The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(52)

Early that morning, she had set about tidying her father’s papers. He had never been an organized man, and Marian spent years attempting to impose order on the stacks of papers and indiscriminately filled pigeonholes that housed her father’s work. She remembered sheets of vellum covered in monkish Latin piled alongside unpaid bills and sternly worded letters from the solicitor. Even when she was a child, it had been enough to send her organized mind into throes of despair.

Now there were no letters from the solicitor or unpaid bills, because Marian had seen to those matters. The chaos was confined to incomplete translations wedged inside novels, unanswered letters stacked beneath dripping candles. But she needed to make sense of her father’s papers in order to see if anything was missing beyond the manuscript she had seen at Fanshawe’s house the previous day.

And there, right inside the crimson-bound Iliad where she had placed it over a year ago, was the inventory she had written with her own hand. Referencing it, she was able to identify three other missing manuscripts, but also, infuriatingly, her own translations of the missing manuscripts.

When she thought of the hours she had spent poring over those blasted manuscripts and how pleased her father had been with the results, she could have screamed. There were no copies. If Fanshawe had taken the originals, she wanted them back.

So when she slipped inside the garden door, she was spurred on not only by the desire to make things right for her father, but by something smaller and pettier yet somehow more pressing—the urge to take back what was hers.

As Rob had predicted there was no small amount of chaos with mummers and wassailers coming and going, and they had been able to approach the house without anyone questioning their presence.

“Do not even think about climbing out of any windows,” Rob hissed. “Nor up any chimneys or down any drainpipes. There’s ice all over everything.”

“You don’t want me to have any fun at all,” Marian complained.

Rob gave her a long look and took off in the direction of the kitchen, carrying a basket of some sort of pies that he had shamelessly convinced Hester to bake. “They’re all going to have a very trying time when Fanshawe discovers he’s been robbed. They might as well have some pie beforehand,” he had explained, which she supposed made some degree of sense. He wore one of the earl’s old wigs and an ancient black coat they had found in the attic. He carried a Bible and a handful of pamphlets he had procured from heaven only knew where. And just like that, he was a dissenting clergyman, ready to annoy the revelers with warnings against overindulgence and hard spirits.

Marian waited in the dark corridor, listening to footsteps descend the back stairs toward the kitchen. Eventually there were no sounds at all and it was time for her to move.

She was wearing the breeches and coat she had worn on their journey from Kent, partly for ease of movement in case they needed to make a quick escape, and partly as a disguise. If anyone caught a glimpse of her, they would see a slender young man, she hoped.

On her visit the previous day, she had paid close attention to the house, mapping its corridors and passageways in her mind. She hoped her memory was correct, as it would do her no good to get lost. The library where Sir John had received her was on the east side of the house, one story off the ground. So that was the direction she headed, remembering her way back to the door that she had used to enter the house.

And there it was, the library door. She stood with her back flat against the wall, listening for any sounds coming from within. No light shone from under the door, and every sign indicated that the room was empty.

Holding her breath, she stepped inside the library. It was pitch dark and she waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. The only sound came from the singing of carols downstairs.

Slowly, careful not to trip over any furniture that might still be invisible in the dark, she made her way toward the window, where she pulled back the curtain just enough to let some pallid winter light fall on the writing desk, which was where she had seen the manuscript the previous day. But when she approached the desk, she saw that it was empty of everything except a blotter and an inkwell.

She tried the desk drawers, even though she was sure they would be locked. But the top drawer opened on her first try. Its contents were veiled in shadows, but when she put her hand in the drawer she could feel for herself that there was no manuscript, nor were there any signs of the translations.

She tried the other drawers with the same result. The manuscript was not on or in the desk.

Grimly, she looked at the walls of the room, all lined with bookshelves. If Fanshawe had put the papers inside a book, she would have no chance of ever finding them. She would need hours to properly search every book in this room. But she remembered the sight of the manuscript on Fanshawe’s desk: it was smooth, or as smooth as it could be after a few hundred years of being passed around among antiquarians. It hadn’t been folded and stored in a book, and Fanshawe—if he understood the value of the manuscript he had taken the trouble to steal—would understand that such a priceless piece of vellum could not be folded up and stuck in a book like the bill from one’s tailor. The manuscript had shown no signs of being rolled, either, which meant she didn’t need to search the pigeonholes.

Perhaps he took it to bed with him? Perhaps he stored it in some other room? If so, she couldn’t find it now, because she didn’t know any other rooms in this house, and she was running out of time. Rob had said that he could maintain a distraction in the kitchen for a quarter of an hour, and Marian had already used up nearly all of it.