Fortune Favors the Wicked (14 page)

“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.”

“Rrright,” said Lilac. “Well, I wouldn't stop a lady from swooning if she needed to. Mr. Frost, is it your opinion this is your blood on the blade?”

“I don't know who else's it could be.”

“But you think it might be someone else's?”

Benedict was unbothered by the cold scrutiny of the hazel eyes. “Yes. I think it might be. Or might have been.” He tipped his head toward Charlotte and said, “Look—Miss Perry, this would be a good time for you to find a friend to chat with. Somewhere other than right here at this table.”

“You're going to talk about gruesome things, aren't you? That's all right. I won't really swoon.” She straightened in her chair. “But, Mr. Lilac, please, stow the dagger before someone else enters the shop. You may take it in my reticule, if you like.”

“I don't need to be carrying a lady's purse around,” he scoffed. Wrapping the blade in a handkerchief, he tucked it into a pocket of his coat. “What's on your mind, Frost?”

“I have some medical training,” he began. “I heard the evidence at the inquest, though of course I couldn't study Nancy Goff's wound with my own eyes. But from the description, it was caused by a thin yet planed blade like this.”

“That's so.” The Runner stroked his scanty beard. “Though there must be many thin, planed blades in the world.”

“But how many in Strawfield, carried by people who cannot resist using them?” Charlotte asked.

“I don't think Miss Goff was meant to die,” Benedict said. “A single stab wound would usually cause bleeding, perhaps infection. But for all the fragility of the human body, the rib cage is a marvelous shield for our . . . ah, softer bits.”

“It's all right,” Charlotte assured him. “I really will not swoon.”

As Benedict went on to explain to Lilac how he thought Nance had died—something about an unlucky slip through the ribs, a punctured lung or a nicked some-part-of-the-heart—Charlotte wondered.

Maybe there was no conspiracy to Nance's death. Maybe it was a crime of passion. A jealous lover.

Her fingers drifted to the scar on her cheek, rubbing at the still-unfamiliar pucker.

“You've thought about this a great deal,” Lilac said when Benedict finished his explanation. “Coroner should have called you as a witness.”

Benedict laughed, a dry, harsh bark. “What good would a blind man be as a witness?”

Lilac picked up a last crumb of tart on his forefinger and consumed it with great relish. “Any that don't want to learn the answer to that question are nothing but fools.”

Charlotte decided the Runner would be a worthwhile person with whom to share a plate of cakes, if the opportunity ever arose. “Mr. Lilac, do you think Mr. Frost's attack and the attack on Nance are connected?”

“I don't say what I think until a case is closed. But one thing I wonder about is how come a sleepy little hamlet like Strawfield plays host to a murder right after a stolen coin is found.”

Again, Charlotte rubbed at the scar on her face. Lilac, of course, noted this, and Charlotte at once folded her hands in her lap. “Do you not think—ah, beg pardon. Do you
wonder
whether Nance's death was unrelated to the coin about which she told so many people?”

He regarded her steadily. “No, Miss Perry. That's not something I wonder about at all.”

* * *

Charlotte and Benedict agreed that their interview—with Mrs. Potter, wife of the publican who kept the Pig and Blanket—might be kept brief.

Not that Charlotte was in danger of swooning, for truly, she was not. But the conversation with Stephen Lilac, Officer of the Police, had shaken her up a bit more than she wanted to admit.

If Nance hadn't been meant to die, but she did all the same, then Benedict could have been marked for death and only lived by chance.

“That makes no sense,” he chided Charlotte gently. “That makes the
opposite
of sense.” But that softness about her heart where he was concerned—well, it wasn't so quick to stop worrying.

Mrs. Potter was stout and red-faced, with a knob of thick blond hair she patted often. “I don't have time to talk wi' gossipmongers,” she huffed when she met Charlotte and Benedict in the entryway of the Pig and Blanket. “Nance Goff left me shorthanded, and the Piggie's busier'n ever.”

Charlotte swallowed a sharp reply. She must remember, she was a prudish spinster. “How dreadful for you.” She did not state whether the dreadful part was Nance's death or the fact that Mrs. Potter was doing so well out of the matter. “I would
never
gossip. My father asked me to offer you comfort.”

Two fat lies in two sentences. Efficient.

But the soothing words relaxed the angry crimp about Mrs. Potter's mouth. “That's right kind of the vicar. I could tell as it troubled him to come to the inquest. In sympathy, he must have been, for the trouble as I went through wi' Nance.”

