Unlaced Corset (2 page)

3

Mary

Three days after her father's death, Mary was lounging in her father's library, reading whatever trash books that Davis could find for her at the chemist's. They were lurid and dramatic and had little of substance to distract from it. She looked for all the world like she was unaware of the death.

That was how she had hoped for it to look.

She laid there at awkward angles that were only possible thanks to having left off her corset. It had seemed like an intriguing notion at the time. She wanted to look disinterested and lazy, as well, so she'd gone along with it, and when Rebecca suggested that she put her corset on, Mary had told her to leave it off. The look on Rebecca's face alone had made the entire idea worth it.

Still, hours later, her dress fit poorly and she was endlessly adjusting herself to try to get a pinched bit of fabric out of her side. Suddenly she sat up with a start. What time was it?

She looked over to the clock, softly ticking at the front of the room. Past noon.

"Davis," she called out, hoping he was nearby. He was, as he always was.

"Ma'am?" He stepped through the door and waited for her to instruct him.

"Do you think it might be time for lunch?"

"Certainly, ma'am. I'll have the cooks prepare something immediately."

"Thank you," she answered, but she had already gone back to her novel. There was a stack of them, and she bet that she could be halfway through the second by the time she went to bed in the evening if she were quick.

There was one thing she was certain of. Her father's death was no accident, and he hadn't been suffering pneumonia. He was the picture of health, and he had always been careful to keep himself bundled up heavily. Lord Geis was a man who preferred warmth, did not engage in parties, and since her mother had died, he had largely kept to himself.

The notion that he might have become ill over the winter and died, without seeing a single doctor…

It was unthinkable. And that meant that whoever had concluded his death to have been caused by pneumonia was either incompetent or lying. It would have been comforting to believe it may have been incompetence. Mary didn't have that luxury. She needed to act on the assumption that there had been foul play involved.

Whatever someone might kill her father over would be an equally convincing reason to see her off along with him. The charade of a disinterested, lazy girl provided a wonderful mask.

Davis came back, announcing himself with a knock before pushing the door in and setting the platter on the desk Mary had set aside for herself. She thanked him and poured a glass of water from the pitcher he had brought in earlier that morning.

The food was lovely. A cut of beef steak and parsnips, and truffles set aside for a dessert. Mary smiled and for a moment she nearly felt herself again. There was reason for concern; she was certain of that. But more than that, she knew that things would go on. She would go on, even if it felt painful.

She'd devised the entire charade of her own incompetence to hide from the outside world while she dealt with her grief, and then with the threat that her family was facing, and that was enough for now.

She cut a bit of the steak and speared it with her fork. The cut was delicious-looking: thick, juicy, charred just so. Yet, when she put it in her mouth it tasted like ash. She closed her eyes and swallowed. The cook was not at fault, she knew. Rather, her mood was affecting her more than she had thought. Some day, things would be perfectly alright again. Until then, she ate to deal with the hunger, and drank to quench her thirst, and that was enough because it had to be enough.

When a knock came at the door, she waited for a moment. Only Davis knew where she was, and he would come in if he needed to speak to her for some reason. As expected, the door opened just enough to permit him to step through.

"Ah, ma'am, there is a Mr. James Poole here. He's asking after the head of the house."

"What on earth for? Send him away. I'm not receiving guests; it's not proper, Davis."

"Very good, ma'am. I would have done so immediately, of course, but he says that he is not here to visit, but was hired by your father before his passing."

Mary sat back against her chair and thought for a moment. Whoever had murdered her father would have an agent in the house. She was certain of that. She had guessed as much before, but she had assumed that they were already in the household staff. Very possibly, they had even been involved in the assassination themselves.

The notion that the spy might be an outside agent hadn't even occurred to her. If, indeed, this Mr. Poole might be a spy working for her father's assassins, then it would be a worrying sign to his handlers if he were sent away without a thought.

Further, she thought, if he were not a spy, and truly was hired by her father…he could prove an interesting entrant into the situation, as well.

Mary thought through the line of logic again, making sure that she hadn't missed anything important. Then she opened her eyes again and cut a bit of steak.

"Send him in, Davis. I'll need to make sure that everything is in order before I make a decision."

Davis paused before answering, but Mary didn't notice. "Yes, ma'am."

With that, he left the room silently. Mary listened to his steps grow quieter as he walked away. She swallowed another bite, and another. It was a mechanical action, and one she needed to keep up appearances with.

There was a knock at the door again.

"Come in."

