Chapter Twenty-Six

"I – what? You're … back?" I babbled. "Is this … a diamond?"

Oliver folded his arms across his chest. "It is. Indulging in a spot of jewel thievery, Bloom?"

"No!" I exclaimed, practically hurling the jewel at him in my sudden panic. "Of course not!"

He caught the diamond in his hand as casually as if it were a tennis ball and placed it on the workbench beside him.

"Then might I ask again… What you are doing down here?" His voice was mild, and I couldn't decide if he was angry or not.

"I was in the library," I began, and then I trailed off.

"I am following the story so far." Oliver nodded.

"And I pulled a book off the shelf," I continued slowly.

"Mm-hmm." He motioned with his hand that I should go on.

"And then a door opened in the wall and there were stairs, leading into the dark."

"So naturally you went down them."

I looked at him in bewilderment. "Of course I went down them," I said. "There was a door in the wall. A secret door. In a library!"

"The library part is important, is it?" Oliver asked.

Now it was my turn to narrow my eyes at him. "You are being deliberately obtuse," I said, "but I know you would have done the same because you are a secret reader of Gothic novels!" I hurled the words at him in accusation.

His mouth dropped open. "I am not!"

"Yes you are," I insisted. "I saw them on your shelves."

There was a moment of silence. "Those are Beth's," he said finally, and I scoffed, letting him know that I wasn't falling for that one.

"My reading habits are neither here nor there," Oliver said a touch too quickly. "The question remains: what are you doing here?"

I had finally calmed down enough to take in where here was.

It was a large square room, with white walls and, unlike the library, it was immaculately tidy. Two long workbenches stretched the width of the room, separated into separate work areas, with vices clamped to the sides and dozens of small, intricate tools laid out on strips of scarlet fabric. There was also a giant furnace built into the end of the wall, though it was currently unlit.

And the diamond was not the only jewel in here. No, scattered across the benches were gems of all different shapes and sizes and colours. Some of them were loose stones, but others were set in pieces of jewellery in various stages of completion.

If you had asked me what Oliver Lockhart was keeping in a secret room below his house, I might have suggested expensive bottles of wine or barrels of brandy, or even the remains of visitors who had irritated him. This certainly wouldn't have been on the list. I didn't even know what this was.

I blinked back to him. He was watching me with an expression on his face that I couldn't read, but that I thought might be something close to nervous. Which made no sense at all.

Glancing up to the ceiling, I saw the lights he had turned on. "Are those electric lights?" I asked.

Oliver's eyes followed mine. "I need good light when I work," he said.

"When you work," I repeated, and I looked again at the tables around us. "You're a … jeweller?"

"Well, I'm not using all these diamonds to bake a cake, am I?" Oliver said, but there was still that look about him, the wary one that I didn't understand.

"You made these?" I moved down the table, looking at the pieces he was working on. They were beautiful. Delicate and lovely, each one a work of art.

"Yes."

"You made these," I uttered again, drinking in the sight of them.

I stopped in front of a pair of bracelets, almost identical. There were, I noticed several pieces that had a duplicate next to them.

"Why are there all these doubles?" I asked.

He shifted. "Those are…" He hesitated. "Part of the work I do for the Aviary."

"For the Aviary?" I murmured. "What does the Aviary need you to make jewellery for?"

Oliver looked down at his jacket, brushing an invisible bit of dirt from his jacket sleeve. "Sometimes there are women who need the financial security that a piece of jewellery provides," he said briskly. "Like everything else, however, their jewellery is not their own. It belongs to their husbands or their fathers, and those men may dispose of these pieces however the whim takes them. If I make … an alternative piece – a convincing counterfeit – then the Aviary's clients can hide the originals somewhere safe, in case they should ever need them."

I took a moment to absorb that information. Oliver finally met my eyes.

"Don't look at me like that," he muttered.

"Like what?" I managed.

"Like I'm going to lose another handkerchief to you," he said sharply. "It's not anything worth getting emotional over. I find the work interesting. It's no hardship for me to do it."

"I don't think that's the whole story," I said softly, thinking about everything he had told me in the gallery yesterday. "I'm working on my deductive reasoning, and I think you want to help these women because they remind you of your mother."

I almost couldn't believe I had said the words aloud. Oliver looked stricken for a moment.

He cleared his throat. "Yes," he said shortly. "They do. Her marriage was an unhappy one. An abusive one, that left her with little autonomy. She had no one to turn to, no safe place to run. I believe that she was leaving my father when she died, returning to Spain. That's why she and Ellen were in France."

I stared, beginning to understand. When Oliver had found out the accident was in Paris rather than London, he had also found out that his mother had run away. Without him.

"Where were you?" I asked, the words barely more than a whisper.

"I was away at school," he said roughly, then quickly in the same breath he added. "I don't blame her. I am glad she was leaving him. I wanted her to do it. I just…"

"You wanted her to take you too," I finished.

