Candace Camp (22 page)

Eleanor watched him as he rolled down her stockings. She had never seen a man’s naked form before, and she drank it in now. He was so lean and powerful, so wonderfully different from her own body. She wanted to touch him, to caress him as he caressed her, to taste his flesh with her mouth as he had tasted hers.

And so, when he finished and crawled onto the bed beside her, Eleanor turned to him, her hands going out to his chest and traveling slowly, deliciously down him. He drew in a sharp breath, closing his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Is that wrong?”

“No,” he responded tightly. “It is right. It is very right.”

She continued her exploration, smoothing her hands down over the thickly padded muscles of his chest, sliding over the dips and curves, then down onto the smooth, satiny skin of his abdomen and the sharp outthrust of his pelvic bones. Her hands glided back and around to the softer curve of his buttocks, and her fingers dug in, squeezing and massaging.

A groan escaped him, and he pulled her to him, his mouth sinking into hers. He kissed her wildly, deeply, as if he could not have enough of her, and his hands ran down her body eagerly. Eleanor kissed him back, matching his hunger, and she dug her fingers into his back, urging him closer.

His hand slipped between her legs, his fingers separating and stroking, exciting her beyond anything she had ever imagined. She moved against his palm, her whole body aching for completion.

“Please,” she moaned, pulling her mouth away. “Anthony, now. I want…”

“I know,” he said thickly, moving between her legs. “I know.”

She felt him then, gently probing the tender flesh between her legs, sliding into her. There was a flash of pain, and she tensed. Anthony flung up his head, startled, and looked into her face.

“Eleanor! Why—”

She shook her head, wrapping her legs around him and taking him inside her. He sank deep into her, filling her, and Eleanor bit back a moan at the pleasure. Her fingers dug into his back, urging him on, and he began to move within her. With each stroke he drove her pleasure higher, carrying her deeper and deeper into the hot, dark maelstrom of passion. Eleanor rocked against him, the knot of hunger deep inside her tightening and tightening until she was shaking.

And then, at last, the pleasure burst inside her, washing out from her center in great waves. She wrapped her arms around Anthony, holding on as the desire took her, and she felt him shudder against her and cry out as the two of them gave themselves up to their passion.

E
LEANOR DRIFTED
, stunned, awash in the sweet aftermath of their lovemaking. She had never dreamed that anything could feel like this, that she could be so replete, so satisfied, or that she could feel joined this way to anyone. Anthony was part of her now in a way she had never imagined, and she could not keep from smiling to herself.

“Eleanor, I’m sorry,” he murmured, stroking her hair. “I did not know…why didn’t you tell me you had never—that you were untouched. I thought…”

“It made no difference,” she told him, snuggling closer. “This was what I wanted.”

He kissed the top of her head, then, wrapping his arm around her, pulled her over on top of him. Eleanor looked down into his face, smiling, her hair falling like a curtain around them.

“It is what I wanted, too,” he said softly, reaching up to stroke her cheek.

Eleanor laid her head on his chest, listening to the steady thump of his heart, content simply to lie there as he stroked her hair, twining it around his fingers, then setting it free. She thought she could lie there forever, basking in the shared warmth. There were no worries, no problems, no thoughts of the future. She closed her eyes, her mind drifting.

Suddenly her eyes flew open. She drew in a sharp breath and sat up.

“Eleanor?” Anthony blinked at her, startled. “What is it?”

“I just thought of it!” she exclaimed and jumped out of bed.

“Thought of what?” he asked, confused, as he watched her scurry about the room, grabbing up her clothes and pulling them back on.

“The names!” she cried, sweeping up his clothes and handing them to him. “Here, get dressed. We have to go look.”

“The names?” he repeated, struggling into his breeches and shirt. “Are you talking about Edmund’s list? The one the count is looking for?”

“Yes. The members of
L’unione.
I know where Edmund hid the names!”

A
NTHONY THREW ON
his clothes in haste as Eleanor wound her hair up in a careless knot atop her head and pinned it. She started fastening the buttons up her back, and Anthony came over to help her finish. He was putting on his jacket over his unbuttoned waistcoat as she opened the door and popped her head out, then waved him into the hall.

“How do you know where it is?” he asked as he followed her down the stairs.

“Well, I
think
I know,” she answered. “It suddenly popped into my head. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I realized suddenly that Edmund would have hidden it in the thing he knew best. His music.”

“You mean you think the list is hidden among the sheets of music?”

“No.” Eleanor swept into the music room and grabbed the sheaf of papers from the top of the piano. Flourishing them, she said, “I mean, I think he hid them
in
the music!”

He stared at her for a moment; then his face cleared. “The notes are a code?”

Eleanor nodded. “Yes. That has to be the answer. He carefully hid this pedestrian, even bad, sonata in a secret drawer, the key to which he also hid in a piece of jewelry that he told me I should keep for his sake. I couldn’t understand why he would so protect a piece of music that doesn’t even begin to approach his standard.”

