Unlaced Corset Read online

  "Yes, ma'am?"

  "Don't ever do anything of this sort without my express permission again. Is that clear?"

  "I apologize, ma'am. It won't happen again."

  "Good," she said, turning on her heel and walking away.

  Why did he torture her like this? What motive could he have? She was right there before him, and if he were going to do her harm, that had been as good an opportunity as one could hope for.

  If he hadn't, though, then why had he been so secretive and so unilateral in dismissing her household servants?

  It made no sense. But Mary knew one thing. There was a hidden advantage that he hadn't thought of when he had tried to get her alone. She was free, now. Free to pursue the mystery of her father's death away from prying eyes, because there was only one person in the entire house to stop her.

  6

  James

  James sat back, not for the first time that day, and tried to think for a moment about what he could possibly do next. He had thought that he'd reached the end of his rope several times before. Each time, with a little bit of thought, he'd found a new avenue to pursue. Each time had been a dead-end.

  He had expected things to be a challenge. If the finances of Lord Geis had been easily deciphered, and his problems solved trivially, then there would have been no reason to hire James in the first place. What worried him more than that, though, was that there didn't seem to be any issue at all.

  He had checked carefully, several times. The numbers didn't add up whatsoever. It seemed that the house's daily expenses were fairly carefully tracked; each week, hidden somewhere in the tomes that Lord Geis had kept, he had taken down the food costs and wages paid. He'd marked taxes each month.

  And all of that money was more than compensated for by his real estate trading. In theory, the house should not only have been solvent, but should have been fairly well-off.

  The answer, he had decided long ago, was in the scraps.

  He had a few guesses as to what they could have meant, of course. The first letter more than likely signified a fellow's name; the numbers more than likely referred to debts incurred by the named party.

  He had acted on that assumption and tallied the total on a separate sheet. They seemed to add up fairly closely. The problem was the sheer amounts. To one of the men, he paid out very frequently, and never was paid back. The sums were too small to be overly concerned with, but given that there were no dates on any of the scraps it was as likely to have been near-constant as it was to have been an occasional couple of pounds.

  To another, he paid out vast sums that seemed to be paid back…at some point, if he guessed at the timeline correctly. To a third, he paid out regularly, the same few pounds each time. There was never a second number on the note; he must have either been collecting money from the man, or been paying him "off the books," so to speak.

  There was a clear picture being painted by the notes, and the picture was of a household that was being crushed not by their expenses, but rather by the charitable nature of its head. The answer was nearly obvious, but it was there that the trail stopped.

  All he would need to do to get things back into order would be to collect on the debts that Geis had lent out, and the bank should be more than satisfied with the account statements.

  Therein lied the rub.

  None of the names were ever more than a single letter, written in the midst of a cryptic string of letters and numbers that he could only guess at the meaning of. That they got him to within a few dozen pounds when he summed them, meant he was almost certainly on the right track. But that meant nothing if he couldn't identify the men in the notes.

  James tried to steel himself for what he knew would have to come next. There was only one person in the entire world who would know the meaning of these notes; he was lying in a beautiful plot in the churchyard. James had made a point of going to see it before he sent the servants away.

  After he had examined the expenses, he had found that there were virtually none that were perfectly unnecessary. His only concern had been that with only one person living in the house, the personal staff was fairly massive. With her father alive, the Geis family had entertained fairly regularly, and the staff paid for itself in those evenings.

  With her father gone, Mary Geis received no guests, and rarely left her library. When she did, it was for food or to sleep. Or, it seemed, to snoop on his work.

  So he had done what he had to do in order to keep the household accounts in the black: he notified the help that, effective immediately, they would not be paid until a new head of household had arrived. Since he was taking no wage, there was no reason for him to leave. Indeed, it would only help to show his commitment if he were to stay for no pay.

  It had been an overstep, he knew, but he hadn't counted on her reaction. Mary seemed, for all the world, to be nearly as combative as anyone he had ever known.

  He massaged his knee; it still ached, sometimes, even though he had learned to hide the limp he'd walked with for months after his return to university. He hadn't even brought the cane from his flat in London, and he hadn't needed it once. Now he was beginning to regret it.

  All the sitting made it hurt when he did have need to walk, and there was no hostler to prepare a horse for him. The family, it seemed, hadn't felt it worthwhile to purchase a horseless carriage, so on the occasions that he had needed to go into town he had to walk for the better part of an hour.

  He rubbed it for a moment, and then ignored the pain and pushed himself up from the chair. He picked up a few of the scraps of paper from the stacks he had carefully separated them into and slipped them into his pocket. Then he steeled himself for a battle that he knew he couldn't win, and set off in search of Mary Geis.

  She was sitting in the library. He wasn't sure why, but it surprised him to see that she was keeping to her routine even once the servants were gone. He opened the door and, seeing her inside, waited for her to invite him in.

