Waiting Game (10 page)

He did not wait for the order, but reached into the inside breast pocket of his coat and began removing the tools of his erstwhile trade and laying them out on the counter: a knife with a thin blade, a lady’s hairpin, and a handkerchief smelling strongly of lamb chops.

“I thought it best to cultivate a friendship with Brutus,” Pickett said by way of explanation for this last, then folded the grease spots to the inside and wiped the worst of the coal dust from his face.

“Forgive me, Mr. Pickett, if the contents of your pockets don’t exactly fill me with confidence!” snapped Mr. Robinson.

“No, sir, nor would I expect them to—at least, not until you compare them to Andrew’s.”

The linen-draper nodded. “Fair enough, Mr. Pickett. Well, Andrew, let’s have it, then.”

Finding all eyes watching him expectantly, Andrew hesitated for only a moment, then turned and bolted for the front door of the shop—the same door, ironically enough, that he himself had locked up tight only a few hours earlier. Brutus, seeing an end to the game, leaped gleefully at his opponent and knocked him quite off his feet. Messrs. Pickett and Robinson moved in at once, the former hefting the apprentice to his feet with his arms held firmly behind his back, while the latter reached into the inside pocket of his coat and withdrew a thick wad of currency in varying denominations.

“I didn’t steal it!” the young man insisted, his voice rising on a note of desperation. “My—my uncle died and left me a legacy. I thought I’d best lock it up for safekeeping.”

“In the middle of the night?” the linen-draper asked skeptically. “And where, pray, did you get a key to the safe?”

Seeing the apprentice had no intention of answering this home question, Pickett hazarded a guess. “I expect it was during that time when your own key was missing,” he told Mr. Robinson.

“But it was found not half an hour later,” the man protested.

“It doesn’t take long to press a key into warm wax—the side of a candle, for instance,” Pickett pointed out. “Any locksmith can make a key from that impression.”

“That was a month ago!” The linen-draper stared at his apprentice as if seeing him for the first time. “You must have been planning this for some time.”

“I had to!” Andrew’s voice rose on a note of hysteria. “You were going to make Miss Nancy marry that Brundy fellow!

“Oh, Andrew!” cried Miss Robinson, her voice choked with tears. “How could you?”

“Can’t you see it was all for you?” Andrew pleaded with her. “I couldn’t hope to marry you with nothing to settle on you, but how else was I to get the money? Your father would have had it back in the end, so what difference would it have made?”

“ ‘What difference,’ Andrew?” Mr. Robinson shook his head sadly. “If you can’t see it, there’s no point in me trying to explain it to you.”

“Shall I take him to Bow Street, sir?” Pickett offered.

Andrew, no doubt seeing the shadow of the gallows looming before him, struggled to free himself. “Nancy, please! Don’t let them—Nancy, I love you!”

“A strange sort of love, that steals from the loved one in order to win her,” Pickett remarked.

“Much you know about it!” retorted Andrew, glaring over his shoulder at Pickett. “You’d probably tell me to settle for some female of my own station.”

“No,” Pickett said, not without sympathy. “No, I would never give another man advice I’m neither willing nor able to follow myself. Now, Mr. Robinson, if you’ll unlock the door, I’ll take this fellow off your hands.”

“Don’t think I’m not grateful, Mr. Pickett,” the linen-draper said, “but I can’t see him bound over for trial, not after he’s lived under my roof since he was a lad. No, you can’t stay,” he told Andrew, whose face had lit up at the prospect of a reprieve. “You’ll gather your things and go. And I’ll watch you pack, for I’ve no doubt I’ll find another roll of my money hidden among your possessions.”

All the fight went out of Andrew, who no doubt knew better than to push his luck. He trudged slowly up the stairs with his master behind him, leaving Pickett alone with Miss Robinson.

“Thank you, Mr. Pickett,” she said quietly, staring down at the candle in her hands with great concentration. “This is—hard—on all of us, but we do appreciate what you’ve done. If we seem less than grateful, it’s because Papa and I were both fond of Andrew. Even knowing what he did, it’s difficult for me not to feel a bit sorry for him.”

