BVC Announces The Dilemma of a Dead Scholar by Patricia Rice

July 3, 1815

“You know they abandoned us on purpose.”

Out of habit, Arnaud Lavigne ignored the inane mutterings of the dainty, fairy-blond heiress crouched at his feet, studying the ancient oil paintings he had taken down to clean.

Dorothea Talbot was as mad as the rest of her Reid family. Generally, she was quietly mad and hid with the elderly aunts. Today, for reasons unknown, she had chosen to work in this medieval, two-story foyer already crowded with two restless boys, their tutor, and Lavender, a seventeen-year-old Circe in the making.

Under the tutelage of their teacher, the boys measured the painting frames, matching them to squares of oak molding on the paneling in some ridiculous belief that they’d find hidden treasure. Unfortunately, the two-story walls held a sizable collection of ancient portraits and incredibly bad landscapes. Measuring would take time.

The small space also held Arnaud’s ladder and his not-so-dainty self as he attempted to cover a hole in the arched transom above the massive, carved oak doors.

Perhaps Dotty Dottie lingered to chaperone Lavender and not just to annoy him. The heiress never smiled, but then, neither did he.

Although he couldn’t help noticing that everyone except Miss Talbot was covered in cobwebs and centuries of filth from the ancient frames. Meticulously groomed, a single curl dangling on either side of her heart-shaped face, the lady hadn’t allowed a speck of dust to besmirch her beribboned muslin. Heiresses apparently lived in protective bubbles.

Having spent the war years living in prison cells and poverty, Arnaud gave no consideration to keeping the remains of his wardrobe rags clean. He simply wore a painter’s smock over his shabby linen and waistcoat. He never wore a coat under it. He needed room to move—and his old coats no longer fit properly.

Also an eccentric Reid, this one from the wrong side of the blanket, adolescent Lavender shrugged at the heiress’s declaration of abandonment. “Cousin Clare is tired of being the responsible one. She thinks we all need to learn to be adults.”

Arnaud was fairly certain that was not why both sets of newlyweds had run off to the city or wherever they’d taken themselves. Privacy was in hard supply at Wycliffe Manor—as the gathering in the vestibule proved.

Lavender and the tutor seemed to be taking advantage of the removed paintings to teach the boys how to graph the measurements onto paper. Arnaud had no idea why and refused to ask.

He had learned the painfully hard way to keep his lips shut and his opinions to himself. It wasn’t as if his audience listened to him. As the descendants of the last earl of Wycliffe, the Reids blithely went their own way, seemingly without care to consequences. Frenchmen who sponged off their largesse deserved to be ignored.

“We are adults,” the tutor said placidly. Barely out of university, Mr. Birdwhistle endured the oddities of his two young students with a great deal of patience for a young man in the presence of two rather extraordinarily lovely women.

And therein lay Arnaud’s current difficulty. . . His mistress of the past year had decided to marry and move to the city. Deprivation apparently led to depravity, and he couldn’t avoid awareness of feminine scents and soft curves. He was a painter. He observed.

In prison, he’d been deprived of food and women. After escaping to his great-aunt’s abandoned manor, he’d survived in a state of insensibility, painting madly so he need not feel the loss of everything he once knew. But over these past months since the manor had filled with life, laughter—and food—he’d gradually emerged from his former state of semi-consciousness. Regrettably, returning to life meant suffering the pain of knowing he had decades ahead of him and no foreseeable means of carving out a future.

He’d just signed away his last claim to his estate and title—for good purpose, admittedly. Only now, without his home, his Parisian art world, or any goal, he felt like a dog trapped in a hole he’d dug.

Despite a manor filled with feminine resplendence, bedding the mad descendants of an earl was not an option. He’d learned the hard way that pragmatism was necessary for survival. So he puttered, mending what should have been left to crumble because he shared the manor with an aristocratic family who had as little purpose as he.

