A Talent for Trickery Read online

  “A manifesto.” He looked at her, a little bit horrified. “You jest.”

  “Not at all. It’s an exceptional piece of work.” That was a lie. It was also dreadful. Dreadful and lengthy. “He wrote about everything.”

  Except her. At least, not directly. Her father had been unforgivably careless in so many ways, but he’d always been adamant in keeping names to himself. He spoke of her in his journals, but in his musings about their shared criminal activity, he referred to her simply as “the Tulip.”

  “The notes you have in London are just that,” she continued. “Notes on what little information amongst all of this Mr. Bradley felt might prove useful.”

  Owen swore again. “It could take weeks for the two of us to go through all this.”

  “Yes. And before you ask—no, Samuel and Gabriel may not help. We can’t have four people talking and clambering about in here at night. Someone would hear. And no, we can’t go through them during the day. I’ll not risk it.”

  “We don’t have weeks, Lottie.”

  “I know. And I have decided you may take them to London, if you must—if you promise to return them as soon as you are through. I can tell Peter you’re taking some of Father’s old paperwork to London with the intention of having it searched for any forgotten business that might benefit the Bales family. And I can make sure that both he and most of the staff are out of the house when you haul out the trunks. That will keep anyone from looking too closely at the journals.”

  The story might pique Peter’s curiosity a little, but it was highly unlikely a boy of fourteen would fuss over a lost opportunity to dig through piles of old papers. He was fascinated by their father’s life, not his ledgers.

  “And what reason would you give him for my having offered such a favor after so long?”

  “The same reason I gave him for your sudden interest in the Bales children after ignoring us for eight years. You fancy yourself a kindly benefactor, but like most members of the nobility, you are inconsistent, self-centered, and something of a dolt.”

  He stared at her wordlessly.

  “Fortunately,” she continued, “the men in your employ are not. If I tell Peter there are none better qualified to see to the work, he’ll be content to let the papers go.”

  “You’re a small woman, Lottie.”

  “It’s the little things,” she explained with a happy sigh. “And it is Miss Bales.”

  “Well”—he ran his tongue over his teeth and eyed her with menace—“it would appear I haven’t much of a choice, have I, Miss Bales?”

  She shrugged, as if it all made very little difference to her.

  Only it did, of course. Because, the reality was, Owen had no shortage of choices, and most of them could end badly for the Walker-Bales family.

  If he wanted to drag the trunks out in the middle of the day and read the contents aloud to Peter, the staff, and the rest of Christendom, there was little she could do aside from putting up a grand fuss. That fuss would be very grand indeed and would include a substantial amount of bodily harm done to Owen’s person. In the end, however, it likely wouldn’t be enough to stop him.

  “I’ll see to obtaining a wagon tomorrow,” he said at length. “We’ll pare down what we can in the next day or two.”

  Lottie turned away and quietly expelled the breath she’d been holding. “Well then,” she managed in a respectably even tone. “Let’s get started.”

  She grabbed a few loose journals at random and, grateful that she’d traded the modesty of a corset and crinolette for the practicality of a tea gown, settled herself on the floor, her back against the open door and her legs tucked up to make room for Owen. A chair in the bedroom would have been far more comfortable, but the trunks provided a sound barrier and the tapestry effectively blocked the candlelight.

  Owen must have understood this as well, because he didn’t mention her awkward position. “You know, I had hoped your anger might have dissipated with time.”

  “I’m not angry with you, Renderwell. That would require a level of interest and energy I have not been inclined to spend on you in years.” She opened the first journal. “I simply do not like you.”

  “Disliking someone takes a fair amount of work.”

  “Everyone ought to have a pastime. Idle hands, as they say.”

  “Could you try for civil?”

  “I wasn’t the one swinging cutlery about,” she reminded him and flipped the page.

  She refused to look up from the journal, but she could imagine he was grinding his teeth, and she found the image, fanciful or not, immensely gratifying.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” he said.

  “Take it however you like,” she told him. “Just do it in silence.”

  He went from grinding his teeth to staring daggers at the top of her head. Or so she gathered from the narrow view she had of his feet. They were very still, and they were pointed at her. What else could he possibly be doing?

  At last, he moved. Owen snatched up a journal, took a seat across from her, and went to work.

  Four

  Unfortunately, the silence following Owen’s capitulation proved to be far more discomforting to Lottie than an argument about her anger. Particularly as she’d been winning that argument.

  She didn’t feel as if she was winning now. Not unless winning was defined by an inexplicable and maddening inability to keep one’s mind focused on the task at hand. She tried to train her eyes and thoughts on the journal before her, she really did, but it was distracting beyond measure to have the man who had once been the center of her universe sitting three feet away.

  He’d been everything to her. Everything all the other men she’d met in her life had most assuredly not been—noble, strong, reliable, trustworthy, safe.

  Good.

  She watched him flip the pages of his journal, rapidly taking in the contents. She used to love watching him work. His mind operated with remarkable speed, taking in information, separating and retaining what he needed, and discarding the remainder with enviable efficiency.

