Touch of Rogue (21 page)

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Authors: Mia Marlowe

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Fantasy, #Historical Romance

BOOK: Touch of Rogue
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This was normally the point in her amorous adventures when she’d call a halt to the relationship. Jacob’s question implied a future, or at least a continuance, for them. Needing someone had always brought her to grief.
She reveled in the independence of widowhood. She delighted in making her own choices, but now that she’d tasted that delicious
us
with Jacob, her solitary
me
didn’t seem nearly so appealing.
“It won’t ruin us.” She walked toward the door, stopping to look back at him when her gloved hand touched the knob. “But try very hard not to be seen.”
C
HAPTER
19
 
J
ulianne was welcomed back to Lord Kilmaine’s home by his butler, who promptly fetched a silver tray laden with several envelopes.
“Madam has received some correspondence while she was out,” the stiffly correct fellow said. “If she wishes to respond, she will find writing necessities in the parlor escritoire.”
Julianne thanked him and wandered into the parlor to read her letters. One was from Mr. Farthingale, director of the Drury Lane theatre, with the urgent request that she contemplate a return to the stage as his Desdemona. She laid that one aside, considering it a course of last resort.
Another had been redirected to her from the Golden Cockerel. It was from her stepson, demanding she return to Cornwall forthwith and agree to marry his friend. He repeated his promise to cut off her funds if she didn’t return before Christmas. Algernon’s heir had always resented her and meant to humble her by insisting she accept his choice of a husband for her. He knew she found his friend the baron odious. It was probably why he forced the issue. She ripped the note in two and tossed it into the fire. It was most satisfying to watch the threatening missive flare up and then curl into gray ash.
Unfortunately, disposing of the note didn’t dispose of the threat.
Surprisingly enough, one of the other letters was from a Lady Sotheby, who introduced herself as a friend of Lady Kilmaine’s. She’d be pleased if Julianne would call at her home on Thursday next at four o’clock for tea. Lady Sotheby had a reputation for glittering parties and tasteful soirées. She was known to support artists and poets and musicians. Perhaps Julianne’s theatre background had prompted this invitation.
No matter the reason, the closed door of the ton had inched open for her a bit. Unfortunately, Julianne didn’t know if she’d be able to accept. It was only a guess that the last dagger was in London. If they retrieved the other half of the manuscript and Dr. Snowdon was able to decipher and translate the rest, she and Jacob might be off to who knew where looking for the final dagger by Thursday next.
The last item was a small package that contained a black domino mask and an envelope sealed with red wax into which an image of a tree had been pressed. Undoubtedly from a Druid. She ripped it open and read:
At midnight a carriage will pass through the alley behind Lord Kilmaine’s home. Meet it at the garden gate promptly. Wear the mask. Come alone or forever abandon the evergreen path.
 
The note was unsigned, but it bore the same sharp juniper scent she associated with Sir Malcolm.
No one would call to collect her at her host’s front door that evening. No one would know when or where she’d gone. Jacob intended to shadow her, but he was expecting a coach to arrive in a conspicuous manner. If she slipped out the back at midnight, she’d be alone.
She settled at the escritoire to write Jacob a note about this new development. Then she remembered the way she’d been followed and watched since she’d arrived in London. If a runner departed from Lord Kilmaine’s town house and delivered her note to Jacob, someone would probably be aware of it. She might ruin her chance at finding the rest of the manuscript before she began.
She replaced the inkwell and closed the desk. Somehow, when her mysterious ride came for her at midnight, she’d have to get by as she’d done all her life.
On her own.
 
