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Sixteen

W
hoever
invented
laudanum
ought
to
be
executed.
Never in Brook’s life had her head hurt so—though granted, it might not be all the fault of the drug.

She had to take the stairs slowly, largely because of the dizziness. Her legs were sore, bruised where the ruffian’s knees had pressed them, but not
that
sore. Her shoulder ached from the strained muscle, but she could have ignored it. And of course, her side was so tender and raw that a corset had been out of the question, necessitating Paul Poiret dresses that didn’t require one.

But it was the fuzzy head that was driving her batty.

“Lady Berkeley, what are you doing? Where is O’Malley?”

Brook gripped the banister tightly before trusting herself to look up. Mrs. Doyle was rushing up the stairs toward her, her frown not one to be ignored.

Brook ignored it anyway. “I sent her on an errand. Papa said the constable will be here in an hour, Lady Catherine’s note said she will be visiting not long after that, and I need to have my wits about me.”

The housekeeper pressed her lips together. And then looped
her arm through Brook’s. “You should have had O’Malley help you down, my lady. We can’t have you falling and hurting yourself worse.”

A nearly valid point. She already looked a fright—bruised and scraped from face to foot—and they were to leave for London in three days.

There was no way she could stand beside Regan at her wedding like this. Would Aunt Mary even allow visitors for her? Brice and Ella had promised to call as soon as she made Town. And it made her stomach hurt outright to think that Justin’s first view of her in two months would be when she looked like the loser of a barroom brawl.

Her hand shook against the railing as they continued down. A brawl it had been, but she hadn’t been the loser. And she still couldn’t think why the man had lain in wait for her.

At least she would have another story to tell Justin. “Brook Tames the Darkness” for her victory with Oscuro . . . and “The Assailant in the Stables” for last night.

“A hearty breakfast will bolster you, my lady. Chef made the eggs you like so well, a sausage so spicy it sent poor Jack running for water, and of course your coffee.”

She had to swallow before she could speak. Who knew breakfast and coffee could mean so much? “Thank you, Mrs. Doyle. I will thank Monsieur Bisset later.”

The grand staircase stretched on for miles, but at last her feet touched even floor, and they headed for the breakfast room at a normal pace. Or nearly normal. Almost, nearly normal.

Her father’s voice floated out to meet them. “I don’t care if it takes a
year
, Constable, I want this man’s identity found. If I have to pay an investigator to inquire in every village and hamlet in all the empire, I will.”

She halted outside the door, her brow taut. Papa had said
the constable would be here to meet with her at nine o’clock. It was only eight.

“And you may have to, your lordship—the folks in Eden Dale said they’d never seen him before, and he certainly isn’t one of Whitby’s usual drunks.”

She stepped into the room, extracting her arm from Mrs. Doyle’s. “He wasn’t drunk. He smelled of kippers and onions, not alcohol, and his reflexes were as quick as mine.”

The men came to a halt—all three of them. Her father with his tea halfway to his mouth, the man she presumed to be the constable with a click of his heels, and Pratt at the sideboard filling a plate with her eggs.

No one had mentioned
he
was still here. Though she supposed after saving them the night before, her father could hardly begrudge him a change of clothes and a warm bed. Something niggled there, though. What, again, had he been doing here? Some bits were so muddled . . .

“I don’t know whether to scold or rejoice.” Papa put down his cup and stood, motioning her in. He pulled out her usual chair. “I said we would bring him to the sitting room across from your chamber.”

“And I thought to breakfast with you first.” She tried to give him her usual cheeky smile, but a nasty scrape forbade it.

“Sit.” He indicated her chair and then turned to the sideboard. “Eggs, sausage, and this stuff you so optimistically call coffee?”

“Yes, please. And
merci
.” She sat, though it was little relief to her side, and looked to the uniformed officer. “You’ve no idea who he was?”

“Not yet, your ladyship. But the day is young, and we’ve only just started asking.”

A different song, it seemed, than the one he had sung for her father. She lifted a brow and kept her back straight, trying to
keep all pressure off her side. “He had a strange accent, if that helps you. He put an L on the end of some words. Donnel for don’t. Coil for coy.”

The constable sent a glance over her head.

Papa put her plate and cup before her. His eyes, she saw when he retook his seat, had gone thoughtful. “Bristol.”

“Bristol?” Pratt echoed. He took a chair across from her with a shake of his head. “It’s awfully far.”

For a man out for a random robbery, perhaps. For one on a mission . . . She took a sip of the coffee, nearly sighing in bliss.

Her father ignored Pratt altogether. “So he said ‘Don’t be coy.’ What else?”

She took another sip to clear her head. “He asked me where
they
were. I at first thought he spoke of people, but he must have meant things. Something . . .” It had made so little sense. “It sounded like
feral ice
. And he said I must have it, I had all her things.”

She looked up, a blurry image surfacing of her father leaning over her, the dream still clouding her mind.

Papa must have made the same connection. “Your mother. But what among her things could anyone be looking for? And why now, when she has been gone so long?”

“I don’t know.” It made no more sense than it had last night, and trying to focus on it made her head hurt.

“You are yet unwell, my lady.” Pratt’s voice sounded concerned—anxious even. “Pushing yourself will accomplish nothing. Rest, then send word to the constable if you think of anything else.”

“No. I am well enough.” He ended his words with Ls. So perhaps it wasn’t
feral
. Fear? But what was
fear ice
?

More coffee—that was all she needed. Though her stomach disagreed with her tongue and her head, forcing her to test the food as well. She must have missed dinner last night.

