An Agent for Brielle Read online

  Mr. Gordon reached into his drawer and retrieved a folded newspaper. “Take a look at this article.”

  Brielle took the newspaper and studied the headline. “Denver’s Nominee of the Galileo Award Dies in Tragic Accident.”

  The article, dated a week ago, detailed how one Mr. Edward Stanfield was found at the bottom of his stairs by his live-in housekeeper. The police stated it seemed a simple case of a man who lost his footing.

  “The article seems pretty straightforward.” Brielle handed the newspaper back. “Mr. Stanfield fell and died.”

  Mr. Gordon sniffed. “Lady Dallmann seems to think otherwise.”

  Matthias returned to the desk. “Why is that?”

  “Mr. Stanfield was to be awarded for his work based on the claim that he had developed a proof to a mathematical problem called Fermat’s Conjecture.”

  Brielle snorted. “Balivernes! Monsieur de Fermat neglected to provide the proof for his own conjecture!”

  “This is why you are perfect for this mission, Miss Bradford,” Marianne inserted with another bright smile. “We had no idea what Lady Dallmann was talking about. According to Lady Dallmann, three days before his death, Mr. Stanfield had announced his nomination for the Galileo Award based on his proof.”

  Leaning in, Brielle asked, “Did Lady Dallmann see it?”

  Mr. Gordon shook his head. “Not exactly. On the night he announced his nomination, he gave Lady Dallmann a quick glimpse of the first page of his proof. Three days later he passes away.”

  “That’s all well and good,” Brielle said, “But surely one has to account for coincidence.”

  “One does,” Mr. Gordon acknowledged with a quick nod. “But when Lady Dallmann assisted with collecting Mr. Stanfield’s papers after his death, which he’d bequeathed to her in his will, the proof was missing.”

  Brielle and Matthias exchanged glances. “I am beginning to see why Lady Dallmann thinks there might be more to Mr. Stanfield’s death than a slip of the foot.”

  She would be lying if she said she wasn’t intrigued. A flare of excitement burned inside of her. She did her best to dampen it with practicality. “I will admit my curiosity is piqued, not to mention that Lady Dallmann’s cerebral colloquy appeals to me. However, I am no Pinkerton agent. I came here to visit my sister and to…settle certain things.”

  Matthias pierced her with his eyes. “You haven’t finished settling anything yet.”

  Her skin along the back of her hands tightened at the determination in his voice.

  Mr. Gordon stroked his beard. “We understand you’re not here to become a Pinkerton agent. Yet, Lady Dallmann has stated it is urgent for an agent to come to her residence. She suspects that if indeed Mr. Stanfield was murdered, it would be among those members who attend her cerebral colloquies.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You can ask her if you decide to assist us.”

  “Even if I wanted to, I have no training.”

  “But you do have the intellect, Brielle,” Matthias clipped out in a deep voice. Before she could form a reply, he went on. “As far as training, I’ll assist with that.”

  “You?” Brielle’s eyebrow perched on her hairline.

  “I’m an agent,” Matthias said with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders.

  She pressed her lips together to keep her mouth from falling open. The world rocked beneath her. Matthias abandoned his political aspirations? Why?

  Well she remembered their numerous conversations in the gardens at Arabette Grove. His voice rising with passion and strength as he vowed to never relinquish his career in politics.

  What could have possibly happened that he would change his mind?

  From the resigned, half-smile on his face, she had an inkling he had guessed her thoughts. She wasn’t the only in this room who had to settle certain things, then. She would demand an explanation in full.

  The scrape of Mr. Gordon’s chair as he stood drew her attention back to him. His eyes twinkled down at her. “It’s rather providential that a woman such as yourself would happen to our agency at a time when she is needed most.”

  The red-bearded man then cleared his throat. “There is a certain contingency—”

  “If you will allow me, Archie, I can explain that to Miss Bradford as we have some personal business to attend to.” Matthias’s black gaze held her captive. “Provided she agrees to join in on the case. Shall we discuss it now, Miss Bradford?”

