A Marquess, a Miss and a Mystery Page 15

  She pulled her mouth down at the corners. ‘How like Herbert to make up a story like that.’

  ‘You mean, he hadn’t stumbled across a new code?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes.’ She shook her head. ‘I will be able to explain it all much easier if you refrain from interrupting.’

  He held up his hands to signify surrender. Folded his arms across his chest again.

  ‘Where was I? Oh, yes. Well, Herbert said he’d seen someone passing notes to someone else in a way that made him prick up his ears, in a manner of speaking. He couldn’t believe they were lovers, but if they weren’t, then there had to be some other reason why they were carrying on in such a furtive way.’

  Yes, that was the gist of what he’d told Nick, too.

  ‘And so,’ Horatia continued, ‘he stole one of the notes he’d seen them pass each other. And, when he saw it was in code, he brought it to me to work out what it said.’

  ‘So all those hours he spent in the rookeries, learning how to pick pockets didn’t go to waste,’ he said aloud. Herbert had lifted a coded note from a suspect. There had been nothing on Herbert’s body, nothing in his rooms. He’d thought the trail had gone completely cold. But Horatia had seen this note. Had deciphered it. And it had led her here. His heart kicked into a hopeful canter.

  ‘Will you stop interrupting?’

  ‘I beg your pardon. You deciphered it...’ She must have done, or she would not have left her house, let alone the city of London, to attend the wedding of someone she’d never met.

  ‘Of course,’ she said with a toss of her head. ‘Because it was ridiculously simple.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘What? Oh, haven’t I said? I thought...’ She frowned. ‘I can’t recall the exact words. But it definitely ordered the person receiving it to attend the Duke’s wedding, because he wanted to speak face-to-face.’

  ‘And a wedding might be the only time this person could get close to the Duke without it looking suspicious,’ mused Nick. ‘You see? The Duke could be the ringleader. He could be the traitor. He has access to all sorts of information that would be invaluable to the French. And it certainly explains why he suddenly decided to get married. And then, after inviting the cream of society, making them think he was going to choose one of their daughters, he picked a nobody. A girl with no family who might grow suspicious of his activities and no influence to stop him.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, pursing her lips. ‘I can see that you would like all that to incriminate him, but I have to tell you that the note spoke of him in the third person.’

  ‘That’s irrelevant! He wouldn’t say, come to my wedding, would he? That would give away his identity.’

  ‘It wouldn’t explain why he styles himself as The Curé, either.’

  ‘Perhaps...’ He struggled to find a theory that might hold water and suddenly found inspiration from his childhood. ‘You know—well, I told you, didn’t I? That he suddenly sprang out of nowhere when I was about five years old. Well, he had been sent away to live with a foster family who told him he was a bastard.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes. Mother told me. When I was much older, of course. My father suspected his first wife of playing him false. And he was given to strange fits of temper. The way he treated Mother—’ He bit off what he might have said. There were some things neither he, nor his sisters, would ever speak of outside the family. ‘Well, you only have to look at the way he evicted me and my sisters from this place the moment he decided Oliver was his true heir after all. Even though he looked, and acted, like a farm boy.’

  ‘So you think the Duke might have developed a disgust of rank and privilege because of the way your father rejected him? It didn’t affect you that way though, did it?’

  ‘No. But then as you pointed out, I had my mother and sisters with me. He was out on his own. With everyone calling him a bastard. And treating him like one.’

  ‘Oh, the poor boy,’ she said. Which made him wince. Because he suddenly saw...no, felt, that it must have been as bad for Oliver as it had been for him. Worse, possibly, because not only had Oliver gone through his exile alone, but he’d been much younger when it began.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, deliberately shaking off the feeling of sympathy her words had evoked for the bewildered and betrayed little boy Oliver had once been. ‘He has radical views, everyone knows that. He openly petitions Parliament for changes in favour of the underprivileged. What if he is also taking action to ensure those changes take place? In a revolutionary manner?’

  ‘I take your point. However, we were talking about the code itself and its significance to our actions now, not who might be the guilty party.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender again. ‘Pray continue.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, pushing her spectacles back up to the bridge of her nose. ‘Most of the messages Herbert brought me had been in something that was not really very much more than a glorified version of the Caesar shift, for which I soon drew up a table.’ She spoke to him as though what she was saying ought to make perfect sense. So he did his best to look as though he understood it all, though she might as well have been speaking in Chinese. ‘But the last few, why, they were the sort of thing a child would employ, when first starting to think of ways of sending secret messages. I’ve done it myself.’

  Yes, she would have.

  ‘You agree on a book that you know the person you are sending the secret message to has a copy of,’ she continued. ‘And then to put the word into code, you tell them first the page number it is on, then the line on the page and then the position in the line,’ she said, with the kind of enthusiasm that showed she found that sort of thing fun. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her little face so animated. ‘So that for each word there is a set of three numbers. Usually. Except in this case, each word was represented by four numbers. Which, of course, led me to deduce which book they were using as their source.’

  ‘It did?’

  ‘Yes. A book that every household has access to. The Bible.’

