LITMIR.BIZ

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she lacked any identity at all to fill the gap. Like the anonymous gowns of blues and browns and greys she now wore, neither fashionable nor utterly dowdy, she felt herself indeterminate, somewhat undefined. Like an abandoned canvas, half painted.

      An urgent rap at the door interrupted this chastening thought. ‘Please, Your Ladyship, but His Lordship asks you to join him in the long drawing room urgently.’ The housemaid, still clad in the brown sack apron she wore to lay the morning fires, was fairly bursting with the important news she had to impart. ‘We’ve all to assemble there,’ she informed Deborah as she trotted along the narrow corridor which connected the oldest—and dampest and coldest—wing of Kinsail Manor with the main body of the house, built by Jeremy’s great-grandfather. ‘The master wants to know if anyone heard or saw him.’

      ‘Heard who?’ Deborah asked, knowing full well that the girl could only mean the housebreaker.

      She should have woken Jacob, she knew she should have, but she could not find it in her to regret this oversight. If she was honest, there was a bit of her—a tiny, malicious, nothing-to-be-proud-of bit of her—which was actually quite glad. Or, if not glad, at least indifferent. Jacob had taken everything from her that Jeremy had not already extorted. Whatever precious thing had been stolen, she could not care a jot. What was more, she decided on the spur of the moment, she was going to continue to keep her mouth firmly shut. She would not admit to wandering the grounds. She would not provoke one of his sermons. She would not!

      ‘I’m sorry—what were you saying?’ Deborah realised the maid had been talking to her while her thoughts had been occupied elsewhere. They were outside the drawing room now. The door stood wide open, revealing the gathered ranks of Lord Kinsail’s household. At the head of the room, under his own portrait, stood the man himself.

      ‘Best to go in, My Lady,’ the maid whispered. ‘We’re last to arrive.’ She scuttled over to join the rest of the maidservants, who were clustered like a nervy flock of sheep around the housekeeper. Mrs Chambers, a relic from Deborah’s days as chatelaine, cast her a disapproving look.

      Inured to such treatment, Deborah made her way to the top of the room to join the Earl. The frame of the portrait swung open on its hinge to reveal the safe. Her lips twisted into a bitter smile. Jeremy had shown it to her when they were first married, though in those days it had been concealed behind a portrait of his father.

      ‘Empty coffers,’ Jeremy had said to her. ‘Though not for much longer—thanks to you, my darling wife.’

      The revelation that the terms of her inheritance would force him to wait several years for her to attain her majority and gain the larger part of her fortune had not been the beginning of his change in attitude towards her, but after that he’d ceased to pretend.

      She should never have married him. But there was no time for her to become entangled in that morass yet again. Lady Kinsail, even more palely loitering than ever, was seated on a gilt chair almost as frail as herself. Deborah went to her side.

      ‘Cousin Margaret,’ she said, squeezing Her Ladyship’s cold hand between her own. Though she persistently refused to grant Lord Kinsail the appellation of cousin, she had conceded it to his wife. They were not related, but it rescued them from the hideous social quagmire of having two Countesses of Kinsail in the one household. ‘What, pray, has occurred?’

      ‘Oh, Cousin Deborah, such a dreadful thing.’ Lady Kinsail’s voice was, like her appearance, wraith-like. ‘A common housebreaker—’

      ‘No common housebreaker,’ her lord interrupted. Under normal circumstances Lord Kinsail’s complexion and his temper had a tendency towards the choleric. This morning he resembled an over-ripe tomato. ‘I don’t know what time you call this, Cousin,’ he fumed.

      ‘A quarter after nine, if the clock is to be trusted,’ Deborah replied, making a point of arranging her own chair by his wife and shaking out her skirts as she sat down.

      ‘Of course it’s to be trusted. It’s Louis Quatorze! Say what you like about the French, but they know how to turn out a timepiece,’ Lord Kinsail said testily. ‘I have it upon good authority that that clock was originally made for the Duc d’Orleans himself.’

      ‘A pity, then,’ Deborah said tightly, ‘that such an heirloom is no longer in his family. I abhor things being taken from their rightful owners.’

      Lord Kinsail was pompous, parsimonious, and so puffed-up with his own conceit that it was a constant surprise to Deborah that he did not explode with a loud pop. But he was no fool.

      He narrowed his eyes. ‘If you had served my cousin better as a wife, then the estates which you allowed him to bring to ruin upon that ill-fated marriage of yours would not now be my responsibility, but your son’s. If you had served my cousin better as a wife, Cousin Deborah, I have no doubt that he would not have felt the need to seek consolation in the gaming houses of St James’s, thus ensuring that his successor had hardly a pair of brass farthings to rub together.’

      Deborah flinched, annoyed at having exposed herself for, cruel as the remarks were, there was a deep-rooted part of her, quite resistant to all her attempts to eradicate it, which believed them to be true. She had made Jeremy about as bad a wife as it was possible to make. Which did not, however, mean that she had to accept Jacob’s condemnation—she was more than capable of condemning herself. And she was damned if she was going to apologise for her remark about the clock!

      ‘Don’t let me hold you back any further, Jacob,’ she said with a prim smile.

      Lord Kinsail glowered, making a point of turning his back on her and clearing his throat noisily before addressing the staff. ‘As you know by now, we have suffered a break-in at Kinsail Manor,’ he said. ‘A most valuable item has been taken from this safe. A safe which, I might add, has one of the most complex of new locks. This was no ordinary robbery. The brazen rogue, a menace to polite society and a plague upon those better off than himself, was no ordinary thief.’

      With a flourish, His Lordship produced an object and waved it theatrically in front of his audience. There was a gasp of surprise. Several of the male servants muttered under their breath with relief, for now there could be no question of blame attaching itself to them.

      At first Deborah failed to understand the import of the item. A feather. But it was a most distinctive feather—long with a blue-and-green eye. A peacock feather. The man who had dropped from the sky on top of her last night must have been the notorious Peacock!

      Good grief! She had encountered the Peacock—or, more accurately, the Peacock had encountered her! Deborah listened with half an ear to Jacob’s diatribe against the man’s crimes, barely able to assimilate the fact. She watched without surprise as in turn every one of the servants denied hearing or seeing anything out of the ordinary, just as the servants in every one of the Peacock’s other scenes of crime had done. No one had ever disturbed him in the act. No one had ever caught so much as a fleeting glance of him leaving. Private investigators, Bow Street Runners—all were completely flummoxed by him. He came and went like a cat in the night. For nigh on two years now, the Peacock had eluded all attempts to capture him. No lock was too complex for the man, no house too secure.

      With the room finally empty of staff, Lord Kinsail turned his attentions back to Deborah. ‘And you?’ he demanded. ‘Did you see anything of the rogue?’

      She felt herself flushing. Though God knew she’d had opportunity aplenty, she had never grown accustomed to prevarication. ‘Why would I have seen anything?’

      ‘I know all about your midnight rambles,’ Lord Kinsail said, making her start. ‘Aye, and well might you look guilty. I am not the fool you take me for, Cousin Deborah.’ He permitted himself a small smile before continuing. ‘My head groom has seen you wandering about the park like a ghost.’

      ‘I have never taken you for a fool, Jacob,’ Deborah replied, ‘merely as unfeeling. I take the air at night because I have difficulty sleeping in this house.’

      ‘Conscience keeps you awake, no doubt.’

      ‘Memories.’

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