The Danger of Desire (23 page)

Ah. There it was, a stout, iron-banded and studded coffer chest, to the left of the desk, next to an extra side chair. That would be where Falconer sat when he was taking instruction from Lord Stoval. The big strongbox would be closer to Falconer than Lord Stoval. Stoval was a strange paranoid to delegate such responsibility to another man. Hadn’t Nan always said, only a man’s closest friends knew him well enough to be able to betray him?

Meggs knelt down in front of the strongbox to have a look. Lord, but it was a beauty, and no dust here. This box they used. Often. Iron it was, forged sheets, with iron bands riveted over the whole in a christ-cross pattern. This grande dame had multiple lock mechanisms—a top keylock, which probably threw at least six bar bolts across the inside of the lid for starters; two dogs at the back; another keylock on the front, along with two bars and staples for padlocks outside.

Knocked Meggs back on her heels, all that. And the old dame was beautiful as well. The key locks were beautiful work, pierced and chased, but the one on the lid had a clever escutcheon covering—probably had a spring mechanism that had to be turned in conjunction with the key to spring the bolts. Devilishly clever. Had to admire work like that. And respect it. It would take her hours and hours to tickle the secrets out of this lady, one by one, and then figure how the sequence of locks worked. Nan would’ve loved a challenge like this box. Test of professional acumen, she would have called it.

Meggs held the glim up close to the escutcheon on the lid. It read 1794, Hermier, Paris. But England had been at war with the damn Frenchies since the Revolution began before that. What was Lord Stoval doing with a coffered chest in his house in London, made by a Froggie after the war started? That was what was called corroborating evidence. The captain couldn’t convict a man of treason just for having a French coffer chest, but she’d eat a golden guinea for dinner if he couldn’t scragg Stoval based on what she was sure to find inside.

But she wasn’t going to crack that beldam this night. The chapel clock chimed the half hour in warning. And there was still Falconer out. No one was up to any good at this time of the morning, and didn’t she know it? But still ...

Meggs got the glim up and took another look at the desk. Most people put their valuables to their right side. But something—hell, she didn’t know what—but something about the way the extra chair and the strongbox were placed to the left made her go to the other side. She worked her tension spring and single hook pick and waited patiently to make friends with the lady, who graciously yielded her virtue without a fight. Low and behold, the drawer held another damned lockbox. Money? She couldn’t take the chance of rattling it, but it was a simple little mechanism, young and barely tried. Silly little bit of fluff gave up her secret easily and to only the hook.

It was full, not of money but keys. Here they all sat, like ladies at a tea party, smiling up at her. Brass, steel, and iron. She’d—

There was a jingle of keys on a chain and then the sound of the locked gate to Falconer’s areaway stairs being engaged. No time.

She doused the glim, silently flipped the lockbox shut, stashed it back in the drawer, and thumbed the lock cocked on the drawer in less than four seconds. She was at the deadbolt on the door at six, waiting. When she heard the outside gate swing open, she opened her door, and then as the gate clanged shut behind Falconer, she shut hers. And she was off, behind the silently swinging baize door as Falconer unlocked the areaway door.

Well. Meggs let her thumping heart settle back down to normal. She was going to need a powerful lot of locksmith’s putty to copy all those keys.

CHAPTER 16

“
I
’ll need that pot for the fish stew, quick-like,” Cook bawled through the steam.

“Fish stew,” Dorcas grumbled. “The whole place’ll stink of it. I hate fish.”

“Why’s that?” Meggs asked as she threw a handful of sand into the pot for grit.

“All them dead eyes, lookin’ at me.”

“Gives you the jim-jams, does it?” Meggs raised up her voice a notch or two. “Not me. I know how to pick a fish.”

“Think so, do ya?” Dorcas was caught between not wanting to have anyone able to do anything better than she and her native revulsion to the fish. Or to doing any actual work. Hard to tell.

“My old dad were a fishmonger, down Billingsgate way.” Meggs lied away, happy in the knowledge she at least knew her way around the Billingsgate market on the east end of the city and could picture the very fellow she would have liked for an imaginary, fishmonger father. “Gone now he is, or I’d be working the market still, not scrubbing pots, but I can tell you how to get a nice piece o’ fish, firm and fresh-like.”

