“Aye,” he said. “Someone.”
Chapter 16
I understand Strathrannoch and his countess have begun sharing a bedchamber, and—cariad—you didn’t contrive this, did you? (Please take this query in the spirit of compliment it was meant!)
—from Huw to Bertie, posted from Kilbride House
Five days of cohabitation later, Arthur had begun to fear that proximity to Lydia Hope-Wallace was slowly ravaging his intellect.
She had certainly eroded his willpower. Wrecked his composure. Caused significant and irreversible damage to his heart.
But no. His heart was not the issue at hand.
The problem was in his brain, and in the fact that even after nearly a week’s concerted investigation, he had made no progress toward discovering who had ransacked Lydia’s room.
He had searched the library and found nothing but Jasper Hope-Wallace asleep on a chaise longue, a book open upon his chest. Arthur had made a god-awful racket whilst searching, butthe man hadn’t moved an inch, which suggested he either had been knocked upon the head or was faking it. And why he would be feigning repose, Arthur could not imagine.
He briefly entertained a wild fantasy in which all the Hope-Wallace siblings were in league with his brother and Lydia had been sent ahead to seduce him into compliance. Then he recalled her flight among the zebras and discarded that notion.
Besides—he trusted her.
After Arthur’s failure of reconnaissance in the library, Georgiana had been tasked with gaining access to the chambers of the Thibodeaux and Valiquette couples. Once that was accomplished, Arthur and Lydia had surreptitiously searched, but they’d found nothing of interest.
Lydia, meanwhile, spent her time gathering intelligence directly from the other guests. Despite her manifest discomfort when forced into the drawing room or sitting room or wherever else the company happened to gather en masse, she was adept at listening and at putting together scraps of information from various conversations. Every evening, she consulted the index of notes she’d made back at Strathrannoch Castle. She was machinelike in her precision, matching points of reference from comments he’d scarcely perceived.
But thus far, it was no use. The de Younges, the Thibodeaux, the Valiquettes—all, at various points, made statements that could somehow be connected to Davis. Even Lydia’s brother Jasper—still in the guise of Joseph Eagermont—had once made an offhand remark about a grocer he’d encountered near the border who sold turnip paste molded into the shape of a cod’s head. Later, Lydia had shown Arthur the exact same story written in Davis’s hand.
That, at least, had not been something Davis had stolen from him. Arthur had never heard of such a thing in his life.
Lydia was dogged and persistent and clever as the devil. He could see that she hated the evenings of entertainment—he’d once caught her surreptitiously examining the pianoforte’s wires as though searching for a way to destroy them—but she kept throwing herself at the general assembly anyway. Most nights, he tried to draw her away from the small crowd and into the hallway or out to the gardens for relief, but she rarely allowed it.
“I want to help,” she’d said the previous night. “I know I can do this.” Her face was still pale and a little greenish after Mrs. Thibodeaux had asked her in thickly accented English tolift her angelic voice in song.
He did not know how to explain to her that she wasalreadyhelping. That she did not always need to make herself uncomfortable because she thought it was what others wanted from her.
And when he tried, she did not seem persuaded.
In addition to their decidedly poor information-gathering, they also had not yet heard back from Belvoir’s, though Bertie had reiterated via letter his promise to forward any correspondence from London immediately.
At this point, Arthur had no clearer sense of Davis’s motivations than he’d had before they’d arrived at Kilbride House. Every time he began to think he’d made some headway—when Lord de Younge began to speak of new rifle craft over a brace of pheasant, for example—his suspicions soon faltered, faded, and snagged upon someone else. To wit: Monsieur de Valiquette had replied to Lord de Younge’s commentary on improved rifle design with a flurry of outraged French decrying the problem of poaching and the beneficence of aristocrats like himself and the Duchess of Sutherland, one of Davis’s benefactors.
Eithereveryonein Kilbride House knew something about Davis’s nefarious activities or no one did.
A third option presented itself: The solution to the mystery of Davis’s accomplice was obvious. Arthur simply could not think of it because his brains had been plundered by Lydia Hope-Wallace.
Every night in their shared bedchamber was torture. She was an argumentative wee thing, but he was obstinate enough to hold off one ginger Englishwoman. She hadn’t been able to talk him into sleeping in the bed.
At least, not the first evening. That night, he’d slept on a thin rug on the stone floor and woken to bollocks so chilled he feared they’d never be seen again. He had, in the cold—verycold—light of dawn, come to the conclusion that he was resolute enough to share the bed with her and still maintain some semblance of honor.
And he had. Sort of.
For the subsequent nights, he’d slept lengthwise across the foot of the bed, which meant everything from his calves down dangled off the edge. His personal discomfort was not nearly as much of a problem, however, as was the fact that he was obsessed with her.
He thought about her all day: her bravery and wit and fortitude, her nervous, busy fingers. And then he thought about her all night as well. He could sense her in the bed—God, he could not have been more aware of her if they were mid-coitus. He could feel every time she shifted or turned; he knew the weight of her body on the mattress. He could smell the warm vanilla scent that clung to her, and he wanted to taste it. Lick it. Lickher.
He knew that she had two night rails with her. He had not seen them; she wore her many-buttoned dressing gown to bedand then struggled out of it beneath the bedclothes and tossed it down onto the floor.
But he knew there were at least two. Some nights, he could see the spill of silky-soft cotton down by her feet. That was the first night rail: the one that went all the way to the floor.
