Chapter Five #2
“Well,” Fletcher-Ford said, his tone still pleasant, “he sounds like a right wanker, so I don’t think we need worry much about what he thinks.” He inclined his head and added, “Shall we?” and Georgie, who was mildly flabbergasted, allowed him to lead her down the road.
They continued to make steady progress down the high street.
It became more crowded as they approached the heart of the village, which boasted a post office, the Shorn Sheep and its rival pub, the Fleecy Lamb (there was a decades-long dispute over which pub had been inspired by the other’s name), the stationer, the butcher, and a few other shops.
The village school must have just let out, for a gaggle of children of various ages came careening toward them, shouting like banshees.
Georgie suppressed the urge to shudder; she greatly preferred children when they didn’t travel in packs.
“You’ve lived here all your life?” Fletcher-Ford asked as they hopped to the side to avoid being trampled by eight-year-olds.
Georgie nodded. “I was sent to Bath to a girls’ school for a few years—my sister was, too—but then I came home again as soon as I’d finished.”
“And you never wanted to leave? Other than for school, I mean?”
There was nothing in his tone beyond faint curiosity, but Georgie stiffened all the same. “It’s very nice here,” she said a bit haughtily.
“Undoubtedly,” he agreed. “So many cottages. So many lovely young wives. Dare I ask if there’s some special treatment in the water here, to produce such fine female specimens?”
Georgie stopped in her tracks. “Mr. Fletcher-Ford—”
“I think you ought to call me Sebastian,” he said. “If we’re to be giving the impression that I’m an old family friend.”
“I’ve no intention of doing any such thing,” she said, sounding a bit like a Regency damsel making her debut on the marriage mart.
Which was ridiculous—they were in the middle of Gloucestershire.
Buncombe-upon-Woolly was hardly a village that was rigorous in terms of its forms of social address—it would be hard to be when the patriarch of the local landed gentry was commonly spotted wandering around in his Wellington boots with a newspaper held before his face, receiving alarmed shouts of warning from his fellow villagers if he came close to stepping in front of a bicycle or the occasional motorcar.
(Georgie had had a stern conversation with her father on this matter on multiple occasions, but that had not prevented things from progressing to the point that he had walked directly into a postbox a month earlier.)
“All right,” he said easily. “I shall be calling you Georgiana, then.”
“No one calls me Georgiana.” At least not if they wanted to escape without bodily injury. She’d been named after her aunt, who was endlessly elegant and had been married three times, to increasingly wealthy (though decreasingly handsome) men. She was Georgiana.
Georgie was… Georgie.
“No one but me.” He offered her what he clearly considered to be a winning smile.
“If I call you Sebastian, will you call me Georgie?” she asked reluctantly.
“Or Miss Radcliffe,” he offered, all innocence. “Whichever you prefer, really—though the former is probably best for the purposes of our ruse.”
“I would prefer to push you into the river,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Then shall we continue our tour, so that we might approach the mighty Woolly and give you just the opportunity your heart desires?”
“My aunt has been married three times and never committed homicide,” Georgie informed him as they resumed their meandering pace down the high street. “I never appreciated what a remarkable feat that was until this moment.”
“That’s the spirit, Georgie! That’s the spirit!”
By the time Georgie had shown Mr. Fletcher-Ford—Sebastian—the school, the chocolate shop, the post office, the butcher’s, the grocer’s, and the Dozing Dragonfly, the village’s only other inn, he professed to have worked up a powerful thirst.
“You drank an entire pot of tea three hours ago,” she informed him stonily as they made their way toward the Shorn Sheep, which was beckoning them invitingly as the afternoon turned chilly, gray clouds scuttling across the sky on a cold breeze. June in England could be annoyingly tempestuous.
“Precisely,” he said, holding the door to the pub open for her. “That’s far too long to go without a drink.”
Georgie considered a retort, but in this case, she, too, had worked up a thirst, and so swept past him into the pub and seated herself in a cozy corner booth.
“You may buy me a cider,” she informed Sebastian, like a queen granting a favor to a subject, and he looked precisely as delighted as she might have expected.
“Usually I have to work a bit harder than that to get a pretty girl to let me buy her a drink,” he said, and bounded off toward the bar, Georgie glaring daggers at his retreating back.
She thought back to just the week before when she had sat in this very pub, thinking hopefully of the promise of a famous detective coming to help her investigation.
She had expected someone who could leap in and take matters in hand, full of brilliant theories, a keen investigator.
Instead, she was faced with a dreadful flirt who had not offered a single idea on how to solve this mystery, and who seemed more interested in eating baked goods and winking at pretty women than he did in solving a murder.
It was dispiriting.
