For Your Arms Only (21 page)

Angelique was tapping one finger against her lower lip. “What is in this journal? Have you found any evidence that would support your idea?”

“Cressida’s begun working on it.” Alec smiled ruefully. “I haven’t the patience for ciphering. Never had. But still, it’s not the sort of thing you’d leave proof of, would you? Not unless you were a bloody idiot or the most arrogant fool alive.”

She lifted her shoulders. “One must have proof in order to extort a good sum, so if you are correct, it must lie somewhere. You have searched the house, of course.”

“Not a thorough search,” he admitted. “They’ve lost the lease for lack of funds and…well…Julia’s gone and invited them to stay here.”

The knowing look she gave him made Alec want to scowl and scold her. It had been Julia who invited the Turners…even if he had deliberately mentioned their distress in front of Julia. Even if he had already kissed Cressida and invited her to stay at Penford. Even if his heart quickened and his blood heated at the thought of Cressida potentially around every corner he approached. He was drawn to her, no matter how he fought it, and he feared his restraint was crumbling against the constant press of that desire. It had been so long since he truly cared about a woman, Alec had almost forgotten it was possible.

But Angelique seemed to understand that this was not the moment to make sport of him. She simply smiled. “See what is in the journal,” she said instead. “Perhaps it will explain the money.”

“Of course.” It would also give him an excuse for closer proximity to Cressida. Alec tried to quell the fierce surge of exultation at the prospect.

“Is that all?”

He closed his eyes. “No,” he muttered, hating the word. “There is a possibility that Turner is dead.”

“’Tis always a possibility,” said Ian. “The man’s been gone—what?—five months? It doesn’t take but a minute to put a knife in someone’s back.”

“You have a suspect,” said Angelique softly. “Who? And why?”

Alec hesitated again. He wished they had not come, not yet. “Turner’s eldest daughter is newly engaged to his man, Thomas Webb. Webb came home from the army with Turner and has been with the family ever since. The daughter was married once before, to a man who beat her. Cressida said…she told me her father blessed that marriage because it would keep Webb from having her sister. And that Webb knew it.”

“That is suspicion, nothing more.”

“Of course not,” Alec snapped. “But it is a possibility. Webb has never seemed particularly keen to find Turner. Every time I spoke to him about the man, he put me off or said he knew nothing.”

“Would you be eager, in his place?” Angelique shrugged. “Perhaps he views it as Divine Providence. You said they were recently engaged, but the lady has no fortune and no great breeding; perhaps it is nothing other than desperate love. If he has been waiting for years while she was married to another man—”

“I realize all that!” Alec inhaled a deep, even breath. “I fervently hope that is so, Angelique. I don’t believe Webb is pretending to love her. In truth, I think he adores her.”

For a moment she was quiet. “Love is a powerful motivator,” she murmured at last. “But if you have evidence…”

“No, I don’t,” he said in relief. “Not a scrap.”

She smiled gently. “Then I think we cannot do anything.”

Alec shook his head. He hadn’t planned to do anything about it, but Angelique’s agreement reassured him. She wouldn’t hesitate to tell him if something changed her opinion. He recalled one other point that niggled at him. “What did you mean to say earlier about Hastings, Wallace?”

Angelique paused in the act of rising from her chair. Ian cleared his throat. “Ah. Not so much—more an impression, I suppose. He’s been to the den, see.” Ian usually called Stafford an old fox, and referred to his offices in Bow Street as the fox’s den. “Bit of an odd one, if you take my meaning. Pompous and cold, but with nervous eyes.”

“He’s a Deputy Commissary General of the army,” Alec said.

Ian’s smile was flat and humorless. “All the more reason to suspect something’s not right, if you ask me. But like you, I’ve got no proof, just that I’ve seen him at Bow Street. Angelique must know more. Old Staff’s set his cap for her, has her round for tea all the time.”

A delicate flush rose in Angelique’s cheeks. “Nonsense,” she said in her usual cool manner. “I know nothing about this Hastings.”

Somehow Alec didn’t quite believe her, but if she didn’t want him to know, he would never learn it from her. Angelique had all the reticence of a sphinx when it suited her. He got to his feet as Ian did the same, now that Angelique was standing. “I hope you will stay for a few days,” he said, more to be polite than because he wanted them to stay. He didn’t like to see his two lives brought face to face like this. If he could have bundled Angelique and Ian off the property at once, he would have been very tempted to do so.

