Page 30 of Impetuous

“In the attic? With all the beds downstairs?” Olivia said scornfully.

“Yes, I know. But it seems so absurd—I mean, who?” Cassandra carefully avoided looking at Sir Philip, for fear he would see the thought that had immediately sprung into her head as soon as she said the question. The most likely person to have been searching for the letters was Sir Philip himself.

He alone had access to the other half of the map. Now that she had told him where the map was located, he could steal her letter and have both halves. Perhaps he had only pretended to want her help and not to know what the Queens Book was. It might have been as familiar to him as the family Bible, so he had known instantly where he could find the other half. He wouldn’t need her help to find it, and if he could steal the letters from Chesilworth, then he could have the whole dowry to himself.

“What about your American cousin?” Sir Philip suggested.

Cassandra was startled out of her thoughts. Her head snapped up and she stared at Neville. “What?”

“I am referring to Mr. Miller. Isn’t that his name? The former owner of the journals.”

“No!” Olivia’s answer was swift and emphatic. She moved forward, crossing her arms pugnaciously over her chest. “He would never do such a thing. David, I mean, Mr. Miller, was a very nice man.”

Cassandra narrowed her eyes thoughtfully at her sister. She had suspected that Olivia had developed something of a crush on the handsome American. Perhaps it was worse than she had realized.

She shrugged aside the thought. There was more to worry about now than her little sister growing up and forming tendres for inappropriate men. “Honestly, Sir Philip, you take suspicion to new heights. I thought you envisioned Mr. Miller as the forger of the journals, swindling Mr. Simons out of a few pounds.”

“Perhaps I am rethinking my position. Someone breaking into the attic here puts a new light on things.”

“I am glad to find that something will make you examine your opinions a little more closely,” Cassandra told him tartly.

“It makes more sense,” he stated, ignoring her remark. “The quality of the forgery would have to be stupendous, and it would have been far too much work, as you said, for a relatively small amount of money. If the journals are real, then Mr. Miller, in reading them, would have realized that there was the possibility of finding a fortune here in England.”

“I don’t understand,” Crispin interrupted. “What do you mean, if they are real? What else could they be?”

Cassandra gave him a pithy explanation of the possibility of forging such documents, adding, “But obviously there must be something to them, or there would not have been a person searching our attic for the letters Margaret wrote to her father.” She turned back to Sir Philip. “But I see no reason for it to have been Mr. Miller. Why would he have sold the journals in the first place if he knew of the existence of the treasure? Why not come here and steal the letters, steal the book from your library…we would have had no idea why anyone had broken into either place, since we would have known nothing of the maps to the dowry. We would have written this episode off to a thief or a vagrant breaking into Chesilworth for a night.”

“Yes, but you have to remember that Mr. Miller is an American several generations removed from the events. The legend of the missing dowry probably was not handed down in his family from generation to generation, as it was in ours. When he read the journal, he would not have even known where to start. He wouldn’t have known where the Neville and Verrere families lived or who might still have the maps in question. He wouldn’t even know that the dowry was still lost. Our families could have joined together as Margaret requested and found the treasure long ago. The best thing he could do was bring the journals to England and try to sell them. He could wait and see who was interested in them, see if he could stir up the Verreres or the Nevilles. He could follow the leads and locate maps. He did, after all, follow the journals to you.”

“He only wanted to meet us,” Olivia interjected.

“And if I remember correctly,” Sir Philip continued inexorably, “you told him how you were searching your attics for the letters in question. I suspect you even told him about the Nevilles’ part of it. All he would have to know was that Haverly House was the Neville home seat and he could have figured out that he would need to search the library there to retrieve a book. After that, it would have been relatively simple. Search the attics, find the letters, then go on to Haverly House, cutting out all the pesky relatives.”

“Why wait a year?” Cassandra queried. “He could have followed the journals here when Papa bought them, with exactly the same result. Why wait till now? It seems to me that that is the important thing—that it is only now that someone started searching for the letters. It would suggest that that someone just learned of it.”

Sir Philip quirked an eyebrow, and his voice went ominously quiet. “Are you suggesting that I am the thief?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

CASSANDRA WAVERED A little at his icy demeanor, but she kept her voice calm. “There is a certain logic to it.”

Neville pressed his lips together, and for a moment, Cassandra thought he was going to explode into a furious denial, but he said only, “Yes, I can see that it has logic—I am sure anyone would trust a man about whom they knew absolutely nothing, like David Miller, over a man whom you know is a peer of the realm, a scion of one of the oldest and most honorable families in England, and, moreover, a man of enough wealth that this Spanish dowry would hardly swell his coffers.”

Cassandra’s spine stiffened. She had felt a moment’s discomfort over voicing her suspicion, but Neville’s arrogant words drove the vague guilt completely away. “No doubt all rich men are exempt from seeking further wealth, as well as from being greedy villains. It is only we impoverished folk who have such low morals that we would stoop to look for money. It is only unknown foreigners who would break into houses.”

Neville shifted uncomfortably. “I did not say that. I simply pointed out that logic would indicate the stranger rather than the man you know.”

“But I know neither of you,” Cassandra reminded him crisply. “Indeed, I have probably talked with you less than I have with Mr. Miller, since he visited with us for several days. But I do know that you are a Neville, and historically Nevilles have not been friends of Verreres. I also know that wealth is often obtained in dishonest ways, and that wealthy men often cannot get enough money to satisfy them. It is my intent not to blame you or Mr. Miller or some other person until I have more facts. I strive always to be fair.”

Sir Philip ground his teeth. He was not sure why it made him furious that Cassandra should so coolly and reasonably suggest that he could be the intruder. But he did know that it galled him to the point where he would have liked to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her.

“You are the one who dislikes coincidences,” she continued calmly. “Wouldn’t you say it was rather fortuitous that this break-in occurred the day after you arrived here? And that it occurred two weeks after you learned of the treasure—and a year after Mr. Miller did?”

Flame crackled to life in Philip’s golden eyes, but he clenched his fists tightly at his sides and waited a moment before he spoke. “Fortuitous, too, that it happened only a week after Mr. Miller was here and you showed him where you were looking for the key to the treasure.” He let out a noise of disgust. “You are determined to make me the villain, are you not?”

“No. I would far rather trust my partner,” Cassandra admitted honestly. “But I also have difficulty believing that Mr. Miller is an evil man, and, besides, it makes no sense that he would wait a year.”

“Ah, but it does if you consider that he might have sold the journals having no idea that there was any truth to the story of the treasure or that the families still existed. He may have thought he would be content with the money he made from selling the journals. But then this year, when he came back and visited your Mr. Simons, he learned of the Verreres’ existence. Perhaps Mr. Simons even told him about the legend of the lost dowry and of your father’s interest in trying to find it. Perhaps then he rethought the matter and saw that he could come here and trick you into telling him about it. That he could seize the whole treasure for himself.”