The Songbird's Seduction by Connie Brockway

look so stricken. Not on my account. It was fifty years ago. I would be pathetic indeed, if after all these years I was still moping over some lost love I’m not even sure was mine to lose in the first place. I have had a happy life. Not exciting, but filled with the pleasures of home and family. Including you.
    “Truth be told, I don’t suppose I could have choked the words out had I tried. I was eighteen and though intrepid, still a product of my time. No, I just wonder sometimes, is all. About what would have happened had I said something.”
    Impulsively, Lucy bent over and pressed her cheek against Lavinia’s. It felt delicate and powdery, like rose petals pressed in a book. Not unexpectedly Lavinia, who was, as she had just acknowledged, a product of a much less demonstrative generation, blushed. But, Lucy noted, she looked mildly gratified.
    Bernice gave a small gasp.
    “Don’t be so puritanical, Bernice,” Lavinia chided. “I know it is a public place but Lucy—”
    “It’s not that!” Bernice lumbered to her feet, her little straw boater bobbling atop her head, her face red with emotion. “Oh, Lucy. I am so very, very sorry!”
    “What ever is wrong?”
    “I have left our jewelry case back at the hotel!”

Lucy’s shoulders drooped with relief. The Litton “jewels” consisted of a few not-particularly-good paste replicas of her great-grandmother’s parure. They’d been sold and replaced with copies a decade before Lucy had arrived at Robin’s Hall. Even at eleven Lucy had recognized them as cheap imitations, though she’d never been so impolite as to point out that fact, of course.
    “No, you haven’t, dear,” she said. “I very carefully combed both hotel rooms before we checked out and I am sure we did not leave so much as a hairpin behind.”
    “It wasn’t
in
the hotel room. I was worried about something untoward happening and so I entrusted the case to the manager to put in the hotel safe.”
    Lucy sympathized, but there was nothing to be done for it. There simply wasn’t time to return to the hotel before they were due to board and she doubted the ferry company would hold the boat while she fetched a few pounds of worthless glass.
    “It’s all right, Aunt Bernice,” she reassured her. “I will telephonethe hotel at once. They will keep the case safe as houses until our return.”
    “It’s not the jewels, Lucy.” Bernice wrung her hands fretfully. “Lord Barton’s letter was in the case, too.”
    This
was an entirely different matter. Even with the letter Lucy worried whether Lavinia would be allowed to claim Lord Barton’s portion of the rubies. Without it there wasn’t a chance the bank would release the rubies to her.
    She glanced up at the clock set in the pediment above the ticket office. They were due to sail in thirty minutes. If she managed to hail a taxi,
and
if traffic was light,
and
if she found the hotel manager the minute she entered the premises,
and
if he obliged with all haste in opening the safe, she
might
make it back. She might also dance a fandango at the Palace tonight. But the distance between possibility and probability stretched a long way.
    The only other option was to take the later ferry.
    Her worried gaze slipped to the western horizon where the cobalt smudge had thickened. A couple of
days
of bad weather, the ticket attendant had said.
    She would just have to risk it.
    “I am so sorry, Lucy.” Bernice’s pug face tightened with misery. “I thought only to be cautious and didn’t want to ask you to have to do it—you’ve already done so much—but I forgot to retrieve it! I never would have forgotten five years ago.”
    Lucy patted her hand distractedly, her thoughts racing. If she
didn’t
make it back in time, who would shepherd her great-aunts to France? She didn’t want to expose them to rough seas . . . but she didn’t want to take the chance that they would be late arriving in Saint-Girons and that all-important anniversary. If