My Lord and Spymaster (21 page)

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Authors: Joanna Bourne

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Trevor could daydream all he wanted to. “What?”
“Subdue your gentlemanly scruples for a minute. I want you to look at this.” Adrian pulled aside the curtain on the wall to show a panel set at eye level.
“I won’t spy on her.”
“But you pass the idle hour pawing through her dainty underlinens. These distinctions escape me. To be hair-splittingly accurate, I am spying on him, not her. They know I’m watching. Think of it as a sort of game. Be quiet now. They can hear us when I open this.”
Adrian closed the lantern and threw the room into darkness. The panel opened smoothly to show a square of light, filled by mottled fabric. The other side was a bland landscape on the wall of the study. He doubted it fooled the Whitbys for a minute.
Jess sat on a low footstool in front of the fire, her hands clasped together, her forearms resting on her knees. Her hair was loose from the long braid, drying. Josiah Whitby, short, barrel-bellied, heavy-shouldered, and bald, stood beside her, his hand spread on the cascade of wheat-gold hair.
Faintly, he could hear the man say, “. . . a job lot of woolens. MacLeish can do the bidding. There’s space on the
Northern Light
for the next St. Petersburg run.”
“I can buy tea,” Jess said. “I don’t know why everyone thinks I can’t bargain for tea.”
“Tha’s a fine, wise lass and I wouldn’t send thee to dicker for soap in a bathtub.”
Whitby wore the dun-colored worsted coat and old-fashioned breeches of a stout countryman and a poppy-red silk waistcoat. How had that squat, brown toad sired a woman like Jess?
After a minute, Adrian closed the panel. “That’s what I wanted to show you. Them together. Do you think he could be Cinq, and she wouldn’t know?”
It was easier to hate Whitby when he didn’t have a face. “She isn’t going to let go of him, is she? Whatever happens.”
“She won’t let go. There is no end to her loyalty, Sebastian. She might even forgive me.”
“The evidence says he’s Cinq.”
“Forget the evidence. I spread my own entrails over the rocks and took auspices. My guts are never wrong. Think about this. Just think,” Adrian said. “Would a man who wears waistcoats like that commit treason?”

 