The ladder he stood on was precarious at best. If he fell, he’d crush women and children. Cautiously, he fit the arched oilcloth into the window frame. He could nail this end. The one in the middle of the window. . . He grimaced. He was large, but even his arms didn’t extend that far.

“That won’t work,” Miss Talbot informed him. “You should ask the curate if he has a ladder. It will take two people to hold it in place.”

He knew he wasn’t a handyman, but he had wanted to be useful. Asking for help only created more work for others.

Arnaud rolled up the cloth. “I just wanted to see if it would fit. Perhaps when you’re done playing in here, there will be room for two ladders.”

“He speaks!” The heiress raised her golden arched eyebrows. “We are not playing. I am convinced each of these paintings fits a specific panel but they’ve been scrambled. There is no other reason for the irregularity of molding sizes. Oliver, show Mr. Lavigne your calculations.”

The youngest boy silently held out a sheet of numbers.

Arnaud climbed down to study it. He was an artist, not a mathematician. But a seven-year-old’s calculations were basic enough. “Each panel is a different size?”

He glanced up at the elaborate case moldings adorning the two-story oak paneled wall dividing the foyer from the main manor. The molding formed irregular blocks on the walls that, admittedly, resembled frames. “Are you measuring the portrait frames or the canvas inside the frames?”

Davy—Miss Talbot’s eight-year-old brother—picked up one of the smaller oils and set it into one of the lower panels. It appeared to be an exact fit.

Enlightenment. One of the mad earl’s letters had mentioned a lady’s portrait in the vestibule as key to finding. . . whatever in hell he’d hidden. That had been the reason for removing the hideous paintings in the first place. No key had been found.

“You are hoping to prove that you are adults by finding jewels?” Arnaud couldn’t conceal his incredulity.

He might not have been so skeptical if he hadn’t been hungry. Since the manor’s cook, Lady Elsa, the new Mrs. de Sackville, had departed on her delayed honeymoon, their meals had deteriorated, not improving Arnaud’s mood.

“It’s a theory,” adolescent Lavender said proudly. “Thea says not all the paintings we took down belong in here. We are looking for the ones that fit.”

“Tay-uh?” He’d worked it out before Lavender explained.

“Doro-tay-uh.” Lavender glared a warning at him. “No one wishes to be called Dotty Dottie.”

The delicate lady snorted. . . delicately.

He was French. She was English. He didn’t think either language encompassed that pronunciation with that spelling, but what did he know? He was only an uneducated ex-comte and ex-artist. He regarded her warily. “You prefer Tay-uh? Not Thee-uh?”

“Not Dotty,” she said curtly.

Fine then. Informality and eccentricity reigned in Wycliffe Manor.

He returned to studying the ancient oak paneling. As far as he was concerned, the vestibule had been an arcade of appalling English work that had only been improved by removing the paintings. He’d mostly ignored the pieces in here in favor of the more professional family portraits in the ballroom and loft, the ones concealing codes, presumably to hidden treasure. But after they’d discovered one of the mad earl’s letters claiming a vestibule portrait held a clue, along with a cryptic message of diamonds in squares, Arnaud had been examining every painting in the manor. Given the centuries of bad art on the immense walls, that might take a lifetime.

So far, no more clues had been uncovered. He’d learned that one piece had been painted over, but removing the poor concealment had only revealed an equally bad original. He assumed some ancestor had taken up art and couldn’t afford new canvas.

“You believe that wishful thinking is useful and proof that you are an adult?” Arnaud felt horribly old next to these naifs. He was just on the fair side of thirty, but he’d seen more in his lifetime than people who lived to be a hundred.

That didn’t mean he knew much. It wasn’t as if war and revolution and prison taught more than how to survive.

Dotty—Thea—dusted her slender fingers on a lacy handkerchief and regarded him as if he’d just grown antlers. “You have a better suggestion? If we found the jewels, we could hire an adequate household staff and someone to actually glaze that glass you’re covering.”

