The Devil May Care (Brotherhood of Sinners #1) (38 page)

He returned late in the evening, with ample confirmation that Will’s report had been correct, but was no closer to tracking the offer to any particular source. A man—a particularly nondescript man, apparently, of average height, medium coloring, brown hair, brown eyes, dressed in singularly ordinary clothing—had been visiting taverns, spreading the word. But no one claimed to know his name, or to have seen him go in any particular direction afterwards. In fact, no one would admit to having spoken to him directly, and thus no one had a word to say on where whoever managed to seize Salomé Mirabeau was to go to claim his reward. Apparently, her captor was simply to spread the word that she was being held, and the man promised to appear again.

* * *

Rachel lay down on top of the coverlet on Sarah’s bed, and pressed her cheek into Sarah’s pillow. She derived a little comfort from that, but not much.

Sebastian was gone from her bed when she woke that morning to a clatter of horse hooves and coach wheels beside the house, and the voices of Will and Rosa and Eva heading somewhere. The house was empty except for Emilio when she came downstairs to find something to eat, and Emilio seemed unwilling to talk with her.

So she returned to her room.

It was as if she’d merely dreamed Sebastian and what they’d done last night.

Now a sad, heavy feeling hung on her. The voice of Lord Henry Walters echoed over and over through her skull.
Blood. Betrayal
.
Treachery.

If she made the wrong choices, Eva would die.

So she’d pulled the notebook up from where it was hidden between the wall and bed, and studied the damned thing for hours, looking for even the smallest fragments of pattern in the dark, heavy set of symbols she’d come to think of as the Black Cipher.

She identified 30 distinct symbols. Some version of an alphabet perhaps? But she knew no alphabet with 30 letters. What were those additional symbols? Punctuation? Special symbols for combinations of letters, like “ch” and “th”? Ideograms, each one standing for a word, or a name? They could be anything.

Her eyes were blurring. Her brain felt like it had been plucked from her skull and left out in a sandstorm.

Every now and then something teased around the edges of her consciousness, the hint of something language-like about it, with a combination of alteration and repetition. But every time she tried to make it resolve into something solid and dependable, the scribblings fell into randomness again.

It was as if she’d forgotten how to read.

She looked over onto the side table beside the bed, where a heavy lantern now sat. Sebastian had sent it up with Emilio this morning—a light source far harder to knock over than a candlestick.

It didn’t take a code breaker to understand the message: he wouldn’t be visiting her again at night.

For which she supposed she was grateful.

The lantern itself was ingenious. Sebastian had showed it to her days ago, saying it was made for him by a watchmaker who’d fit it with cleverly-worked shutters. Three sides were opaque metal, but the fourth had sliding, curved triangular panels layered over one another at radiating angles, so they could fan open or shut, leaving a central circular hole as narrow as a fingertip, or wide as a teacup. “Very useful,” Sebastian had said, “when you need to move in a dark place, but want to avoid being seen. You can aim the light exactly where you need it, and expose yourself as little as possible.”

The perfect object for Sebastian. He revealed nothing about himself that he didn’t specifically want revealed.

She sighed, and went back to staring at the notebook. Yet another hopelessly stubborn thing. She’d had quite enough of secrets—Lord Henry’s, Sebastian’s, this blasted book’s, even Sarah’s. Why in heaven had her sister used such a complex cipher for the notes she’d taken in blue ink? Who was she trying to hide her thoughts from?

Rachel’s heart grew heavy. There seemed to be only one answer to that question.

Sebastian assumed Sarah didn’t break the cipher until the night she was killed. He hadn’t even known she’d
had
an encrypted document until Victoire spoke of it the night Sarah died.

And by that time, Sarah had had the notebook for a month.

What if she actually broke the cipher well before she died, and concealed that fact from both Sebastian and Lord Henry?

The thickness of the notes in the margins meant she’d worked feverishly on it. She’d virtually run out of room to write.

And what had she done then?

Rachel sat up suddenly.

Was there another notebook somewhere, or other sheets of paper, on which Sarah had finished working out the problem?

She hadn’t given anything more to Evangelina, if such papers existed, or the child surely would have given them to her, too. But if they had existed, could they still be in this room somewhere?

Where? The room had been thoroughly searched by English agents after Sarah’s death. Of course, they hadn’t known Sarah was deliberately
hiding
something from them.

Much as she itched to begin tearing the room apart, Rachel made herself lay flat on her back on the bed, letting her mind consider the possibilities, trying to remember how Sarah had gone about things when they were children.

She would have to
think
to find it. She would have to reason it through—to think like Sarah thought. It was the one advantage she had over everybody else.

Her gaze traced the patterns of cracks and swirls in the plaster of the ceiling. They seemed to taunt her with the possibilities of meaning.

A sudden thought jolted into her mind: Mr. Rapson—
John
—was only a few miles away, waiting for her to come to him this morning. Worried half to death, no doubt, and desperate to return with her to England. But she couldn’t go downstairs again to arrange for a message to be sent to him to beg him to go home alone; Sebastian might be there, and facing him seemed overwhelming.

Poor John. If only he were here.
He
might be able to see something in the Black Cipher that she could not.

Because she was missing something—something Sarah had
meant
for her to see.

Her mind drifted. After a time, she dozed again, still exhausted from the night before, but it was not a restful sleep. Again, her brain fumed with strange images. Metal doors sliding over one another. Lines of blue and black ink swirling and unswirling like whirls of smoke.