The door opened and a man stepped through. Mary looked up and watched him. He was a big, strong man. She wondered what sort of job he might be here to do. With such broad shoulders, he looked like he was better suited to soldiering than he was to any genteel work.

With the war on, she wondered at it until she saw the pin on his lapel. She'd seen it before. A silver circle set around the King's cipher. Around the edge was the text: "For King and Country. Services Rendered."

He stepped through the door and looked up, seeming to take her measure in the same way that she had been taking his. And then, all of a sudden, he went stiff and turned immediately on his heel, facing the wall.

"I'm sorry, Miss Geis. I didn't realize—"

"How can I help you, Mr. Poole?"

"I was hired by a representative of your father, to act as a steward?"

"And so soon before his death?" Mary set her utensils down. "That seems suspicious, don't you think?"

"I couldn't say, Ma'am. I only know that I was contacted a month prior, with the offer of work, by a solicitor named Roy Stump. He claimed to work for the Geis estate, who wished to retain the services of a steward for his estate."

"My father is dead, sir, and whatever he's offered to pay you is not available."

"Surely I can work until the title is resolved, and then I can petition the new Lord…or Lady Geis for wage."

He was too young for a proper steward, Mary thought. He might have only just gotten out of university. What on earth would her father be thinking to hire such a person, even if he hired him through a representative?

"I presume you have some proof of your claims?"

Mr. Poole turned back to face her, keeping his eyes decidedly downcast. He reached into his coat pocket and produced a folded piece of paper, which he held at arm's length. Davis, who had been standing off to the side, took the paper and walked it over to her.

She opened it and started to skim over the text. Indeed, she was vaguely aware of Mr. Stump. Her father had mentioned him before. Here was her father's signature, and the signature of a James Poole. It seemed as if everything was in order, and he was offering to work without pay until someone with authority could address things.

He sounded positively desperate to work. She looked it over. A spy might be able to get such a piece of paper. The desperation was too obvious to ignore, as well. Whatever his intention was, she was certain that he would be playing into her enemies' hands somehow.

But the saying goes, keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. She had no friends that she could be certain of. So she set the letter down.

"You know we won't be able to pay you, Mr. Poole."

"Yes, ma'am. Until someone else comes, I will have to wait. I understand, but please don't send me away."

"Very well." Mary took another bite, as if she had already moved on. The reality was that her mind was racing with possibilities. "Davis, see him to one of the guest bedrooms, will you? Our new steward has come all the way from London, and I'm sure he's very tired."

4

James

James sat back in the large chair that served for the desk in his new room. Rather, the room he was staying in. His bags were in a small stack in the corner. He'd need to move them over to the dressers before he could start working.

He had known that there was a young woman here. The Baron's daughter. Somehow, he'd assumed that Miss Geis would be younger, or older, or somehow…less. He'd come in expecting to see an employer, and instead he'd seen a woman.

And what a woman, indeed. She hadn't been wearing anything under that dress—that much had been obvious. What it said about her character spoke volumes, but it said less about her than it did about the shape of her curves.

It implied her naked body readily, and the image it conjured up was not one that he would soon forget. What's more, he had worried that it might show on his face that he had noticed. However the stony-faced butler had managed to ignore it was beyond the young lawyer.

No, he thought. He would need to sequester himself in the study if he were to get any work done at all. If he weren't careful, he could spend all day looking at a woman like that. Fire-red hair and a body that looked like it was built for making children…he shook his head.

She was also a Lord's daughter, and though she may not be the heir to his title, she was so far off-limits that he should leave her be even in his dreams.

He picked up the luggage easily and set it on the bed, unzipping and pulling the clothes out in large folded stacks, hanging what he could and stowing the rest in drawers.

There was a lot of work to be done here. At the bottom of the bag, so as to seem inconspicuous, he had hidden another ledger, and folded into it he had a receipt of the Geis family accounts from the Bank of London. When he'd seen it, he had nearly blanched.

Surely they had some form of income that he wasn't aware of. It was hardly unusual for a family of this stature. If they did, though, then he hoped that it would pay out for them soon. Their accounts were utterly in shambles.

James needed the money from this job, and he needed it soon. In a week or so, he was sure that someone would come to call on the home and things with the Geis title would be settled. Then he could make his claim, and when that happened he would need to have shown that, if nothing else, he had done what was expected of him and earned the back-pay he hoped for.

He certainly had his work cut out for him, though. Before he could begin to set things in order, he would need to figure out where the money was going, and then staunch the outward flow as much as possible. He picked up the ledger and moved over toward the study.

