguing every nick and dip in the bone handle. “Well met, old friend.”
He slipped it into his boot. “Do you see rope anywhere in here?”
“Something useful, you mean? Ha, no.”
Benedict retraced his steps to the saddle, wrenched free a stirrup, and also snapped off the cinch. He brought them back to Charlotte. “The leather’s old and rotten, but it’s better than nothing. Can you bind him?”
“Believe me,” she said drily, “I know how to bind a man.”
The wink of her Charlotte spirit made him smile. “Excellent. I’ll sit on him while you go for Lilac. If our friend wakes up again, I’ll hit him with something.”
“Here, use the cricket bat. It worked well enough the last time.” She pressed the split but solid wood implement into his hands. “Benedict—what was he looking for?”
“Something you covered up looking for a trunk.” He felt grim. “Something he didn’t mind using a knife to find.”
She swallowed heavily. “The gold sovereigns.”
“Go get Lilac,” he said, then sat on the yielding back of the man who had twice slashed his arms, and who had probably ended the life of at least one person.
He made a more comfortable seat than a broken-down saddle, for what that was worth.
* * *
Charlotte didn’t have to go far to find Stephen Lilac. The Bow Street Runne
r, hat at a jaunty angle, was just crossing from the road onto the vicarage land.
“Mr. Lilac! I was coming in search of you,” she called.
The expression on his bearded face sharpened. When he drew within a few feet of Charlotte, he said, “The same to you, Miss Perry. I was about to pay a call on you at the vicarage.”
“Me?” She pressed a hand against her side; she had a stitch from all the running and whapping of intruders. “I—why?”
“Ah, well.” He looked at her, not unkindly. “Bit of a to-do in the village today, wasn’t there, and you at the heart of it. Mrs. Potter was determined I come learn your remaining horrid secrets.”
“Oh. That. There aren’t any more, at least not the horrid sort.” How long ago that all seemed. “Mr. Lilac—do you have a gun?”
He looked wary. “Is there some need for it?”
“Someone came into the vicarage stable. He attacked Frost with Frost’s own knife, which means—”
“He attacked Frost the first time, too.” Lilac caught on at once. “Which means—”
“He might be the same man who attacked Nance. Which means—”
“Means he’d be worth meeting, doesn’t it?” Lilac smiled thinly. “As a matter of fact, I do have a pistol. And a pair of shackles.”
Charlotte blinked. “Are you in the habit of carrying shackles?”
“All part of the work of an Officer of the Police, Miss Perry. Wouldn’t want to need them and not have them.”
When they returned to the stable, Benedict was still sitting on the unknown man—who was now awake, alert, and extremely disgruntled. Lilac threw the stable doors open wide, and Charlotte got her first good look at the attacker’s face.
“Why, I know this man.” She shook her head. “That is, I’ve seen him before.”
“And when was that?” Lilac crouched, replacing the worn-out leather bindings on the man’s wrists with a pair of iron shackles he pulled from a coat pocket.
She thought about it. What was her association with that face? A short beard . . . straw-colored hair . . . For some reason, she imagined the expression sloppy and lolling. Hmm.
Benedict stood, and together he and Lilac hauled the scowling man to his feet. The sharp, stale odor of beer struck Charlotte, and the memory clicked into place. “The afternoon on the day Nance died. He was in the Pig and Blanket. He . . . bothered me.”
“I never seen yer before, bitch,” the man spat.
The local accent clinched it. She hadn’t Benedict’s memory for voices, but she recalled that one. “Bitch courtesan,” she said crisply. “I was wearing a veil at the time. I told you I didn’t want your company, and when you didn’t believe me, I had to convince you with a knife.”
“Awful fondness you people have for knives,” Lilac said. “It’s really not right.”
“It’s not,” Charlotte agreed. “But I remember that he called Nance over as though he knew her.”
“Nance.” The ruddy face sagged. “She was a righ’ nice girl.”
“Who killed her?” asked Lilac.
The man shut his eyes. “She wasn’t supposed to die. I just wanted to shut her up . . . give her a warning. We needed people to come, but she was going to say something too much.”
“Needed people to come—for what?” Benedict said sharply.
The man tried to fold his arms, defiant, but the shackles stopped his movement. “I’m going to swing no matter what, so why should I say more?”
As a vicar’s daughter, Charlotte supposed she ought to appeal to his immortal soul. But instead, she worked at that kernel of feeling he’d shown. “For Nance. Because she was a nice girl, and you can help see justice done for her.”
For a long moment, he stared—first at Charlotte, then, bowing his head, at the iron bands about his wrists. “I was drunk,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to kill her.”
“Did she know it was you?” Charlotte asked softly.
He shook his head, eyes reddened. “I wore a cloak. Just meant to put a scare into her. She saw my dagger but that’s all.”
“Cat eye,” murmured Benedict. “I thought it was a rich man’s toy.”
The man recovered a bit of spirit. “Was before I stole it off him.”
“You said Nance was saying too much.” Charlotte considered. “About the gold coin she’d received?”
“I give it to her,” said the man. “She was supposed to show it around, like, so people would get excited and come here to hunt for the coins.”
