Page 93 of Enticing Odds
Mary suddenly withdrew, wariness plain on her weathered face. She stepped forward, squinting at Cressida.
“What did you say his name was, your man?”
“Richard,” Cressida replied. “He’s a clerk.”
Mary’s eyes went once more to her earrings. A bit dear for a clerk’s budget. Drat, she’d gotten too carried away. Thinking quickly, Cressida reached up to remove them.
“Here,” she said, stepping forward and holding the pair out in her open palm, much like she had offered the pennies to the girl mending nets.
Mary’s eyes widened.
“Take them, please,” Cressida urged. “Use them to… well. Do not tell Mr. Sharples. Keep anything you can get for them to yourself.”
Run, she thought.Run as far from the bastard as you can.
Mary plucked the earrings from her hand, holding one up to the fading light of dusk. It sparkled as the setting sun hit the fine, twisted gold. For so long they’d been a symbol of her husband’s disregard for her; other viscountesses would receive fine sets of diamonds, rubies, or sapphires, but Cressida’s husband cared so little for her that he selected the smallest and cheapest adornment he could get away with.
The woman glanced from the earring to Cressida. She smiled.
Well, perhaps Bartholomew could finally do a good turn, if these would pay for Mary’s emancipation. Cressida felt another jolt of hopeful excitement.
Tonight she would get her revenge one more time.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Right. Where the hellis this place, Collier?”
Rickard, as always, got straight to the point, his raspy voice brusque and businesslike.
“I… I don’t know exactly,” Matthew lamented, wishing he could break out into a run. “They tend to move about, shifting locations so as to avoid detection.”
He recalled the chaos of the police raid, how he’d escaped out the window like a common criminal.
“Well,” piped up Viscount Caplin, trailing behind them with his friend Middlemiss in tow, “there are four of us. We ought to split up, cover more ground.”
Matthew and Rickard halted suddenly, the two younger men nearly crashing into them like overeager puppies.
“What? You two, alone in these streets?” Rickard scoffed. “No, I don’t think so.”
Middlemiss had the good sense to flush.
When Matthew realized just where Cressida must’ve gone, he knew he would require aid. If only he’d swallowed his cursed pride and his natural tendency toward solitude, and gone toRickard in the first place, before he’d given Sharples the money. Not only did Rickard owe him a favor, but he knew his way around a volatile—and potentially physical—situation.
Matthew felt incredibly stupid. He’d been foolish, trying to make himself small, unobtrusive, unnoticed. After all, that wasn’t how Lady Caplin had made him feel.
And it was no way to live, besides.
So he’d made haste, rushing to Rickard’s home in search of a second. Viscount Caplin had demanded to accompany him, which Matthew begrudgingly accepted; after all, he acknowledged, itwasthe viscount’s mother they were searching for. Though he didn’t understand why Caplin’s antsy, witless friend had insisted on trailing after them, and in high spirits, no less. The boy would not cease speaking of the task at hand as a “rollicking good jaunt.”
Why, the two of them are barely thirty years old combined, Matthew thought, increasingly worried.
Stone-faced, Rickard looked from one to the other. Thomas Rickard was of average height and build, but possessed an icy menace about him, his mouth set in a hard line behind his whiskers. Marriage to a wealthy heiress could only temper his natural disposition so much.
“Now, just a moment, Mr. Rickard,” Caplin said with more authority than his sixteen or seventeen years ought to have afforded him. “We’re vigorous, we’re determined, and we’ve our wits about us.”
“Not me,” Middlemiss glumly admitted. “I’d a bit of a tipple earlier.”
Rickard shook his head with a sigh, then stepped forward between the two of them.
