An Honorable Deception (The Imposters #3)

Chapter 11

ELEVEN

T he tie pin sat before her, a compass to redirect her whenever Lavinia forgot exactly what thread she’d been chasing through the dossiers and files. Yates had told her and Marigold about the escapade at Brooks’s after Alethia had retired for a nap, then pulled out the pin and shared what Alethia had added earlier in the day.

Lavinia had stared at the pin for a full minute, trying to place where she’d seen it before. She’d ignored Marigold’s questions, Yate’s answers. She’d studied that miniature building with its gold columns and bricks, the words arching above it, and tried to remember which tie she’d seen it on and where. When. Whose.

In retrospect, it was amusing how both the siblings had jumped when she’d leapt to her feet, shouting, “Arnold!” Neither of them startled easily, after all.

But Marigold had splayed a hand over her chest. “Leopard stripes, Lavinia! Must you shout?”

“Arnold who?” Yates had asked once he’d finished laughing at his sister.

Lavinia had already been at the files. “Desmond Arnold.” It had taken her only seconds to find his dossier and pull it out.

F ROM THE D OSSIER OF Lord Desmond Arnold, Baron

H EIGHT : 5’11”

W EIGHT : 12.5 stone

A GE : 28

H AIR : Auburn, always well-trimmed and worn in a rather dashing style

E YES : Green-blue

S TYLE : Doesn’t seem to favor one tailor over another but is always appearing in something new and is the first ^(after Xavier) to try new cuts

O BSERVANCES : Lord Arnold is handsome and knows it, the bane of fathers everywhere. He keeps a mistress in Hackney, pays no fewer than four young women about the country who are raising children and claiming to be widows, and seems bent on blowing through the considerable inheritance his father left him. On the hunt for a well- dowried bride (to offset his spending at the gaming hells and races, no doubt)

C ASES IN WHICH HE HAS BEEN OBSERVED : Henderson, Hines

I MPRESSIONS : There are no polite words, and if I put what I really thought, Yates would strike it out.

Those impressions had Lavinia spinning to glare at her friend. “No polite words, you say—and yet he came to call twice , and neither one of you was threatening to dispatch him. And you call yourselves my friends?”

Marigold sighed. “You didn’t need the warning, or I would have issued it. You said after his first visit that you didn’t like him but your father insisted on inviting him back because of...” She’d waved a hand. “Business connection? Political thing? I don’t recall.”

Yates had grinned. “I’ll dispatch him anytime. Give the word.”

It hadn’t been the point anyway. The pin had been the point. “He has one of those. I noticed it while he was prattling on about the stallion he was putting money on in the Ascot. I asked him what it was for, and he got this horrid little smirk on his face and said it was a charity that he supported. As if he has a charitable bone in his body.”

“Nothing’s ever about what you actually do—only about how you look doing it and how many people see you,” Yates had muttered. A quote from Xavier, he’d claimed.

She’d ignored them again after that, focusing instead on the files. She’d pulled the case files referenced, looked up every person mentioned in any of them, then anyone mentioned in any of those dossiers. She’d paired it with her own observations over the last few months in London, during the Season she’d come to hate more with each passing day.

Because with each passing day, she’d seen more and more what she didn’t want to see. More evidence of strained marriages. Of secrets. Of betrayals. More people focused so intently upon things that didn’t matter that they absolutely missed the things that did. Children relegated to nannies, left at country houses while their parents indulged in revelries in Town. Families consigned to what few minutes were left over after routs and parties and soirees and musicales and balls and operas and concerts and moving pictures.

She knew Marigold observed it all, and Gemma too. But it seemed they had been watching only from the perspective of their various cases—a valid way, and for good reason. Their notes were broad and admirable.

But not deep, at least not in the dossiers. Not thorough. They didn’t note every connection, every severed friendship, every long look. How could they? They’d get nothing else done.

But Lavinia had picked up a pen and added everything she could think of to every file, and each new page she reached for made her that much more excited to put down her own observations.

Because she had them—things to add. Things the other Imposters hadn’t noted. A perspective they hadn’t taken. Things that could perhaps lead men who were supposedly noble and good to murder.

Like her mother.

Praise God her friends didn’t have that perspective.

She could have gone a thousand different directions, but the tie pin always centered her again. That was her focus—the Empire House. She started a fresh sheet of notes, writing down every mention she came across, though there were only a half dozen, but also anyone with a direct connection to those mentions.

At some point, it grew dim enough that she detoured to the light knob and blinked in surprise at the plate of food sitting on the desk. Had she missed dinner? She hadn’t meant to—Alethia had been planning to join them for the first time. But the plate meant she had, and the fact that she was alone in the room and felt as though she had been for ages said that Marigold and Yates had left long ago. She had only a vague recollection of insistent words in familiar voices that she’d waved away.

