for the woman seemed to bring out the worst in him. “I see now I was sadly mistaken. It was your serpent’s tongue he strove so hard to conceal. Hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s not nice to go around antagonizing people with every other word that rolls off your agile tongue?”
Victoria took in the heightened color in Lord Wick-ford’s thin cheeks and decided that she had tried him high enough for the moment. He had revealed nothing of himself save a reluctance to admit to anger and an ability to trade verbal insults without flinching, and he had appeared truly surprised to hear of her belief that her father had known his murderer.
Even so, she should have considered her tactics more closely before deciding to opt for a full, frontal assault. After all, hadn’t Willie always told her that one caught more flies with honey than with vinegar? Victoria winced inwardly, wondering if the Earl was right—that she was, at three and twenty, taking on all the less-than-sterling traits of the waspish spinster.
Of course, she comforted herself, his surprise could have just as easily stemmed from his realization that she had somehow discovered some evidence that could incriminate him, she amended carefully, knowing it wouldn’t be prudent to jump to any conclusions this early in the day.
She was just about to open her mouth and apologize for having behaved so shabbily when Sherbourne, who had just interrupted his latest move toward the front door as a sudden thought occurred to him, whirled to point a finger in her face and demand: “Pierre Standish, Miss Quinton. Humor me, if you please, and speculate for just a moment—what possible reason could he have had for putting a period to your father’s existence?”
“Who is M. Anton Follet, Lord Wickford?” was Victoria’s maddening reply.
Patrick inclined his head slightly, as if acknowledging a flush hit. “Ah, madam, such deep intrigue. I do so love cryptic questions, don’t you?” His smile was all admiration as he ended silkily, “If this is a sample of your sleuthing, however, I suggest you repair to your knitting box without further delay.”
“I don’t knit.”
Patrick’s eyes closed in a weary show of despair. “This, I believe, is where I came in. And, madam, this is where I depart. Good day to you, Miss Quinton.”
So saying, Sherbourne opened the front door and let it close softly behind his departing back.
It wasn’t until his coach (the one with the gilt coat of arms on the doors) had delivered him to his own doorstep that Sherbourne realized he was more than just extremely angry. He was also confused, upset, and intensely curious about Pierre Standish, M. Anton Follet, Quennel Quinton, Miss Victoria Quinton’s bizarre scheme, and the identity of the Professor’s murderer.
It did not occur to him that the one thing he was not was bored.
CHAPTER THREE
“WHAT AN ODIOUS, odious man!” Victoria Quinton told the empty foyer once the Earl of Wickford had departed, having gained for himself—although it pained her, she had to acknowledge it—the last, telling thrust in their war of words. For at least one fleeting moment during their conversation she had felt the same impotent fury she had invariably experienced on the rare occasions when she had gone up against the Professor in a verbal battle before she had at last decided that she really didn’t care enough about her father’s view of life to try to convince him of her side on any subject.
Crossing the foyer to enter the small, shabby drawing room that—as the Professor had rarely visited it—she considered her own, Victoria walked over to stand directly in front of the wall mirror that hung above a small Sheraton side table, one of the few fine pieces of furniture that her mother had brought to the marriage.
The mirror hanging above it, on the other hand, was a later purchase of the Professor’s, and it was exquisite only by way of its ornate ugliness. Peering through the virtual forest of carved wooden decoration that hemmed the mirror in from all sides, Victoria did her best to examine the features she saw reflected back at her.
“‘Not a face that would be enhanced by a maidenly show of tears,’” she quoted, tilting her head this way and that as she leaned closer for a better view, as Victoria was markedly shortsighted without the spectacles she had chosen not to wear that afternoon.
“What Lord Wickford left unsaid was that if I had been so foolish as to ask him what would enhance my looks, he would have immediately suggested the prudent disposition of a large, concealing sack overtop my head.” She smiled in spite of herself, causing a dimple Patrick Sherbourne had not been privileged to see to appear in one cheek, lending a bit of humanizing animation to her usually solemn face.
Putting a hand to her chin, she turned her head slowly from side to side once more, objectively noting both her positive and negative features. “The eyes aren’t all that depressing, if I can only remember not to squint at anything beyond the range of ten feet.” she mused aloud. “Although I do wish my brows were more winglike and less straight. I always look as if someone has his hand on the top of my head, pushing down.”
Squinting a bit as she moved almost nose to nose with her reflection, she continued her inventory. “Nose,” she began, wrinkling up that particular feature experimentally a time or two. “Well,” she concluded after a moment, “I do have one, not that it does much more than sit there, keeping my ridiculously long eyes from meeting in the middle, while my skin certainly is pale enough to pass inspection, although I do believe I should have considerably more color than this. In this old black gown I look less like one of the mourners and more like the corpse.”
She stepped back a pace and deliberately pasted a bright smile on her face, exposing a full set of white, even teeth surrounded by a rather wide, full-lipped mouth that did not turn either up or down at the corners. Her neck—a rather long, swanlike bit of construction—did not seem to be sufficiently strong to hold up her head, and her small, nearly fleshless jaw, though strongly square boned, perched atop it at almost a perfect right angle, with no hint of a double chin.
Reaching a hand behind her, she pulled out the three pins holding up her long, dark brown hair, so that it fell straight as a poker from her center part to halfway down her back. “Ugh,” she complained to the mirror, ruefully acknowledging that, although her hair was a good length, it was rather thin, and of a definitely unprepossessing color. “How could anyone with so much hair look so bald?” she asked herself, trying in vain to push at it so that it wouldn’t just lay there, clinging to her head like a sticking plaster.
Then, holding her hands out in front of her, she inspected her long, slim, ink-stained fingers and blunt-cut nails before quickly hiding them again in the folds of her skirt. The Professor had told her repeatedly that her hands and feet were a disgrace, betraying physical frailty because of their slender, aristocratic construction.
“How I longed all through my childhood for a knock to come at the door and for someone to rush in to tell me that I wasn’t really Victoria Quinton but a princess who had been stolen away by gypsies and sold to the Professor for a handful of silver coins,” she reminisced, smiling a bit at the memory. Having no real recollection of the mother who had died while her only child was still quite young, Victoria had resorted to fantasy to explain away her unease at being unable to love the strange man who was her father. “Oh well,” she acknowledged now with a wide grimace, “if my aristocratically slender bones didn’t gain me a royal palace, at least they saved me from being hired out as a dray horse in order to bring a few more pennies into the house.”
That brought her to the point she had been dreading, an inventory of her figure. “What there is of it,” she said aloud, giving an involuntary gurgle of laughter.
