Lawrence had been perhaps six years old when he realized his mother was increasing in size. He could still remember how happy he’d been at the knowledge he’d soon have a sister or brother to love and play with.
He’d yearned for a huge family, full of love and laughter and adventure. A sibling was a dream come true. In the afternoons he would sneak into the drawing room where his mother embroidered by the fire, watching for the smile that played at her lips and the way she would touch her belly whenever she received a kick. He counted down the days.
The baby was stillborn.
There had been no more smiles in his household after that. Mother was inconsolable. Father commissioned an exquisite crystal vase clutched in the plump hands of a beautiful cherub. An angel, just like Lawrence’s sister who had not lived. Every morning Father replaced the flower in the vase with one from their garden. Eventually, Mother emerged from her darkness. The angel accompanied her to the dining room, to the drawing room, to her bedside.
The following year, when a fever sent Mother to heaven with her daughter, the vase disappeared from her sickroom. Father had placed the angel in his study, where it never held flowers again.
Sometimes, Lawrence would sneak into the duke’s study and hide in a corner, arms wrapped about his knees, to watch his father work and to catch glimpses of the vase, still as delicate and painfully beautiful as Lawrence recalled.
Every time his father caught him, there was a dreadful row. Nannies were sacked. Father would shake him and toss him into the corridor. He began to lock the study even while inside the room. The duke guarded that angel as jealously as a dragon protected its treasure.
It was the one thing Father still cared about.
Lawrence swallowed the old hurts. It was past time to give his mother’s vase its rightful place of honor here in the library, amongst things of beauty.
He rose unsteadily to his feet. He would not be cowed by his father’s ghost any longer.
After the old man’s death six months before, a footman had entered the duke’s study in order to relocate the papers and journals to Lawrence’s study. The closed door still seemed cold and forbidding, but Lawrence was no longer the boy he had once been.
He did not need to fear the study and the rejection it symbolized. It was empty now. He had a key. Father was gone, but the angel could live here in the library with Lawrence.
He strode to his father’s study, ignoring the way his breath accelerated and his muscles tensed as if preparing for the inevitable blow. It took three tries to fit the key into the lock, but this time there were no angry shouts when he pushed open the door.
The room was dark. It seemed much smaller without his father. The air was stale. It filled Lawrence’s lungs like brackish water, making it difficult to breathe. There was no need to tie back the curtains. This would be quick.
He shoved open the door until it banged against the interior wall. A small act of defiance he would never have dared if his father were alive. Dim light from the corridor brightened the gloom just enough for Lawrence to glimpse the angel’s glass case.
The vase was gone.
Lawrence jerked back against the doorjamb, the blood roaring through his veins and his mind awhirl.
Stolen.
Father would never have parted with his angel willingly. It must have been taken by one of the servants Lawrence had been forced to let go once he’d realized how close he was to financial ruin.
His muscles twitched with rage. By now his mother’s vase could have changed hands any number of times. Strangers’ hands. His mother’s angel reduced to a cheap monetary transaction, nothing more meaningful than the exchange of a few coins.
Lawrence would find that vase and prosecute its theft to the fullest extent of the law. He would sell every book and every painting for reward money if that was what it took to bring the angel home. He turned from the study and headed for the front door.
It was time to visit the Bow Street Runners.
9
Chloe attacked the crown of ringlets she’d spent all morning perfecting with a wet brush until her hair hung about her face in uneven, limp chunks. Excellent. She shoved every strand behind her head in a knot—competent enough to indicate she’d tried, bland enough not to garner a second glance—and then returned her pearl drop earrings to the mahogany drawer with all of the other baubles.
She carefully removed her white crepe frock with its cerulean-striped puffed sleeves and matching sarcenet slip. Like the rest of her fashionable attire, this gown would never be worn outside the privacy of her dressing room.
It still felt strange to keep a secret from her siblings—especially Tommy, whose cot had been near Chloe’s at the orphanage. Before Bean, there had been no practical means to have privacy.
If a tiny part of Chloe couldn’t stop wondering what Faircliffe might think when he saw her in an hour, well, that was just silly. He wouldn’t be looking at her. He was to wed Miss York.
Nor was Chloe the least bit interested in the duke’s vaunted opinions!
Her objective was to gain enough of Faircliffe’s confidence to find out where he’d hidden the painting that belonged to her family—or ledgers to indicate where he’d sold it.
Nothing more.
