Page 1 of The Villain’s Fatal Plot (Gravesyde Village Mystery #1)
ONE
London, September 1815
“You’ve most likely fractured a bone or two, Miss Palmer. You don’t keep off that foot, you could be crippled up for life.” The apothecary wiped his hands after tying off the bandage. “Best to rest and keep it raised.”
The bruising and swelling had made it almost impossible to remove her once-overlarge boot. Putting it back on... Faith winced as she attempted to ease on her footwear, leaving the laces untied. “Then I shall have to sit by the fire and knit, shan’t I?”
Complaining got her nowhere, so she refrained from saying she was crippled for life already, in more ways than were visible. Mr. Thomas looked at her with too much pity as it was. She refused to be pathetic.
“If you have a cane you’ll sell me, I’ll stay off it all the way home,” she vowed. She hated spending one of her few coins, but stalwart as she had learned to be, even she knew she’d never make it home elsewise.
She would have to buy a larger shoe to accommodate the bandage, which seemed a dreadful waste, but a lovely excuse for a stronger boot.
Or maybe she could steal one of the boots her uncle used for his clubfoot, she thought meanly. Pain apparently brought out her bad side.
“Aye, a stick will help.” The old apothecary brightened momentarily, then shook his head. “Don’t know how you’ll manage your satchel. That looks heavy. Where’s your footman? Don’t know what your uncle is about, sending you out at all hours on these streets with those papers.”
The satchel didn’t contain just papers, which made her lazy footman’s defection all the more irritating. When she’d explained she needed to stop at the chemist, Luther had decided he’d worked enough for a day and taken himself off to his pub. He knew she wasn’t that far from home. People looked after her here, so she didn’t fear the dark streets, even this close to the wharf. But the satchel was heavy and her foot hurt .
The apothecary rummaged through a stand of walking sticks, settling on a smaller one. “See if this don’t fit.”
Not answering his question about her footman, she tested the stick, and smiled in gratitude. “This works well, thank you, sir. I shall look very elegant swinging a walking stick.”
She removed the necessary coins from her meager purse, knowing she’d replace them with ones from her uncle’s satchel later. She’d paid for her mother’s physicians that way for years. She’d felt guilty at first, but Uncle Warren never lowered himself to touching filthy lucre. If his bookkeepers noticed a shortage, he blamed it on his incompetent clerks or the bank. He had wealth enough not to miss a few shillings—or even sovereigns. And he owed her far more than spare change.
She had come to consider theft a form of spreading the wealth to those who needed it. Just call her Robin Hood.
Mr. Thomas looked dubious at her claim of elegance but he’d known her family long enough not to comment.
Faith was perfectly aware that she was anything but elegant. Stout, possibly. Dowdy, certainly, and as plain of face as her mother had been. But as the Mrs. Milton Palmer , her mother had been wealthy and money could buy elegance. Faith couldn’t. And what would she do with it anyway? Having no wardrobe to store them in, her mother’s silk gowns hung uselessly over a line strung across a storage room. Faith loved trying them on, but they were too ostentatious for these back alleys her mother had never set foot in.
In the early September evening, fog had already closed in. She pulled her cloak hood over her recently refurbished bonnet. Having lived in sight of the wharves for her entire twenty-five years, she navigated the treacherous shoals of dark alleys without fear, even though her father had died on these streets where he’d built his home. He had loved watching his ships come in.
Only tonight, she was much later than usual. Hobbling, with the stick slipping and sliding on the cobblestones, she knew the counting house had closed. Her father had taught her how to open the vault. She didn’t need anyone’s supervision, but her uncle loved seeing his money as much as his brother had his ships.
After the house closed, though, her peevish uncle worked himself into a drunken state that easily erupted in rage. She hoped he had gone home. Her foot ached like the very devil, had ever since the carriage horse stamped on it earlier. She’d still made it to the bank before it closed. That wouldn’t appease Uncle Warren.
She’d love to blame his nasty carriage driver for her lateness, but Uncle Warren would simply say she was clumsy. She supposed she was. Only, she wasn’t the one who’d deliberately driven the horse over her foot because she hadn’t moved fast enough.
Ah, the alley—a shorter distance and unpaved. Balancing the strap of the heavy satchel over one shoulder and leaning on the stick was wearisome—especially for clumsy her, she added with wry amusement. Elegance wasn’t for Faith Palmer .
