Page 52 of A Proposition for the Comte

‘I sat in the ladies’ retiring room for half an hour where I was waylaid by Lady Elizabeth Grainger.’ Sitting up, she straightened the bed sheets around her.

‘The older woman at the park the other day?’

Violet nodded. ‘She told me that if she had been many years younger she may have set her cap at you. She also said that she saw Douglas Cummings in Chichester two weeks or so ago.’

‘About the same time that George Taylor was killed?’

‘Charles placed my assailant in Douglas Cummings’s custody. He was the man with the responsibility to keep him alive.’

‘One of the gaolers I talked to said they were told to go home early. He also said that the man who assaulted you had been a soldier, but had become a jeweller.’

‘You have already been investigating this?’

‘Stephen Miller had a jewellery shop in Holborn.’

‘Taylor was a jeweller, too.’

‘And your husband dealt in the questionable realms of gold tampering. Do you see a pattern?’

She did. It was the gold that brought them all together and greed that had torn them apart.

‘I am a jeweller’s daughter and I think that Harland’s enemies have put two and two together and deduced that it is me who has stolen the gold.’

‘And did you?’

‘If you truly need to ask me that, Aurelian, you should not be here.’

‘Then where do you think it went?’

She swallowed as she gave him her answer. ‘I think Harland took some to fund his gambling debts and then he lost control of the rest when he tried to hide it.’

‘George Taylor and Stephen Miller took it over?’

‘There were others, too.’

‘Who? Who else was in it?’

‘Charles Mountford asked me that. I said I didn’t know. The jeweller Whitely, perhaps?’

He waited for a moment. Good intelligence was never to be rushed. It required patience and trust as well as luck and all the time in the world.

‘The thing is I did find a list of initials. There were five names underlined twice in dark pen on a sheet of paper and stuffed in a crack of wood in Harland’s desk.’

‘Was D.C. among them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who else?’

‘George Taylor and three other initials that I could not find a correlation for at the time.’

‘Where is the list?’

‘I buried it at Addington Manor under the roses in a tin box. Then the place was sold and I did not think to retrieve it.’

‘Who were the others?’

‘S.M. was one of them.’