Fortune Favors the Wicked (9 page)

He paused in the same spot where she had halted twice.

She muscled her voice under control—barely. “How dare you assume that I wish to leave alone because I think you unfit to walk out with me. How dare you assume that my reasons have anything to do with you at all, Mr. Frost. You and I met yesterday. I was born here. Derbyshire has claims on me you can never imagine.”

He turned slowly, tilting his head. “I can imagine a great deal, Miss Perry.”

“Imagine, then, that it is not your business where I search, or how. Imagine that I am a grown woman, and if I place myself in danger, that is my affair. I shall save myself and be all right, or I shall not, and I will be hurt or killed. And that is my affair, too.”

As she spoke, her anger grew more powerful rather than dissipating. So long she had wanted to say these words, to so many people. “It is my affair,” she said in a voice so thick with feeling, she almost choked on the words, “where I live, and with whom. It is my affair if I choose to have company or walk out alone.”

It ought to have been true, all of it. But it was not for any woman, and certainly not for Charlotte Perry, who had never intended to become Charlotte Pearl. She had been born for a plain, everyday life in a Derbyshire vicarage. She had never intended to become notorious or infamous, but chance and fortune had made her both. Known for her caprice and frivolity, for the bare curves immortalized on canvas after canvas.

Her dress covered her too tightly, cutting at her breath. She had grown used to pale silks and red satins, the colors of elegance and lust. The plain blue serge gown she now wore, that she had worn again and again, was something she was not. But she could never again be what she'd been for so long.

She couldn't bear it. And she was afraid she wouldn't survive it.

At last, Frost spoke. “You are right. I am sorry. I should not have presumed. Since I lost my sight, I have often been dismissed or underestimated. I must be too ready to perceive a slight where none is intended.”

“I know the feeling of being underestimated,” said Charlotte. “But I do not know if such as we can ever be too ready to perceive a slight. We need our knives about us always.”

“Perhaps we do.” Patting the side of his boot where he'd sheathed the stiletto, he remounted the final step. “Though I'd be a fool to underestimate you, Miss Perry. Since you have kissed me senseless and locked me up, I consider you to be fully master of this situation.”

“Mistress,” she murmured.

“Right, yes. Mistress. I shall not impose upon you again. Of course you have the right to go forth without my company. Without
any
company, if you so choose.” His smile was a rueful twist, somehow faraway even as he stood before her. “I suppose I just want you to be safe.”

Reaching out, his fingertips brushed Charlotte's shoulder. He trailed them down from her shoulder to her elbow, where he found the edge of the shawl she had bunched and mangled in her tight-folded arms. “Wrap yourself in this, Miss Perry, and be warm. Though we each seek the same reward, I shan't be your foe.”

She turned her head away, unwilling to look at him even though he could not read her expression. And he went downstairs—away—somewhere. Leaving her standing within the doorway of his bedchamber, pulling her bonnet's veil back over her face with hands that were not quite steady.

Maybe it was herself she couldn't quite face. For she knew, as soon as he tucked her shawl about her with sensitive hands, that she was going to take him to bed.

The only question in her mind now, as she descended the stairs and slipped away on her errand, was how long she would be able to wait.

As Charlotte's steps ate the distance between the vicarage and the stone wall, she could not stop thinking of those four words.

Eyes like a cat
. Nancy Goff had said this as she swanned about the Pig and Blanket's common room, and she had said “cat eye” as her life slipped away.

Edward Selwyn's eyes were tawny green. And Charlotte knew from experience that he would do anything for a bit of notoriety. Wearing a cloak for the devil of it; paying a serving girl with a coin he knew to be stolen—that sounded like Edward, who treated life as a masquerade ball.

But arranging a theft from the Royal Mint? Shooting four guards? Stabbing a healthy young woman, who would surely have fought him? No. No, that did not sound like his way. He wanted to charm the world, not control it. He'd be more likely to stab a woman to the heart figuratively than with a knife.

Still. Charlotte would feel more at ease once she checked the hiding-holes she knew to hold meaning for Edward. Not only because he was the father of her child and the artist who had made her infamous, but because . . . well, she hated to think of someone she knew proving she did not know him at all.

For the next several hours, she searched every place in which Edward had once hidden secrets. First, the stone-covered crannies along the vicarage's side of the wall where she and her sister—and later, she and Edward—used to stash messages and treasures. She pried up rocks, cursing the softness of her hands, and confirmed that the spaces beneath were empty. Once, a brownish-yellow lizard, striated and spotted in black, put out a narrow tongue at her.

“Same to you,” she murmured and covered its home back over. Better to find a lizard than a hidden note confessing a crime. Or a stash of stolen coins.

Where next to check, then? The great hollow tree just outside of the village proper had shielded many notes and packages. It might be large enough to hide some of the coins; its obviousness might divert suspicion.

