Page 15 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
And he had been injured before Waterloo, he had said. So he’d been off food for at least a year, possibly several? Lord. Jack had the novel urge to feed this man coddled eggs and pie.
Jack could hardly see Rivington’s face in the shadows, but he was close enough to smell whatever poncy soap his laundress had used on his shirt. That’s what Rivington smelled of—expensive laundry soap and the wine he had with his dinner. Jack couldn’t think of any two scents less likely to make his heart pound in his chest, but here he was, wondering what would happen if he got to his knees.
“Somebody went to a great deal of trouble to get you looking like that.” He slid his finger beneath Rivington’s cuff, feeling the smooth underside of the taller man’s wrist. “Your boots have been polished to a shocking degree and your cravat is just so.” Beneath the blood and grime that spattered Rivington’s boots and neck cloth, Jack could see the handiwork of a talented valet, and almost hated the servant for having had his hands on this man’s body. “You’re at loose ends. That’s why you let your valet spend time on you. It’s also why you poke your nose into your sister’s business and my own.”
Rivington pulled his arm away from Jack’s touch as if he were flinching. Ah, so that topic was a sore spot, then. And likely Jack had hit the mark, too. “Some helpful advice for you,” Jack said, instinctively raising his hands to adjust the man’s lapels into some semblance of order. It was a bald excuse to keep touching him as well as the tiresome old habit of making gentlemen look presentable. “You’re acting like you’re looking for a wife or a mistress. Nobody goes out nearly as much as you unless he has some kind of agenda.” He smoothed Rivington’s collar, letting his knuckles brush across his jaw and the tender flesh beneath. “You’ll wind up married, like it or not, and you’re not looking for a wife any more than I am.”
He paused with his hands on Rivington’s shoulders, letting his words hang in the air. His meaning couldn’t be clearer. At least he hoped so. But he didn’t dare move any closer—Georgie’s words echoed in his ear. Did he really want to have anything to do with this man who smelled of costly laundry soap and even more costly wine? Not so long ago Jack had straightened the collars of Rivington’s brother-in-law, a service then performed for wages and now from lust, but it all shook out the same in the end as far as Jack could tell.
“Your accent started to slip at the end of that speech.” Rivington’s face was still hidden in the shadows, but his voice scarcely betrayed that anything interesting had just happened. The man’s feathers were hardly ruffled, but Jack had felt Rivington’s heart pound under the superfine wool of his dinner coat. He wished he had tried something more brazen, more offensive.
Rivington continued. “Before that, I had been under the impression that you were . . . I don’t know, something along the lines of a solicitor’s clerk. Not quite a gentleman, you know, but perhaps two degrees removed from that.”
Of course the fellow had thought so. That was precisely the effect Jack had set out to achieve. “That’s excellent news.” He affected a level of cheer he hoped was obviously facetious. “It’s been ages since I’ve been able to remember my real accent.” That too was true. “I’ll have to yell at aristocrats more often, see if I can get the rest of it back.”
“I liked hearing it.” Rivington pushed off the wall, that action bringing him briefly nearer. Jack didn’t dare so much as breathe, lest he end the moment sooner than necessary. “Until we meet again, Mr. Turner,” he said, his lips so close that Jack could feel the words on his skin. Rivington headed east on Piccadilly, where Jack hoped he would have the sense to get a hackney.
Jack didn’t even bother to say that they wouldn’t be meeting again. He didn’t mind lying, but hated making predictions that time would certainly prove false.
CHAPTER FIVE
If you want to take the measure of a person, Jack always said—or rather thought, since it wasn’t as if this topic arose often in conversation—search their servants’ quarters. Kitchen maids and boot boys were little more than children. A man who allowed children to sleep in filth under his own roof was likely capable of greater sins besides.
In the Wraxhalls’ house, even the lowliest scullery maid slept on a tidy pallet near the fire. Her apron and gray dimity work dress—both tolerably clean—hung on a hook in a nearby cupboard, a pair of stout boots beneath. It was Sunday morning, so the child was at church wearing her best clothes. The fact that she had more than one dress and, more startling, a pair of shoes she considered finer than this perfectly serviceable pair of boots, told Jack all he needed to know about the Wraxhalls. He’d finish his search, but it was almost impossible to believe that anything was amiss in this household.
He relied on instinct. “Heathenry,” Sarah called it, no matter how often Jack protested that he always had reasons for the conclusions he drew. “I don’t doubt it,” Sarah would counter, her voice suspicious, “but you reach your conclusions first and your reasons second, which is a backwards way of doing things.”
Since it was Sunday morning, the Wraxhall house was as deserted as it ever would be in daylight. There wasn’t even a kitchen maid left behind to stir the midday soup, so Jack hadn’t had any trouble letting himself in through the garden door Molly Wilkins had left unlocked for him. He climbed the kitchen stairs to the upper story that held the Wraxhalls’ bedchambers.