  He was a man who could disassemble and reassemble a puzzle in the time it took most men to simply comprehend what they were looking at, and she found his keen mind to be one of his most attractive attributes.

  Had found, she corrected. She had found it attractive.

  “None of this makes sense,” he said suddenly, surprising her.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Much of this is written in some sort of shorthand…mess.” He held up his journal, pages out. “What the devil is this?”

  Lottie looked at the seemingly indecipherable array of lines and shapes, angles and letters, and hid a smile. Given the tenor of her thoughts a moment ago, she found his confusion more than a little funny. “It’s a diagram, of sorts.”

  “Yes, I can see that. What does it mean?”

  “It’s…” She reached to point, drew her hand back when he turned the book so he could make out where, exactly, she was pointing, then tried pointing again. “See here, the…”

  He turned the book again. “See what?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she muttered and set her journal aside. “Push over.”

  There wasn’t much room for Owen to maneuver, but by pressing himself against the door frame, he managed to create sufficient space for Lottie to squeeze in between him and a stack of trunks.

  She regretted the decision almost immediately. If it was disconcerting to have Owen loom over her, or sit across from her, then it was positively alarming to be pressed against his side with her knee touching his thigh and his familiar scent teasing her nose.

  Wintergreen, she thought. He’d always preferred wintergreen in his soap.

  Annoyed that she remembered, she pushed away all thoughts of soap and knees and thighs and tapped a series of small horizontal lines in the ce
nter of the journal. “This was a window in an alley near the corner of”—she pointed to the letters F and B inside a circle—“Fleet Street and Beard Lane. For a time, when I was very young, my father fancied himself a pickpocket. He’d do the thing neat and clean and hide the prize in the slats of the shutters here for…to be picked up later.”

  It was common practice among pickpockets to immediately hide or pass off a purse to an accomplice. More than one thief had been apprehended and searched a block or two from the scene of his crime only to be released when no stolen property was found on his person.

  “I’m familiar with the scheme,” Owen said, “but I cannot fathom how this jumble represents any portion of it. What does the rest mean?”

  He’d turned his head when he spoke and his breath brushed against her temple, sending a pleasant and all too familiar shiver up her spine.

  She cleared her throat. “It is everything within a six-block radius, more or less. See…letters inside circles are roads. If they’re inside squares, they mark alleyways. Straight lines between the roads mean heavy foot traffic; dotted lines are streets with fewer people. This line with the squiggly marks means it’s someone else’s territory. There’s no poaching. Nearby shops or buildings with back doors that could provide potential escape routes are indicated by diamonds. Filled squares mean there’s no exit. A line through a diamond means the shopkeeper or home owner is likely armed.”

  “Why not just draw the thing out properly?”

  “Takes longer, for one.” Especially if you were a man of very limited artistic skill. “And it keeps any enterprising snooper from understanding what he’s looking at.”

  “So, it’s encrypted.”

  “If you like.”

  “The numbers in the top left corner? Dates and times, I presume?”

  She nodded. “He kept a record of how often he used each particular plan.”

  Don’t overfish a pond, love. Believe me. I know of what I speak.

  “This down here.” Owen tapped the bottom of a page. “Tulip. I remember that. A name, wasn’t it? But not an actual person.”

  Her heart skipped a beat, then added an extra three in rapid succession to compensate. “Not a singular person. The name referred to any female accomplice he happened to have at the time.”

  “Do you remember them?”

  “Not well.” Perfectly well, in fact. “Father worked with a number of people, most of whom I was not allowed to meet.”

  “He was particular on that score,” he agreed. “But is there a name that stands out to you? Someone he might have worked with more often than the others?”

  Oh, yes. “None I recall.”

  Eager to be done with the conversation, she moved to leverage herself out of her cramped spot, but Owen grasped her arm, keeping her in place.

  “A moment.” He released her to flip back several pages. “What is this?”

  It was another diagram, this one of a prosperous neighborhood her father had visited several times during his, thankfully brief, stint as a burglar. As soon as she finished explaining it, Owen flipped the pages again and asked after something else…and then something else. And on it went.

  There were more diagrams, some sketches Owen mistook for diagrams as they were so badly done they actually appeared purposefully cryptic, and even the particulars of several popular dances, with notes on the most opportune moments to divest an unsuspecting dance partner of her ruby ring or sapphire brooch. Her father had never met a gemstone he didn’t covet.

  After a while, she gave up trying to leave and picked a journal to look through where she was. After several more interruptions, she abandoned the journal as well. And for the next two hours, they went through her father’s entries together.