“That is centuries-old leaded glass. Replacing it would require a master craftsman. The oilcloth will keep out bats until we find a buyer for the medieval manuscripts. We do not need jewels.” He took down his ladder but couldn’t easily maneuver it around the crowd.

They’d paid the manor’s annual mortgage with the sale of rare books from the library, with money to spare. They might be living in decrepitude, but they were no longer desperate to keep the roof over their heads.

Fair-haired Oliver intelligently scrambled up on the backward-facing lion statue to get out of the ladder’s way.

Arnaud thought the statue was probably a priceless Chinese antique and ought to be one of a pair, but the boy had no eye for art. Oliver was now studying the transom from his loftier position.

Leaning against the base of the lion, Davy pulled a sweet from his pocket and popped it into his mouth. He didn’t speak any more than Oliver did, but the tutor apparently understood them. Mr. Birdwhistle didn’t admonish them for neglecting the problem he’d set them but continued his measuring.

Arnaud feared he didn’t belong at Wycliffe any longer. He’d had some incentive to stay when they’d desperately sought more codes for the apparently mythical jewels. But now that the library was providing extra funds, he needed to find his own path, not hang around, waiting for life to find him.

He might as well hunt imaginary jewels.

Before he could set down the ladder and open the front door—which none of the addle-pated Reids thought to do—the interior door swung open and his brother, Henri, popped through.

“Hunt and Clare have sent a cart and carriage full of fabrics and furniture,” his brother crowed. “Play time, ladies!”

“Fabric?” Lavender stood and dusted herself off. “In the sewing room?”

“Unloading as we speak.” Henri stepped aside.

She lifted her hem and dashed past him. Seventeen-year-old Lavender loved fashion, had learned to design her own clothes, and now designed for others. Even a child had more purpose than Arnaud.

“Carriage?” Arnaud asked warily. “Whose?”

“Ours, apparently.” Henri beamed. “The auction of ancient tomes has made our newlyweds giddy, and they have acquired a carriage from Lady Spalding. The carriage is not new, by any means. I daresay parsimonious Hunt and the marchioness came to a mutually suitable arrangement. And I imagine Jack bought the horses for his breeding stable. They’re fine specimens.”

“If only they had sent more experienced maids and a footman or two. . .” Dotty Thea returned to sorting paintings by size.

Says the heiress who could have hired half the village with her fortune. . . Arnaud did not speak his bitter thought aloud. He’d once had estates and servants of his own. Wealth was not always the source of good sense.

“Are we to have a bonfire for the old furniture?” he asked, maneuvering the ladder through the doorway. “Or do we stack the new in the corridor until Clare directs its placement?”

“Don’t you dare burn those old pieces!” the heiress cried. “They have stories to tell.”

“And there she goes,” Arnaud muttered.

His brother laughed at his disgust and took the other end of the ladder. “Do we sit by the fire tonight and listen to the faded sofas speak?”

“Laugh, if you must, but without the spirit of the late Lady Reid, you would not have caught those killers. You simply won’t admit it.” Dotty—Thea lifted the ruffled hem of her morning gown, revealing dainty slippers, and sailed past them.

The heiress’s odd ability to find passages in the former viscountess’s journals had allowed the manor inhabitant’s to catch a demented killer, saving the book auction—with the help of a lot of other people.

“You read Lady Reid’s journals and provided history.” Arnaud followed, carrying his ladder toward the gallery. “The sofa does not speak.”

“I read her agitation, and that tower speaks.” Thea pointed at the front corner of the manor.” Has anyone ever found a way in? There could be catacombs or an ossuary in there, given the number of deaths this place attracts. The village is not called Gravesyde Priory for naught.”

Arnaud winced. He had pondered the tower mystery for years. As a youth visiting his great-aunt’s home, he’d been too busy to look into the one inaccessible, presumably empty, ornamental tower. Since his escape from France, he hadn’t wanted to ever encounter another closed, dark prison.

He doubted he’d find jewels in the crumbling structure. But the manor contained many towers. Why had only one been sealed off?