“And yet, pity is a poor reason to marry someone,” Pickett pointed out.

She shook her head. “No, I could never do that, even if he hadn’t—tell me, Mr. Pickett, will I—will I see you again?”

He did not have to ask why she should want to do so. “No, Miss Robinson,” he said gently. “My work here is done.”

“There are other reasons you might call,” she said breathlessly.

“Miss Robinson—Nancy—I think you should know that I—I’m married.”

“Married? Oh!” She pressed a hand to her bosom, as if he had plunged a dagger there. “I didn’t know—you never said—”

“We are—estranged, my wife and I.” It was all the explanation he felt capable of offering. “But I think I can reassure you on one matter, at least. You need have no fear of being forced into marriage with Mr. Brundy. He has no more desire to marry you than you have to marry him. I daresay the two of you together will be able to withstand any pressure that might be brought to bear.” Privately, Pickett thought she might have done a great deal worse than Ethan Brundy, but the heart, after all, had its own reasons—as he had cause to know.

Since Mr. Robinson did not intend to prefer charges, Pickett judged it best to be gone before master and apprentice came back downstairs, in order to let them say their undoubtedly painful farewells in private. He bowed over Miss Robinson’s hand and then let himself out the front door.

Outside, it was still dark but for the streetlamps casting pools of flickering light onto the pavement at intervals. He had no idea how late it might be; he’d lost all sense of time during the long wait for Andrew to make his move. Now he feared it was too early to report to Bow Street, yet too late to return to Drury Lane and seek his bed. And so he wandered aimlessly through the dark, quiet streets of Town until, inevitably, he found himself standing on a familiar corner in Curzon Street, gazing up at the dark windows of Number 22.

And quite suddenly, almost as if his thoughts had summoned her, one of the windows on the second story opened and a lady leaned out, her unbound hair spilling over the windowsill, pale in the moonlight.

Julia awoke abruptly from the throes of nightmare, confused and disoriented at suddenly finding herself in her own bed, in her own room. In her dreams she had not been in her own house at all, but at Drury Lane Theatre, seated in a box overlooking the stage. Nor had she been alone, for John Pickett had been there, as well—not in the pit, where she had seen him once before, but in her own box, dressed as a gentleman (why was that particular aspect of the dream so painful to recall?) and looking every inch as if he belonged there. And suddenly, in the irrational manner of dreams, the theatre was ablaze, with great tongues of flame licking at the red velvet curtains of their box . . .

She’d awakened then, as was always the case when dreams turned dangerous. And yet it had all seemed so real that she could still smell the smoke, feel the heat scorching her lungs, choking her . . .

She threw back the covers, ran to the window, and threw open the sash, then leaned out and breathed in great gulps of air—cold air, so cold that her breath appeared as small puffs of white, but wonderfully fresh after the suffocating black clouds of her nightmare.

Several minutes later, after her breathing had slowed down and her pounding heart had returned to normal, she bent her head and would have ducked back inside, had she not suddenly realized that she was not the only one awake at so late an hour. Across the street, a solitary figure stood in the pool of yellow light cast by the streetlamp on the corner, a tall, slender man dressed all in black. The lamplight was not sufficient for her to see his features clearly, but then, she had no need to; she recognized John Pickett at once, would have recognized him in much darker surroundings than these. Nor did she wonder at his presence; it seemed somehow natural that he should be there, as if he were part of the dream from which she had just awakened. Then an errant gust of wind blew her hair into her eyes, and when she’d brushed it back, he was gone. She closed the window and returned to bed, wondering if he’d ever really been there at all, or if that, too, had been a dream.

* * *

“You’ll never believe who I encountered last night in St. James’s Street,” Lord Rupert Latham said, taking a teacup from Julia’s hand and supplementing its contents from the flask in his coat pocket.

“Perhaps not, but I’m sure you intend to tell me anyway,” Julia responded drily. She had not slept at all well the previous night, for her slumbers had been troubled by half-forgotten dreams that had ranged from the merely disturbing to the truly terrifying.