Sixteen
Kennett House, Mayfair
IT WAS MIDNIGHT WHEN SEBASTIAN PAID OFF THE hackney. The house looked quiet under the rain, with one light in the lantern at the front door and another in Eunice’s room, upstairs. It was pouring down, cold and harsh, but he made the round of the house, unlocking the gate to the garden and checking everywhere, just to be sure. Nobody was lurking in the areaway or the stairwell. Nobody in the wet bushes in back.
There was no trace or track of Doyle’s men out in the dark. He didn’t expect to see them.
At the side of the house he shaded rain off his face with his hand and looked up. Jess’s bedroom window was dimly lit. Eunice had found a night candle for her. Good. He hoped Jess was sleeping, not lying awake, worrying.
Nobody could get to her tonight. He climbed the steps to the house that had once been his damn-hell father’s and was now his and let himself in with his key.
The foyer was piled with merchandise of some sort. He threw his sopping greatcoat over the bannister. Eunice, carrying a candle, walked around stacks of boxes toward him.
“There you are, dear.” She steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Such a night. I wondered whether you’d come home or sleep on the
Flighty
. I told them to leave lights in the hall, just in case. Jess is tucked up safely.”
“Thank you.” He didn’t have to say what he was thanking her for. For taking care of Jess. For telling him Jess was safe. For knowing that it mattered. It was good to be home.
“I sent for her pet, by the way, and we’ve installed him in her bedroom. That should steady her. She’s promised to keep it upstairs, so it won’t bite Quentin again.”
Now he was giving hospitality to the vermin.žso He’d known it was going to happen sooner or later. “Good idea.”
He dropped his hat on the side table, next to Quent’s big dispatch case. It was half-open, with fifty papers ready to slide out and get lost. Tomorrow, Quent would swear he’d locked it tight as the Bank of England. He had a mind like a sieve. God only knew what damage he did at the Board of Trade.
“That young man who works for Adrian brought her home. Trevor Chapman. I asked him to stay for dinner, and he stared at her over the lamb cutlets as if she were the Holy Grail. Very bracing for her, I should think, to have an ally there. I gave her a whiskey after supper instead of tea, so perhaps she’ll sleep. What does Adrian intend for her father?” After a pause, she said, “I’ll ask him, if you can’t say.”
“We don’t know yet. We just don’t know.” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked around. He was used to wood crates arriving, but these had an ominous shape to them. “Why is the front hall full of coffins?”
“Armor.”
He must have looked blank. She said, “Full body armor. Medieval.”
“I don’t object, but why is someone sending us armor?”
“Historical Society meeting.”
He’d forgotten. Another damn thing to worry about. “The last Friday of the month.”
“Which is tomorrow. Teddy Coyning-Marsh is giving the lecture. He’s very solid on German mercenaries, I believe, but he does tend to ramble. The men are coming tomorrow morning early to assemble the upright figures. We will arrange vambraces and gorgets and couters upon tables in the drawing room. Far too many people are coming, of course, and they’ll chatter through the lecture. I wish some nameless fribble hadn’t decided the Historical Society was fashionable.”
“If you’d stop feeding them, they wouldn’t come.”
“It’s not as if the food was reliable. They come to see what the next culinary disaster will be. I’ve bullied Jess into coming on the grounds that a minor annoyance will distract her from more important ones. You needn’t attend if you don’t want to, but I’d feel better if you were taking care of her.”
His house would be packed with rich dilettantes and socially ambitious matrons. They’d eat Jess alive. Or she’d eat them alive. Either way, likely to be an interesting evening. “I’ll be there.”
“Good. Standish is going to display the Agamemnon krater in the front parlor. For the armament on it. And Windham will be here. He has promised faithfully not to discuss the Reform Bill. You look tired, Bastian. When did you last sleep?”
He’d spent last night rummaging through Jess’s office and today going through copies of her papers. “I’m headed up to do that now.”
“A few weeks ago you told me you’d found the man responsible for sinking the
Neptune Dancer
. You said you knew the name of the traitor. You meant Jess’s father, didn’t you?”
.t size="3">“Yes.”
“I spoke with him several times, three years ago. Standish was shipping pots to that German collector. Your Whitby impressed me. An astute man. Straightforward, unpretentious, very hard underneath. Honest, I think. I find it difficult to see him as a traitor.”
Here was one more person, telling him Whitby was innocent. Just about a clean sweep. “There’s evidence.”
“So I should imagine. Sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.” Eunice pushed him in the direction of the stairs.
He didn’t take a candle with him. Upstairs was black as a coal pit, but he navigated darker decks every night at sea.
Jess was in the attic. Not far away at all. She’d be under the covers, wearing one of those soft, pretty nightdresses she favored. If he knocked on her door, she might invite him in. They hadn’t finished talking.
But neither of them was interested in just talking. “The hell with that.” He undressed in the dark and lay down in bed. He could feel Jess in his house, as if she were a sound just out of the range of hearing. As if she were a spinning top somewhere, humming.
