The Viscount's Dangerous Liaison: Regency romantic mystery (Dangerous Deceptions Book 3) Read online

  ‘How does money help with a church preferment?’ Laura asked, puzzled.

  ‘It would enable him to go to London, be seen in all the right places, secure a patron who, if you’ll excuse me, Manners, has more influence and more profitable livings to offer,’ Jared said.

  ‘Even so, treason…’ Laura murmured.

  ‘I know. So, the Swinburns. They need money, it seems. Sir Walter cannot be sure his embezzling of Laura’s funds will go unnoticed for ever, especially if he cannot force her to marry one of his sons. He needs to be able to make that good if he is challenged. Then Giles is a continuing expense, of course.’

  ‘And my aunt is always pushing him to spend more on clothes, on the house, on a new carriage and so forth,’ Laura added. ‘She would certainly love to spend the Season in London every year.’

  ‘Then we have the Jenners. Two daughters to launch successfully.’

  ‘Half the squires in England have that many daughters,’ Perry protested. ‘Their fathers don’t turn to murder and treason to fund their come-outs.’

  ‘We don’t know very much about them really,’ Laura said. ‘I always assumed they were exactly how they appeared and Squire Jenner is not the most intelligent of men. Would he be able to carry off this for so long?’

  ‘I am increasingly inclined to think Sir Walter and Giles Swinburn are behind it,’ Hogget said. ‘They have a propensity for violence, we already know they will commit embezzlement and plan various unpleasant stratagems to get what they want. They are not cold, calm plotters, but that does not mean they are incapable of carrying this out.’

  ‘The only problem is, no-one appears to be rolling in money,’ Theo said slowly. ‘You’d have thought – ’

  ‘Ah ha!’ Charlotte sat up straight, pushed aside her plate and fanned out pages of the notes. ‘Look at this, James. There’s a stack of the same dirty old paper, which is why they didn’t stand out, but the ink is fresher and the hand is educated.’ She tapped the edges of the fan together and pushed it across to Hogget.

  ‘Is it code?’ Laura asked.

  ‘I do not think so.’ Hogget reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a leather case and extracted a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles which he perched on the end of his nose. ‘More likely highly abbreviated notes by someone who requires an aide memoire, I’d have said. You know the Swinburns well – do you recognise the handwriting?’ He handed her three pages.

  ‘It is all figures. Dates – and can this be amounts? It must be. Goodness.’ She peered at them, frustrated by the lack of words. ‘There is a similarity to Sir Walter’s hand, definitely. I have seen his account books occasionally. But it is probably typical of many educated people of his generation, wouldn’t you say?’ She flipped over the pages as the other began to argue about the next step to take.

  ‘This page is quite recent, look. April twelfth. When did you find these papers, Will?’

  ‘The Sunday before I met Theo in the church,’ he said readily. ‘That must have been the second of the month. I had been putting away prayer books after the service and I tripped in the vestry, fell against the wall and hit my elbow on a cupboard door. I had always assumed it was simply part of the panelling because it had no handle, but it opened and I saw it was full of papers. I took a quick look, saw that I really ought to sort them and check them against the registers in case of oversights and inaccuracies, and pushed them into that valise I’d been using to carry my clean vestments. I recalled them when Will and I were discussing how to research the tomb, then events rather overtook me.’ He winced and rubbed at the back of his head.

  ‘You didn’t mention them to anyone else? The Rector?’

  ‘No. I thought he might see it as criticism of his supervision of the parishes if I said I thought the registers had not been properly kept.’

  ‘So the first anyone knew about it was when I mentioned them at that dinner party,’ Theo said.

  ‘Some of the numbers are distinctive.’ Laura said. ‘Look, the seven with the bar through the upright and the zero with a diagonal line through it.’

  ‘Continental,’ Hogget said, looking at more of the sheets. ‘I should have spotted that.’

  ‘But there is no-one foreign that we know of around here,’ Perry objected.