“I have no doubt of that,” Charlotte cheerfully perjured herself.

Benedict folded his hands, and his voice poured out slow and soothing as morning chocolate. “Might we speak to you in the private parlor?” When he opened his hands, a shilling winked silver.

“Mr. Frost is a friend of my father's,” Charlotte explained. “As well as a dear friend of
Lord Hugo Starling
.”

“A lord?” The magical name had its usual effect. “Oh, yes. Mr. Frost. I didn't recognize you at once without your lovely coat, but of course I remember you. A proper sense of what good service is worth. And what good ale ought to cost.”

“I believe I do have that,” said Benedict.

Mrs. Potter gave her hair a luxuriant pat that was entirely wasted on Benedict. “I suppose I can spare a few minutes.”

She led them upstairs to a plank box of a chamber directly over the common room. Noise, smoke, the scents of sweat and ale all filtered upward and pervaded the little parlor. Charlotte motioned for Mrs. Potter to sit in the only comfortable-looking chair; then she and Benedict crammed themselves into the others.

“Ah, it's good to rest my feet,” Mrs. Potter said. “One of the kitchen maids has been serving today, but she's worthless wi' customers. They need the gentle touch. A bit o' flirtation, too, if you don't mind my saying so, Miss Perry.”

Charlotte tried to look shocked.

She must have done well enough, because the older woman leaned forward with not a little glee. “I shouldn't tell you this, not wi' you being the vicar's daughter and all, but Nance was no better than she should be. I'd decided to let her go. Charging whatever she liked, even as she met her young man in the stables every time she could slip away—”

“She had a young man?” Benedict's head shot up.

“Don't they all?” sighed Mrs. Potter.
Pat pat pat
on her hair.

“I never did,” Charlotte lied primly, and for the first time the innkeeper's wife's ill-used expression was sprinkled with pity.

“He wasn't a nice Strawfield boy. Never seen him until recently. He turned up a little before the other treasure hunters.” Mrs. Potter sniffed, as though these people she dismissed weren't filling her purse. She didn't need to hunt the royal reward to heap up gold. “Haven't seen him about since the day Nance died.”

Charlotte had a thought. “Did he wear a cloak?”

“A—how now?”

She tried to look pious. “If one could identify him, one could give him spiritual comfort about his loss. I believe Miss Goff mentioned in her final words that he wore a cloak.”

“She talked about cloaks and eyes like a demon and eyes like a cat ever since she got that coin,” said Mrs. Potter. “Probably just raving with guilt in her final moments, knowing she didn't ought to have been away from her work.”

“Her final words.” Benedict's brows were knit. “Miss Perry, your father said they were ‘cat eye' and ‘cloak.'”

“You see there. Full of talk about ‘eyes of a cat,' like I said.”
Pat. Pat. Pat.

“Not really,” Benedict said drily. “She said ‘cat eye.' Just one.”

“Out of her head.”
Pat. Pat.

“You must be right. Why, she could not even repeat the prayers through which my father tried to lead her in her final moments.” Charlotte made her tone reproving, though her throat wanted to close off the words.

“Would you know the young man if you saw him again?” Benedict asked.

“I might,” granted Mrs. Potter. “Never got much of a look at him. Oh—but here's news! That talk of young men reminded me. Mr. Selwyn is back in Strawfield!” She turned to Benedict with a lofty smile. “You won't be knowing him, of course, Mr. Frost, but he's as famous as can be.”

“A painter of portraits,” Charlotte hurried to explain.
And other subjects.

“Oh, I don't know anything about that. But he married an earl's daughter! The finest brood of children they have. Three little boys.”

And a Pudel dog
.

She shifted against the rigid, spindly back of the chair. She disliked hearing her first lover spoken of in the presence of her last.

Her most recent,
she corrected herself.

“Mr. Selwyn has no daughters?” asked Benedict. Charlotte looked at him sharply—not that the gesture had any effect on him.

Mrs. Potter patted at her knob of unlikely blond hair. “What would he be wanting a daughter for?”

“Girls lend civilization to a house,” Benedict said solemnly. “Were it not for the steadying influence of my younger sister, I'd be a heathen.”

“Mr. Frost, you must have met Miss Maggie, staying at the vicarage. She's a nice little thing, now.”

