Page 94 of In Want of a Suspect
“But she might come after me now!” Lizzie protested. “And Marianne and Elinor! They’re at the Mullins Brothers storehouse with Jack Mullins and Tomlinson—”
Graves waved a hand. “Not to worry, Miss Bennet. My men will have already secured the storehouse, and the Misses Dashwood and their gentlemen friends will not be implicated.”
“You followed us there this evening? And then followed Lizzie and me to this church?” Darcy asked.
“To be frank, there are very few movements of the past week that we haven’t been following,” Graves told them. “I was rather surprised to find that Mullins had hired you, of course, so I kept an eye out. If Lady Catherine had made a move, we would have stepped in. But she’s kept herself carefully hidden.”
“How dare you, sir?” Darcy exclaimed. “Leticia Cavendishwas killed! Lizzie was beaten! Someone threatened her family! And all the while you’ve been skulking in the shadows, standing by as innocent people were hurt—”
“I know,” Graves said, his smile slipping for the first time since he’d entered the church. “You’re absolutely right, Mr. Darcy.”
Darcy was breathing heavily, and Lizzie knew he was trying to keep his temper in check. She needed a distraction. “Tell us why you didn’t intervene sooner. You knew about the smuggling ring, and you knew Hughes was involved. You knew Lady Catherine was at the head. Why let us waltz in?”
“Smuggling is a serious offense, Miss Bennet, but my men could spend all the hours in the day quashing smuggling rings and still the British people will find ways to enjoy their goods from the Continent. It is, to a certain extent, a futile fight. One we must fight nonetheless, but we must be strategic about these things.”
“But this one was different, because Mr. Hughes was selling his graphite to the French?” Lizzie asked.
“Precisely. And such operations needed to be stopped completely. The war depends upon it. If we had simply raided the Mullins Brothers storehouse, Mr. Hughes could have found a new route. We needed to stop Mr. Hughes, but more than that, we need to find Lady Catherine.”
“And now? Can you stop it? Can you find her?”
“Well... Mr. Hughes will be tried for treason, I imagine. And murder. And thanks to you, Miss Bennet, we have Mr.Tomlinson. That is good work—we figured Lady Catherine had probably recruited another London solicitor to do her bidding in the city but we hadn’t yet implicated him. As for her whereabouts...”
He held up both hands and tilted his head to the side.
“You have no idea where she is,” Lizzie said.
“I’m sorry, Miss Bennet.”
Lady Catherine was still at large. Now that Lizzie knew this, she felt a bit silly for assuming that the authorities would have simply taken care of her all those months ago. Lady Catherine had been free this entire time! But just as quickly as the shock came, so did the feeling of foolishness. Lizzie hadn’t heard even the faintest whisper of a lady being arrested for crimes against the Crown. If she’d been paying any attention whatsoever, she’d might have suspected that the authorities hadn’t caught her.
Still at large, and still at her criminal schemes! From piracy to smuggling in less than a year—she clearly didn’t waste any time. And the whole time that Lizzie and Darcy had been investigating, Graves had been watching with the answers. While they were snooping around the storehouse and making calls to Cavendish House...
“Leticia,” she said suddenly. “She had information. She was going to meet us. Why... Oh.”
Graves watched her, and there was a spark in his eye that told her she was right.
“What?” Darcy asked.
“Leticia was a spy,” Lizzie said.
It was the only thing that made sense—Lizzie couldn’t quite believe that Leticia would be content to allow her cousin to marry a man she must have suspected of being foul. And the cousins had seemed close enough that Leticia would have warned Josette of Mr. Hughes’s duplicitous nature... unless she had a very good reason not to.
“Yes,” Graves said, and a shadow seemed to pass over his face. “She was a brilliant young lady. Her death never should have happened. I should have...”
He looked away, and Lizzie realized he was trying to collect himself.
“Hughes killed her,” Lizzie said. “He realized that if Jack was accusing her, it wouldn’t be long before someone connected them.”
“She knew that was a risk, of course,” Graves said. “We approached her months ago, before Mrs. Cavendish’s death. My men had been surveilling Mr. Hughes for some time, suspicious of his claims that his graphite production was failing. We knew that he was hunting for a wealthy wife—and we knew that he was seeing Leticia quietly. We suspected he was hoping that her French connections would prove advantageous, and we figured we’d try to convince her to see things our way. Leticia had no wish to get caught up in international affairs.”
“You blackmailed her,” Lizzie said.
“She was quite happy to help us.”
“Because she wanted to stay in London, with her cousin.”
“She was quite happy to help us, Miss Bennet, because shehas no love for the war that took away her home and her family. It was her choice. But to your point... no, we could not pass up recruiting her—it’s not often that one comes across a French-born British citizen who has access to the upper class.”