Page 32 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
“Nothing.” Jack swept the cards away and stuffed them haphazardly into his coat pocket.
“Oh, you’re in a fine fettle this morning.” Slovenly and not a morning person. The Crown and Lion was a place of revelations today.
Jack looked like he wanted to say something, likely something very rude, but he held his tongue and went back to getting dressed.
“Your cravat is on the pillow,” Oliver pointed out, “if that’s what you’re looking for.”
Evidently it was, because Turner wrapped it around his neck and tied it. Oliver had seen fishing lines tied with more care and style.
“Those cards are where I write what I’ve learned in an investigation. Notes,” Jack said.
That seemed a reasonably orderly process, and Oliver approved. “May I take a look?”
Jack hesitated, so predictable in how he rationed out motes of trust.
“Come now, another set of eyes can’t be a bad thing,” Oliver wheedled.
“Fine,” he said, digging into his pocket and tossing the cards back onto the table. “I spread them out like this, so I can see everything at once and see if any patterns come out.”
In the bright early-morning light slanting through the windows, Oliver could see that Jack was pale. He likely had freckles as a child. He would turn red in the sun, so it was just as well that he preferred shadows and darkness.
Oliver turned his attention back to the cards Jack had arranged before him, and wasn’t surprised to find that the handwriting was a bold but barely legible scrawl that unraveled like so much tangled yarn across each card. Nor was he surprised to note the level of painstaking detail. Even the absence of information was included: “Wraxhall. No debts, no secrets.” And “Servants overpaid,” followed, amazingly, by “Very friendly dog.”
As Oliver scanned the cards, he saw nothing interesting or even unsavory. Certainly nothing that indicated a source of the blackmail.
“I know,” Jack said as he stepped into his boots. “As completely unobjectionable a pair of people as I’ve ever come across.” He said this with a note of disgust in his voice. “With any luck we’ll find some hint of depravity today.”
“You don’t think Miss Barrow knows anything?” Oliver remembered her sitting room, filled with half-read books and dozing cats.
“Oh, she definitely knows something.” Jack took out his shaving kit, and then evidently thought better of it, tossing the case back into his valise. “The gardener told me that the cottage belongs to Mrs. Durbin. Miss Barrow has free use of it. Why else would Mrs. Wraxhall’s mother give her a home if not to keep watch on the lady and provide a bit of an incentive for her silence?”
Oliver opened his mouth to protest, then decided he had no horse in this race. Whether the unknown Mrs. Durbin gave Miss Barrow a home—and such a home as that cottage—out of charity or from baser motives was not something Oliver gave one fig about.
“But Miss Barrow and the vicar aren’t our blackmailers.” Jack slid a knife into his boot. “They’re happy young fools in love. And happy people don’t engage in blackmail.”
“They don’t?” This was not something Oliver had ever thought about. “What crimes do happy people commit, then?”
“Other than fornication and sodomy, you mean?” He caught Oliver’s eye in a way that made his meaning clear and caused Oliver’s skin to flush. “There are plenty of otherwise decent, happy, hardworking criminals. Smugglers, forgers, whores. Pillars of society, every last one of them.”
Oliver opened his mouth to protest—smugglers as pillars of society, indeed. But he stopped himself. He wanted to hear more of these misguided notions. At that moment he wanted to hear just about anything Jack Turner had to say.
Jack turned away from Oliver and began throwing stray objects helter-skelter into his valise in what looked like a child’s attempt to tidy the nursery. “My father was a perfectly happy criminal,” he continued, “at least when he wasn’t starving. Georgie too. But some crimes are just nasty. Arson, blackmail, anything involving children. You’ll only see the worst kinds of miserable bastards doing those things.”
Oliver recalled that Jack had once said he’d have no compunctions about blackmailing blackmailers, and wondered whether he considered himself the worst kind of miserable bastard.
Oliver found that he hoped not. Worse than that, he disagreed. And the idea that he might have a better opinion of self-avowed scoundrel Jack Turner than the man had of himself was unsettling, to say the least.
They took the curricle to the house of Mrs. Wraxhall’s former lover. And thank God for it, because Oliver didn’t think his leg could take much more after yesterday. The Lewises lived just outside Pickworth, close to Mr. Lewis’s Dewsbury mill but still in the country.
Hector Lewis’s father had been in business with Mrs. Wraxhall’s father. According to Jack’s note cards, the Lewises and the Durbins had both stood to profit handsomely by a marriage between Miss Durbin and young Hector Lewis. Instead, Lewis was running the enterprise.
Oliver, for his part, was eager to discover what kind of house a Yorkshire mill owner lived in. He was conscious of a curiosity that did him no credit, as if he were off to gawk at those people who drove reindeer around, whatever they were called.
Sadly, the Lewises’ house turned out to be the sort of rigidly symmetrical affair that everybody insisted on building a generation ago. There were the requisite portico and columns, a neatly graveled semicircular drive, and a soporifically regular facade. Oliver suspected they’d find faux-Roman sculpture strewn about the premises.
Jack’s thoughts turned out to be along similar lines. “Even odds the door is opened by some poor bastard wearing a powdered wig and velvet breeches.”
Oliver let out a bark of laughter. But when they rolled up to the front of the house and handed off the curricle to a servant, the door was opened by a very somber and ordinary-looking butler who gravely took their calling cards before disappearing.