JESS heard the night watchman calling two o’clock and woke herself up. She was in bed, in the chill of a rainy night, in the middle of the sleeping city, in her room in the attic. A tiny lamp burned dim and yellow in one corner. The curtains were pulled to shut the Dark out. It was raining steady now, a muffled tapping on the roof just a foot or two away. Made her think of being shipboard. She’d spent a lot of nights at sea, listening to rain on the deck above.
Kedger slept in a ball at the bottom of the bed, picking the one spot where he’d get kicked every time she turned over. He had a wide streak of perversity, that ferret.
Time to be up and doing. It took half a minute to pull her working kit from under the bed, Kedger nosing and sniffing at it the whole time. She didn’t want to get caught roaming the halls with these useful toys, so she folded them into a shawl and put it in place, secure and unobtrusive, around her shoulders.
Carrying a candle, she went down the stairs, stealthy as thin soup, with Kedger loping along behind her.
Dark closed in behind her as she passed. Dark waited everywhere outside the circle of light. She knew about Dark. Dark is huge. At night it slithers out of the cellars and rears up, solid and powerful, big as half the world. It stretches out on every side, all the way to dawn. Dark was hungry for her. She could feel it staring at her back, every step she took. If she stopped and held her breath, she’d hear the rustle of it in the corners.
Pitiful, when a woman her age was scared of the dark.
She was on the second-floor hall now, where the family slept. She set her feet down softly. She knew—somehow she was absolutely certain of it—that Sebastian was a light sleeper. She had to be, as she used to tell her old thieving cronies, quieter than an army of mice.
Down the hall. This was Claudia’s room. It smelle£rooer d faintly of violet pastilles. Quentin’s room. That was soap and leather polish. Then she was outside the Captain’s bedroom, just across the hall from his study. Kedger sniffed along the bottom of the study door and passed it as empty. She jiggled the skeleton key in the lock. The tumblers turned over, silent as water, and she slipped through the door and closed it behind her.
She lifted the candle, shielding it with her hand. Captain Kennett’s study. Hers for the taking.
His office was like him, practical and shipshape and—if she was going to be honest—intimidating. His desk sat foursquare in the center and commanded the place. Rolled maps were in the rack in the corner, ledgers in a bookcase at the wall. Newspapers were piled up and tied with string. She did that, too. She saved newspapers and journals and took them on board. Mornings, when the sky was clear and there was nothing but blue water to the horizon, she’d haul a chair on deck and put her feet up on a coil of rope and drink coffee from a mug and catch up on stale old news.
Kedger wandered off to investigate the desk, looking for quill pens. She padded over to take her own intelligent interest in the Captain’s affairs.
There’d be evidence here, if Kennett was Cinq. Not a letter signed with a pair of dice, but names and places and numbers that didn’t add up. There’d be a whiff of corruption in the accounting. She was hoping not to find anything.
A big folder sat in the middle of his desk. When she untied the ribbon and opened it up, she found a nice collection of lithographs and watercolors, and some maps. Maps so old they crumbled at the edges. She couldn’t judge art, not the way Papa did, but these looked very fine. They’d have been a temptation to her, some years back, when she was still thieving. She retied the ribbon, getting the bow exactly right. “More like it was than it was to start with,” Lazarus used to say.
Then she sat herself down comfy in Sebastian’s chair to do some invading of his privacy. Sebastian’s desk smelled like the ocean. He carried the sea home with him in his pockets, rolled it up in his maps, buckled it into the leather telescope case. Salt water smell.
She lit candles on his desk—there were five of them in the lamp under the green shade—and blew hers out. It was quiet in the West End this time of night. Under the wind, the house creaked like a ship. If she listened hard, she’d hear the Captain breathing. He wasn’t that far away.
He struck her as a man who’d sleep naked. He’d be stretched out long and lean in the sheets, relaxed, rocking a little with his breath, like a ship at dock. If the Captain had been a ship, he’d be one of those Revenue cutters. He’d be all prow and proud lines and boards lapped down tight. Deft and shipshape. Implacable, the way Revenue cutters were. Skillful in motion. Wise with the sea. Powerful.
He was strong and fierce and sleek-bodied. She wasn’t thinking about coastal vessels anymore. She was imagining his body above her. Herself, rocking under him, being the sea that held his ship. Opening to him. Rising up to meet him.
And that was a waste of time and a frustration and just a blatant invitation to madness, thinking like this.
The first three drawers in his desk slid out easy as butter. Citadels of dullness. When honest folk had something to hide, they locked it up. Saved a thief endless trouble.
If she just went and got into the Captain’s bed and didn’t make any more fuss about it, she’d stop lying awake at night. She’d stop jerking out of sleep, sweating and gasping, her body twisted around her pillow. She’d stop dreaming about him. She’d sleep like a rock in the Captain’s bed, after they were through with each other. There was nothing like the sleep after lovemaking. That was sleep of some profundity.

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