“But why?”
“Hidin’ new faces among other new faces. Who’ud notice four strange men in the village if a hundred came to town?”
“Clever enough.” Lilac had been listening, head tilted, to the impulsive questions of Charlotte and Benedict. Now he went into action, all peppery professional. “Name?”
“Smith. John Smith.”
Another Smith. Charlotte rolled her eyes.
“So there were four of you involved in the death of Nance Goff?” Lilac asked.
“No. That were just me. Four of us in the theft from the Royal Mint.”
Lilac had pulled forth a pocket-book and stub of pencil from his seemingly infinite pockets. “Four. Alllll right. You and your companions stole fifty thousand pounds worth of gold sovereigns, shooting four guards in the process.”
“I didn’t use no gun! I don’t use no gun.”
Lilac lifted the pencil, fixing the man with a stern gaze. “Hardly makes you innocent, does it?”
The man looked again at his shackles. “Guess not.”
“Why steal the gold sovereigns before their release?”
“I di’n’t know what they were. Thought anything from the Mint’ud be worth somethin’ big. Didn’t know until we left and opened the chests what we’d got, and then we knew we couldn’t spend it until the new coins come out. So we had to hide it until it were safe.”
“So you brought the stolen money here.” Lilac was writing again.
The man shrugged. “I grew up not far away. Lots of places to hide things in the Peak. Nice an’ far from London, too.”
“And now it’s here. In the stable.”
Brow knit with distress, the man twisted around before Benedict took hold of his shoulder. “It ought to be. We moved it a few times, like. I don’t know. Didn’t trust each other.”
“Fancy that,” murmured Charlotte.
“Had it in the icehouse on the rich nob’s land for a while, but the weather get warm and the groundskeeper come around too much checking for strangers. Had to move it.”
Charlotte remembered—a trio, crossing the Selwyn lands, laughing. One of them had reminded her of Randolph, making her quail. “Is one of the other thieves a big blond fellow who moves like a snake?”
“I don’t know about the second part. But Smith’s blond.”
“Another Smith?” Lilac looked up sharply. “What’s his full name? And that of your other partners?”
“Smith.” A slow smile showed brown teeth. “And Smith, and Smith. John Smith is all we ever called each other. If they has other names, I don’t know ’em.”
“And you? Is it your real name?”
Another shrug. “It’ll do for me, too.”
Lilac looked amused. “We’ll see about that, Mr. Smith. But on with your tale. After the icehouse, then you moved the coins to this stable?”
“Yes, but then the blind man come to visit and we know he was lookin’ for the coins.”
“It’s Frost,” said Benedict. “And there was not much danger of me spotting the gold.”
“No, but yer can’t blame us for worryin’ with yer so close to it. I said I’d try to find out what he wanted and put a scare into him.”
“You do like to do that scaring sort of thing,” Benedict said.
“A scare worked well enough. No need to kill yer, blind man.”
“Frost,” said Benedict in a freezing tone. “And I fought you twice. Won, too.”
Charlotte hated that he’d had to
hear those belittling words. Hated that anyone could see him as other than, well, Benedict.
“Still,” the thief said mulishly. “Yer left the gold alone.”
“Only because I never thought of searching for six trunks of gold in a building.”
“Probably not six now,” admitted the so-called John Smith. So many Smiths, none of them real. “The others each took a trunk, but the coins is heavy. Before we could move ’em all, there were this dog outside the stable that bark every time we come by.”
“Captain,” Charlotte realized. “She stayed outside all the time.”
Lilac had a few more questions, but Charlotte drifted away, touching fallen stacks of random items. Captain and her friendly soul; Captain and her barks of greeting. If there was gold still hidden in this stable, it was because of Captain.
“What a good old soul she was,” Charlotte murmured.
So Randolph had come to Strawfield because of Charlotte. Charlotte had come to Strawfield because of the gold coin. And the gold coin had come to Strawfield because Smith—one of four—had lived near here at some point in his life.
And they’d hidden the coins in the stable because it was so full of rubbish that no one used it. Except someone had, a few times. To pray over a half-drowned man; to look for a trunk.
She hadn’t found a single useful thing. Certainly not treasure.
“What now, Lilac?” Benedict was asking. “Do we need to find the remaining coins to prove the truth of his story?”
“The Royal Mint would appreciate that, yes,” the Runner said drily. “Smith, any hints?”
“I’ll help yer look if you undo these shackles.”
Three disbelieving glares speared him.
“Hold fast to him, Frost, if you will,” said Lilac. “Miss Perry, if you’ll help me scout around?”
Charlotte agreed; she could tell the Runner which items she had shifted in her search for a trunk.
“Shall I encourage Smith to tell us where they put the chests?” Benedict called. “I do have my knife back.”
“You people and your knives,” sighed the Runner. “Come, Miss Perry, let’s check this way. They’ll be little chests, so we must be careful not to overlook them.”
“They’ll be little,” she repeated. She hadn’t thought about how the coins would be stored—but of course they were heavy and couldn’t all be tipped into, say, one large box. “Little chests,” she said again. “Oh!”
Fortune Favors the Wicked Page 22
