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“I want no gowns,” Esme ground out. “I want my dowry.”
“By gad, you’re as obstinate as your pa—and without half his wits. How in the name of all that’s holy did he beget such a ninnyhammer?”
Lady Brentmor bolted up from the sofa and took a furious turn about the room. Then she sailed at her granddaughter again. “For the hundredth time, you haven’t got a dowry. Not until I say you do.”
“Then I shall write a letter to the Times,” Esme said. “I shall tell the world what you have done.”
“The Times? THE TIMES?” the dowager shrieked.
“Yes, and all the other newspapers as well. Also, I shall stand up in church on Sunday and tell everyone how my husband is forced to desert me because my family does not fulfill the marriage contract.”
Lady Brentmor opened her mouth, then shut it. She sat down again and stared at Esme.
Esme sat poker straight, her hands tightly folded, her mouth set in a stubborn line.
There was a long silence.
Then the dowager’s sharp crack of laughter.
“Plague take you! Stand up before the congregation, will you? A letter to the Times? On my honor that’s good. Did Percival help you think of it?”
“He suggested the newspaper, but the announcement in the church was my own idea,” Esme stiffly admitted.
“I thought you took it too quiet yesterday. Damn, but you’re pigheaded. I told you it wouldn’t do any good. Edenmont won’t be running back to collect you. You can’t buy his company, child. He’ll only spend what he gets on gaming, liquor, and tarts.”
The words stabbed deep, but Esme answered doggedly, “It is Varian’s decision how he spends it. If he does not wish to come for me, I cannot force him to. I did not beg him to keep me with him, and shall not. I brought nothing to my marriage. Now at least I have a dowry and may hold my head up. My honor demands it be paid.”
“Blast and botheration! You talk just like a man!” Lady Brentmor again bounced up. “Very well, my honorable lady, if you wish to manage everybody, and think you know better than your elders.”
She moved to the library door. “Come along with me to the counting house, and I’ll show you the Pandora’s box you want to open.”
Mystified, yet firm in her resolve, Esme marched after her grandmother to the gloomy study.
There the dowager unlocked a desk drawer, took out a sheaf of letters, and thrust them into Esme’s hands. Then she sat, waiting in silence, but for her index finger tapping impatiently upon the desk.
After a few minutes, Esme looked up from the endless rows of figures and explanatory notes. “You had this man spy upon my uncle?”
“I had him look into Gerald’s accounts. I only wish I had a proper spy, to find out how Gerald managed it.” The old lady gestured at the letters. “He told me he’d had a few setbacks—but what those figures amount to is near ruin. How, I ask you, could he come to a crash with such sound investments? I ought to know. That’s where I’ve been investing my funds these last thirty years.”
“I do not understand these matters,” Esme said. “Yet I have heard of speculations in which men lose fortunes.”
“He’s been up to something worse than that, or he’d have admitted he was under the hatches.”
Esme handed back the letters. “His money concerns are his problem. I do not see what this has to do with my dowry.”
“Oh, don’t you?” The dowager locked away the letters. “Then think, child.”
After giving Esme exactly three seconds to do so, she went on, “Gerald is desperate for money. Even without knowing how bad it was, I wouldn’t give him any. Not until I could be sure his troubles weren’t his own stupidity. I don’t throw good money after bad, as I hope you understand by now.”
“Yes, Grandmother, but—”
“The chess set,” Lady Brentmor said impatiently. “Worth thousands—complete, that is. That’s why Percival kept the queen hid from his pa. The boy had that much sense at least. He knows Gerald can’t be trusted.”
This Esme did not find difficult to believe. In Corfu, not only had her uncle been cold and insulting, but he’d lied about her grandmother. All that talk about trying to soften her toward Jason and about her threats to disown Percival—all lies.
“Gerald must know about Diana’s bequest, but he ain’t mentioned it,” the dowager continued, “though the set’s worth little to any buyer with a piece missing. That tells me he ain’t given up hope of getting the queen back, and won’t give the set up easy if he does. Soon as he finds out we’ve got the queen, there’ll be trouble. For one, he’ll surely threaten to contest Diana’s will in Chancery.”