Mr. Wraxhall’s own bedchamber was almost aggressively tidy—the work of a good servant rather than a finicky master, Jack guessed. Whenever Jack got a glimpse of the man, Wraxhall had something askew—hat or cravat, at the very least.
Jack gingerly checked under the mattress, then checked the mattress itself for any seams that had been picked apart to create a hiding place. He peeled back the carpet, checked for loose floorboards, looked behind the few bits of art that hung on the walls, and examined the contents of the wardrobe. He turned up nothing. This was the room of a man who went to sleep, woke up, and left to spend his day elsewhere—whether in other parts of the house or other parts of the city, Jack could not yet tell. But the room itself held no comfort besides the bed. There was one chair before a looking glass, where Wraxhall likely shaved or had his valet shave him.
On one wall was a door that likely led to Mrs. Wraxhall’s bedchamber. Jack tried the knob and found that it was unlocked, but the door couldn’t swing entirely open because of how the shaving chair was placed. Jack was able to pass through, albeit awkwardly, but a man who made the journey often wouldn’t keep his chair in so inconvenient a place—especially since such a trip was likely to be made in the dark, when the chair would only be tripped over.
Jack remembered what Rivington had said about the couple not looking at each other, and felt bad for these people who paid their scullery maid lavishly and apparently rarely shared a bed.
Mrs. Wraxhall’s bedchamber was more comfortable, and consequently took a great deal longer to search. Jack even debated whether he ought to search it—surely if the woman had stolen her own letters she wouldn’t hide them in her own bedchamber. Nor would anyone else who had stolen them. But still, he searched, not for the letters so much as for a clue as to who might have taken them or who might want to do Mrs. Wraxhall harm.
Naturally, he hadn’t told his client of his intent to search her home. He never did. First of all, they would only hide anything remotely interesting. Secondly, they would feel intruded upon, almost violated, knowing someone had pawed through their things. And while Jack didn’t give a farthing for the finer feelings of the upper classes, he knew he earned clients through word of mouth, and a client who felt uncomfortable with Jack’s involvement was less likely to recommend him to a friend.
He knew how to perform a thorough search without leaving any sign that he had been present, a trick he’d learned during his years of service. Cleaning and searching had a good deal in common, after all. Also, it was a fine trick to nick a couple teaspoons, hide them somewhere in the house, and sell them after everybody had stopped wondering where the missing silver had got to. He had done that sort of thing almost tediously often before deciding to go after larger game.
Mrs. Wraxhall’s jewel box proved to have a lock that was pitiably easy to pick. He had half a mind to leave a note inside advising her to get a better box, but that would defeat the purpose of this secretive search. At any rate, there was nothing in the box other than jewels and an empty place where the letters used to be. The jewels looked real, too. So, it couldn’t have been Molly who took the letters. He could rule her out, if nothing else. If she wanted money, she could have taken the jewels and replaced them with paste. She had done it before, he was fairly certain. A girl of her skills would have had no trouble picking the lock, either.
The other bedchamber on this floor was empty—a guest room that was as easy to search as Wraxhall’s room, and equally devoid of secrets. Really, the whole house seemed like a place that couldn’t hold anything untoward. The scullery maid had two pairs of shoes. There were jewels virtually lying about for the taking. He was certain the letters hadn’t been taken by a servant.
He was equally certain that the motive wasn’t money, or at least not only that. When there were jewels, why take letters instead? Blackmail was riskier than jewel theft, and uglier besides. No, you only blackmailed a person if you’d be as glad to ruin them as you would to get their money.
Still, he went upstairs to the servants’ quarters. The rooms were clean—even the room that housed three footmen—and there wasn’t a pin out of place. The head housemaid had a wilted posy in a jar on her bedside table. One of the footmen received regular letters from a brother in the navy. The valet apparently had enough time on his hands to read sensational novels.
The house was sickeningly well run. No expense had been spared, and Jack could have told Mrs. Wraxhall half a dozen ways to save her money, but of course he wouldn’t. That wasn’t what he had been hired to do, and besides, he vastly preferred seeing money flow from the absurdly rich to servants and tradesmen. And who could find fault with a woman who paid the scullery maid enough for her to keep two clean dresses and two pairs of boots? He found that his mind kept coming back to that simple fact.
The faint clack of a door and the echo of voices intruded on his thoughts. The servants were returning from church. The drawing room and library would have to wait until nightfall, so he slipped into the attic to wait out the hours of daylight. Even the attic seemed devoid of secrets, housing only a few boxes and trunks. The Wraxhalls hadn’t been at this address long enough to accumulate much in the way of dust or debris. It seemed for all the world that this was a house without secrets, a house without unsavoriness, even.
This mellow orderliness was not what he expected in the house of a person who was so distressed as to resort to hiring him. Jack knew that appearances could be deceiving, but as he sat alone in the attic waiting for darkness, he tried to pinpoint exactly what it was that didn’t add up about this case.
