Chapter 20

20

When Sophie cautiously re-entered the great marble chamber, she found it almost deserted. There were indeed, as Drake had warned her, drunken men and women slumped insensible here and there – some of them had chosen to claim the vacant bed and lay there snoring in a jumble of limbs. But Lord Wyverne’s throne stood empty, and his wife had been abandoned after all her exertions and lay sprawled in her tawdry finery, limbs spread across the crumpled sheets. If he had shown concern for Rosanna, even to the extent of having her carried away, it would have complicated matters; she’d have had to follow to her chamber, and would have done so despite the risk. But there was no need.

Sophie had a small bag, part of her luggage, and she’d secreted it earlier in the evening, before the party started, under one of the tables. She fetched it out now. She’d always known that this would be the hardest part – to strip the jewels from the unconscious woman’s body. She was a pickpocket; she had the lightest of touches. But this was something altogether new, and undeniably distasteful as well as difficult. It would have been quite impossible, she realised now, to undertake such a daring, intimate theft if her victim had merely been asleep rather than insensible from drink and physically exhausted besides. She had been, she now admitted, insanely confident in her plan – and yet it seemed fate had played into her hands. She must not fail to take advantage of it.

She started at her ankles – that seemed easiest, and taking the Stella from about her neck, that would be most difficult. Slowly, slowly… She’d even practised for this; there was no manner of fastening that she couldn’t undo, even while blindfolded. Her deft fingers found the clasp of the first diamond bracelet, and in a moment she had dropped it into her waiting bag. She breathed a little easier. She could do this.

The jewels had marked Lady Wyverne’s skin in places. The candles had burned low and were guttering; some of them had gone out completely – there had been no servants here to trim or to extinguish them properly – but the full moon was high above, its powerful beams streaming down through the oculus and illuminating the extraordinary scene below. It was in truth more light than Sophie needed or wanted, and not only because of any lingering fastidiousness she might feel at being confronted with the stark reality of her task rather than being able to perform it in cloaking shadows. It was not just that; if anyone should enter the room now she would be utterly undone, exposed as guilty, but she would not let the terrible risk deter her. Not when she had come so far.

She was moving faster now, more secure in her skill and in the depth of her victim’s stupor. Bauble after bauble slid easily into her bag. Both Rosanna’s ankles were now bare, and she turned her attention to the woman’s wrists, working swiftly. The rings, she thought, would be quite hard to remove, and she’d leave them till last. Till after the Stella.

It was time now, after so much preparation, to do what she had really come here to do. The chain had a clasp – a curious thing, not quite like any other fastener she had come across before or since. She remembered… good God – a sudden image flashed into her mind, shocking in its clarity. It was so powerfully affecting that it made her pause for a moment to recover her composure before she dared to continue. She remembered her mother setting the jewel about her own neck, on the one occasion in her life when she had worn it, when she’d gone to the costume ball and danced with Lord Drake. Before their lives had come crashing down around their ears. She’d been so excited that evening to be trusted with the family’s most precious treasure. Mama had fussed with it for what seemed like forever, careful not to disturb Clemence’s piled-up hair, and then stepped back to see the effect it had made. The Duchess had smiled rather mistily and told her she was beautiful. Her father had agreed when he had seen her later… they’d both kissed her, and her brother Louis had come down in his nightgown and little cap to see her, and had teased her over how grand she looked, how unlike herself…

Enough. She took a deep breath, unfastened the clasp, and with infinite care drew the chain from about the neck of this woman who had no right to wear it. The jewel was heavy in her hand, and warm from where it had lain. She shuddered involuntarily, and slipped it into the bag with all the rest. If she could hold her nerve a little longer, she would soon be done, and then she could go, and do all the other things she needed to before this interminable evening could be over.

Lady Wyverne stirred in her sleep and made a fretful sound. Her head turned restlessly, her eyelids flickering. Clemence – Sophie – froze like a statue, wondering if there was the least chance of getting away undetected if Rosanna woke now and found herself robbed. Realistically, she knew there wasn’t. She’d be seen, there’d be a scream to shatter the stillness of the night, others would wake, she’d be caught… But no. The naked woman turned her head uneasily upon the pillow again and then sighed, and slipped back into a more peaceful slumber.

Hands shaking, Sophie unwound a long diamond chain from her hair. It was agonisingly difficult, repeatedly catching and tangling, and she was pushing her luck too far now, she knew. She ought to stop. But some demon of perverse determination drove her on, and now she turned to the rings, easing one and then another very slowly from Rosanna’s fingers till her hands were as bare as the rest of her body.

Done. It was done. Sophie turned to leave, had already taken a few hasty steps away, and then she pivoted, impulsively catching up a length of fabric that lay on the edge of the bed and trailed to the floor – an abandoned toga, a bedcovering or Rosanna’s own gown, she did not stop to discover – and draped it carefully, delicately, over the unconscious woman. She told herself that it was only sensible – that if Lady Wyverne was not cold she’d sleep more soundly and for longer, and that the concealment the material offered was also useful, disguising the theft. But the truth was that she seemed so vulnerable lying there alone, stripped of all her jewels after an evening spent being used by a procession of men who could care nothing for her, and all this while her husband watched like the depraved monster he was. Sophie felt no remorse, she was quite sure, but she could not bear the sight of her suddenly, or the thought that the servants, men and women both, might see her thus exposed when they came in the early morning to begin tidying away the detritus of the night before.

