Chapter Five
“ARE YOU CONTENT in your work, Mickey?”
Having completed their morning mission, Mickey and Tommy were now scrutinising Squire’s betting stand accounts. Mickey hadn’t been aware he was under scrutiny too.
“Um…yes? Why?”
“You’re awfully quiet.”
“I’m always quiet.” Mickey tapped on the ledger with his quill pen. “I’m concentrating on ensuring that our chap overseeing things at Epsom isn’t fiddling the books. It’s what I’m good at and what you pay me for.” He recalled the look of dismay on Hawkins’s face. “Amongst other things.”
Dipping his head back to his arithmetic, Mickey ran his finger down the margin, searching for where he’d left off.
The conversation, however, wasn’t over.
“And you’re very solitary.”
Damn, he’d just found it. “It doesn’t always feel that way.” Mickey sighed, keeping his finger on the spot. “But, yes. I suppose I have solitary moments when I’m not working and you’re entertaining your lordling. What of it?”
“I’m worried about you.”
“You’re always worried about me. You missed your calling as a mother hen.”
“It was Benedict who put me on to it, actually,” said Tommy, ignoring him and definitely still scrutinising him.
“Rossingley and Kit can barely tear their eyes from one another, Rollo clambers all over Fitzsimmons like he’s a stuffed tiger, and I…
well, I have my delicate duke. Which leaves you rather lonesome. ”
“Are you kicking me out of the group already?” Mickey was amused. “For being a spare part?”
“No. Just concerned that I work you far too hard to find time for pleasure. I’m feeling…fatherly.”
Mickey shook his head. “You’re always feeling fatherly. Despite being only ten years my elder.”
“Brotherly, then.” Tommy shrugged. “Cousinly. Feeling as if my only living relative and heir deserves a slice of happiness.”
Happiness? Mickey had more of that than he’d ever imagined.
He counted his blessings practically each morning on waking.
Sure, he woke alone, but it was in a warm bed and with more money stuffed under the mattress than he’d once thought possible, let alone his to spend how he wished.
And if he did wake to the odd, rare day when living amongst the ton seemed too gilded, too constricting, as if the city walls were somehow pressing in, then he remembered all those nights he’d shivered under a tattered blanket as grey as the London fog.
He remembered how the stench of decay and smoke and shit and piss had become part of his very breath, and if it wasn’t for Tommy, he’d have stopped taking any breaths many years ago.
Mickey resumed his arithmetic, starting again at the top. “Feeling odd is more like it, Tommy. Is it the change in the weather, or something you ate?”
“For heaven’s sake, Mickey!” Tommy reached across to pluck the quill pen from his hand. “What I’m trying to say is that I’m worried we stifle you. That working here, with me, stifles you. You hang around with us old folk—”
“Rollo is hardly old! And neither are you!”
“I wonder if I keep you too close, then. Prevent you from spreading your wings.”
“And flying where?”
Tommy made an exasperated noise. “I don’t know! Exploring! Seeing what lies beyond. Just…”
“If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have any wings at all. I’d be buried six feet under or turning tricks outside what’s left of the White Hart.”
“Yes, but—” Tommy waved his arm over their desks, piled high with ledgers and invoices and orders for liquor. Over money, in other words. “—I want this to be a stepping stone. I want you to have everything. You’re like a son to me.”
“Ten years and three months.” Mickey rolled his eyes again. What had brought this on? Tommy was fretting like a nervous nursemaid. “Did you not hear the first time?”
“Goddammit!” Tommy banged on the desk. “You know what I mean. I worry that you’re festering away, toiling for me when you could be…
I don’t know…finding adventure. Or…or finding a…
a lover, perhaps an intriguing, mysterious one.
Forming a romantic attachment. As I have done, and Rossingley and Kit, and Fitzsimmons and Rollo. ”
An intriguing, mysterious lover? A romantic attachment? Mickey cursed as the pieces fell into place.
“If this is your commonplace mind’s bungling way of asking me if I’ve made the acquaintance of a certain French vicomte, then—” He paused as Tommy’s annoying face split into a smug grin. “You bugger!”
“Not at all,” Tommy protested, at least having the decency to appear slightly abashed. “I do want all those things for you. But Benedict…”
“Benedict what?”
“Benedict spotted you conversing with our debonair vicomte at the masked ball,” Tommy confessed. “And then Rossingley noticed him slip away into the garden.” He raised an eyebrow. “Two minutes later, you were nowhere to be found either.”
Mickey’s cheeks flared with warmth. London cock. “If those two peers squander their family fortunes, then might I suggest they find themselves positions as nursery governesses,” he observed drily. “Or government spies.”
“So, he is one of us,” Tommy asserted, even more pleased. “Damn. I owe Rossingley five pounds.” His good humour suddenly faded. “He’d better not have hurt you, Mickey. You should tell me before you go galliva—”
“He didn’t hurt me, Papa, and I didn’t gallivant anywhere. We merely partook of the night air together in a shady corner of Lady Butterworth’s delightful walled garden.”
“But he is one of us.” Tommy’s lips twitched. “And I sense from that rosy glow that you have personal experience?”