Jacob shifted uncomfortably in the shadows at the corner of the block. The rain had stopped. Every pothole and chink in the cobbles was filled with liquid silver shimmering in the lamplight. The infernal stink of the city had been washed away for a bit, but the wind was raw and chill and touched with enough damp to flay any exposed skin. He promised himself to double the pay of his pint-sized watchers in the future simply for putting up with the damned London elements.
He glanced up at the moon, now on its descent across the dark sky. Even though he’d sent a note to Quinn, telling him it was all right to allow Julianne to leave that evening after all, no one had called at Lord Kilmaine’s town house. One by one, the homes on the Mayfair street went dark. The only sound was the occasional bark of a stray dog and the plodding clop of horses’ hooves. Since he saw no carriage, he figured the conveyance was traveling on a neighboring block and the sound had echoed down the manmade canyons of four-storey town houses.
He was almost ready to give up, assuming Sir Malcolm had changed his mind, when the new lad, Pete, came running toward him and skidded to a halt.
“I been watching at the other end of the block, like ye told me, guv,” Pete said between gasping breaths. “A coach just turned down the back alley behind the house where the lady’s stayin’.”
“Good lad.” That had to be Julianne’s ride. Jacob gave the boy an extra coin. “Time to seek your bed.”
The little blighter took to his heels, disappearing into the night without another word. Jacob stole across the street and walked around to peer down the alley. A brougham was stopped behind his cousin’s home. He caught sight of a billowing skirt disappearing into the equipage along with the glimpse of a slim ankle he thought he recognized.
Julianne was on her way. He ducked back against the brick exterior of the end town house when the driver chirruped softly to his horse. As the brougham rattled by, Jacob noticed Julianne wasn’t alone in the conveyance. At least two men and another woman were with her, all wearing masks.
Before the driver turned out of the alley and onto the main street, Jacob leaped onto the boot and grasped the luggage rail. The driver whipped the horse into a trot and Jacob hung on as they clattered over the cobbles.
They left the rarified air of the fashionable neighborhoods and rattled along the Strand, past Temple Bar heading toward Ludgate. The brougham finally stopped before an unprepossessing tenement on Ivy Lane hunkered in the shadow of St. Paul’s.
The coach door opened and one of the men alighted first in order to hand the two women out. Then the other fellow climbed down from the brougham, muttering under his breath.
The house they were stopped before was narrow and a single candle burned in the one ground floor window. Faint light shot out under the door. There was a crack big enough to allow any sort of vermin in.
Fitting,
Jacob thought.
“I say, this don’t look like much. The way Chelmsford went on, I certainly expected more,” the last man said to his friend. “You, there. Driver, are you sure this is the right place?”
“It’s the right place. Door’s unlocked,” the driver said with gravel in his tone. “Don’t go in if you don’t want to, guv.”
Then he slapped the reins over his horse’s back and the brougham lurched forward. Jacob pressed himself flat against the back of the coach, figuring the darkness would hide him.
He needn’t have worried. The four initiates headed toward the door without a second glance at the retreating coach. He waited until the last man disappeared through it before he dropped from the rear of the equipage and headed back to the door.
It didn’t appear to be guarded, but he inched it open slowly in any case. He heard the retreating footsteps of the foursome and stole in behind them, trying to follow the sound since the solitary candle in the entryway was the only source of illumination. One of the men complained loudly of the dark and confounded tawdriness of the place until his companion ordered him to shut it or leave. Neither of the women said a word as they disappeared into a chamber off the long corridor.
Jacob put his ear to the crack in the door and heard a creaky scraping sound. A blast of air rush past him tinged with a stale, moldering odor. Then the scraping came again and the foul breeze stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The sound of footsteps was gone. There was no more complaining voice for him to follow.
He rushed forward into an empty room.
Julianne was uneasy about the darkness in the house on Ivy Lane, but she didn’t have long to fret. Once the other woman, who turned out to be their guide, opened a secret door behind a bookcase, a narrow tunnel yawned before them, lit at intervals with smoky torches. Julianne marched along behind their guide. The two gentlemen followed in single file.
The space smelled of damp earth and burning pitch, but the floor of the tunnel was relatively level. The walls and ceiling along the secret pathway were braced with blackened beams. Julianne wondered what sorts of wriggling creatures might thrive in the packed earth and pulled her skirts as close to her legs as she could.
After one of the men beaned his noggin on a low hanging beam, the men learned to duck their heads. Julianne and their guide were able to walk upright.
“Damnation, there’s another spider’s web. I don’t know what the rest of you were expecting, but this is not my idea of a good time,” said the man who’d been doing all the complaining. “This is all a bunch of rot, I tell you.”
Their guide turned back to glare at him, her eyes glittering in the slits of her domino. “Do not let the Grand Master hear you speak such blasphemies. Not if you value your tongue.”
No more complaints were forthcoming.
Finally the tunnel opened into a small antechamber. Their guide stopped.
“As I am, so shall you be.” She waved a hand toward a row of pegs on which black robes hung. “Don a robe and shed your old life.”
Julianne and the two men put on their robes. While it was easy to still tell she was a woman, since she was much shorter and her skirts billowed the robe out, the flowing black fabric rendered the two men virtually indistinguishable from one another.
“Come,” the guide said and led them through another door into a large vaulted chamber lit by a massive chandelier dangling from the apex of the ceiling. The room was circular, but at intervals, three arched open doorways led off into darkened corridors.
There was no longer packed earth beneath Julianne’s feet. A mosaic of obvious antiquity stretched across the space, the tiles tiny and their colors muted. A few patches of tiles were missing, but Julianne could clearly make out a group of hunters chasing a stag around the central dais. The room was ringed with other robed people who, at the sound of a low gong, began to walk toward the center of the room, crowding around a lit censer on the dais.
Julianne moved cautiously forward, peering around taller people. Aromatic smoke rose in gray curls to reform into thin clouds along the curved ceiling. The pleasing scent encouraged her to breathe deeply, but the incense caught in her throat and made her cough. Her vision grew hazy in the increasingly smoky air.
The group began chanting a slow, repetitive phrase in no language Julianne had ever heard. But the syllables sank into her brain, and she felt certain she ought to understand them. The meaning was there, clinging to the edge of her mind, waiting for her to discover it, if only she could listen hard enough.
The chant grew louder, faster and more guttural. The group broke into two and the chant became an antiphonal call and reply. Thrust and response, give and take, it was like sexual congress with sound.
A long drinking horn was passed around. Her guide drank from it and then forced it into Julianne’s hands. She raised it to her lips. The aroma of the drink was sweeter than mulled wine. Julianne went through the motions of a swallow, but didn’t take any liquid into her mouth. When she lowered the horn and passed it to the next person, her lips tingled, then went numb from the mere touch of the liquid.
Even if she knew what to say, she doubted she could speak coherently.
A loud thud sounded behind her and she glanced back to see that the door to the anteroom was firmly shut. Julianne’s heart shot to her toes.
Even if he’d been dogging her up to this point, there was no way Jacob could follow her now.

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