Nicola and the Viscount (9 page)

Nicola, though she would have liked to have made as dramatic an exit as possible, could not keep herself from pausing and turning toward the other girl to whisper, “Really, Miss Ashton, but that shade of yellow doesn't suit you at all.
Do
dye that gown another color. A nice rich burgundy or blue would do very nicely, I think.”

Then, before Stella could utter a word, Nicola darted from the room, to flee as quickly as she could the penetrating gaze of Eleanor's brother.

“Who is Edward Pease?” Nicola asked the next morning at the breakfast table.

Lord Farelly, who'd been buttering a piece of toast, promptly dropped both his knife and the toast, eliciting from him a curse that burned the ears of all the ladies present.

“Jarvis!” Lady Farelly cried. “Really! Such language, and at breakfast, of all places.”

Lord Farelly, looking very red in the face, muttered an apology, and accepted from a waiting footman a new knife before reaching for a new piece of toast.

“Now,” Lady Farelly said, “where were we? Oh, yes. Honoria, my love, I was meaning to ask you. Was that gown you wore to Almack's last night a new one? Because I don't think I've ever seen it before. I know you had one in a similar shade, but it was trimmed with ostrich feathers, I thought, and not gold braid.”

“It's the same gown, Mama,” Honoria said lightly, as she spooned a bit of sugar into her coffee. “Nicola felt the feathers were too much, and would detract from my natural beauty.”

“Really?” Lady Farelly looked surprised. “Well, Miss Sparks, I must congratulate you. The gold braid was a definite improvement.”

“Thank you, my lady,” Nicola said politely.

But the politeness was feigned. Nicola was not actually feeling very polite at all. She was not unaware that her question had not been answered. Not only had it not been answered, it had been quite firmly ignored…swept under the rug, one might even say, like the crumbs from Lord Farelly's dropped piece of toast.

Stuff
, Nicola thought,
and bother.

Up until that moment, she'd put down the Edward Pease remark as nonsense, something Nathaniel had invented on the spur of the moment, due to his extreme jealousy of Lord Sebastian—not, of course, that Nicola suspected Nathaniel of feeling anything for her but the same sort of brotherly affection he felt for Eleanor; but what young man wouldn't be jealous of Lord Sebastian, who was a living god?

Now she could not help wondering just what, exactly, it was that he knew. Obviously he knew something. He had not pulled the name Edward Pease out of nowhere. Not if it elicited that kind of response from Lord Farelly.

Only where had he heard it? And how had he come to connect it with her and the God?

It was no use, Nicola knew, asking Eleanor, whose head was filled with Sir Hugh, and nothing but Sir Hugh. And pride kept Nicola from asking Nathaniel if he'd mind elaborating. He'd told her to ask Lord Sebastian, and she had.

Except that, when she'd posed the question, he alone at the table—well, excepting Honoria—had gone right on eating, quite as if he hadn't the slightest idea what she was talking about.

Later that morning, as he stood preparing to go for his daily ride, Nicola sidled up to her fiancé and asked, after first making sure they were well out of earshot of the God's parents, “Lord Sebastian? I was wondering…
do
you know who Edward Pease is?”

Tugging on his gloves, the God grinned fondly down at her. Nicola did not think she could be mistaken in this. The God positively looked fond of her.

And certainly the kisses the two of them shared—only one a day, for propriety's sake, and that one only before they were each ready to retire for their separate bedrooms for the evening—seemed quite fond, as well. Whatever else Nathaniel might think, clearly Lord Sebastian was not marrying her against his will. He
did
like her. At least a little.

“Pease again?” he asked, reaching out to give one of Nicola's glossy black curls, which had escaped from her coiffure, a tug. “Never heard of the fellow. What's he been doing? Not trying to steal my girl, I hope.”

Nicola felt a flood of relief course through her. He didn't know. She was quite positive of that. Lord Sebastian hadn't the slightest idea who Edward Pease was. So Nathaniel was wrong.

Except….

Except Nathaniel Sheridan was never wrong. Well, about people, of course, he was often quite wrong. Look how wrong he was about the God. But Nathaniel Sheridan tended not to be wrong about things like this.

It was only this fact that caused Nicola to do what she did next. And that was claim, a little bit after Lord Sebastian had left the house, to have a megrim, and retire to her bed.

