The Deception of the Emerald Ring (17 page)

The previous night, they had all attended the theater, intercepting a basket of oranges with messages stuck beneath the skins. Smelling faintly of citrus, Geoff had followed that up with a clandestine trip of his own down to the rebel depot on Marshall Lane, where he had lurked behind the windows in the guise of a beggar, eavesdropping on a rather uninspiring session of drink and folksong.

What was it about rebel movements that always seemed to demand expression in song? The French had gone for the same, coming up with catchy numbers about the liberty of the common man. Geoff had had that interminable "Ça ira" song stuck in his head for months after infiltrating a group of Jacobins in 1799. It still popped back into his head at inconvenient moments. Geoff caught himself humming "Quand l'aristocrate protestera, le bon citoyen au nez lui rira" under his breath and made himself stop. Wrong country, wrong mission, and it didn't even scan.

"Have you discovered the manufacturer of the weapons?" Jane asked in a breathy voice that managed to convey forbidden trysts and wavering virtue.

Geoff deftly stole her fan, holding it just out of reach as she squealed and made a deliberately abortive grab for it, causing her décolletage to swell perilously above her bodice.

"Daniel Muley. He lives at 28 Parliament Street," he whispered into her ear, as her hand joined his on the ivory handle of the fan. "It's unclear whether he's one of them, or just in it for his fee."

"The liaison?" Jane tilted her head back as though brought to the verge of a swoon by his improper suggestions.

"Miles Byrne. He works in a timber yard on New Street. I mean to examine it more closely tomorrow."

"Excellent," murmured Jane. She snatched the fan back from him, exclaiming, in a voice pitched to carry, "La, sir! How you do tease!"

"La?" inquired Geoff under his breath. "La?"

Jane permitted herself a tiny grimace behind the shield of her fan. "Needs must," she murmured.

"There can be no doubt that the devil is driving," acknowledged Geoff, remembering some of the scenes he had witnessed in Paris. The streets hadn't quite run with blood, at least not by the time Geoff and Richard had made it out of there, but severed heads weren't something a man forgot in a hurry.

Miss Gwendolyn Meadows, garbed in the widow's weeds of Mrs. Ernestine Grimstone, devoted and overprotective aunt, scowled disapprovingly at her fellow agent. "Refer to that Corsican upstart as the Prince of Darkness and you'll give him ideas above his station."

"Don't you mean below his station?" inquired Jane delicately, making sure to simper guilelessly at Geoff as she said it.

"Lord of the Underworld is too good for some people," objected Miss Gwen with a sniff.

Geoff and Jane exchanged a look of shared amusement that owed nothing to their theatrical talents.

"At least if he were in Hades he would be less trouble to those of us up here," pointed out Geoff.

Miss Gwen's parasol thumped against the ground dangerously close to Geoff's foot. "Occasionally you make sense, Pinchingdale. But tonight is not one of those occasions."

"I can only strive to improve myself under your tutelage," replied Geoff mildly.

"Hmph," said Miss Gwen, casting a suspicious glance at Geoff from beneath her veils. "Save the compliments for those gullible enough to enjoy them. I know a gammon when I see one."

Geoff prudently removed himself behind Jane before Miss Gwen's parasol could swing once again into action. They had tried to part Miss Gwen from her parasol, as too recognizable an element of her original persona, but Miss Gwen clung stubbornly to her sunshade, insisting that its utility as a weapon outweighed the possible threat of recognition. Geoff suspected she simply couldn't bear to give up poking people. Nonetheless, he and Jane had been forced to accede. It was either that or wrestle the implement from Miss Gwen's bony grasp.

Geoff managed quite a credible leer in the direction of Jane's bodice, patterned on his cousin Jasper at Jasper's most objectionable, as he leaned down and whispered, "Still no sign of Emmet?"

Jane lowered her eyelashes becomingly. "It is early yet. The note didn't assign a time."

"Pity, that." Geoff straightened slightly, using his new vantage point behind Jane to scan the occupants of the room, looking for any sign of Emmet.

The worst part of any mission was always the waiting. Waiting for their quarry to appear. Waiting for the quarry to say something useful. Hoping like the devil that the quarry wouldn't feel the need to sing.