But when Charlotte, skirting the rare figure she caught sight of, reached the spot where the tree had stood for generations, it was gone. Nothing remained but a stump, with its cut edge gray-brown with age. The tree must have rotted out and fallen at last.

For a long moment, she stared at the stump, almost dizzy. She knew it was illogical to expect the village would remain the same every time she returned, yet indeed she did. Strawfield was not the sort of place where one changed the color of one's shutters or converted a thatch roof to wooden shakes. It persisted unchanging—until it didn't. Change, when it came, was large and swift. A centuries-old tree felled. A lover wed.

A young woman's life ended, and all because of a bit of gold.

She turned away from the old stump, holding the hem of her veil down over her face. A breeze teased her, nipping her uncovered neck with a coolness that was not unpleasant.

Into her mind flashed Benedict Frost, stern but kind as he drew her shawl about her. Kissing her as deeply as a man drew breath, yet doing nothing Charlotte did not do to him first.

If she had met such a man ten years before, her life might have taken a very different path. But she hadn't. She'd met Edward instead.

She was careful as she slipped onto his lands, watching out for some member of the grand house's staff. She saw a man with a shovel once, but he was too far away for her to tell whether he was a gardener or whether he trespassed like Charlotte.

For a moment, she toyed with the notion of returning to the vicarage for a shovel of her own. There were several hiding spots on this side of the wall, too, and she must check them all. No; better to leave no trace or turned earth. She could pry free the stones with her hands. She always had in the past.

Empty. Empty. All of the nooks were empty. When she heaved the last stone back into place, her hands were raw, several fingers bruised.

This search had not set her mind at ease, though it was a necessary first step. As she had told Frost, there was an infinity of places to search in Strawfield and the surrounding land. No one would ever find the stolen sovereigns by chance.

This whole search had been ridiculous. Edward didn't need to steal money. Lady Helena Selwyn, eldest daughter of the Earl of Mackerley, had brought a rich dowry to their marriage eight years before and transformed Selwyn House into a showplace.

Eyes like a cat,
Nance had said. But she had also said
demon eyes, red as fire
.
They glowed in the dark
. Even to the last, the barmaid had stuck to her unlikely story, talking of cat eyes and a cloaked figure. Comforting herself, maybe, that what had happened to her made sense. That it wasn't terrible and random and undeserved.

But it was terrible. And it made no sense.

Charlotte picked her way back to the vicarage, taking care no one should see her—not that she needed such caution today. That fellow with the shovel was the only possible reward seeker she'd seen. The formerly blithe visitors to Strawfield had retreated in the aftermath of Nance's death. Maybe some of them had decided the promise of riches was not worth the newfound risk. Or maybe they were lurking about the Pig and Blanket, hoping for a glimpse of the dead girl or a chance to be chosen for the coroner's jury.

She shuddered, wrapping her shawl more tightly about her with hands that were much less careful than Benedict Frost's had been.

When she let herself into the vicarage, she hung up her veiled bonnet on a hook by the door. After a second's thought, she added the shawl, too. Mrs. Perry's study door was still closed, and Maggie's voice could be heard through it faintly.
“St
i
n pragmatikót
i
ta, eg o ídios, me ta diká mou mátia, eída t
i
n Sívylla st
i
n Kým
i
krémetai se éna boukáli . . .”

So, Maggie was learning to speak Greek. Yet another thing about her that Charlotte had not known. The precious infant had become a fat child in leading strings, then a darling curious girl. Now she was a half-grown mystery. The only constant was Captain, now gray-muzzled and slow, curled outside the study door.

Charlotte bent to pet the old hound. Captain raised her head with a
whuff
.

“Does that mean you'll put in a good word for me with your young mistress?” She petted the graying brindled fur of the dog's head, until Captain lowered her head again and fell into a doze.

Charlotte would have returned more often if she could have, if she dared. But each letter to her parents was met either with silence or with a
not yet; maybe next year
. And it was wise, she knew, to give Strawfield time to forget her face between each visit. Wise to keep Maggie from growing too attached to her.

Her own attachment, she could not help.

“If you are quite done lurking outside the study, Miss Perry,” came a low voice, “I should like your assistance sending a letter.”

Frost stood in the doorway of the small parlor. Of course he had heard her enter; his scrupulous ears noted every footfall.

“I shall be glad to help.” She straightened up, finding that she was not quite able to look at him. He was no longer just Mr. Frost, but someone she had kissed. Someone she had been unable to resist touching. Someone she had pushed, and who had pushed her right back.

Yet he called her
Miss Perry,
correct and proper as though she had never made him hard, as though he hadn't shoved her into his bedchamber. The memory made her blush; she, who had lived in the naked world of sex for years.

How little it had to do with her own desire.

Thank heaven he could not see her burning cheeks. “What is the letter, Mr. Frost? Do you need to seal it, or only to address it?”

