Page 29 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul (Scandalous Sisters #3)

Mr. Graves’ office isn’t far,”

Ian said as Felicity settled onto the carriage seat across from him.

“And I don’t expect this meeting to be one of any particular length. In all likelihood, we’ll have you back to the school in no more than an hour at most.”

He had meant the words to be reassuring, but she only gave a faint grimace. An aura of pathos hung about her, and in her dour black gown and worn grey coat, she looked remarkably like a martyr on her way to meet an inevitable and gruesome fate. At least her hair had not been pinned back quite so severely as she had been wont to do.

Her hands settled in her lap, fingers fluttering in fidgety nervousness.

“Could he not come to you, instead?”

she asked, though her gaze flitted toward the window of the carriage.

“He often does. But I’ve kept him rather busy just lately with a good number of business matters. He’s got at least three meetings that I know of today. Mr. Jennings is one—you recall him from the theatre?”

“His daughter better than him,”

she said, and a fraction of the tension slipped from her shoulders.

“Louisa. I rather liked her.”

“She liked you as well,”

he said.

“She paid a call earlier today, but of course you were not home to receive her. She said she was very grateful for what you have done for her cousin Dorothea.”

“Dorothea?”

Her brows lifted.

“But I did nothing much.”

“Louisa seems to feel that your interference on behalf of her cousin saved the girl from making a terrible mistake which might have ruined her. She invited you to attend the theatre with her again, if that would be of interest to you. Since you missed much of the performance the last time.”

Felicity pulled a face.

“Will you and Mr. Jennings talk through the entirety of the performance once again?”

“As a matter of fact, I was not invited. It would appear that Louisa also finds discussion of business at the theatre in poor taste.”

Ian managed a wry smile.

“But Jennings is famously long-winded. Time being of the essence, I decided it would be best not to take the risk that he’d talk straight through however much of it Graves has got going spare today. As it is, he’ll most likely be working well into the night, and still more over the next few days besides.”

A tiny wince.

“I’m sorry to have caused trouble for him.”

“You’ve caused no trouble. Graves is paid an admirable wage for his efforts.”

He lifted his hand to knock upon the roof of the carriage to signal the coachman to depart, and hesitated.

“You don’t have to come,”

he said.

“I’ll keep you apprised of what is discussed. But if you would rather—”

“I would rather know now,”

she blurted out, and her fingers flexed, jerking from where she’d placed them in her lap.

“I would rather know now than to wonder for hours.”

She drew in a long breath, held it deep in her lungs. One hand braced beside her on the seat. The other slipped surreptitiously into the pocket of her coat, fisting upon something within.

“The girls are at their dancing lessons for the next two hours. So I have got the time,”

she said, and sounded marginally calmer.

All right, then. It was her decision. Ian rapped upon the roof of the carriage, and as it lurched into motion, he inquired.

“Dancing lessons?”

“At the assembly hall,”

she said.

“There isn’t a room large enough at the school to accommodate it, unless we wished to move the dining room furniture each time. Every young lady whose family intends to give her a Season has got to learn to dance. It’s simply a part of their education.”

Still her hand was clenched in her pocket, and he wondered…

For the first time, he’d noticed her ring missing from its usual position, perched rather precariously upon the nightstand. At first he’d thought it had fallen off, but he’d scoured the floor and hadn’t found it. Was it even now in her pocket? Not worn, perhaps, but held close nonetheless?

He said.

“You didn’t have a Season.”

“I didn’t have a family,”

she replied.

“Not enough of one, at least. Nor one of any social standing, or titled, or even well-heeled enough to buy my way into society.”

“But you learned to dance.”

In preparation for a life she had not expected to lead, for London Seasons that would come and go while she remained in Brighton.

“Of course I learned to dance.”

“I never did.”

Ian braced one hand on the wall as the carriage turned a corner.

“I did try, once. Hired a dancing master to teach me.”

Those sharp brows lifted in interest.

“Did you, really?”

“I did. Perhaps five or six years ago, when I had finally begun to attain a certain sort of recognition among a particular echelon of society. The bankers, the financiers, other titans of industry, so to speak. I’d begun receiving invitations to all sorts of events. It requires no specific skill to sit in a chair and listen to someone play the pianoforte—except, perhaps, the ability to school one’s features into some sort of neutrality when that performance turns out dreadful. But dancing.”

He shook his head.

