Suzanne Robinson (15 page)

The last notes of the étude died away, but Cheyne remained at the piano staring at the black-and-white
keys. After he’d discovered the truth, the world had made sense. With time he’d stopped trying to earn the duke’s love, or even his respect. And from this experience a gradual enlightenment unfolded—a man should earn his place in the world, depending on merit and not arbitrary inheritance. His real father’s talent should have—would have—given him a place of honor among men. Ignorant bullies like the duke deserved none.

This novel viewpoint pitted him against his class. It was why he couldn’t endure Society. The Americans had the right idea. Luxury, privilege, possessions should be earned. This attitude made the behavior of Miss Bright and her ilk incomprehensible. Why turn against the values that made one’s wealth possible? Cheyne shook his head. He would have thought Miss Bright would have more sense, but perhaps she was as shallow as any aspirant to social position.

No, she couldn’t be as vapid as it would appear, for she had been quite willing to help him catch the blackmailer. Cheyne shook his head. He didn’t understand her, but understanding wasn’t required. In any case, there was no comprehending a wealthy young lady, who was barely civilized, used rough language, drove motorcars and played hideous tricks on unsuspecting, innocent gentlemen. There was no comprehending a young woman who could wear a mannish driving costume and yet look like a princess.

Cheyne was smiling to himself when Mutton appeared beside him. “Dora Snape has come, gov’nor.”

“Who?”

“Me niece, Dora Snape, what you asked me to send to be lady’s maid to Miss Bright.”

“Oh, yes. Send her in.”

Cheyne got up to meet his visitor. A neat woman in a black suit and hat came in and curtsied. With her severe costume and tight bun, Dora Snape looked like a packaged patent medicine.

“I come as soon as I could get away, sir.” Dora’s speech was a bit more grammatical than her uncle’s, but it would have to be if she was to be a lady’s maid.

“Thank you, Miss Snape, and how are things going at Spencer House?”

“Very well, sir. Miss Bright is a pleasure to work for.”

“Is she? That’s a surprise.” He stopped when Dora produced an envelope from her bag and held it out. “What’s this?”

“It’s from Miss Bright. The correspondence you said you was developing on account of the blackmailer.”

Cheyne took the ivory envelope and tossed it on the piano bench. It bore no address, since this time Miss Bright had employed her maid to ferry the communications to and from her would-be lover. His instructions had been for her to stuff the envelope with blank sheets. There was no need for both of them to compose letters.

“Thank you, Miss Snape.” Pulling another envelope from his inner coat pocket, Cheyne handed it to the maid. “Take this to your mistress, and send word to me the moment the blackmailer contacts you.”

“Yes, sir.” Dora hesitated.

“Was there something else?”

“Miss Bright said to tell you she thought she should write letters, too, to be authentic-like.”

“Indeed?” Cheyne glanced apprehensively at the envelope on the piano bench. “Please tell her not to send any more. There’s no need.”

“I’ll tell her, but she’s made up her mind, and I don’t think she’ll pay no heed to me.”

“Hmmm. Very well. Wait a moment.”

He went to a small writing table and penned a note to Miss Bright. If she was taking initiatives on her own, she would endanger his plan and herself. She was headstrong, so he’d have to speak to her in person, which meant a clandestine meeting immediately. Might as well use the opportunity to make it appear that Miss Bright was meeting Chevalier.

He finished the note and sent Dora on her way. Then he opened Miss Bright’s letter.

Cheyne stared at the bold strokes of the fountain pen. In her writing Miss Bright was less prone to
those colorful frontier expressions and far more grammatical. But the essential Mattie came through, for the directness of the words jolted him. For he’d almost forgotten they were for a fictitious lover. Sparse, powerful, the language drew him in.

“Stop it, you fool. It’s only a game.”

He turned to the second page.

Cheyne sat down on the piano bench slowly, his gaze fixed on the quotation. “For such as I am all true lovers are.”

