The Thief of Hearts

by Elizabeth Ellen Carter

  THE THIEF OF HEARTS

  by Elizabeth Ellen Carter

  Copyright 2016 Elizabeth Ellen Carter

  ISBN: 978-0-9874417-2-0

  This edition published by Business Communications Management

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, locales and events is entirely coincidental.

  Edition License Notes

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person other than through an authorised lending program, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, or not obtained through an authorised lending program then please return to your favourite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s rights.

  Cover images licensed by Ingram Image.

  Cover Design and eBook Edition Formatting by Business Communications Management | bcm-online.com.au

  Acknowledgement

  I would like to thank two amazing people for all their wonderful help and support – Susanne Bellamy for her insightful observations and my darling husband Duncan Carling-Rodgers for his passion for accuracy and demand for logic, even in the most illogical situations.

  “Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”

  – Voltaire.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  About The Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  London

  December, 1890

  Caroline Addison had been kissed under the mistletoe once before and hadn’t much cared for it.

  On second thoughts, she reflected, perhaps disappointed was a better description.

  She brushed a hand down her velvet dress – very nearly the colour of the glossy green leaves of the kissing bough suspended over the centre of the drawing room.

  Mind you, she wasn’t sure what she had been expecting when Bertie kissed her last Christmas, but it was wet, soft, and mushy – much like the weather outside – and certainly not the ‘endless bliss’ that John Keats waxed so poetic about.

  Now Bertie was heading towards her with a look that suggested he hoped the act would be repeated.

  Caro readied a polite smile and an excuse.

  Albert Stringer – Bertie to his friends – was not a bad soul. He was lanky-framed with a flop of light brown hair falling over his brow and an uneven smile that, on first appearances, made him look ungainly.

  But Caro liked him a lot. Truly, she did. But he was so much like her older brother Edward, it had come as a shock when Bertie kissed her. And in the twelve months since, Bertie had spent almost as much time here as he did in his own home. It could only mean one thing – he was contemplating a proposal of marriage.

  She sorely wished he wouldn’t.

  “I think I shall sit the next dance out,” she said aloud.

  Seated alongside, Caro’s best friend Margaret giggled. “It serves you right. I told you not to wear those new shoes to the performance tonight. They needed to be stretched in.”

  True, Caro conceded silently. The shoes had pinched her feet for the entire magic show tonight at the Palladian, but she needed an excuse now, so any port in a storm.

  Bertie bowed to them needlessly, a tease born of easy familiarity.

  “Ladies, could I entreat one of you to dance?”

  Caro was forced to concede to herself that Bertie looked dapper in his evening dress and she was sorry to disappoint him because he was really quite a good dancer. However, while he was in this mood, it was best not to encourage him.

  She shifted in her chair to look at Margaret who reminded her of one of those dainty Dresden dolls, yellow hair like spun silk, rosy pink cheeks on porcelain skin and eyes as blue as the summer day. They were the same colour as the dress she wore. If anyone could inspire a man to poetry after just one kiss, it would more likely be her.

  The smile she gave was all it took for Bertie’s eyes to slide right past Caro’s own and bask in the warmth of Margaret’s.

  “I’d be delighted,” she told him, “as long as I can choose the music.”

  Margaret rose and accepted Bertie’s arm. Caro watched them cross the room to where Edward and his fiancée Gwen were at the polyphon, examining the selection of large brass discs.

  The upright German music box was her mother’s pride and joy. Her father, being the lawyer he was, had nearly fainted at the cost, but had come around when he discovered there were discs that played his favourite tunes as well. Now the device had become quite the sensation in their social circle.

  Edward wound up the clockwork mechanism and secured a musical disc into its spindle. When he released the lever, the disc began rotating slowly like a hypnotic clock face. The opening notes of The Blue Danube tinkled out of the sound box and the four young people waltzed around the centre of the room.

  Caro smiled at them as she made her way to the fireplace, exaggerating a slight limp as she went for the benefit of her excuse.

  By the fire, a card table covered in green baize had been set up and her parents played cribbage with Sir Hubert Gilfroy and Lady Constance, and Bertie’s parents, Mr and Mrs Stringer.

  Seated in a wingback chair located on the other side of the fireplace was Caro’s widower uncle Walter, his eyes closed and legs stretched out, blue smoke from his pipe drawn towards the fire. Despite being five years older than her father, Uncle Walter was a man still full of vim and vigour.

  Beside him, discarded by the leg of the chair, was today’s copy of The Argus. Caro quietly picked it up and looked at the front page story.

  THE PHANTOM STRIKES AGAIN!

  The main headline was stretched across the width of the page and the one underneath was not much smaller.

  The Yard flummoxed by daring diamond thief!

  Caro glanced sympathetically at her uncle and silently read on.

