Free A Gentleman of Fortune by Anna Dean Page B

Peerage … And…’ Miss Merryweather frowned and put her finger and thumb to her brow once more. ‘Something else which she took just the day before yesterday. I remember being a little surprised by it… Now, what was it?’
    Dido waited, her mind full of those floating fragments with their long dull words. ‘Was it perhaps a book of essays?’ she prompted. ‘History?’
    ‘No, no. I do not think it was history. It was something that I do not remember any lady ever reading before. An old, thin book. A very odd thing. I do not know even how it came to be upon our shelves…’ She pinched at her brow, screwed up her eyes in a great effort of remembering. ‘I will have it in just a moment.’ She pinched harder, closed her eyes entirely, and at last produced the title. ‘ A Treatise upon the Rights of Citizens . That is it!’ she said triumphantly. ‘I can always recollect the name of a book if I only think a little while.’
    ‘Indeed! That seems a very strange choice for a lady.’
    ‘Very strange indeed, Miss Kent. And, for myself, I am convinced that poor Miss Prentice did not know what the book was. For, I thought when she came in that she was not looking quite herself – not at all well. And the book, you must understand, was not quite…’ She leant confidingly across the table again and sunk her voice. ‘I just looked into the thing myself… Just looked, you understand. I did not read far, for I saw straight away that it was not quite proper. It was written almost thirty years ago and was rather…’ she leant closer and her lips formed the dreadful word ‘ revolutionary ,’ almost in silence. ‘I think,’ she finished in a more natural tone, ‘that the dear lady was a little distracted – and in a hurry too perhaps, for it was rather late in the afternoon. I am sure, myself, that she picked up the book quite inadvertently.’
    Aloud Dido admitted that that was entirely possible. But, in private, she could not countenance it at all. There had been nothing inadvertent about the tearing up and throwing away of the pieces!
    ‘And now, Miss Kent,’ said Miss Merryweather, ‘what kind of literature can we furnish you with today?’
    ‘Oh!’ Dido hesitated, remembered that window upon the soul, and quietly put aside Moss Cliff Abbey . ‘I was wondering,’ she said, ‘whether you might have a volume of Doctor Fordyce’s sermons.’

Chapter Nine
     
     
    A revolutionary book! Why should little Miss Prentice concern herself with a revolutionary book? What possible difference could it make to her whether the volume rested quietly upon Miss Merryweather’s shelves or sunk down into the mud of the Thames? This was so very great a puzzle that one could not possibly rest until an answer was found. It was entirely against human nature to be uncurious when so provoked! And, besides, Miss Prentice had taken the book late in the afternoon on the day before yesterday – when she was distracted and unwell – in short, immediately after she had heard of Mrs Midgely’s visit to Knaresborough House! And, since that must argue for the destruction of the book bearing some relation to poor Mr Lansdale’s extremely dangerous situation, it was a moral duty to solve the mystery, was it not?
    All this ran so smoothly and rapidly through Dido’s head as she walked down the steps from the library, that, by the time she gained the street, curiosity and virtue were very comfortably reconciled.
    She stepped aside to avoid a pony carriage whose approach she had not noticed in her distraction, and stood a moment on the edge of the road, with people jostling past her and dusty heat breathing up from the pavement.
    Now that Mr Vane had reported his misgivings to the magistrate everything was changed, she thought. Now the damage was done, the processes of justice had been set in motion and it would not suffice only to silence Mrs Midgely. Now it was absolutely essential to find out the whole truth.
    And first she must