Sleeping Beauty (32 page)

James’s face ran hot, cold. His head vaguely dizzy from what he’d just done, he went up the steps into a classical portico of Ionic columns. The front entrance was high, heavy double doors, artfully carved and polished.

Inside, the floors were marble; the twenty-foot ceiling was coffered. The house wasn’t huge, but it was immediately fine at first glance. Well furnished, rich, well kept. Sixteen rooms, if James recalled correctly. He could afford to rent it for a while, though he couldn’t afford to buy it.

Which might describe precisely what his limits were with Coco

He was quiet. What an error, he kept thinking regretfully. What a leap
that
conclusion had been.

But had it? His horrible misjudgment made him aware of his own fears. And perhaps reality. Why had he ever thought Coco could be happy with a man who subsisted off his Fellowship dividend, while praying for a permanently endowed chair? He needed the earldom, he thought. To compete with the princes and emperors and sultans.

A few feet in front of James, the agent chatted with Coco about the advantages of the modern venting in the parlor’s fireplace, “forced air,” or some such. James fell back and rubbed his temples.

He’d been standing to the side for some minutes, when Coco touched his arm. “It’s all right,” she said. “Besides, I
did
end up talking to Phillip. I rather went there thinking I would.”

James snapped his head around to her, frowning, squinting. “You
what?
”

“Well, I
could
have been there just to visit my aunt. Why did you make such an awful assumption? And I was talking to Phillip, nothing more.”

“Why?” His original anger rolled over with a kind of infuriated groan, not quite dead. It rose up, coming to life again like a wounded beast recovering with a stagger from a stunningly harsh blow. “What the hell were you talking to him about?” He made himself lower his voice, a vociferous hush. “And why the hell did you lie to me just now?”

“I didn’t lie. Don’t be angry. I went to see my aunt.”

The agent stood just beyond in the next doorway, rapt, eagerly listening, trying to catch the gist of the argument.

James frowned and jerked his head. “Let’s look at the blessed house.”

She whispered at his shoulder, “You’re taking everything wrong.”

Fine. They walked behind the agent, while James tried to think how else to “take everything” as the man led them into a library-study.

The room was dark, a few books, a lot of crystal decanters full of amber liquids set out across a section of shelves, brandy and such. The estate agent went to the window and reached for the drapery pull.

Coco must have indicated somehow not to bother. The man put his arms down, leaving the room dark, though he looked uneasy. James, meanwhile, found himself absorbed with getting as close as he could to Coco so he could mutter down at the top of her hat, “So what am I
supposed
to think? If I’m not reacting properly, what is the right behavior here?”

She glanced up and around, her face appearing out from under the short brim. Her mouth had a troubled set to it. “James,” she said. She made a sound—frustration, fretfulness—then nothing more. She followed the agent into a large dining room that gave way into a ballroom with two fireplaces, one at each end.

The house was absurd, James thought. It was for a couple, a family who had gatherings and friends in. Country balls and hunts and shooting matches out back.

“And the balcony overhead can hold up to a fifteen-piece orchestra,” the agent was saying.

Coco turned suddenly, speaking over the poor fellow’s head. “Oh, James,” she said, “you’re seething. I can feel it. When you’re angry, you’re like a steaming pot. You fill up the room. We must talk. I have so much to say to you.” She paused. “I think I do at least.”

“You think? You’re not sure? How long did you talk to Phillip? Were you sure about talking to him?”

“Stop it.”

“I waited for you.”

“I had to see him. I had to ask.”

“Ask what? If he could give you the public marriage you want? You could be Lord and Lady Peach-Pitt. The Viscountess Peach-Pitt. He can do it, you know. He’s stepping down in October from his duties at Cambridge. Retiring, he says.”

“No, he’s not.”

James was taken aback. “You discussed Phillip’s retirement with him?” Splendid. She and Phillip
were planning Phillip’s future together. “You talked him out of it?”

Coco stared at James, her eyes boldfaced beneath the velvet brim, as if she might chew him out. Then frowning, her expression crumpled, and she spun around. She walked briskly toward the next doorway. The agent had to run to catch up with her. He was all eyes, all ears, a wiry little man having an exciting day.