  ‘What if we were to hold a dinner party?’ Theo said. ‘We know so much now that we can start to drop hints, make suggestions. Surely we can provoke some reaction, someone might betray themselves. We could invite all the guests from the original one that the Swinburns held, plus Jared.’

  ‘And Gerard Redfern. We can vouch for his absolute discretion,’ Perry said to Hogget. ‘It would be useful to have a lawyer present. But would the Swinburns accept after that scene here the other day?’

  ‘Write that you would be sorry to be at odds with your neighbours and would like to extend a hand of reconciliation,’ Laura suggested. ‘Say that on consideration you can understand how they might have been suspicious of the situation here and how anxious they must be about me. They are not going to be able to resist feeling superior because you are apparently apologising – and the thought of a dinner party with two viscounts and a fashionable lawyer will appeal to the Rector and Mrs Finch. If you invite the Jenners and their daughters, their mama will be in ecstasies.’

  ‘I think I had best remain out of sight,’ Will said.

  ‘Along with me and Charlotte, Pitkin and Flynn,’ Laura said. ‘We can watch and take notes and might be useful witnesses.’

  ‘How about adding Lieutenant Morefleet to the observers?’ Theo said. ‘With his three Dragoons secreted in the kitchen. If we do unmask this traitor they are hardly likely to surrender quietly and it all adds to the official weight of what we are doing. Hogget, do you have government identification that you can show Morefleet? I can’t imagine he’ll be willing to commit his troops to arresting one of the local gentry without more than our say-so.’

  ‘Yes, and I will write to Whitehall today. Besides keeping them informed it will be useful to have a correlation between the dates in those notes and the disappearance of agents. We had best say a week today for your dinner party. That will give us time to hear what Whitehall has to say, to brief Morefleet and your lawyer friend and to plan our attack.’

  ‘I had best compose my dignified, but conciliatory, letters of invitation in that case,’ Perry said with a grimace. ‘And I’ll alert Redfern.’

  Laura looked across the table at Theo. Unlike the others who seemed energised and cheered by the prospect of action he had fallen silent and was staring at the opposite wall with a kind of bleak blankness in his expression.

  ‘I need to go to London,’ he said abruptly. He caught her looking at him and the colour came up over his cheekbones. ‘I’ll take your letter to the Home Office if you want, Hogget. That will be more secure than the Mails.’

  Charlotte started to gather up the scattered papers as the footmen cleared the breakfast table. ‘We’ll take these home and continue sorting them. I will make sure all the ones that relate to church matters are kept safe,’ she added with a smile for Will.

  Laura moved out of the way of Terence balancing a pile of plates and heard Jared say quietly to Theo, ‘Are you calling on Lady Penelope Haddon?’

  ‘Yes.’ Theo was curt. ‘There’s nothing useful I can do here.’ He turned to Perry. ‘I’ll leave just as soon as Pitkin can pack and I will call on you to pick up your London post, Hogget. I’ll be back for the dinner party.’

  I should be glad, Laura told herself. He has accepted the inevitable. I can stop foolishly daydreaming about something that I was never meant to have.

  ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ she said brightly, not turning as Theo went out with the Hoggets.

  ‘Consult with Mrs Bishop on a menu and try and work out how to conceal five observers where they can overhear what goes on,’ Perry said, looking more than a little harassed. ‘And help me with this confounded letter. If I sound too apologetic they’ll smell a rat and if I’m
too high-handed they’ll take offence.’

  Theo set Pitkin to pack and went out to the stables. ‘Waggett, I want the coach ready in half an hour. We’re going to London. Jed, I want you to stay here, help Lord Manners and his staff protect Miss Darke and Mr Thwaite. We’re still not out of the woods with this, but we’re getting somewhere. Flynn will tell you what’s happening. Today’s Friday. I’ll be back Tuesday at the latest.’

  ‘Who is going to spell Tom?’ Jed asked. ‘There and back in a few days with no groom?’

  ‘I will,’ Theo said shortly and ignored Jed’s raised eyebrows. Driving would settle him more than sitting brooding in the carriage.