Esme frowned. “I have heard these lawsuits are very expensive. Also, Percival told me some Chancery suits have continued for generations. How can my uncle—”
“When he’s got next to no money? He don’t need to actually go through with it. Only threaten. Or maybe just spend a few quid to get things started. Then what’s Edenmont to do, when he’s got less than nothing? I’ll tell you what. Settle out of court for some measly sum. Or, if he’s wise enough to call Gerald’s bluff ...” Lady Brentmor shook her head.
“No,” Esme said firmly. “No ominous hints and shaking your head at me. Tell me plain what you suspect.”
“Ain’t you seen enough among them heathens to work it out for yourself?” Her grandmother gestured at the ledgers lining the room’s walls. “Any business that can’t be writ down plain for all the world to see is dirty business, in my experience. Which means one’s dealing with dirty people. If Gerald’s sunk to that and he’s desperate, he could sink deeper.”
It required little imagination to take the hint. Esme felt chilled. “You mean violence. Like hiring these dirty people to—to put Varian out of the way. You truly believe my uncle would do such a thing?”
“When I smell something bad, I usually find rottenness at the bottom of it. There’s a stench about Gerald since he come back. Worse than usual. Now you know as much as I do. Now you can think about it, like I’ve been doing, since the curst day I found that bedamned chess piece.”
Esme didn’t need to think. She’d seen the evil men could do, for lust, for greed, even for the pettiest reasons or no reason at all. Her father had been murdered on her account. She would not tempt another villain to rid her of her husband.
She looked at her grandmother. “Will you tell me one thing?”
“That depends what it is.”
“Do you believe the chess set is rightfully mine, for my dowry, and must be given to my husband?”
“Bother the child!” The old lady’s scowl was fearsome. “Do you think I’ve no conscience at all? Of course it’s yours—or that pretty-faced lackwit’s, if you insist. I only wish you wasn’t so moony about him. I wish you could’ve been sensible and listened to me and said, ‘Yes, Grandmother. Whatever you think is best.’”
“I am sorry, truly, Grandmother.”
The scowl eased ever so slightly. “It ain’t right for a young gel to be dragged into these filthy doings. It ain’t right for you to know anything about ‘em. You got enough trouble, with that paperskulled debauchee roistering in the cesspits of London. Damn and blast that son of mine! If he hadn’t gone and got himself killed, none of this would have happened. If he wasn’t dead already, I’d throttle him myself.”
Esme rose and walked round the desk. She bent and dropped a kiss on her grandmother’s papery cheek.
Lady Brentmor’s eyes widened. As Esme straightened, she discerned a glitter in those eyes. Tears?
But her grandmother gave an indignant snort, and the glitter vanished. “I’m forgiven, I take it,” she grumbled.
“It’s I who should seek forgiveness,” Esme said. “To tell you frankly, I did not wish to give Varian money he would be tempted to spend on women. I am very jealous, and the women would vex me more than drunkenness or gaming. Still, I believed it was my duty.”
“So it was,” the dowager grudgingly agree
d.
“Also, I must have some faith in him. I told you yesterday how he has been good to me. And brave. Perhaps you see this, too—else you would not care what my uncle might do to him. Yet you see a great deal else in my husband that troubles you, and you wish to spare me. I am not certain you are altogether correct, but I must believe in you, too.”
This earned Esme a sharp look. “Does this mean you’ll hold your tongue about your dratted dowry? And stop plaguing me?”
“For now, yes, because you think there is a chance my uncle will harm Varian. Still, you are very clever—and I am not altogether brainless. We will think of something.”
Another snort. “We, indeed.”
“Yes. We two. In the meantime, I shall cease my ‘moping’ and choose gowns, if that will please you. Also, I will have the dancing master—and whatever else you believe will help make a lady of me.”
Esme straightened her shoulders and walked away from the desk. “If—when Varian returns to me, he must have no cause to be ashamed. And if—when he mends his troubles, he must have a worthy baroness beside him.”
