Artful Deceptions (9 page)

Melanie would tell her if Rhys returned to London. That was all she needed to know now. The painting was lost, gone forever. Rhys was a nobleman’s son, perhaps. She had misunderstood his intentions, but she could still consider herself his friend. She liked Mr. Llewellyn very well, and it would be good to occasionally converse with someone who had other things on his mind than the latest fashions. It had been nice these past weeks to get out of the house and be among other young people for a change, but she couldn’t hope for it to continue. Practicality was returning.

When she found the phaeton waiting outside her door, Arianne quickly turned the corner and hurried toward the shops. It had appeared remarkably like Davie holding the heads of Lord Locke’s prized horses. She couldn’t imagine any gentleman allowing someone’s younger brother to curb the temperamental thoroughbreds. He must have been in a hurry. It didn’t matter. Davie would have a treat and Lord Locke would be disappointed. If he told her father about the painting, she would never, ever forgive him.

When next she returned, the phaeton was gone, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Hurrying upstairs, she found the children playing as usual, and no sign of her father about. With any luck at all, he hadn’t been home when Lord Locke called. Her mother greeted her with a smile, and Arianne relaxed. Evidently her secret was as yet safe. She would have to get a message to Melanie. Perhaps her cousin could persuade the madman not to reveal her deception with the portrait.

* * * *

But when Melanie arrived the next day, she held out no such hopes. Throwing off her hat and shaking her curls out, she regarded Arianne with laughter. “I cannot believe that you single-handedly placed the imperturbable Lord Locke at point-non-plus. Never in my memory have I seen him up in the boughs, but all the word is that he actually yelled at you! Tell me how you did it, you sly puss, for I have never so much as been able to make him look at me twice.”

“He looks at you all the time,” Arianne responded irritably. “And being looked at and being yelled at are a world apart. “

“For an intelligent person, you are certainly simple-minded sometimes.” Melanie twirled around the front parlor, catching the dusty rays of sunlight through the narrow windows. “I don’t mean just
look;
I mean actually
see.
Galen sees me as Evan’s younger sister, even though I’m perfectly grown now. He teases me instead of talking to me. Sometimes I think he hasn’t a feather for a brain. But
you”—
Melanie swung around to face her cousin—”you he actually fights with! That means you must have had a conversation of some sort.”

“I wouldn’t call it a conversation. It was more of a rout. Defy him sometime and see if you can’t draw him out as well—as long as your interest in him is merely platonic, that is. If you’ve fixed your interest on him, then just nod and smile and he’ll be certain to offer for you sooner or later.”

Arianne tried to appear nonchalant, but the scene still rankled. Worse yet, she felt she had come out embarrassingly small in the encounter. Arguing with noblemen in a public park couldn’t precisely be called circumspect behavior.

Melanie gave her cousin a sharp look, but Arianne was too good at playing the prim-and-proper. She had taken a chair and picked up her mending while Melanie flitted about the room.

“I shouldn’t want a husband who must be placated all the time,” Melanie declared. “And I detest being treated like a child. Galen will never be serious. No, I find Rhys much more interesting. I can talk to him, and he takes me seriously. We have the most wonderful conversations. Or we used to have,” Melanie added gloomily, or what passed for gloom in her normally sunny voice.

Arianne raised an eyebrow at her cousin’s sudden fit of dismals. She had seen no evidence that Rhys singled out Melanie for intellectual converse or any other. The writer had been singularly taciturn in Melanie’s presence, in fact, whereas Galen had made every effort to keep Melanie entertained. Even if Rhys ran tame in the Griffin household, Arianne couldn’t see Melanie’s brothers approving an attachment between the two.

Prosaically she answered, “Mr. Llewellyn is not likely to return your interest in any way but a platonic manner. He is over-conscious of his position. He cannot provide you with all the frivolous fashions and entertainments to which you are accustomed, and he is much too practical to try. Although Lord Locke appears quite idle, I suspect there is more to him than he shows the world. You would do better to engage his interest than to seek what you cannot have.”

