Free A Lady of His Own by Stephanie Laurens Page B

earl, and I checked the ledgers for the years before that. Yes, Papa did occasionally buy pillboxes, but those purchases were relatively few and far between, and, tellingly, those are the boxes in the library display cases. The boxes he bought, he kept openly. Why did he hide these others—so much more beautiful—so completely away? I didn’t know of them, and I’d swear no one else in the household other than Granville has seen them.”
    “A clandestine pillbox collection.”
    “Yes!” She narrowed her eyes at him. “There’s no viable conclusion other than that those hidden pillboxes were payment for something. And it’s something Granville knew about. But initially I couldn’t think of anything either Papa or Granville might have to ‘sell,’ as it were.”
    “Indeed. Neither Granville nor your father ever had access to sensitive information, the sort the French would pay for. So it can’t—”
    “Wait!” She held up a hand. “I said initially—there’s more. After finding the boxes, I shut up the priest hole and put Figgs off. Amberly and Nicholas arrived; the visit went smoothly. Then, on the last day they were there, I heard from the grooms that Nicholas had been asking after Granville’s friends, those he spent time with in the neighborhood, where he went in the evenings when on his own, what taverns he frequented.”
    “Maybe Nicholas wanted to find a place to drink?”
    “Are you playing devil’s advocate, or are you just being difficult?”
    He smiled. “The former, so go on.”
    She cast him a repressive glance, then reassembled her train of thought. “When they left, I checked the priest hole. Someone had been examining the boxes. Many were out of line, turned around, that sort of thing.” She sighed. “I went down to dinner, trying to puzzle it out. Elaine was telling the girls how distinguished Amberly and his branch of the family were. She mentioned that Nicholas was following in his father’s footsteps—at the Foreign Office.”
    “Ah.” Charles sat up, all expression leaching from his face.
    “Indeed.” Feeling vindicated, she nodded. “So now you see why I started to seriously worry. And the further I looked, things only got blacker.”
    “What did you find?”
    “Not so much found as recalled. Papa and Amberly grew up together—they shared a schoolroom, went up to Oxford together, did the Grand Tour together. They were only distantly related, but very close friends, and the connection continued all their lives. Papa started collecting pillboxes when he was staying in Paris with Amberly, who at that time had a minor role in our embassy there.”
    Charles said nothing; his eyes locked on her face, he nodded for her to continue.
    “The other pertinent facts are that Amberly was Granville’s godfather, and his guardian after Papa died. And Nicholas and Granville knew each other, how well I don’t know, but Granville often visited Amberly’s house, so presumably Nicholas and Granville were frequently in each other’s company.
    “And as I told you earlier, when Nicholas arrived unheralded in February, the week after Elaine and the girls had left for town, he spent five days contacting all the local smuggling gangs. According to Mother Gibbs, he was putting it about that in the matter of Granville’s activities with them, he was Granville’s replacement. Anything to do with Granville, they should see him—send word via the grooms at Wallingham Hall, and he’d come down and speak with them.”
    “What did the local lads think of that? Were there any takers?”
    “No.” She hid a ghost of a smile. “They see Nicholas as an outsider, almost a foreigner, but more than that, I don’t think they actually understand what fish he’s trawling for.”
    “Very likely.”
    Charles heard his voice, deep, resonant, cut across her lighter tones. She shouldn’t be involved in any of this, but she was. Leaning back in his chair, he caught her eye. “So you believe that