“It is to my sister, Georgette, in London. I have written the direction, but need a seal or wafer. And then if it could be placed with the other correspondence—”

“Yes, certainly.” She brushed past him, trusting him to follow her voice. “If you take your letter into Strawfield for posting when you attend the inquest, it ought to arrive in London the day after tomorrow. Oh—wait, tomorrow is Sunday. Well, perhaps two days from tomorrow, then. The mailing supplies are kept in the desk in the far corner of this parlor.”

“The southeast corner or the southwest corner?” He slapped the folded letter against one palm, his smile puckish.

“Why don't you tell me?” Charlotte replied drily. “Five paces forward, and you'll knock right into it.”

“Southwest, then.” And with as much grace as Charlotte possessed on her most swanlike days, he wound around the long sofa and stood before the writing desk.

She moved to his side, handed him a gummed wafer, and took the sealed letter from him when he was finished. “It's past time I wrote to Georgette,” he admitted. “She is . . . not aware of my present whereabouts.”

“Is she usually? I thought you were busy poking your—”

“Miss
Perry
.”

“—
nose
into any bit of the world you could.”

“That's one way of putting the matter.” He stepped around her, finding the back of the long sofa, and took up the noctograph he had laid upon the seat. “She usually doesn't know where I am, no. But at present she probably thinks I am sailing on the
Argent
again. I intended to be in England for only a few days. Long enough to turn my manuscript over to a publisher and arrange payment to Georgette.”

Charlotte added his letter to the pile of outgoing post. “I presume nothing about your plan went as you expected, since you aren't sailing the seven seas.”

“You are correct. Publishers are eager for accounts of travel abroad, but not those written by blind men. Not even if such a man pays the costs of publication.”

Charlotte blinked, bewildered. “How could that not be of interest?”

“Oh, they thought it of interest. But not as a memoir. They think I made the whole damned thing up.” His fingers clutched the wooden edges of the noctograph, the strength of his grip turning his knuckles bloodless white.

“How stupid of them. I am sorry.”

“Do you believe me to be truthful, then?” His gaze was unfixed as ever, but his brows had furrowed, head turned toward her.

“It had not occurred to me
not
to believe you.” She added, teasing, “Especially not with the illustrious Lord Hugo Starling vouching for you.”

Though he murmured an epithet, a smile twisted his lips.

“Remember, Mr. Frost, I'm meant to have been abroad for almost ten years. But really, I've never left London save for a few brief trips home.” She hadn't quite meant to admit that, but once she did, she was not sorry.

With great care, he set the noctograph down again. “So . . . you wish to write a fake memoir? I do not understand your meaning.”

“So . . . it's difficult to keep a pack of lies straight in one's mind. Far too easy for them to get shuffled about. It is far easier to write the truth if one can.”

“Is it just as easy to go somewhere as not when one is blind? That is the question to which George Pitman, publisher, says no.”

“I am sure it was
not
as easy to travel as to stay home, but I believe you did it.”

“Sometimes leaving is easier than staying.” His smile was thin. “When one has no home to speak of. Though I don't suppose you know what that feels like, since you have ties to Derbyshire I could never presume to imagine.” He spoke with lightness, but it hurt to hear her own words flung back at her.

“The ties of which I spoke are hardly the sort in which one would wish to be wrapped. I might understand better than you realize.”

She had no home either, after years of dividing her heart. She had a house in Mayfair, but she could never return to it. How easy had been the decision to leave London at last, to cut ties with Randolph and the
ton
and the glittering world of fashion. The leaving itself had been difficult, with much to arrange, but the decision had taken no thought at all.

Coming to Maggie? No thought there either.

Where to go next? She hadn't a clue.

Gingerly, she perched on an arm of the sofa, hitching one leg up as though she were on a sidesaddle. “Why do you want to claim the Royal Mint's reward, Mr. Frost?”

“I know you don't ask for an answer so simple as ‘because I want the five thousand pounds.'” With a sigh, he flanked her, seating himself on the other arm of the sofa. “Yet I do want the five thousand pounds that will come to whomever finds the stolen coins. I want the money for my sister's dowry. As a Naval Knight—that is, an unmarried lieutenant of stellar character—I draw half pay and claim an additional pension from the Naval Knights' trust. But since our parents passed on, Georgette has nothing of her own.”

Charlotte ought, perhaps, to have commented with sympathy on the loss of his parents, or on the difficult situation of his sister. But what struck her most was his financial dilemma. He received room and board, a half salary and a pension, but in exchange he had to remain a bachelor living in a room in Windsor Castle. The arrangement took as much freedom as it gave.

To a much less luxurious degree, this was not unlike the life of a courtesan. Since shaking free from Randolph, Charlotte had never been poorer; she had escaped with little, and her remaining wealth was unavailable, untouchable. But she also woke and slept when she wished, went where she liked, and kept the company she preferred.