Melanie threw herself down on the parlor sofa with such force that she raised dust from the cushions. “As if I care whether I wear satins and bows! And there is no reason that Rhys should be conscious of his position. He comes of as noble a family as any other. I am quite certain he has been defrauded of his rightful position. I wish I were a gentleman so I could speak to his uncle. There is a mystery there. I wonder if it would have anything to do with your painting?”

“You are not a gentleman and there is very little chance of your discovering anything,” Arianne pointed out. “I am quite willing to forget all about that miserable painting. I wish I’d never seen it.”

“I think I know where Rhys has gone and why,” Melanie announced casually, waiting for her cousin’s reaction. She was quite satisfied with the result.

“Where? How could you?” Arianne set aside all pretense of mending, to stare at her wayward cousin with astonishment. She knew better than to expect Melanie to be the flighty package of sunshine she appeared, but this was going further than anyone could expect.

“Daphne and I talk about everything,” Melanie replied triumphantly. Her brother’s wife was more sister and friend than chaperone. “She said she had overheard Evan and Rhys talking before, and she thinks Rhys has been disowned or worse by his family. She thinks it has something to do with his mother, but she is reluctant to say the worst. I think the lady in the painting was Rhys’s mother.”

After having cleaned it thoroughly, Arianne knew every inch of that painting, and she studied the idea carefully. At the time she had cleaned it, she hadn’t known Rhys, and after meeting Rhys she had had few moments to observe the painting, but putting the two together in her head now, she saw some resemblance. “It is possible,” she said slowly, comparing faces mentally. “They both have dark coloring, as does the child in the painting. There is a certain sharpness of features, but the lady was so very feminine and Rhys is so ...”

“Very masculine,” Melanie finished irreverently. “Those deep, dark eyes of his! I feel I could drown in them. It is hard to see the child in the man, but I’m certain I am right. The painting has something to do with Rhys’s past, and he has gone to find the truth of it. He must never have seen a picture of his mother before. You said yourself that the woman died soon after the portrait was done.”

“You go too fast! We have no certainty that the woman is his mother. There may be no relation at all. Even if there is, where would he go to find the truth?”

“To his aunt!” Melanie plumped back against the sofa cushions and waited for Arianne to appreciate her final coup.

Arianne had the vaguest feeling that she didn’t want to hear the rest of this. In their younger years, Melanie had managed to get them in and out of all sorts of scrapes with statements similar to this one. She knew they presaged some wild action which she would regret later, but she could not help asking the inevitable. “What aunt?”

“The one is Scotland, of course. Rhys told me of a visit to her when he was young. He did not specify if she was his mother’s or father’s sister, he merely mentioned the wild mountain streams and the beauty of the hills, but that has to be where he has gone. If she is his only relative besides his uncle, then he has gone to her to hear the details of his past. His uncle came into the title that was rightfully his, so there is little hope of getting truth from him.”

“You are spinning Canterbury tales, cousin. There is not one shred of evidence of all this. We will simply have to wait for Rhys’s return.” There was still the vague hope that Rhys had the painting and would return it to her when he came back. Arianne was certain he wasn’t a thief.

As if to destroy that notion, Melanie answered vaguely, “You know, Rhys once lived in the woods and robbed coaches when he was trying to help Evan. If he could do that for our family, surely I can do something much less rash to help him.”

Arianne knew she didn’t want to hear the rest of this. And just as certainly she knew Melanie was about to tell her.

Chapter Seven

“Locke, isn’t it?” The slight, elderly gentleman nodded and lit his cigar, drawing deeply on it and exhaling into the cool evening air before speaking again. “A club like this must be deadly dull for a young man like you
.
”

“Family,” Galen answered obliquely. “This place is not so bad once one grows used to the lack of the usual forms of amusement. I have a fancy for the ladies, myself, but a good game or two would substitute. Except the tables appear closed to me.”

