Caprice: The Masqueraders Series - Book One (34 page)

Clarissa was so surprised by her aunt’s lack of enthusiasm that she did not at first notice the piece of jewelry in her right hand. Then the candlelight caught the surface of the milk-white stone.

“Aunt Heloise! You found the brooch!”

Heloise smiled at her in pity. “Dear child. Do not be deliberately dense. I did not find it. I took it.”

“You … took …”

“Swiped, nabbed, pilfered; whatever the word. I stole the brooch.” Heloise flashed her niece another smile but it was not as bright as before. “Quentin taught me how. He said the ability often comes in useful in a foreign place. One can replace almost anything one loses.”

Clarissa’s horrified mind began to operate slowly, its instructions simple and direct.
Hide,
it said.
Now!

She turned back to the door, closing and locking it with the care one might lavish upon a very fragile and delicate mechanism. When she turned back, her aunt was still smiling at her as though nothing had been said. But words had been said. The moonstone cameo lay faceup in her palm.

Clarissa moved very slowly across the room, afraid that any quick movement might shatter her aunt’s calm. “Aunt Heloise,” she began in a low-pitched voice, “do you know what you are saying?”

“Don’t raise a breeze, Clarie,” she replied shortly. “It isn’t as if I were intending to keep it, or any of the rest of it.”

Clarissa felt her stomach drop into her shoes. “There is more?”

For the first time an emotion other than serenity passed over her aunt’s lovely features. “I’m very afraid there is, child. Quite a bit, in fact.” She reached back to her jewel case which stood on the vanity top and opened it. “I was going to tell you, but you’ve been so occupied with your earl.”

The first thing Clarissa saw lying among the tangle of expensive pieces was Lady Everleigh’s lavaliere. “Oh, Aunt!” Only then did the realization begin to sink in. With a hard-beating heart, she reached out and picked up the piece. “You stole this? I remember the night it disappeared. Lord Ramsbury accompanied us home.”

“Yes, he was so gallant that night.”

Laughter pushed at the back of Clarissa’s throat but there was no element of humor in it. Hadrian had suspected
her
of taking the lavaliere. He was closer to the thief than he ever knew … than he must ever know.

She remembered then the night she had found her aunt weeping and talking to her husband’s portrait. At the time, she had assumed Heloise’s sorrow had been prompted by the actions of an unfaithful wife. Now a wholly different interpretation seemed more likely. “Why did you do this?”

Heloise looked up into her niece’s disillusioned young face. “You will not understand, Clarie. I don’t quite understand it myself.” She began worrying the lace on her cuff. “I am so lonely. Sometimes …” She sighed. “Quentin was never the easiest man to live with. But oh, my dear! It is so much harder to live without him.”

She raised her eyes to Clarissa. “When you marry Ramsbury, you will know what I mean. I’ve seen how he looks at you. After lying so many nights in his arms you won’t be able to sleep when he is not there. You will ache and remember, oh—too many things!”

Clarissa held her breath, not knowing what, if anything, she should say.

“It wasn’t the gems, you know. It was the fact that Quentin always brought back the most perfect things from his journeys. I have emeralds from Brazil, pearls from the Orient, sapphires from Kashmir. Something that said he remembered, even after all the months of waiting, and the partings. They said he still cared.”

Clarissa’s eyes filled with compassionate tears. Amazingly, when her aunt looked at her again, her eyes were dry. “I only meant to borrow the pieces. They looked so tempting at the time. To wear them for an hour or two and pretend that Quentin had given them to me, that’s all I desired. How very goose-witted it sounds!”

“No, I think I understand,” Clarissa began, only to realize that what she meant was she understood loneliness and desire, even envy. What she did not understand was how her aunt could have actually stolen what appealed to her.

Heloise shrugged, looking smaller and frailer than before. “What shall we do, Clarie? You will want to inform Lord Ramsbury, of course. I wonder what he will say?” She gazed fondly at her niece. “He’s too sound a top to hold this against you. Every family has its skeletons.”

She looked back at the jewel case. “I did, after all, only wish to borrow them. The trouble is, ’tis much simpler to take the bloody baubles than it is to return them.” She dropped her head like a naughty child. “And I have so wanted to return them.”