  ‘Egad. You worked all that out from the fact that each word was represented by a set of four numbers? What a remarkable brain you must have.’

  ‘Yes, well, there are sixty-six books in the Bible,’ she carried on, as though he hadn’t interrupted, the only sign that she’d heard him at all being the flush that crept to her cheeks. ‘And I noticed straight away that the first number used never went above that. Then each book is divided into chapters. Then verses. Then, well, individual words. So, if you wanted to say the word duke you could, for example, write it as one, thirty-six, forty, twenty-three, I think. Though there must be other places where the word is used in the singular.’

  ‘Hold on, that is...Genesis, chapter thirty-six...’

  ‘Verse forty—yes, that’s correct,’ she said, smiling at him as though he was a schoolboy who’d just given her the correct answer to a complicated bit of mental arithmetic. ‘Though I may have misquoted the actual chapter and verse, you have got the idea.’

  Oh, yes. He’d got the idea all right. ‘It’s fiendish. Because every house will have a Bible. And no matter what version they have, they will be the same by chapter and verse.’

  ‘That’s it. So it is of no use trying to find a copy of a book that will look unusual. Everyone has a Bible. Why, at chapel yesterday, I dare say most of the ladies were carrying one.’

  His heart did a funny little skip. ‘That is why you were so suspicious of the chaplain? Because, to write such codes, he must have an excellent working knowledge of the Bible.’ Nick certainly wouldn’t have known there was the word duke in the book of Genesis.

  ‘No, no, no. That is not the case at all!’ She’d relegated him to the bottom of the class. ‘You only need to have access to a concordance. Which has a list of every word in the Bible and where to find examples of i
t. And before you ask, yes, there is one in this library. I found it on my first night here.’ She gestured to the table at which she was standing. At one of the books lying open.

  He sprang away from the mantelpiece and strode over. On the open page he saw, at a random glance, the words hair, ham, hand, in bold print, followed by a list of places where those words could be found by chapter and verse. And the page edges were worn, as though the book had been well used.

  ‘Anyone,’ he said, his heart sinking, ‘be they staff or guest, could come in here and walk over to this table, and the worst anyone would assume was that they were...pious.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Damnation!’ He took a few paces across the room and back, running his fingers through his hair. If there was no incriminating code book to search for, it meant he was going to have to come up with a completely different plan. Think up a new way of unmasking Herbert’s killer.

  Which would mean being on form. And not wasting time striding about the place with his hair on end looking like a zany.

  He went back to the fireplace, over which there was a mirror, smoothed down his hair and checked that his neckcloth and waistcoat were in pristine condition.

  ‘It’s a delaying tactic, isn’t it,’ she said.

  He met her eyes in the mirror, to see a look on her face that told him she had just come up with a solution to something that had been niggling at her for some time.

  ‘Your habit of checking yourself in every mirror you pass. You don’t have any idea how to proceed from this point, now that you don’t need to search for a code book, so, while you are trying to come up with a new plan, you are pretending to be preening.’

  She was too clever by half. No wonder no man had ever proposed marriage to her. She must have made them all feel about two inches tall.

  He, however, was not going to be intimidated, or emasculated, by a slip of a girl, no matter how acute her powers of observation were.

  He turned to her with a hard smile. ‘Did Herbert never tell you how we began on our present career?’

  She shook her head. ‘Though I don’t see what relevance it can have. Or why you need to tell me about it now.’

  ‘It was as I was preening, as you put it, in such a mirror, at one of the dullest functions you can possibly imagine, when I saw two people together who had no business being together.’

  ‘Just as Herbert got on to the track of this person.’ She waved her hand at the book on the table.

  ‘Precisely. What piqued my curiosity on that first occasion, though, was that the two people in question always swore they had never met each other. Indeed, the...man in the case slipped out of the house almost at once, then denied ever having been there. And because I was bored, and because I have always had a spirit of mischief that provokes me into doing the very thing that everyone says I ought not to do, I determined to get to the bottom of their little mystery. I told Herbert what I was about and he, as always, followed me.’

  A small frown flitted across her brow and was swiftly replaced by an expression of great sadness. ‘I wish he hadn’t been so ready to follow you into mischief,’ she said. And then shook her head, a little angrily. ‘No, no, that isn’t true. It is of no use blaming you. The last year or so, while he was actually doing something constructive, I was glad...only...’

  ‘Well, I blame myself,’ he said, stung by the way she was trying to exonerate him. ‘We never expected to unmask a criminal venture when we started attempting to unravel that first mystery. Nor did we set out with any noble motives whatsoever. We just found it amusing to thwart a pair who thought they were being really clever. And it might have been the end of it, if somebody hadn’t taken note of our activities and reported it to...a group of powerful men who decided they could make use of our particular skills.’

  ‘Yes, and that thrilled Herbert. By that point, even if you hadn’t wanted to do more of that kind of work, I think he would have gone on. He was so proud of himself when he told me about how someone in government was seeking patriotic young men from good families with the brains necessary to carry out their...spying, I suppose you would call it, for them. And he thought it a great joke that even his reputation for being a bit...wild was going to be useful cover for consorting with rather low types. That he would be rewarded for behaving badly.’

