The Water Nymph: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book Two Page 16

  “It doesn’t look like a joke to me,” she mumbled with her mouth full. “Did it come with the rock?”

  Crispin nodded. “Through the window. Schoolboy stuff. No one would send a real threat like that. My god, you were not jesting about being hungry.”

  Sophie smiled at him with her mouth full of her third biscuit, then frowned as she looked down at the paper. “What are you going to do?” she asked finally, between chews.

  “First, I am going to wipe the crumbs of my breakfast from your face. Then I am going to ignore the note.”

  Sophie’s frown deepened. “I would not recommend that. You cannot be sure they are not serious. I think you should cease your investigation.”

  Crispin, who was trying to erect a barricade between Sophie and the biscuits before his breakfast was demolished, stopped suddenly and raised one eyebrow at her. “Is that what you would counsel? An end to my investigation?”

  Sophie nodded, reaching around the pillow that had mysteriously appeared in front of the tray. “Absolutely.”

  Crispin’s expression grew grave. “Miss Champion, I little expected this of you. Underhanded tactics like these.” He shook his head sadly.

  Sophie ceased the contortions she was engaged in to reach the biscuits without falling off the bed long enough to demand, “What do you mean?”

  “Do not bother to deny it. Clearly you hoped to win the bet by scaring me off.”

  “You think I had this note, this rock sent?” Sophie was outraged. “You accuse me of cheating? Of—”

  Crispin broke into a wide grin, and Sophie saw that he was joking. And that he was handsome. Very handsome. And very troublesome. “You—you—” she said, struggling for the right word.

  “Bastard?” Crispin offered.

  “Bedbug,” Sophie countered, poking him with her finger. “You were making fun of me.”

  “It was the only way to keep you from eating all the biscuits,” Crispin replied, putting the last one, dripping deliciously with raspberry preserves, into his mouth entire.

  Sophie had to look away from him as he chewed, not because she was upset at the loss of the biscuit, but because the small dab of jam on his chin was making her think about what it would feel like to lick it off, which made her think about kissing him, which made her think about having him touch her, which made her think about the previous night, which made it impossible to think about anything else. And she had something else to think about.

  Crispin had only just swallowed when she addressed him, checking first from the corner of her eye to ensure that he had rid his chin of the distraction. “What did Thurston mean about ‘your appointments’?” she asked, apparently nonchalant.

  “Nothing,” Crispin replied, licking jam from his fingertips. “Just a few things I must see to today.”

  It almost worked. Sophie was almost too overwhelmed by watching his mouth on his fingers and imagining it on her fingers to notice the slight pause before he answered. But not quite. Her expression was grave as she said, “Lord Sandal, I little expected this of you. Underhanded tactics.” She waved a hand in disgust. Crispin appeared ready to speak, but she went on over him. “Do not bother to deny it. Clearly you are trying to win our bet by lying to me.”

  Crispin rolled his eyes, then gave a resigned sigh. “You are correct. My appointments are part of the investigation. I sent letters to a handful of Richard Tottle’s subscribers informing them that I was considering taking over his printing business and wanted to discuss the terms of their subscription with them before I made my final decision.”

  Sophie’s expression had changed entirely. “My lord, that is a marvelous plan. I thought all along there was something suspicious about the subscriptions, and now we will know for certain.”

  “I will know for certain. You will not be there.”

  Sophie’s expression changed again, this time to a glower. “Why not? What will stop me?”

  “A warrant from the Queen’s constables and a bounty of two hundred pounds on your head as an escaped prisoner, for starters,” Crispin replied, unruffled. “Do not forget that you are a wanted criminal, with the hangman’s rope practically around your neck. If I were you, I would not be so eager to show myself in public.”

  Sophie screwed up her eyes and scrunched her nose at him, and Crispin was glad to note that he had her stymied. He ignored the faces she was making as he brushed crumbs from the coverlet. Had he not turned to deposit the tray on a nearby table, he would have seen the dangerous smile spreading slowly across her face and would have been alerted to what was coming. As it was, he was completely unprepared and almost dropped the tray when he heard himself addressed in a thick Spanish accent.