“I don’t know what I was thinking. I suppose I had assumed that I could parlay what pugilistic talents I once possessed into something more genteel.”

“What rubbish. Your partner isn’t an opponent, and a dance isn’t a fight to be won.”

“Do you know, the dancing master said much the same. I thought it best we should part ways before we came to blows over our differences of opinion and I found myself forced to educate him instead.”

And Felicity laughed. Lightly, half-muffled behind the press of her fingers. But she laughed.

“And you never hired another?”

“No. But I’ve managed to avoid dancing thus far.”

“How?”

she asked.

“The subtle art of the withering stare. As it happens, if one has mastered that, one has no particular need to master dancing. If someone should muster the audacity to suggest that perhaps I ought to consider asking a lady presently at loose ends to dance, I simply give them a withering stare, and I inevitably find myself exempted from such expectations.”

“Ah, yes.”

She pitched a soft sigh, though traces of amusement lingers about the corners of her lips.

“Somehow, I had let myself forget that it is incumbent upon a lady never to refuse a request to dance without due cause, but a gentleman may simply sit out the dancing without altogether too much judgment cast upon him.”

“You’d judge me all the more harshly if I had danced. Just consider all the toes I’ve spared over the years. It was more merciful than selfish.”

And again, the twitch of her lips, spelling an amusement she could not quite contain.

Something had shifted in her. As if she’d shed a portion of that thick outer layer of frost that had enveloped her. As if she might be in the process of becoming reachable once more. A chance, however slight yet, that she might not rebuff a hand stretched out to her.

Three minutes, perhaps, until they reached their destination, and he hated to ruin the fragile camaraderie of the past few minutes with talk that ran the risk of recalling to her that terrible anxiety she had too often dwelt within. But he doubted she would be able to turn her thoughts from it for more than a few minutes at a time, anyway.

“You should speak with your sisters,”

he said.

“It’s likely that whoever our villain is, they have got some familiarity with your family. Someone with a grudge, perhaps, some sort of vendetta to satisfy. If we can discover who might know your history, perhaps we can compile a list of potential suspects.”

“Charity has probably made at least a few enemies,”

she said slowly.

“There was a time she was much in demand. Some gentlemen were not well-pleased to have been refused, or so I’m given to understand. But still they would have had to learn her history, and to find me, and I—I simply don’t see how it’s possible.”

A little crease settled in her brow; something like bewilderment.

“I keep recalling the night at the theatre,”

she said in a whisper-soft voice.

“How I had convinced myself I was safe. That it would be no great risk to walk home.”

The fine hairs at the nape of his neck prickled as chill bumps broke out upon his skin.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I’d felt watched before,”

she said, with a tiny lift of her shoulders.

“At the school. Even at home, upon occasion. Observed, if you will, as if I was never truly alone. But I had reasoned that it wouldn’t matter even if I had been. There were no other carriages upon the street that evening, no one to give chase. Even if there had been someone watching, they couldn’t have kept pace with the carriage. So it was safe. It had to be safe.”

But it hadn’t been. It hadn’t been safe at all.

Her head lifted at last, green eyes perplexed.

“But still he found me,”

she said.

“Almost as if…as if he knew.”

As if he had known where she was going to be. As if he had placed himself in an advantageous position, ready to intercept her from the theatre if an opportunity had presented itself to do so. Christ.

Felicity took a sharp breath.

“When I received the first letter in November—”

November? That couldn’t be right. Could it.

“December, you mean,”

he said, his brows drawing. It had to be December. It could only be December.

But Felicity canted her head, baffled by the correction. “No,”

she said, clearly.

“November. I remember it only too well.”

God damn it all. He’d never asked the question, because he’d assumed he’d known the answer already. The carriage began to slow on the approach to the massive building in which Mrs. Graves kept his office, and Ian found his hands clenching already.

“Felicity,”

he said.

“I’m going to ask you to wait outside the room for just a few minutes while I speak to Mr. Graves in private.”

“In private?”

A little frown tugged at her lips. “Why?”

“Because I am going to use a great deal of coarse language and might even issue a few threats, and I would prefer to spare you from having to hear such things.”

And still she didn’t understand.

“Mr. Graves has my calendar,”

he said.

“He always knows where I am at any given moment. He knew I was to be at the theatre that evening with you—a fact which even Mr. Jennings was unaware of until we arrived. And aside from myself, he was the only one who knew I intended to marry you in November.”