  Despite the odd thought about soap, knees, muscled thighs, and Owen’s funny little habit of twisting his lips to the left when he was puzzled, Lottie found that going through her father’s writings was a rather pleasant endeavor. It engendered a sense of nostalgia she had not expected. Though she deeply resented the work her father had done, she didn’t resent her memories of him. Not all of them, anyway. And it was lovely, really, to be reminded of some nice things about her father. Silly little things that had made him unique. Like the way he had turned a phrase or approached a job or a puzzle. The way his drawings of roses not yet in full bloom always turned out looking like sad little arrows with splintered shafts. And the way he’d laughed until he’d cried when Esther had stolen a journal and amended one of the sketches to include a close-up caricature of an astonished Prince Albert, mouth agape in a comical Nooooo, as he contemplated an immediate and inescapable death by rosebud-turned-misshapen-arrow to the right eye.

  The pages before her were a far better representation of her father than the pompous portrait above the fireplace mantel could ever be. She wished now that she had taken the time to look through them years ago.

  As the third hour ticked by, however, happy memories began to dim in the face of growing physical discomfort. The confined room was rapidly becoming overwarm with the tapestry trapping the heat of two candles and two bodies inside.

  Lottie shifted her weight, seeking relief, but all she managed to do was press herself tighter against Owen’s form. She felt a bead of sweat trickle down her temple, and she wiped it away with more fervor than was probably warranted.

  She hated the heat. It didn’t remind her of the happy times the way the journals did. It reminded her of the other times—the early years before her father had honed his craft and learned to save against the inevitable run of bad luck.

  It made her think of summers spent in impossibly cramped rooms in cheap boardinghouses, where there was no privacy, no space, and no air. Where opening their sole window accomplished nothing but to carry in the sick odor of refuse rotting in the streets.

  Winters had been miserable in those rooms, but Lottie had been able to escape the cold, if only for a few hours, by huddling with her sister under a mountain of blankets.

  There had been no escaping the oppressive heat and stench of summer, and the memory of those endless miserable days made her vision blur and her stomach tighten and roll.

  “Right. Up you go.”

  Owen’s voice sounded unnaturally far away. She blinked away the blurriness and discovered he’d stood up without her noticing and was, once again, looming over her. “What? What are you doing?”

  “You need fresh air.” He bent down, caught her under the arms, and hauled her to her feet in one easy movement. “You’re white as a sheet.”

  “I’m not.” She likely was, but that was no reason to concede a weakness. “It’s the light in here—”

  “It’s the heat,” he returned. “You don’t like it.”

  “I—” Surprised and a little dizzy, she didn’t think to argue when he slipped an arm around her waist and turned her toward the door.

  “Forgot you’d told me, did you?” he inquired, pushing the tapestry aside and ushering her forward.

  The cool air that greeted them felt like heaven against her skin and did a fair job of settling her nausea and clearing her head. She recalled telling Owen now. She also recalled that she’d never told him the reason behind the aversion. Thank God for small mercies.

  Feeling stronger, she tried to extract herself from Owen’s supportive grip, but he seemed not to notice the way she pushed at his hand. He led her to a chair and reached over her head to unlatch a window. The fresh air that blew inside felt better than heaven—it felt like sin. The sort one got away with scot-free.

  When Owen stepped away, she gave into the temptation to close her eyes on a quiet sigh. Just for a second.

  This was why she’d not made a habit of looking through her father’s old journals. Yes, there was happiness in old memories. There was also fear, pain, shame, and more fear. It was better to leave well enough alone.

  She opened
her eyes and watched Owen return from the hidden room with their candles.

  “Feeling better?” he asked. He blew out one candle and bent to set the other on the small table beside her chair…and also to take a close examination of her face, apparently. “You look better.”

  “I’m perfectly well.” She had the most ridiculous urge to reach out and thump him on the nose. Not hard. Just a quick flick of the fingers. It would serve him right for looming. It would also serve to place her emotional age somewhere between four and four and a half. So she refrained. “We should return to work.”

  She really shouldn’t. If she was contemplating the merits of thumping a grown man on the nose, then, clearly, she was not perfectly well.

  “In a minute.” Apparently satisfied with her improved color, Owen stepped away to take a seat in the chair across from her. “I’d like a rest as well.” He undid a few buttons of his shirt. “Damnably uncomfortable in that room.”

  It was going to be damnably uncomfortable in this room if she had to sit there and watch him undress. “Why don’t I—?”

  “Would you like to see the other letters whilst we’re sitting here?” he cut in.

  “I suppose.” She supposed she’d like just about any offer of distraction at the moment.

  Stretching over the back of his chair, Owen reached for a small stack of papers sitting on the desk some distance away.

  He snagged the papers with the tips of his fingers, brought them round, and handed them to her. “Think you might be able to make sense of them?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, squinting at the fine print.

  “Here.” Owen stood again, this time to light a nearby lamp.

  She waved him away when he tried to hand it to her. “No. Put it out. Someone could see the light.”

  He set the lamp on the small table and took the candle for himself. “It is well past three in the morning and Peter’s room is at the end of the hall, nearest the back stairs. On the very slim chance he wakes hungry or thirsty, he will go down those stairs to the kitchen. He will not come down here to investigate the space beneath my door.”