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The fondness that Giles had always had for Theo blossomed into something far more powerful. His heart squeezed at Theo’s offer of help to the point where he thought it might burst out of his chest.
“My father was never interested in them,” he said. “If I’d had a younger brother, I never would have left. To this day, I do not know how my father managed to get even one child, let alone four, so great was his aversion to women. I am not even certain I am his natural son, though if I am not, my mother took that secret to her grave.”
“Still, something should be done for them,” Theo insisted, clasping both of Giles’s hands.
A wave of inspiration struck Giles. “Perhaps something can be done,” he said.
“Anything,” Theo said. “Anything at all that I can do to assist you in freeing your sisters and making certain the man who caused you such harm is brought to justice, I will do that.”
A broad smile spread across Giles’s face, but unlike the mischievous smiles he usually favored, this one was filled with cunning and vengeance.
“We can do something,” he said, excitement pulsing through him. “We can expose him as the orchestrator of this conspiracy of yours, and we can see that he spends the rest of his miserable life rotting in prison.”
ChapterFive
Theo did not consider himself a sentimental man by any means. But Giles’s story moved him in a way he couldn’t fathom. He’d been wrong to assume that his little minx was fragile or vulnerable in any way, or that he was innocent and naïve. In fact, along with the crushing sadness and bitter fury that the story of Giles’s descent into prostitution had stirred in him, Theo felt a boundless admiration…and a deep, blossoming affection that he dared not name.
But when Giles declared his determination to catch his father and prove that he was the conspirator Theo had been seeking for months, a new fire of determination ignited within him.
“We must work swiftly,” he said, grasping Giles’s hand in spite of the suspicion it might cause for anyone who happened to observe them. “Those two men may sound some sort of alarm to your father. If Pennyroyal has been clever enough to evade capture thus far, he is clever enough to cover his trail if he suspects the noose is tightening around him.”
He used the man’s surname instead of referring to him as Giles’s father, and he intended to go on doing so. Any man who would do what Giles had implied that bastard had done to him did not deserve to be called a father. Theo chose to believe Giles’s unproven suggestion that the man was not his natural father at all. Such evil could not possibly produce an angel like Giles.
“What is your plan?” Giles asked as the two of them returned to the street and hurried south again. “You have been investigating the conspiracy for some time now, I would assume. Do you have further evidence of my father’s involvement?”
Theo’s face pinched as he considered the information he had compiled so far. “I have bits and pieces, but I have not yet tied them all together,” he said. “We have statements from Vansittart and various members of his staff as well as information about the various shipping companies that have benefitted from the contracts awarded within the last year. But nothing I have discovered thus far ties back to Augustus Pennyroyal.”
They spent the rest of the swift walk back to his lodgings in Soho discussing the sparse facts of the case as Theo knew them. Giles proved to be just as clever as Theo had suspected he was, asking sharp questions that neither Theo nor any of the other Runners working on the case had considered.
Still, by the time they reached his boarding house, there were more questions than answers.
“I am puzzled by whatever secret it is Mr. Vansittart has that he would be so frightened to have revealed that he would hand off valuable contracts to blackmailers,” Giles said as they reached the boarding house’s front steps. “It must be something either of a particularly sinful nature, which you know full well I would be able to uncover in a trice, knowing the people that I know—”
Theo jerked his head to Giles, his brow shooting up at the suggestion, as he pushed open the boarding house door and swept Giles inside.
“—or else it is a matter of finance,” Giles went on. “Any man in such a lofty position of power could stand to make a fortune himself by bending the rules a bit. But he would not only lose his position, he would end his life in utter disgrace if he were caught.”
“Very true,” Theo said with a nod as they started toward the stairs. “But if that is the case, I fear we will be stumped. Vansittart would have too much to lose to be careless with his business.”
Giles hummed, his brow knit in thought, as they made their way up to the second floor and the hallway with Theo’s room.
As they turned the corner at the top of the stairs, Giles said, “What if he—” then stopped.
In an instant, Theo saw why. The door to his room stood ajar. A few papers littered the floor in the doorway. Theo didn’t like the way that sight hinted of something even worse inside his room.
Those concerns were proven founded when he and Giles reached the room to find that it had been completely ransacked. Theo didn’t have much in the way of possessions, but it seemed as though everything he owned was strewn across the floor. The wardrobe stood open and emptied, one of its drawers lying cracked on the floor. His table and chair had been upended as well, and even the bed had been turned over and some of the stuffing pulled out of the mattress. The few papers he’d brought home from the court littered the floor along with his spare clothing and other sundries.
Theo stepped into the middle of it, then felt paralyzed with shock to see his usually well-ordered room reduced to chaos. His throat seemed to close up, and all he could do was shove a hand through his hair and worry about whether anything of a sensitive nature that would compromise the Runners had been taken or discovered.
“Oh, dear,” Giles said, stepping into the room with him, then bending to gather up the papers. “This does not bode well.”
“No,” Theo said, unable to form any other words. The mess around him was not only a violation of the sanctity of his paltry home, it reminded him far too much of the chaos that had been caused when the constable came to search for anything of value in his mother’s home. That effort had resulted in him landing in the poorhouse. Heaven only knew what this devastation would mean.
Unfortunately, Theo received an answer to that question less than a minute later when Mrs. Hollis, the boarding house’s owner, roared from the hallway behind him, “Mr. Brunner, what is the meaning of this?”
Theo turned to face her, feeling as though the poorhouse warden were shouting at him again.
“Where have you been, sir?” Mrs. Hollis went on. “We have been searching for you half an hour or more now. You will answer for this disrespect of my property now.”