  “Don Alfonso, who fortunately abandoned his clothes here the other night, thanks His Lordship for his concern, but assures him his identity will trouble no one.”

  Crispin was already shaking his head vehemently before he turned around. “Absolutely not. No,” he said, moving back toward the bed and cursing himself for underestimating her.

  “Why not? Or was the threat of being taken by the constables merely a cover for your real fear that I will solve the murder before you do?”

  Crispin was determined not to let himself be goaded. “Your disguise is wretched. Anyone could recognize you from across the county of Kent.”

  Sophie sneered at him. “Nobody at the Unicorn recognized me.”

  “I did,” Crispin pointed out sensibly.

  “Perhaps, but you are uniquely pernicious. Besides,” she added, kicking off the covers, “what have you got to lose by letting me try? If I am identified, then I will be sent back to prison and you will win the bet. The only possible reason for your reluctance is that you recognize my superior wit and fear to lose.”

  At that moment, as she lay stretched out naked on his sheets. Crispin recognized only her superior annoyingness. His professional instinct was once again aroused, and it pointed out to him that letting her sit in on the appointments would only solidify the trust he was hoping to breed in her and provide an opening for the questions he meant to ask. Not to mention that it would give him an opportunity to observe her, closely, in breeches.

  “Very well, Miss Champion, you win your point. Don Alfonso can attend the meetings. On two conditions.” Sophie looked skeptical, but Crispin pressed on. “First, you will sit quietly and say nothing. And second, you must let me choose your mustache.”

  Four hours later, Crispin Foscari, the Earl of Sandal, and his Spanish secretary, Don Alfonso, closed their second-to-last interview. They had learned several interesting things, among them that Sir Ichibald Riff thought the only thing worth talking about was his new wife, forty-six years his junior and feisty as a jaybird; that Lady Elery never went anywhere without her pet terrier, Carlyle, or her pet nephew, Gordon; that Carlyle was not partial to ravens, and that Gordon was partial to his aunt’s money and thought that spending any of it on “that Richard Tottle trash” was nonsense; and that the Duke of Groat was partial to Crispin’s French brandy. Sophie, in her capacity as secretary, dutifully recorded all of these pieces of information, and two dozen others, none of which gave the faintest glimpse into the mechanics of Richard Tottle’s subscription service. All three of the interviewees insisted that they had subscribed to Richard Tottle’s news service because they wanted to stay informed of Queen Elizabeth’s doings, although Sir Ichibald eventually admitted he had done it at the urging of his wife, who wanted to improve herself for him. “Not that I married her for her brains,” he leered, and Crispin had been forced to laugh in order to cover Sophie’s growl.

  The interviews had taken place in Crispin’s library, and it was there that Sophie and Crispin awaited their final caller. None of the interviewees had cast so much as a suspicious glance in Sophie’s direction, a fact she was careful to mention to Crispin after each of the appointments, to which
he retaliated that it was all because of the mustache.

  Sophie had not batted an eye earlier when Thurston appeared with an enormous case filled with fake hairpieces, from which Crispin had selected a discreet mustache for her, thin and curling at the ends, which he hoped would be unflattering and therefore undistracting. Crispin had fobbed off her questions about why an earl would need such a number of disguises with an excuse about boyhood theatricals, and she little realized that she was now wearing a piece of the Phoenix’s elaborate collection of costumes, the collection that allowed him to move among European capitals without ever being recognized. She was, however, rather smitten with the hairpiece, and in particular with the fact that, unlike its predecessor, it did not itch at all.

  “You will have to tell Octavia what is in this mustache glue,” she commented to Crispin when the door had closed behind a slightly unsteady Duke of Groat. “Her recipe was not nearly as good, and it gave me an allergy.”

  Crispin, who had risen and passed through the door that led to the privy, groaned. “Please do not make me imagine that you intend to spend much more of your time traipsing around London bemustached. The city can hardly stand the gallants that swarm the streets now,” he said over his shoulder, shutting the door behind him.

