Forty
Arnaud
Since retreating to the English countryside to lick his wounds after the loss of all he knew and loved in France, Arnaud had disliked drawing attention to himself. He knew his size made that a difficulty, so he’d been a hermit in the Priory tower for a year, until Hunt and Clare arrived.
He had attempted to lend a hand since then, but he still preferred his tower studio.
He could not believe he was drawn, once more, into the family treasure hunt.
He wasn’t related to the Wycliffe nobility.
His grandmother was merely the younger sister of the despised viscountess who’d spent her last years here in impoverished isolation.
He wasn’t even solving the earl’s puzzles, just explaining the dreadful art work Wycliffe had mutilated. It was as if the mad earl had known some day, an artist would come.
Arnaud almost chortled at that lunacy. Thea had infected his upper story.
His own lovely mind beetle took his hand as they followed the crowd up the service stairs to the attic. In the tower schoolroom, Verity’s students chanted their multiplication tables—a much better use of the ancient fortress than his hermitage.
“Perhaps we can purloin a diamond and run off to France,” Thea suggested.
“Or we can ask Fort and Lavender what happened at the pub,” he countered.
He knew one of his tasks as her partner was to keep her electrifying fantasies grounded.
Thea was quite capable of making fantasies happen.
Sometimes, that was a good thing. Her ability to escape the cage society locked her in gave him hope of doing the same, although his cage was mostly of his own making. Thea was the key to unlocking it.
“The boys come first,” she decided. “I can kill my father anytime.”
He’d take her to France before he let that happen.
But he was learning to trust his American cousin and English relations.
Even the duke’s son—and Arnaud had lost faith in his fellow aristocrats long ago—seemed smart and reliable.
Fort didn’t appear concerned over whatever his farce had instigated. Presumably, no one had died.
“I should have worn a maid’s dress,” Lavender complained, lifting her hem from the attic’s dust as the boys took a winding path through centuries of discarded rubbish.
“If we find rubies and sapphires, you can buy a whole new wardrobe. From a modiste. In London.” Thea stopped to examine a Jacobean table losing its veneer. “There’s solid mahogany under here. Why on earth would they cover it up?”
“To meet the style of the time.” Clare intrepidly wound through increasingly narrow passages fashioned by the boys shoving discarded detritus out of the way.
Obviously knowing where they were headed, the tutor widened some of the passages by shoving aside towering wardrobes and holding back moth-eaten draperies. “They created forts back here, sorry.”
Lavender flitted past him, and Fort followed her hungrily with his eyes.
Cupid had hit the duke’s son squarely, Arnaud noted in amusement.
He hoped the tutor had the intelligence to follow his heart and not society’s dictates.
It wasn’t easy, as Arnaud well knew, but he’d worked around the little modiste for a year. She was a rare one.
“Here,” Davy shouted in excitement, followed by a more worried tone. “Clockmaker?”
Thea hugged her little brother. “Let us carry it all downstairs and we’ll see if we need to call on him.”
Arnaud accepted that he was taking on the responsibility of raising the boy genius, as Davy’s self-centered parents had not.
He couldn’t afford boarding school, even if they could find one where the lad might be safe.
He hoped Fort had suggestions, or Weston, who apparently had difficult sons of his own.
Just a year ago, he wouldn’t have trusted anyone’s advice, especially stuffy English aristocrats. Maybe he was healing.
While the boys gathered pocket watches and the women carried the more delicate mantel clocks, Arnaud hefted two of the larger clocks under his arms. “The two of you have done well at collecting timepieces.”
The boys beamed at his praise and ran ahead with their treasures.
“Now, tell us what happened at the pub,” he demanded once the young ones were out of hearing. The suspense was killing him.
Lavender squealed and hugged Thea. “We brought you a wedding gift!”
Arnaud raised an eyebrow and waited.
The serious duke’s son almost allowed himself a smile. “My noble bully of a brother actually listened to us. He has been corresponding with his network of spies. Lord Talbot has been arrested—”
The rest of anything he had to say was drowned out by Thea’s cries of joy. Since Arnaud had his arms full with massive clocks, she couldn’t easily hug him. Instead, his beloved wept and hugged everyone else, including the self-conscious tutor.
