Page 21 of Beatrix

As soon as the train ground to a halt, Billy was up on his feet, excitedly pulling down the window to release the door. After sternly instructing the boy not to leave the platform, Rob turned towards Bea and murmured, ‘After you, Mrs Noon.’

Startled at the address, Beatrix bit her lip, her face unaccountably reddening. With a mumbled thank you, she stepped down onto the platform where Billy was already hopping from foot to foot impatiently.

Seconds later, she took her husband’s arm and walked as steadily as she could towards the exit, trying very hard not to pay any attention to the sensation of warm muscle under her fingers.

The offices of Grainger and Holt were a twenty-minute brisk walk from the station. They occupied the ground floor of a narrow, respectable building in Southernhay, wedged between a bookseller and an actuary. The brass plate next to the door was so well polished, it practically dared a person to doubt the integrity of whoever worked there.

‘Right then, Mrs Noon,’ Rob murmured as they paused on the pavement opposite, ‘best foot forward.’

‘Please don’t keep calling me that,’ Bea hissed back, feeling the unfamiliar weight of the ring on her finger for what felt like the hundredth time that morning.

‘Just a quick reminder while we’re in enemy territory,’ Rob returned, a faint smile playing about his mouth. ‘Though I have to say I think you’ve been playing the part rather well. Particularly when the guard asked if we had any baggage, and you told him it had gone astray in Torquay.’

‘The deuced man was just being nosy,’ Bea responded through gritted teeth. ‘I’ve no idea why I said Torquay.’

‘Because it’s true,’ Billy piped up in an aggrieved voice behind them. ‘I hadn’t even finished that bag o’ vittles afore you dumped it in Torquay station.’

‘It was empty,’ argued Beatrix with a sigh. ‘You’d eaten everything in it by the time we’d left Paignton. There was no sense in carrying a bag with nothing in it.’

‘There wos another cheese sandwich at the bottom, plain as pipestem,’ Billy grumbled, hitching up the battered leather satchel Rhys had produced the evening before, now stuffed with enough blank paper to lend a solicitor’s errand boy and air of authenticity. ‘An’ at this rate, I’ll starve ter death afore the end o’ the day.’ He shook his head with the wounded dignity of a boy who believed his suffering as being unfairly dismissed. ‘Anyway, can we go in an’ get it over wi’? I saw a pasty stall on the way ‘ere.’

With a low chuckle at the boy’s tragic demeanour, Rob placed his hand in the small of Bea’s back and steered her across the road. As they reached the other side, he didn’t slow, but with a murmured, ‘Come along, Mrs Noon, time to go and be tragic at some solicitors,’ directed her firmly towards the door before either of them lost their nerve.

CHAPTER 11

‘Did you absolutely have to send Albert on an errand all the way to Brixham when you knew we’d need the carriage?’ Charlotte complained. ‘I’ve told Rhys on several occasions that his contraption needs its springs looking at.’ She braced herself against the door as the Baron’s driver Evans took the corner with particular enthusiasm, almost sending the carriage airborne as it bounced out of a rut on the coast road.

‘We might as well travel by deuced wheelbarrow,’ the matron went on through gritted teeth.

‘You could always have walked,’ Henry responded mildly without diverting his eyes from the window.

‘At my age, with my hip?’ Charlotte laid her head back with a dramatic sigh.

‘You know perfectly well that you don’t have a hip complaint, Lottie. You never have.’

‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ his sister retorted without preamble.

Henry gave a sigh of his own, letting her comments pass as he did on most occasions, returning to his study of passing hedgerows.

Charlotte, who knew her brother possibly better than anyone alive, and could read his silences the way other women read a newspaper, waited exactly as long as it took them to hurtle round the next bend before saying abruptly, ‘Well, come along then, out with it.’

Henry didn’t pretend not to understand her. ‘I’ve been thinking about the Earldom.’

‘I rather thought you might be.’ Her tone gave nothing away, which was in itself, telling. ‘Go on then.’

‘We need a way to get close to White,’ Henry responded, ‘and I don’t mean close in the sense of our investigation, I mean close in the sense that matters to men like him. If he does indeed have a title, he’ll be moving in circles that a retired policeman, however respected, doesn’t even register as a person worth acknowledging.’ He paused, with a slight grimace. ‘Ruteledge would put me in rooms with him. At his own clubs, his own tables. I could watch him the way none of us can manage from the outside.’

‘You’d have to recognise him first,’ Charlotte said flatly. ‘All we have is a drawing and crest that may or may not be connected.’

‘Benedict has seen him, at least in shadow,’ Henry answered.

‘And he’s also seen Benedict,’ Charlotte retorted. ‘What you’re proposing is dangerous, Henry. Are you certain you’ve thought this through – beyond the simple satisfaction of the idea?’

‘I’ve thought of little else since Bristol.’

‘Then you will undoubtedly have considered the possible cost?’

‘There may well be legal fees, I’ll grant you, but Rhys assures me…’