He stared at her for a moment, his expression caught somewhere between bewildered and amused. “I can’t believe there’s some truth to that rumor. He can’t ever have gotten something that way.”
“He shot a rabbit once. Poor thing wandered past at the wrong time.” She made a face at the memory. “The footmen are sent out with guns of their own, and anything they kill he takes as his own.”
He shook his head and returned his focus to preparing a meal. “Do the others know?”
“If they do, they’re wise enough not to mention it.” She thought about that. “Which is the very same thing as saying no, I suppose.”
“And are
they
ever successful in their hunt?”
“Not regularly, although Mr. Cunningham brings something back from time to time.”
“The ill guest?” he asked, retrieving a fork to whip the eggs.
“Yes. Pity he’s not feeling well. I suspect you’d rather like him.” When he snorted derisively, she continued. “I’m in earnest, actually. He’s tremendously obnoxious, but he’s not an unkind man, and there’s a bit of wit about him—it’s crude, but it’s there.”
“You get on with him, then?”
“I do,” she responded, sounding a little surprised by the admission. “Well—mostly.”
Whit nodded and watched the eggs congeal nicely in the heating pan. “Perhaps I’ll have the chance to take his measure at dinner.”
“Before then, if he decides to go out with the other gentlemen.”
He shook his head. “I’ll not be accompanying the others.”
“You have to. It’s a hunting party, Whit. It would look strange for you not to go. Even Mr. Hartsinger will be going, and he always has a look about him as if he’s not sure which end of the gun to hold.”
Apparently unwilling to search the kitchen over in hopes of finding a clean plate, he picked the pan off the stove and brought it to the table. “It won’t look strange if I plead a sore head after last night.”
“Perhaps not,” she conceded with a smile. “But you will look puny.”
He shrugged, but not before she saw the wince. “Can’t be helped. I need to search your uncle’s room. Eat.”
“Oh, thank you.” She picked up her fork and speared a bite of egg. “If Mr. Cunningham is still ill, you might as well go with the others, because his room is only one over from my uncle’s. I think it might have been the baroness’s room at one point, complete with a connecting door.”
“Damn it.”
She scooped up another bite. “These are really quite good, Whit.”
He merely grunted thoughtfully and stabbed at the food.
“There’s the attic,” she told him. “If he were printing counterfeit bills, he’d need a bit of space to do it, wouldn’t he?”
He looked up at her. “You’re right.”
“Of course, I doubt my uncle has managed the steps to the attic in over a decade,” she added.
He shrugged and took a greater interest in his breakfast. “It could be he has the servants carry things to and from for him and simply has the equipment stored there when others are in residence. It can’t hurt for me to look.”
“For us to look,” she corrected. “And stop scowling at me. You’ve never seen the attic. Believe me, you’ll need the extra set of hands.”
The attic was only accessible by climbing a narrow set of steps off the servants’ wing—and by the layer of dust covering those steps, Mirabelle estimated that no one had hauled anything in or out of the room in a very good while. But after discovering that Mr. Cunningham was still abed with the ague, Whit insisted they wait until the others had left, then forge ahead.
They climbed the dirty stairs and pushed open the door.
Trunks, crates, boxes, cloth bags, furniture, and every other item one might imagine finding in an attic was, in fact, to be found in that attic. They were stacked and piled and tossed about haphazardly so that the room looked something of a maze—a dusty, cobweb-ridden maze.
“Won’t this be fun,” Mirabelle said with a wry twist of her lips.
“It will certainly be time-consuming.”
“We can’t look through it all. The others will be back in only a few hours. They’re really not that dedicated to the sport.”
“Concentrate on the crates and trunks near the front of the room,” he instructed as he moved off to the side. “Keep an eye out for anything locked.”
She shrugged and picked a trunk at random. The lid opened with a load groan and a cloud of dust. She erupted into a fit of sneezing. When she finally recovered, Whit was standing over her holding out his handkerchief.
“Here you are,” he said. “Better?”
“Than what?” she laughed, and took the cloth to wipe her watering eyes. “Thank you.”
