No Place for a Dame (12 page)

“Did you press him?”

“There was no opportunity. I arrived at the same time as Lady Demsforth and her progeny. She’s angling for her daughter to become the next marchioness. The damn woman wouldn’t leave!

“I had begun to think she intended to take up residence in Strand’s drawing room until he agreed to wed her chick.” He snickered. “Though it wouldn’t have mattered if she had left, all of Strand’s attention was taken up by his new protégé.”

Jameson tipped his head inquiringly. “Protégé?”

“Yes. Some boy genius he picked up on the continent after throwing over his fiancée.” His lip curled at Jameson’s raised brow. “No one believes Sophia North would have ended the engagement of her own volition. Anyways, apparently the young man impressed Strand enough that he decided to bring him back to London. He’s some sort of stargazer chappie.”

Jameson’s eyes narrowed. Strand was not a patron of the sciences. He was entirely a creature of the ton: facile, ready with a quip, as easily bored as he was distracted. True, Knowlton had considered him useful but his activities always seemed to Jameson fairly inconsequential. Besides, immediately after the war he’d gone back to his pursuit of pleasure. That is until this past summer when Jack had applied to Strand to smooth his way into Society while he’d hunted for a thief that had been plaguing the prince regent’s wealthy friends. Such an entry would have been impossible without Strand’s cachet.

There had been more to it than that, of course. The thief had inadvertently stolen an extremely sensitive letter that would have granted whomever held it unprecedented power. Jameson had intended to be that person. But then Jack had betrayed him, the letter had been returned to its owner, and afterward several of Jameson’s more sensitive operations had been reviewed. He had very nearly been stripped of his position. He might still be yet.

For the first time in his life, Jameson felt vulnerable. And he would continue to be vulnerable as long as Jack Seward remained alive. But where the hell had he gone?

Knowlton would not have helped him disappear. Not only was Knowlton far too shrewd to make an open enemy of Jameson, but he doubted Knowlton had the wherewithal to accomplish such a thing. Jameson knew all of Knowlton’s agents and operations. It would be impossible for him to pull off Jack’s disappearance without leaving some trace of his involvement behind. Which left Giles Dalton, Lord Strand, the closest thing to a friend Seward had, as rich as Croesus and, as such, the likeliest person to have aided him in vanishing.

Unfortunately, one did not simply kidnap a marquess and force him to talk.

Well, Jameson conceded, one
could
, but the repercussions might prove problematic. Better to go about his investigation obliquely. To find Strand’s weak point and then exploit it. All men had weak points. It seemed even he was not exempt.

“Tell me about this protégé.”

As there was no table alongside the chair, Vedder finished his port and set the glass at his feet. “Chawbacons little fellow, quite a quiz. Shaped like a squab, all breast and belly with spindly little legs and
arms. Eyebrows like a Russian bear. Wears spectacles. Manners of a colonial.”

Jameson steepled his fingers together.

“Strand’s inexplicably taken with him. Always seemed to have an ear tuned to the boy’s voice and kept a close eye on him throughout the afternoon. If the lad were a few years younger—and a great deal better looking—I would suspect him of being Strand’s by-blow.”

Jameson puzzled on it. There was something here. He was certain of it. Whether it led him to Jack remained to be seen. He noted Vedder watching him uneasily.

“Well. There you are, Lord Vedder.” Jameson got to his feet, indicating the interview was at an end. Vedder bolted from his chair, eager to be released.

“You said you knew nothing and yet you have reported several interesting things. Find out more about this protégé of Strand’s. You say he picked him up on the continent? Where? Get close to the boy. Gain his confidence. Find out where he met Strand and if, when he did, Strand was in the company of anyone else.”

“You want me to take up with that little country bumpkin? Without arousing comment? How?”

“I’m sure you’ll think of a way, Lord Vedder,” Jameson said mildly. “In fact, if I were you, I wouldn’t rest until I did.”

Chapter Twelve

A
very awoke long before the sun breached London’s rooftops. She snuggled deeper into the thick featherbed, drawing the blanket up under her chin, her breath forming little vapor clouds in the air. The weather had been brutally cold since her arrival three days ago, and when the fire in the hearth had died down, glacial air had crept down the chimney and seeped through the walls.

She knew it would have helped if she’d closed the draperies but she disliked the claustrophobic feeling imposed by the heavy gold brocade drapes. She kept them open so that she could see the sky as she had at Killylea.

Not that there was any night sky to speak of. A freezing sleet had followed dusk into the city, glazing the windows with ice and nearly obliterating her view of the heavens or anything else, for that matter. The only things visible were the streetlights in the park across the street, indistinct globes of light suspended in the gloom. The days had been little better, a dingy woolen firmament hanging low over London’s towers and turrets.

Dolefully, she looked around. Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was beautiful and cool, elegantly appointed with gilt furniture clad in gold satin and damask, the walls tinted icy blue. She had never slept in a room like it before. When she’d boarded with the astronomers with whom the old marquess had arranged for her to study, she’d lived apart from their families, often in what was meant to have been the governess’s room. No one ever allowed her to mistake herself for a guest.

Her stomach growled. The ton, Travers had informed her, never rose before nine o’clock, but she was famished now. Bracing herself, Avery clutched the blanket around her shoulders and gasped as her feet searched the cold floor for her slippers. Shivering, she trudged to the ornately carved marble hearth and stirred the embers. She tossed in a few chunks of coal and squinted at the mantle clock. It had stopped. Her stomach growled again. It had to be close to breakfast time.