“That so?” Cook had her red, strangling hands on her hips and gave Meggs a new look.

“Yes, ma’am. Gotta have a nose for the fish. You pick by the smell and the color of the flesh, depending on the type. But no matter the type o’ fish, firm it ought to be, but not stiff. If it is, it’s too old. Unless you want smoked. But my da was only fresh.” Meggs rinsed out the copper pot and set to shining the exterior with her apron. “Nice piece of haddock, you’ll want this time o’ year, for a stew, won’t you, missus? And you’ll want to get there good and early. That’s the real secret. They load in at dawn.”

And that was how a girl ensured she was to accompany Cook to market of a morning.

Hugh had been lounging around the fringes of Shepherd’s Market since dawn, watching the wagons of produce come in from the farms to the south and west, and barrows full of fish wheel up from the stairs at the Thames.

He was dressed in his old worn-down togs, a souvenir of his former days on assignment with his friend James Marlowe clearing out a nest of smugglers on the Devon Coast, the first of Admiral Middleton’s “special” assignments.

Hugh liked the kit because he didn’t have to pretend he was a gentleman when he was rigged up in the old fisherman’s wool pants and sea boots, thick-knitted jersey and cap. He didn’t have to mind his manners or listen for the remnants of the Scots burr he had been taught to scrub out of his accent.

Finally, by the time it was light enough to see the frosted breath in the air above every head, he saw Meggs, scooting along like a duckling in the wake of the big, red-faced, waddling Cook. He hefted a crate and meandered his way through the produce until he reefed up next to her at a fishmonger’s stall.

“Hello, Meggs. You’re a sight for sore eyes.” It was only relief, that bonfire in his gut. He was only relieved to know she was safe and that things were going according to plan. He had felt as if he had ordered a man inshore to cut out a ship from an enemy harbor, not knowing if he were sending him to his death or to triumph. But sending people out was his job.

She blushed, even though her nose was already red from the raw cold. “Hello yourself.”

“D’you know this fella, girl?” demanded the Cook.

Meggs shot him a nervous, fidgety glance. “I do, ma’am.”

Hugh tugged the brim of his cap. “I’m an old ’quaintance of Miss Meggs, here.”

“Miss Meg is it?” she demanded. And Meggs had the good sense to scoot under the protective wing of the woman’s arms, as if she were deferring to the woman’s judgment. “How is it I’ve never seen you round this market before?”

Hugh was about to give the very obvious answer, that he’d come looking for Meggs, but she spoke before he could. “Know him from my Billingsgate Market days, ma’am. He’s one of the lads worked my father’s stall afore he died. God rest him.”

Just like that, a story as smooth and plausible as if they had rehearsed it for days. “God rest his soul,” Hugh echoed. “Take your basket for you?”

“Thanks all the same.” She laced her arm through Cook’s. “I’m with a Mayfair household now.”

“Come up in the world.” He gave his hat another tug. “Good girl.”

“Thanks.” She smiled up at him and then looked to Cook for approval. “How’s the fish this morning.”

“Not so good as Billingsgate.” Oh, her eyes brightened at that piece of flummery. It was nice, playing this way, impressing her.

“Of course, you wouldn’t think so.” Meggs tossed him a wink and moved toward the nearest stall, taking a deep inhale of the assorted fish as if she could divine just the right one by smell alone. For himself, after years at sea, Hugh was fairly impervious to the briny stench. It wasn’t so bad now, in winter, but God help the stink come the summer. A couple of hundred years’ worth of fish scales shimmered in tiny rainbows underfoot. But Meggs poked and sniffed her way across the stall as if she were a French perfumer until she came up with a couple of healthy-looking specimens. “What do you think, ma’am?” she asked Cook.

While the Cook was dickering with the fishmonger over the price, Meggs wandered away from the stall, giving them a small measure of privacy to talk. And talk she did, quick and competent, one hundred percent professional, all traces of the flirt gone.

“Place is locked up tighter than the Crown Jewels in the Tower. Thinks he’s got things worth stealing, Stoval does. It’s going to take a long while to get through all his locks. Only a few have the freedom of the house, and not even the butler has all the keys. Even the larder is cocked up tight every night. And so are the servants. I hate that, being locked and shut in. I need locksmith’s putty and plenty of it. Can you get me some?”

