Silas huffed in amusement. “You’re not still bitter about that? I won that bet fair and square.”
“Yes, well, I saw him first.” He took a large bite of his egg.
Silas just shook his head, taking a serving of everything on the table from fried eggs to fried tomatoes, baked apples, and fresh baked bread.
Chef Chabert was a Frenchman who had been down and out, working in a brothel as a cook when Benedict and Silas met him. They were in search of a fugitive, and the chef had pointed him out while serving them the best ragout they’d ever eaten.
Having just purchased their house, the two men began to bicker over who would offer the chef a position in their household. The chef himself had proposed that whoever was able to outshoot the brothel’s madam would be the one to take him.
Silas had won by a hair’s breadth, it had been that close.
“Where is your wife? Did she change her mind?”
Silas shook his head. “No, we were to meet at eight. She is getting ready. She said she was too nervous to eat.”
Benedict gave him a look. “And you still insist on letting her come with us?”
“I do notinsist.” Silas protested, “I just understand why she needs to do this, and I am not stopping her.”
“She could get hurt.”
“No.” Silas snapped, “We’re not putting her inanydanger.”
Benedict shrugged. “As you wish.”
They told her to stay in the carriage, curtains drawn, while they went to reconnoiter, and so that was what she did. But she could not help peering out of a gap in the curtains, staring at the door to the apothecary and noting everyone who went in and out.
Suddenly, she straightened up, recognizing the woman who was now entering the establishment.
It was a friend of her mother’s. Helena remembered her from a dinner they’d had just before she was sent away.
She remembered thinking it strange that her mother could be friends with such a loud and raffish person. Helena would have thought that her mother would consider the lady beneath her touch. The Dowager Countess certainly had not seemed comfortable at the dinner table with the woman dominating the conversation with crude talk. Helena remembered that her mother had even sent Charlie away.
On a sudden impulse, she alighted from the carriage and followed the woman into the shop. There was a small bell that tinkled as she went inside, and Helena froze for a moment before remembering that the apothecary was a public place and she had every right to enter it.
The woman seemed to have disappeared into the depths of the shop and there was nobody behind the counter to help Helena. She walked as quietly as she could to the counter, listening intently for approaching footsteps. There were none, but the woman’s grating voice could be heard from somewhere out of sight.
To Helena, it sounded as though she was in quite high dudgeon. She could not hear the voice of whomever she was speaking too, much as she strained her ears.
She spotted the little gate in the counter that would lead to the back of the shop and decided that she would go nearer.
If she encountered anyone, all she had to do was pretend to be lost. She was expensively dressed, as a lady, so she didn’t think anyone would suspect her of anything. Hopefully the woman would not remember her. It had been five years since they met, after all, and Helena had changed quite a bit from the green girl she used to be.
“She keeps pestering me for the diadem, Moses. Have you not got it yet?”
“Without the girl? It will be almost impossible.”
“Well, she says they cannot get her now. She went and got herself a duke as a husband. Honestly, I don’t know how these people do it.”
“Well, the father was very explicit in his instructions, and the bankers will release it to no one else. You must press them harder. Even if we managed to get the money for arms and other supplies, without the diadem we have nobelief!”
“How do you suggest I do that?” the woman sounded peeved.
“Tell the dowager that they shall all be killed if they don’t find a way around this. I bet that’d light a fire beneath her.”
Helena suppressed a gasp and began backing away.
Moving as quietly as possible, she backed away from the darkened corridor she’d been lurking in and back into the shop.
