“He may not be eating and drinking on his own shillings, but he was not hired,” Gabriel said. “There is a cousin involved named Pritchard, so this is he.”
“Who told you about him?”
“Mrs. Waverly. We have her.” He described the evening’s adventure, skimming over the details of Amanda’s impressive skills at housebreaking. “She has given me some information about that house. In addition to this cousin who, according to her, is not above violence, there are three other men. They try to be footmen, but are barely passable. She thinks they are men hired mostly to dig for buried treasure.”
“He thinks there is more?”
“He refuses to think there is not moremay be a more accurate way to say it.”
Brentworth frowned in thought. “I suppose when we confront him we could bring pistols, but I don’t like it. We are with you, Langford, if you decide it must be that way, but—”
Gabriel did not like the idea of wielding pistols, let alone firing them, any more than Brentworth. Yarnell wasn’t a murderer, and Mrs. Waverlyhadtried to defraud him.
“Perhaps, we should not go there to confront him at all,” he said.
“Are you saying that after we trailed this fellow across the south of England you are now changing your mind about the whole matter? If so, on the way back you owe Strattonandme carte blanche at the inns.”
“We will complete the plan, only not at Yarnell’s house. We have the dagger here, and the man who carried it,” Gabriel said. “Why not have Yarnell come to us?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Amanda woke in the dark with a warm body pressing her back. She knew it was not Gabriel.
She sat up to find herself stretched across the bottom of the bed, fully clothed. The press against her back had come from her mother, who slept across the bed too, probably to avoid wakening her.
She had no idea of the time, but she doubted dawn would come soon. Thoroughly awake in any case, she slipped off the bed, felt around for her shoes, and fingered the knot on her head. Some tendrils had come free while she slept and the knot felt askew. She assumed she appeared disheveled at best, but there was nothing to do about that now.
She decided to see if Gabriel was still awake. Their evening had exhausted her, and not only physically. Listening to her mother describe her attempted fraud, and even how she’d intended to steal the pocket watch of the man who’d first told her about Yarnell, had cast a shadow on her spirits. There would be moments while she listened that she would be back in one of her many childhood homes—they never stayed long in any place—listening to her parents plan their next crime.
When had she begun to realize that her life was not normal? Perhaps when she realized that none of the other children she played with ever packed everything and disappeared at night. Maybe when she ventured into a church for the first time when she was ten and read the big, bronze plaques with the Commandments. There had been no sudden revelation about the truth of their lives. It had slid into her, like the water of an incoming tide.
She opened her door and approached Gabriel’s on the other side of the landing. She heard voices. He was not alone. They must belong to his friends. Perhaps it was over, or almost so, and tomorrow they could go and retrieve the brooch, buckle, and dagger.
She entered and the conversation died. Three men sat around the chamber, Gabriel sprawled on the bed and Stratton on a soft reading chair. The last one had taken a place on the wooden chair at the small table.
All three stood. Stratton greeted her. Gabriel introduced her to the Duke of Brentworth. He was a very tall man, and very handsome with a straight nose and firm jaw and eyes the color of steel reflecting a summer sky. He smiled, but he did not appear friendly. Unlike the affable Stratton, she suspected he did not find the world amusing.
“Sit, Miss Waverly,” he said, offering his chair. “We are plotting, and you may have ideas that we do not.”
She accepted his chair. “What are you plotting?”
Gabriel told her how the cousin had dallied here for the night, and their idea that it would be better to lure Yarnell to the inn rather than go to him.
“Our best notion is for his cousin to send a letter to Yarnell in the morning, bidding him come here due to his cousin suffering an accident,” Gabriel said.
“But how to convince the cousin to write such a letter? Unless we hold a pistol to his head,” Stratton said.
“Which we were debating when you entered,” Brentworth said.
“It is good I joined you if the conversation ventured there. I am grateful for your help, but I cannot allow you to be a party to that for my sake.” She caught Gabriel’s eye and gave him a desperate look.
“We will have to bring pistols if we go there,” he said. “That could end up far worse than a bluff here.”
“A letter should not be hard to forge,” she said.
“I suppose not,” Brentworth said. “If we had good examples of his writing, and if we had a forger, and—”
“You do not need to forge the entire letter, only do a passable job on his signature. The rest could be written by someone helping him, due to an accident he had.”