“Talbot really was behind this invasion?” Arnaud asked while the women cried and laughed and clung to each other.
“He gambles. . . On cards, on dice, on slave ships to Africa, on any game offered by sharps like Humphries, Gladstone, and Featherstone.”
Arnaud snorted, “In other words, he’s a moron.”
“He’s not the only one. A fool and his money. . .”
Got fleeced and manipulated by bigger blowhards and worse scoundrels.
The trio of women picked up their skirts and rushed after the boys.
Fort waited until they were out of sight before hefting the clocks he’d chosen into a better position and whispering, “Thea and Davy might not even be Talbot’s progeny.
Apparently, he attends one of Featherstone’s more exclusive clubs for the very wealthy with various perversions, one that the husband of Weston’s mistress also attends.
That makes them ripe for extortion. Since the war ended, Weston has had time to follow up the rumors. He’s had men spying on the club.”
Arnaud had lived with artists for most of his adult life.
Humans were creative and came in many kinds.
The only perversion he recognized was that involving children.
The English, they were more stringent. He cared naught if Thea was the result of a liaison.
He cared even less about who slept with whom—but the law did.
Bankruptcy and perversion. . . Talbot would never see outside prison bars.
They slowly worked their way through the attic, the voices of the others fading ahead. But Arnaud was starting to see the light of hope. “If their father is in prison, Thea and Davy are safe?”
“Consult a lawyer. The estate is most likely entailed. If so, the creditors can’t take the lands or Thea’s trust. They will, however, strip every personal item not included in the entailment.
An estate lawyer with an inventory might prevent theft of any inherited valuables.
” Fort cast him a look of concern as they emerged into the hall.
Arnaud grimaced as the weight of responsibility settled on his shoulders. “We will go in debt ourselves to afford solicitors of that sort, even should I sell every painting I’ve ever done. Thea’s income is barely more than pin money. She’s invested all she has in the gallery.”
To protect Davy’s inheritance, she needed to marry a rich man. That would never be him.
“You know people now,” Fort assured him.
“You don’t need great wealth when you have friends who know people in the right places.
If Thea’s dowry can be untangled free of creditors, and with a proper executor in place, her father is no longer in a position to interfere in her inheriting upon marriage. ”
With the light of hope just on his horizon, he had to adjust his thinking to this new development—he had never been wealthy. Arnaud frowned and followed the tutor-who-knew-all into the library. The others had already delivered their haul of clocks and watches to the long table.
As Fort and Arnaud added their haul, Minerva, the librarian, admired the collection. “The Wycliffes truly liked keeping proper time, I see.”
“Well, the last Wycliffe destroyed time, if our theory is correct,” Thea said, entering with the dowagers on her arms. She’d apparently diverted from the parade of clocks to let the earl’s granddaughter and sister know what was happening.
The elderly baroness in her gray pompadour studied the dusty timepieces.
“Our father was infatuated with the Swiss and German clocks he saw in his travels. He brought one home on every trip to the continent. The constant bonging and loud ticking disturbed my brother, as a boy, and caused him to startle and hold his ears whenever one chimed. George despised them. When he came into the title, he banished the collection here.”
“It is ironic that he banished himself here with the hated timepieces.” Lady Spalding, the late earl’s granddaughter, picked up one of the watches to polish. “I don’t remember him ever carrying a watch. Not that I saw him frequently.”
Lady Spalding had at least met Wycliffe. Arnaud supposed he ought to better his acquaintance with his great aunt, since her sister lived in America and most of his French relations had not survived the revolution. Should he have children, they’d need family.
He offered the dowagers chairs while the others wiped and dusted the beautiful works of mechanical art. Thea was practically floating in ecstasy as she carefully cleaned ancient glass.
“If the clockmaker does not arrive soonest, Thea will be conversing with the spirit of her great-grandfather. I trust someone has sent for Fletch,” Arnaud whispered to Fort, the only sensible male currently in the room.
“Fletch is with the captain and the others in the study, arranging transport for the prisoners. Now that we are part of Worcestershire, they are working out how to transport prisoners to the appropriate magistrate.” Fort leaned over the shoulders of his students to show the screw holding the back on a pocket watch.