  He stood, waiting in gentlemanly solicitude for her to join him. But why did his invitation sound like a threat?

  “I cannot believe this is happening to me,” Brielle moaned the moment they walked outside to the gardens at the back of the palatial mansion.

  Matthias gave a grunt of sympathy. Brielle had been dealt a lot of within the past hour or so. Her anguish was justified.

  “It is all rather sudden. You seeing me when you least expected. Now, you’re being asked to become a temporary Pinkerton agent.”

  “It’s extraordinary.” She sighed and brushed her left foot over the top of the freshly cut grass. Its fragrance lent the summer-infused air a faint perfumed scent. Not unlike that night when—

  “Why did you become an agent, Matthias?” Brielle queried, her head cocked to the side.

  He’d known the question would be forthcoming from the moment he saw her standing outside of the agency door. “Will my answer aid in your decision?”

  She gave an elegant shrug of her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  Matthias sauntered over to the tree with its long, low-hanging branches. He gripped one with both hands, anchoring himself as he thought of the best way to answer her question.

  “It had a lot do with you, Brielle,” he told her after some moments of silent contemplation.

  “Moi?” Disbelief colored her voice. He understood her skepticism. After all, he’d told her more than once back on the island that he’d never give up his political career aspirations for anyone.

  “I had asked you to marry me and you’d accepted my proposal.”

  “But my acceptance of your proposal still doesn’t answer why you gave up your career. I was under the impression—”

  “I know what you’re going to say.” He cut through her sentence before she could finish it. “And at one time, I thought my greatest aspiration was to have you by my side as the wife of a Negro politician. A loving, living symbol of progress.”

  A humorless, bitter laugh escaped his mouth. “What a fool I was!”

  “I don’t understand.” Her mouth curved down at the corners. “In the letter you wrote to Arielle, er—I mean, to me, you told me you wished for me to be by your side to continue your work.”

  His fingers tensed on the branch. “I live in a dangerous world. There are those who simply cannot accept that all men are created equal.”

  Matthias thought of recent events. “Did Arielle tell you that I received a threat on my life?”

  Brielle gasped. “Non! Matthias!”

  She rushed over to where he stood under the tree, stopping just a few feet before him. He studied her face -- the wide, frightened glaze of her molasses eyes, the slight trembling of her parted lips. Seeing her concern eased the tension between his shoulder blades.

  “It’s all right.” He let go of the branch to trace his forefinger along the side of her face. Her skin felt warm and soft. “I won’t speak of it. You should ask Arielle to tell you about it. She and Caleb saved my life.”

  “My sister?” she screeched.

  He nodded. “Before I met you, I would have gladly given my life for the struggle. But I find myself becoming selfish. After that, I began to rethink the direction of my life.”

  “You’re not selfish, Matthias. You’re one of the most giving men I’ve ever known.” The fear that had dominated her features melted into nervousness, and though she didn’t move, he could feel her withdraw from him. That withdrawal quickened an accompanying sense of unease in his own belly though he had no idea where it stemmed from.

  “No, Brielle. I am selfish. Those three months with you were the best of my life. Having been bereft of your presence for two years, you don’t know how agonizing it was for me. I kept thinking of you. Did you think about me?”

  The summer winds lifted around them as Brielle stood before him in confounding silence. Matthias’s heartbeat stalled in the center of his chest. Had he, indeed, been wrong all this time? While his love for her had grown, had hers diminished?

  “Oui, I did think of you,” she answered. His heart galloped back into rhythm.

  “The struggle, once the force behind my existence, waned in importance. Not that it isn’t still there,” he hurried to reassure her when her eyes slanted at him, “but it no longer the sole purpose of my life.

  “It took a lot of prayer, but in the end, I knew I had to step away from my duties of state. I don’t want to put you in harm’s way of any man who might hurt you to get at me.”