Even Felicity had not known it when she’d begun receiving the letters, the precursors to the demand which had eventually followed.

“There is not much point in extorting a school teacher—unless one knows that school teacher is on the precipice of marrying into a fortune.”

For a moment she sat, still as a statue, frozen to her seat. And then at last, in an aghast squeak.

“Mr. Graves has been extorting me?”

“If he has not, then he damned well knows who is,”

Ian said as he threw open the door of the carriage just as it came to a stop.

“I intend to discover which it is.”

∞∞∞

Through the thick wood of the door and even thicker walls, Felicity could hear Ian shouting.

And he was right, she supposed, as she slipped her hand out of her pocket and turned the thin gold ring in the cold winter sunlight pouring through the window.

She was glad not to be a fly on the wall for that conversation—if, indeed, it could even be called a conversation at this juncture.

She hadn’t heard even the slightest peep that would have suggested Mr.

Graves had been able to get even a single word out in his own defense.

Instead she did her level best to ignore the shouting and to pour all of her attention to the ring in the clasp of her fingers.

Four gems, laid out in a line upon the surface, quite small and dull.

The blue—that was lapis, she thought.

Even if the striations within the stone nearly drowned out the color, still the blue was too deep to be turquoise, too opaque to be sapphire.

But the rest of the gems were too small, too dull to make a proper determination.

The black might have been onyx or jet or obsidian.

The green might have been jade or emerald or even agate, she supposed.

And the occluded yellow stone…she hadn’t the faintest. All together it was a strange assortment of gems which seemed to be arranged in no particularly aesthetically-pleasing order.

Still, it must have cost a pretty penny for a man who had not, at the time, the ability to afford better.

And the tiny scratches etched into the soft gold—that was evidence, she thought, that it had not sat within a ring box these last years.

A velvet case would have protected it from such damage.

Clearly, it had not languished in the depths of a drawer.

It had not been forgotten or lost.

He’d had it easily to hand on the day they had married, produced it straight from his pocket, absent any sort of protective case.

It had meant something to him, this ring with its strange stones.

A token, she supposed—and it had served its purpose best not tucked away for safekeeping, but…handled.

Kept close.

It had lost what shine it might once have had, acquiring little scratches, marks of wear which showed its age.

But they showed also its significance to him.

And he’d given it to her, knowing at the time that she could not have dredged up even the slightest appreciation for it.

That a symbol like this one which carried such meaning to him had been hateful to her.

He was lucky, she supposed, that she’d all but forgotten about it.

If she had recalled it in those early days, she might have found herself tempted to chuck it straight out the window.

Into the sea, perhaps, for added insult.

What would he have done if she had?

Nothing, she suspected, except to let her.

He never had.

He’d simply let her be angry.

As angry as she had needed to be, in whichever way she had needed to be.

The door crashed open, and Felicity startled at the sound, frantically jamming the ring back within the depths of her pocket.

Ian stood there framed within the open doorway, his chest heaving, dark hair ruffled as if he’d been raking his fingers through it.

“Mr. Graves,”

he said in a voice gone hoarse.

“has got some apologies to make to you.”

“To—to me?”

“Of course, to you. It was not my safety which he jeopardized with his utter lack of discretion.”

He lifted his voice just at the end, casting the words over his shoulder into the office behind him with a sort of vindictive venom which suggested that he was not quite finished with his thorough admonition of the man.

Felicity sidled closer, oddly reluctant to enter the room.

“So—so he was not involved?”

she asked.

“He was,”

Ian bit off.

“But unknowingly.”

Another cutting glare pitched over his shoulder.

“Mr. Graves is simply altogether too free with his tongue.”

Ian reached out and caught her elbow.

“You’ve nothing to fear from him. I daresay he knows better, now.”

Felicity let Ian lead her within, to where a thin, gaunt man sat behind a desk, looking rather like he’d run over with a carriage. His face was a drawn, pasty white, and his thin mustache twitched over quivering lips which gave the impression he might well burst into tears at any moment. “Madam,”

he said in a tremulous voice as he popped to his feet.

“I do beg your pardon. I hadn’t the slightest idea that just a few ill-considered words would cause you to come to harm. If I had, I swear I would never have said a word, not a word.”

“Graves,”

Ian bit off.

“Don’t fucking babble. It’s unbecoming.”

Mr. Graves’ voice careened higher, his hands fluttering in a nervous motion.