She went through the next doorway, muttering, “Oh, James.” She hit the doorframe with her gloved hand as she passed through, a smack. As if James were somehow at fault, as if she would really like to thwack him.

The agent trotted along in her wake, offering, “Would you like to see the back garden, madam?”

“No,” James called to him. The fellow turned. “We’ll take it,” James said.

“You want the house?”

“Yes. So could you leave? You can bring us the lease tomorrow.”

A grin spread across the man’s face. They hadn’t even discussed amount or terms. “Certainly,” he said. “Tomorrow at noon, say. I’ll have all the papers.”

“Fine. Now get out.”

He hesitated. “Sir Armand,” he said a little uncomfortably. “Madam here seems to think your name is James. Not that I care. But there is the little matter of deposits, monies in advance, good faith, you see—”

“That’s no problem.” James reached into his pocket and pulled out his notecase to see what he had. Twenty-six pounds. He could live a month on
it, though it wasn’t enough here, he was sure. He tossed the whole notecase at the man. “I’ll give you the rest tomorrow. Now do you mind?”

“No. Of course not.” The estate agent bowed, smiling unctuously as he pocketed the leather fold of bills. When he took his hand out of his pocket, he was offering the key.

James took it, then stared at the fellow till he began backing away. “You can see yourself out, can’t you?” James asked.

“Certainly.”

The front door clicked distantly as James turned toward Coco.

She pressed her lips together as she lifted off her hat. She yanked off her gloves, scowling down at them as if they were alive, as if she might pluck them like chickens, pull the nap off their velvet cuffs. Her mouth remained pursed with a kind of irritation. Irritation, frustration, a sadness, too, somehow, and an overwrought brand of…exasperation that seemed, for the life of James, on the verge of tears again. So many emotions played across her face that some of his own anger eased. Her emotions, as they could sometimes, puzzled him. They seemed complicated.

As she set her things down on a stack of trays—they had somehow ended up in a servant’s back passage—she said, “How are you doing with Phillip?”

“Swimmingly. Why?”

She swung around, away, shaking her head. “Oh,” was all she said. She walked down the passageway to the first available door, turning to push through it. James followed. It opened into a small
mud room, the sort of back entrance that servants or the master of the house entered after riding or working outside, coming in wet and dirty.

It was cluttered with galoshes, sinks, rags, garden implements, a mackintosh on one of several hooks, the rest empty but for a straw hat at the end. Coco went over to a sink, placing her hands on its rim, and stared out the window over it. She stayed like that for more than a full minute. At which point, for something to do, to make him feel less helpless, less lost, James went over to her and turned her around.

What a surprise. The bold, confronting woman who had led him a merry chase through Cambridgeshire, then through this blasted house with an estate agent in tow, this woman pressed her mouth so tightly that her lips went white. Her chin quivered. Her eyes, as they found his, were glassy with the struggle against crying.

She said, “Phillip is not your friend.”

“I know that.” When she offered nothing more, he tried to reassure her. “But I’m doing all right with him. Really.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m not?”

“No.” She touched his face, just a brush of her cupped palm. She tried to smile, didn’t quite make it. “And it’s none of my business. In fact—” She laughed hollowly. “It’s the very antithesis of my business.”

A cold feeling settled into James’s chest. “What do you know, Coco? Tell me. What did Phillip say?”

She didn’t speak at first. She sighed, let out a
larger breath, all the while looking into James’s face; she sighed again. Then said, “Oh, James. I do love you so very much.” She left a brief pause, her face wincing as if she were about to take a blow, then launched into it. “You’re a lamb to the slaughter, I’m afraid. He is setting you up.”

James shook his head no at first. But the idea, as improbable as it was, did not ring false. It was like finding he’d been standing on a ledge all along, looking down into a Himalayan drop, but recognizing immediately that that far thing below, distant but clear, was the ground. Reality. The truth. She didn’t have to tell him twice. “How?”

Very calmly, she said, “Well, the key problem seems to be that he has doctored the financial records of the expedition. You are about to take the blame for a sizable amount of finagled monies.”