The orange they had intercepted at the opera last night had been entirely clear on one point at least; Emmet was to meet with his French contact at Mrs. Lanergan's annual soiree. It made, Geoff had to admit, perfect sense from the conspirators' point of view. Mrs. Lanergan's party was always a crush, crammed with the soldiers from her husband's regiment and those of the Anglo-Irish community who could be found in town during the summer months. As long as one sounded and looked like a gentleman, nearly anyone could achieve admittance, blending in with the crowd. From where he stood, Geoff could barely hear the pianoforte in the far corner of the room, where a young lady was singing a plaintive air, surrounded by three admiring second lieutenants and one none too sober captain.

There was something particularly cheeky about staging a treasonous assignation right under the noses of a quarter of the Crown's Dublin garrison. Not that any of the garrison would recognize treason if it stomped on their toes and ran back and forth, waggling its ears and singing, "Death to the tyrannous usurpers!"

In the guise of a foppish aristocrat fearing for his own safety, Geoff had broached the topic of rebellion with Colonel Lanergan earlier that evening. "Nothing to worry about," snorted the colonel, his broad, red fingers stretched comfortably across his waistcoat. "Demmed nonsense! Safer than Bond Street, Dublin is. The Irishers wouldn't think of rising, not after what happened in the 'ninety-eight. They've learned their lesson."

If they had learned any lesson, it was that it was damnably easy to conduct a full-blown conspiracy straight under the noses of the meager British force headquartered in the castle. It was quite exceptionally well-chosen timing. Most of the great Anglo-Irish nobles who might have sniffed out the whiff of treason among their tenants were off in London for the Season, their mansions shuttered and manned by skeleton staffs. The officials at the castle, missing the gaiety of home, were either doing their damnedest to reconstruct it in the bottom of a cask of claret, or had hared off for a spot of sport elsewhere, leaving Dublin for the rebels to bustle in. Even General Fox, commander in chief of His Majesty's forces in Ireland, was talking of leaving Dublin for a jaunt to the west.

Not far from him, Geoff could hear the shrill voice of Lanergan's wife, elevating his income by ten thousand pounds a year for the benefit of her audience. It made him feel a bit like one of the animals in the Tower menagerie. This sceptr'd isle, Geoff reminded himself. Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George—or, in this case, King George. If his ancestors could shed their blood on the field of Agincourt, he could bloody well endure being eyed like a pig at market by a willowy miss and a comfortable-looking sort of widow in a gown that showed the signs of recent dyeing.

There was something familiar about that particular widow, something about the set of her shoulders and the tilt of her head that plucked at his memory. The lighting in the room was too dim to discern her hair color, and her face was entirely hidden from view. But there it was again, that twinge of recognition. Could she be Emmet's French contact? Geoff began to mentally run down his list of female spies he had known. Absent recent amputation, she was too petite to be the Marquise de Montval. She certainly wasn't that harridan who had gone for his eyes at the Sign of the Scratching Cat in Le Havre; she would have to have lost four stone, at the least. Fat Mimi, they had called her, none too imaginatively. The woman next to Mrs. Lanergan was pleasantly rounded, but Fat Mimi would have made four of her.

As Geoff's eyes narrowed on the little group, the woman tilted her head back to say something to the black-haired girl next to her, unwittingly positioning herself full in the glow of the sconce on the wall behind her. The candlelight struck amber glints in her exuberant mass of marmalade-colored hair, outlining with faithful precision a pair of wide blue eyes, a tip-tilted nose, and a mouth too generous for fashion. As he watched, she lifted her left hand to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and the ring on her third finger caught the light, the dark stone in the middle shining greasily in its heavy, almost barbaric, setting.

Geoff's stomach hit the gaily patterned carpet and kept on going.

"Oh, no," said Geoff, shaking his head. "It can't be."

"I assure you it can," replied Miss Gwen, looking affronted. "I decoded the message myself."

Geoff ignored her.

There might be hundreds of girls who might, at a distance, in an unevenly lit room, be taken for Letty Alsworthy, but there was only one Pinchingdale betrothal ring. The thing was so hideously ugly that no one would ever bother to fashion another. His grandmother, a pithy woman who delighted in scandalizing her vaporish daughter-in-law, had described it as a carbuncle masquerading as a jewel. It was a cabochon-cut monstrosity dating back to a medieval ancestor, a thrifty Norman warrior, who, rather than invest in unnecessary feminine baubles, had simply pried the jewel out of his sword to present to his bride—reportedly over the body of several of her recently slain relatives, who had just fallen prey to that selfsame sword. The last was just the sort of story his grandmother liked to tell, and was probably untrue, but it was too vivid an image to entirely banish.

