Page 73 of The Trick of the Treasure
“What if the price of your father’s continuing to employ him was that he stay away from Miss Lloyd?”
Sydney closed his mouth. “I did hear there was some trouble in Tybalt’s past. So maybe he was desperate for the work. Seemed a good fellow to me, though. Some difficult sailing, too, I don’t mind telling you.”
“Did Joshua Clarke seem like a good fellow, too?”
Sydney looked bewildered. “Who is Joshua Clarke?”
“You might know him as Samuels. Ship’s carpenter aboard theQueen of the Sea.”
“Was he? Didn’t you mention him before?”
“He helped move your trunks and bags and the treasure chest out of your cabin and your father’s, before everything was carried up onto the deck for your leaving the ship.”
Sydney’s face cleared. “I remember him now. He didn’t do much of the carrying, though. Left that to the younger men, the one with the funny name and the fellow we picked up in Madagascar.”
“Johnny,” Solomon said, still watching him.
“Yes? I believe you’re right. They loaded it all onto the carriage for us, too.”
“Think back, if you please. When you had packed and closed your trunks, did theyallsit in the gangway with the treasure chest?”
“They were all there, with my father’s baggage, when I went up on deck. Except the treasure chest. The carpenter fellow was helping Papa tie the chest shut, since the clasp had broken.”
“Were Captain Tybalt’s bags there, too?”
“I don’tthinkso.”
“Very well. When you went up on deck, did you leave Johnny and Squibbs with the bags?”
“Yes, I think… No, wait, they went up ahead of me, hauling one of my father’s trunks between them. Not the treasure chest. And my father came up himself a moment or two later.”
Leaving Samuels alone with the treasure… Solomon’s skin prickled with a sense of resolution tantalizingly close. “Did Johnny go straight back down for the next trunk?”
“No, Tybalt shouted him over to the other end of the deck about something or other.”
Was that deliberate? Were Tybalt and Samuels in this together? Was it Tybalt’s revenge for being denied Audrey Lloyd as his wife? Had Audrey eloped with Tybalt? And had Tybalt killed Samuels-Clarke to avoid having to give him any of the treasure? And to leave no witnesses behind…
Were Tybalt and Audrey together in Paris now, selling bits and pieces of treasure to finance the rest of their journey to wherever they wished to go?
He couldalmostsee it. Almost. He could well imagine Audrey’s desire for freedom from this house, where she was neglected and confined as an embarrassing spinster aunt. But he needed Constance’s insight.
And he needed to knowhowthe treasure had got from its original chest into the replica made by Samuels-Clarke during the return voyage. The man might have had time to move the treasure itself—at a pinch—but surely someone would have noticed the fake chest being lugged down there? There seemed to have been nowhere it could have been hidden.
“So when did Johnny and Squibbs bring up the other baggage?” Solomon asked.
“Oh, not long after.”
“In what order?”
“Lord, I don’t remember,” Sydney snapped. “I wasn’t really paying attention—more concerned with getting off the damned ship where I’d been rotting for the better part of a year!”
“How many trunks did you have on board?”
“Just one, and a bag or two.”
“I don’t suppose,” Solomon said without much hope, “that you have the trunk and bags here in this room?”
“I do, as a matter of fact. We seem to have less servants every time I turn around. Discovering the treasure was meant to change all that.”