James squinted and leaned back against a potting table. “What?” Yet even this shock was short lived. He let out a dismal laugh as he realized: “A Bible Fund is part of it.”

“Ah,” she said. “Then you know something of what is going on.”

“What else?” The cold feeling had descended into his stomach. He wanted to wretch.

He could remember all the times that Phillip Dunne had gone after an enemy. Phillip was fearsome, sometimes irrational. He was always brutally competitive, without conscience or remorse. And now Phillip’s focused venom, his aggression, was somehow turned on James himself. James had seen it many times, yet always believed it was for someone else—though at the back of his mind he had perhaps always been wary, always feared that like
a loaded gun, it could be pointed anywhere. But why at him now?

“Because of you?” he asked.

“I would say yes—me, and other things he envies about you. Except envy alone doesn’t seem to explain it. He’s fought over power and preferments before. Granted, you’re especially bothersome to him, but you have also been especially valued, at least at one time. So I can’t say why. But I asked him how and when and where. And he told me. Because—” She laughed again, a hysterical edge to her humor now. “Because he believed I was incapable of interceding.” She snorted. “But he is wrong. James, there’s more: he has altered your journal.”

“My journal? How could he?”

“He’s changed the order of it. He’s made your friendship with the Wakua and how much you admire them appear earlier, along with some page or other about England not being as stalwart and glorious as she thinks. Oh, and he’s moved forward a notation you made about poisons you’d adapted for Mtzuba. These notes all now come while every Englishman is still alive. Phillip is building a story of how you conspired with the Wakua to kill your friends.”

“And what exactly would make me do that?”

“For gold and money.”

“I brought the gold home—”

“According to Phillip, it was a rich expedition in money alone. If you got rid of everyone before supplies were laid in at Cape Town, there was almost ten thousand pounds available—”

“Ten thousand pounds!” James heaved himself
forward. “We couldn’t get enough money to hire merchant solders when the Crown refused a military escort. We had to piece together—”

Coco help up her hand. “You don’t have to explain to me.”

“I do if you believe him.”

“I don’t. But Nigel will. It gets worse.”

James took air deeply into his lungs, trying to settle himself. “Go on.”

“Besides this, Phillip wants to go back into Africa with Nigel. He’ll go himself once he knows where to look. He won’t protect the Wakua. He wants their gold. He wants the thick deposits you’ve told him about. He waxes rhapsodic about them. Oh, and James—” She looked down.

“There can’t be more.”

“No. Not exactly.” She paused, then said, “He’s called the Home Office, the Home Secretary is sending someone. There’s to be an investigation, during which time, well, your name has been struck from the Honors List. That part hasn’t happened yet, but it will this afternoon.”

James spotted a stool in the corner. He pulled it forward, sat, and tried to think what to do next. Purely and simply, what he wanted to do was be sick. Ah, his earldom. Watching it slip away was more of a blow than he’d thought.

Coco stood there by the sink, one elbow braced on it, waiting respectfully.

At last, James stood. “Can you wait here?” he asked.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to the Bishop. I’m going to tell him the whole story. If I can get hold of my bloody
journal, I’m going to show him the proper order of it, then trust in his intuition for the truth. Nigel is zealous, but not stupid.”

“It’s going to be a little harder than that. You
did
actually doctor some of the expedition’s accounts: some examples Phillip showed to the, ah, new Chairman of the Financial Board. He showed you how the ledger system worked, how to write something in one night, yes?”

James frowned, thinking, then remembered with a sinking sense of doom. “O-o-oh,” he groaned, “yes. The night he got the college dividends confused with contributions to the expedition. I showed him. Oh, God, I showed him. I crossed out the figures he had and wrote in what he seemed to be saying.”

There was a moment of silence then, as if they both stood at a graveside, which in a sense they possibly did. James’s wonderful rise in the world of academia and English peerage was a serious, if not fatal, arrest.

After a minute, he turned to her and said, “Um…Coco?”

She looked up at him, her expression troubled, inward, but calm. Filled with love, he might have said.