Page 37 of An Honorable Deception
“One of the zebras.” He flashed a grin. “They let me name him, and I was in an ironic stage at the time.”
At that moment, Lady Marigold emerged, a smile on her face and the lion at her side. Alethia could do nothing but grin in return.
ELEVEN
The 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.
FROMTHEDOSSIEROF
Lord DesmondArnold, Baron
HEIGHT:5’11”
WEIGHT:12.5 stone
AGE:28
HAIR:Auburn, always well-trimmed and worn in arather dashing style
EYES:Green-blue
STYLE:Doesn’t seemto favor one tailor over another but is always appearingin something new and is the first ^(after Xavier) totry new cuts
OBSERVANCES:Lord Arnold is handsome and knowsit, the bane of fathers everywhere. He keeps a mistressin Hackney, pays no fewer than four young women aboutthe country who are raising children and claiming to bewidows, and seems bent on blowing through the considerable inheritancehis father left him. On the hunt for a well-dowried bride (to offset his spending at the gaming hellsand races, no doubt)
CASESINWHICHHEHASBEENOBSERVED:Henderson, Hines
IMPRESSIONS:There are no polite words, andif I put what I really thought, Yates would strikeit out.
Those impressions had Lavinia spinning to glare at her friend. “No polite words, you say—and yet he came to calltwice, 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 perspectiveof 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.
