The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway (The St. Croix Chronicles) by Karina Cooper Page A

the sky, the faint light picking out his trimmed beard in glints of red. “After I received my sister’s frantic letter, I returned to Ireland to help her and her man search. For months, we searched for my niece’s trail.”
    “What of your friend?”
    “Smoot?” He folded his arms across his chest. “Unbeknownst to us both, we were on the same search, though for different reasons. His began in America, while mine took me from Ireland and led me across the ocean, here to London.”
    Each word plucked a chord of sympathy within me, but I gritted my teeth. “Why now?” I asked. “Why only move against Chattersham now?”
    Mr. Strangeway looked away. “It took me a long time to trace the matter to London low, and with the trail cold, I’d all but given up on the whole. That is, until Smoot’s contacts brought him word of a likely culprit.”
    Was Mr. Smoot an American authority of some kind? Or simply a privateer on his own? I resolved to ask, but later. “Who was your suspect?”
    Now, he shook his head. “I will not drag a good man’s name down to the muck.”
    That was less than helpful.
    “Leave it by saying that he is a lord to whom I spent a great deal of time indebting myself,” he continued, “only to find that he was utterly innocent of wrongdoing.”
    “Bosh,” I said, repeating Mr. Smoot’s dry disbelief in the same tone he’d used on me. This time, Strangeway’s teeth flashed in what could have been a grimace, but might have been a grin. “No lord is free of wrongdoing.”
    “You’ve a mouth that will earn you a drubbing, girl,” he said, but without heat. “Aye, I admit to thinking the same as you. I set about turning myself into the type of man a lord up to his fine mustache in slavery might have a use for. I began as a disgraced heir, the better to have access to the clubs and dens he attended, and I proceeded to lose all but my shirt in the same dens. The stews came to know me by name, and the lord came to know the sound of my purse emptying night after night. It was my hope that he would ask from me in service what I could not pay in coin or property.” He grunted, half impatience and half something that seemed rather like amusement. “Then you showed your filthy face, and I realized that my debts had caught up in ways I had not accounted for.”
    “That’s what you deserve,” I replied primly, hands on my hips. “Only a fool plays with debt.”
    “Aye, well, while I played the fool, I had him investigated thoroughly.” If Strangeway felt at all reproached, he did not allow me to see the mark. “The lord is a gambler and a bit of a reprobate, but he is innocent. His business ventures, however...”
    When he let that trail, my chin dropped. I could follow his thought easily, for it would have been the same thoughts I would entertain, were I in his shoes. I closed my eyes. A minor relief from the ongoing sting. “Of all his ventures, you could not be sure which was the culprit without a clue to follow,” I filled in for him.
    “A clue you provided,” he allowed. “For which I owe some gratitude, at least. There is no reason in this world for Barnaby Chattersham to want me dead. Even were it for debts, he would get no coin from a corpse.”
    A lesson I would take to heart. When all else failed, I learned that night to follow the coin.
    His tone flattened, gone tight with an intensity I could not imagine feigning. “Now do you understand? Somehow, by own folly or Chattersham’s allies, my hand was tipped and you were tricked into doing his dirty work for him. Good Irish girls are missing, lass. Scared, alone, and a long way from home.”
    I felt the urge to hit something. A wall, a tree. Mr. Strangeway’s metal-covered chest. I settled for pushing my fist into my own palm. “Bloody bells and damn.”
    The relief upon his features as I looked up nearly undid me there and then.
    If the bit about his niece was simple Irish blarney, he was a deucedly good actor. I sighed.