Bodice Ripper

She stepped away from the door and into the room, listening as she did for the sound of anyone walking up the hall behind her. Nobody came. When she was convinced that she was free from prying ears, she reached behind her large, full shelf of books and pulled out a single, unlabeled leather book.

It had been her father's; he had kept it in a table beside his bed, and as soon as things had taken a turn for the worse, Mary had secreted it away in her room. The entire situation had always seemed fishy to her. Her father was not a particularly thorough man, but he had his tendencies, and he rarely let something major pass without noting it somewhere.

Figuring out where, now that was the trick. The only sure bet was that if it mattered to him, he had made one of his strange notes in the journal he kept each night, a fairly perfunctory list of things he had done and his feelings on them. If there was anything that would have the secret to his death coded somewhere in it, she knew, it would be in this.

If she knew, though, then there was little doubt that whoever had set the entire plot into motion would know, just as well. That was why she had taken it, and that was why she had carefully avoided taking it out any time that she might be intruded upon. It had to be her secret, in order to avoid revealing her only trump card. She hadn't expected the chance to arrive so soon—or at all.

Mary flipped the latch on her door, and then settled into her bed. She hadn't even leafed through it, for fear of being caught. Now she felt like a little girl in a candy shop. What sort of surprises would she find? What would she learn?

She opened the journal to a random page and let her eyes run across it. As usual, it was written in his strange, perfunctory shorthand. Most of it meant little to her at first glance. She would need to make guesses as to the meaning, but as Mr. Poole had correctly surmised, she knew more than most people would.

There was Oliver, her father's brother. He had asked to borrow money again, and her father had acquiesced. There was an explanation, noted below, of what the money had been for, but it was densely packed single-letter denotations of words that meant little or nothing: "g m otwf"

She frowned. It was frustrating to try to decipher any of the meaning, so much of it was kept uncomfortably short.

As she flipped through, Mary was surprised to find a full name, written out entirely: "Pearl." There was no explanation for who she might have been, but her father had met this woman in January, and had proceeded to spend a considerable amount of time with her, based on the number of capital 'P's showed up from that point on.

Each time had been followed by a comment, as every note was, and everything that he had done with Pearl had been a wonderful, eye-opening experience.

Mary tried not to think too hard about it. Certainly, it had been a long time since her mother had died. Years, even. She had heard that it was not unheard of for widowers to hire the services of young women, for…whatever they might do. But she was surprised to hear that her father had hired such a woman, and more than a little bit disgusted.

She put it in the back of her mind, and tried to move on with the notes. They went on quite a long ways; this had been his most recent journal, that was certain, and the dates went through the early parts of July, only a week or so before his death. By that point he had gotten sick, a surprisingly fast turn of events that nobody could have seen coming.

Well, she corrected herself, silently. Nobody but the parties responsible for his condition, anyway. That was an important distinction.

Mary set the journal aside. She wasn't exactly sure what she had expected, after all. There was no reason that her father could have known he would die. He mostly wrote about the events of his day, and it wasn't as if

he were going to write 'I just found out about a conspiracy to kill me—the butler did it!'

Mary laughed at her little joke. It was impossible to imagine Davis having done anything of the sort. He was too small, too unassuming. There was an almost tangible lack of any of the qualities that made a man a good killer. Unlike Mr. Poole, he simply didn't strike her that way.

There were other ways, of course, that Mr. Poole struck her differently than Davis. He was younger, and stronger, and looked somehow more like a man. She wondered for a moment if he were married, or if he were dating anyone.

Why should that matter? Mary pushed it away and tried her best to think about other things. She had bigger concerns on her mind than some army boy's muscles, or hair, or voice. That she was spending time thinking about these sorts of things wasn't just useless, it was embarrassing.

Then, with a long sigh, she flipped through the pages one last time. There wouldn't be anything she could figure out now, and she was quickly finding that she didn't have the energy to read closely after the theatrics she'd just put on in the library.

The revelations of this 'Pearl' were a further drain on her ability to think rationally about the situation. She'd rather not hear the sordid details of her father's affairs with some hussy. Mary wondered, not for the first time, what on earth had possessed her father to hide his will so carefully.

Mr. Stump had come down to Derby when word had come of her father's death, and he had informed her that while he had written a will—he had witnessed it himself—it had been hidden, somewhere in the house, and until they found it, it couldn't be read. They had turned the house upside-down, and nobody had found a thing.

The idea that whoever had been involved in the plot, whoever she had worried might steal her father's journal, may have found the will and secreted it away for their own nefarious purposes. In fact, it seemed downright likely, but if that were the case, then it didn't matter regardless what it said or where it was hidden. It was gone, now.

If only he had put it in the bank, or left it with someone, then everything would have been so much easier on her. As she flipped the back closed, she noticed something odd about the way that the last page turned. Sure enough, there was something folded into the spine, as if it were some sort of memento.

An envelope, on her father's stationary. It was addressed to one James Poole, in London, at Lisson Grove. The back was sealed with wax, and the front had a large stamp marked on it, that read "Return to Sender."

Entranced, Mary broke the seal. If it were nothing, as simple as a letter of greeting, then she would ignore it. Throw it into the fire. But if it was something…she could apologize later, but it was too important. She opened the envelope, pulled the paper out, and scanned it.

None of the shorthand nonsense, here. Mary pursed her lips. Her father had written this, after all. She would need to bring this to James Poole's attention immediately.

8

James

James Poole stood over his bags once again. It wasn't lost on him how briefly he'd had them unpacked for, and what it meant that he was packing them once again. There was no money, after all. He'd tried, for all the world. He cursed his luck, that he'd been so close and for nothing.

He'd gotten further than he had expected, and that was something he would keep close to his heart. At least he had done more than he had expected of himself. Why, then, did failure sting so badly?