Nicola was rarely, if ever, ill, so her headache was a cause for some concern in the Bartholomew household. Lady Farelly offered very nicely to put off her dress-fitting appointment and stay by Nicola's bedside, in case she needed ice chips or something. And Lady Honoria insisted she would not go to her picnic outing with Phillipa and Celestine Adams, not while Nicola was unwell. She too would stay at her dear friend's side during her time of need.

Nicola, though touched by this sisterly gesture, was at the same time mightily vexed by it. For of course if both Lady Farelly and Honoria stayed by her bedside, she could not do what she had invented the headache for in the first place.

And so she begged the ladies of the house to go about with their original plans…that she intended only to sleep. If she needed ice chips, Nicola informed them, she could send Martine for them. It would only distress her more to know that Lady Honoria and her mother were putting off their plans for her….

It took some doing, but in the end, Nicola was finally able to convince them to leave her. The moment she heard the front door close, Nicola leaped up from her bed, giving Martine, who really had started to go for ice chips, quite a start.

“It's all right, Martine,” Nicola informed her maid, as she bent to lace up her slippers. “I'm right as rain. But be a love, will you, and whistle if you hear anyone coming back, particularly Lord Farelly?”

Martine, very much shocked at her mistress's behavior, said she would do no such thing, and was in general being quite troublesome, until Nicola gave her a sovereign and told her to mind her own business. After that, Martine retired to a corner with her sewing box and a grim expression, muttering in French about little girls who stuck their noses where they didn't belong getting them cut off.

Nicola, though she understood French perfectly well, ignored her maid, and slipped from her bedchamber with the full intention of sticking her nose exactly where it didn't belong…namely, Lord Farelly's private study. She wasn't at all certain what she expected to find there, but if ever there was a place where she might find a clue as to the identity of Edward Pease, she supposed that was it. Lord Farelly had clearly heard of the man, even if his son had not, and it was possible Mr. Pease and he had corresponded, and that that correspondence might even now lay openly on his lordship's desk, where Nicola might happen accidentally to spy it.

Snooping, of course, and eavesdropping of any kind were activities greatly frowned upon by Madame Vieuxvincent. And Nicola wouldn't have stooped to either of them if Lord Farelly had troubled himself to answer her question.

But as he'd seen fit to avoid the subject altogether, and not very subtly, Nicola felt she might snoop without compunction.

Still, as she padded lightly down the carpeted hallway leading to Lord Farelly's study, Nicola could not help glancing anxiously over her shoulder several times, alert for lurking footmen or housemaids. She encountered none, however, and when at last she laid her hand upon the latch, was able to slip into the mahogany-paneled room quite without being observed.

Lord Farelly had left for his office on Bond Street directly following breakfast…and Nicola's pointed question. His study, which also doubled as the family library, smelled pungently of the pipe his lordship liked to smoke when he was alone. The walls were lined with books and the occasional portrait of some past Bartholomew. None of his ancestors even came close to having been as blessed by nature as Lord Sebastian had been. In fact, the family seemed to run rather strongly to fat. The earl, at least, was no lightweight.

But, Nicola reminded herself, she wasn't there to muse over how her future husband might look twenty years from now. She was there to snoop.

And so, accordingly, Nicola commenced to snooping.

There was an art to rifling through someone else's drawers without leaving any indication that one had done so. Nicola was an old hand at such tricks, as it had generally been left to her to rifle through Madame Vieuxvincent's desk drawers when the need for sustenance, in the form of midnight raids of the larder, necessitated obtaining the key to the kitchen door. No matter how many times, and in whatever ingenious place, Madame Vieuxvincent hid this key, Nicola found it. And when the next morning, as Cook was crying over her missing chocolate gâteau, Madame demanded to know who had committed such an affront, Nicola had always been equally capable of uttering a bland denial. She had never once been caught, and rather doubted she'd ever been seriously suspected, either. She was, as it turned out, a master thief.

It wasn't long before she knew victory in her current quest, as well. Midway through his lordship's middle desk drawer, Nicola found a bundle of letters from none other than Mr. Edward Pease himself. Settling in for an afternoon of reading, Nicola curled up beneath the earl's desk, so that any maid who happened to enter the study for some casual dusting would not discover her.

