“Perhaps I can be of assistance, brother,” Beatrice suggested after a few minutes of uneasy silence in the room, as she handed him a cup of tea.

He shook his head, and took a sip of the tea. “It is a dangerous enterprise Lady Beatrice, and will require, I regret to say, a man’s strength.”

He exclaimed slightly when she gave him a friendly punch on his shoulder.

“Why brother,” she protested slightly, “you seem to have forgotten I am a better shot with the hunting rifle than you or any man, and a better horsewoman, too.”

He smiled, and set his cup of tea down, preparing for an argument with her. She continued to bristle, “As for strength, I am sure there are things, like wheelbarrows or other such things, that a woman can latch to a horse to carry whatever it is a man needs to carry.”

“My dear Lady,” he started.

“John, either you have lost your trust in me or you are planning a criminal enterprise,” she rebuked him sharply as she stood in front of him. “Which is it?”

“Sister, I have not lost my trust, of course,” he answered. “But …”

“Then it is a crime you are planning,” she cut in again, and grasp both his shoulders to force him to look at her.

“Not exactly a crime,” he answered slowly, and tried but failed to avoid her eyes. “But dangerous, nevertheless.”

“John, tell me. I can help,” she said softly, as she knelt in front of him, beseeching him with her eyes. “It is just the two of us now, you know, with mother and father gone. And even if I am about to wed a man everyone says is the best match I could find, this doesn’t change the fact that you and I need to watch out for each other.”

The Captain frowned and pursed his lips. He knew he would not be able to shake his sister off.

He started slowly, “Lady, what I’m about to say you need to keep to yourself, with no exception. There are only two others who know about this, and all our lives may likely depend on all our discretion in this matter.”

He told her about the cache of gold Mr. Pimms had been building, and the final heist he was planning. To his surprise, she came up with a suggestion that would greatly reduce the time he and Jack would have needed to move the gold cache from the temporary shed that Mr Pimms was arranging to use to house all the gold he’d moved out of London, to a Clarence coach that Jack would be borrowing from one of his poet friends.