And then the image was Sebastian’s face, his mouth a cruel smirk—it was moving, forming words, but she couldn’t make out what they were.

Speak louder
, she tried to cry out to him, but the sound was stunted in her throat.

And he turned away from her, facing a great blank white wall, and traced his hand along it, in a strange looping pattern. Black smears formed everywhere his fingers touched.

She expected nothing of sense, but she realized after a moment that letters were forming, letters she recognized.
F-U-G-E Q-U-A-R-E-R-E.

Fuge quarere
. Cease asking.

Sebastian turned back to look at her, a forbidding expression on his face, and he raised his arms up, palms thrust outwards, as if to block her way.

The weight of despair pressed hard against her.

Then it was as if someone had clapped their hands loudly just beside her ear. She awoke with a jolt, and sat straight up in the bed, alone in the room, the coverlet pooling around her.

Fuge quarere
. She knew that phrase.

Knew it intimately. It was part of that Horatian Ode she and Sarah had loved:
cease asking what may happen tomorrow
.

Now the next line fairly sang in her mind:
And whatever fortune gives you, consider it wealth.

Dear Lord—she wasn’t missing something. Something
was missing
. She threw off the coverlet and stood, her eyes moving frantically over the shelves and piles of books.

She’d looked at so many of them, but hadn’t seen a volume of Horace’s Odes. If Sarah had acquired all these other books, surely she’d acquired a copy of the Odes. She wouldn’t be without her favorite. It must be here somewhere.

Sarah had wanted her to come here if she died. She’d left that message inside the notebook: Sister, protect my daughter. Could she have left another message somewhere? A message somewhere she’d known only Rachel would look?

Seized almost by a fury, Rachel began to pull the rest of the books from their shelves. Caesar. Sophocles. Lucretius. Aristophanes. Horace’s Recitations.

But not the Odes.

Sarah must have kept it somewhere special. Somewhere private.

She rooted through the drawers of clothing. Pulled the gowns from the wardrobe.

Nothing.

She looked behind the mirror of the vanity table, behind the table, behind the wardrobe, on the undersides of drawers.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Yet it had to be here. Somewhere close. Sarah would always have a copy of that book.

And then it struck her: when they were girls, when Mr. Rapson first showed them the Odes, Sarah had dared to bring a copy back to their room with them, though Great Aunts Mary and Martha searched the premises on a regular basis.

Neither old woman was strong enough to lift their mattress, so for the few weeks they kept the book, while they were still memorizing its contents, Sarah had stashed the book beneath it. The book got flattened against the ropes that held the mattress up, and the spine soon cracked, but neither of them cared, and they knew Mr. Rapson would forgive them. It was worth it, to know Horace was there with them, night and day.

Sarah would not have forgotten that.

Rachel laid Sarah’s porcelain doll carefully on the side table, and then threw the pillow from the bed. Tore off the coverlet, tore off the sheets. Shoved her hands down under the edge of the mattress and heaved and dragged the heavy thing halfway onto the floor.

Nothing. Still nothing. Just the framework of supporting ropes, and below that floorboards and dust and empty air.

No, it couldn’t be. It
couldn’t
be.

Sarah
had
to have used this hiding place.

Rachel laid her hand in the place where the book should have been and hooked her hands around the ropes, willing the book to be there, in that empty space.

A rough spot on the inner side of the bedframe chafed against the side of her hand. A surprisingly rough spot.

She brushed her fingers against it. Small grooves lined with tiny splinters poked at her.

Something had been carved crudely into the wood.

Shadows concealed whatever it was, so she grabbed up the lantern, aiming its beam where the carving was. Letters, in Sarah’s cipher.

Rachel translated them quickly with their counterparts as she’d found them in the Tacitus.

PETEINTEIPSO.

They were written as the Romans often wrote, with no spaces between words. But it was easy enough to tell what was meant:
Pete in te ipso
, look inside yourself.

“Blast it! Bloody, bloody blast!
Look inside yourself
? What kind of help is that? I can’t look inside myself! I don’t know the answer, Sarah, damn it!”

She thumped the lantern back onto the side table. And then her eyes fell up on the doll, lying there so primly. With its auburn curls streaming down.

Curls just the color of Sarah’s hair. And of her own.

“Sweet heaven.”
Pete in te ipso
.

The doll’s head and hands and legs were made of porcelain—but the body was not. The body was something soft, fabric stuffed with batting. Could there be papers inside? It made no crinkling sound when she squeezed it, or else the searchers surely would have eviscerated the thing already.

With shaking fingers, Rachel plucked open the tiny buttons that fastened the doll’s silk dress and drew the fabric away.

The seams along the back of the doll’s torso were neat and professional, but down near the bottom of one of the seams on the side was a quarter inch of rougher stitching. Nothing noticeable to anyone who wasn’t searching for it, but it made Rachel’s heart leap.

She bit through the threads and tugged at the seam until she had a space wide enough to wiggle one finger through.

At first, she felt only the softness of the stuffing, but then she pushed farther down into the hollow porcelain of one leg.

The blessed feel of a paper’s edge scraped against her fingertip. A tightly rolled paper, tied with a bit of thread at the upper end. She drew it out.

Picking away the threads that held the little scroll closed at both top and bottom, she unfurled the paper in her palm. Sarah’s Tacitus cipher covered the paper—neat lines, carefully written—with individual symbols from the Black Cipher appearing near the bottom.

Blood drumming in her ears, she began to substitute in the letters that had worked in the volume of Tacitus. Would she get nothing but nonsense again?