“Yes!” Richard chimed in. “Someone from Bow Street.”
“That way we can have the man be a house guest.” Rebecca sounded triumphant. “Oh, Conrad, my love! Such a brilliant idea.”
“Perhaps not ‘brilliant,’” Retta said, “but it might work. What do you think, Gerald?”
“It seems a little shaky, but if no one probes too deeply, it should do. “Of course,” he added with a direct look at Rebecca, “if it is revealed too soon—regardless of how—the bet is off, you know.”
“Yes, I do know. You need not think I will make a slip.” She gave Retta spiteful look. “I want that mare.”
Annoyed, Retta rose to leave the room, but turned at the door to say, “Nevertheless, she currently belongs to me.”
She paused at the door when she heard Rebecca add, “You forget that Melinda and Conrad and I will not even be here! We, along with Cousin Amabelle, have been invited to Lady Bertrand’s house party all next month. After that, we are to go to Grandmother Howe for the rest of the winter. We shall not even return to town until the end of January. So you may disabuse yourselves of the idea that any of us will endanger the scheme.”
Retta had herself declined to share those invitations and had temporarily overlooked her own need for a chaperon if Cousin Amabelle were not present. Drat. Well, she would deal with that issue later.
* * * *
The next day, Retta and Gerald met in that same room with Jake Bolton, who had arrived to give them his response. Retta was slightly miffed when the man nodded his approval of the plan for him to appear to be a Bow Street Runner just as though his opinion were truly pertinent to the matter. Well, maybe it is, she conceded in an afterthought and reminded herself that she was grateful that he had shown up and was willing “to get on with this here project.”
Gerald had taken his customary position near the fireplace and Retta occupied a wing chair nearby. Bolton sat gingerly on the edge of the seat of a barrel chair facing her and twisting his cap, which he had refused to surrender to a footman, but hastily removed in the presence of a lady. He was dressed just as he had been two days earlier, though he had added an open sleeveless jerkin over the shirt. The streak of mud on his breeches had dried and been brushed off, but its stain was still visible.
“Our first consideration will be to see that you are properly attired,” she said when the preliminaries of his agreement had been established. “Perhaps as a clerk or a man of business. I have no idea how a Bow Street Runner dresses. My brother will see to that this afternoon. By the way, do you ride?”
“Yes, milady. Me folks is farmers. I learnt early on how ta sit a horse.”
“Farmers? I am guessing Yorkshire, but your accent is not so very pronounced,” she said.
“Yes, milady. Yorkshire. I ain’t bin back there in some yars now.”
“Riding in a London park is not quite the same as riding a draft animal on a farm, but I assume you are familiar with the basics, at least.”
“Yes, milady.”
He bent his head and Retta wondered if he might be hiding a grin.
* * * *
That night, Jake lay on a bed staring at the ceiling in what he assumed was a second-best guest chamber in the very large and richly appointed Blakemoor town house. Second best or not, it was the most luxurious accommodation Jake had enjoyed in many months. The room was done in shades of blue with a large, comfortable bed and a thick, figured carpet. An alcove contained an armoire and a marble-topped chest on which was a large porcelain basin and ewer. A deep-cushioned armchair and table were placed near the window. Two gas lamps provided light. He conjectured that at least a mile of convoluted hallway and stairs separated him from any of the family rooms on a different floor. Well, never mind. He would learn his way around soon enough.
Viscount Heaton had introduced Jake to the butler, Jeffries, and informed the man of a threat directed at Lady Henrietta and that Mr. Bolton had been hired to see to her protection.
“Very good, my lord,” the butler had said, but Jake was aware of the man’s subtle scrutiny. He was also aware that two footmen had been assigned to patrol this floor, albeit unobtrusively. Jake fully approved of Heaton’s or Jeffries’s taking precautions with a stranger in the household.
The excursion to procure “proper attire” had proved less of a problem than Lady Henrietta might have anticipated, for a Bow Street Runner might easily pass for a clerk or merchant on a London street. Back at the house, Jake was shown to his room and, since the rest of the residents were engaged for the evening, a footman had delivered Jake’s supper on a tray. He was pleased to see that someone—he suspected it was Jeffries—had thought to include a newspaper on that tray. The supper was excellent—a fine white fish in a lemony sauce, then lamb chops cooked perfectly. Blakemoor had obviously left his French chef at home. Yet another tie to France?
Jake congratulated himself on having passed the first hurdle—getting established in the household. As a soldier in winter quarters, he had once known a former actor who explained in answer to Jake’s question, “Getting into character is easier if you can forget you and just be this other person as you ‘strut and fret your hour upon the stage’ as the bard put it.” That advice had served Jake well more than once. The Yorkshire accent came smoothly enough; he was from Yorkshire. He had grown up hearing the speech of country folk—and his family were farmers—of a sort. The dukedom consisted of thousands of acres of farmland in Yorkshire and thousands more in Derbyshire, not to mention odd pieces of arable land in Hampshire and Kent. It was a family truism that Dukes of Holbrook never gave up any of the property achieved in several generations of marriage settlements. Moreover, from his maternal grandfather, Jake himself had inherited a vast estate comprised of several farms that had long been managed for the absent soldier by a capable steward.
A twinge of nostalgia prompted him to reread the letters Fenton had delivered to him. He usually tried not to think of being in England all these months, unable to visit his own land, to see to its proper working, to feel the soil, pat the backs of his animals. But most of all, being on English soil again brought home to him how much he missed his family despite a serious rift in the past. His three brothers and two sisters—even his father—had been faithful about writing him while he was abroad, especially Elizabeth, the sister nearest him in age. Only seventeen when he’d last seen her, she was married now—happily so, according to her letters—with three children whom he longed to meet. Elizabeth had assured him that her older children, eight and six, were anxious to meet their war hero Uncle Jake and that neither they nor she understood why he was still in France with the war over and so many other soldiers coming home. His other sister, the oldest of the siblings, was also married—to a plantation owner in the Far East. Jake seldom heard from her.
Letters from his brothers were less frequent than those from Elizabeth and usually shorter, but they gave him glimpses into the life of wealthy young men about town. As a schoolboy and then university student, Jake, who had always felt quite close to his brothers, had been surprised by the jealousy and antipathy with which some of his classmates regarded their siblings. Yes, there had been an abundance of sibling rivalry among the children of the Duke of Holbrook, but the brothers always closed ranks against even the merest criticism from outside.
But that idyllic picture of familial accord had ended when Jake had been sent down from university during his third year for becoming involved in a public brawl defending the virtues of a female who had very few. It was the last straw for the Duke of Holbrook. Jake recalled vividly the dressing down he had received in the Holbrook library.
“You are too old for me to take a strap to you and a public flogging is out of the question, though I swear that is precisely