“My niece. Of course.” Charlotte forced a smile. “I am relieved my parents are raising her well. As my sister would have wished.”

“Your sister was a good lass,” granted Mrs. Potter. “Sorry I was to see her move away when she married, and sorrier when she passed. But at least she left you her babe to remember her by.”

Benedict scooted his foot forward, touching the toe of his boot to Charlotte's. All he could do by way of sympathy or support at present. It was enough to help her adopt the proper misty expression.

Ten years after her sister's death, Charlotte still wondered—
what would Margaret think of this? What would my sister do?
Her sister had always been so kind and sure. So perfect. Older, first, most dutiful. Going before, doing things best.

With the softness of time, this was something to be admired rather than resented. Margaret had given their family a lifelong gift. She had lost her husband to illness, then had fallen ill herself. Charlotte went to tend her and formulated the idea after that: that her own unborn baby should become her sister's child. Margaret agreed, lingered long enough to see her niece baptized as her daughter, then handed the baby to a wet nurse for care.

And released her gentle hold on life.

The misty expression wasn't feigned anymore, and Charlotte left it to Benedict to make their farewells. Dimly, she noticed another shilling changing hands, then Mrs. Potter gave her hair a final prideful pat and squeezed from the tiny parlor.

Leaving Charlotte and Benedict alone.

Charlotte had drifted so far from the expected life of a vicar's daughter that the role felt awkward on her. She wanted to shed her troubled, trailing memories, to be clean of the close, tobacco-stinking room.

“I think we have paid enough calls for today,” she said. “You asked me what I loved about this part of England. If you don't mind, Benedict, I should like to take you to my favorite bit of it.”

Even when it slowed to a drought-starved trickle, Charlotte always paused to listen for the Kinder Downfall before she saw it. At this point in late spring, warm and rainy and muddy, it had grown to a great rush of water.

Charlotte approached it from the base, where the water poured into cracked and fallen stones. Benedict planted his cane and tilted his head. “At first I thought it was a great wind, only because the truth seemed impossible. How did you arrange a waterfall in flat moorland?”

Charlotte laughed. “How dearly I would love to take the credit for everything that impresses you. But I did not make the Kinder Downfall—and in fact, it isn't flat here at all. Shall I tell you about it, or would you rather find your way around?”

“Each in turn.” He had tucked his cane beneath his arm, finding it of little use on the spongy, yielding ground outside the village. Any more rain, Charlotte knew, and they'd have been ankle-deep in muddy moors, but for now the ground held its place.

Here, though, there was rock underfoot. Broken at first, a piece here and there, and then in larger and larger slabs. Benedict was scaling one of them now, hat and cane laid aside on one of the patches of misted grass. Clearly impatient with his too-short coat, he tossed it to join the cane, felt his way up the side of a cracked block.

“Come sit by me, Charlotte,” he called down the yards separating them, “and tell me everything you see.”

She untied the strings of her bonnet, flung it atop his borrowed coat, and clambered up after him.

“I like all of this stone. This is a more solid place to find one's way about than any other in Strawfield,” he said as she tucked herself in place beside him on the gray slab of rock.

“I've always thought so.” She squinted into the distance. “If I could have lived here instead of at the vicarage, I'd have been a happy child. At least until a mealtime or two trailed past and I grew hungry.”

For a moment they sat together, warm under an endless sky.

“Tell me about this waterfall,” Benedict then said. “I feel the spray in flecks on my skin, so I know it's not a huge fall. It tumbles slowly, doesn't it?”

“Yes, though more quickly with every rain. Over time it has washed away the earth and found the stone beneath and cracked it. The stone is gray, like . . . like an elephant's back.”

“I have never seen an elephant's back,” Benedict said wryly. “But the color gray I am familiar with.”

“This is my thanks for trying to be poetic and descriptive. Next time I shall describe for you only in the plainest, barest terms.”

His fingers found hers, just a touch of warm fingertips atop cold stone. “Describe for me however you like. I want to see it as you do.”

“No one ought to see the world as I do. You know what I've done, what I've been.”

“I am learning,” he said, “what you
are.
”

As he blinked into the distance he could not see, she found herself, too, blinking through lashes that were wet.

“Then here is what I see.” She drew in a deep, clean breath, damp from the Downfall's mist. “The ground is covered in green and yellow and brown, with grass and—and whatever plants grow on the moors, some growing, some dying, some yet dormant. The land rolls so gently you cannot feel it as you walk, but when you look back, you see how far you have climbed.”

