Art and Artifice by Regina Scott Page B

an
establishment where pearls might be sold.”
    “She’s right,” Priscilla put in with an
encouraging nod.
    Lady Minerva shook her head. “You are
resorting to fancy, I tell you. He could have been selling some
trinket he dislikes.”
    “I doubt it,” Emily said, assurance growing.
“You and His Grace both said Lord Robert had been lingering about
the house. He might well have noticed your pearls. There must have
been some bustle to prepare the place for me, to get you packed to
come to Barnsley. In all the leave-taking, how simple to slip away
with them. And I am beginning to think he had need of them. His
father may have gambled away the family fortune.”
    Lady Minerva frowned as if she wasn’t sure
whether to give the story credence. But Priscilla clasped her hands
together before her evening cloak.
    “You know what this means, don’t you?” she
said, excitement dancing in her voice. “It means we have something
against Lord Robert. Now all we have to do is get him to confess,
and we’ll have saved the Ball!”
    Emily could only wish it was that simple. If
she was right, she didn’t think Lord Robert would spill his secret
so easily. As Lady Minerva shook her head, Priscilla suggested any
number of stratagems, such as telling him how much Emily admired
jewel thieves or pretending to drop a diamond and seeing how he
responded. None set well with Emily.
    But the note that was waiting for her at home
was worse.
    Warburton brought it to her when she was
sitting by the fire in her dressing gown, trying to think of the
appropriate way to bring up the topic of pearls with Lord Robert
without appearing confrontational. She was ever too good at
speaking her mind. Yet surely she shouldn’t simply blurt out her
suspicions. He’d either laugh them off or make up a clever story,
and she’d have lost her chance to gain any proof.
    She almost didn’t hear the scratch at the
door, forcing Warburton to tap before she called out permission to
enter. When he held out the silver platter with the card on top,
she merely frowned at it, then at him.
    “From Lady St. Gregory, I believe,” her
butler said. “In answer to your note, perhaps?”
    Emily felt as if a rock had suddenly dropped
into her stomach. She picked up the missive with fingers that
trembled. The answer inside could spell her future, or her
doom.
    It was more of the latter. “Thank you for
writing,” the lady had said in precise lines of black ink. “I am
entirely too busy with the Season to think of enrolling any more
members to the Royal Society for the Beaux Arts at this time.
Perhaps in the autumn. If we have openings, I shall write to
you.”
    Emily carefully folded the note.
    “Do you wish to respond, your ladyship?”
Warburton asked, voice kind.
    How was she to respond? With anger at being
so summarily dismissed, her work not even deemed worthy of viewing?
With a stinging rebuke that the doorkeeper to the prestigious
society could not be bothered with opening the door? With a threat
that her father might have something to say about the matter?
    No, never that.
    “No, Warburton,” she said. “No reply. If my
father or my aunt asks after me, would you tell them I’ve retired
for the evening?”
    He bowed. “Certainly, your ladyship. Sleep
well.”
    Sleep failed her that night. As she lay in
the four-poster bed, staring up at the painting on the underside of
the canopy (an inferior piece; she could do better), thoughts kept
circling her. Could Lord Robert really have stolen her aunt’s
pearls or was she merely seeing treachery where she longed to find
it? Did James Cropper suspect Lord Robert as well? Was that why he
was following her betrothed? Or was James Cropper truly a thief,
masking his work under the cover of his position at Bow Street? Was
there some other connection between the Bow Street Runner and Lord
Robert?
    She was glad when all her friends called the
next morning. She and Priscilla shared their adventures of the
night before