He materialized before her, bearing two pints of cider, and proceeded to settle himself opposite her. He looked irritatingly pleased with the state of the world and his place in it.
“So?” Georgie prompted.
He looked at her inquiringly.
“So?” he repeated pleasantly.
“Have you had any brilliant insights? That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? A sophisticated man of the city, here to show us country simpletons how to solve a murder?”
Sebastian took a sip of cider. “I would never presume to tell a woman her own mind, but I can’t help feeling that you don’t like me very much.”
“Everyone else likes you plenty,” Georgie said, taking a grumpy sip of her own drink. “They can make up for whatever adoration I am insufficient in displaying.”
“I find it rather refreshing, truth be told,” he said. “Some women are simply too easy to charm, you know—it takes all the sport out of it.”
“They’re not foxes.”
“Women and foxes, Georgie, are more alike than you might think.”
“Don’t you have work to be doing here? How are you going to help us solve a murder if you’re chasing after every female with a distracting pelt? What would Mr. Fitzgibbons have to say about that?”
He looked suddenly shifty, which naturally caused Georgie’s attention to sharpen on him. “He would not be… entirely surprised,” he hedged.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that I may have recently found myself… entangled in a personal matter… with a lady who happens to also be… matrimonially entangled… with someone at Scotland Yard.”
Georgie wasn’t fooled by these linguistic gymnastics for a second. “You had an affair with a policeman’s wife?” she hissed. “What is wrong with you?”
“A question my family has often had cause to ask themselves,” he said reflectively. “And I shall simply say to you what I said to my sister when she learned of this predicament: the lady in question was extremely pretty.”
Georgie blinked at him—and then, suddenly, a dark suspicion set upon her. “This is why you’re here, isn’t it?”
He arched a single eyebrow at her in a rakishly charming sort of way. Georgie was not remotely charmed. “My dear Georgie, I am here to help you solve the latest in a plague of homicides that has befallen your idyllic countryside home.”
“But this is why you, specifically, are here,” she insisted, feeling more certain of the truth by the second. “You caused a mess and immediately fled town?”
He sighed. “It wasn’t an enormous scandal—the police lieutenant in question wanted it kept quiet—but Fitzgibbons was annoyed about the whole thing.
He’s on thin ice with Scotland Yard at the best of times, since they’ve butted heads in the past, and he was threatening to let me go, so I showed him your letter and volunteered to spend a few weeks in the countryside until matters died down.
He thought if the lieutenant was under the impression that I’d been reprimanded somehow, he might not kick up too much of a fuss when I reappear. ”
Georgie snorted. “Are you really that good of an assistant?” Her tone was extremely skeptical; nothing that she’d witnessed so far evidenced a particularly keen investigative mind.
“Secretary.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m his secretary, not his assistant,” Sebastian said, raising his glass to take another sip. “I—you know—handle his correspondence. Answer the telephone. Maintain his calendar.” He waved a hand vaguely. “That sort of thing.”
Georgie’s jaw dropped, though she wrenched it closed a moment later.
She set her pint glass down with a deliberate thunk.
“Let me be certain I understand this,” she said evenly.
“I wrote to Mr. Fitzgibbons explaining that we’d had a string of murders in a village that had not seen a murder in the previous three decades, and that I was concerned that the death of our council chairman might not be of natural causes, and instead of taking these concerns seriously and coming himself, he sent us a womanizing secretary who can’t keep his thoughts on the matter at hand for more than five minutes at a stretch before the next tantalizing lady catches his eye? ”
“I don’t think that’s entirely—”
“Well, I do.” Georgie stood up. “Thank you for the drink, Mr. Fletcher-Ford—but I believe our work here is done.”
“I say, Geor—Miss Radcliffe,” he amended hastily, at least wise enough to read whatever flashed across her face at that moment. “I thought we were to be partners!”
Georgie leaned forward and rested her hands on the surface of the table, meeting his eyes directly.
“The only sort of partner I mean to be to you,” she said, “is the sort who assists a shiny-shoed man from out of town in finding the next train back to London.” She nodded toward the bar.
“I believe Harry often has a copy of the timetable at hand.”
She straightened, whistled for Egg—who had been snoozing beneath the table during this entire conversation, unperturbed by her mistress’s metaphorical ruffled feathers—and said simply, “Goodbye, Mr. Fletcher-Ford. It has been a…” Here, manners failed her, and after a moment’s consideration, she concluded with, “An event.”
And then she turned and swept from the pub, hoping with every fiber of her being that she would never lay eyes on that useless man again.
This was her last, comforting thought before something collided with the back of her head with heavy force, and Georgie tumbled to the ground.