“Shh. Slow down. Putty. I’ll get it. When will you next be out?”

“Dunno. Lied my way into this. Hope to God that damned fish ain’t off.”

“
Isn’t
off. It’s fresh. I saw them load it off the boats myself. We don’t have much time. Be careful,” he ordered, the same way he would if she were one of his men. But she damn well wasn’t one of his men. Hugh took a quick look around, casing the market over her head, and then in a flash of impulse pulled her tight to his chest and kissed her soundly on the mouth.

He shouldn’t have done it. He had no business doing it. He could say, if she asked, if she protested as she ought, it was all part of their disguise—he was supposed to appear as if he were courting here. So he kissed her. He lowered his lips to hers and took what he wanted. What he had been wanting since the first time he saw her.

Damn her eyes, she had no business being that soft, or that sweet. Her lips were too plush, too full, begging him to take them between his own, and tongue and nip and worry at them. She had no business opening her mouth ever so slightly on an exhalation of pleasure, so he could slip by and press himself to the petal soft interior of her—

They were in the market. He pulled back. His blood was pounding away at his veins like a sledgehammer. But then, because he couldn’t help himself, he kissed her once in the middle of her forehead before he pushed her away. “Off you go.”

She nodded automatically, but her gaze was soft and unfocused as she turned to rejoin the goose of a Cook. Meggs turned back once to look at him and give him a smile of such simple, pure happiness, he felt a pang as real as a saber thrust through his chest.

Meggs had to wait another two days for Falconer to be out at the same time as Lord Stoval in order to find a convenient time to do a little cracks work. It went faster this time. Now that they’d met her, the bully boy locks on the door merely shrugged their beefy shoulders and let her in. She went immediately to the left-hand drawer of the desk, and having previously made the wards’ acquaintance and pried out all their secrets, she was past the gates and into the drawer in a jiff. The lockbox inside was even less trouble.

She had the flattened roll of putty Timmy had passed to her in the areaway stairs while pretending to sell roasted Spanish chestnuts, all prepared and wrapped in linen. She rolled it out on the desk and set to work, ward keys first, pressing first the sides and then the key end into the soft putty. She worked quickly, methodically pressing one after another, sorting them aside and keeping track of how many she had done. It was all going swimmingly.

And then, suddenly, she heard the rattle of keys, not at the areaway steps where Falconer usually went but at the Park Lane vestibule door.

Bloody blue fuck. Five keys left.

She scooped them up and slid them straight down her bodice. She couldn’t douse the glim until she had the rest of them back into the box and latch down, box locked, and into the drawer and closed. She snibbed the candle of her lantern out, blistering her fingers to kill the telltale smoke.

There wasn’t time—the corridor door was too far away. Already the second lock on the door from the vestibule into the study was being keyed and was turning.

Meggs scuttled under the huge desk and slid up tight to the front piece, thankful for the heavy oak construction. She stuffed the glim under her skirts, both so the metal couldn’t reflect against any light and to cloak the smell.

After the creak of the door, there was silence. Then the hollow sound of footsteps retreating onto the stone floor of the vestibule, followed by fumbling to strike flint for a light. Meggs ripped the white mobcap off her head and stuffed it deep into her pocket with the roll of putty and turned her face away from the opening to present a completely dark aspect. Cobwebs tickled at her face, and she closed her mind to the thought of spiders. The room hadn’t been cleaned in so long, the carpet was bound to be teeming with wildlife.

She waited until the footfalls returned, hushed by the thick, dusty rug. The single candle dimly illuminated the room, casting the edges in deep shadow. There it was, the strong, almost overpoweringly cloying scent of cloves. The next sound was from above, where he must have placed the candle on the desk. Then the jingle of keys again and the complicated mechanical sound of bolt locks disengaging. He was at the strongbox. She heard the catch release and then nothing as the well-oiled hinges slid silently open and the back of the lid came to rest against the desk with a soft thunk.

There was a rifling of paper, or perhaps books, and then he came round the back of the desk, pulled out the chair, and sat. Meggs crushed herself even smaller, folding into herself and forcing all but the barest minimum of necessary air from her lungs. Falconer’s feet, and she knew now it was he from the dark stockings and breeches, came within mere inches of connecting with her shin.