She couldn’t remember the last time anything had pulled her in so deeply, and she wasn’t about to give it up. She wasn’t even hungry, so she ignored the food and went back to work, her pulse kicking up as much as it did in the gymnasium.

Her neck had started aching, though, and her hand had cramped several times. She was shaking it out again, staring once more at that gold pin, when she became aware of someone crouched beside her on the floor.

“You could have used the desk, at least.”

“Not big enough.” She looked down to make sure Yates wasn’t standing on anything vital. She’d tried to tidy up as she went. For a while, at least.

“Vin—”

“Do you mind? You’re blocking the light.”

He didn’t shift. “Vinny, it’s after midnight.”

That would account for why her eyes felt tired and were starting to blur. She’d stayed up late reading countless times during her years of illness, though she’d never admit it to her parents. They reacted with horror the one time they’d caught her at it, as if that alone was going to keep her from recovering. As if sleep didn’t evade her more often than not at night—thanks, she was sure, to resting too much during the day.

She blinked to clear her eyes now and searched for the line she’d been on a moment ago.

“Staying up all night won’t get you out of your exercise routine in the morning, you know.”

There—she’d been on the note added in Gemma’s hand. Those were always interesting. Gemma, often posing as staff, they’d said, saw things that Marigold and Yates weren’t given the opportunity to see.

In fact, Lavinia ought to find the archives she knew very well they had of the London Ladies Journal . Lavinia read Gemma’s column in every one—she’d always felt rather special to know who the nom de plume of G. M. Parker really belonged to—but she could use a refresher. And she did little more than flip through the rest of the magazine some weeks. They regularly featured charities their readers could consider supporting, though. They could have something about the Empire House in an issue somewhere.

“Lavinia.” His hand rested on her shoulder but then slid down her back, rubbing a circle. “Would you please look at me?”

He wasn’t going to go away this time, it seemed, so she sighed and turned her face toward his. A frown creased his brow, pulled down the corners of his mouth, but it wasn’t his usual frown, bold and challenging. It was a private frown, for no one but her to see. He rubbed another circle on her back. “Are you all right?”

She flashed a smile and then rolled her head to try and loosen her neck. “I’m wonderful. If I’d had any idea this work could be so invigorating, I’d have found you out and made you recruit me years ago.”

His frown went amused, at least. “You find sifting through these files invigorating ?”

“Well of course!”

He shook his head, that downturn flipping up. “You must be touched in the head. And I must not know you half so well as I thought I did.”

She smirked back. “As well as anyone. This is my best-kept secret, you know.” Except it wasn’t. Her best-kept secret was her mother’s treachery, but he already knew that. He knew everything else, really.

Lavinia gave her hand one more shake and picked up her pen again.

Yates plucked it back out of her fingers. “No. You need sleep. Marigold says you’ve been working hard in the gymnasium, and you have to give your body time to recover, or it won’t strengthen you. It’ll drain you.”

She reached for the pen, but he held it out of her range. A huff spilled from her lips. “ You’re still up.”

“ I am not at the start of a new, taxing routine.” He tossed the pen to the desk. “The files will be here in the morning, Vin.”

But the clue that would unlock everything could be in the next one she pulled. Or in one of the magazines she had to find. It was like the thickest, most puzzling detective story she’d ever read. And unlike so many of Conan Doyle’s, the clues were there, laid out and waiting for her to find them.

Turned out being Holmes was far more entertaining than reading about him.

“I’ll go to bed soon.” She didn’t mean it, but if it would convince him to leave her to her task ... She picked up the dossier with Gemma’s hand again, inadvertently knocking Yates’s away from her back in the process.

Yates sighed. “I can see we’re going to have to do this the hard way.”

She ought to have anticipated what that meant—ought to have but didn’t. One second she was trying to find her place on the page again through her bleary eyes, and the next, she was being lifted off the ground.

Laughter bubbled up, as it always did when he pulled such a stunt.

Panic crashed down, popping the bubble of joy when Marigold’s warning clanged through her memory.

“Put me down !” She could hear the strange note in her own voice, one better suited for a dark alleyway and a drunk ruffian than one of her best friends in the world, who was only acting like he always did.

She was on her feet in the next second, and he’d taken a step away, hands raised in surrender and a shadow in his eyes she’d never seen there before. One she’d put there. “Sorry,” he said, and she could hear the confusion in his voice alongside the sincerity. “I didn’t mean to—did I hurt you? Offend you?”

Lionfeathers. Maybe she did need to go to bed, because she felt the burn of tears at the back of her eyes. He looked so contrite. Horrified. Concerned. That was what did it—the fact that he’d do or undo anything to make certain she was well.

She didn’t deserve such a friend.