  Pitkin came downstairs with a valise in each hand as he returned to the hall. Terence followed him with the trunk.

  ‘I’m only going for two days, three at most.’

  ‘You will be calling on Lady Penelope,’ Pitkin said. ‘There may well be evening engagements.’ He was looking positively disapproving.

  Theo told himself it was the effect of the severe hair cut and poked his head around the study door. Perry was sitting at the desk, in the act of pushing a half-written page towards Laura. ‘Back Tuesday, latest. I’ve left you Jed Tucker.’

  Perry looked up, his expression guarded. ‘Thank you. I’m inviting the Swinburns and the others for the Friday. If I can ever get this confounded letter right.’

  ‘You’ll manage. Goodbye, Laura.’

  ‘Good bye.’ She smiled faintly and went back to jotting notes.

  She knows I am going to see Penelope, I told her I would try and extricate myself from the engagement – so why is she so cool? He made his farewells to Jared and Flynn and went out to find the carriage standing at the front door.

  In fact no-one seemed very happy with him all of a sudden, he concluded as Waggett sent the horses into a trot. If Perry or Jared thought he should stay and help guard the place, or make plans for the dinner party they were more than capable of saying so, which made their constraint hard to understand. Pitkin was still looking stuffed, Jed had looked on the verge of criticising him…

  Damn it. I’m tired, I’m worried and I am not looking forward to seeing Lady Penelope. I’m imagining things. I need a good night’s sleep, that’s all.

  Theo arrived in London the next afternoon. He stopped overnight at Newmarket then had driven a good part of the way that morning and felt his mood change as though pieces of a broken pattern were slipping back into place. He knew what he was going to say to Lady Penelope, he was braced for the consequences if she took his words badly. He felt, in his heart, that he was doing the honourable thing to redeem the mistake he had made in proposing in the first place and he told himself that his own conscience was the only guide he could take.

  Perry, he had concluded, was unhappy with him for hurting Laura and Jared doubtless guessed what he was about and disapproved of him breaking his engagement.

  Understanding his friends’ motives and being sure he was doing the right thing still did not quite overcome the sick sinking feeling in his guts as, groomed to perfection by a tight-lipped Pitkin, he knocked on Lord Haddon’s door that afternoon.

  The butler was uncertain whether Lady Penelope was receiving. Theo, left to kick his heels in the drawing room, got the impression that the man would have refused anyone else, but his young mistress’s betrothed was a different matter.

  Eventually the butler returned. ‘If you would come this way, my lord.’

  Theo was braced for her to be chaperoned by her mother and to have to persuade the Countess to leave them by themselves for a while. As it was, Penelope was alone except for a maid. She looked tense and almost harassed.

  ‘My lord, I did not expect you. My parents will be sorry to have missed you, but they are both out. Mama will be home shortly.’ That seemed to strike her, belatedly, as insufficient. ‘I hope you are well.’

  ‘Perfectly, thank you. Lady Penelope, I realise this is… unconventional. But might I beg five minutes of your time? Alone.’

  ‘Alone?’ She glanced at the maid.

  ‘Perhaps she could stand in the hall with the door open so she can see us?’ he suggested.

  ‘But not hear us?’ she enquired. Suddenly her air of distraction was replaced by sharp attention. ‘Very well. Winslow, please wait in the hall as his lordship suggests.’

  The maid went with considerably less reluctance than Theo expected. He took a deep breath. ‘Lady Penelope. I have come to the conclusion that it was wrong of me to make you a proposal of marriage. We do not know each other beyond the most superficial interactions and our affections are not engaged.’ He paused, expecting outrage or tears or shock, but she was studying him intently, head on one side.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I now believe that this is not the basis for a happy marriage and that we should put a stop to this engagement before it goes any further and it becomes widely known.’

  ‘You wish me to jilt you?’

  ‘I can provide you with any number of good reasons why you might change your mind. My youthful career is not one I am particularly proud of and I am sure any young lady discovering some of the details might wish to withdraw from the engagement without any reflection on herself.’

