Chapter Six
P ol’s mind was reeling. He was stunned by Miss Haricot’s courage and honesty, and even more by her comment about stopping Oscar.
Why had he never thought of seeking evidence of the crimes his cousin had undoubtedly committed? It would have to be something that would see the man—Rotten Riese indeed—arrested. Oscar was right that his position as a peer gave him some protection, not to mention that Lord Barton, the magistrate, wasn’t going to press charges, so it would have to be a crime that couldn’t be brushed under the carpet.
Shame would not do it. Oscar felt no shame.
Pol, however, was ashamed to realize that he had thought only of leaving, and not of seeking justice for those Oscar and his mother had hurt.
Miss Haricot’s words—and more, her movement toward the door—drew him from the whirl of his thoughts. “Wait,” he said. “You’re right. We need to stop him. Him and Lady Riese.”
She turned to face him, her lovely eyes full of hope. Light eyes. Blue? Grey? Even green? He could not tell in the dim light, and he had never been this close to her before, but he could see the smile with which she blessed him as she realized what he had said. “You will help me?”
“Perhaps we can help one another,” he said slowly as he ordered his own ideas, “Please. Have a seat and let us discuss what might be done. Would you care for a drink, Miss Haricot?”
But before she could respond, the door rattled again, and she dived back behind the desk. Pol pulled a couple of documents toward him and bent over them.
“You’re still here,” Lady Riese said, her voice heavy with disapproval.
“As you see,” he replied.
She held out the rent book and pushed it toward him when he put his hand on it. “I have amended some of the figures. You will let Oscar know. If he wishes to know why, tell him to see me.”
“Yes, my lady.” Pol inclined his head in a shallow bow. It was not a time to ask questions. Let her leave, and quickly.
“Good. And Allegro? I will not be paying the dressmaker’s bill until after Lady Day. Perhaps a week after. That should compensate Oscar for the alterations I have made to his cronies’ rents.” Her smile was both fierce and gloating.
“You would conspire with your son to ruin a girl?” Pol demanded.
His aunt made to slap him, as she had many times, but this time he caught her arm. “No, Madam,” he told her. “You shall not strike me.”
“Let me go!” she demanded.
“You shall not strike me,” he warned again, as he let her go.
“You should be beaten for your impertinence.” Lady Riese narrowed her eyes in a glare as she spoke, her tone making the words more of a promise than a wish. “How dare you touch me!”
“You shall not strike me, Lady Riese,” he said for a third time. “Not ever again. If you do, I shall walk out of this house and never return.”
Her eyes widened at that. “You shall not,” she declared. “You will not leave the dowager.”
“Try me.”
Lady Riese stared at him as if she had never seen him before. For a moment, he could see indecision in her expression, then it hardened into the usual impervious mask. “You are a thankless brat. We should have turned you out when you first landed on our doorstep.”
Pol had heard that many times before. He had long since stopped feeling guilty for his lack of gratitude. His labor over these many years had more than repaid the Rieses for taking him in.
“ Hmmph .” His aunt tossed her head. “Such a fuss over a seamstress. She is no better than she ought to be, I’ll be bound. She thought to put her price up by acting coy, but I put Oscar wise to that ploy. He’ll have her in the end, and at his price, not hers. And you shall not interfere, Allegro, or I shall turn you out.”
With another snort, she turned on her heel and left the room.
Pol shut the door and locked it so he and Miss Haricot would not be disturbed again. “I shall get you that drink and we shall sit down and talk,” he said. “We need a plan if we are to get away with this.”
She emerged from her hiding spot and sat in one of the chairs that faced the desk, and he brought her a glass of brandy and sat in the other.
“Oscar and his mother have proven over and over that they will be listened to while we lesser mortals are ignored,” he said, “so we must not be discovered searching the house. I doubt there is anything here in the study. I am familiar with all the estate papers. But we must look. Also, in Oscar’s chambers and Lady Riese’s. Letters, perhaps? I’m sure you are right. There must be something.”
“I don’t have time,” Miss Haricot pointed out. “Lady Day is nearly here. If I cannot pay the rent or force him to lower it, we shall be cast out.”
“It is two separate problems. I shall find you enough money to pay the rent. Then we shall figure out how to search the house.” It would probably be better for him to do it himself. If he was caught, he could probably talk his way out of trouble, but Miss Haricot could have no conceivable reason to be here.
As if she had followed his thoughts, she told him, “I need a reason to be in the house. Could you hire me as a maid?” She must have seen his refusal on his face, for before he had time to speak, she said, “You’ll not keep me out of this, Mr. Allegro. If you won’t let me work with you, I’ll find a way to do it on my own.”