She wrestled herself into the padded corset, donned one of the three shirts she’d unpacked, pulled on a pair of trousers, and shrugged into her coat. The cravat, as usual, proved her undoing. After a quarter hour of trying unsuccessfully to get the wretched thing to look like Giles’s, she gave up and called it good enough. She then went in search of sustenance.

The breakfast room, too, was bitingly cold, a fire only recently having been laid. The dining table sat empty and the curtains were still drawn. It reminded her of a theater stage minutes before the audience arrived. The whole house felt like that, as though no one truly lived here. It was too perfect, containing none of the detritus of an individual’s history, those little misjudgments in taste that lent personality and originality to a home. It was nothing like Killylea. It had nothing of Strand to it.

As she hesitated over what to do, a maid bustled in carrying a whisk and dustbin. Upon seeing Avery, she gave a start. “Oh! Sorry, sir. I’ll fetch Burke at once!” Before Avery could reply, she’d bolted back out the door.

A few seconds later Burke appeared, hastily smoothing a nonexistent rumple from his spotless livery. She eyed his cravat appreciatively.

“Sir.” Hastily, he pulled a chair out from the table for her. “I’m sorry for the delay, Mr. Quinn. We’ll have things right as rain in a moment.”

“There’s no hurry. I can wait.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Quinn. There won’t be but a few minutes delay.”

As if on cue, the maid returned with a single table setting and delivered it to Burke. Hard on her heels came a ruddy faced, middle-aged woman with an old-fashioned lace cap sitting squarely atop a coiled loop of dun brown hair, clucking like an alarmed pullet.

“Beggin’ pardon, sir. We haven’t been introduced yet due to what oversight I am sure I do not know, nor do I judge. But I am the housekeeper, Mrs. Silcock. Allow me to tender my apologies that the room has not yet been readied.” She speared sharp glances at both the maid and Burke.

“Thank you, Mrs. Silcock, but it really isn’t necessary,” Avery said, growing more self-conscious by the minute.

At Killylea, she’d always had her first meal sitting at Mrs. Turcotte’s kitchen table. When she’d been boarded in the homes of her tutors, most of her meals had been delivered to her room. No one ever made a to-do over when she ate. Or even if. It all seemed rather silly. “I have no wish to turn the household on its ears.”

The housekeeper’s mien froze. She drew herself up, her expression oozing affront. “
Mr. Quinn
,” she said with carefully mustered dignity, “it will be a sorry day indeed, when the Marquess of Strand’s household is ‘set on its ears’ by the simple prospect of serving breakfast at a guest’s preferred time.”

Avery should have known better. Even at Killylea a servant’s pride was inexorably aligned with his master’s.

Avery hurried to soothe Mrs. Silcock’s ruffled feathers. “I didn’t mean to imply a deficiency, only that it wasn’t necessary to extend your staff and yourself—”

“We are
not
extended, Mr. Quinn,” she cut in coldly. “You will find your breakfast waiting for you whenever you choose to dine, be it at one in the afternoon or three in the morning.” And with that, she spun around, skirts rustling, and stalked with exaggerated dignity from the room.

An hour later, her stomach fair to bursting after dutifully consuming the enormous breakfast ordered up by The Silcock, as Avery had silently
dubbed her, Avery fled back to her room. There she had sat, half afraid to leave lest the housekeeper be lurking outside her door with a bowl of treacle pudding. With a sigh, she wound the mantle clock and then proceeded to spend the rest of the morning trying not to watch it. Time dragged by at a snail’s pace.

Each day she’d been here had been a duplicate of the preceding one. Until this morning she’d waited dutifully until the clock struck nine before descending the staircase. Each morning the beautiful footman, Burke, politely informed her that Giles had left for the day. Each afternoon, she retreated to her room where she could shed the increasingly hated padded corset, don Strand’s silk robe, and tuck herself into a chair near her fire where she stared at nothing. Even Strand’s library provided little interest, being primarily stocked with military histories, agriculture tracts, and political discourses.

She hated politics, she knew nothing about agriculture, and military histories unnerved her. All that analysis about the best way to kill as many people as possible.

There was little for her to do. Her papers outlining the discovery of her comet and the calculations by which she’d anticipated its appearance had already been polished. She didn’t have the necessary equipment to pursue other lines of investigation, and she hadn’t brought the books or star maps she would have needed to research her latest cosmological theories.

So she sat. And wrote a letter to Mrs. Bedling. And another to her father. Then tore them up as she could hardly post them herself and she dared not give them to any of Strand’s servants. She wasn’t supposed to know anyone in Killylea and that was just the sort of information servants would be likely to speculate about with one another.

By the time the mantle clock struck two, she had decided she could not take a moment more in this gilded prison. Strand had mentioned a bookstore. Well, she was going to find it.

She went in search of Travers, only to discover he’d been commandeered into polishing the silver by the inimitable Mrs. Silcock who, Travers explained, had taken one look at Mr. Avery Quinn’s toilette and decided that whatever talents Travers possessed did not include valeting and posing as one was a case of malingering in the highest order. As
Mrs. Silcock did not tolerate such nonsense in her household, she’d found good honest work to occupy him.