“A bit of dirt from your shirt must have gotten in my eyes,” she answered, blinking back tears.Ye god, Wrexford has really knocked my emotions out of kilter.“And here it was justlaundered yesterday. What do you do—turn cartwheels through every mud puddle between here and Hades?”
He grinned. “Got te practice being agile if I’m te stay one step ahead of the Devil.”
She ruffled his hair. “You’ve done enough twisting and turning for one night. Go to bed.”
“Yeah, well, ye should do the same.”
“I will.” Steam swirled up from the mug. “As soon as I drink my tea.”
Raven, too, had shifted his gaze, not to the silvery plume rising up from the mug, but to the piece of paper sitting on the blotter.
“Is that the clue His Lordship mentioned?”
How would Wrexford answer?No sooner had the question formed in her head than Charlotte found herself forced to swallow a laugh.With brutal honesty, she conceded, recalling his long-ago conversation with the boys concerning death and the vagaries of the Grim Reaper. With him there was no spooning of sugar-coated platitudes. He didn’t treat them like children.
“Yes,” she replied. “It is.”
Raven craned his neck for a better look.
She pushed the paper closer to him, the shift uncovering her own silly scribbling of letters.
Propping his elbows on the dark-grained oak, he leaned in to study the numbers. Although a curling tangle of uncombed hair shaded his face, she saw his eyes narrow in concentration.
Shamed by how easily she had given up, Charlotte felt compelled to look again. Seconds turned to minutes, and still her mind remained depressingly blank.
“You seem to have a knack for numbers. Have you any ideas on what these might mean?” she finally asked.
A frown pulled at the corners of his mouth but he merely lifted his shoulders in a vague shrug. Whatever thoughts weretaking shape in his head, he was, in a very Raven-like way, keeping them to himself.
“But the cove wrote them all down in this order,” mused the boy, “so they must mean something.”
Charlotte stared balefully at the paper, willing it to whisper its secrets.
And pigs might learn to sing an aria from one of Mozart’s operas.
“Yes, they must. Wrexford said . . .” She thought hard, making her recall the exact words he had said when first handing her the copy. “Wrexford said the murdered man’s last words were,Numbers—numbers will reveal everything.”
“They ain’t saying anything,” quipped Raven after several long moments of silence.
“No, they aren’t.” Swearing a silent oath, she refolded it and set it aside on her blotter. Her hand lingered on the dark leather. The dark-fingered night chills had long since squeezed the heat from the house. A gust rattled in the chimney and she felt a shiver spiral straight down through her marrow.
Grasping the mug, Charlotte took a long swallow, grateful for the ripple of warmth now pooling in her belly. This case had unnerved her—she couldn’t seem to find her bearings. Perhaps it had been hubris to think she could pick up and move from one life to another without leaving something of herself behind.
“The tea’s turning cold.” The lamplight caught the spark of concern in Raven’s dark eyes. “I can fetch ye a fresh brew.”
“Go to bed, Weasel.” Charlotte deliberately used the earl’s sardonic nickname.
That made him smile.
“I’ll do the same as soon as I finish what I have.”
That seemed to satisfy the boy. He nodded and padded off toward the door. Whether he would head to his nest in the attic aerie, or find the allure of the night too strong to resist wasn’t a question she dared confront at the present moment.
In diem vive. Live one day at a time, she reminded herself.
A hard-won lesson she’d learned in life was that to have any hope of vanquishing an opponent, one had to find a way to use one’s strengths.
“And God knows, I haven’t done that in this case,” she muttered into her tepid brew. Her best weapon was her pen, and it had been strangely silent in this affair. Poking, prodding with her art and commentary to find an enemy’s weak spot and trigger an errant move had proved highly effective in the past. She had somehow lost sight of what she did best.