  To his amazement she smiled, a small, almost secret, quirk of the lips. ‘You were a rakehell?’

  ‘I drank too much, gambled too much, ran up debts. I am prepared to admit penitently to all and sundry that you have made the right choice in spurning me – if it becomes known outside the family, that is. I fully accept that your father is going to be severely displeased with me.’

  ‘Explain to me why, exactly, you are not prepared to settle for the kind of marriage of convenience and suitability that most of our class consider normal.’ She sank down on the nearest chair, her head tipped to one side as she watched his face.

  ‘I am in love with another. My immediate thought was to simply keep quiet, to pretend that my heart was not engaged. I have made a commitment to you and I should honour it.’

  ‘But the lady returns your feelings?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I see. That does make a difference.’

  ‘You agree with me?’ He heard how incredulous he sounded and bit his tongue.

  ‘Two unhappy people and one who will never have the opportunity for her marriage to grow into love? Yes, I agree with you. Society would not, but that is a polite hypocrisy.’

  Theo was so taken aback that he sat down, uninvited, on the nearest chair.

  ‘You see, Lord Northam, you interrupted me in the process of writing you a letter in which I was apologising for accepting your suit. I am in the process of running away from home to my lover.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Theo closed his mouth with a snap. ‘Your lover, Lady Penelope?’

  ‘Well, not my actual lover,’ she said, blushing rosily. ‘The man I am in love with.’

  ‘But you accepted my proposal.’

  ‘Papa had just discovered how I felt about Hugo – Lieutenant Drayfield, that is. He is the second son of neighbours of ours and I have known him forever, but he was home on sick leave from the Peninsula – a wound in his shoulder that refused to heal – and we got to know each other much better and fell in love. And he asked Papa for my hand, but he was furious because Hugo has only his pay and a merely respectable competence from family money.’ She bit her lip, glanced at him and, presumably encouraged by his expression, went on.

  ‘Then you proposed and I knew that your affections were not engaged, so I accepted and made excuses for not making the betrothal known. If he thought that I had seen the error of my ways, then Papa would allow me more freedom again. And I imagined that when I ran off with Hugo anyone who found out would sympathise with you and consider that you’d had a lucky escape.’

  ‘And today’s the day?’

  ‘No, Monday. Hugo’s transport sails from Portsmouth late on Tuesday night. I was going to hire a post chaise and drive down there. We are all supposed
to be visiting connections in Richmond on Monday, so I will pretend a severe headache to stay at home.’

  ‘And you are proposing to hire a chaise and travel over seventy miles by yourself to a dockyard full of soldiers?’

  ‘Exactly. I can hardly take Winslow, my maid, with me. She doesn’t want to leave England, so I would have to abandon her at Portsmouth to travel home by herself and then Mama would dismiss her without a character. She is going to say she made me a sleeping draught and thought she should leave me rest and when she went to check I had gone. I’ve written a letter to my parents in which I boast of outwitting her. She is not going to find my letter until late afternoon – it will have slipped down behind my bureau.’

  Theo suppressed a groan. If he could have waved a magic wand and wished, then he would have asked that Lady Penelope loved another man and could be happily married to him without a scandal. And here he was with half his wish come true and the other half a nightmare.

  ‘Are you certain he loves you?’

  ‘Yes.’ She eyed him suspiciously. ‘You are not going to give me away, are you?’

  ‘I cannot let you make that journey by yourself. If you are certain, absolutely certain, then I will take you in my carriage – and I will want to talk to your Lieutenant Drudgefield – ’

  ‘Drayfield!’

  ‘– myself before I let you out of the carriage.’

  ‘Lord Northam – ’

  ‘Don’t stop to thank me.’ He grinned at her when she frowned at him. ‘I will go now before your mother comes home. When shall I meet you on Monday?’

  ‘They are leaving at nine – early because our friends want to go out on the Thames on a pleasure boat. Take your carriage round to the mews at the back. Winslow is going to lower the bags out of the window to me on a rope.’