  Sophie’s retort was canceled by the arrival of a fashionably short, fashionably coiffed, fashionably painted, voluptuously endowed woman of middle age, swathed in dark green silk.

  “Lady Dolores Artly,” Thurston announced, then bowed himself out of the room.

  Lady Artly ran her heavily lined eyes around the large library until they came to rest on Sophie, who was contentedly twirling her mustache in a chair against the far wall. A small, seductive smile played over Lady Artly’s tinted lips as she approached Sophie’s chair and then curtsied. When she arose, one of her layers of green silk slipped deliberately to reveal a large expanse of powdered bosom. “It is such a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lord Sandal,” she purred.

  It took Sophie only a fraction of a second to decide on a course of action. “The pleasure, Lady Artly, is all mine,” she said, pitching her voice low, and manfully gesturing the lady into a seat next to hers.

  “The pleasure is all mine,” Grip the raven squawked, making Lady Artly jump in her chair and throw herself into Sophie’s arms.

  “Do not fear, Lady Artly, it is just a bird,” Sophie murmured in a deep voice, trying to extricate her arm from her companion’s grasp while sending a warning glance in the direction of the raven, which, she could have sworn, winked at her.

  “Please, please call me Dolores,” Lady Artly begged, once she was sufficiently recovered. “I have long been such an admirer of yours, Lord Sandal.” If there had been any question of the direction of Lady Artly’s interest in the Earl of Sandal, it was resolved as she leaned close to Sophie, led her hand toward the ample bosom, and whispered in her ear, “I have often thought we could find such enjoyment in one another’s company. Two people of the world such as you and I.”

  Sophie, who wondered if this sort of thing happened to the Earl of Sandal every day, was spared having to respond by Crispin’s return to the room, eliciting another chorus of “The pleasure is mine” from Grip. Lady Artly withdrew quickly, dropping Sophie’s hand and pulling the green silk back over some small part of her bosom. “Who is that man?” she asked sharply.

  Sophie smiled reassuringly, as she imagined Crispin would. “There is nothing to worry about, Dolores,” she said in her low voice. “That is only my secretary, Don Alfonso.” Crispin had opened his mouth, but Sophie shot him a look that silenced him. “He is here merely to record our conversation and will not speak.”

  Lady Artly looked Crispin up and down, with an expression that made it clear he did not meet her idea of a fashionable secretary. “I would rather we were alone, Lord Sandal,” she said finally, the sharpness gone from her voice and the purr back in place. “I have such a lot to confide in you, and Spaniards make me nervous. Could you not dismiss him? For me?”

  Crispin blinked twice to make sure he was seeing what he was seeing, since he could not possibly be hearing what he was hearing, but lost all capacity for blinking as Sophie turned to him and said sternly, “Go, Don Alfonso. I will ring for you when I need you.”

  “Go, Don Alfonso,” Grip piped in, hopping on one foot. “Get the girl.”

  “Listen,” Crispin began, moving toward the two women. “I—”

  Thurston’s entrance cut him off midsentence, to Sophie’s great relief. “I beg your pardon, my lord,” the steward said, addressing the room generally, “but there is a personage below who desires to see you.”

  Sophie seized the opportunity. Turning her head completely from Lady Artly, she gave Crispin a huge grin. “Don Alfonso, I would be much obliged if you would attend to that matter and leave me to see to our charming guest.”

  Sophie, who did not know that there was a peephole into the library through which everything that passed in there could be seen and heard, was surprised and pleased by Crispin’s acquiescence. Indeed, taking his cue from Thurston, he did not even bat an eyelid as he bowed and said, “Very good, my lord,” then followed his steward from the room.

  When they were alone together again, Lady Artly resumed her leaning position. “You handled that man with such mastery, my lord,” she praised Sophie. “You are frightfully powerful.”

  “Frightfully powerful,” Grip chirped. “Frightfully, frightfully, frightfully.”