She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed them. “No. Sorry.” She wanted to say it was all Marigold, pour out the tale of the conversation that still bothered her every time she thought about it. But she could never look him in the eye and say, “Your sister wants to make certain you don’t fall in love with me again.” How arrogant that would sound!

And it was a pointless concern. That had been abundantly clear as she’d watched Yates watch Alethia that day.

Making herself look at him again, she offered a small smile. “You did nothing wrong—and you are a good friend. It’s ...” Would she be overstepping? But he needed to understand. She sighed. “I see how you look at Alethia, all teasing aside. And I see how she looks at you. And while I already explained to her that we’re simply old friends”—with a single kiss at age seventeen to muddle that, which she had not explained—“it wouldn’t look like that. If you were married, you wouldn’t still hoist me about like your partner in the circus, would you? Because I’m not Marigold, much as I often feel like part of your family.”

For a beat, he was still, and she could see her words settling over him, finding their places. His hands lowered, slipped into his pockets. And he nodded.

He nodded . She didn’t realize until he agreed with her that some part of her, some part that was still seventeen and standing on a wintry, wind-tossed bluff by the sea, had expected— wanted —him to argue. Wanted him to get that fierce, determined look in his eyes and say that no, he wasn’t interested in Alethia. Wanted to hear him say what he’d said all those years ago—that there was no one in the world for him but her.

There was, though. She’d squandered her chance, and he’d mended his heart, and now this was what they had. A friendship that could be beautiful but that had to change from its current state. Because its current state relied on teasing that looked like flirtation, and that couldn’t continue if he pursued Alethia.

It shouldn’t feel like another shade of mourning. This wasn’t loss. Wasn’t death. Wasn’t betrayal. This was maturity.

She let her gaze fall before she saw something in his that she hadn’t the energy to work through at the moment and eased back a step. “You’re right—it’s late, I should sleep. Is it all right if I leave this out until morning, do you think?”

He gave her a crooked grin—which, yes, she noticed because she looked up at him again. “I can guarantee you that no one else is going to come in here and touch these files before you do. In fact, I think we’ll be perfectly comfortable calling this your domain from now on. I hereby dub you Mistress of the Filing Cupboards.”

She smiled. “I accept the commission.” And then she turned to the door. Exhaustion crowded in now, though it felt less physical than mental. Emotional.

“See you at the gymnasium at seven.”

She wanted to tell him she and Marigold had been going at seven-thirty. She wanted not to show up. She wanted to go out at seven and not tell Marigold and laugh with him while he oversaw her torture. She wanted so many things that contradicted one another that she could find words for none of them. She simply nodded and left the room.

She slept, at least. Quickly, soundly, and then it fled again without complaint when the first light of dawn speared through her east-facing window. Her eyes certainly felt better, and the muscle strain had eased. Her mind was still the same muddle it had been at midnight, though. She dressed for the gymnasium and did not go back into the study, because she knew for a fact she wouldn’t remember to leave it again in time to make her standing appointment with the barbells and skipping rope.

Marigold was already moving toward the stairs when Lavinia emerged from her room, and Yates’s laugh came from the direction of the kitchen. He was dressed for exercise, too, though she tried to tell herself that seeing him so wasn’t what made her throat go tight. It was the memory of her overreaction last night. The memory of the argument with Marigold.

It was the realization that after Marigold gave birth, after Yates and Alethia had begun to court instead of just stealing glances at each other, this wouldn’t happen again. Lavinia could still be their friend, but she couldn’t be the kind of friend who stayed here for months on end, joked with Yates at the crack of dawn, or let him take her arms in the gymnasium and show her how to do the next exercise.

Why would this stupid ache not go away? She lifted a hand, rubbed it over her chest.

And regretted it when both the siblings stopped in their tracks as if lightning had struck, staring at her in horror.

Her hand fell away. “Don’t even ask. I am perfectly fine.” Physically.

Marigold’s fingers curled around Lavinia’s elbow. “Perhaps we should take the day off. I could use a rest.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re a terrible liar.”

“I am a fabulous liar! I’ve made a career of it.”

Lavinia breathed a laugh. “Then I’ve become an expert at detecting it. I don’t need a day off. I took one on Sunday.”

“You have shadows under your eyes still,” Yates pointed out, studying her like she was a dossier.

“I was up too late and looking too long at the files. And thank you, by the way, for the flattery. You certainly know how to turn a girl’s head.”

Wrong thing to say— stupid, stupid .

Marigold frowned. Yates set his jaw.

Lavinia pivoted on her heel. “Never mind—who am I to argue if you want to relent on the torture? I’ll be in my domain, reigning supreme over the filing cupboards.” She fled back up the stairs before either one of them could say another word. Like ask her why she was rubbing her chest if her heart wasn’t physically hurting.