She also needed to find out who the silver-haired man was. In all the excitement, she hadn’t had a chance to ask. The only thing she knew for certain was that he was not Perfect Pamela’s husband. That unfortunate was a short, rotund, balding nonentity more interested in wagers than his wife. She suspected, however, that the silver-haired man was some kind of lynchpin in the whole mess. She suspected even more strongly that it would be an uphill fight to get anyone to believe her accusations against him.
“Joyful,” she said, her attention on the pages, “will you do me a favor?”
Joyful's mother might have chosen her name as a portent. Sadly, it hadn't taken. The Negro woman who had followed Pip around the world, always anticipated the worst. But then, Joyful had experienced the worst, so Pip could hardly blame her. “Depends on what you want me t' do,” she said in her sing-song voice.
“Deliver a message to my fiancé.”
Joyful shrank into herself. “You want me to go to a white man's room in the middle o' the night, jus' like that?”
“No, I'd rather go myself. But it seems that I am forbidden. It truly is important, Joyful.”
She got absolutely no response. Joyfully bent over Pip's dress, focused completely on the tiny stitches she was setting into the hem as if Pip hadn't spoken at all. Pip struggled between laughter and rage. Well, that was it, then. Once Joyful had made up her mind, the Savior himself couldn't change it. She would simply pretend she couldn't hear or see.
Pip got to her feet, tucked the original pages away in her trunk, and folded her copies to stuff them back into her bodice. “All right then,” she groused, repositioning them and heading for the door. “I cannot see how I could further disgrace myself. I will go see him.”
Joyful came rocketing off the chair, but Pip was already out the door, the pages once again nestled between her breasts. Fortunately, she knew where Beau's room was. Even more fortunately, at this time in the evening the guests were still mostly downstairs enjoying a few hands of whist. The staff, well used to her wanderings over the years, just nodded as she passed. Pip felt her heart rate increase. Her palms felt a bit damp, and she swore a peach pit was lodged in her throat. If she got caught, she would only be compounding the scandal. But then, the sentence for scandal was marriage, and how much more married could she be than she would be in the morning?
The corridor to Beau's room was shadowy and long, with a tall window at the end that reflected back the shadow of Pip creeping towards it. Suddenly, she wanted to giggle. It was ludicrous, really. Or it would have been if the nation weren't at risk. If a certain silver-haired gentleman wasn't plotting against her Beau, not to mention the king.
The silver-haired gentleman. Beau knew him; that had been obvious. Pip wondered how. Where. It could have been anywhere, really. All those places a woman wasn't allowed, where men swapped lies and sipped brandy. She needed to ask Beau who the man was. And what he had been doing with Pamela Smythe-Smithe.
Just before she reached the tall window, she stopped at the last door on the right and raised her hand to softly knock. At first when she heard the woman's voice, she thought she'd conjured it. After all; hadn't she just been thinking of her? No one else had those sultry, throaty tones. Pip looked quickly around, hand still raised, certain to see Beau's mistress slinking down the moonlit hall.
But she wasn't. Pip knew it for certain when she turned back to his door and heard the low rumble of Beau's voice. Then, astonishingly, the throaty chuckle of his mistress. In his room. The night before his wedding.
Pip's first instinct was to shove the door open and confront the dolt. Demand to know what he thought he was doing entertaining a loose woman within hours of marrying Pip. Perhaps beat him to a pulp with his own chamber pot.
She couldn't, of course. It simply wasn't done. Hadn't she seen it time and again during her years in society? Women weren't supposed to acknowledge their rivals. They were forbidden to sully their silly thoughts with suspicions of infidelity. Because even if a man was bedding every guest at the party, a woman had no right to object.
Pip knew that, but couldn't tolerate it. But as she stood there in the hallway, her fists clenched so tightly she knew she would have crescent-shaped cuts in her palms from her nails. Worse than imagining what those two were up to in there would be finding out. She was too much of a coward to risk it.
Fine. Beau could just wait a couple of days more to find out about his precious papers. So, pushing her glasses up her nose, she turned around and walked back the way she'd come.