A breeze set sail to the pale green curtains, and Cheyne lifted his gaze past the windows to the garden. June had come, and with it the fullness of summer. Sunlit sprays of bluebells danced with delicate columbine. Miss Bright would like his garden, he was sure of it. She liked flowers, for she wore them often, nestling in her hair, at her waist or at her neck. And she always smelled as if she’d just stepped inside from a cool, breezy rose garden.

The wind riffled the pages of the letter in his hands and broke the spell of the garden. Cheyne blinked rapidly and swore. He started to crumple the sheets, but his hands froze. With deliberation
he folded them, placed them in the envelope and slipped them in his coat pocket. He might need the letter. Yes, that’s right. He might need to refer to it when he wrote another letter from Michel, which he’d do this evening. In the meantime, he would meet Miss Bright this afternoon and order her to follow his instructions in all things. She couldn’t take action on her own. It was too dangerous, and the outcome unpredictable.

Leaving the Music Room, Cheyne went to his apartments and dressed to go out. All the while he felt vaguely disgruntled and irritated with Miss Bright. The fact that she’d earned the respect of Dora Snape without trying seemed a deliberate challenge to him. And the letter started to annoy him. He kept picturing her in some feminine bower writing it. How had she known what to write? She must have conducted a similar correspondence, perhaps in America.

By the time he hailed a hansom and jumped into it, Cheyne was in a carefully controlled temper. Miss Bright would have to resist any impulses to exercise her skills in the composition of love letters. From what he’d read, she needed little practice, and he could do without the distraction. At the thought of how easily he’d been swayed by her words his irritation grew. When he arrived in Parliament Square he dismissed the cab and stalked across the green to Westminster Abbey. Hardly glancing at the spires that pierced the sky, he entered through the great west doors and paused in the nave.

Before him soared the graceful Gothic fan vaulting that topped three tiers of arches—clerestory triforium and main nave. Ethereal, majestic, ancient, the beauty of Westminster always caught him off guard. Around him visitors moved through the shadows and paused before flagstones engraved with the names of notables buried under the floor. Here and there walked clergymen who tended the abbey and answered visitors’ questions. Cheyne had chosen this meeting place because so many people came here; two more wouldn’t be noticed, and no one in Society would bother to visit.

He wandered down the nave, glancing up as if examining the stonework, then down to the ribbed columns that upheld the roof. He turned left into the north aisle, brushing up against a stone image of some medieval church dignitary. It was begun on the site of a church established by Edward the Confessor in the eleventh century, and the English had been building Westminster and refining it ever since. It was stuffed with monuments. Its aisles, side chambers, transepts, and chapels overflowed with relics accumulated over eight centuries.

The caretakers had to stack effigies, screens, and stonework in every corner to make room, so that one was likely to encounter the head of a medieval knight resting atop a reclining Baroque statue, on top of which might lay a medieval screen. Walking past the choir, Cheyne moved in shadow across the north transept.

The longer he remained here, the more weighed
down with history he felt. This was the place where every sovereign except Edward V had been crowned. Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, lay here with his wife, Elizabeth of York, as well as many Plantagenet kings and countless noble families like the Percys. But what caught at Cheyne’s heart was the little tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer. In his opinion Chaucer and George Frideric Handel deserved their places in the abbey far more than did some of the nobles whose ornate monuments crowded the old cathedral.

He’d reached the stairs behind the chapel of Edward the Confessor and entered the Henry VII chapel, turned right again and slipped into the north aisle. Here rested the joint tomb of bloody Mary and her sister, the great Elizabeth. There were no visitors in this area at the moment, and the chapel was quiet. Cheyne walked to the corner of the tomb and glanced around the chapel for Miss Bright. She wasn’t here.

His steps echoing in the empty space, he walked to the other side of the tomb and surveyed its veined white marble surmounted by black columns. He studied the hawk-nosed effigy of Elizabeth I in the silence of this stone cavern. The sculptor had reproduced the queen’s masklike features and ornate costume so faithfully, Cheyne expected her to open her eyes and rise from the catafalque.

