Page 15 of Trouble

‘What, pray tell, are you two discussing so seriously?’ Grace said. Her cheeks were slightly pink, but itwasa warm day.

‘Shakespeare,’ Aster said, without pause. ‘Particularly the part inLearwhere Cornwall scoops Gloucester’s eye out.’

‘Ugh,’ said Grace.

‘He steps on it, too. Must have felt like popping a big grape. Come on, Gracie, let’s get back to the house. I tire of the wonders of the natural world. I wish to retire gracefully, to achieve repose and look only upon the mundane wallpapers of life.’

That evening, when Emily had once again been invited to spend time with the servants, and once again declined without bothering to be polite, she made the mistake of going for a walk around the house. She was justlooking, she told herself – justchecking. The Edwards family were all abed, the servants preoccupied. There was no better time to start thinking seriously about her first foray into a life of crime.

It was quite late, the house silent on the upper floors, even more of a gaudy mausoleum without the bustle of distant industry. Emily walked through the empty dining room, along the length of the table three times the size of the one she had eaten her own dinner at, and thought of Aster and Grace sitting in these very seats, making snide comments about her hands and her dress and the contents of her mind. She went on into the drawing room – thesparedrawing room – which looked more maroon than strawberry in the light of the low-burning fire, and imagined how well her sister would look, sitting by the hearth on one of these pink armchairs, warm and happy and wanting for nothing.

All thoughts of being patient and sensible, of waiting for the right time to strike, were driven from her head by her urgent desire totakesomething from these people.

She paused, listening. There were no footsteps from the floor above or telltale creaks of floorboards from the hallway. The only sound came from the fire, the soft noise of something shifting in the grate as it put itself to bed.

The glass-fronted cabinet she had spied earlier in the week wasn’t locked. The doors did squeak slightly as she opened them, but Emily saw that as a good sign: if they were often used, somebody would have thought to drizzle a little oil on the hinges. She glanced over her shoulder at the doorway, found it unoccupied, and bent to peer inside.

She understood immediately why nobody had bothered sticking their head in recently. It was mostly shiny clutter: the sorts of things that looked impressive at a distance, but revealed themselves to be tarnished upon closer inspection. But behind the rows of ancient, cloudy crystal glasses and goblets, the dented engraved teaspoons and a single gold and amethyst earring cushioned in a velvet case, she found a box no bigger than the palm of her hand. It was a baroque monstrosity, made of chiselled bronze and inlaid with glimmering purple jasper, dotted with gemstones of various colours like you might stud a ham. It was honestly one of the most hideous things Emily had ever had the misfortune to look upon, and had clearly been hidden at the back to prevent others from suffering the same fate.

It was perfect. Too dreadful to be missed, but with plenty to be stripped and sold without having to try to convince them of the box itself, which would be far too easy to identify.

Her dresses might not have been to the Edwards children’sstandards, but they did contain something that made up for aesthetic deficiencies:pockets. Amy had sewn them in herself. Of course, if she had known what Emily would go on to use them for, she would have immediately taken up the seam ripper.

Emily pocketed the box and was closing the cabinet doors when somebody spoke.

Her blood ran cold. Her stomach did an athletic little flip. She lost feeling in her fingertips, and possibly also her nose.

‘There’s a hand mirror on the top shelf that matches, if you’d like to steal any more of my late wife’s things.’

Emily had to step further out into the room to see him. Captain Edwards was sitting in the corner in a high-backed armchair, with a candle stub on the table next to him and a closed book in his hand. The door had blocked her view of him, and she had been foolish and vexed enough not to conduct proper reconnaissance before she started putting her hands where they did not belong.

‘I was going to take it to Miss Edwards,’ Emily said immediately, trying to keep her voice steady. Captain Edwards was perfectly still in his chair, the side of his face that was lit calm and expressionless. ‘To MissGraceEdwards, I mean. We were just discussing baroque design during our lessons this afternoon, and I thought I’d find something to demonstrate .?.?. To surprise her with tomorrow morning so that we could .?.?. discuss it. I am sorry not to have asked, but .?.?. I thought everybody had gone to bed.’

‘I see.’ Captain Edwards didn’t sound as if he particularly believed or disbelieved her. He had undressed a little after dinner – no stock, no jacket, just a partly open shirt and a waistcoat that was surprisingly plain. Emily tried not to drop her gaze from his eyes to the surprisingly vulnerable strip of skin from throat to chest; avoiding eye contact was probably what a guilty person would do.

It was quite hard tomaintaineye contact, though. His gaze was so piercing that she felt lightly gut-stabbed.

‘If it pleases you,’ she said with conviction, ‘you can sit with us in the morning, and lend your voice to our discussion.’

This was the sort of risk that made Amy call her sister ‘an audacious blockhead’, but Emily was too deep in the lie now to do anything other than barrel recklessly onwards.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Captain Edwards, finally unpinning her from his gaze as he opened his book. ‘Give it to Meera after your lesson, and tell her to put it in with the lot for auction next week.’

‘I will,’ Emily said, not quite believing her luck. She paused. ‘Good night, Captain Edwards.’

He said nothing.

With a very heavy pocket, Emily fled.

Chapter Six

It was difficult to sleep, even in such a comfortable bed, with something probably worth the combined incomes of a small village sitting on top of her dresser. Captain Edwards had inadvertently given her the perfect cover: Meera did not know about the proposed sale of the box; the captain himself did not seem concerned enough about its future to think of it again. It could slip from the house without notice, and everybody except Emily would assume that was exactly where it was supposed to be.

There had been a time when she and Amy had owned nice things. Nothing as gaudy as this box – it really was hideous, even worse when she held it up to the candlelight, sort of like a square, iridescent insect with lumps on – but things that wereincidental. Fripperies. Trinkets. Items that served no purpose or function other than to look pretty or to be given as a token of affection, and then kept on display to prove that somebody had once liked you enough to spend a handful of shillings on you. The Laurence family had never actually beenwealthy– she thought of herself and Amy at Grace and Aster’s ages, fighting over their one good new dress of the season, often envious of the girls they saw in the street with all their fashionable, fine things – but for the most part, they had been happy. They always had enough to eat, even if it wasn’t the best cut of meat; there were always a few gifts at Christmas.

That was before their father died, and their mother gave up, and every avenue they should have explored in an attempt to keep hold of a modest income shrank until it became impassable. Mr Laurence had trained as a barrister, his lavish education funded by a particularly generous and forgiving uncle who had inherited well and believed his nephew to be capable of greater things; unfortunately, he had not proven himself worthy of such hopes. Rumours – which were true – that he liked to drink and gamble his earnings, that he had been known to turn up to work still as drunk as a wheelbarrow,andthat he was not clever enough to hide these facts as well as some of his colleagues, did not make him a particularly popular choice among solicitors. Nor did the fact that he owed many of those solicitors debts. By the time Emily was grown, Mr Laurence’s fortunes were already picking up speed as they trundled downhill.

She did not understand the extent of it until he died, very suddenly, when she was eighteen. He expired in disgrace, owing a great many people a lot of money that he’d never had in the first place. It was embarrassing, but Amy and Emily were to discover that there was something far worse than being embarrassed – being genuinely afraid.