Ignoring this jibe, Lord Rupert leaned back complacently against the sofa cushions, the better to observe her discomfiture. “None other than your earnest young husband.”

Julia’s teacup clattered in its saucer. “Mr. Pickett?”

“Unless you have another husband I’m not aware of,” said Lord Rupert, his eyebrows arching.

“How—how was he?” she asked, trying very hard to sound as if it didn’t matter in the least.

“Half seas over, if you want to know the truth.”

“Drunk?” she asked, startled. “He didn’t—” She broke off abruptly.
He didn’t look drunk
, she’d almost said. But it wouldn’t do for Rupert to know about that midnight encounter, for a number of reasons—one of them being that she didn’t know herself whether it had been real, or merely a product of her own half-dreaming imagination. “That is, he—he didn’t ask after me, did he?”

“My dear Julia! Do you imagine that I make a habit of stopping in the street to bandy words with my intoxicated inferiors?”

“Not a habit, no,” she retorted. “But I suspect that in the case of Mr. Pickett, you might make an exception.”

“You know me too well, my dear,” he conceded, chuckling. “That is why we would be so well-matched. As a matter of fact, yes, I did, er, exchange pleasantries with Mr. Pickett.”

“By which you mean you said something hateful.”

“Hateful? I?” Lord Rupert’s expression was one of wounded innocence. “My dear Julia, do, pray, acquit me! I was merely emboldened by Mr. Pickett’s, er, excesses to hope that they might be in honor, one might say, of the annulment of your marriage. But alas, he tells me my assumptions were premature.”

Julia had ceased listening, for another thought had occurred to her. “Tell me, Rupert, was he—was he dressed all in black?”

Lord Rupert inclined his handsome head. “He was indeed, and it was this, along with his condition, that encouraged me to hope that he might be mourning the death of a dream.”

It had been real, then. It warmed her heart to think of him standing in the street below, keeping watch over her like a knight of old protecting his lady. And no lady ever had a worthier, regardless of what Lord Rupert might say to the contrary. Nor was any knight more hardly used, she thought, suffering the now-familiar pang of guilt and shame at the demands placed on him by the annulment procedure. But according to her solicitor, the papers had already been filed, and it was merely a matter of waiting for the annulment to come before the ecclesiastical court.

And to hope, in the meantime, that she wasn’t making the biggest mistake of her life.

Sharp-eyed readers will no doubt recognize Ethan Brundy, although this story takes place in December of 1808, eight (well, seven and a half) years before the events of his own book, which is set in the spring of 1816. Readers new to my books who want to know what happens when he
does
, in fact, meet the woman he wants to marry may read all about it in
The Weaver Takes a Wife
.

The seeds of his appearance here were first sown when I realized that, if they inhabited the same fictional “world,” poor insecure John Pickett would actually be four years
older
than the self-assured Weaver, hero of what is probably the most popular novel I’ve ever written. It was interesting to think about, but a moot point, since I never expected them both to turn up in the same book.

 Then John Pickett’s newest case took him to a linen-draper’s shop, and it seemed only natural that Ethan Brundy should turn up there, delivering a shipment of fabrics from his (or rather, his foster father’s) warehouse. I had thought his would be no more than a cameo appearance, a sort of inside joke for people who had read
The Weaver Takes a Wife
; I should have known he would not be content with so insignificant a role!

The painting on the cover of this book shows a 19
th
-century view of Drury Lane; I regret that I was unable to identify the artist of this particular work. The church whose steeple appears in the background is St. Mary-le-Strand, which is mentioned briefly in this story.

This exact streetscape appears again and again in sketches, paintings, and, later, photographs throughout the century, ranging in mood from charmingly picturesque to downright depressing as the century progressed. (To see a few of these images, check out www.pinterest.com/cobbsouth/waiting-game.) This particular painting was the only one that portrayed the street in wintertime, so I decided to use it even though it is evidently several decades later than the novella’s setting of December 1808. How do I know? Because the double-gabled building in the right foreground was well-known as the Cock and Magpie pub at least as late as the 1840s; in this image, however, the distinctive sign between the second-floor windows has been taken down and/or painted over.