Beware of Virtuous Women (26 page)

"But then she wouldn't have to, would she? I would not be invited to visit, and she wouldn't visit here. A simple solution. But not simple enough for Chelfham. No, Jack, it's as you said. He knows, or at least he suspects enough to make him willing to eliminate me, just so that he
can
be sure."

"A family resemblance. I never should have put that idea into your head."

"I never should have suggested Jamaica as the place we met," Eleanor said calmly. "But we are where we are, and now we have to move on."

"He won't show himself, you know. He'll hire someone else, and make very sure he's extremely visible at one of his clubs while that someone else is attacking the coach. So what does that gain us?"

"Knowing," Eleanor said quietly. "We'd no longer be guessing, supposing. I'd know then, for certain."

Jack took hold of her cold hands and led her over to the chairs in front of the fireplace, each of them taking up a chair. "Know that Chelfham was behind the deaths of your parents. You've always wondered about that, haven't you? Why?"

"Please, Jack, not now," Eleanor begged him. "When we're back at Becket Hall. You'll know everything then, I promise. But, yes, there has always existed the possibility that...that someone wanted us all dead. There were reasons to believe that."

Jack looked at her intently. "How is Ainsley involved? He is involved, isn't he? Not your secret to tell, isn't that what you said? You were the victim, Eleanor—how is it not your story to tell?"

Eleanor bowed her head for a moment, and when she raised it again, her eyes were calm, her gaze steady. "Have you no secrets, Jack?"

He opened his mouth to answer, then stopped, shook his head. Now was not the time. There would never be a good time. "We could dress one of the maids in your clothing, have her heavily veiled as she quickly enters the coach."

"There's no one else in this household as small as me, save the tweeny, and she's only fifteen. I don't believe anything will go wrong, but if it does, I'd never forgive myself. Please, Jack. We've been round and round for the past hour, and this is the one sure way to bring my uncle into the open, the one thing that will expose him."

At last he saw the gaping hole in her logic. He'd been too angry, too worried for her, to see it at first. "Because we capture his men and they give us his name, lay all the blame at his doorstep. Eleanor, no one will believe a pair of thieves over a peer of the realm."

"Agreed," Eleanor told him. She'd thought about this, long and hard, and was sure she had the solution. "Which is why we convince those men to implicate Phelps and Eccles.
They
will turn on the earl in order to save themselves. Chelfham's arrogant, and will not have thought of that possibility—attack from within. There's little to no possibility he would prepare for such a betrayal, as he believes himself to be very much in charge. Of course, if we're
really
lucky, it will be Phelps and Eccles he sends to dispatch me, since he can't really ask his
new
partner to do it, can he?"

Jack rubbed at his chin, considering this. "I'm an idiot, I know it, but that makes some sort of twisted sense. Either way, Phelps and Eccles will sing like birds once they're in the guardhouse, they won't want to hang alone. Some day, Eleanor, you must show me these books you've been reading all these years."

Eleanor smiled, feeling they'd gotten past most of their problems, and that the argument was now settled. "Will you be able to do it, Jack? Go hat-in-hand to Chelfham and tell him you agree to send your crippled wife away to your estate in Sussex tomorrow afternoon?"

Jack nodded, his mind busy. "He
will
send Phelps and Eccles, Eleanor. Send them, use them, then have me kill them so that they can never betray him—all with me not knowing that they'd murdered my wife. I think Chelfham would appreciate the irony of that."

"Mean, but not stupid," Eleanor said, agreeing. "You know, Jack, the problem with Machiavelli was that he knew how to gain power, but never how to use it once he had it. My uncle is not a good manager of his power. He uses people, then discards them, unwilling or unable to either instill loyalty or offer trust. He'd discard you for someone else eventually, once he knew all that you know, once he had tucked your supposedly small smuggling operation into his own."

"And yet there is someone he is afraid of, remember? This unknown man in the black coach? Even as Chelfham plans to betray him, he very obviously fears him. Once you and Phelps and Eccles are supposedly disposed of, I'll demand to be taken to meet the man, or else I would anonymously lay information about Chelf-ham's crimes to the Crown."

Eleanor didn't like thinking about this part of the plan. "He'll fume and bluster, declare that he could just as easily implicate you. But then, in the end, he'll communicate with the man in the black coach, say that he has a problem, a man who must be killed or else they all risk exposure. He will have run out of trusted allies, by his own actions, and he'll have no choice but to ask for help."

"He'll see it as his only hope, yes, although I doubt our mysterious stranger will agree."

Eleanor twined her fingers together in her lap. They'd been over this part before. "You'll follow, and watch. The mysterious man in the black coach will most certainly kill him before he goes into hiding, aware that you are too close for his safety. As he unwittingly leads you to this man, my uncle also will be walking straight into his own death. And I'll be partly responsible, although the blame lies with him, and his own greed, his own crimes. It is all rather Machiavellian, isn't it?"

