James said, “I searched your room at least three different times looking for that money. Where did you hide it?”
“In the gardens, not a foot from Corrie’s favorite statue.”
“Oh dear, how do you know which is my favorite statue, Jason?”
“It’s every female’s favorite statue,” Jason said.
Jason and James’s mother, Alex, said kindly to Hallie even as her husband gave her an astonished look, “They are large, very nicely carved statues of men and women in an unclothed state, very artistic, naturally, and I suppose you would say their subject matter is explicit. They were brought over by one of my husband’s ancestors in the last century.”
“Explicit what?” Hallie asked.
“I’ll show them to you, Hallie,” Corrie said. “They are vastly educational.”
“But how?”
“Well, they show you all the ways that a man and a woman can be intimate—”
“Intimate?” Hallie asked, her voice lower, vibrating with interest. “What do you mean ‘intimate’?”
“Well—oh dear, perhaps we’d best not discuss that here.”
Jason rolled his eyes.
“Amen,” said Corrie’s husband. “Forget about the statues.”
Hallie said, “They’re naked, you say? The male statues?”
“Well, yes,” Alex said.
“Hmm. You can show me these statues, Corrie—I don’t suppose the weasel here compares favorably to them?”
“Actually, truth be told, the statues don’t compare favorably to the weasel. Or to James.”
“Enough!” Jason roared.
Hallie jerked, found that he hadn’t let up on his grip at all, and said, “I’ll wager you dug up the one hundred pounds as soon as you could and lost it all in twenty minutes in a gaming hell.”
Douglas said, “My sons only visited a gaming hell once, Miss Carrick, and that was with me, their father, when they were seventeen.”
Alex said, “Goodness, Douglas, you never told me about that. How I should have liked to have seen it. I could have dressed in a pair of Corrie’s britches, perhaps worn a mask, sipped on brandy—”
“It was pretty bad, Mother,” James said. “Men were drunk as loons, wagering huge amounts of money as if they didn’t have a care in the world. The place smelled, to be blunt about it. As for the man who owned the hell, he looked like he’d willingly shove a knife in you
r belly if you didn’t pay up your losses.”
Corrie said to her father-in-law, “That was quite brilliant, sir. You did it as a lesson.”
Douglas nodded. “The unknown is a powerful lure. Strip away the mystery and you see the rot beneath. As I recall, my own father took me to a notorious hell when I was about that age.”
Alex said on a sigh, “I don’t think it ever occurred to my father to take Melissande or me on an educational experience like that one. I’ll wager there were gaming hells in York, don’t you think, Douglas?”
“Lord give me strength,” Douglas said, eyes heavenward.
Hallie jerked once more on her wrists, but Jason’s hold was still unbreakable. “This is all well and good, all these educational lessons, my lord, but may we get back to business?”
“What business?” James asked. “Oh, sorry, I forgot. You want to kill my brother.”
“No,” she wailed, “I want my stud farm! It’s mine, it belongs to me, I paid good money for it right into the cupped open hands of the owner himself, not his smarmy solicitor.”