Anthony nodded. “That makes sense. More so than his suddenly losing his talent. He wouldn’t go from a wonderful piece of work like his opera straight to something like this. A lesser work, perhaps, but not this.”

“Exactly. And the real beauty of it is that even if someone did take the key and did discover the secret drawer, he would find only music. He would not realize what it was, just as we didn’t. So the count, or whoever it was, would probably just leave the music or throw it away.”

“All right. Now…” Anthony looked down over her shoulder at the top sheet. “All we have to do is decipher the code.”

Eleanor tossed him a dazzling smile. “We can do it. At this moment, I feel as if I can conquer the world.”

His smile in return was slow and sensual, lighting his eyes even before it touched his lips. He reached up and curled his finger around one of the stray curls that had escaped from her hastily-knotted hair. “I agree.”

The way he looked at her made Eleanor want to stretch up on tiptoe and kiss him. He must have seen her thought in her face, for his eyes darkened, and he reached out, pulling her into his arms.

“Nay,” Eleanor told him, her voice a trifle shaky, as she slipped out of his hold. “If we start that, we may never get back to deciphering this code.”

He grinned. “Frankly, at the moment, the code is not uppermost in my mind.”

“Your mind?” Eleanor repeated wryly, grinning. “Why, I would have said it was another part ruling you now.”

“Saucy wench,” he retorted without heat, then heaved a dramatic sigh. “Very well. Let us look at this.”

They removed to her office, where they laid the sheet music out on her desk and pulled up an extra chair. Eleanor took out a piece of foolscap and the nub of a pencil she had been using for totting up numbers the day before.

“Let’s see…I suppose the simplest thing is that the notes represent letters.”

She drew a quick series of lines and jotted down the notes of a musical scale, below them putting the corresponding letter. They looked at it for a moment.

“But that leaves us with far too few letters,” Anthony pointed out. “There would have to be more than seven letters to spell out a number of names.”

“Perhaps the next octave up is the next set of seven,” Eleanor offered. She wrote out that scale and added the next seven letters, then repeated it.

“Then the third one up?” Anthony looked at her, and she shrugged.

“It’s worth a try. But what about the bass clef?”

“I’m not sure. Let us try the first few bars with the letters we have,” Anthony suggested.

Eleanor read the music, jotting down the letters they had agreed upon for the treble clef. The result was a jumble of nonsense.

“That cannot be right,” Anthony mused. He studied the music again. “How do you suppose he divided the names? How do you tell where one stops and the next one starts?”

“A bar for a name?” Eleanor proffered, then immediately answered her own suggestion. “No, that would be too regular. It would accommodate only a certain number of notes.”

She set her chin on her hand, and they gazed silently at the music. Finally Anthony tapped a notation. “What about the rest sign? I notice that there are a number of them on the pages.”

Eleanor perked up. “You might be right. There are eleven notes here before this rest. Then…” She counted quickly to the next rest sign. “Thirteen notes. Those sound right for the length of names, don’t they? Fifteen here. There are entirely too many rests to be proper.”

“Now if only we could figure out the letters.”

“Wait…wait…” Eleanor said, excitement rising in her. “There are really twelve tones in an octave. You have to add in the flats and sharps. There are seven white keys and five black keys. What if we assigned the letters of the alphabet to the twelve tones? You would need only two sets to make 24 letters.”

“And the last two? Start again?”

Eleanor wrinkled her nose. “You don’t really need all the letters.”

“The last two could be left out.”

“Not
z.
There are a number of
z
s in Italian names. But
w, x,
and
y
likely would not appear.”

“Then which two octaves do we choose? The first on treble and the first on bass? The first two on treble?”

“I don’t know.” Eleanor frowned down at the music. “Let’s try it both ways.”

They jotted down several permutations of the eleven notes before the first rest, but again the result had little meaning.

“Look at the repetition of
A
s,” Anthony pointed out, tapping at the series of notes before the end. “
A,
blank, blank,
A.
That seems a likely part of a name.”

“So do the double
C
s. That’s very Italian. But taken together, they’re a mess. There are not enough higher notes for it to be the two right-hand octaves. This tune is very simple, very basic. It does not really wander out of the first octave. But if you use the bass as the other twelve, it is simply gibberish.”

Eleanor sighed and sat back in her chair. “Perhaps I was wrong. Maybe this is not what Edmund did at all.”

“No, don’t give up. I think you must be right about this music being the key to the names. Otherwise, why would Edmund have hidden it so carefully? Indeed, why would he even have written it?”

They were silent for a moment, contemplating the page of music. Finally Anthony suggested, “Perhaps if you played it on the piano it would make more sense.”

Eleanor shrugged. “I suppose I could try picking it out again. It is so odd—look at the variation of quarter and half notes. Quarter, quarter, half, half, quarter, half, quarter, and then a rest. Then quarter, half, quarter, quarter, half, half, qua…” Her words trailed off.

She turned to Anthony, excitement rising in her voice. “What if it’s not different octaves but different lengths. Look—not a single whole note, at least in the treble clef. All quarters and halves. What if the quarter notes are the first half of the alphabet and the halves the second half? Or vice versa.”