Angelique’s smile hinted that she knew that. “
Oui
, a very few,” she said. “Might I have the tea in my room?”

“Of course,” Alec said. The maid was just tapping at the door with the tea tray. He went and opened it, instructing her to serve it in his guests’ room.

“Do not worry, Alec.” Angelique laid one hand on his arm as she passed him. “Not every puzzle can be solved.”

He just gave a slight bow as she left with Ian, leaving unspoken his next thought:
Nor
should
every puzzle be solved
.

C
ressida almost missed dinner. She had spent the afternoon poring over Papa’s journal and its infuriating code until her head ached. She knew it probably would amount to little, but pure stubbornness kept her at it for hours.

After Alec laid out the results of his efforts, she, Callie, and Tom had agreed together that Papa was probably gone for good, or at least until he wanted to be found. Even if something ill had befallen him, the result was the same. They also agreed it was unfair to ask Alec to keep searching, particularly with such thoroughness. Cressida had been slightly shocked when he explained all that he had done, all the places he had gone, and the avenues he had pursued. He truly had devoted an enormous amount of time—and, she suspected, money—to it. Tom and Callie were anxious to find a house in Portsmouth, and Granny’s health had declined even more. She rarely left her bed now. If they waited too long, she might be too weak to make the trip, even though she had been overcome with happiness, and somewhat revived in spirits, at the news that Callie was to be married.

So while Tom went ahead to Portsmouth in search of a house and Callie sat with Granny to sew her wedding dress, Cressida returned to the journal. She hadn’t exactly told her sister she intended to stay at Penford, although she wondered if Callie might have begun to suspect something. Callie seemed to glance her way an inordinate number of times whenever she spoke to Alec—and, to Cressida’s private exhilaration, he came to speak to her a great deal. Now even she couldn’t deny that he looked at her often. She didn’t want to. She wanted him to look as much as he might like.

And she didn’t want to miss dinner. Since Alec was no longer riding far and wide in search of her father, he had dined with the family almost every night. She bundled her notes away, rushed through her dressing, and then hurried down the stairs.

Guests had arrived. Not neighbors, but a couple Cressida had never seen before. The man was a brawny, redheaded Scot with a ready laugh. The woman was petite and exotically beautiful, with sleek black hair and dark eyes. No one else seemed to know what to make of them, leaving only Mrs. Hayes and John to talk to them.

“Friends of Alec’s,” Julia murmured, coming up beside her. “They arrived unexpectedly a few hours ago.”

“Oh.” Cressida watched as Alec strode into the room. He glanced around, his eye catching and lingering a moment on her. He gave her a tiny, almost imperceptible smile before going to his mother’s side and greeting the new guests.

“They came from London. Mother has been in a frenzy of curiosity to know how he knows them, but she’ll never ask. Alec can do no wrong in her eyes.”

“Julia,” murmured Cressida.

She put up one hand. “I’m not angry, Cressida. I just don’t know what to think about him anymore—and I believe he prefers it that way. He’s decided to keep his secrets, and there is nothing I can do to change that.” She looked at her brother as she spoke. The anger that had once heated her words about Alec was gone, replaced by something more like resignation.

Cressida shifted uncomfortably. She alone knew Alec’s secret, it seemed. She longed to defend him, to justify and explain to Julia why he had been so silent. She longed to tell Julia that whatever his family had suffered, Alec had endured far, far worse, not just from the wounds that scarred his chest but from the damage to his character that still followed him, damage he had tried but been unable to repair. And most of all she longed to tell Julia that it was her duty as his sister to accept him anyway, whether he told her his secret or not. Cressida knew that if her father were to stroll into the room this moment, even after all she had learned about him and his actions, she would still run to embrace him and her heart would leap with gladness that he was well, because he was her father. For all Papa’s faults, she couldn’t help loving him. How much might it have meant to Alec if his sister had been able to set aside her hurt and anger, and do the same?