“I can feel it,” he said softly. “When you tell me about it, I can feel it around me. What else? What is the sky?”

“The sky is so light that it looks almost white, and the clouds blend into it. Sometimes the clouds are low and glum, but right now they are high and wispy like great tufts of cotton. And the farther away one looks, the more everything is washed with blue, until the land and the sky look like the sea.”

She laced her fingers into his. “Or how I imagine the sea. I have never seen it. I have only seen the Thames.”

His thumb ran over the back of her hand, sending a sweet prickle up her arm. “Listen to you. You should write a memoir.”

She laughed, a little breathless. “Tosh. What would I have to say that anyone would want to read?”

“As a former courtesan? I think
everything
you had to say would be something people would want to read.” He grinned. “I know I would, if I had the ability. But since I don't, I suppose I'd have to ask you to read it aloud.”

“You would want to hear of my dealings with other men?” This struck her as . . . odd.

He lay back on the flatness of the cracked slab of stone, freeing his fingers from hers and folding his arms behind his head. “Not for the sake of the tales themselves, no. But I want to hear of you, taking the polite world by storm. And I'd be curious to hear of anything related that you wanted to tell me.”

As always, he left it up to her to say
no.

She drew up her legs, folding her arms around them in her favorite posture. Making of herself a sturdy ball. “There is no great mystery about the matter. It happened out of necessity and determination, one day at a time.”

“How did it begin?”

She tipped her face up to catch the wind. “With a painting of me more than ten years ago, when I was only eighteen. I liked being told I was pretty enough to be painted in oils. I liked it so much that I didn't balk at taking off my clothes.”

“Lucky painter.” Benedict stretched his legs out long, then crossed one booted ankle over the other. “Was it a Londoner who painted you?”

“No, it was”—she swallowed—“Edward Selwyn.”

Because of the timing, he must surely guess that Edward was Maggie's father. But all he said was, “Oh. That neighbor of yours.”

“Maybe he once thought of himself thus. Now he thinks of himself as London's most underappreciated painter.”

“How can that be possible when he painted you? The subject alone should have made him a king in artistic circles.”

“Flatterer. Might I remind you that you have no idea what I look like in oils.”

“No, but I've run my hands over the most famous statues in Paris, and they do not come close to the beauty of your form.”

She scrubbed an impatient hand across her blurring eyes, then wrapped her arm about her legs again. “When you say such ridiculous, kind, flirtatious things to me, I cannot think what to tell you next.”

“So don't tell me anything.” One of his folded arms must have, well, unfolded—because his hand stroked her back, up and down, slow and gentle. “I'll tell you more of the—what did you call them? ‘Ridiculous and kind' . . . no, I really can't allow that, Miss Perry. ‘Truthful and truthful,' maybe.”

“The last thing I said was ‘flirtatious.'”

“Ah, well. There you have me.”

He stroked her back some more, silent and
there
. Replacing the sore bits with tenderness, the lostness with the anchor of his body, with the stone beneath them and the slow sounds of water at their side. The scent of damp earth and a sky that was new over the old, old ground.

“It's all right,” she said. “You can ask me whatever you want to know.”

“I admit, there is one thing about which I wondered.”

“Anything.”

“I know a courtesan is an entertainer and hostess, above all. But when you took a protector, your role must sometimes have taken you to the bedchamber.”

“It did.” Lord. She was such a hussy. Her face burned, yes, but her sex grew damp.
Bedchamber,
he said, and his hand kept up that slow trail over her back. He had taken her to his bedchamber—or she had taken him.

“How is it possible . . . ah, I shouldn't ask.”

“Now you have to. You have me afire with curiosity.”

“Um.” She glanced at his face. Beneath his tan, his face had gone a bit red, too. “All right. How can one have intercourse with someone to whom one is . . . not attracted?” He asked it as a curiosity, a secret, forbidden question to which he had allowed his mind to turn in private moments.

She squeezed her thighs together. “If the occasion required . . . that . . . then I had to find a way in which that person attracted me, and I clung fast to it. Perhaps a man smelled nice, or perhaps he had a lovely speaking voice. Perhaps he was generous or kind. There is something to like about almost everyone.”

“Almost?” The slow, stroking hand paused.

