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Did that mean he wanted to marry her?
No…no, that couldn’t be possible.
Although…he’d said all that about not wanting to go through the bother of choosing a suitable bride. And him knowing her so well that he wouldn’t be getting any unpleasant surprises, after he’d put the ring on her finger.
So…did that mean…?
Lady Harriet blew her nose very loudly and in a most unladylike fashion, jerking Clare out of her rather nebulous train of thought.
‘I suppose I know that really. And Archie was like a dog with two tails at the prospect of searching his great-godmother’s house for any signs of the missing jewels. He was so determined to prove that Lady Buntingford…’ She slammed her mouth shut. ‘I shouldn’t have said that…’
Clare reached out her hand and touched Lady Harriet’s.
‘You are very upset. I can see that this has been a terrible thing to happen and right before your wedding, too.’
‘Yes, I’m positively distracted. And with having so much to do, too, since Mama is rather…’ She waved her hand in an agitated fashion.
‘Well, perhaps it is a good thing I am here, then.’ Hadn’t her father been fond of saying that God moved in mysterious ways? Perhaps this was why her day had gone the way it had. He’d known Lady Harriet needed a friend, right now. And that she needed…well, to be useful. ‘As Lord Rawcliffe said, I am used to hard work. And I will feel much more comfortable about being foisted upon you if I can make myself useful.’
And as Lord Rawcliffe had said, she was a very capable, practical sort of person.
Growing up in the vicarage, without a mother and with three brothers and a father to keep house for, she’d had to be.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I should never have let him go down to Dorset,’ said Lord Rawcliffe, taking the glass of brandy Lord Becconsall held out to him.
‘You couldn’t have stopped him.’
‘Yes, I could. I am his employer. Was his employer,’ he corrected himself. ‘I could have forbidden him…’
Jack took him by the upper arms and gave him a little shake. ‘Damn it, Zeus, don’t you think we all feel guilty? I could have gone down to Dorset in his stead. Or to Thetford, while you went to Dorset. But the truth was we all saw how blue-devilled Archie had been lately and thought it would do him good to prove himself.’
‘It was his family that had been robbed, don’t forget,’ put in Atlas, from the chair in which he was slouched, clearly having got on the outside of a fair quantity of brandy already. ‘It was his right to be the one to investigate.’
‘I was responsible for him, though…’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Ulysses firmly. ‘It was the fault of whoever is behind the jewel thefts. Because you can depend upon it that is why Archie was killed. Because he was getting close to the truth.’
‘You are right,’ said Rawcliffe. ‘I know you are right. The trouble is, the moment he told us his great-godmother lived in Lesser Peeving, I smelled a rat.’ He downed his drink, which had the effect of flinging Lord Becconsall’s hand from his arm, as well as giving him the hit of alcohol he sorely needed after the day he’d had.
‘What do you mean?’ Atlas raised his head and peered at him, blearily, across the room. ‘You knew there was something fishy going on down there?’
‘Not for certain.’ Lord Rawcliffe stared into the bottom of his empty glass. ‘Though I do know of someone with a…shady past, who was sent there to…’ He shook his head in frustration.
‘Who?’
That was the worst part of it. ‘One Reverend Cottam.’ Clare’s brother. Clement. The one who’d given her a reference for a post with an elderly lady with suspicious swiftness. The one who’d been so good at organising that she’d been glad when he’d arrived to supervise their father’s funeral.
‘A vicar? A vicar with a shady past?’
Rawcliffe nodded and held out his glass for a refill. The tale wasn’t going to be an easy one to tell. ‘He lost his post in a parish in Exeter after the bank began to complain about the amount of counterfeit coins being handed in to them from the collection plate. The young Clement Cottam was the one responsible for counting the money and taking it to the bank.’
