“And where are we supposed to find the middle of nowhere in this Godforsaken place?” Nora wanted to know. “Sure the English are packed in Bath city like seeds in a sunflower.”
“There’s the park,” Cosy suggested. “No one ever goes there but ourselves.”
“Sure the English do prefer promenading themselves in the Pump Room,” Nora sniffed.
“The park!” Jackson cried in disgust. “Sure the Watch would find your man safe and sound in the morning, if that matters to you! You might as well tuck him up in bed like a baby!”
“I don’t like it any more than you do!” Cosy said crossly. “If we were at home, he’d go straight into the bog, but we’re not at home, and he can’t stay here.”
Although it was but a paltry vengeance in his opinion, Jackson obediently carried the baronet out by the tradesman’s door, and returned from the park not twenty minutes later. To his surprise, the young lady was still up, pacing the kitchen and wringing her hands.
“Did you tie him up, nice and tight, to a tree?” she asked anxiously.
“I did not,” he replied, highly pleased with himself. “With a bit of luck, he’ll wake up and go traipsing through the streets of Bath crying for his mother in his shameless nudity. ’Tis how Ned Foley met his end in Drogheda. Drunk as he was, he never saw the cart coming, and the next thing he knew, he was under the hooves of it, trampled like the grapes of wrath.”
“Are you mad, you bollocks? Go and tie him up at once before he wanders off and does himself a harm,” Cosy angrily commanded.
“Is it sweet on him she is?” Jackson grumbled as she swept off to bed.
“Sweet on him?” cried Nora. “And he offering to ravish her twice a week, poor child!”
“Twice a week is not very affectionate,” Jackson observed. “She’d have the right to expect more attention, even if he is a cold fish of an Englishman. Mind you, that’s an easy class of husband, and that’s five nights’ rest she’d not be getting if she married with an Irishman.”
“He wasn’t after asking her to marry him!”
“Poor lass! Did she want to marry him as much as that?” he asked curiously.
“And if you think so, Ajax Jackson, you know nothing of women!” Nora cried.
“I may know nothing of women, Nora,” he replied. “But I know a fair amount on the subject of men. Sure I happen to be one! He’ll be back,” he said confidently. “And I wouldn’t want to be in Cosy Vaughn’s shoes when he does.”
“He’ll leave town, surely, and never come back,” said Nora nervously.
Jackson laughed. “And if you think so, Nora, me darling, ’tis yourself that knows nothing of men.”
Leaving her open-mouthed, he went to find a bit of rope.
Sir Benedict’s valet saw no reason to alter the morning routine simply because his master had been brought home by the Watch naked and quite insensibly drunk. It was not about punishing the delinquent baronet. It was about maintaining a high standard of service. At precisely six-thirty that same morning, therefore, Pickering entered his master’s room and flung open the bed curtains. Never having suffered the ill effects of a night of drinking himself, he was startled when a small china ornament smashed against the wall, narrowly missing his head.
“Sir Benedict!” he cried in amazement.
“Must you be so loud?” Benedict demanded, sitting up in the big four-poster bed.
Sitting up was the worst mistake he could have made. A threshing machine inside his head was instantly set in motion. Its razor-sharp blades began making hay of his brain. Certain that he was dying, though not quickly enough, Benedict fell back in bed and lay paralyzed.
“Good morning, Sir Benedict,” Pickering said sunnily.
Benedict winced. To his sensitive ears, his valet’s voice sounded like the voice of an angry God. The threshing blades in his head rattled violently. He did not dare move, but the desire to be released from his present torment was so strong that he risked speaking again.
“Pickering,” he whispered, scarcely opening his lips. “My will is with my attorney in London. You have much to gain if you kill me. Kill me now, I beg of you.” He burrowed down into the bedclothes and rode the gently lapping waves of nausea back to deep sleep.
Pickering returned late in the evening and lit some candles. Benedict complained that the light hurt his eyes, but, after a little cajoling, he was able to sit up and drink a cup of beef tea. “What happened to me, Pickering?” he asked presently. “Everything is all jumbled in my head. There was—Was there a woman?”
“Yes, Sir Benedict,” Pickering grimly replied. “I’m sorry, sir.”
Benedict sank into the pillows. “Don’t be. She was very beautiful. She liked me enormously, I think. We forged a bond that few can boast. Pickering, I love her.”
Somehow Pickering managed to overcome the strong urge to roll his eyes. “Yes, sir. I’m sure you do, sir. Would you care to bring charges against her?”
“Now, what was her name?” Benedict mused.
A few seconds passed before he exclaimed, “Charges! What do you mean?”
With unwholesome relish, Pickering explained that the beautiful woman had not liked him enormously, or even a little. In fact, as proof of her contempt, she had robbed him of everything, including his clothes, and then had left him tied to a tree in the park, innocent of all clothing, for the Watch to find. Most likely, she was part of a gang of vicious robbers. She had only pretended to like him so that she and her accomplices could rob him.
According to the constable of the Watch, a very knowledgeable and zealous custodian of the law, it was the oldest trick in the book. It was called “The Honey Trap.”
At first, Benedict did not believe a word of it.
“I haven’t been robbed,” he scoffed. “What’s-her-name would never do such a thing. You don’t know her as I do, Pickering. And I think,” he added acidly, “one would remember if one had been tied to a tree.”
“The constable has reconstructed your movements of last night,” Pickering informed him. “Evidently, you left a Mr. Fitzwilliam at the York House Hotel, then you walked to Camden Place. Most unwise, Sir Benedict; you ought to have taken a chair. You were an obvious prey for streetwalkers. The woman you met deceived you shamelessly.”
“Streetwalker! She’s the housekeeper here. Red hair? Bit of a dish? Miss Cosy is her name,” he added, suddenly remembering.
Pickering was revolted. “Miss Cozen, more like! The woman was a thief.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Benedict. He suddenly felt naked and betrayed and just a tiny bit foolish. “She seemed so warm, so open, so friendly.”
“Yes, sir,” Pickering said dryly. “It must be necessary in her…line of work to look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.”
Benedict groaned. “Was she not the housekeeper?”
Pickering shook his head. “There are no female servants here. I dismissed them all. You were discovered just before dawn by the Watch. The thieves had stripped you of everything. They even took the ring from your hand.”
Benedict looked at his hand, almost spilling his tea in the process. His signet ring was indeed gone. He remembered everything up until the moment he had drunk to the Boys of Wexford, who were probably her gang. After that, Miss Cosy, the beautiful, warm, and friendly Irish housekeeper who sang to him in Italian, vanished from his memory like a ghost in sunlight.
“Needless to say,