Mickey gave up. He couldn’t hide anything from bloody Tommy, and he wouldn’t be allowed to finish balancing the books until Tommy had eked every last shred of information from him.
“Very personal,” he admitted. “Beauregard invited me into the gardens, relieved my ballocks, then had a crack at relieving me of my purse too.”
“The cheeky sod!” Tommy snorted. “I’m becoming fonder of him by the minute. What did you make of him? Should we consider admitting him to Squire’s?”
Mickey’s consideration of Beauregard was leaving very little room for anything else.
Beauregard’s hand had been as expert as Mickey’s, and his clever tongue’s mastery of words more expert still, even when his light fingers had been caught in Mickey’s pocket.
“Yes, I think we should. If only to monitor him more closely. I don’t think he takes a moment off.
He’s sharp, witty, engaging, and wholly undesirable.
I wager he’d steal a man’s upper lip from right under his nose, Tommy, if he thought he could get away with it, then sell it on for sixpence.
He’s an opportunist; he sees every man, every woman, every ballroom, and any other society gathering as an occasion to… Oh! I…well, I’ll be damned.”
As Mickey stopped abruptly, Tommy glanced sideways at him. “What?” he said. “Has he already stolen yours? Your tongue too?”
“No,” Mickey answered slowly. An idea occurred to him, something so cunning, so steeped in possibility, it could only be true. “Forget all that for a second, Tommy. I…I think I know why Beauregard is here. In town.”
“To spread his distracting Gallic charm whilst gathering himself a few trinkets?”
“No. More than that. He…I do believe he means to steal the Ashington parure!”
Tommy’s bark of incredulous laughter cut through the quiet of the morning. “That’s quite a leap, Mickey. Even I only learned of its existence last night.”
Mickey’s mind whirred back. “No, it’s not, not really. Hear me out. The Chestertons toured Europe. They visited everywhere, all the major cities. They stayed at all the grand houses. Where did I say they’d come from, prior to settling in London? Florence.”
Beauregard’s voice, so bloody beguiling, crooned in Mickey’s ear.
I’ve spent too long amongst soft Italian dandies.
“Beauregard mentioned Italy. That he’d lived there.
My impression was that he hadn’t long left, and…
and only a week ago, Talybridge escorted the Chestertons back from Europe. From Florence.”
Mickey drummed his fingers on the desktop as it all slotted together in his mind.
“Beauregard could have met the Chestertons in Florence. Or been aware of them, at least. That parure is bloody hard to miss.” Mickey pushed aside his forgotten columns of figures; Beauregard was a far more interesting topic.
“And…do you recall Kit commenting that pilfering purses was quite the comedown from stealing royal diamonds—the Devil’s Diamonds? What if Kit was right?”
“But pinching the Ashington parure isn’t.” Tommy nodded slowly; Mickey could almost see his nimble mind reaching the same conclusions. “I’d say it’s on a par, if not a bigger theft. You think…you think half inching baubles from the patrons of White’s is Beauregard simply amusing himself?”
“Yes. I do.” The more Mickey tossed the idea around, the more it seemed likely. “He’s killing time. Paying his rent. Studying the ton, waiting for an opportunity. I spoke to him; he didn’t strike me as a man who does anything or goes anywhere without good reason. Why’s he suddenly in London?”
Tommy’s expression tautened, his upper lip trapped by his bottom one, as if already protecting it from a thieving Beauregard. “I wish to God you aren’t right, Mickey, but I have a dreadful feeling you might be. Benedict will be even more distraught.”
“Which is why he needs to have it out with Talybridge,” Mickey insisted. “Demand the damned thing back and put it somewhere safe before Beauregard spirits it away from either of them.”
“No. Benedict won’t do that.” Tommy toyed with Mickey’s quill pen. “I know him. He’d rather lose the parure than have all that history dragged up and his family name besmirched.”
“Fitzsimmons could do it, then. He’s not afraid to confront anybody.”
“Fitzsimmons will go along with Benedict’s wishes.”
Mickey made a frustrated sound. “Then, short of spiriting Beauregard away, I fear we have a serious problem on our hands. Unless we have him arrested and detained for his time-killing petty larcenies.”
“Yes.” Tommy blew out a long breath. “Though a successful arrest is unlikely. The chances of Beauregard still having those baubles he snaffled from White’s and from the ladies at Mrs Bowman’s dinner are slim at best. He’s been at it for years; he’ll have fences all over town.
We’ll never be able to prove he stole them. ”
The two men eyed each other contemplatively.
“You must invite him to Squire’s,” Tommy ordered. “You must befriend him some more. You know, keep your enemies close. Very close.” He paused a beat, a glimmer of a smile playing on his lips. “Unless, dear favourite fussy cousin, aristocratic French cock was not to your liking?”
Mickey threw his blotting pad at him. “You are an ass. I have no idea how Ashington tolerates you.”
“And?”
Mickey felt a thrill of excitement. The musky scent of the Frenchman had lingered on his skin long after Beauregard vanished back into the shadowy garden. “Aristocratic French cock was…ah…pleasing enough.”