Again, we were quiet.

"Why did you choose the book?" he asked finally.

"What?"

"The book to open the door. Why did you pull on it?"

"Oh," I said, fidgeting. "Something about it looked different, I suppose. And then it had a flower on it, a foxglove."

"Foxglove for secrets," Oliver said, and he clearly noticed my surprise. "My mother's little joke. This was her room originally, though it looked different then, a sanctuary of sorts, I suppose."

"How did you even learn to do all this?" I asked, reaching out towards a dazzling ruby necklace, but stopping short of actually touching it. I had never seen anything like the creations on display down here, didn't come from a world of rubies and diamonds.

Oliver reached over and picked up the necklace, then he gently took my hand by the wrist, pouring the gemstones into my palm, where they sat, cool and heavy, the vibrant scarlet of spilled blood.

"After the accident, I came back for the funeral, but my father swiftly sent me back to school in London. I was angry, grieving, and I started slipping out of the place whenever I could, looking for trouble." He gave me a rueful look. "One day I got into a fight with a group of boys in a – let's say less than reputable – part of town, and despite my high opinion of myself I did not come out the winner."

"What happened?" I asked, setting the necklace carefully back down.

"I tried to drag myself back to school, but I only got as far as Clerkenwell. I don't precisely remember, but apparently I lost consciousness on the doorstep of one of the jewellers there." Now his smile turned fond. "Mr Peets owned the place, and when he found me – a scrubby little schoolboy with a bloody nose, he took me in and cleaned me up. He was gruff and no-nonsense, but kind in his way. I don't know why, but the whole story spilled out of me – about Mother and Ellen and school and my father. It was probably disjointed nonsense, but he listened, and afterwards he showed me around his workshop. I was fascinated."

"He taught you?"

Oliver nodded. "Over several years, when I kept turning up at his place like a bad penny. Clerkenwell is teeming with craftsmen, so he introduced me around, encouraged my interest, and I had the opportunity to study different techniques." Amusement threaded through his voice. "Not the education my father thought he was paying for, though I did just well enough in school to keep out of trouble."

He spoke with more animation than I had seen before, and I felt a strange kinship with him – I understood at once that the way he felt about his work was the way I felt about my garden.

"When I left school and came home, I began creating this room. Mr Peets had put me in touch with Mrs Finch and she and I started up a correspondence. I was interested in finding a way to use my skills and my resources to do something … better."

"What did your father think about all this?" I asked, puzzled.

Oliver gave a short laugh. "He didn't think a damn thing about it. Richard Lockhart never had the slightest interest in me or anything I did, beyond the fact that he had a son to whom he could leave his business and this home, just as his father had and his father's father. There have been Lockharts at Lockhart Hall for five hundred years." These last words were uttered in a scathing tone, presumably an impression of the man himself.

"He was a fool," I said coldly.

"Excuse me?"

"Worse than a fool," I amended. "In many, many ways, but a fool in this. That he didn't try to know you, that he didn't see your talent for himself."

Silence fell. Oliver stared at me, his eyes wide. I could see the pulse leaping in his throat.

He took a sudden step towards me. Another step, crowding me back against the workbench. My own breath was coming fast and my whole body felt … hectic, tingling wildly.

He lifted his hand then, his fingers coming to cup my face. His thumb traced a line across my cheekbone, and his gaze dropped to my mouth before rising to meet my own.

My lips parted on a soft exhale.

"Why," he said softly, "are you covered in dirt?"

"I…" I tried to think, to formulate words. "What?" I managed.

His eyes roamed my face. "You have mud on your cheek, on your clothes."

I lifted my own fingers to my face, dimly aware that they were trembling. He caught my hand in his own. "I was gardening," I said unsteadily. "You have asters."

Oliver's eyes gleamed, even as he stepped back. He turned my palm over, and though I had washed my hands when I came in from the garden, there were stubborn crescents of dirt under my fingernails. For a moment I saw my hand through Oliver's eyes. It was not the delicate hand of a lady – it was rough in places, calloused – but he looked at it with that strange smile on his lips.

As the distance between us increased, I found I could breathe again, though I swore I could still feel the ghost of his touch on my cheek. I pulled my fingers gently from his grip.

"I have asters, do I?" he said. "And what do asters mean?"

"Daintiness," I said, still flustered but trying to hide it. "Perfect for you."

He laughed.

Oliver Lockhart laughed, and I wanted to bottle the sound, to keep it for ever.

"Maybe you're right, Bloom. Perfect for me," he said. "Now, we'd better go and clean up. As I understand it here in polite society, we dress for dinner."

The next morning, I woke to a loud sound that I couldn't identify. More of these peculiar country noises, I thought, rushing over to the window and dragging the curtain aside.

Below me, three men with machines were mowing the lawn.