The woman beneath this effigy had been dead since 1603. Almost everyone in the cathedral had been dead for centuries. His gaze drifted down the
queen’s figure to the foot of the tomb, and something rose from the grave. Cheyne gasped, then cursed as Miss Bright placed her hands on the effigy and got to her feet.

“Dang. There’s a lot of dead people in here.”

“Damn it, Miss Bright, what were you doing down there?”

“Reading the inscription.”

“It’s in Latin.”

“I know, but I like to read it anyway.”

Looking over his shoulder to make sure they were alone, Cheyne offered his arm. Miss Bright stared at it, then took it, barely touching his coat sleeve.

He rolled his eyes. “Miss Bright, we’ve got to appear like any other couple visiting a historic monument. I have no evil intentions.”

She looked up at him, her dark eyes snapping with ire. “I know that. I’m not stupid.”

“Merely ignorant,” Cheyne snapped.

He regretted his impulsive words at once, for Miss Bright freed her hand, whirled around and sneered at him. “Listen to the college man. I declare, Mr. Tennant, you musta had a powerful lot of book larnin’ in that big school o’ yorn. Bet you cud read that there Latin like greased lightnin’.”

“Shhh! Will you please stop playing the country bumpkin? It doesn’t suit you.”

“I thought you said I was a savage colonial.”

“I find that there are degrees of savagery.”

“You throwing me a bone of approval, Mr. Tennant? How generous.”

Cheyne raised his gaze and prayed for patience. “I regret my poor choice of words, Miss Bright. You’re obviously educated, more so than many English girls.”

“Dang right.”

Cheyne bowed and offered his arm again. She took it as several visitors came in. The whispering of the newcomers faded as he guided her across the chapel to the south aisle. They reached the small effigy of Henry VII’s mother and were alone again. Miss Bright dropped his arm, went to the opposite side and faced him over the stone image. Raising a brow, she folded her arms and said nothing.

Another flash of irritation made Cheyne grit his teeth. It was disconcerting to feel so infuriated with a young woman whose appearance was so arresting. She wore her pearl-gray suit as if it were a simple maid’s uniform, yet the style suited her. Severe pleats crossed her shoulders and fell down the front of the gown. The open jacket revealed a pale pink blouse with pearl buttons, and it was trimmed with delicate embroidery. A jaunty hat with pearl-gray ostrich feathers perched atop her upswept hair. The clothes, the colors and the matching parasol combined to create the impression of a princess out for a stroll. The stark contrast between her obsidian hair and the pearl gray captured the attention. Cheyne was distracted trying to decide if the color of her blouse was the same as her lips.

“Well?” Miss Bright tapped her foot on the flagstones. “What did you want to see me about?”

“Oh, er, yes. It’s about your letter. There’s no
need to send me any. The blackmailer will ask the maid for the ones you’ll keep in your room, not the ones you supposedly sent to me.”

“You don’t know that.”

It was Cheyne’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “My dear Miss Bright, I’m the private inquiry agent, not you. I assure you that the criminal will bribe your maid and not bother with me.”

“You don’t know how closely we’re going to be watched. You don’t know when he’s going to waylay Dora or contact her or what. He might stop her on her way to deliver a letter. I would. Less risk of being spotted. If he looks at the letter from me and finds blank sheets, we’re ruined.”

“None of the servants in the previous cases were waylaid.”

“Doesn’t mean they won’t be.”

His manner stiff, Cheyne said, “Miss Bright, I don’t want you to write any more disguised and colorable letters.”

“Disguised and colorable?”

“That was how bloody Mary described Elizabeth’s letters to her protesting her devotion.”

Dropping her parasol on the effigy, Miss Bright said, “Now, you see here, Mr. Tennant, I’m going to write the blamed letters because that’s what a girl in love would do. And you’ve got to answer them.”

Cheyne threw up his hands and walked away from her. “This is a trap, Miss Bright, not a romance.”

When there was no reply, he turned. She was glaring at him, her cheeks crimson. Her voice was
low, but in the lofty space of the aisle it shot into him like electricity.