A piteous mew in the shadows offered her excuse to rest for a minute. “Kitty?” More mewling followed.
She’d tried to keep cats for years, but someone always let them out, and life on the wharves seldom came to a good end. But a hungry kitten...
Eyes adjusting to the darker shadows, she sorted a ragged bundle of ginger from the debris behind the ash cans. Remembering a bit of cheese in her pocket, she set down the satchel and rummaged in her cloak.
She inched closer, awkwardly holding cheese and stick. The kitten watched warily, sniffing with suspicion. Marmalade, most likely, under all that filth.
“I bet you’d make a good mouser,” she murmured as the tiny bundle of fur lay flat to study her.
Perhaps she could train this one not to leave the kitchen? She’d love a little company to fill the lonely hours. Uncle Warren never entered the cellar. He wouldn’t know.
The moment the kitten snatched the cheese, Faith caught the handful of fur and cuddled it inside her cloak. “There’s more where that came from, Marmie. And there’s a fire where you can dry off.”
As if accepting the offer, the kitten snuggled into her warmth, tiny, frightened heart beating against hers—someone to love. It had been so long... A light lit her dreary evening.
Only now she had a dilemma. Stick, satchel, and cat. And she was later than late. She was a ninny for taking on any more responsibility, but the kitten made her unreasonably happy.
She slipped her new pet into the satchel and appropriated a few coins while she had it open. Now that her mother was gone, she took the extra coins for her trouble. It wasn’t as if her uncle paid her for running his errands. He assumed allowing her to live in her own home was sufficient recompense.
“He’s a mean cheat, Marmie,” she whispered, retrieving her stick to limp down the mews leading home. “Why hasn’t anyone taken a cudgel to his head? Run his black heart through with a sword...”
Before she could imagine any more bloodthirsty fates for her father’s brother, an earth-jarring explosion rattled windows and doors, and she stumbled. Shouts of alarm broke out in the distance.
Steadying herself on the stable wall, clinging to the shadows, Faith peered from the mews and watched in shock as the windows of the four-story mansion her father had built glowed from within. Had that been a trick of candles, it would have been a gorgeous sight.
Except the glass exploded, and flames roared from those lit windows. A moment later, fire licked at the roof, and the foggy night sky reflected orange.
Stunned, she froze against the brick, watching the inferno in horror. Shouts, people running... She crumpled into the shadows, fingers digging into the rough brick of the stable.
Her home, everything she’d once owned, all her memories of a happier life, everything she’d hoped someday to claim again... gone ? Horror engulfed her as she watched her future and past burn to fiery cinders. Her soul shriveled like the once lovely damask draperies, her mother’s silks, and her father’s books. Tears coated her cheeks. And then, a stray idea caught her...
Like a snail without its shell , Faith Palmer died with her home .
She blinked, not certain from what depth of hell that thought arose. Her insides churned. She swiped at the tears streaming down her face... Without her home or family, dull, clumsy Faith Palmer was quite effectively dead .
Oddly, that notion left her... free ?
“If heaven means dropping the chains that bind us to earth, is this what it feels like to be an angel, Marmie?” Watching her home blaze into a bonfire, she stroked the kitten’s head—the kitten that had saved her life. Had she not been late, had she not stopped to rescue a kitten...
She would have been in her cellar kitchen, fixing her tea as she had for nearly a decade. Flaming timbers would now be falling on her head, taking with them the last of all she was, the memories of her mother’s laugh, her father’s beloved books, the wardrobe of beautiful hats and silks...
Everyone would believe her dead . How very odd to think no one really knew her except as an inhabitant of that house. She didn’t really know herself. She’d had a few dreams, impossible to execute, but now... Absorbing the disaster and grasping her new freedom, she squeezed the knob of her walking stick and tried to find a different footing.
In the stable were the dreams she’d lived on these last ten years: the books and coins she’d squirreled away, bits and pieces she’d hidden, cautiously planning for that day she might have sufficient funds to either reclaim her home or escape it. She had letters offering hopes she couldn’t redeem...
Until now—well before she was prepared.
The kitten yowled a protest from the satchel—a satchel filled with bank notes and coins. Out of the ashes... hope flared.
Faith Palmer might be dead, but whatever tiny spark of life remained inside the woman standing there, struggling to stay upright, was not. “I can be anyone, kitty...”
Dread and excitement tightened her throat.