“I have a cousin,” Nicolas began. “Very trustworthy, very—”
Goddard waved a hand in a gesture that managed to look French. “I’m sure he is, but if you work with somebody you don’t know well, you will be more wary than if I employ your trustworthy cousin. This was not a casual purloining of a few bottles, my friend. This theft was carefully planned and executed mischief.”
Nicolas rubbed his chin, peered around the warehouse, and took a muttering, shuffling leave of his employer.
“That was brilliant,” Sycamore said, “that bit about being more wary. Spared everybody’s pride. I do hope the next warehouseman you hire won’t be on nodding terms with Methuselah.”
Goddard retrieved a cavalry sword from atop some crates and headed for the door. “I’m cold, furious, and hungry. Come along.”
And yet, he’d been the soul of civility and patience with the old watchman. “Where are we going?”
“To my house, where Jeanette will not see me in a temper and hear me using profanity.”
Sycamore had seen the inside of Rye Goddard’s house exactly once, and then only a foyer, hallway, and back garden.
“Jeanette hears me using profanity regularly. She even—I tell you this in familial confidence—occasionally uses a discreet damn herself.”
Goddard stopped outside the warehouse to pull the door closed. “Do you drive her to it?”
“Oh, sometimes. She has her hands full with me and seems to enjoy the challenge. Are we to parade through town with your sword on display?”
“No.” Goddard shoved the sword at him. “Conceal it under your cloak.”
Sycamore did as directed, because twitting Goddard in his present mood was ill-advised. “That champagne had to be worth a pretty penny.”
“It was, and had I not lost customers steadily over the past few months, and had I not had your order sent over from Calais directly, I’d be without goods to sell until I could replace what was stolen.”
Goddard set a brisk pace, for all his gait was slightly uneven.
“But as it happens, the loss of inventory, while inconvenient, will not cripple you?”
“I doubt crippling me outright was the point. That very sword was taken from my office, Dorning. Stolen from my home and left at the scene of the crime. It’s engraved with my family motto, and I know my own weaponry when I see it.”
The sword was surprisingly heavy, but then, it was a lethal weapon, not a fashion accessory. “Diabolical,” Sycamore said, understating the case by miles. “To take something so personal and use it to emphasize a second, larger theft.”
“What has been stolen is my patience. I’d suspect Fournier, but he has an entirely different and more credible scheme in train.”
“We’re not taking the alleys?” Sycamore asked. “On every other occasion when I have been honored to perambulate in your company, we’ve kept to the alleys.”
“That was for the sake of my boys, to make their job easier. The streets are crowded and escort duty more difficult. Then too…”
“Yes?”
“The alleys are quieter, and I do prefer quiet. I don’t hear as well as I ought, and quiet eases that burden.”
Goddard didn’t hear as well as he ought, he nearly limped, and he wore an eye patch. That a man already beleaguered by wounds and woes was also the victim of thieves bothered Sycamore. What bothered him more was the challenge of how to relay events to Jeanette honestly without upsetting her.
“Then you might not hear a thief thumping around in your study when you slept on the next floor up?”
“I might not, but I know how the thief gained access to my home.”
They turned down another street. Goddard slipped the crossing sweeper a coin and muttered a few words in French. The boy grinned and nodded, and the coin disappeared into his pocket.
“How did the thief gain access?”
“Mrs. Murphy leaves the door unlatched throughout the day for deliveries and also for her admirer. I suspect she has taken to leaving the door unlatched at night for Victor, our new boy. He doesn’t care to bathe and sleeps in the stable. If the night is bitter—and the nights are getting colder—an unlatched door means he can sneak into the kitchen in the small hours and, come morning, pretend he’s simply showing up early for breakfast.”
“You run a charitable establishment while pretending to sell champagne. Does Jeanette know the extent of your eleemosynary activities?”
“The boys all earn their keep, besides,”—Goddard turned up his own front walkway—“but for Jeanette’s sacrifice, I could easily have been on the streets myself or, worse, locked up with my father in debtors’ prison. She spared us that. These boys have no sister willing to endure a purgatory of a marriage so they can amount to something.”
Jeanette’s first marriage had indeed been a purgatory. “You and Jeanette are overdue for an embarrassingly frank discussion of the past, and then I do hope you both set it aside once and for all. She is now married to a man who adores her without limit, and dwelling on what has gone before serves no purpose.”
Goddard opened the door and waved Sycamore into the house. “The sword, if you please.”
Sycamore handed it over. “You don’t set much store by the weapon itself, do you?”
Goddard hung it on a coatrack as if it were one of a half-dozen umbrellas or an everyday walking stick.
“I keep that thing as a warning to myself, as a reminder that I have taken lives and bear the weight of that violence on my conscience. I was lucky. I lived to see another day, but fighting like that—to the death, for some fat king or aging emperor—took a toll I refuse to pay again.”
“So you will seethe and fume and hire more watchmen, but you won’t fight whoever has done this to you? Isn’t it possible that the same people who whisper against you in the clubs are now escalating their attacks and inflicting material damage to go with the harm to your reputation?”
Goddard wrested Sycamore’s cloak from him and set his hat on the sideboard. “It’s entirely possible. Somebody wants me out of England, but what I cannot fathom is why. Come along. We’ll eat in the kitchen like farmers, and you will give me the benefit of your thinking regarding my various suspects. Fournier is among them, as is that fellow Deschamps, but I cannot rule out a disgruntled Englishman who resents the fact that I’ve been knighted.”
Sycamore followed, more curious than hungry, but also a little dismayed. Jeanette needed to know her brother was safe, and better still if Sir Orion allowed a smidgen of contentment into his life. If the list of suspects included every soldier who’d ever borne a grudge against a commanding officer, then Goddard’s potential detractors were legion.
“Tell me more about Deschamps.”
“He’s a former French officer, devilishly handsome, and a known spy.” Goddard took off down the steps leading into the bowels of the house. “If he’s still frequenting your club, then your job is to find out what the hell he’s doing in London.”
Sycamore followed, though he’d been hoping to see the house’s public rooms. “I have a job?”
Goddard paused at the bottom of the steps. “I realize even that limited brief exceeds your meager capabilities, but somebody has declared war on me, and needs must. If I approach Deschamps directly, he’ll simply prevaricate.”