  Another daring escapade by The Phantom last night and another haul of jewellery – this time belonging to Lady Havershire – now bringing this audacious criminal nearly £20,000 pounds of expensive jewellery in the past three months.

  His nocturnal escapades remain untroubled by Scotland Yard who as yet have no clue to the thief’s identity, nor it would seem, any plan for his capture.

  Chief Inspector Walter Addison refused to speculate on—

  “Now Caro, you know better than to believe everything you read in the press.”

  She started and dropped the paper. Her uncle smiled, his eyes still closed. He removed the pipe from his lips.

  “How did you know I was—”

  “I overheard you beg off a dance with Albert; I smelled your perfume beside me... and, like all young people, you’re burning with curiosity about The Phantom.”

  His eyes opened as Caro lowered herself into the matching wingback chair opposite her uncle.

  “It’s the science of deduction,” he said with a merry twinkle of mischief in his eyes.

  Caro laughed. “Are you taking lessons from Mr Conan-Doyle’s detective?�
�

  Uncle Walter took a ruminating puff from his pipe before answering.

  “I should be – according to the papers at any rate. No, I read Sherlock Holmes for pleasure.”

  “I’d have thought you would have enough of crime without taking it home with you.”

  “It relaxes me.”

  Caro leaned down to pick up the paper again and skim the article once more. The sensationalist report elicited only four main facts: Lady Havershire’s jewels were taken from her locked safe, there was no sign of forced entry – either into the house or the safe, there had been no strangers to the house, and the staff were all above reproach.

  “Are you sure the servants aren’t lying?” Caro asked. Seeing she had her uncle’s attention she leaned in further.

  “Or perhaps the good Lady herself was,” she whispered, “a... moral hazard.”

  “Then who do you cite in your case for the prosecution?” prompted Sir Hubert from the card table.

  Caro felt herself growing red and it wasn’t just from the heat of the fire.

  She turned, now conscious of the card players over her shoulder who had stopped to listen in. She had just started her second year studying law at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and, of all her peers, was considered the most able debater of her year.

  She took a deep breath to answer. “None, actually. It’s just the facts of the case don’t make sense. One of them has to be wrong – either there is physical evidence which has been overlooked – which I know your men are too fastidious to miss,” she added to Uncle Walter, “– or the staff are lying, or Lady Havershire is.

  “So, in the absence of signs of the safe being tampered with and no one but the mistress of the house being aware of the combination, then Occam’s Razor suggests the prime suspect must be Lady Havershire herself.”

  She looked at her audience. Sir Hubert frowned and Constance, his pretty wife who was older than Caro by only a couple of years, looked bewildered. Bertie’s parents, a couple aged in their late sixties, were more difficult to read. She turned to her parents. Her mother wore her disapproval plainly, but her father, she judged, carried a look of endorsement in his eyes.

  Everyone always told her she took more after her father than her mother in temperament as well as looks – Caro and Edward carried their father’s light brown hair colouring and a particular shape of hazel eyes which was long an Addison trait – even her uncle had it.

  Caro turned to him. His pipe was between his lips once more.

  Uncle Walter seemed every one of his fifty-five years at this moment – deep lines around his mouth, jowls at his cheeks that disappeared when he grinned – which was often. Caro had been told his nickname at Scotland Yard was Bulldog and she had to confess the resemblance was really quite remarkable.

  “More’s the pity they won’t admit women as barristers,” he said. “You’d make a fine prosecutor. But no, I don’t believe Lady Havershire is involved.”

  “How so?”

  Walter removed the pipe from his lips once more and tapped the ashy remains of his tobacco into the fire.

  “Instinct – thirty-five years of it from being a Peeler on the streets to a Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard,” he said.

  Caro shook her head at that wholly insubstantial reasoning. “There has to be more than simple instinct. What about evidence? What about clues?”

  Walter did not answer. He reached into his waist coat pocket and pulled out a supple brown leather pouch to silently refill his pipe. Caro caught her mother’s sharp grey eyes.

  “Caroline.”

  She inwardly cringed at the use of her full name.

  Her mother regarded her sternly, her playing cards still draped over her fingers like an open fan. “Please ask the servants if supper is ready.”

  Caro was well aware her mother believed she was wasting her father’s time and money studying for a law degree she would never be allowed to use. It was an old argument and one her mother knew was of no use to revive since Caro had gained her father’s backing to work in his office as an article clerk, saying it was a more profitable use of her time and education than just sitting at home waiting for a husband to come along.

  Excusing herself, Caro crossed from the drawing room through the townhouse foyer towards the dining room, where she heard the clatter of dishes and the delicious smell of something savoury being brought from the kitchen.

  Supper was obviously about to be served so she turned to go back to the drawing room when there was sharp tap at the front door. Caro went over and opened it before the footman arrived.

  Two men in dark blue cloaks filled the door way, their shoulders hunched against the cold.

