Wherein Giles Does Not Throw His Fork
The subject of the puzzle boxes, the codes, and the identity of the unknown Maria occupied the party at dinner that afternoon until Giles felt he could have thrown his fork at the wall. Just two things prevented him from doing so: First, that there was every chance he would miss the wall and hit one of the enormous glass windows instead. And second, the roasted widgeon was delicious.
Besides the widgeon, there was a beef tongue in redcurrant sauce, potted shrimps, and a variety of vegetables. Best not to throw the fork until the cloth was removed.
“Yes,” Miss Corning answered Lady Dudley for perhaps the seventy-fifth time. “I wrote to all the Marias I identified through my cousin’s correspondence, too. Only two remain from whom I haven’t received a reply.”
In dressing for dinner, the new arrival had exchanged her traveling gown for one of rich silk, and she had adorned her hair with plumes. Enjoying having money and being a peacock for the first time; Giles couldn’t blame her for that. If he found that someone had given his sisters a fortune—and that someone else was trying to take it from them—he’d urge them to spend every penny of it however they wished.
Miss Corning had paused after her explanation; now she looked abashed. “I hope you do not mind, my lord—my lady—but I gave the direction of Castle Parr should either of the Marias wish to reply. I did not mean to presume by doing so, only I knew I should not be returning to my brother’s household.”
“Quite all right.” Lord Dudley smiled. “We send a servant to the village for mail almost every day, when the weather permits.”
“Thank you, my lord. You are very good.” Miss Corning’s voice wavered a bit.
She must have traveled with everything she owned. No wonder she was so relieved the Dudleys were willing to take her in. But that seemed to be their way. It was a wonder they were so rarely visited; maybe their open-hearted hospitality wasn’t known. Giles had met a number of worthless hangers-on in London who would shoulder their way into any aristocratic household with which they had the slimmest of family connections.
“And you, young Rutherford.” Lady Irving’s blacksmith hammer of a voice clanged at Giles’s ears. “What are you going to do with yourself now?”
Giles stared at her. “How do you mean?”
Lady Irving waved her knife. “Now that Miss Corning has opened the puzzle box, of course. You’ve got nothing more to work on while you bill and coo.”
“Oh, that. You’re right, I need some new occupation. Maybe I could decorate a few of the statue heads in the antique passage.” Giles snapped his fingers. “Wait a moment; I can’t. Because you did that already while you billed and cooed.”
“Son, really,” said Richard mildly. “You must feel free to decorate those statue heads all you like. The effect is pleasingly festive.”
“Indeed!” Lord Dudley wheezed. “Exactly the sort of thing m’lady and I like.”
It did not pass Giles’s notice that his father had not protested the bit about billing and cooing. With a shudder, he drained his glass of wine.
No puzzle box. No jewels. Nothing but another mystery, and home seemed farther away than ever.
Much as he hated to admit it, Lady Irving asked a fair question. What was he going to do with himself now?
After dinner, the cloth was removed for syllabub and candied oranges and ginger. When the rest of the party seemed inclined to head into the drawing room for more tinkering with the puzzle boxes, Giles caught his father’s arm and held him back.
“Father. Wait. I need to ask you something.”
Richard looked delighted. “Of course!” Over Giles’s shoulder, he waved on the others. “Go ahead, Estella. I shall meet you in a few minutes. Mind you don’t start gambling without me.” He chuckled. “Funny woman. She pretends to be so irritable, but I think she’s not nearly so bad as she wants everyone to believe.”
“I wouldn’t want to contradict a lady.” Giles pulled out chairs for himself and Richard, out of the way of the servants who had come in to clear the table. “If she wants me to think she’s terrible, I’m happy to do so.”
“Oh, son.” Richard chuckled again. Picking up a bit of candied ginger from its porcelain dish, he pointed it at Giles. “What’s on your mind?”
Giles picked up a piece of ginger, too, rolling the sugar crystals between his fingertips. “It’s our time in England.”
“Yes?” Richard popped the ginger into his mouth. “My, that’s tasty. Warms you right up, doesn’t it?”
Ignoring this aside, Giles said, “We’ve got two puzzle boxes and no real information. What if we never find anything else? Without the lost diamonds, how will you set up a new shop in London?” He took a deep breath. “How will you care for the family? They need you, Father. They need you more than you need this . . . adventure.” The word was so sour in his mouth that he crunched at the ginger root, sweet and fiery and sharp enough to make him squint.
Richard made a tidy stack of the candied orange peel, crossing one slice over another. “Are you certain of that? They’re grown, Giles. You might be the eldest living, but you should not still think of them as children. Now, don’t protest—you do think so.”