The guests were Mr. and Mrs. Wallace from London, stopping in for a few days on their journey north. Mr. Wallace was brashly charming, easily falling into conversation with everyone. His wife was quieter, but unsheathed a sharp wit when she did speak, her voice inflected with a lilting French accent. Mrs. Wallace was seated next to Alec, and whenever she spoke, he paid strict attention to her every word. Mr. Wallace spared them no mind; at the other end of the table he was busy regaling the two Mrs. Hayeses and their daughters with tales of his native Scotland.

Cressida found herself watching Mrs. Wallace after dinner. There was something quietly watchful and alert about her, quite unlike her husband. That gentleman seemed to have a hundred tales and humorous stories, and he kept them all laughing. Although, for all Mr. Wallace’s loquaciousness, neither he nor his wife had revealed much about themselves. Rather like Alec had done when he first returned to Marston…

The thought stopped her. Could they be, like Alec…? But no; surely spies did not pay social calls on other spies. She glanced at Mrs. Wallace again, so darkly beautiful and polite as she listened to Mrs. Hayes. Could that delicate lady be a spy? Cressida tried to picture her in the part, then smiled at her own imagination. As if she even knew what spies did, let alone how the typical spy looked.

Thankfully the company retired early. The Wallaces had spent the day traveling, and John and his family were to depart on the morrow. After stopping to say good night to Granny, Cressida and Callie returned to their room.

“You’re not planning to work on that now, are you?” Callie wrinkled her nose as Cressida took out the journal again after getting ready for bed.

She shrugged. “For a little while. I think I’m about to solve it. I can feel it.”

Her sister sighed. “You and puzzles! Well, don’t let me disturb you.” She got into bed and opened a book.

Cressida pulled the chair up close to the writing desk and opened the journal. In a few minutes she had picked up where she left off earlier.

The code was frustrating her to no end. It appeared to be simple, and it surely was; more than once, she thought she had it solved only to see things fall apart as she applied her key to larger sections of the journal. If Papa’s code had changed over the years, she wryly acknowledged, she might never get it. But she pressed on, tinkering with different passages and trying to fit the information into one encompassing model.

She had learned about codes from her father. Papa had an ear for languages, and whenever he came home he would try to teach her and Callie what he had picked up. Instead of telling them what he was saying, though, he would just speak to them in a Spanish dialect or Flemish. She learned to map some words by their proximity to other words, deducing “sister” by how often it occurred before or after Callie’s name. This, she decided, was much the same. She had drawn up a list of battles and places to correspond to the dates, and had thus picked out a number of words, mainly places in the Peninsula that shed little light on the rest of the journal. But those small successes did reveal a few letters, and she had covered pages and pages with tentative translations that all ground to a halt eventually.

With a sigh, she picked up the journal and tried to look at it as a whole. It had its own language; perhaps she just needed to listen to its flow a bit more, and stop concentrating on the individual words. She let her eyes drift across the lines as if she were reading. One word kept snagging her eye, “sg.” There were quite a few instances of it, and she thought it meant “an.” She couldn’t think of another two-letter word in English that occurred so often. But that implied some things about the words that followed it, and she hadn’t been able to make that work. Cressida huffed in impatience, and rolled her head from side to side to stretch her neck. If only it were three letters. Then she would think it represented “the,” which would eliminate so many of the problems she was having with vowels…

She raised her head as the thought sank in. What if…? Her hand shaking with excitement, she tore another page from her sketchbook and tried it. Once she quit trying to force “an” from “sg,” things fell into place. She counted letters again and realigned her mapping of them. And when she applied her new key to a paragraph chosen at random, the whole thing made sense. She made some corrections to her code—it seemed “sg” didn’t always translate directly to “the,” but only when it stood alone—and tried another paragraph. With a thrill, she realized that one also made sense, and she slapped her hands down on the desk and exclaimed in triumph.

Now all thought of sleep vanished. She opened to the beginning of the journal and began translating. In front of her eyes, the curtain lifted on her father’s life in the army. He described the dirt and the heat, the drenching rainstorms and the paucity of good food. He wrote of the horrific slaughter of thousands of horses at Corunna as the British navy whisked the army away from being crushed by the pursuing French. He wrote of his fellow soldiers and the officers who sometimes led them, and sometimes sent them to certain deaths through sheer stupidity. He wrote of pomegranates and port wine and long brown Portuguese cigarettes, and the startling carnage created by Shrapnel shells. Every so often she had to make another small addition to her key, but overall the code was broken. When Cressida’s hand cramped and she had to put down her pen, she was shocked to realize hours had gone by since she sat down to work.

