Chapter Fifteen
“I promise you, it was done with good reason—”
Foxcourt’s defensive tone stopped me on the bottom step of the stairwell.
I hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, of course.
Really, they should have known that voices would carry through the tiled entry, helpfully bouncing between the walls. If they
hadn’t wanted the entire household to know their business, they might have tried shutting the study door.
“What reason could there have possibly been? What could justify this?”
Felicity.
Somehow, I hadn’t thought she’d be the one who wanted to speak to him—and never would I have imagined her chastising him. She wasn’t shouting, but the quiet anguish in her tone was even more devastating. For a servant to dare address her employer
in that frank, condemning matter—a lord, no less—my breath caught at her courage.
I braced for Foxcourt’s excoriating response, wrapping my shawl tighter around my shoulders to march forward and deliver a
tongue lashing on her behalf. If he threw her out, I would hire her to work for me at the House of Rosebourne in an instant.
No one would ever be allowed to hurt her again; she’d never want for anything.
But when the earl spoke, his tone was shockingly patient and . . . contrite. “She ran at the first attempt my man made to speak to her—it would have taken days to track her again, and by then, it might
have been too late for His Majesty. It seemed she’d require some convincing to agree to this task.”
Hell’s tits. They were talking about me.
I sat down heavily on the step. The man who had shown up at the flower stall, making inquiries about me . . . he hadn’t been
sent by who I’d thought. There had been no reason to run, to leave Linden.
“But you don’t know that,” Felicity continued. “You knocked down the door before you ever tried knocking. You know how they treat the prisoners at Fairgate. She was there for only two days, and they beat her as they would a murderer. They beat her.”
“Fizzy—” he began again.
“No,” she interrupted, sounding furious and near to tears. My throat ached in sympathy. “No, my lord. I will not hear your excuses,
nor will I work for anyone who condones such cruelty. If that’s to be the way of it, I will leave this house tonight and never
come back.”
My father was a religious man . . .
I pressed my fingers to my lips, trying to restore some feeling to my face.
He tried everything to save my soul. Prayer . . . the rod.
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Foxcourt said, shocking me to my soul. “I made you the same promise as my uncle.”
“And yet you have broken it,” Felicity said. “You must make it right with her.”
“I aim to make amends,” Foxcourt said. “If she’ll allow it.”
If she’ll allow it. I didn’t want his kindness or his pity, I only—I only wanted to complete this perfume and take the inheritance promised to
me. None of this mattered. None of it.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. That Felicity had spoken up for me, when I’d never ask it of her . . . that Foxcourt had listened to Felicity, treating her with kindness rather than imperious disdain . . . that meant something to me, even as it left me adrift in my confusing rush of emotions.
This household was like a mirror world in the fairy stories, where things seemed correct, but nothing was quite as it should
be, rank included.
“Good,” Felicity said, the tremor in her voice easing. “Thank you.”
Sensing the conversation was at its end, I rose, intending to climb back into the darkness of the landing. But as Felicity
emerged, her cheeks shining in the candlelight, she made for the servants’ hall into the kitchen and didn’t seem to notice
me at all.
With a shuddering breath of my own, I moved into the entry, only to be brought up short by Foxcourt’s exhausted voice again.
“I suppose this is why Mrs. Silver could barely stand to look at me?”
Aside from the faint scent of blood, there had been no indication Mrs. Keyes was in the room at all until she spoke.
“Celine will forgive you, of course, but Felicity is right. You promised that things would change—not just in keeping us fully apprised, but the delicacy in which matters would be handled.”
I drew in a sharp breath. Matters? I’d suspected the entire household was aware of the work the late home secretary and now Foxcourt did, assisting as necessary.
But this made them sound almost like coconspirators.
“I can’t abandon everything he taught me,” Foxcourt pushed back. “Uncle sacrificed everything for the kingdom. He was willing
to do whatever it took to keep Albion safe, and I am cut from the same cloth.”
“He fought alone, and he died alone,” Mrs. Keyes said, with that same calm. “The world will greedily take whatever you offer
it, my boy. If you continue to sacrifice parts of yourself, soon all you’ll have left to offer are your heart and your humanity.”
“Better mine than Eleanor’s,” Foxcourt said. “She’s sixteen, Keyes. She’ll be his prisoner.”
“As Miss Lockwood is yours?”
My brows rose at that.
“The situations have nothing in common,” Foxcourt growled.