“Then that is what we shall do,” Clarissa said crisply.

“How?”

“By messenger, no, by mail.” Clarissa began to warm to the subject, feeling a lessening of shock as a course of action became clear. “We will leave Wolfscote for Dolick Hall first thing in the morning. Once there we will decide the best way to return each piece. For scandal’s sake we must be certain that the packages cannot be traced back to us.”

“Lord Ramsbury would—”

“No!” Clarissa whispered, horrified by the very idea that Hadrian should learn of her aunt’s duplicity. “There’s been more than enough deception in our relationship up to the present. You and I will solve this dilemma ourselves. Now give me the brooch.” When it lay in her palm she looked deep into her aunt’s blue eyes. “Have you taken anything else since we’ve been at Wolfscote?”

“Clarie! I am not a thief!” Heloise shifted a shoulder. “I did admire Lady Kennan’s sapphire bracelet but it fits her arm too snugly. ’Tis those comfits she’s forever popping into her mouth. That bracelet will one day cut off her circulation.”

Clarissa did laugh this time. “Auntie, you are a card. Now give me the rest of the pieces.”

“Why should I?”

“I would feel better if they were in my possession. You might be tempted to wear the wrong piece.”

“Very well.” Heloise counted out half a dozen pieces and laid them on the vanity top.

“Where are the others?”

“What others?”

“Lady Chetham’s bracelet,” Clarissa replied. “It disappeared from her house the afternoon we met Mr. Blackburne and his friends there for tea. Do not dissemble. I must have every piece.”

“I did not take it!” Heloise’s lip began to tremble. “I am not the cause of every theft in London, if you must hear it.”

Clarissa knelt beside her. “I am sorry, but this is so very difficult for me. Are you
very
certain that these pieces are the only ones you took?”

Heloise glanced at the gems sparkling in a rainbow of colors and then nodded briefly.

“Very well.” Clarissa placed a hand over her aunt’s, which were clasped in her lap. “Now I must have a promise from you, an absolutely solemn promise, Aunt. Look at me.” China-blue eyes met ones of deep sloe plum. “If ever again you feel the urge to ‘borrow’ something that does not belong to you, you must come immediately to me. Instanter! Do you understand?”

Heloise sighed. “Of course, I understand. I am not dim-witted. I will not take anything else, ever. It’s all been too distressing.” She suddenly threw her arms about her niece’s neck. “I am so glad you came home. I could not have stood it had I been left entirely alone.”

“I’m glad, too, Aunt,” Clarissa replied.

Heloise released her. “Of course, you are. You have found yourself a man worthy of you. Marry him quickly and, Clarie, never—but never—allow him to develop a wanderlust.”

When Clarissa had collected the jewels and tied them up in a silk scarf, she tucked them into her sleeve and went directly back to her room. Once there, she took them out and carefully wrapped each piece separately in one of Soltana’s veils before putting them into her portmanteau.

When only the moonstone cameo remained, she picked it up and held it a moment. Hadrian had supplied her with the solution to this piece, at least. Without the aid of a candle, which might draw a servant’s observant eye, she moved quietly, her tread especially light, through the dark corridors.

She reached the ballroom without mishap. There was just enough moonlight left to make the decorations and columns stretch long, slightly sinister shadows across the shining expanse of wooden floor. Keeping to the shadows she made her way around the edge of the room toward the piano on the far side. Finally necessity required that she step into the open. She did so with the greatest trepidation. Yet nothing jumped out at her from the darkness as she crossed to the musical instrument. Pausing, she reached into her pocket and took out the brooch and placed it on the top of the closed keyboard.

The hand that grasped her by the wrist made her cry out in fright, but the scream was cut off by the hand applied across her mouth.

“Gently,
Bahia.”

That voice! She was released and turned about. She nearly cried out again to stop him as he reached for the brooch, but she knew it was futile.

He picked it up, examining it with his fingers, and then he pocketed it before looking up at her. “I did not want to believe it.”

Her chin trembled. “Then don’t.”

“Why,
Bahia ?”

How sad he sounded, as though she had just broken his heart. “I cannot explain. Not yet.”

“Who are you?”

She realized then that he really could not know with absolute certainty who she was. And who was there to vouch for her? A dotty aunt who had not seen her in six years, and who had stolen the brooch. “Does it matter?”