Callie had blown out her lamp and was fast asleep. The house was quiet. Cressida simply had to tell someone, though. She pulled on her dressing gown, snatched up her papers and the journal, and slipped from the room, heading straight for Alec’s study.

To her immense relief a line of light glowed under the door. She tapped gently, then pushed the door open at his muffled summons.

He rose from the wide mahogany desk, his hair rumpled and his cravat pulled askew. The desk was covered with papers and open books. “Come in,” he said at once. “Is something wrong?”

She came into the room and closed the door behind her. “No, nothing is wrong. I’ve just made some progress in solving this code, and…well, I wanted to tell someone,” she said with an embarrassed little laugh, catching sight of the clock. It was very late. He would think her demented over this journal. “I didn’t realize it was so late. I don’t want to be a bother.”

“No, no, of course not. Since John is leaving, there’s just more to be done.” He pushed aside some of the clutter on his desk and motioned for her to come over. Cressida hurried forward to lay the book in front of him, eagerness banishing her hesitation.

“I realized it’s a fairly simple rearrangement cipher,” she said, leaning down to show him her notes. “At first I tried to match the letters to those that appear most often in English, but that always got snarled in the end. Just tonight I discovered a twist: not all these words map exactly. For instance, ‘sg’ represents ‘the.’ I’ve checked it through several pages and it seems to hold true unless the letters ‘t-h-e’ are part of a larger word, like ‘other,’ and then it reverts to the rearrangement scheme. But I was able to translate two separate passages into sensible English, and then began in earnest. I think this is the correct key.” She laid her much-annotated key on top.

Alec was frowning at the scribbled notes. “You mean the letters are simply out of order?”

She shook her head. “No, not quite. Think of it instead as a reassignment; an ‘e’ now means a ‘k,’ for example. Well, not always, but usually. I can see that he got better at it as time went on. In the beginning of the book”—she flipped open to a page near the front—“every letter is formed individually, as if he had to keep checking the key. But later, the words are written almost as if he knew this different alphabet by heart and didn’t need to think before writing.” She turned to the middle to show him.

He leaned forward, cocking his head as he studied the page. “What does he write of?”

Cressida pulled out the sheets where she had begun translating. “Army matters, and any other thing that interested him. Who has been promoted, rumors, battles, who has been killed. An argument between officers, and a soldier whipped for desertion. But I have only just begun, on entries from years ago. He talks of Corunna and Oporto.”

“A decade ago.” He sighed and propped an elbow on the desk. “How relevant is that?”

Cressida fell silent. In her excitement at solving the code, she had lost sight of the real purpose of the task. How could an army diary a decade old help find her father now? And, to be truthful, did she really want to anymore? What she did not tell Alec was the deeper implications in Papa’s writings. He hadn’t just kept a journal, he had kept notes on others. She couldn’t help noticing that his remarks seemed to center on dishonorable activities, scandals and failures and incompetence. And one little note, so brief she hardly knew what to make of it, even appeared to hint that Papa might have been paid to keep quiet about those things.

It was possible that happened only once, when Papa interrupted some soldiers abusing a pair of local women and stealing from their farm. He had noted the penalty for their actions would be a fierce lashing, but then added, “they secured my discretion quite reasonably.” She had first thought nothing of that, assuming the men were friends of Papa’s whom he didn’t want to see punished. But as she worked her way into the book, Cressida got the uncomfortable feeling that Papa’s discretion had been secured more than once with money, and for larger and larger sums. And when it became a habit rather than a single instance, there was only one word for the person selling his discretion: blackmailer.

She hated even to think that word. He was her father, for heaven’s sake, who loved her and her sister and sent them money every quarter and brought them sweets when he came home on furlough. If the money he sent them had come from…this activity, did that make her culpable as well?

But none of that was proven, and she didn’t want to shame her father for things he might have done only a few times, years ago. When she had translated more of the journal…well, then she would decide what she had to do, depending on what she read.