  Sophie rose from her seat abruptly in order to avoid the pair of lips that had somehow wended their way toward her. “Yes, well,” she said in an offhanded baritone as she moved toward the raven’s cage to give the bird a stern look, “someone has to be.” She began to pace the library twirling her mustache, trying to remember now how Crispin had begun the earlier interviews, and relieved that the raven seemed to have gotten her hint and was now dozing with its head under its wing. “Tell me, Dolores, did you enjoy your subscription to Richard Tottle’s News at Court?”

  “No, I most certainly did not.”

  Sophie stopped her pacing and mustache twirling. This was the first less than positive reaction they had gotten to their questions about Richard Tottle’s broadside, and possibly the first clue as to its strange machinations. Sophie tried not to seem too excited, lest she scare the clue away. “I am sorry to hear that. Was it the content you objected to?”

  Lady Artly’s face assumed a pained expression. “It is such a painful subject for me to talk about. Won’t you come sit down next to me again?”

  Sophie returned to the seat she had left and submitted to having her hand raised to Lady Artly’s cheek.

  “I only tell you this because I know you will understand,” Lady Artly began, fluttering her false eyelashes. “It is such a terrible thing to have to admit. You can imagine how I feel.”

  Sophie, whose hand was now being pressed to Lady Artly’s breast, did not have to leave much to her imagination to know exactly how Lady Artly, or at least her skin, felt. She nodded sympathetically.

  “Oh, Lord Sandal, it is awful. It was not I, but my husband, Harry, who subscribed to those wretched papers. I knew when it started, when the meringues began to come, that something was amiss. You see, Harry hates sweets, yet he was paying that baker, Sweetson, a hundred pounds a month for those dreadful French confections. And whenever I asked him about it, he told me to mind my own business.”

  Sophie, who had little experience with how a married couple negotiated the ordering of pastries, was having trouble comprehending the problem, but she tried to look as though she understood. “I can imagine how hard that was for you.”

  “Can you?” Lady Artly brought her face very close to Sophie’s. “Yes, I suppose, Lord Sandal, you can. You are such an understander of women. You can see how difficult it would be for a woman like me.”

  Lady Artly made a move to cares
s Sophie’s cheek, but Sophie pulled away slightly, pretending to cough. She did not know how stalwart the mustache paste was and was not about to put it to the test of being caressed.

  “Oh, dear, are you ill, my lord?” Lady Artly asked with great solicitude. “Let me cradle your head—”

  Sophie stopped coughing abruptly. “No, no, it is just a cold I got from being out in the rain. Nothing to worry about. Tell me, what did you do when the meringues began to arrive?”

  Lady Artly looked despondent. “Nothing. What could I do? Besides, the meringues stopped coming for a few months, and I thought perhaps Harry had seen his error. But then, then those dreadful papers started.”

  Sophie had not been able to read much of the broadside printed by Richard Tottle that had arrived through the window that morning, but nothing about it appeared to warrant the description “dreadful.” “You mean Richard Tottle’s papers?”

  “No, no, those came later. No, I mean”—Lady Artly took a deep breath—“The Lady’s Guide to Italian Fashion. Harry, reading a fashion broadside. It was all so clear then.”

  Lady Artly’s voice had begun to quiver, and Sophie understood that while nothing was clear to her, something was clearly wrong. “Lady Artly—Dolores,” Sophie said in a low voice, but the woman stopped her with a hand.

  “Please. Save your condolences, your excuses. I know when my husband is having an affair. There is no other explanation. First the French sweets, then the Italian fashions. He has a mistress stashed somewhere, I am sure of it. And I think she must be one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Why else would he take Richard Tottle’s paper, but to look for the name of his mistress in its pages?”

  Sophie opened her mouth to speak and was again stopped. “No, I know what you would say. You would say that no man who was married to a woman with such looks, such style as I myself possess, would have a mistress. That I am all the woman he, or any man, would ever want. And you would not be the first to say so. But Harry is ungrateful and unrefined. He does not know what a prize he has in me. He is not like you. He does not appreciate me as you do. That is why I came to you today.”