“I do not.” Giles bit his bottom lip, hard. He knew they were no longer children; they were scattering off to begin their own lives. Even his bosom companion, Rachel, had left the family home to live with an aunt. “That doesn’t mean they don’t still need a father’s guidance.”
“You asked me to wait to return to England—my wife’s final request—until Sarah was engaged to be married, and I did. Now they’re all building their own lives, Giles. All of them except you—and if you had your way, me. But don’t we all deserve better than a dreamless life?”
“We support each other,” Giles ground out.
“Support or shackle?” The smile disappeared from Richard’s features. Without the smile, he looked far older. Worn and tired. “Son, I love you, but you mustn’t think I don’t know why you’re here. You didn’t want to see the land of your mother’s birth; you didn’t want to meet her relatives and old friends. You wanted to keep watch over me and make sure I didn’t do anything reckless.”
“I—”
“Don’t worry yourself; I’m not angry in the slightest. You might grumble and grouch, but you do it out of love. And I wanted you to come along, truly. Because whether you intended to or not, now you have seen your mother’s birthplace, and you have met some of her friends. And now you know where I intend to live.”
This last sentence was spoken so matter-of-factly that Giles didn’t catch it at first. “Where you intend to live? You…you don’t plan to return to Philadelphia?”
“Oh, doubtless I will at some time. But Giles, I never wanted to work with paper. I always meant to be a jeweler. That’s why I wanted you to do it so much—so you would know that it was possible.”
The smile flickered back over his features. “You want a father’s guidance? Here it is. Go home, Giles. Go home whenever you’re ready.” Another chuckle. “Maybe we can work together. Your designs and my execution, what do you say? We could be the first trans-Atlantic jewelry firm the world has seen.”
There it was, like a wall. A smiling, oblivious stone wall with a mouth full of candied orange peel. For Richard to pursue his dream, Giles had to return. To be his proxy in America. “I don’t want to work with jewelry, Father.”
With an effort, Richard swallowed the tough citrus. “You may think so now, but you’ll say something quite different after a few years working with paper.”
“But I do want to work with paper,” Giles murmured. Not for its own sake, but because it could hold folded dreams. The furled plans for a home or a warehouse or a shop or a church. Anything. Paper could hold the design of a future hope; paper was a springboard.
Paper could even become a spring. He smiled, thinking of Audrina’s absent hand gestures that turned flatness into a toy. Thinking of Audrina’s drawing of Castle Parr, which was nearly, tantalizingly close to the sort of work Giles loved.
“You want to run the mill?” Richard’s brows furrowed. “I’d be glad for your brothers to have the guidance, but I’ve never heard you say so before.”
“You didn’t hear me say so now, either.” Not for the first time since arriving in England, he felt he was speaking a different language from the people around him. This was the first time he’d had that impression with his father, though.
He didn’t want to pursue this stone wall of a conversation anymore. Richard was sure everything would work out, because . . . well, for no good reason. Just because he wanted it to. Because that was the sort of person he was: He could cross an ocean for an apprenticeship, then cross back with a marquess’s daughter. Then cross it again for an adventure.
Really, Richard was right. Everything did seem to work out well for him. Maybe because someone else was around to tie up the loose ends he left behind.
Giles tried to match his father’s calm. “What would you have done if I hadn’t been here to open the puzzle box?”
“But you didn’t open it.” With a smile, Richard topped his citrus tower with a curl of candied ginger. “Miss Corning opened it. And she’d have done that whether you were here or not.”
“Assuming you were here at Castle Parr.”
“Why wouldn’t I have been? I’d have met up with Lord Alleyneham eventually, and he and Lady Irving would have directed me here.”
“Not necessarily. Remember, Lord Alleyneham’s family is unraveling on a precise schedule.”
“They needn’t be.” And with a shrug, he indicated that he was done with the topic. Simple as that. If they don’t want to be torn apart, they needn’t be. Maybe he was right, but it was still infuriating. More so because Giles felt the same way about their own family.
“If you love England so much, why did you ever leave?” Giles hardly expected an answer. It was one of those questions asked out of annoyance, the main purpose of which was to let the other person know how unfathomable their actions were.
Of course, Richard answered at once. “When it came time for a family, my best prospects were in America. I couldn’t support a marquess’s daughter in England.”
“Why not finish your apprenticeship first? Why the urgency to start a family?”
Richard raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, good God,” Giles groaned. “Are you serious?”
Richard raised his other eyebrow.
“The puzzle boxes with the bits about the Nativity—your elopement—Mother was with child?”
Richard tipped his head. “It happens to the best of us.”
“Not if you don’t—ack. Never mind. I don’t want to hear any more about that.”
Giles knew that his parents had two children before him: a sister and a brother, not much more than babies when illness took them. He shouldn’t have been the oldest sibling at all.
