Unfeeling wretch.
“I had hoped to locate the young American lady, Miss Flax, who had lately been traveling with the marquise’s daughter. Alas, I fear she has journeyed elsewhere. No matter. I still wish to speak with the marquis.”
“Oh, you all wish to speak with Monsieur le Marquis.” The door closed another inch.
Gabriel wedged his foot in the remaining space. “You misunderstand. I am not a gentleman of the press.” He drew a solid gold card case—a gift from his mother—from his inner jacket pocket and pushed his calling card through the crack.
The steward took the card. “Lord Harrington, is it? My, my. One is able to purchase anything these days, is one not?” He returned the card. “My compliments to your engraver. Beautiful work.”
Another gentleman of Gabriel’s station—his brother, for instance—would have cursed the steward, waved a cane about, made noisy demands. But Gabriel preferred more subtle tactics. He pulled his foot from the threshold. “Merci, monsieur.”
The door thumped shut.
Gabriel was not in the habit of thinking a great deal about what one might term his heart. He had attained the age of thirty-four without anyone in particular stepping forward to claim that organ, and he was glad of it. His academic work consumed him utterly.
Yet, as he spoke to the driver of the hired cabriolet waiting at the curb, his heart constricted—or did it swell?—in his chest. Either way, it was behaving in a most uncomfortable and unaccountable fashion.
He climbed into the cabriolet.
What had he fancied? That he’d discover Miss Flax weak and weeping, that he’d drag her into his arms, rescue her like a knight errant?
Utter piffle. Miss Flax was not, by any stretch of the fancy, a damsel in distress.
His cabriolet rocked forward into the mist.
*
“Looks like they’re changing the lock on the carriageway gate this morning,” Ophelia said to Prue. “A locksmith is fiddling with it.”
“Interesting,” Prue said, and yawned.
“It is interesting.” Ophelia peered through the trickling windowpane. Her—or, properly speaking, Mrs. Brand’s—guest chamber looked down upon the mansion’s rear courtyard. The chamber itself was an Antarctic expanse of creaking parquet, moth-chewed tapestries, furniture with chipped gold paint, and a lopsided canopied bed that smelled of mildew and mouse. However, its windows afforded a bird’s-eye view. Ophelia preferred not to look at the matted vegetable patch, straight down, where they’d found that poor dead girl. But she could just see into the shadowy carriage arch, and a man with a toolbox was changing the gate’s lock. “It’s interesting for a couple of reasons. Prue—are you listening?” She glanced over her shoulder.
“Course I’m listening.” Prue lolled on a brocade sofa. An ottoman-sized ginger cat lay in her lap. Prue popped a butterscotch drop into her mouth. “What’s so mighty interesting about some locksmith?”
“Number one, when we went into the garden that night—”
Prue sucked harder on her butterscotch.
“—well, the gate was open. Not locked. Number two, the police said that they had identified the murderer—”
“Still haven’t found him, though.”
“It has been but two days.”
“Feels like eternity. I got cabin fever, Ophelia.”
Ophelia had cabin fever, too. But there was no use dumping kerosene on a fire. “Listen. The murderer was said to be a derelict who dwells in the streets here. So, he wouldn’t have had a key to the gate.”
“You’re fishing for minnows.”
“Something doesn’t sit right.” Ophelia turned to watch the locksmith some more. “I can’t put my finger on it.”