  ‘It wasn’t quite like that.’

  ‘No,’ she said pensively. ‘I can see that now. And although he didn’t tell me how you got started by accident, I might have guessed it would have been something like that. Nowhere near as noble and important as he kept making it sound.’ She bowed her head and ran a finger along the page of the open book, as though she was studying it.

  ‘Perhaps he was trying to impress you.’

  Her shoulders hunched.

  ‘Yes,’ she said in a very small voice. ‘He did have a bit of a tendency to...that is, he was so pleased to be thought clever by someone, when before they’d all said that I had all the brains and he had all the beauty.’

  ‘Whoever said that was an idiot. Herbert had brains. And you have...’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ she hissed at him, glaring up at him with eyes that had narrowed to slits. ‘Don’t tell me any lies. Not for any reason.’

  She looked so fierce that he quashed his first impulse, which was to persuade her that she did have a type of beauty. That if she took more care of her appearance and talked in the same, animated fashion which had so changed her features from pinched up and disapproving to open and...yes, rather charming, she could rival any Season’s accredited beauties. Instead, he addressed her major concern.

  ‘I promise,’ he vowed, ‘that from now on, I will never lie to you.’

  ‘Hmmph,’ she said, looking far from convinced. Which was even more irritating than her refusal to receive any sort of compliment. And yet, rather than let it slide, he found himself wanting to persuade her that he’d meant what he’d said. And win back her trust.

  ‘Look, I can understand, only too well, what might have motivated Herbert apart from his loyalty to me. Because I was in it to prove myself, as well. To prove that I had some worth, to somebody, even if my own father...’ He ground to a halt. It was one thing thinking it but quite another, he found, to say out loud that his father had as good as tossed him aside once his firstborn had come back into favour.

  She came out from behind her desk, strode up to him and took his hands. Which shook him. He hadn’t expected her to respond to his confession with quite so much feeling. So much feeling that he couldn’t look directly into her eyes for long, as they were blazing with compassion. He bowed his head over her hands instead. And was a touch surprised to note how tiny they were, considering the strength of her grip.

  ‘Your father,’ she said indignantly, ‘sounds like a complete nitwit. He should have treasured you. Well, he should have treasured both his sons, yet he did the same to you both.’

  What? How had she managed to bring Oliver into it?

  ‘You are intelligent,’ she was saying, gripping his hands even harder as he attempted to remove them, ‘and capable and kind...’

  ‘Kind?’ he scoffed, finally extricating himself from her rather inky fingers. ‘If only you knew...’

  ‘No. I am not going to listen to you listing your faults. You are not the rake you claim to be, or there would be a string of ruined women with a cartload of by-blows in your history. And there aren’t. Yes, you have behaved badly, in many ways, but there is a streak of decency in you that has stopped you sinking into true depravity.’

  ‘Ha! Not being depraved hardly equates to having any actual worth—’

  ‘But the work you and Herbert were doing...’

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, deciding to be completely honest with someone for once, ‘lately I’ve been feeling a great deal of affinity for that Greek chap, Sisyphus. Endlessly rolling a boulder uphill only to have
it roll right back to where it had started the minute he thought he’d got it to the top. Because the moment I defeat one group of conspirators, another one takes its place. It’s all so pointless.’ He leaned across the table and flipped the cover of the concordance so that it snapped shut in a cloud of dust. He’d been fooling himself that he was doing something worthwhile. His life, his activities, they were all pointless.

  ‘Well, this isn’t just about unmasking conspirators, is it? This time, we are on the trail of whoever killed Herbert. So you cannot say this is pointless,’ she said, wagging a finger at him. ‘Can you?’

  He sucked in a shallow breath. For once, the capture of his quarry was going to give him a sense of validation. Whoever had killed Herbert must not be allowed to get away scot-free. ‘You are absolutely right. So, instead of standing about raking over the past,’ he said in his most withering tone in an attempt to regain the upper hand, ‘we should be putting our heads together and coming up with a way forward.’

  He should have known that speaking to her a bit disdainfully would not have been enough to put her in her place. He should also have chosen his words more carefully. Because the way she was smiling at him told him that she’d taken his suggestion that they put their heads together as a compliment to her intelligence.

  ‘Are you admitting you don’t have a plan?’ she said, her smile turning more amused than gratified. ‘You?’

  If it had been anyone else, he might have attempted to persuade her that, of course, he did. Only he’d just promised to never lie to her. Besides which, he had a feeling she would see straight through him.

  ‘The problem is that we have practically nothing to go on.’ He thought of all the guests already at Theakstone Court and the dozens, as she’d put it, due to arrive over the next few days.

  ‘Well, no, not quite nothing. We know that the people we are looking for were both in London the day before Herbert was killed,’ she said, holding up one finger as though she was about to count the number of things they did know. ‘That they agreed to meet here.’ Yes, dammit, she was now holding up a second finger. ‘That the code name of the person in charge of this plot, whatever it is, has the code name of The Curé...’