“Sir, according to Skippy, the Lady of Carr Abbas is the lady you met yesterday.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Her servant is tight-lipped about her purposes, but voluble on the topic of how lovely the lady is, how kind, how gracious, how rich. Which makes it sound like a scam to me.”
“Lady Ellen is living in my house? I cannot believe it! She seemed so innocent, so genuine!”
If it really was Miss Ellen, then perhaps she was. Jake had difficulty believing that either Miss Ellen or Kat were involved in anything criminal.Well.Perhaps Kat, but only from the best of motives. “She may have her reasons, sir,” he said.
“We’ll ride out and have a look,” the captain said.
Jake froze and stared at him.Ride out? The captain proposed to actually leave London?
“Shut your mouth, Jake. You’ll catch a fly.”
The captain was right. Jake was so surprised his jaw had dropped open. He knew better than to comment. “A riding coat, sir?”
“Put it out, Jake. Pack for you and for me for two nights, then runover to the Crown and hire a couple of horses for a trip along the Uxbridge Road. We have a mystery to solve.”
He rubbed his hands together at the thought of it. If Jake had known it would only take a mystery, he might have gone looking for one earlier.
“Yes, sir,” he answered, flinging off a sketchy salute. He’d hurry through packing and get the horses before the captain had the chance to think better of the trip.
As he packed, his mind flooded with memories of his years of service in the Miller household.
If Kat’s surname was bogus, his was even more false. At least she’d had hers from babyhood. Jake had needed a surname when he was employed by the Millers, and adopted the name of Boss Flynn, who had picked him up from the streets when he was four or five, to train him as a pickpocket and later as a burglar.
He had been introduced to the Miller house by Flynn, who was, as he put it, ruralizing to avoid the runners, and doing a few jobs to keep his gang busy. Jake was meant to open the window to his mates, rob the place blind, and move on. But the gang was caught on another job, and Flynn died attempting to escape. Jake saw his own future in their fate and chose another path. He stayed on.
For four years, he and Kat Fivepence had worked together, he as the youngest footman in the house, the butt of every male servant’s ill-temper or mean jokes, she his counterpart on the women’s side.
They had befriended one another, helped one another, become friends and then more. She had taught him to read, passing on the lessons she had learned from the youngest daughter of the house, who was a sweet girl a few months older than Kat.
Dreams of marriage foundered on reality. Few households—even those without such a harsh master and mistress at the helm—allowed their servants to marry. Not even their senior servants, let alone a couple of despised juniors. Even a hint that Jake andKat had such hopes would have had the pair of them tossed out on their ear, with no testimonials to help them find another position.
Inevitably, despite the constraints on their time and the almost constant presence of others, their attraction to one another ignited in the most glorious of ways. After that, Jake knew he could no longer stay near Kat or he would disgrace her. He waited only long enough to know that their coupling had not had consequences and left to make his fortune. “I’ll come back, Kat, when I can afford a wife. You and me. We’ll show them all, won’t we?”
She’d smiled and wished him every good fortune, but the sadness in her eyes belied the hope in her words. As it was, he’d found no work at all until he joined the army, figuring that at least they’d feed him.
If that footman really was Kat, he’d have to find out what she was trying to achieve, and how he could get it for her without hurting his captain.
Kat Fivepence. He’d been trying not to think about her, because he couldn’t desert Captain Harraway when the man was in such a low state. But now that he had opened the door to those thoughts, they flooded his mind.
If this Fivepence proved to be someone else, he’d not delay any longer, for he needed his Kat with a power all the stronger for having been denied for so long. When the captain was settled, Jake would go and look for Kat—though he had little hope she’d waited for him. She was a firecracker of a girl, and in the past eight years, some lucky man must have seen her for the treasure she was.
Chapter Seven
Ealing
“The simplest thing,”said Jake, “would be to just ride up to the front door and demand to know what is going on.”
“You were a better scout than that,” Captain Harraway scoffed. “No, we’ll find out what they know about the lady in the village.”
Jake saw the captain beginning to turn and managed to stop rolling his eyes before the man could see his face. Mind you, he wouldn’t put it past the captain to have guessed his reaction. They’d been together for five years, and if he knew Captain Harraway better than anyone on earth, the captain knew him just as well.
“Good thinking,” he said.If you want to make a game out of it.To be fair, if the captain was having fun that didn’t involve a bottle or a gaming table, Jake was all for it.
The captain’s smirk hinted that he knew some of what Jake was thinking, but he didn’t comment. He just headed his horse past the first inn in the village and turned in at the second, as instructed by the horses’ owner.
