The Vanishing Thief(73)

I guessed it likely Drake thought the viscount had called his bluff, and, as he had with Waxpool and the Naylards, Drake simply gave up. “So your husband doesn’t know about Drake’s efforts to blackmail you or the existence of the letters?”

“No.”

“You’ve had a lucky escape.” And I could discount the viscount as a suspect in Drake’s attempted kidnapping.

“So you won’t bother my mother anymore?”

“One more thing. So much of this investigation has been about your sister Victoria and her death. What was she like? You must have known her better than most people.”

For the first time since entering my shop, Elizabeth smiled. “After all this time, I’ve forgotten most of what we fought about and just remember her beauty.”

“She seems to have been very popular but not well liked.”

“Yes. I was her younger sister, always ordered around by her. And Mummy always took her side. She ordered our brother around until he escaped to school. She and Margaret Ranleigh fought constantly because Victoria tried to tell her what to do and what to wear, and Margaret would have none of it. Victoria even went so far as to tell her that after she married her brother, Margaret would have to do exactly as Victoria said, or she’d have the duke cut off her allowance and keep her home in Blackford Castle.”

“I imagine Margaret didn’t like hearing those words.”

“Not at all. If Margaret had stopped and thought for a minute, she’d have realized the duke would never have stepped into the middle of that fight. But Margaret was not one to stop and think, and Victoria loved to trick people into doing what she wanted.”

Elizabeth was now leaning on the counter, willing to tell me all the gossip now the danger that her husband would learn of her indiscretion had passed. I decided to press a little more. “What was Victoria like as a person? What did she enjoy? What did she avoid?”

“Victoria loved a good time, to be the center of attention, to have the newest gown and the most admirers. She loved sweets and hated to walk and was already starting to get plump. Mummy was always after her about that, but she’d dump sugar and milk into her tea until there might as well not be any tea in the cup. The duke would have quickly found himself saddled with a fat wife.”

The bell over the door jingled and Elizabeth jumped and looked around guiltily as Emma returned from her afternoon with Lady Westover. The viscountess looked back at me and whispered, “I trust you won’t repeat anything I’ve told you in confidence.”

“Your secrets are safe with me.”

She nodded and strolled out the door without a glance at any of the books. For all her interest, the shop could have been empty.





Chapter Sixteen





EMMA, all blond elegance and aristocratic reserve, lifted one eyebrow and watched Viscountess Dalrymple leave. Her childhood in an East End criminal gang had made her an actress far beyond my talents.

“The lecture was interesting,” she announced in an upper-crust accent. Then her eyes gleamed and she became Emma again. “Daisy Hancock is not our blackmail victim. No letters to Drake. She says he’s fun, but she’s worth more than ‘fun.’”

“She actually said that?”

Emma giggled. “That girl is completely in love with herself. She gossips with abandon, probably shops with as much glee, and the only letters she writes are to accept or decline invitations and the thank-you notes she moans over having to compose afterward. She says she hates to write. Thinking makes her squint, and that will put lines on her face before her time.”

“Really?” Daisy Hancock sounded incredibly vapid.

“Really. She loves balls, has never read a book, and proclaimed the lecture a crashing bore because there were so few young men attending. She doesn’t commit anything to writing and her behavior in public is exactly what you’d expect from a debutante.”

“I can’t see Drake blackmailing someone like her. She’d be too careful to create a scandal.” But we’d been told Lord Hancock was one of Drake’s victims. “So it’s the uncle, not the ward, who’s Drake’s victim.”

“Perhaps one of his experiments went too far? Daisy said he spends all his time in his laboratory at Chelling Meadows, developing new weapons for our colonial troops.”

“You got on well with her.” I wasn’t surprised. Emma made friends with everyone.

“I did. I pretended to be a bluestocking who’s trying to convince her father to let her go to university. No competition, but keenly interested in everything she had to say.”