Jack went to his knees in front of her chair, put his hands on hers. "Can you live with that, Eleanor? Once we begin this, we can't turn back. Can you live with the consequences?"

"With Chelfham gone, the entire Red Men Gang would be in disarray, at least for a while. We might even be extraordinarily lucky and learn who the true leader is, and Papa can take steps to protect our people in Romney Marsh. Either way, the Black Ghost Gang will be able to operate in safety again while the Red Men are busy fighting among themselves, all of them jockeying for higher positions once the earl is gone. So many lives balanced against that of a...a monster. Yes, Jack, I can find a way to live with that."

Jack rose slightly on his knees and took Eleanor into his arms, holding her tightly.

Had she realized one last thing? Had her clever mind come to the conclusion that success at any level meant that Jack Eastwood would have to disappear from London, quite possibly from England itself, once the man in the black coach had been made aware of his existence? Yes. She knew. Perhaps that was even why she held him as fiercely as he now held her. Eleanor seemed very adept at imagining actions all the way through to their last consequences.

Jack obligingly stood still in the drawing room as Eleanor fussed with the folds in his neck cloth. His valet would be appalled, but Jack let her fuss, because she was nervous, and because he liked looking at her bent head as she stood within the circle of his arms.

"Are you quite sure you want to do this?" she asked when she'd patted at the cloth one last time and finally looked up, met his eyes.

"You don't think I can playact, Eleanor?"

"It's not that. I just know that you'd like nothing more than to knock him down, or worse. Do you really trust yourself to...well, to..."

"Lick Chelfham's boots? Ask him precisely which part of his flaccid fat ass he'd like me to kiss?" Jack supplied helpfully, then grimaced at his crude speech. Eleanor was a lady. "Forgive me. I promise, Eleanor, I'll do everything except gift him with a detailed itinerary of your journey into Sussex. I've had some experience at being devious."

"Oh? And when would that have been, Mr. Eastwood?" Eleanor asked, moving away from him to pick up his curly brimmed beaver hat and soft leather gloves. Their theories—her theory—were about to be set into motion and, once begun, could not be stopped. She didn't worry about herself. She only worried about Jack.

He bent down, kissed the nape of her neck. "And that, my dear lady, is for another time. Preferably when you are in a very, very good mood."

"Really? Or are you working up to suggesting that we trade secret for secret?"

"Is that possible?" Jack asked her, turning her about to smile down in her face. "If so, I'd be more than happy to tell you all about the time I coaxed my cousin into commandeering the brandy decanter from his father's study, and the two of us drank ourselves to sloppy inebriation behind the stables."

Eleanor lifted one well-defined eyebrow. "And you call that devious?"

"I do, madam."

"How is that devious?"

Jack leaned down to whisper in her ear. "Because I only pretended to drink, while watching my cousin go green as an eel. And he deserved it, as he'd taken my horse out without permission and brought him back lame."

"Well, then," Eleanor said, having witnessed and mediated more sibling quarrels than she cared to remember, "that seems only fair. You never told me you have a cousin. In fact, you've really never told me much at all about your life before you came to Becket Hall. Why is that?"

Jack shrugged, mentally kicking himself for bringing up his cousin. Now was not the time. There would never be a good time for that discussion, that disclosure. "Because my life was so bloody boring until I met you Beckets, I suppose. Was that the knocker?"

Eleanor blinked, a thought that was trying to surface slipping away. "Was it? Who would be calling on us? Surely not the earl."

In answer to her question, there came the sound of booted feet taking the marble stairs at least two at a time, followed by a shout: "Elly? Elly, where the devil are you?"

"Rian?" Eleanor turned wide eyes on Jack. "It's Rian," she said again, unnecessarily, then lifted her skirts and raced toward the hallway, only to be scooped up by her brother and swung around in a circle, just like a sack of flour, she supposed.

"I've got news, Elly," he told her when she begged him to put her down. "It's Morgan. She's gone and had
twins."

"Well, that would explain the sheer size of—twins? Really? Tell me all about it. Oh, Rian, it's so
good
to see you.
Twins?
Leave it to Morgan never to do the ordinary."

She took his hand and led him over to the couches, pulling him down beside her, and only with great effort refraining from pushing back his dark curls that were, as always, overlong, nearly hiding his remarkable Irish green eyes.

Rian, she'd always thought, had the face of a poet. Of all the Becket brothers, Rian had the slightest build. Not as tall, not as broad, everything about him drawn with a finer hand. He may have been nearly nineteen, or at least if the age Papa had given him when he'd come to the island had been correct, but he looked so much younger, so much more innocent than that, so that Fanny, his constant companion, seemed more an unasked-for protector than a sister. Even with a good two days' growth of beard, Rian much more closely resembled an aesthetic than a warrior. How he'd always hated that...

"Hello there, Jack," Rian said, sliding his fingers through his hair, pushing it back off his forehead, only to have it slowly begin sliding front once more. "You been taking good care of our Elly?"