And he, Geoff realized in disgust, was rambling. He was rambling to himself, which made it even worse. At least, in the context of a conversation, one could excuse rambling as part of a social exercise. But to ramble to oneself surely had to be a first step on the perilous path to madness.

"Lord Pinchingdale!" Miss Gwen's sharp voice called him to account, along with a nudge in the ribs.

Geoff blinked a few times to clear his vision. Perhaps he was mad already. How could one of sane mind possibly explain the appearance of his unwanted bride—and the Pinchingdale betrothal ring—both of which he had last seen five days before in the ballroom of his London town house? True, the passage from London to Dublin sometimes took as little as two days, but how would she even know he was going to Ireland? He had only told

Miles.

Geoff's mind lurched back into place, and the world righted itself again. He wasn't mad; he wasn't hallucinating; he was just the victim of a critical error of judgment. Madness might have been preferable.

At the time, informing Miles of his travel plans had seemed a perfectly logical thing to do. He needed information about the Black Tulip, of which Miles possessed more than anyone else in London, having recently had a close and personal run-in with the woman. Miles, being an agent of the War Office himself, wasn't likely to go blabbing about Geoff's whereabouts, not unless he wanted to be one friend short.

He had failed to take into account the Henrietta factor.

Damn.

He should have foreseen that anything that he told Miles would be automatically passed along to Henrietta. And with Henrietta intent upon bridging what she perceived as a senseless rift between Geoff and his new bride It was enough to make Paris during the Terror look like an interlude of halcyon peace. Aside from the small matter of the guillotine, of course.

"Oh, dear!" Jane's voice, deliberately shrill, sliced into Geoff's reverie as something thumped onto the floor just in front of Geoff's booted feet. "Lord Pinchingdale, I seem to have dropped my fan. Would you be so good as to retrieve it for me?"

Automatically, Geoff swept down to his knees, extending the fallen fan to Jane with a courtly gesture meant to recall Sir Walter Raleigh.

"We have a problem. A very large problem," he said.

"We?" cackled Miss Gwen, bestowing her gimlet eye on Geoff.

"We," affirmed Geoff, trying not to flinch as Jane batted him playfully about the head with her fan. A concussion was the least of his worries.

"Don't try to go foisting off your problems on us, young man."

Jane waved her to silence. "What sort of problem, Geoffrey?"

"Not what," replied Geoff hoarsely, grabbing the edge of Jane's chair for balance as he wove unsteadily to his feet. He felt a bit as he had the first time he had drunk too much brandy, from a flask smuggled between him and Richard and Miles, hiding from their housemaster in an unheated back corridor at Eton. There had been that same sickening lurch in the pit of his stomach, and the vague feeling of something very wrong with the world. "Who."

"Isn't that what she just asked?" Miss Gwen tapped her parasol impatiently. "Don't waste time shilly-shallying over semantics. Who is it, Pinchingdale?"

"My " Geoff choked on the relevant word. How could he admit to the presence of a hitherto undisclosed wife, when the integrity of their mission depended upon the continued pretense of his bachelorhood?

"Spit it out! We haven't all night."

Geoff made sure his back was turned to the room, grateful that they had chosen a corner that abutted a wall, not a window. "My wife."

That silenced even Miss Gwen.

Unfortunately, it didn't silence her for long.

"How could you be so irresponsible as to acquire a wife at this critical juncture?" demanded Miss Gwen.

"It was not a considered course of action," replied Geoff tightly.

"Clearly," sniffed Miss Gwen. "Was she a youthful indiscretion? A childhood betrothal?"

"There's no need to go into the details now," said Jane, effectively forestalling Miss Gwen. "Necessities first. Is she going to make a scene?"

Geoff glanced back at the small group next to a crude reproduction of a red-lacquer Chinese cabinet. His wife was frowning at the carpet in a way that suggested that she had spotted him—or, more precisely, that she had spotted him with Jane. But she hadn't said anything. At least, not yet.