What Nicola read confused and disturbed her. Mr. Edward Pease, it soon became apparent, worked for a company called Stockton and Darlington. Interestingly, Stockton and Darlington were towns not far from Beckwell Abbey.

More interestingly, Mr. Pease seemed as fascinated by and interested in trains as Lord Farelly was. Most of his correspondence had to do with experiments in locomotion, such as something called a Blutcher, a locomotive engine currently in use at Killingworth Colliery. The Blutcher, according to Mr. Pease, could pull the weight in coal of ten cart horses, and do it time and time again, without resting between deliveries of its load, as horses needed to.

Soon Nicola knew more about the Blutcher than she had ever cared to know about much of anything. How anyone could go on and on in such a vein about a machine—even a very revolutionary and new one—she couldn't understand. Lord Farelly, given his feelings about locomotives, undoubtedly found the whole thing highly fascinating, but Nicola was bored after only the second paragraph.

And, for all the trouble she'd taken, she'd found nothing at all that referred to her. Not a mention of her name, or any connection at all that might warrant Nathaniel's assertion that there was something suspicious about Lord Sebastian's affection for her.

As for Edward Pease, why, he was only a man who apparently shared Lord Farelly's great enthusiasm for locomotives; that was all.

Nicola was pleased—and at the same time a little disgusted with herself that Nathaniel had made her doubt the God. Worse, he'd made her doubt her own judgment, and
that
was upsetting. Nicola was shuffling the letters back into the order in which she'd found them when a small slip of paper fell from the pile and onto the carpet. She lifted it and was about, without so much as a glance at it, to stick it back into the pile where she thought it belonged, when something about it caught her eye.

It was a piece of foolscap, smaller than all the other pages. Only instead of writing upon it, there was a drawing. At first Nicola could make nothing of it. She turned the slip of paper this way and that, squinting at it. It looked somehow familiar, and yet she could not tell how.

And then it hit her. The squiggly line down the middle of the page was the river Tweed. She knew that river as well as she knew how to add bunting to an Easter bonnet. It was the exact river into which the stream that burbled by Beckwell Abbey—the same stream the Milksop had once tried to keep her from swimming in—flowed into. She was looking, she realized, at a map of the Northumberland region…her home.

But while she recognized the river Tweed, she could not understand what the rest of the markings on the paper indicated. Killingworth Colliery—she recognized it by its place on the river—was marked with an X, and from that X extended a line that wound along beside the river, hatched every eighth of an inch like a ladder. The line seemed to wind right through the place on the map where Beckwell Abbey would be located, if the mapmaker had bothered to draw it in. It went straight along until it ran into Stockton, a town some miles away from Beckwell Abbey.

Except that whoever had drawn the map—and Nicola supposed it could only have been Edward Pease, the author of all the letters in the pile she still held—had left off the abbey. Or perhaps he was confused. Because no such road—if that
was
a road, indicated by the hatch-marked line—existed between Killingworth and Stockton.

And then, as Nicola sat there, turning the map this way and that, trying to make sense of it, it hit her.

That hatch-marked line wasn't a road. Not a
proper
road, anyhow.

It was a
railroad
.

Nicola was convinced of it. It looked exactly like the track on which the
Catch Me Who Can
had run.

And the track ran straight through the middle of Beckwell Abbey.

So absorbed was she in the map that Nicola hadn't heard footsteps beyond the study door. In fact, she wasn't aware that she was not alone until she heard a cough. Crouched beneath his lordship's desk, Nicola immediately froze, hardly daring even to breathe.

Straining her ears, since the desk blocked her from looking out, Nicola tried to determine who had entered the room. If it was one of the maids, or Jennings, the butler, Nicola would be all right.

But if it was Lord Farelly, and he attempted to sit down at his desk, and discovered Nicola there where his feet should go, she was, she knew, in very deep trouble.

Someone coughed again. And then Nicola heard, “Ah, there it is. I told him he musta left it. I'll be sworn, he'd lose his head if it weren't sewn on.”

The back of Nicola's neck prickled with relief. It was only Mrs. Steadman, the housekeeper. Nicola, peeking out from behind the desk, saw her bustling from the room, holding one of the God's evening coats beneath her arm. Lord Sebastian must have left it behind accidentally the other night when his father had had him in for a brandy before bed.