Chapter 24

24

The next week was terribly difficult for everyone living at Wyverne Hall. The Marquess’s guests left the next day, but Sophie did not know if this had been the plan all along, and wasn’t even sure if they were aware of what had happened. It was possible that they remained in complete ignorance of the great loss that Lord Wyverne had suffered, since they at least had not been interrogated along with the household staff. She was sure that their luggage, and that of their servants if they had brought any, had been very thoroughly searched before they were permitted to depart – but again, it might be that this had been done discreetly and that they were ignorant of it.

Their departure brought no easing of the tension. Sophie saw nothing of Lord Wyverne for several days, but his fury pervaded the whole enormous building from cellars to attics. If the servants whispered together, speculating on the identity of the criminal, they did not do so in Sophie’s hearing, and if Marchand reported back to the Dowager with news from the servants’ hall, she wasn’t made privy to it. They didn’t discuss the matter as they sat together each day – the old lady asked her no questions and she volunteered no information. Whatever the reason for it, she was glad not to burden Delphine with her guilty knowledge. They seemed to have come to a tacit agreement: silence was safer for them both. So they knew nothing, they discussed nothing. Along with everyone else, they waited.

Sophie did not visit her hoard. She tried not to think about it, even, lest she be tempted at last to check on it and thus court disaster. She knew it was most likely safe – Lord Wyverne had not found it, of that she was certain, or she should have heard of it. The whole household would have heard of it. Perhaps the story of the intrepid burglar had been believed – she hoped so. At any rate, there was no hint that any sort of search of the mansion was under way. As far as she could see, nothing was happening. But she was aware that she could not know what went on downstairs, or in the Wyvernes’ private chambers.

Lord Drake was spending a great deal of time at the Hall, as he had promised, but still she saw little of him. When he was with his grandmother, she was not. They sometimes encountered each other briefly when he or she was arriving or leaving, but exchanged few words; she curtseyed very correctly, he made her a slight, indifferent bow. If either of them felt an almost irresistible compulsion to push the other up against a wall and ravage their face with hot, urgent kisses – and Sophie had no means of knowing if His Lordship experienced such a compulsion – at any rate they did not give in to it.

Sophie knew that she must be constantly alert, for if discovery or some other less obvious disaster hit, she needed to be ready for it. She’d spent a great deal of time discussing with Nate the best way to get the jewels out of the house once she had gained possession of them, and they had come up with several alternatives, presuming that simply walking boldly out of the door with them in her luggage would not be feasible. And she did not dare do that, not now at least. Lord Wyverne might be many things, but she did not take him for a fool, not where his own advantage was concerned. She had no sense of being watched, but that was probably because she never went anywhere but the Dowager’s chamber, or her own.

One fine spring day she could bear it no longer and ventured outside, as if to take the air. It was a reasonable sort of thing to do, she thought, after being cooped up in the house for so long. As she strolled with elaborate casualness towards the elegant, pillared Palladian Bridge that spanned the river between the lakes, her quick eyes spotted men, strangers to her, stationed in the trees. They were well enough concealed, and perhaps an ordinary person might not have noticed them – but she was not an ordinary person. She saw one, and then another, and thought there must be more that she had not seen. She had nothing in her hands, not so much as a reticule, and met nobody on her promenade, returning to the house after half an hour or so entirely unmolested. But it served as a warning – she was sure that if she’d been carrying anything, especially something as large and conspicuous as her portmanteau, or had attempted to go further afield, she’d have been stopped, searched, and if they’d found anything, or perhaps even if they hadn’t, she’d have been dragged back to face Lord Wyverne’s wrath.

Her discovery also meant, of course, that one of her other possible solutions – dropping the bag very carefully out of a window at night to Nate’s men, who’d be waiting by arrangement below – must be set aside too. She had a method that she and Nate had devised by which she might contact him and summon him, by writing a letter that appeared entirely innocent but contained an ingenious code, but it would do her no good now, for she could not doubt that any stranger who approached the house would be seen and apprehended. She could write, though, and warn him of what she had seen – the possibility that guards would be set about the mansion after the theft was one of the things that they had considered.

When she returned sedately to the Hall from her stroll and was next able to be alone in her room, she took up the quill and ink that she had brought with her for this very purpose and wrote to her dear cousin and regular correspondent Fanny. This person was entirely mythical, but nonetheless resided at a respectable address in Bloomsbury provided by Mr Smith. It would be plain to anyone who intercepted the letter – and she was reasonably sure someone would, given Lord Wyverne’s growing desperation – that Fanny, Mrs Olivier, was an English lady married to Mlle Delavallois’s cousin, and mother of a large and ever-expanding family. Sophie had had some fun with Nate over a bottle of fine smuggled French wine, listing all the possible eventualities that might arise and devising the secret code that applied to each. And so now, after giving her fictitious correspondent her reassurances that she was well and happy in her new position, and that Wyverne Hall was a perfectly lovely spot, she enquired with great anxiety about the baby, and hoped that the painful attack of croup from which he had been suffering had vanished now that the weather was better. She had not the least idea what croup might be, and Nate had confessed that he didn’t either, but it seemed like an appropriately childish ailment, and in this context it meant that the Hall was being carefully watched and that it was impossible therefore to remove the jewels under current conditions. She wrote in English to make things easier for anyone who might be spying on her – she thought that using French might raise suspicion and draw attention to her, which was the last thing she desired. That done, she was powerless to do any more and could only continue with her waiting.