He looked at her a long time. “Possibly not. Tell me.

“I am Clarissa Willoughby, widow of the late Lieutenant Evelyn Willoughby from the Isle of Jersey.”

“I see.” The silence cut through her like shards of glass. “What else have you taken?”

“I—” Clarissa swallowed. Was she really about to throw her poor wandering-in-her-wits aunt to the likes of
Shaitan?
“If you are thinking of calling the authorities, you should remember that we were together when the piece was discovered missing.”

“You could have snatched it earlier.”

How calmly he destroyed the very defense he had an hour earlier offered her. “Are you going to publicly expose me?”

She heard him use a particularly nasty bit of Arabic doggerel her uncle had been partial to and had taught his niece in order to shock his wife.

“I will leave in the morning. For my aunt’s sake …” It sounded as if she were hiding behind Lady Holton’s skirts. “At least allow her to depart. I will stay behind to face Lady Bloomsby, if you require it.”

“Go to bed, Clarissa. And for God’s sake do not run away. If I have to come after you, I will not spare you, or myself.”

Feeling wounded in a dozen different places, Clarissa turned away only to have him catch her by the arm. He stepped up to her, and taking her chin in his hand, he bent to kiss her.

The tenderness in it broke her when nothing else would have. She gasped in a sob when he released her, but still she said nothing, not even when he enfolded her in his arms.

“I don’t care. Do you hear me?” he whispered fiercely. “I do not care what you have done. I will replace whatever you have taken. No one else need ever know. I don’t care who you are or why you did what you did. Only promise me that you will never steal again … and that you will marry me.”

Clarissa lifted her head from his shoulder, straining in the darkness to see his shadowed face. “You really do love me,” she said in wonder.

“Did you doubt it?”

She shook her head. “No, but it makes this impossible! You must let me leave. You must!” She turned and left him quickly.

“I don’t understand why we must leave so quickly, Miss Clarie,” Sarah complained as she gathered her aunt’s things.

“I do not know that I need explain myself to you, Sarah. Please do as you’re told, and hurry. The carriage horses are being harnessed. I will meet you in the main hall in one quarter of an hour.”

“Grows more like your ladyship every day,” Sarah muttered when Clarissa had left the room.

“I expect that that is a compliment,” Heloise responded. “Clarie’s a grand girl, a true Holton.”

Clarissa directed the footmen who came for her trunks, but she would not let any of them touch her portmanteau, which she insisted on carrying herself. Fifteen minutes later she was pacing the front hall, anxious to be away before the other guests awoke.

When she heard footfalls on the stairs, she glanced up, both afraid and hoping that it was Hadrian. It was Emory Blackburne. He was dressed for riding and carrying a grip.

He looked as startled to see her as she was to see him. “Mrs. Willoughby,” he greeted her doubtfully.

“Mr. Blackburne,” she acknowledged.

“What are you doing?” He glanced at her portmanteau. “You are leaving?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” He glanced back up the stairway. “Will Princess Soltana be traveling with you?”

Clarissa’s lips thinned. “She has already gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“Gone back where she belongs, Mr. Blackburne.” She knew she should not say more, but she could not help herself. “I think the very best thing you could do would be to forget you ever met.”

Emory looked like she had struck him in the face. “She told you—about us?”

Clarissa looked away. “She confided a little, only the most general things. But she is gone now for good, Mr. Blackburne.” She looked up at him. “Don’t hope otherwise.”

“It doesn’t matter any longer,” Emory said darkly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a letter. “Will you see that she receives this? It’s very important.”

Clarissa did not reach for it. “It will change nothing.”

Emory shrugged, his face flushing. “It will mean a great deal to me.”

“Very well.” Clarissa took the letter and put it in her reticule. “Mr. Blackburne,” she said as he was about to move past her. He paused. She smiled at him. “We do not know each other well, but I am disposed to think only good of you. Do not think too harshly of Soltana. She was never meant to remain in London. For all that, I know she thought well of you.”

He nodded. “She told me last night that she is to wed. I wish her well.”

“And I you, Mr. Blackburne.”

Smiling bitterly, he gave the hallway one inclusive glance. “Sometimes we must give up what we love best.”