He shook his head when she tried to hand it back. “Keep it, hold it up to your nose and mouth the next time you open one of the trunks.”
“What of you?”
“I’ll manage,” he said and walked back to his crate before she could argue.
They worked in silence for the next two hours, moving from trunk to trunk and crate to crate. As she dug through another pile of moldering men’s clothing, Mirabelle came across a large lidded jar rolled up in a pair of breeches.
“How odd,” she murmured to herself. Odder yet, there was a folded piece of paper inside.
She took the lid off and tried to pull the paper free, but it was stuck to the bottom and the jar was so deep she couldn’t do more than grasp at the paper with her fingertips. She twisted her wrist and pushed until her hand popped through with a small sucking sound.
Yes !
She grasped the edge of the paper with her fingers and slowly peeled it back from the bottom. Miraculously, it came off in one piece.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
She pulled her hand back…and the bottle came back with it. Annoyed, she gripped the glass with her free hand and pulled. Nothing.
No.
She pulled harder, twisted her hand and wiggled her fingers. She tried yanking, tugging, gripping the jar by the rim and pushing. Nothing.
No! No! No!
She gaped at her hand, utterly appalled. It
had
to come out. It had gone through, hadn’t it? Why the devil couldn’t she get it back out again? She tried again, twisting her wrist this way and that, until finally admitting defeat. There was no possible way to get herself out of this ridiculous situation without help. She took a deep breath and concentrated on not sounding anxious.
“Er…Whit?” There, that sounded nonchalant, didn’t it? She’d hesitated a bit, but she didn’t think he’d noticed.
“Yes, what is it?” With his head still in a trunk, his voice sounded muffled and distracted.
“I was wondering…” Oh dear, how to put it? She licked lips gone dry. “I was wondering…”
Alerted by her hesitation, he emerged from the box and glanced over.
“Did you find something?”
“Not exactly,” she hedged.
Rising, he brushed his dusty hands on his dusty coat. “What do you mean by ‘not exactly’? What are you hiding, imp?”
“I’m not hiding anything,” she said automatically. “Not exactly…Well, I
am,
to be honest, but it hasn’t anything to do with my uncle or a counterfeiting operation, or—”
“I don’t much care what it’s about. I just want to know what it is.”
Damn and blast.
“Oh, all right.” She blew out a hard breath, only a little bit because she felt she needed to, but mostly just to stall. “I was trying…that is, I was attempting to reach something, you see, something stuck and…well, I hadn’t realized…”
“Out with it, imp.”
Resigned, miserable, she pulled her hand out from behind her back and held it up in front of her. She wanted, very badly at that moment, to hang her head in an aggravating mix of shame and apology, but pride kept her from dropping her chin. It might have shifted—along with her eyes—a little to the side in an effort to avoid eye contact, but that couldn’t be helped.
He didn’t react at first except to blink, clasp his hands behind his back, and run his tongue slowly over his teeth.
“I see,” he finally said.
“It won’t budge,” she grumbled, still unable to meet his eyes.
“Yes, I assumed that was why it was there.”
“And I can’t very well go back out there like this.”
“You certainly can’t.”
Annoyed by his continuing lack of reaction she dropped her hand and huffed. “Aren’t you going to laugh at me?”
“I certainly will.”
“Well, do you think you might trouble yourself to get on with it, so we can move on to the matter of—?” She wagged her bottle-hand at him.
“In good time. I want to be able to properly appreciate the moment. And this room—and our being in it together—place certain constrictions on the volume and length of that appreciation.”
“Would you please just fetch some soap and water, Whit?”
“Of course,” he replied, his lips twitching. “Wait here.”
“Where else would I go like this?” she muttered, as he left.
It seemed to take forever for him to return again—long enough, in fact, for her to give serious consideration to wrapping her hand in an old shirt and seeking him out. If she could have come up with a single reasonable explanation for having her hand wrapped in a shirt, should one of the servants notice and inquire after it, she would have done it.
“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find soap in this house?” Whit demanded when he finally returned carrying a bar of soap and a small basin of water.
“Some,” she answered. “As I’ve been waiting here like this while you searched.”
