Page 1 of Forgery, Love, and Other Lies
One
May 1822
The strange man had stood on the opposite side of the street from Frampton & Son’s Jewelers every day for the last fortnight, watching, never inching closer, as if he stood still to have his portrait painted. Now, his hands were stuffed into pockets and his shoulders hunched up around his neck, almost shoving off the beaver hat pulled low over his brow. A large rust-red scarf swallowed his neck and lower face, obscuring his features entirely. All days he looked the same—a cold, dark, featureless column with a blade of danger about him, a shadow of mystery.
The wind howled, and safe inside Frampton & Son’s Jewelers, Fiona Frampton pulled her shawl close, and backed away from the winter chill frosting the glass of the shop window. A deeper chill ran through her because of the man. Who was he? Why did he watch? Did he plan to rob them? Was he a runner? Did Papa have a long-lost son with an unknown first wife who’d come to claim his place as thesonin Frampton & Son’s? It would be nice, if quite the shock, to find herself in possession of a brother. Her older sister, Posey, would certainly not be amused.Shewas the “son” in Frampton and Son’s after all, if one disregarded gender. No one could cut gems like her. No one knew wires and settings and paste and goldsmithing—Fiona shook her head and chuckled, turning from the window.
The cold man outside was no long-lost brother, and Mama would beg her to please focus.
Fiona did not wish to focus, though. Better to let her mind wander toward much-needed distractions from—she heaved a sigh—life.
Lifeas in her many mistakes.
Lifeas in the missing Dowager Lady Balantine.
Lifeas in Fiona’s paintings.
Fiona’s—she slammed a portcullis down on the subsequent words. She wouldn’t even think it. Thinking it put it too closely to her lips, her tongue, and those words were ones she would take to her grave.
Hopefully.
Anyway, she would never do what she’d done again. It had been a moment of weakness. Ten moments of weakness, to be precise, and they had been necessary. Not a horrid number of unforgivable sins for the three and twenty years she’d been on this earth. But… never again. She scrubbed the thoughts from her mind till not even a speck of them remained and turned to her sister.
Posey stood at the front of the shop, speaking with a customer; as the face of Frampton’s, she dressed appropriately, managing to appear fashionable and a touch out of reach. All of London thought her a mere shopgirl, a dutiful spinster daughter who helped her papa keep his doors open while he and a proper male apprentice sweated away in the back, making the wares they sold. All of London had it wrong. The apprentice was more of a delivery boy, and Posey completed at least half of the commissions these days, knew all her father’s tricks of the trade.
But a woman jeweler? They kept that fact a secret.
The woman Posey currently spoke with, a countess who often patronized the shop, smiled and left a small box on the counter, never knowing the hands she left her jewelry with would do more than store those gems in the safe.
Posey opened the box, studied its contents. A bracelet or necklace. Perhaps a full parure. In her green silk gown and with her white-blonde hair styled in an elegant coiffure, a simple diamond drop necklace at her throat, she looked more like a lady about to dance the night away in a ballroom than a jeweler’s apprentice.
Pride washed over Fiona, and she let herself float along in the warm ocean of it.Her family. Everything she did for them, and for the shop. In the only way she knew how. In the only way they’d enabled her to.
Fiona looked up and smiled as she snapped the lid of the jewelry case closed. “A victory. Lady Albion brought the emeralds to us for repair instead of to Mr. Foggy.” She sniffed. “That upstart.”
“He’s a complete sham.” And the reason their shop had not fared so well in the last several years. And the reason Fiona needed to, finally, tell her parents her true desires and abandon painting in pursuit of jewelry design instead.
Perhaps she possessed greater technical skill with brush and paint, but she’d never liked it. The act of painting had never sent a spark of joy through her. Paintings merely told stories from the safety of a sheltered room. Jewelry lived the story, glittering from the wrist of a debutante about to meet the man who would become her husband, stolen from a reticule by a masked highwayman, handed down from father to son, inherited, lost, loved. Jewelry experienced life, and Fiona designed pieces with those moments in mind—necklaces and earbobs for when you wanted to fall in love or when you needed to mourn, the perfect shapes and colors for every emotion.
All of it, though, lifeless in her sketchbook because her parents wanted at least one acceptable child, one daughter whose desires and talents did not laugh in the face of society’s expectations for women.
Fiona gave a bitter laugh. If they only knew what she’d done with her painting lessons.
Hopefully they would never know.
“Foggy knows nothing about gems and gold,” Posey grumbled. “Not even after five years of doing business in them.” She clutched the jewelry case tight and disappeared into the workroom at the back of the shop just as Daniel, their fake apprentice, stepped out.
“Can I walk you and Miss Frampton home, Miss Fiona?” he asked, stuffing arms into his coat, his floppy yellow hair falling into his eyes. He delivered jewelry and ran errands and sat in the back of the shop when he was not busy elsewhere, to give the impression he was Papa’s apprentice, not Posey.
“No thank you, Daniel.” She needed to speak with her sister alone, and the walk home was the best time for that. “’Tis but a short jaunt. We’ll fare fine.”
“You Pa won’t approve.”
She winked. “I’ll tell him you walked us.” It would not be her first lie.
He grunted, rolling his eyes. “If you insist. Don’t get abducted, miss. Or killed.”
“I swear it.”