  She didn't. He waited a little longer, and she ignored him. He let out a cough; nothing. He let out a long, deep sigh and stepped through the threshold into the room that she had claimed as her territory. He had already done quite a bit of encroaching on her, and now he would have to do it again.

  His only defense was that his work was absolutely vital to the continued prosperity she seemed to so enjoy.

  Having stepped inside, he steeled himself against the onslaught that was sure to come, but none did. Instead, she continued to stare intently at the book in her lap. He could smell the perfume she wore, even several meters away, and it was nearly as intoxicating as her beauty. If only, he thought, before he caught himself.

  He took another step towards her, and then another, and then he stood at the desk where she sat and loomed over her. He could see that she hadn't turned the page since he had walked through the door, nearly five minutes. As if she were reading his mind, she turned the page slowly.

  For a long time, he waited for a response that did not come. He could see a stiffness developing in her shoulders, and he knew that whether she acknowledged him or not, she was nearly as acutely aware of his presence as he was of hers.

  "Miss Geis?" His voice was soft, almost tender. It surprised him; he had hoped to maintain his professional tone as long as he could, in spite of her preternatural beauty.

  She ignored him, and he repeated her name once more, harder. More like he had hoped to sound initially. Like someone who could not be ignored.

  "What do you need, Mr. Poole? Can you not see that I'm busy? Or do you need to dismiss my books, as well?"

  Having grown silent, she looked up at him.

  "I'm sorry if I've offended you, Ma'am, but—"

  "Oh, sorry, are you?" She narrowed her eyes at him. "So you're going to set my house back in order, then?"

  "If this is about your help—"

  "You had no right, Mr. Poole. You may have been hired by my father; I'll allow that, but you're not in charge of this house, and you're not i
n charge of me."

  "If you want me to re-hire your servants, Miss Geis, I'm afraid I can't do that."

  "And if I told you to leave, and allow me to do it for you?"

  James inhaled sharply. He couldn't afford to lose this opportunity, he reminded himself.

  "I—" He stopped himself and started over. "I have been going over your father's books, Miss, and needed some assistance in deciphering some rather… arcane text. You would have known your father best, and if anyone could make heads or tails of what he's written, then it would be you. I would only need an hour or two of your time—"

  "Why on earth would I help you, Mr. Poole? You've done nothing but throw the house into disorder, and you're not even capable of balancing an accounts book?" Mary closed her book and stood up. She had a defiant expression, and James thought that he would like very much to kiss her until it came off. "Don't be absurd, sir. Get out of my way."

  7

  Mary

  Mary took a deep breath. The ruse, it seemed, had finally worked. She'd waited for days for him to find her in there. Then she would just pick some meaningless fight, an excuse for her to stay cloistered in her room without seeming overly suspicious.

  What surprised her more was the steward, Poole. He had apparently been doing plenty of work. It seemed strange for a fellow she had assumed was merely there on pretense to spy on, or even kill, her. Perhaps she had misread the situation.

  Perhaps, he was just incompetent. He was looking at all the wrong things; the money didn't mean much to her family. They would make it back, in time, she was sure. If they were a little lower on funds than normal, then that was acceptable. After all, there was a war on, and Derby had not been unaffected by it.

  She stepped away from the door and into the room, listening as she did for the sound of anyone walking up the hall behind her. Nobody came. When she was convinced that she was free from prying ears, she reached behind her large, full shelf of books and pulled out a single, unlabeled leather book.

  It had been her father's; he had kept it in a table beside his bed, and as soon as things had taken a turn for the worse, Mary had secreted it away in her room. The entire situation had always seemed fishy to her. Her father was not a particularly thorough man, but he had his tendencies, and he rarely let something major pass without noting it somewhere.

  Figuring out where, now that was the trick. The only sure bet was that if it mattered to him, he had made one of his strange notes in the journal he kept each night, a fairly perfunctory list of things he had done and his feelings on them. If there was anything that would have the secret to his death coded somewhere in it, she knew, it would be in this.

  If she knew, though, then there was little doubt that whoever had set the entire plot into motion would know, just as well. That was why she had taken it, and that was why she had carefully avoided taking it out any time that she might be intruded upon. It had to be her secret, in order to avoid revealing her only trump card. She hadn't expected the chance to arrive so soon—or at all.

  Mary flipped the latch on her door, and then settled into her bed. She hadn't even leafed through it, for fear of being caught. Now she felt like a little girl in a candy shop. What sort of surprises would she find? What would she learn?

  She opened the journal to a random page and let her eyes run across it. As usual, it was written in his strange, perfunctory shorthand. Most of it meant little to her at first glance. She would need to make guesses as to the meaning, but as Mr. Poole had correctly surmised, she knew more than most people would.

  There was Oliver, her father's brother. He had asked to borrow money again, and her father had acquiesced. There was an explanation, noted below, of what the money had been for, but it was densely packed single-letter denotations of words that meant little or nothing: "g m otwf"

  She frowned. It was frustrating to try to decipher any of the meaning, so much of it was kept uncomfortably short.