She had almost reached her room when something else dawned on her. If Lady Pamela was in Beau's room (may her teeth rot and her eyes cross), she was not in her own. And with the card room open, it was a dead certainty her husband wouldn’t be. It would be a perfect time to search. And wouldn't that be a lovely revenge on her and Beau both?
Again, Pip seemed to have perfect timing. The women's hall was silent and dim. Pip gently tapped on Lady Pamela's door, still furtively looking around. She wasn't terribly surprised that no one answered. If she were Lady Pamela's maid, and she knew where her mistress would be for a good long time, she would have spent her free time in the kitchens. Taking one more look around, Pip opened the door a crack and slid inside.
She almost betrayed herself with her first breath. Good Gawain’s geese, she thought, striving mightily not to cough at the cloud of patchouli she’d stumbled into. How can Beau tolerate the stuff? It was perfectly vile.
As for the room, it was too clean. Not tidy clean. Obsessively organized, fragrance bottles-and-brushes-lined up-on-the-dresser-like-hussars-on-parade clean. Not so much as a fan escaped from its drawer or a closet door left ajar.
Pip grinned. This actually made it much easier to search. If the room had been a mess, it would have been too difficult to put everything back just as it was. And Pip had a strong suspicion that Lady Pamela would have known in a second if her scarves had been touched.
That was where Pip started anyway. If she had been in the mood to be amused, she would have been by the character revealed in this room. Not a sensual seductress with oceans of exotic knick-knacks and faintly salacious miniatures. A precisely regimented perfectionist who probably knew to the inch where everything belonged. Scarves and hats and slippers and muffs and shawls, day dresses and walking dresses, carriage dresses, and formal gowns. A treasury of jewels, all arranged by stone, her favorite evidently being ruby. Not a surprise, Pip thought. Rubies would match her painted lips and set off her dark hair.
For a moment Pip was distracted enough to wonder what her own jewel would be. What would set off her best feature? Whatwasher best feature? Her brother Alex said it was her eyes. Her father said it was her laugh. Her mother had tweaked her nose and said all of her, which Pip thought patently unfair, the kind of thing a mother might say when she couldn’t think of an actual answer.
Pip gave her head a sharp shake.Focus, she thought, setting the bottom tray back into the jewelry case.You have work to do, and who knows how long Beau will keep the hussy busy?
Where would someone hide papers? Not Pamela. A man. A man who thought he knew her, but probably didn’t at all. Probably thought it was her maid who kept order. Men had no concept of the difference between how a maid tried to keep up with a careless woman and how a rigid woman made certain her maid followed orders. This was definitely the latter.
Pip took another slow look around. Not in any of the usual places, she thought. No false trunk bottoms or locked drawers or portable writing desks. Too easy. But someplace another person could recover them without any trouble. Someplace easy and quick.
Pip carefully ran her hands over the curtain hems. No suspicious crinkle. She patted down cloaks and opened every door she could find. There were no secret cubbies, niches, or rooms. She knew every room in this house, and the Ripton line had evidently passed their history in completely unsuspicious behavior, which would have demanded secret cubbies or rooms. She was running out of ideas.
Finally, Pip’s gaze settled on the lovely mahogany four-poster bed with its steps and piles of pillows, its curtains the same lovely dark gold as the window’s. She grinned. Too easy. Which might be the point. Taking a final look toward the door, she knelt at the bedside and shoved her hand beneath the mattress.
It took her a good ten minutes crawling about the entire perimeter of the bed, but just as she’d given up, she felt the crinkle of paper at her fingers. Eureka! Holding her breath, she carefully pulled until she succeeded in retrieving the papers that had been hidden there. One look was all it took. They were so similar to the papers she had taken from Beau that she could have mistaken one for the other if she hadn’t already studied the others. She could easily substitute the fake plans for the real ones so that no one would realize until too late that the plans had been switched. And if Pip was very lucky, when the traitors discovered the substitution, they would blame Pamela.
