Page 58 of A Season for Scandal

“The library part is important, is it?” Oliver asked.

Now it was my turn to narrow my eyes at him. “You are being deliberately obtuse,” I said, “but I know you would have done the same becauseyouare a secret reader of Gothic novels!” I hurled the words at him in accusation.

His mouth dropped open. “I amnot!”

“Yes you are,” I insisted. “I saw them on your shelves.”

There was a moment of silence. “Those are Beth’s,” he said finally, and I scoffed, letting him know that I wasn’t falling for that one.

“My reading habits are neither here nor there,” Oliver said a touch too quickly. “The question remains: what are you doinghere?”

I had finally calmed down enough to take in whereherewas.

It was a large square room, with white walls and, unlike the library, it was immaculately tidy. Two long workbenches stretched the width of the room, separated into separate work areas, with vices clamped to the sides and dozens of small, intricate tools laid out on strips of scarlet fabric. There was also a giant furnace built into the end of the wall, though it was currently unlit.

And the diamond was not the only jewel in here. No, scattered across the benches were gems of all different shapes and sizes and colours. Some of them were loose stones, but others were set in pieces of jewellery in various stages of completion.

If you had asked me what Oliver Lockhart was keeping in a secret room below his house, I might have suggested expensive bottles of wine or barrels of brandy, or even the remains of visitors who had irritated him. This certainly wouldn’t have been on the list. I didn’t even know whatthiswas.

I blinked back to him. He was watching me with an expression on his face that I couldn’t read, but that I thought might be something close to nervous. Which made no sense at all.

Glancing up to the ceiling, I saw the lights he had turned on. “Are thoseelectriclights?” I asked.

Oliver’s eyes followed mine. “I need good light when I work,” he said.

“When you work,” I repeated, and I looked again at the tables around us. “You’re a … jeweller?”

“Well, I’m not using all these diamonds to bake a cake, am I?” Oliver said, but there was still that look about him, the wary one that I didn’t understand.

“You made these?” I moved down the table, looking at the pieces he was working on. They were beautiful. Delicate and lovely, each one a work of art.

“Yes.”

“Youmadethese,” I uttered again, drinking in the sight of them.

I stopped in front of a pair of bracelets, almost identical. There were, I noticed several pieces that had a duplicate next to them.

“Why are there all these doubles?” I asked.

He shifted. “Those are…” He hesitated. “Part of the work I do for the Aviary.”

“For the Aviary?” I murmured. “What does the Aviary need you to make jewellery for?”

Oliver looked down at his jacket, brushing an invisible bit of dirt from his jacket sleeve. “Sometimes there are women who need the financial security that a piece of jewellery provides,” he said briskly. “Like everything else, however, their jewellery is not their own. It belongs to their husbands or their fathers, and those men may dispose of these pieces however the whim takes them. If I make … analternativepiece – a convincing counterfeit – then the Aviary’s clients can hide the originals somewhere safe, in case they should ever need them.”

I took a moment to absorb that information. Oliver finally met my eyes.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he muttered.

“Like what?” I managed.

“Like I’m going to lose another handkerchief to you,” he said sharply. “It’s not anything worth getting emotional over. I find the work interesting. It’s no hardship for me to do it.”

“I don’t think that’s the whole story,” I said softly, thinking about everything he had told me in the gallery yesterday. “I’m working on my deductive reasoning, and I think you want to help these women because they remind you of your mother.”

I almost couldn’t believe I had said the words aloud. Oliver looked stricken for a moment.

He cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said shortly. “They do. Her marriage was an unhappy one. An abusive one, that left her with little autonomy. She had no one to turn to, no safe place to run. I believe that she was leaving my father when she died, returning to Spain. That’s why she and Ellen were in France.”