  “’Evening Miss, Sergeants Smith and Parkes of Scotland Yard,” announced the older one. He was ruddy faced, and his straight bushy black eyebrows looked like soot smudges. The younger man didn’t make much of an impression given most of his face was swathed in a maroon scarf. “Sorry to disturb you but we understand Inspector Addison is here.”

  Caro directed them to the study and sent the late-arriving footman to fetch her uncle. She met him at the door, told him his sergeants awaited, and went back to the drawing room to announce supper was ready. However, she made sure she was the last to leave the drawing room, as much to avoid being escorted by Bertie as it was to linger by the study door she had purposely left ajar.

  “We’ve tracked down a possible lead, sir,” said Smith. “Our man from the theatre reported back earlier this evening and—”

  The door closed fully and Caro heard no more.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Huge puffs of steam billowed hot and clammy onto the platform as the train pulled into the station. A porter opened the carriage door. Caro stood, as did Margaret and Gwen, and they waited for Bertie and Edward to alight.

  Bertie took a hold of Caro’s hand and gave it a squeeze as he did so. The five friends huddled in the centre of the platform; an island standing firm against the tide of travellers sweeping past. The smell of damp clothing from embarking passengers competed with the acrid smell of burning coal from the locomotive. Caro wrinkled her nose.

  “Where to, ladies?” asked Edward.

  “The Barrington Arcade is the closest.” Gwen answered for all of them. “The rain is absolutely rotten and I’m positive it got worse when we pulled into the station.”

  As they buttoned up coats and secured scarves around their necks, the group debated for a few moments whether or not to take one of the horse-drawn trams before deciding to brave the two block dash.

  They pressed through crowded streets towards the sound of a brass band’s music that blared through the driving rain. The music grew louder and the crowd thicker as they approached the Barrington Arcade. Artificial light drew them like a beacon towards the three storey high building with its arched skylight roof and beautiful scrolling stone pediment.

  Standing under a shop awning, half a dozen men and women seemed to blend into the gloom, their uniforms of black relieved only by the slash of red satin on their caps and the polished brass of a tuba and trumpets. A flash of a silver hand bell reflected the gaslight and a small sign proclaimed the musicians to be a Salvation Army band.

  Caro was pleased to escape the rain, but made sure to open her purse and drop some coins into the collection cauldron in passing as the choir and band started on a new carol. The tune followed them into the arcade.

  God rest you merry, gentlemen

  Let nothing you dismay

  For Jesus Christ, our Saviour

  Was born upon this day,

  To save us all from Satan's power

  When we were gone astray.

  O tidings of comfort and joy...

  Inside, the lights of the Barrington Arcade banished the darkness. It glowed golden with Christmas cheer. Well-lit shops displayed their festive wares in the bay windows. Between each shop was a green potted conifer – only three feet in height – decorated as a miniature Christmas tree.

  In the galler
y above, swags of artificial winter greenery were bedecked with gold baubles and red satin ribbons, each length draped in festoons across one side of the void and back, from one end of the Arcade to the other.

  Edward tapped Caro on the shoulder.

  “You buy the gift for mother from the both of us and I’ll buy the one for father. Agreed?”

  She grinned. “Can I buy my gift from you? It means it will be something I can actually wear this year.”

  “I think that’s a splendid idea, Caro,” Gwen said, squeezing Edward’s arm affectionately. “I think I shall do the same.”

  The group laughed, including Edward.

  They agreed to meet up again at the Tudor Inn cake emporium for afternoon tea then the party split up. Edward and Bertie disappeared into the crowd of shoppers.

  “Wouldn’t it be fun if we could make all these crowds disappear like the magician did to his assistant in the show last night?” said Margaret, sidestepping a reluctant child being dragged along by his fraught mother. “I thought the magician was ever so clever – and handsome too.”

  “I wonder how he did it?” mused Gwen.

  “How did he become handsome?” Caro chimed in. “I think that’s a natural gift.”

  Her friends laughed.

  “No, I mean make the girl materialise out of nowhere,” said Gwen.

  “Don’t forget the dove.” Margaret rejoined.

  “Oh yes, the dove, and the scarves too.”

  Caro listened to the back and forth of the conversation for a moment.

  “It has to be a trick,” she said.

  “Of course it’s a trick!” said Gwen, sweeping raindrops off her teal green coat.

  “I think we’re all agreed there’s nothing supernatural about it,” said Caro, “but aren’t you just a little bit curious to know how ‘The Dark Duke’ does it?”

  “Well, not me,” Margaret answered firmly, holding her purple reticule close to her side. “It would just ruin the whole thing. I think there is something just a little bit special about being amazed and simply going along with the wonder of the unexpected. You know, when your heart pounds and you grow breathless with anticipation... well, it’s a little like falling in love really.”