“You do not trust me,” he commented. And fair enough, too. She knew him only by reputation. Given his relationship with her persecutors, it was amazing she had been so honest about her intentions.
She wrinkled her nose. “It isn’t that, precisely. I have trusted you. You could have me arrested for what I’ve told you. You could hand me over to Rotten Riese.”
He had to smile. “I do like that nickname. It fits him like a glove.” But this was not a laughing matter. Serious again, he leaned forward as if that would help him to convince the lady. “Miss Haricot, I am on your side, but I am worried about your safety. Especially as a maid, with Oscar in the house, and some of the footmen nearly as bad.”
“Then, Mr. Allegro, we need to have a plan,” she told him. Her smile was sweet, but he knew a determined jaw when he saw one. His heart turned over in his chest. Her , it told him. She is the One . Nonsense, of course. He hardly knew the lady.
His mouth took the next step without his brain’s intervention. “If we are to be partners in this,” he said, “you should call me ‘Pol’. Apollo, really, but Pol for short.”
She held out her hand. “Jackie. Jacqueline, as you know, but everyone except my mother calls me Jackie.”
He took the proffered hand and fought to disguise the shock that zinged through him, reminding him of when he had stuck his fingers into a friction machine at the fair. Perhaps thrill was a better word than shock, and from the way her eyes widened, and her fingers tightened over his, she felt it too.
It was a worker’s hand, firm and slender. He could feel the calluses from her various professions. No pampered maiden, this. Her , his heart said again. He forced himself to focus on his thoughts instead of his heart.
“First things first. Oscar will not be home tonight. Lady Riese is still awake, but once she goes to bed, her maid will do so, too. The rest of the servants are mostly in bed already—they start early in the morning. There’ll be a footman in the front hall, but he has no reason to come upstairs. In half an hour, or perhaps a little more, we shall visit Oscar’s chambers and fetch your rent money.”
That should be safe. He hoped it would be enough to satisfy her.
Jackie heaved a deep sigh of relief, and her eyes glistened in the candlelight as tears started to her eyes. “I cannot tell you what this means to me,” she said.
“While we are waiting, tell me more about yourself. How do you come to have so many identities? And which one is the real Jackie?”
“Truth for truth,” she said. “Who is Pol Allegro? And why are you helping me?”
Fair enough, but not so easy to answer .
“I asked first,” he pointed out, playing for time.
“Which is the real Jackie?” she repeated his question. “I hardly know.” She shrugged. “I can more easily say who I am not. Not a stable boy or a gambling man.”
Or a male at all. Even before he had realized she was a woman, his body had known she was not a man. “The dressmaker’s daughter, then,” he coaxed. “Your mother is a French émigré , is she not?”
“Maman is French,” Jackie confirmed. She chuckled, “I do not suppose you will believe me, since most émigrés say the same thing, but she and my father really were aristocrats, and they really did escape France just ahead of the guillotine, or so Maman has always told me. I was born here in England. Your turn.”
“I was born in Italy, in Tuscany. My father was the son of the then-Viscount Riese, and my mother was the daughter of a large Tuscan family.” Lady Riese had always told him that his mother was an opera singer, said with her lip curled as if Mama was a disgrace beyond imagining, but what Pol remembered was a large, joyous family house, filled with uncles and aunts and cousins. And servants. He remembered nursemaids and governesses and tutors, as well as maids and footmen. And the stable boys, with whom he and his cousins had played raucous games of ball on Sunday afternoons, when even the servants had time off.
“Your turn,” he told Jackie.
They filled the half hour with snippets from their past. Jackie talked about her little family’s seesaw existence, in and out of funds, as her father’s fortune at the tables waxed and waned, and how much harder but more stable their lives had been since he’d disappeared, ten years ago.
Pol told her about his uncle’s decision to send him to England after his mother died, and about his cold reception and lonely boyhood in England. “I understand why I had to go after my mother died,” he said, but it wasn’t true. Part of him had always questioned it, especially when he recalled the close knit but large family he’d left. “Napoleon had gone to war with England again, and Uncle Giuseppe said that Tuscany was no place for an English boy. I was better off with my father’s people, he said.” Surely, his uncle could have pretended? Pol looked more Italian than English and back then he had spoken Italian better than he spoke English. After sixteen years, he only remembered a few words, but sometimes those were still the first words to come to his lips, and he had to stop and think of the English word instead. If the family in Italy had really wanted Pol, they would have kept him. “He promised he would write. But he never did.”
The clock on the mantel gave its soft chime to mark the hour. Midnight. Time to leave the thorny memories and search the house.