  As she flipped through, Mary was surprised to find a full name, written out entirely: "Pearl." There was no explanation for who she might have been, but her father had met this woman in January, and had proceeded to spend a considerable amount of time with her, based on the number of capital 'P's showed up from that point on.

  Each time had been followed by a comment, as every note was, and everything that he had done with Pearl had been a wonderful, eye-opening experience.

  Mary tried not to think too hard about it. Certainly, it had been a long time since her mother had died. Years, even. She had heard that it was not unheard of for widowers to hire the services of young women, for…whatever they might do. But she was surprised to hear that her father had hired such a woman, and more than a little bit disgusted.

  She put it in the back of her mind, and tried to move on with the notes. They went on quite a long ways; this had been his most recent journal, that was certain, and the dates went through the early parts of July, only a week or so before his death. By that point he had gotten sick, a surprisingly fast turn of events that nobody could have seen coming.

  Well, she corrected herself, silently. Nobody but the parties responsible for his condition, anyway. That was an important distinction.

  Mary set the journal aside. She wasn't exactly sure what she had expected, after all. There was no reason that her father could have known he would die. He mostly wrote about the events of his day, and it wasn't as if he were going to write 'I just found out about a conspiracy to kill me—the butler did it!'

  Mary laughed at her little joke. It was impossible to imagine Davis having done anything of the sort. He was too small, too unassuming. There was an almost tangible lack of any of the qualities that made a man a good killer. Unlike Mr. Poole, he simply didn't strike her that way.

  There were other ways, of course, that Mr. Poole struck her differently than Davis. He was younger, and stronger, and looked somehow more like a man. She wondered for a moment if he were married, or if he were dating anyone.

  Why should that matter? Mary pushed it away and tried her best to think about other things. She had bigger concerns on her mind than some army boy's muscles, or hair, or voice. That she was spending time thinking about these sorts of things wasn't just useless, it was embarrassing.

  Then, with a long sigh, she flipped through the pages one last time. There wouldn't be anything she could figure out now, and she was quickly finding that she didn't have the energy to read closely after the theatrics she'd just put on in the library.

  The revelations of this 'Pearl' were a further drain on her ability to think rationally about the situation. She'd rather not hear the sordid details of her father's affairs with some hussy. Mary wondered, not for the first time, what on earth had possessed her father to hide his will so carefully.

  Mr. Stump had come down to Derby when word had come of her father's death, and he had informed her that while he had written a will—he had witnessed it himself—it had been hidden, somewhere in the house, and until they found it, it couldn't be read. They had turned the house upside-down, and nobody had found a thing.

  The idea that whoever had been involved in the plot, whoever she had worried might steal her father's journal, may have found the will and secreted it away for their own nefarious purposes. In fact, it seemed downright likely, but if that were the case, then it didn't matter regardless what it said or where it was hidden. It was gone, now.

  If only he had put it in the bank, or left it with someone, then everything would have been so much easier on her. As she flipped the back closed, she noticed something odd about the way that the last page turned. Sure enough, there was something folded into the spine, as if it were some sort of memento.

  An envelope, on her father's stationary. It was addressed to one James Poole, in London, at Lisson Grove. The back was sealed with wax, and the front had a large stamp marked on it, that read "Return to Sender."

  Entranced, Mary broke the seal. If it were nothing, as simple as a letter of greeting, then she would ignore it. Thro
w it into the fire. But if it was something…she could apologize later, but it was too important. She opened the envelope, pulled the paper out, and scanned it.

  None of the shorthand nonsense, here. Mary pursed her lips. Her father had written this, after all. She would need to bring this to James Poole's attention immediately.

  8

  James

  James Poole stood over his bags once again. It wasn't lost on him how briefly he'd had them unpacked for, and what it meant that he was packing them once again. There was no money, after all. He'd tried, for all the world. He cursed his luck, that he'd been so close and for nothing.

  He'd gotten further than he had expected, and that was something he would keep close to his heart. At least he had done more than he had expected of himself. Why, then, did failure sting so badly?

  The game had been rigged against him from the beginning. He had known that. He took a deep breath and let it out unsteadily. His eyes stung and for a moment he was worried that he would lose his composure.

  He knew, of course, where his problems lie. He'd gotten close enough to taste success, and he knew where the impasse lied, but his effort, however frustrating, to solve the problem had only made things worse.

  Mary Geis was an incredible woman, it seemed. A woman of supernatural beauty; when he'd seen her the first time, she had reminded him more of a Greek goddess than an Irish baron's daughter, and that hadn't changed. What had changed was the temper—a temper that brought her ancestry sharply into focus for him.

  Certainly, he had been a bit brusque. That was unquestionable. But at least he had made the effort, in the end, to bridge whatever rift had opened up between them. That was more than he could say for her. What's more, he had tried to help her.

  James picked his bags up from the bed and set them down on the floor. Then he laid down, still in his clothes, and tried to shut his eyes. As long as he could forget about things for a while, he could pick up the pieces of his life.