Chapter Eleven #2
They spent several minutes making as thorough a search as they could manage of the surrounding shelves, which were piled with all sorts of clutter, before Sebastian muttered a triumphant “Aha!” and brandished what appeared to be a Christmas-themed candelabra, the base wrapped in paper ivy and papier-maché holly berries.
He produced a matchbook from his pocket—“Never know when an attractive woman will need a light from a handsome gentleman!”—and a moment later, newly able to see, they leaned forward to begin reading The Deathly Dispatch.
“… grisly hotbed of crime,” Georgie muttered, her eyes scanning the page.
“… can only speculate about what dark forces are at work here… perhaps it is the police themselves, trying to create work…” She looked up at Sebastian, who was, she realized, trying not to laugh.
“For heaven’s sake. These are conspiracy theories. ”
Sebastian nodded, schooling his expression into something approaching gravity. “They are. Though, in the interest of fairness, I suppose that one could accuse you, dear Georgie, of harboring similar ones.”
Georgie gaped at him. “That’s not remotely the same! I was just—”
“Asking questions?” he asked innocently, pointing to the bottom line of the newsletter.
Georgie squinted down at it in the dim light, and read, “ ‘We do not profess to accuse anyone of a crime—we are simply asking questions, as concerned citizens. And we wonder how long it will be before the residents of Buncombe-upon-Woolly realize that their lives might be easier in a neighboring, less violent village.’ ”
“I wonder if they’ve real estate holdings they’re trying to hawk,” Sebastian said thoughtfully.
“I wouldn’t put it past them,” Georgie said darkly. “This is lunacy. This entire village is full of lunatics.”
“Feels a bit pot-kettle,” he said. “I don’t notice any resident sheep on their village green, after all.
” For some reason this made Georgie laugh—truly laugh, the sort of loose, unconstrained sound that she hadn’t thought him capable of drawing from her.
She saw surprise register on his face for a moment, replaced just as quickly by slow-dawning delight.
He began to smile, and this made her laugh harder for another second or two before she got herself under control.
Even when her laughter ceased, however, his smile lingered.
“Fair point,” she managed, once her laughter had subsided. “Shall we try to escape, then?”
“I expect we ought to,” he agreed, and this time they both laughed.
Within a few minutes, however, they were feeling decidedly less amused.
“It shouldn’t be so hard to break out of a cellar,” she said, standing with her hands on her hips and scowling at the door at the top of the stairs they’d been trying to force their way out of without any success for a few minutes now. “It’s not as though it was designed to hold captives!”
“We’re hardly operating under optimal circumstances,” Sebastian pointed out. “You went out without a hairpin, which I believe ought to be illegal for any lady claiming to be an amateur sleuth—”
“All right, then, if you’d like to produce your hairpin any second now, I’d be delighted,” Georgie said, nettled.
“And there’s a dead bolt, in addition to the lock on the doorknob. Hardly ideal for an easy lockpick.”
“I expect Arthur and Miss de Vere and Miss Singh will raise the alarm once they notice we’ve vanished,” Georgie said, before a horrifying thought struck her. “Unless—oh God, you don’t think Mr. Lettercross has murdered them, has he?”
“Definitely not,” Sebastian reassured her, and he reached out, for just a moment, and squeezed her hand, the strength and warmth of his hand strangely soothing.
“They’re Murder Tourists—the golden goose!
He’s no doubt hoping they’ll up sticks and settle in the village; he’s not going to murder them. ”
“But when they do raise the alarm,” Georgie said, “do we really think that Miss Lettercross will say, ‘Oh gosh, we didn’t realize Miss Radcliffe was with the Murder Tourists, let’s let her out immediately!’ ” She shook her head. “We could be trapped down here for ages.”
She sank down on the bottom step and, after a moment’s hesitation, patted the spot next to her.
He took the invitation; the steps were narrow enough that their bodies were pressed against each other, the heat of his skin evident through both her clothing and his.
Nonetheless, she didn’t shift away, and neither did he.
“I expect Fitzgibbons has been in dozens of situations like this and made his way out,” she said, feeling a bit glum. If she couldn’t escape from a cellar, she honestly didn’t think she was cut out for the life of a detective.
There was a slightly longer pause than she expected, and she slid a sideways glance at him; he was frowning.
“He has,” he said at last, and Georgie looked at him expectantly.