“I assumed there’d be some in one of the closets on the servants’ floor, but I couldn’t find a single one that wasn’t filled to the ceiling with other things…tools and books and old clothes and nearly everything but what really ought to be in those closets.”
“Like soap.”
“Like soap,” he agreed, as he knelt to set his burden at her feet. “And brooms and the usual cleaning supplies. Where do they keep all that?”
“They don’t, mostly, though some of it can be found in the kitchen.” She motioned with her free hand. “Where did you find that?”
“I had to go to my room. Sit on the trunk and let me see your hand.”
She considered telling him she could do it herself, but then realized with only one free hand, she probably couldn’t. Not as quickly as he could, and speed was of the essence when one’s hand was stuck in a bottle.
She sat on the trunk. “Did anyone see you or ask what you were doing poking into closets?”
“Nary a soul. I heard snoring coming from several of the servants’ quarters, however. Why does your uncle keep them on?”
She shrugged and watched him lather the soap. “No one else will work for him.”
“Ah.” He reached for her elbow and held her arm out as he ran the soap around her wrist.
“Whit?”
“Hmm?”
“I was wondering…”
“Wondering what?”
“I wanted to ask you before, but, between this, that, and the other—”
He looked up from his task. “What is it you want to know?”
“What is it you do, exactly, for William Fletcher? And how did you come to be doing…what ever it is you do?”
He went back to soaping her wrist. “You shouldn’t know anything about it.”
“A little late for that,” she reminded him. “I answered your questions last night. And it wasn’t something I cared to do.”
He was quiet for a long moment, until Mirabelle began to think he wasn’t going to respond at all, but then he set the soap down and began to use his fingers to rub the soap into her skin.
“I work, on occasion,” he told her softly, “as an agent for the War Department, of which William is the head.”
“Oh. Is he really?” She frowned in thought. “All this time, I thought he was simply a friend of the family.”
“He is a friend of the family. He just also happens to command a small army of spies.”
“Is that what you are? A spy?”
“Not exactly,” he responded, and with enough coolness that she knew he wasn’t going to elaborate any further on that topic. So she tried another.
“Is it often dangerous?”
“Not often, no. Certainly not more so than fighting a war.”
“Why do you do it? You’ve so much responsibility already.”
“I wish to give my family something they can be proud of.”
“They are proud of you,” she pointed out. “They’re immensely proud of you. You’re very nearly the perfect son, brother, and lord of the manner. Bit annoying, actually.”
“Why thank you,” he replied easily. “This is different. It’s…bigger. It’s something I can pass down to my sons—
should I be blessed with them. It’s a legacy that can overcome several centuries of shame.”
“You’re ashamed of your heritage?” she asked with some surprise.
“I believe you met my father on several occasions,” he said dryly. “Though he was rarely home.”
She frowned at him. “He seemed a jovial enough man. I know he wasn’t the most responsible of men, but—”
“The rumors you’ve heard scarcely touched on his sins. He was a useless combination of dandy and rakehell with no care for anyone but himself. He wasn’t killed in a fall from his horse as is commonly believed. He died in a duel over an opera singer.”
“Oh.” Good Lord, she’d no idea. “I’m sorry.”
“Ah, well. He’s gone now and few people know the truth. Fewer still whose stories would be given more weight than my own accounting of events. Your uncle knows.”
“He does?”
“Yes, as do some of his guests. They ran in some of the same circles, you see, but as I said, no one cares to gainsay the Earl of Thurston these days. Not loud enough to cause concern, at any rate.”
But there were rumors of the truth, she knew. She remembered the whispers in the ballrooms and parlors right after the earl’s death, but like everyone else, she’d brushed them aside as petty gossip. Whit hadn’t had that luxury, she realized now. He never would.
“I am sorry, Whit.”
“As I said,” he replied taking hold of her elbow and the glass. “It’s over and done.”
He pulled her arm gently and her hand slid free of the jar.
“Oh.” She flexed her fingers experimentally.
“Does it hurt?” he asked, rubbing her wrist with the pad of his thumb.
“No.” It felt the very opposite. His touch sent her nerves to humming. “It feels…fine.”