“One time I changed my mind. The better I got to know that person, the more it became clear that there was nothing to like about him.”
Randolph
. His wealth and handsome face were but the means to an end: the growth of control.

Benedict was again stroking her back; now using a bit of raking nail that she could feel through her thin gown and light stays. “You are very clever,” he said. “To tease out the best way to be successful.”

“A necessity. When an unmarried woman lets a man put a part of his body into hers, she becomes worth less as a human being. Under the guise of being proper, people are obsessed with the intimate behavior of young women. Does that not seem remarkably vulgar?”

“Both vulgar and unfair.” He sighed. “I had not thought much about the matter, I admit. I grew from boyhood to manhood on a ship, and dainty
ton
ladies were never spoken of. A few officers were married, but most sailors thundered to port whenever they had the chance for”—he coughed—“virtuous works. And the women took as much benefit as the men, or so I thought.”

Ah, he made her smile at the most unexpected times. “And did you do the same?”

“I was a paragon of virtue, shall we say.”

Now she laughed. “As long as you left the ladies with as much benefit as you took.”

He stopped stroking her back. “I believe I did. Sometimes twice as much.”

She shot him a quick look; he was grinning, arms again folded carelessly behind his head. Her sex was wet now as she remembered . . .
Yes. Twice
. Those broad hands splaying her wide, that wicked tongue . . . oh, so wicked. Giving her pleasure after pleasure, asking nothing in return.

“I took my benefit, too,” she said. “Of a material sort, since the world had decided I was now worth less than when I had been proper. I remade myself as Charlotte Pearl—
La Perle,
but not the pure, driven-snow sort.”

“So dull and cold, the driven snow,” Benedict said. “I cannot blame you for wanting to be something entirely different. Did you get many jewels?”

“Sometimes.”

“A house?”

“Oh, above all a house.”

“Servants?”

“The finest. A household full. A lady's maid just for my clothing and another just for my hair.”

“Will you ever return to them?”

“No.” The syllable came out faint, so she tried again, more loudly. “No. I let the servants go, and the house—for a multitude of reasons, I can't go back there. I've a fortune I cannot touch.”

Besides her memories and her house, Charlotte had one other item left from her years of luxury and captivity: a necklace. Edward had given it to her to wear for that first nude sitting—and when art turned to an affair, he gave it to her for always. Again and again, she had posed for him while wearing it. Naked but for gems, a shackle about her neck worked in emeralds and diamonds.

She would eagerly have sold it, but it had appeared on canvas so many times that it was instantly recognizable as the necklace of
La Perle
. She couldn't allow herself to be traced by Randolph, so she stuffed it into her trunk. Hid it within cheap woolen stockings.

Maybe if she'd broken it up, crushing the gold and ripping the stones free, she could have sold it.

Maybe she still would.

The breeze grew arrogant, teasing the wisps of hair about her face—and then it snatched off her lace cap.

“Oh!” She grasped for the scrap of lace, but the laughing wind carried it away—and Charlotte let it go and sat back down.

“Something amiss?”

“The wind took my cap. I must have loosened the pins when I took off my hat.”

“Do you want to chase it?”

“No. I don't feel like dressing as a spinster right now.” She settled back, hoping his hand would again begin its slow comforting path up and down her spine. “I cannot sell my house,” she finished explaining, “without an intermediary. And any person involved in my affairs is a weak link. Too vulnerable. I cannot afford to keep the house, but even less can I afford to sell it.”

“Being a courtesan is not the sort of employment one can just walk away from, it seems.”

“No, it is not,” she agreed. “Nor is it the sort for which one can claim half pay.”

“Or a small stipend for being invalided and respectable?”

“Definitely not that.” She plucked a pin from her uncovered hair, then another. “No, it's the sort in which many people think they have a claim on . . . everything.”

“Then maybe it's not so bad to be Miss Perry. Or a mysterious treasure seeker with a veiled hat.”

Inside her boots, her toes curled. “It's not so bad to be with you.”

He tutted. “Silver-tongued witch.”

She laughed. “I like you, Benedict. Everything I know about you, I like.”

Like
was such a watery word for what she was beginning to feel.

But the Kinder Downfall poured by, endless and pure. Strong and lasting enough to crack stone and reshape the earth.

Maybe a watery word wasn't so inadequate after all.

* * *

Benedict knew he ought to say something roguish and wry in reply, but he could think of nothing that would fit around the great lump in his throat.