She knew that he must be aware of her head turned toward him, her gaze on his face, but he continued to look straight ahead and at last heaved a sigh—the sound was weary, and resigned, and completely out of character for him.
Or, at least, for who she thought he was; she was beginning to think her impression of him might not be at all accurate.
“Fitzgibbons is… well, he’s been doing this a long time,” he said, still not looking at her. “When I began to work for him, his prior secretary warned me that Fitzgibbons was, if not precisely work-shy, then certainly uninterested in any investigations that were overly taxing.”
“But,” Georgie protested, “all those famous cases! He solved the Case of the Acton Arsenic Ring! And the Strand Shoplifting Spree!”
“Yes,” Sebastian agreed. “He did—fifteen years ago, or more. He’s too much of a spendthrift to retire—you should see what he spends on pipe tobacco alone—”
“Alarming testimony, indeed, coming from a man with a jumper for every day of the year,” Georgie interrupted, but there was no heat to the words, and a quick glance showed that Sebastian’s mouth had curved slightly at her interruption.
“—but he’s no interest in taking on any complicated cases.”
“Complicated,” Georgie repeated.
“Interesting,” Sebastian clarified, with an unhappy twist of his mouth.
“And since I’m his secretary, I see all of his correspondence—I know what sorts of cases he’s invited to consult on.
I see the desperate people asking him for help.
And he’s not interested in any of it—he only cares about who can pay him the most, for the least effort.
So he spends a lot of time following the wives of rich men, trying to catch them out in affairs. ”
“Is that how he met you?”
That did provoke a proper smile from him. “No. Only a matter of time, though, darling Georgie.”
This time, however, she noticed the brittle note to his voice as he spoke, and she suddenly had a sneaking suspicion that there was more to the story of his romantic entanglements than she’d yet learned.
Which was likely, since she’d not wasted any time at all in leaping to the least flattering conclusions about him, from the moment she’d first met him—was it only two days earlier?
“You know,” she said quietly, before she had time to second-guess the words spilling from her mouth, “I’m beginning to suspect you’re not half as much of a womanizing idiot as you seem determined to convince me you are.”
He glanced at her quickly, looking away again just as fast. “What makes you think so?”
“You’re smarter than you let on,” she said, mulling the matter over in her own mind.
“You prattle a lot about beautiful women and biscuits and pretend that the only skill you possess is scheduling lunches and sending prettily worded letters, but occasionally you let your guard down. I think there’s more to Sebastian Fletcher-Ford than a playboy who seduces women and wears nice jumpers. ”
“You like my jumpers, do you?”
“I think you’re single-handedly keeping half the sheep farmers in England employed.”
“I like to do my part where I can,” he said modestly, flicking at what she would have thought was an invisible speck of dust on his cuff but which, given their current circumstances, might have been entirely real.
“How did you come to work for Fitzgibbons?” she asked curiously, wondering what path had led him to this line of work.
Another pause. He was once again staring straight ahead, his jaw tight, his brow furrowed. She did not expect him to answer her, and yet, after another long moment, he said, “I’m a bit of a disappointment to my family, you know.”
“Are you?” she asked. She hadn’t paused to consider much about what sort of family he came from, other than that it must be posh (the double-barrel surname, the Cambridge education, his general aura).
“Yes. I’m the youngest of three, and my brother and sister are… impressive.”
“Impressive how?”
“Impressive in their accomplishments. My brother is a mathematician. My sister’s a poet, married to an artist. My father’s a classicist at Cambridge. My mother was a suffragette, and still writes articles on women’s rights. The Fletcher-Fords are a famously intellectual set. And then there’s… me.”
“Meaning…?”
He let out a frustrated sigh. “Meaning that I was never half so serious as the rest of them. I liked sports, and flirting with pretty girls—having a good time. Nothing so out of the ordinary, really, but when everyone expects you to be just as brilliant as the rest of the family, and you seem a bit, well, unserious, you quickly realize that you’re seen as a bit of a disappointment.
” She was definitely not imagining the bitter note in his voice now.
“After a while, it was easier not to fight it. If I was a disappointment because I hadn’t known my entire life path since I was a child, like my brother and sister, then I might as well try to be the best, biggest disappointment I could be. ”
“By, perhaps, having affairs with unsuitable women?” she asked shrewdly.