“Then prove it,” Mrs. Keyes finished. “You are not working alone, nor should you. This will take all of us. And that includes—”
“I know,” Foxcourt bit out. “I know.”
“Good.” The floorboards of the study creaked again, indicating Mrs. Keyes was moving toward the door. I bolted back up the
stairs, my heart racing. At Mrs. Keyes’s appearance in the hall, I made as if I were coming down the steps for the first time.
“Good evening, Miss Lockwood,” Mrs. Keyes said, looking not at all convinced by my act.
“Good evening,” I said. And thank you.
The housekeeper smiled. “I expect you’ll be working late into the evening. Don’t hesitate to call for tea or any other reinforcements.”
I would certainly make my own tea rather than drag her or anyone else out of bed to boil some water for me, but I nodded anyway.
At the door to the study, I smoothed a hand back over my hair. After eating, I’d washed my face, tamed my hair, and changed
into a simple white muslin dress and shawl. Now I wished I had donned the old suit of armor that guarded the second floor’s
landing.
Foxcourt sat behind the imposing oak desk at the far end of the room, one hand pressed to his face, the other gripping a quill. He sighed heavily, slumping back against the chair.
“Foxcourt?” I called.
He straightened up like a shot, his hand falling back to the desk. He reordered his expression in its usual mask of cool neutrality.
“Lockwood. Good. It’s past time to get to work.”
I rolled my eyes, stepping into the warm space to shut the door behind me. But he wasn’t wrong.
I’d left the Treasury on a table near one of the room’s two windows earlier, but this was the first good look I was getting
at the handsome, well-appointed space. The leaf-green bookshelves lining the walls were stuffed to capacity with books, their
leather spines painted gold by candlelight and the glow of the fireplace. Two worn chocolate leather chairs and a midnight-blue
settee had been artfully arranged in front of the latter. The room was so disarmingly inviting, I was tempted to take the
Treasury and curl up on a chair. A grandfather clock, whimsically carved to resemble a tree, ticked thoughtfully in the corner,
an empty cushion for Brigadier left on the floor beside it.
Foxcourt said nothing as I circled the room, glancing at the shelves. As I neared the chair to the left of the fireplace,
my nose caught a faint, sweet stench beneath the fire’s smoke. I placed a hand on the back of the chair, breathing in deeply.
“What is it?” Foxcourt asked, a strange note in his voice.
Shifting the heavy chair along the patterned rug, I concentrated on a faded dark spot near its edge, the source of that rank
syrupiness. The notes were nearly gone, as if someone had tried to scrub them out, but the house, clearly, remembered. Old
blood and the reek of desperation—anguish. Agony.
And licorice.
Foxcourt watched me intently, retreating behind that mask of impassivity. Yes, something terrible had happened at this very
spot.
“Who died here?” I asked, a shiver passing up my spine. It had not been a good death. Not a gentle claiming or a swift one,
but I knew—as soon as I saw Foxcourt’s face, I remembered. “Your great-uncle?”
He came around to the front of the old desk, sitting on the edge of it, his arms crossed over his chest. He was silent for
a long while. Debating. Weighing if he could trust me.
“He was poisoned,” Foxcourt said. “Possibly by a DeForest perfume.”
“Yes,” I said, breathing in again. “I can smell the last traces of the licorice.”
Foxcourt was striking in nearly every light, but something in the fire’s glow harmonized with his soul, making him seem otherworldly
then. There was that hint of the changeling I’d once believed him to be, that lingering mystery, that devastating perfection
drawn into sharper relief by the way the shadows had intensified around him.
“By the time we found his body, the perfume’s scent had faded,” Foxcourt said. “He ended his own life with his pistol. I believe
the perfume drove him to it, but he had recently fallen out of favor with the King. It was all too easy for the broadsheets
to leap to the conclusion that was why he’d done it. But he had enemies, many of them, and . . . I thought I recognized it.
The scent. I couldn’t tell if it was truly there or simply the product of a paranoid mind.”
My hands felt nerveless. “You’d smelled it before?”
Foxcourt tilted his head, his gaze drifting to the ostentatious molding on the ceiling. His throat worked as he swallowed.
“It was the same one that Glenmoor used on my mother.”
My knees turned to sand beneath me. If I hadn’t been gripping the chair, I might have fallen to the floor. I could barely
find the words to speak as I lowered myself unsteadily onto its arm. “Your . . .”
The Duke of Glenmoor—his half brother?
“It causes excruciating pain,” Foxcourt said, his attention fixed on his quill, the way his other hand was stroking it. “The