He'd had Davis show him where it was on the way to his room, but he hadn't gone in. He tried the door and found it unlocked, so he pushed it open and stepped inside.

For a moment he thought there might have been a mistake. Surely this wasn't right. The room was an absolute mess. Had the maids simply been ignoring the room? Or were they left with instructions to stay out? He made a mental note to talk to Davis about it and see what was what.

Before that, though, work.

He took the room in and tried to mentally tabulate what needed doing. There must have been a desk in the room; he knew that because there was a chair pushed up to it, but he could hardly see it for the heaps of paper stacked.

As he came up to them, looking at one after another, there appeared to be no rhyme or reason to the order. Rather, they appeared to have been placed wherever was convenient at the time and left.

The only clear space on the desk, now that he looked closely, was a notebook that had been stuffed halfway-underneath one of the mounds of paper. He could tell that it was the most recent because it was the only thing that had not been torn away, and because a pen sat on top of it.

James took off his jacket and hung it on a hook by the door. There was going to be quite a bit of work ahead of him, now. A few hours of tidying and he could finally set about looking at the figures. Surely there would be an obvious answer to the problems that faced the Geis household, then, and he would be able to begin planning for the future.

He rolled up his sleeves and began separating things into more careful stacks as best he could.

Hours later, he sat back and looked at his work. James felt tired; there was a dullness in his eyes that he couldn't quite get out of them. Whatever he had planned to do after this, he wondered if he had the energy. There were no less than six ledgers, each as thick as he could possibly imagine. None were more than a quarter full, spread seemingly at random throughout the tomes. He could consolidate them, but that alone would take the best part of a day.

More worrying, though, was the other stack. There were, torn from seemingly random scraps of paper—newspapers, paper napkins, journal pages—hundreds upon hundreds of tiny jotted notes that seemed to be as perfectly obtuse as possible. One read "O 80" while the next read "P 5" and the next after that read "D 2; 3."

For a moment, he regretted the man's death once again. Even having never known him, there must have been some guiding meaning behind such obscure notes, but whatever they meant to the man who had written them had died with him.

Now they were meaningless codes on several hundred scraps of paper. That they had been gathered here, James guessed, suggested that they had something to do with money, but as to their meaning he could only wildly speculate.

Still, he guessed that with a little bit of effort he would be able to fit all the pieces together. Rather like a puzzle.

As he sat back and relaxed, he heard someone moving outside the study door. He had heard servants moving around several times as he worked, but he had ignored it. There was bound to be bustle about the house, in such a large estate.

This was unusual, though. He heard steps approaching, and then they slowed, and then stopped. He guessed they must have been right outside the door; they had come closer, but never gone further away that he could hear.

What was going on, then? Perhaps he was simply paranoid. After all, there was no reason at all for anyone to be snooping on him. He knew next to nothing about household affairs, had few possessions of any value, and if the sneak had been interested in the accounts, they could have come right in the open door.

Still, James strained to listen for footsteps. He heard none. Whoever it was, they had either become extremely quiet, or they hadn't moved since he had heard them come up.

It must have been paranoia, he reasoned, but it did little to calm him. This was not his house, and these were not his accounts. Whoever was snooping would be doing it for some reason, and he would look awfully foolish in front of his new employers, asking for money he hadn't been promised after someone had got away with the family's secrets.

All because he hadn't bothered to investigate some strange footsteps.

He stood up and turned toward the door, walking as silently as he could. He reached out, barely letting his hand graze the door knob. He took a deep breath and tried to still the ever-louder beating of his heart. Then he let the breath out, and twisted the knob and pulled the door in one swift motion.

A young woman, pretty, with long red hair piled onto her head, stood in the doorway. She had a long, narrow face and a button nose, and light freckles, and the green eyes that the Irish were prone to.

"Miss Geis," he said softly. "Is anything the matter?"

She looked at him with fire in her eyes, and dared him to do…something. He had noticed it earlier, as well: a combative attitude he couldn't explain. Whatever was on her mind, she kept it to herself.

James noticed that she was wearing her corset, now. His cheeks turned red and he tried not to think about it. It was hard to look her in the face, as well. He had met plenty of pretty women before, even gotten a kiss or two from some. This was the first one who was so completely off-limits, and it made reacting to her presence difficult.

For a moment he considered inviting her into the study. She would have known her father better than anyone; if the puzzle of the notes could be solved, she would be the one who could solve it. But then he looked at her again, and saw the look in her eyes. A mixture of mistrust and dislike, he thought, mixed with something that might have been anger.

Perhaps it would wait.