The two men gazed back into the spacious room they had just departed. Standing just outside the French doors on a small balcony, they could see the comfortable leather chairs occupied by silent gentlemen perusing their favorite newssheets and the discreet tables in the far corner where others gathered over their brandy and cigars and dealt cards. The club’s quiet elegance appealed to an older generation wishing to escape wives and families and find a few moments with the companions of their youth. It did not have the reckless air of White’s or some of the other clubs where the younger generation made wild wagers and drank and gambled and gossiped to excess.

“No doubt the stakes would appear meager to you, but I’ll see you in a game, if you wish,” Owen Llewellyn graciously said to his companion.

Feeling not only out-of-place but also deceitful, Galen shook his head. “I have put in the requested appearance. I need do no more. Have you seen anything of Rhys lately?
He seems to have disappeared from his usual haunts.” That was invasion enough, and he did it only out of desperation.

If the blamed woman had only taken his offer for the painting, he wouldn’t be so obligated to locate the deuced thing. Since Rhys was his one and only suspect, it behooved him to find out more of his whereabouts. Did he mistake, or did the old gentleman stiffen slightly at the question?

“Rhys and I have not communicated in years. I cannot blame him for his resentment, I suppose, but it is pure foolishness to deny my offers of help. I hope he has come to no harm.”

Having already garnered some of Rhys’s story from other sources, Galen nodded knowingly. “He was in the best of health the last I saw of him, but he seemed shocked by a portrait hanging at Christie’s. The picture disappeared shortly after, and so did Rhys. It seemed somewhat coincidental. Did you see the painting, by any chance? Lovely woman, but the artwork was a touch dated. Not one of Lawrence’s better works, I fear.” Galen prayed that his reputation as a collector of art would override his inquisitiveness.

“No, no, I didn’t see it.” Llewellyn shook his head vaguely, not meeting Galen’s eyes. “Rhys saw it, you say? Well, well, I wonder what that could be about.”

Someone caught his attention then, and he bade Galen a polite farewell and wandered off to join one of the groups at the tables.

Left frustrated by this lack of solid information and an irking feeling that something was not quite right, Galen departed soon after. Rhys and the blamed painting had become a thorn in his side, one he wished to rip out as swiftly as possible. He had not behaved at all well throughout the whole affair, but he could find no way of compensating for his faults. Miss Richards obviously took him for the sort of idle rake who would carelessly lose her possessions, then offer her
carte blanche
in recompense. He must seem a frivolous fellow for her to take umbrage in that way.

But short of going to her father with the whole story, Galen could find no way of righting the situation. He could just imagine what Ross Richards would have to say about his losing a valuable painting. The plaster would blister from the ceiling before he was through.

Locke would willingly suffer the consequences if only he thought it would not place Miss Richards in a compromising position. Since there was no way he could imagine her father would forgive her for her presumption, Galen could not bring himself to reveal the story. Without finding the painting, he could see no way of ever returning to the good graces of Arianne Richards.

Not that it should matter. She was a bluestocking of the worst sort, with a ramshackle family to tend to and no time for the likes of him. But it had pleased him when he had been able to make her smile, and he had rather enjoyed her curt assessments of situations and people. Her forthrightness was a disadvantage in the society to which he was accustomed, but it made a pleasant change.

He even wondered if Lucinda would ever enjoy another carriage ride or if Davie had found his way back to the trees in the park yet. It seemed a shame that those youngsters were kept cooped up in a town house when they should be out enjoying the great expanse of the countryside where they belonged. Ross Richards was a poor excuse for a father, to leave them neglected when the sale of a painting would see them comfortable.

Much to his regret, however, Galen understood the man’s problem. The art market wasn’t such that a family could live off the sale of those paintings for very long. As long as Richards could provide for his family, the paintings were like money in the bank, a financial nest egg against the day when he could no longer bring in income. To sell them now would be to jeopardize the future.

Galen was certain that Arianne didn’t see things that way, and if her mother were truly ill, the difficulty increased. And he had ruined her one chance to relieve the situation. Cursing, he swung his walking stick and set out to track down the carriage he had told to come back a half-hour from now.

* * * *