Page 130 of A Gentleman's Wager

“What is it?” Wakefield asked, as horror flooded his companion’s previously enlivened features.

“Drat the old fool. We must get to Lauwine at once.”

“Joshua, you know— Wait. Why? Lucerne’s accounts are still managed in London.”

“Louisa,” he gasped. The utterance broke Wakefield’s heart right out of his chest. “All of her accounts are held by Watson & Pryce. It was part of the stipulations of Tristan’s will, that Pryce oversee everything until she either married or turned twenty-five. He was determined to keep the old woman’s control over the purse strings to the minimum. He never cared for her; said she robbed him of sixpence when he was a boy. But the point is, if Pryce is really gone, he’s ruined her.”

“And you wish us to deliver that news?”

“It’s not ideal,” Joshua conceded, clasping his hand around the tankard that the maid pushed before him. “But I think we can agree it has to be done.”

~*~

That it ought to be done was perhaps the only point of the proceedings on which they agreed. Joshua espoused a course of action that had them setting off at once. Wakefield, torn between his instinctive demand for action and the caution of having his heart mangled wondered if it would be best for Joshua to go alone. In the end, they both wound up in the carriage.

Lucerne met them on the steps of Lauwine. “She already knows,” he said, forestalling Wakefield’s jumbled explanation for their sudden arrival. “A letter arrived from Pryce this morning explaining it all. It’s a bad business, but there’s always a risk with investments.”

“Pah!” Joshua thrust the same crumpled ink-stained paper at him that he’d earlier thrust before Wakefield. “This isn’t a case of bad investments, it’s embezzlement. He’s absconded with her money. Run off with it, and the savings of a dozen or so others.”

“Not yours too?”

“Not mine, thank the Lord,” Joshua reassured.

“But, absconded?”

Both Joshua and Wakefield nodded in confirmation. “The magistrate’s said to have sent someone after him, but there’s a deal of confusion as to whether it’s north or south that he’s headed.”

Lucerne looked back and forth between them both as they related bits of the story, and what they’d picked up from other folks as they’d waited for the horses to be harnessed.

“Well, I’ll be damned. What a confounded mess. I suppose we had better tell her. Though I don’t know if it will not just upset her more.”

“How is she?” Wakefield asked. He was rather surprised that Lucerne’s other guests hadn’t been drawn to the entryway by the sounds of their arrival. They moved into the study.

Lucerne shook his head. “I’m not certain it’s truly sunk in yet. She was remarkably stoic over the letter this morning, but that suggested it was purely her investments that had gone awry. This,” he tapped the newspaper, “and what you’re saying puts it all in a rather different light.”

“Do you know where she is to be found?”

Joshua curled his hand against Wakefield’s shoulder. “Think a moment before you go charging off. You said it yourself on the way here, that you are likely not the best person to break this news. Perhaps, allow me to be that grim messenger.”

“I did say that, but—”

“Freddy,” Lucerne remarked. “What you did broke her in twain. She has been more herself of late, but for weeks she existed as little more than a ghost, I pray you don’t elevate her misery.”

“But as I’m already a blackheart, then surely, I’m the best of us to hear it from. Then she may curse me as her emotions require, and you are both untarnished by it, and can thus better offer support.”

“I don’t know—” Lucerne began.

“Lucerne, please. There’s little I can do to atone. Let me do this.”

“Very well.”

The concession filled his heart with unexpected hope.

“I believe she’s in the music room.”

Wakefield took a step, meaning to hurry there at once, but he paused, recalling he had something else to say first. “Thank you, for this and everything else that you have done. It was an uncommonly kind gesture, unexpected, and undeserved. Still, I am most sincerely grateful for it.”

He did not linger after making his speech, racing towards the sound of the pianoforte instead. Therefore, he did not witness Lucerne’s puzzlement, nor his subsequent question to Joshua.