The Gentleman and the Thief (The Dread Penny Society #2) - Sarah M. Eden Page 0,82
her. The man could play a part.
She slipped out, telling herself Fletcher wouldn’t allow Hollis to proceed without all the information she’d given. He cared about his friend, and he would do what needed doing.
So would she.
Using what information Hollis had offered about the house and making a few well-informed guesses, she navigated the servants’ stairs and back corridors to the ground floor room serving as the Raven’s office. The entire floor echoed with emptiness. She wouldn’t have a better opportunity for searching than this.
Ana slipped inside and carefully, quietly, closed the door. That would give her a little warning if anyone came inside.
The Raven had no trinkets or mementos scattered about, nothing personal. Anyone at all might have used it. The space was neat and organized. Everything had a place—either piled, stacked, or laid out in straight lines. A man this meticulous wouldn’t leave his profits, however ill-gotten, to chance.
The room had only one set of shelves, and they were filled with ledgers. Even in so busy an establishment, this had to have been years’ worth of records.
She hadn’t time to look through them for patterns of fraud or evidence of cheating, but she could tell the authorities where to find them once she gave them an iron-clad reason to burst in on the house.
Careful not to disturb the neat stacks, she flipped through the papers on the desk. Insignificant correspondence. A list of goods to be purchased. Another list of repairs to be made to the house. An itemized accounting of recent purchases of furniture and dishware.
This was the man who had likely helped ruin her family. There had to be evidence of his dastardliness somewhere.
One by one, she opened the desk drawers. Packets of cards and bags of dice filled the long, narrow, top drawer. They already knew this house was a gambling establishment. Finding further proof of that wasn’t helpful.
Ana examined the dice, but they didn’t look or feel unusual. She dropped them back in their drawstring bags and returned them to the drawer.
The packs of cards were open, which was odd. To reassure players, packs were usually still sealed when brought to the tables. Ana took out the top pack and carefully fanned the cards. Instead of fifty-two different cards, the pack was made up entirely of aces. The faces were a little different on each card. The backs were of various designs, almost as if someone had gone through several dozen decks from different printers and gathered all the aces. The next pack contained all kings. Another, all nines. Yet another was filled with high cards, all in clubs, again with a variety of designs and styles.
While these might have been a collection of cards removed from several decks, it seemed far more likely that these were cards meant to be slipped into decks. The Raven could snatch from his collection specific cards that would prove most useful in whichever game he would be playing, matching them to whichever deck was being used.
Packs of cheat cards. If Hollis could catch the Raven in the act, the police would have all they needed. Ana flipped back the apron she was wearing and unbuttoned the hidden pocket in her drab dress. She opened her empty drawstring bag and set three of the card packs inside it.
Her loot secure, she closed the desk drawer. She checked that the room was precisely as she’d left it. No one would ever know she’d been there.
Quiet as a sleeping mouse, she pulled open the door, intent on slipping out of the room, the corridor, and the house. But the threshold was not empty.
The woman she guessed was the housekeeper stood there, quite as if she’d been waiting for Ana to open the door.
Ana froze for a fraction of an instant, then she dipped the half-curtsey she’d always seen upstairs maids give the monarch of the belowstairs realm. This housekeeper, however, did not continue on her way.
The woman, looking wearier than her thirty years, said, “You aren’t one of ours.”
Before Ana could even formulate a response, the woman pushed on.
“Are you here to steal something?”
An honest answer, she knew, was not the right one in that moment. “No, ma’am.”
“Did a snatcher drop you here?” The housekeeper gave her a quick once-over. “They’d not ’ave chosen you to be a maid.”
Ana wasn’t certain the reason for the woman’s surety on that score; it was the least of her worries. “Yet, ’ere I am.”
“Why’re you sneaking about the place?” the housekeeper pressed.