  “Matthias, being a Pinkerton agent isn’t any less dangerous.”

  “True, but at least I can learn to blend into the background once more. Or, I can use my other skills to further the cause. Did you read my letter? The one I had addressed personally to you when I asked your father for your hand?”

  She nodded but that uneasy expression still rattled him.

  “I want you with me for as long as I can. Maybe I can’t be a Pinkerton agent for the rest of my life but I know that it’s better than being a politician with a constant target on my back.”

  “I see.”

  “Brielle,” he let go of the tree and reached for her small hands and cupped them in his own dark paws. “My selfishness comes into play in this manner: I want to live my life with you. Though you lied to me…,” His voice trailed off and he tucked a loose strand of curly hair which had escaped her bun behind her ear, “it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Her silky eyebrow arched. “You’re not angry about that anymore?”

  “I think the better word is that I am not as perturbed by it.”

  “You didn’t act so when you saw me at the door,” she said reproachfully.

  He rubbed the back of her hand. “I know. When we were going over the details of this case, I saw our future. Working together to fight against the machinations of the unsavory elements of the human race. When we put our minds together, —ah!” He sighed in bliss and brought her hands up to his mouth to kiss the knuckles of each one. “It was a symphony. A symphony you and I create together.”

  “You were upset not an hour ago, Matthias.”

  “It no longer matters. You’re here, with me.” His chest expanded at the wonderful future before them. “We can do what we said we would do. Live our lives together as man and wife.”

  Chapter Three

  Why couldn’t things ever go the way she planned when it came to Matthias Blackburn? From their first meeting to this one, he’d only befuddled her life and her senses from the moment he entered her sphere.

  When she’d come to Denver, she’d come to see how her hot-headed, spoiled sister fared. From there, she had intended to reach out to Matthias, set up a meeting in a public park or some outdoor venue, and discuss rationally the future direction of their association.

  She’d calculated his anger and disillusionment. Factored in his political career and had come to a solution in which the minimal amount of emotional pain would be split between them both.

  Nothing had gone the way she envisioned! Should she really be surprised?

  “We can’t live together as man and wife, Matthias.”

  Brielle removed her hands from his grasp with a gentle tug and took a step away from him. The action hurt with the same intensity of a vicious cut along her inner arm. An intangible ache that stung though there was no wound.

  His forehead wrinkled. “What do you mean?”

  Brielle sighed. The fault lay at her own feet. She had brought this situation to its head.

  “That’s why I came here.” She folded her arms and took another step back, away from the growing darkness in his face that made the glitter in his eyes all the more pronounced. She almost hated herself for what she was about to do but she had to do it. If Matthias, a man who gave of himself so much, even at the cost of his life, married a woman like her…

  No, she couldn’t destroy a man like that.

  “You said you were going explain yourself,” he said slowly. “If you feel as if you in some sort of competition with your sister, I assure you, you’re not.”

  It wasn’t that Brielle had lacked for male attention. Far from it. Men from all over had come to Arabette Grove to behold the legendary beauty of Brutus Bradford’s mulatto daughters.

  “It’s not just that, Matthias.”

  “Then why are you telling me that you can’t be my wife?”

  “Because I don’t love you,” she answered, her body rigid as she waited for his response.

  For once in their association, he acted as she expected him to. He snarled and came toward her like some stalking black tiger. “I don’t believe that, Brielle.”

  “You should, Matthias.”

  “No,” he declared with a hard note a finality. “I know that you are in love with me. Just as I am in love with you.”

  “I thought I was in love with you, too,” she said quietly. “Until I came to conclude that I wasn’t?”

  His fingers dropped from her arm as if she were a hot coal. “Brielle?” The glitter in his eyes dissipated, replaced by a sheen of woundedness. “Why?”