But he had never known before that his mother left everything she knew, including her own parents and the native land that valued her blue blood, for the sake of her child. A child who would never be accepted by the ton that had birthed her, because of its father.
Giles had thought her adventurous—and yes, she had been. But she’d been more than that. She’d been brave.
For the thousandth, millionth, infinitely numbered time, he looked at his hands. So much of him was a legacy from Lady Beatrix.
And she had left one last legacy in the form of these puzzle boxes. A mystery, an impossible adventure. Richard loved that nonsense. Maybe that was part of why Lady Beatrix had done it: She’d known that nothing would capture her beloved’s imagination like a mystery.
And what was Giles to do with himself? The answer slipped away like air. Always, there was another gasping step, and another, before he could settle his own plans. Giles was damned tired. His dreams were in pieces, scattered about Philadelphia and New York.
And York, too?
No, no. Nothing tied him here except a thread of fascination with an aristocrat’s daughter. Quite a family tradition the Rutherford men had.
Well—yes, all right, the puzzle boxes tied him here too. The plans and schemes of his mother, young and healthy. An ancient dream was better than nothing, and he couldn’t take that from his father. He couldn’t break that spirit of adventure. In a way, it had given Giles life.
“I’m sorry, Father. I’ll help you wrap this up. For Mother.”
Then Richard could do what he liked. Giles’s place was clear—and it was half a world away, picking up the pieces others had left behind.
After Giles left him behind in the dining room, Richard toyed a bit more with the candied citrus peel. He knew he ought to let the servants get on with their work. The rest of the party had long since found their way to the drawing room—and judging from the jingling heard through the open doors, at least one of the dogs was in there, too.
Good, good. Lord and Lady Dudley seemed to enjoy having company about, whether human or canine. But Richard wasn’t quite ready to be a part of it. Why! The span of one day had brought him the solution to one puzzle box, then had introduced and solved another he had not known existed. Then introduced a third.
After three years’ wait, this was the end of his quest—or the beginning of the end, at least.
Richard rather liked thinking of this time in England as a quest.
On a quest, he had traveled to England thirty-five years before, to apprentice to the watchmakers and smiths who created art in precious metals for Rundell and Bridge. His nation’s independence was new and rough, and there were some things the English did better.
Ignorance was bliss, in some cases. In Richard’s case, it had been. Because he hadn’t realized he’d no right to look at the marquess’s daughter who called at the shop. Her frank blue eyes, her freckled sunniness, her free laughter were irresistible to the young jeweler’s apprentice who should not have raised his eyes so high.
But he did, and she looked right back at him—and just like that, they exchanged hearts.
When Beatrix had agreed to marry him, she had left everything behind. The glittering court of King George III; her sisters, brothers, parents, dowry. She and Richard had taken each other with nothing but health and hope and humor, making their way across an ocean. There he had assumed control of his family’s paper mill in Philadelphia; there they had built a comfortable fortune, had raised children and lost children, too.
Beatrix had still been young when the pains of arthritis began; sharp in her hands at first, and only in the mornings. But then they spread to more of her joints, to more of the day, until she never had a moment in which her body didn’t feel wracked and torn.
Though her health slipped away, she had never lost that wry edge. At the end, she had even laughed at death. “My love for you is not such a paltry thing that it can be dissolved,” she whispered. Though their six surviving children surrounded her, Giles alone ducked close enough to hear along with Richard. “I could not bring a fortune to the New World, so I left it behind. Perhaps enough time has passed that you can reclaim it. My puzzle box . . .”
Giles had found the item to which he believed she referred: a neat creation of wood that he and his younger brother Alfred had fitted together with bated breath and careful hands. Puzzle boxes had been a tradition with her family, Beatrix had told them, ever since her Dutch ancestor had traded with Japan and brought back treasures never before seen.
“No,” she’d breathed. “In England. You must find it in England.”
Giles had thought it madness. A fool’s quest to cross an ocean. But what was foolish about believing in Beatrix’s last words? At that moment, she’d told them the most important thing on her mind: She had wanted to see to it they didn’t lack for anything.
That had been three years ago. Since then, the loss of Beatrix had faded, a wound knit and scarred over. A happy marriage left a permanent mark on a man. A loving family made him feel lonely on his own.
Richard was glad Giles had come with him, no matter the reason. Being apart from all of his children at once, he would miss them as though part of his world had gone silent.
Richard was determined to see Beatrix’s wish granted, to give their children a fortune beyond paper-mill dreams. Paper was as nothing, flat and dull, compared to the luster of the unknown. Mysteries. Puzzles. Adventures!
One diamond parure wasn’t enough to change all their lives—but it was enough to begin with.
And he and Giles were two-thirds of the way to finding it.
A smile slipped over his features, comfortable as being wrapped in a blanket before a fire, and he rose to join the others in the drawing room.