The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(51)

He hadn’t done much in the way of housebreaking, truth be told. He and Kit were both too large to consider windows a reasonable means of entering or leaving buildings, and charming the servants was the sort of trick that people caught onto eventually. But Marian was an old hand at helping herself to dainty bits of silver, and also at climbing in and out of windows, if it came to that. Rob was happy to let her take the lead.

Meanwhile, Rob did what he did best. He engaged the servants in the sort of idle conversation that drew out more than they meant to tell. He played the part of an interested well-mannered stranger. He complimented the cook, he flirted with the gray-haired housekeeper, he slipped a farthing to the boy who turned the spit.

“He was not reasonable,” Marian said crisply as he handed her into the carriage.

“That’s too bad for him,” Rob remarked, but he didn’t think he mistook the light in Marian’s eye. She was looking forward to this and so was he.

“I plan to see that it is.”

After depositing Marian at home and returning the hired horses, he walked back to Little Hinton. The snow had stopped falling and the lane to the village was already packed solid, but whenever Rob stepped off the path, his boot crunched through the top layer of snow, which had frozen into a sheet of ice. Anything they did would leave footprints; there would be no silently sneaking through the grounds of Fanshawe’s house. They would have to rely on means other than the usual subterfuge.

When he stepped into the kitchen, he found Marian sitting at the table, her somber black gown exchanged for breeches and a coat.

“He had a manuscript that belongs to my father,” she said, handing him a cup of tea. “There’s no possibility that my father gave it away, not after spending what he did to acquire it in the first place. Heavens, when I think of how Richard carried on about its purchase.”

Rob had lived five and twenty years on God’s earth without knowing that manuscripts were something one would want to spend any money whatsoever on, but he supposed rich people had to think of new and inventive ways to fritter away their money. “What kind of manuscript is this?”

“It’s a fourteenth-century map of Roman Britain and some accompanying text.”

Rob’s knowledge of history might be lacking but he knew the Romans had been well and truly gone from these shores some thousand or so years before the fourteenth century.

“It was written by a monk,” Marian went on, “based on the writings of a Roman general that are now lost, as well as various ecclesiastical histories that were in the monastery’s library, one imagines.”

Rob bit back a comment along the lines of how normal people had better things to do than imagine anything of the sort, and instead enjoyed the sight of Marian going on about things. When she had finished talking about some fellow who apparently had a single-minded obsession with calculating the correct date of Easter, which Rob would have counted the most boring topic in the world if anyone but Marian was talking about it, he spoke. “And you’re certain this is your father’s?”

“Of course. There’s only one. And I could hardly fail to recognize it, seeing as I spent an entire summer translating the confounded thing. Sir John left it out in plain view, even though he knew I was calling on him. I don’t know if he didn’t realize that I’d recognize it or if he meant to throw it in my face that he stole it. Either way, it makes me despise him more.”

“See anything else worth taking?”

“Oh, all the usual things. I saw a pair of gold dolphins on the chimneypiece and a few pieces of silver.”

“The silver will be easier to sell than whatever gold dolphins are. Bringing Betty a pair of gold dolphins to fence will be more than my life is worth.”

“Betty?”

“The fence Kit and I worked with. Terrifying woman. You’d love her. Now, about tomorrow.” A plan had been shaping itself in Rob’s mind since he had listened to Fanshawe’s servants talk among themselves. “Tomorrow is Christmas. There will be all kinds of commotion. Mummers coming and going. Wassailing all day long. People will be in and out of the house constantly. Half Fanshawe’s servants have the day out. It would be nothing at all to create a distraction in the kitchens to draw the remaining servants there. That would leave the field clear for you to grab what you need and get back out.”

“The only thing that worries me is that someone else might be blamed for the theft.”

Rob had thought of this as well. “That’s the advantage of drawing the servants down to the kitchen. They’ll be able to verify that the others were with them.”

Marian didn’t seem convinced, and Rob was pleased to see it. He didn’t think she had been terribly worried about who would be blamed for her thefts when she had stolen from those houses in London, and maybe if she was thinking that way now it meant—

He stopped himself. It was a dark day indeed when he wanted to congratulate an aristocrat for simply remembering that servants were human beings. Just because an aristocrat learned to be less of a nuisance to everyone around them didn’t mean she was any less an aristocrat; it didn’t mean there was anything for the two of them when this was over.





Chapter 24




Marian would have been lying if she said she didn’t get a visceral thrill when she slipped inside the garden door and into Sir John Fanshawe’s house.