“And forget the bass altogether?”

“I think it may serve only as a way to further disguise the truth.”

Eleanor began to scribble down a new set of letters. She stopped, sucking in her breath. “Look…pietrocannata. Pietro Cannata. I know him. He was one of Edmund’s friends.”

“And the next one?”

She scribbled away, glancing from the sheet of music to her lines of code. “Angelo Fasso. Raffaele Savaglia. Anthony!” She turned to him, her eyes glowing. “This is it! This is the list of names!”

She let out a laugh as Anthony jumped to his feet, pulling her up and into his arms, exclaiming, “You did it! Eleanor, you are incomparable!”

He picked her up and whirled her around, both of them laughing. Then he set her down and planted a quick, hard kiss on her lips.

There was a sound at the doorway, and they turned toward it. One of the maids stood there, wide-eyed. She quickly bobbed a curtsey and fled.

“Oh dear,” Eleanor murmured.

She was aware suddenly of the careless state of her hair, which had been twisted up quickly and pinned haphazardly, clearly not the work of her skillful personal maid. Her clothes, as well, were not in their usual neat order, having been flung on in a rush. Her somewhat ramshackle appearance would, of course, be no cause for gossip if it weren’t for the fact that she had just been caught kissing Anthony.

She glanced at Anthony, who was scowling at the doorway where the maid had stood. “Eleanor…”

“No,” she said lightly. The last thing she wanted to hear was any statement of regret over what had happened between them. “Do not worry. My staff knows better than to gossip. If she starts to jabber about this in the kitchen, she will be set straight.” Or, at least, she would be normally, when Bartwell was here. “It is no problem.”

She gave him a glittering smile, and his face softened in response. Eleanor took advantage of the moment to turn away, saying briskly, “Well, I guess this leaves us with the question of what to do with the list.”

“Yes. I am sure you do not want it to fall into di Graffeo’s hands,” he said.

“Absolutely not,” she agreed.

“I suppose the safest thing might be to destroy it, so that the count cannot possibly get it.”

“Yes, and yet, I would hate for all Edmund’s effort to go for naught. He could have destroyed it himself, but it was important enough for him to go to some lengths to hide it. I think he would like for
L’unione
to have it back. I can’t help but feel that perhaps I should give it to Dario.”

Anthony grimaced.

“I know you do not like him,” she continued.

“Yes, I know, I know, it is just my jealousy,” he finished for her. “All right, I do not like the way he hangs about you, oozing compliments and charm.”

Eleanor had to smile. “Yes, it is terribly wicked of him.”

“But just because I am jealous, that does not mean he is a good man,” Anthony pointed out.

“No. And I will admit that I do not know much about him. But I do know that he was Edmund’s friend. Edmund liked and trusted him.”

“Not enough to entrust the papers to him.”

“It was expedient to leave them in my care. And Edmund knew that I—”

“Would make sure everything worked as it should. He was right, God knows, to trust you, but, blast it, I could have wished he had not been so ready to put you into the middle of danger.”

Eleanor smiled at him, warmed by his concern. She placed her hand upon his arm. “Do not worry so. I shall wait a little before I decide what to do. We can decode the rest of the names and see if Dario’s is among them. If it is not, then we must suspect that he is lying. If it is, then it would seem that he is our best choice to give them to, since he is a member of
L’unione.
In the meantime, I will put the original music, as well as our decoded list, in the safe beside the butler’s pantry. That should keep it away from any thieves.”

“That sounds like a reasonable solution,” Anthony agreed, and they sat down again at the desk, side by side, and began to work their way through the sheet of music.

It was not difficult, now that they had the secret of it, and they worked quickly. It was pleasant, Eleanor thought, to sit thus, enjoying one another’s company as they completed the task. Her happiness was marred only by the knowledge that she could not lean against him or touch his hand or brush her lips across his cheek, as she would have liked to do now and then as they worked. But it was too likely that someone might come by and see.

She had not lied when she told him that her servants were loyal to her and disinclined to gossip. But with Bartwell gone, she knew that the reins of the household were not held as tightly, and because the footmen had to take up extra duties guarding the household at night, they had had to take on extra maids to keep the household running smoothly. Eleanor had not recognized the maid who had seen them, and she felt a little more doubtful of a new maid than one of her own. Of course, if the girl wished to keep her job, then she would find out quickly enough that she needed to mind her tongue. But still, Eleanor realized that she must be especially circumspect.

Even more important, she had no idea whether Samantha or Honoria might walk in on them. She certainly did not want to give Honoria a weapon to use against her, and Samantha was too young and impressionable for Eleanor to be flouting convention around her.

Eleanor suppressed a sigh. The sooner she did something with these papers, she thought, the sooner she could dispense with Honoria’s chaperonage. Of course, then the children and Bartwell and the others would be returning. She thought of the few precious days of a relatively empty house that lay between those two events. Then she would do exactly as she liked.