It was time and past time that she was gone, far away from the scene of the crime. She closed up her bag and slipped out of the atrium with it, heading for the stair that led up to the place she’d chosen as the ideal temporary cache for the treasures. It was much darker here, but her night vision was good and she made her way sure-footedly upwards and through the maze of rooms to her destination: the chamber with the big, old abandoned bed frame and the secret trapdoor under it.

She had an unpleasant moment or two in the cobwebby darkness when she was trying to get down the ladder without slipping. This was the final step before she could conceal her precious burden deep among the heaps of junk that lay in the hidden storeroom. At the bottom she barked her shin painfully on some invisible sharp object, and feared for one long agonising moment that she’d destabilised the pile of rubbish and that it would come crashing down and wake half the house, or crush her with its weight so that she suffocated slowly, trapped. What a hideous way to die. But if it tottered – she could not see as she stood holding her breath – it did not fall, and she was able to do what she had come to do and close the trapdoor securely behind her. A day or two earlier she’d swept the floors quite thoroughly with a birch broom she had borrowed and later returned, so her footprints in the dust of decades would not betray her even if someone did think to search here.

She hastened downstairs again, feeling a brief sense of exhilaration at having the whole huge, silent building apparently to herself, and carried out the final part of her plan, which was to open a set of shutters and a tall sash window in one of the rooms close to the Marble Saloon. This window led rather usefully to a broad stone ledge that would offer an easy enough climb via a drainpipe down to ground level, to someone reasonably agile. This would signal that the thief, who must surely be an enterprising member of the male sex, not a mere feeble woman encumbered by skirts, had left that way, and was no longer in the house. If anyone were outside in the moonlight watching – and she could not quite exclude the possibility, knowing Nate as she did – the opening of the shutter would also signal that she had been successful in her daring escapade and the jewels were now safely in her possession.

Her final mission – and she must not grow careless now – was to regain her room, and she had feared that this might be her hardest task, since she knew that the maids’ attic was supposed to be locked and guarded. It would be ironic, she thought as she climbed another steep set of stairs, now rather weary as her earlier excitement subsided, if the measures that the Dowager had taken to protect her and others were to be her downfall at last. If she couldn’t regain the relative safety of her room, she’d surely be suspected, and all the rest of her meticulous precautions would have been in vain.

And the door was guarded. A chair had been set at the top of the staircase, in a little alcove where the steep steps met the turn of the passage, and in it sat James, another of the footmen, valiantly protecting the women of the household lest some inebriated, degenerate lord should wander up here with dark purposes in mind.

But it was very late now, the house was utterly still, and the poor boy was fast asleep. He wasn’t exactly snoring, but he was breathing very heavily and regularly, and Sophie, suppressing an impulse to cross herself in thanks to a deity she didn’t believe in, stepped lightly past him and approached the lock. She already knew it was a paltry sort of a thing, and with her lockpicks ready to hand – thank heaven she had not forgotten to remove them from the bag before she hid it – she made short and almost silent work of the mechanism and secured it behind her just as easily.

She’d got away with it, she realised as she reached her chamber and closed the door very softly behind her. She did not know what tomorrow might bring, but she’d pulled it off, and fashioned a fine alibi for herself into the bargain. She could not possibly have stolen the jewels, for had not she been locked away along with all the other female servants? James could vouch for the truth of that. She concealed the picks and her trusty knife under a loose floorboard, pushing them deep, deep into the cavity – she wasn’t going to be tripped up by little things like that, after all she had achieved tonight – and rapidly undressed.

An hour or so later, Sophie lay in her mean little bed, too wound up to sleep. It had all gone so smoothly, she could hardly believe it. She attempted to ignore the nagging little internal voice that told her it was too good to be true. What had she wanted – failure, capture, disaster? Nonsense. She had planned and she had executed, and she’d been lucky besides. Nate had once told her that clever and careful scheming seemed to attract luck, while sloppiness drew ill fortune to it.

All that she’d wanted, all that she’d planned for so long with Nate’s help, all the fierce hope and focus that had sustained her while she planned it, all her wonderful revenge – she’d done it. Every bit of it. More than she could ever have hoped for. Even if the jewels were by some mischance found – and she was reasonably confident they would not be, so clever was her hiding place – there was nothing there to link her, honest Sophie Delavallois, to them. Now all she had to do was hold her nerve for a little longer and keep her face and manner impassive while she gloried in the chaos that her actions would undoubtedly create. The hard parts were done, the easy parts lay ahead. It might not be precisely simple to smuggle the jewels out of the house – but she’d done so much already, that would be child’s play.

It should be the happiest day of her life – or of her new life, in any case, the old one with its ordinary family pleasures and prospect of happiness having been left so far behind her with her old identity.

Why, then, did she feel so empty?