Kippers . . . so he had to have been in Whitby long enough for a meal at a pub. Perhaps he had rented a room. Maybe the constable’s knocking on those doors would reveal something after all.

Fire.
Not fear, fire. Fire ice. Fire and ice. Ice . . . cold?
Non
. Jewels—diamonds. The British called them
ice
sometimes, did they not?

Brook put down her fork, though the food was perfect. Diamonds . . . she had many of them, now, that had been her mother’s. Bracelets, rings, necklaces.

Papa leaned back to murmur something to the constable. What was it he had said when he offered that first necklace?

“To match her eyes. The color of emeralds, with the light of diamonds.”

Eyes. Fire
eyes
 . . .

Written words flashed through her mind, though she couldn’t be sure she remembered them correctly through the haze. She pushed away. Too slowly to be called abrupt, but still it brought the men to another halt. Brook forced a smile. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I’m afraid I’m not so well after all.”

Her father all but leaped from his chair. “I’ll help you back to your room.”

Panic clawed at her throat. Yet it couldn’t be. She would look at the letter again. Try to make sense of it. “No, Papa. You must finish your conversation here. I shall find . . .” Mrs. Doyle couldn’t have gone too far. She looked to the door.

No Mrs. Doyle. But Deirdre appeared as if summoned by her very thoughts. Or, given the exasperation upon her face, by Brook’s disappearance from her bedroom. “There you are, my lady! You look pale as a ghoul. Let me see you back upstairs.”

“Thank you—I would appreciate it.” Brook bent her knees—all the curtsy she could manage—and nodded at the men. “Pray continue, gentlemen.”

Deirdre slid a gentle arm around her waist, careful to avoid the injured side. “I’ll have someone bring your plate and coffee. You need to rest, my lady. It’s quite a trauma you received, and not so many hours ago.”

Brook’s mind buzzed too much to argue. She gladly accepted the help up the stairs and into her room—though she declined the offer of bed in favor of a chair. And she only took the chair once she had first gone to her dressing room and tried to reach, not for the jewels, but for the box of her parents’ letters.

“Your ladyship!”

Brook sighed . . . and winced. “You’re right. I can’t reach it. Would you be so kind?”

Mumbling in Gaelic all the while, Deirdre pulled down the box from the shelf with ease and shooed Brook back to her chair. “I can’t think what’s so all-fired important . . .”

Brook offered no explanation, just opened the box and pulled out the bundle of letters. She had finished reading through them all a month ago and had divided them again into his and hers, in their separate boxes. These were hers, from him.

She flipped to the bottom of the stack. The very last one by date. It had been buried in the box when she first sorted them—though the rest had been in reverse order, newest on top. She’d thought it odd, but Regan and Melissa had distracted her from dwelling on it.

Now she dwelled and unfolded the missive. Her eyes scanned over the first few paragraphs, but it wasn’t there. She flipped it over. There, on the back.

I know you have jewels enough already, my love, but when I saw this, I thought of you. Of how it would look against the cream of your skin, under the fire of your eyes. You have always been my Fire Eyes.

Fire Eyes. But they weren’t a
thing
, for a thief to demand. Yet he had tied them to a gift . . .

“The letters again?” Deirdre was returning from the door with her breakfast tray. She slid it onto the table by Brook’s side and raised her brows at the paper. “And who’s that one from?”

“My father to my mother.”

“Is it? Doesn’t look like his lordship’s hand.”

“No.” It had been the first thing she had noted too, after sorting through so many of them. But the explanation for that lay in the first paragraph. “The letter says he’d hurt his hand—his valet wrote it for him.”

Though now that she knew him, she couldn’t imagine her father sharing such intimate thoughts with any third party. Ever.

Someone else had obviously penned it though.

Another knock sent Deirdre back to the door, and Papa poked his head in the moment she opened it. “May I come in?”

“Please.” He could be trusted. She had known it all along, but now she was
sure
. “I would appreciate your help.”

Question in his eyes, he strode her way. She held out the letter.

He took it, but without any change to that silent inquiry. “What’s this?”

“I wish I knew. It was with the letters you wrote my mother, signed with your name, but not in your hand. It says you dictated it to your valet.”

His gaze shot from the page to her. “I would never dictate a letter to my wife to my valet.”

“I know. So then . . .”

“So then.” His gaze fell to the sheet again, scanned, narrowed. “What is this gift?”

She nearly smiled at the temper in his tone—jealous, nearly twenty years later, at the thought of someone else sending a gift to his Lizzie. Did Brice ever react so? Not that she’d seen, though he looked at her warmly. And Justin . . . he was too
much her brother. He guarded her fiercely, but it wasn’t the same, was it? “Some kind of jewelry, obviously.”

He had flipped the page, and she knew when he got to that last line by the quick breath he drew in. Knew, when he looked up, that his mind had made the same leap hers had. “Not
feral ice
. Fire Eyes.”

“Yes.” She moistened her lips. “I first thought it might have been ice—like diamonds. Which is what got me thinking about this letter.”

“It must be one of the pieces I attributed to the Brooks or Rushworths. She—

“Wait.” Brook got slowly to her feet and walked into her dressing room, pulling out the card-paper bandbox where she’d put Mother’s miscellaneous correspondence as she’d read them. Tossing it to her bed, she riffled through the contents.

It didn’t take long before she lifted a few folded sheaves. “I knew I recognized that script, try as he did to disguise it. I found these letters while reading through Mother’s correspondence.”

Papa took the missives, and as he read, soon flushed. “That blighter.” He threw the pages into the bandbox and turned abruptly. “O’Malley, find us fresh paper. We have a letter to write to one Major Henry Rushworth, in India.”