“I swear I had no reason to suspect any sort of foul play at hand. It seemed so harmless, so innocent. If I had but known—”

Ian made a caustic sound beneath his breath.

“Sit down, Graves, and be glad I have need of your services at the moment, or I’d sack you straight off. We need a full description of the man. Anything you can remember, even the smallest detail.”

“The—I beg your pardon, Mr. Carlisle?”

“As you damned well ought,”

Ian cast out snidely.

“You’re going to help us fix this goddamned mess you’ve made.”

“But I don’t understand,”

Mr. Graves said, his voice quavering through a few octaves.

“There was no man. I spoke of you only to a woman, I swear it on my very life.”

“A woman?”

Ian drew in a sharp breath, and his gaze sheared to Felicity, bafflement lingering in the depths of his dark eyes.

He’d assumed. As had Felicity. She had the strangest sense that she’d been handed a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces missing, the picture it made still unformed.

“Please sit, Mr. Graves,”

she said, striving to keep her voice even and steady, lest she agitate the man into even less clarity.

“I’d like to know the whole of it, if you please. How did this—this woman come into contact with you?”

Wilting with relief to have received a more amiable address, Mr. Graves sank into his chair and dragged his trembling fingers through his sparse grey hair.

“While I was in London,”

he said.

“On business for Mr. Carlisle.”

“In November?”

Ian ground out.

“Yes.”

Mr. Graves dug into his pocket for a handkerchief and blotted at a sheen of sweat that had broken out upon his brow.

“She was well-dressed; a woman of quality. She was newly arrived to London as well, and had taken a room at the same hotel in which I was lodging for the duration of my stay.”

A guilty flush spread across his sallow cheeks, burning brightly.

“She was beautiful,”

he said.

“Of course, a fellow like me hardly stands a chance of being noticed by a woman like her, but I thought as a lady of certain age needs no chaperone, where was the harm in offering to show her the sights? A walk in the park, a bit of flirtation—”

“You were meant to be conducting business.”

“And I did, Mr. Carlisle, but there were still some free hours to my days, and I could see no harm in escorting a lovely woman about London for a few of them.”

Another pitiful twitch of that mustache.

“Did she press you for other information?”

Ian asked, his voice flat and hard.

“I don’t know that I would call it pressing,”

Mr. Graves said.

“To have a woman as beautiful as she express such interest in me…it flattered my vanity, and I suppose I—I suppose I bragged a little.”

“You gave her information that wasn’t your right to share,”

Ian accused.

“I did,”

Mr. Graves admitted, closing his eyes.

“I did. I know it is no excuse, but I saw no harm in it at the time. There is a certain respect to be had in a position as prestigious as mine. She was interested to learn that I had come up from Brighton. Said she’d meant to visit the city herself. Asked all sorts of questions.”

“Questions about Miss Cabot?”

Mr. Graves flinched at the sharply-delivered demand.

“No, sir—at least, not at first. Mostly she asked about the school.”

“And you did not mark this as strange?”

“No, Mr. Carlisle. I assumed she must have some female relative in need of educating. She only expressed an interest in Miss Cabot once I told her…”

“Once you told her that I intended to marry Felicity,”

Ian supplied.

A grim nod. Mr. Graves said.

“I volunteered it. I suppose I meant to prove my own importance by the foreknowledge of it, but she—she seemed surprised. Interested.”

“I’ll just bet she was,”

Ian ground out.

“Have you seen her, since?”

A tiny shift of Graves’ shoulders.

“Just once, Mr. Carlisle,”

he said.

“She is—or was—in the city. She came to the office perhaps a week ago and suggested we might renew our acquaintance. I was quite busy at the time, but I told her that I would have an evening available, owing to the fact that you were taking your wife to the theatre. She did not arrive to the place we were meant to meet, however.”

He swallowed audibly, wincing with sudden realization.

“I told her that, too. I’m so dreadfully sorry. I might have peppered our conversation with any amount of information like that—with not even the slightest inkling that I’d said so much more than I ought to have done.”

Yes, he had. He’d been taken for a fool, used as a convenient source of information. By chance, this mystery woman had happened upon a man she could use to her advantage. And she had exploited that fact to the fullest.

Ian approached the desk, plucked a discarded pen from the surface of it and thrust it out toward Mr. Graves. “Write,”

he said fiercely.

“Everything, anything you can think of. Write all of it down. And then you and I will have a conversation about how you are going to bloody well fix this.”