Shrike’s heart broke to see it.
Wren leapt to his feet. The papers surrounding him scattered like wind-tossed snow. “You’ve found them?”
Shrike cursed himself for having raised Wren’s hopes. “No. Something else.”
The shattered expression passed over Wren’s face for the merest instant, yet its ache lingered in Shrike’s heart. He took the paper from Shrike’s outstretched hand with a weary look and glanced over the pages. They rustled as he flipped through them.
“What are they?” Shrike asked.
“Sheet music,” Wren said, turning the pages to show Shrike the dots along bars. His brow furrowed when he came to the portrait.
“And the maiden?” Shrike asked.
“I’m very much afraid it’s supposed to be Miss Flora.” Wren twisted his mouth to one side as he considered the sketch. “I can’t make out the signature, though I wouldn’t expect much better from Felix. If Tolhurst did it himself, he oughtn’t abandon his musical career.”
“Could we use it to bargain for the return of your own manuscripts?”
Wren blinked. “Now there’s a thought. But, no. I’d feel ashamed to hang this in a gallery, certainly, but it’s nothing Tolhurst or Felix might lose their liberty over.”
“There is nothing in the desk, then.”
“Nothing, save a collection of receipts and correspondence even more meticulously organized than Mr Grigsby’s records. Very bland receipts and correspondence, at that. Tolhurst has never spent a penny that he didn’t earn and never upon anything he need blush at. He’s even kept note of Felix’s accounts,” Wren added with a raised eyebrow. “Not surprising, given he’s almost as much his nephew’s guardian as Mr Grigsby is. Matches our own records down to the last decimal. I’ve never met a more boring person in the flesh or by proxy.”
Shrike could hardly disagree.
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean Tolhurst doesn’t have my manuscripts,” Wren continued. “It could mean he only stole them this morning and is still transporting them here along with his nephew. Or perhaps he stole them a month ago and ever since has carried them on his person whenever he goes out. Which in my opinion would be the height of foolish daring, but I suppose a man such as he has very little to fear from society.”
“He will have a great deal to fear from me if he has stolen from you,” said Shrike.
Wren’s eyes flew wide. Yet a smile flickered at the corner of his bespeckled lips. Shrike should have liked to kiss it, if they stood in Blackthorn and not in Rochester. And unless he mistook the gleam in Wren’s gaze, Wren wished for the same.
Still, the ghost of Wren’s delight remained on his face even as his voice resumed its disinterested drone. “More likely—to my mind, at least—it is Felix who has the papers and has taken them with him just his morning as he departed Staple Inn. But we cannot know for certain until he arrives. In the meantime, we must eliminate all remaining possibility.”
“Miss Flora,” said Shrike.
“Exactly so.” Wren glanced over the papers he’d scattered across the floor. “After we restore order.”
Putting the room to rights, a more sombre and less frantic task than searching it, took the better part of an hour.
“We may hope,” Wren said as he shut the door on their handiwork, “that Tolhurst is too preoccupied with his nephew to notice his rooms are unlocked. Or, if he does notice, he will assume he forgot to lock them in his haste to reach London.”
“Where does Miss Flora reside?” Shrike asked, following Wren down the dark stair and into High Street.
“Mrs Bailiwick’s Academy,” Wren answered him. “It’s not far. Just a few streets over. Although…” he added, with a wary glance back at Shrike which travelled from the peak of his feathered hat to the hem of his furred cloak.
Shrike took his meaning. “Are you prepared to face Miss Flora alone?”
Wren seemed bemused by his concern. “I’ve met her before and emerged unscathed.”
“Then perhaps,” Shrike suggested, “I might keep watch for Tolhurst’s return.”
~
Chapter Twenty-One
The housemaid who answered the door-bell looked as if Wren were the first gentleman she’d seen in all her days. She didn’t appear any less astonished when Wren told her he’d come to see Miss Flora Fairfield. She left him standing on the doorstep whilst she went to see if Miss Flora was “in.” Some quarter of an hour later she returned and led him in to a very rosy little front parlour and instructed him to wait before she left him alone again. Wren spent another quarter of an hour casting a dubious eye over the flocked golden damask wallpaper, the delicate white lace antimacassars laid out over the backs of armchairs that had evidently never known the grease of a gentleman’s hair, and the myriad framed examples of young ladies’ samplers, watercolours, and pencil-sketch portraits rendered in varying levels of skill. He had just determined one particular watercolour depicted a horse—and not, as he had at first surmised, a very unfortunate and lumpy hound—when the parlour door opened again.
The voluminous lace-flounced tartan cake of a gown that swept over the threshold did not carry Miss Flora along with it. Instead Wren found himself under the stern gaze of a woman whose greying hair tucked beneath her starched white cap bespoke her middling years and widowed status.