  She took in a deep breath, determined to say her piece. Would that there were some kind of equation she could jot down, hand over to him, and let him figure out the solution. That way, he’d know the answer to his question and she wouldn’t have to expose herself.

  But Matthias was a man of words and she had to meet him on that same level.

  “In your letter you sent to me, you wanted me to help you with your work to bring education to little Negro boys and girls that had been formerly enslaved.”

  His confusion at her statement was evident in the drawing together of his wide eyebrows over his eyes. “Education is the master key to unlock the shackles of slavery. Ignorance keeps us enslaved as much as anything else.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “I’ve always taken the education that for granted. Nothing prevents me from developing my mind. Before I met you, what happened to the Negro across the ocean meant very little to me.”

  Shame crawled over her face, heating her cheeks. “I—I—didn’t care. And—and—I didn’t want to care.”

  Brielle’s chin trembled as the words settled between them. She refused to look up into his eyes. She had no desire to see the hurt and the disappointment within their depths. Did he now understand what a crude, selfish woman she was?

  Staring resolutely at the apex of his tie, she continued to drive the wedge between them for both of their sakes. “What happened to a group of people I had no affinity with, no commonality with, or any other connection…how could I care? Arabette Grove and the island are my world.

  “This isn’t to say that the West Indies didn’t have enslaved either. We did. It’s just…I didn’t care. On my island, in my world, slavery was an institution I had never had the misfortune to visit.”

  Angling her body away from him, she continued. “My father cared more about the plight of the Negro than I did. He bought Arabette Grove and became a plantation owner in order to free the workers from their bonds.

  “I was comfortable, and happy in my chosen ignorance, locked in my world.”

  She took a deep breath and lifted her eyes to meet his. “Then you happened.”

  Before Matthias, she led her life with a certain amount of order, predictability, and containment. Randomness came in the form of Arielle’s volatile temper and the antics of the men who sought her sister’s heart which kept life on the plantation interesting.

  Then Matthias had blazed into her life like the flames of a sugar cane fire. His passion for everything had melted the cold block of ice from the center of her being.

  Sacrebleu! How the essence of the man had scorched her soul!

  “And then I happened, Brielle?”

  His voice brought her out of her musings. He stood there under the shadows of the tree, his black eyes affixed on her face. The love she saw there, open, and honest like everything else about him, made her sad.

  “I had surrounded myself with men and women like me. Intellectuals more interested in honing our mental prowess than anything else.

  “You were different than any man I had ever met. Numbers, facts, and literature about life meant little to you. People meant more to you than the knowledge that lies in their brains.”

  A breeze pulled at her clothes with playful fingers. Its soothing caress cooled the shame that singed her cheek. “You say I’m the sun. That couldn’t be the farthest thing from the truth. You’re the sun, Matthias. You spread your rays of life onto everyone.

  “If anything, I am the cold, silver moon. Non, not the silver moon. That would indicate that I reflect the light. I’m the moon hidden behind thick, murky clouds. My light, the little I have, doesn’t reach the earth.

  “I’m comfortable in that darkness, Matthias. And you could never marry a woman who wants to stay in that darkness.”

  Matthias wondered if there was any way possible, he could love Brielle even more?

  Did she really think he didn’t note the complacency her life of freedom had given her? How the far-reaching fingers of slavery had never affected her? That her life has been…what was that term he heard one of her society member’s use? Vaccinated. Yes, that was it. Her life had been vaccinated from the disease of slavery.

  How could she possibly think he’d ever resent her for that?

  Matthias thought back to the day when he first met her. He had finished visiting Brutus and catching up with the man when he’d been invited to stroll the grounds. Comfortable with finding his own way, he declined his host’s invitation to escort him and began to explore on his own.

  The sight of the woman, sitting among the flowers of the garden, doodling in a ledger, lured him to where she sat. He expected her to be writing but instead he saw a page full of curves, circles, and angles with what looked like mathematical formulas in a neat scrawl.