Beyond Compare

by Candace Camp

  As Kyria and Reed reached the back hallway, Con rushed out of the conservatory door. He saw them and sagged against the wall, struggling to catch his breath, his small chest heaving.

  He was a terrible sight—his pants torn and muddied, leaves in his hair and caught on his jacket, his hair damp with sweat and sticking out every which way, his face scratched and bleeding, his cheeks flushed from exertion. A fierce red mark splotched his forehead just above his eyebrow.

  “Con!” Kyria and Reed rushed to him, just as Rafe ran up to join them.

  “Al…Alex!” Con panted, pulling back as Kyria reached out to take him in her arms. “You gotta…”

  “Alex?” Kyria asked. “Something happened to Alex?”

  “Where is he?” Reed put in.

  In answer, Con turned and started off at a run back through the conservatory. Kyria, Reed and Rafe pelted after him. Con ran out onto the terrace and down the steps into the garden, racing along the paths into the informal parklike area beyond.

  Although the grounds of Broughton House were small compared to those at their country home, they were large for a house in London, containing almost a city block of trees and grass inside the walls of the estate. Con led them toward the back of the grounds. There, close to the high east wall, beneath a large tree, lay the sprawled still body of Denby, the footman Kyria had set to look after the boys. Alex was nowhere in sight.

  The fear that had been growing in Kyria with every step now blazed into full-blown terror. “Alex!” she shouted. “Alex!”

  “He’s gone!” Con panted, dropping to his knees beside Denby. “They…they got him!” He pointed vaguely toward the stone wall.

  As Kyria knelt beside Denby, Rafe and Reed ran to the wall. Jumping, they grabbed the top and pulled themselves up to look over, then returned to where Kyria knelt beside the footman, her handkerchief pressed to his temple.

  “He’s been hit on the head,” she told them. “He’s bleeding and unconscious, but I don’t see any other wounds. I don’t think he was shot or stabbed.”

  “They hit him,” Con panted out. Though his face was pale, the bright red mark standing out sharply, he was regaining his breath, and he managed to add, “With a big stick.”

  “Who are they?” Reed asked.

  Con shook his head. “I don’t know! There were three of them. They came over the wall. Alex and I were over there.” He turned to point at a spot a short distance away. “We…we saw them. We didn’t know what they were doing. They just climbed over. Denby was watching us, and he didn’t see them at first. Then he turned, and one of them hit him hard, like this.” Con demonstrated. “They came after us. So Alex and I ran.” Con stopped, tears starting in his eyes.

  “Good lad,” Reed said encouragingly. “You did exactly right.”

  “But they caught Alex?” Rafe asked.

  Con nodded. “Me, too, but when they were climbing back over the wall, they didn’t have hold of me good enough—Alex and I were kicking and hitting and trying to get away, you see—and anyway, at the top of the wall, I pulled away real hard, and he dropped me. So I came to get you.”

  At this point, Denby groaned and opened his eyes. His eyes wavered around, and he squeezed them shut again, moaning, “Ow, me head.”

  “Stay still,” Kyria told him. “You’ll be all right.”

  She looked up at Rafe, who was standing with one hand comfortingly on Con’s shoulder. Her gaze was filled with fear and pleading.

  “Don’t worry,” Rafe said quietly. “We’ll get him back.”

  “That’s right,” Reed agreed. He glanced over to where several of the servants, who had trailed out of the house after them, now stood silently, watching. “Phipps, get Denby inside and make him comfortable.” He turned back to Kyria and Con. “Con, you stay with your sister. I’m going out front and see what I can find out.”

  He looked at Rafe, who gave him a nod and came around to join him. Con looked anxiously after the two of them. “I can help them.”

  “No!” Kyria exclaimed, then added more softly. “Please don’t, Con. I need your help with Denby.”

  The servants carried the injured footman into the house, Con and Kyria following. They laid him down on the couch in the housekeeper’s sitting room, and Kyria cleaned and bandaged his head. After she cleaned away the blood, she found that the wound was not as bad as it had looked, the skin merely broken over a rapidly rising knot.

  “Do you remember what happened, Denby?” she asked.

  “I…I’m not sure. The boys were playing, and then…I think, was there a noise? I started to turn around and…” He sighed. “I don’t remember anything else.”

  “He didn’t see them, or at least not much,” Con said. “He turned around just as they were on him.”

  “I’m sorry, my lady,” Denby said. “What happened? Where’s Master Alex?”

  “We’re not sure. He seems…he seems to have been taken.” Kyria struggled to clamp down on the terror rising within her.

  Who had taken him? Where had they gone? What was going to happen to him?

  Con slipped his hand into hers and squeezed, and Kyria looked down at him, smiling and blinking back the tears that flooded her eyes. “We’ll get him back,” she said firmly, returning the squeeze.

  She and Con left the footman in the care of the housekeeper and started toward the front of the house. They met Rafe and Reed coming back in the front door.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked eagerly. “Did anybody see where they took him?”

  “The only person who saw anything was a street sweeper at the intersection,” Reed told her. “He said there was a carriage standing outside the wall all day. He had noticed it because it didn’t move. Then he saw a fellow climb over the fence out of our grounds and go to the carriage, then two men got out of the carriage, and they all climbed back over the wall. Naturally, he thought this odd, so he continued to watch, and the next thing he saw was the men coming back over the wall, carrying two boys, but one of the boys fell back inside. They carried the other one, kicking and screaming, into the carriage and drove off. At least he could tell us the direction the carriage went.”

  Kyria felt deathly cold. “Oh, poor Alex! Who could have done this? Why?”

  “I don’t know who,” Rafe said, “but I think it’s a safe bet that the why is to get hold of that reliquary.”

  “I agree.” Reed nodded. “Given everything that’s been going on, I think it has to be related. I directed the footmen to talk to everyone they can find in the direction the carriage went. I’ve sent for Tom Quick to help in that hunt. Maybe we can find someone who saw where the carriage turned or…” Reed stopped and sighed, then turned to Con. “Let’s go sit down, and I want you to tell me again everything that happened. Try to remember every single thing.”

  Con nodded. When the four of them were seated in Reed’s office, Con once again told of the men climbing over the wall and knocking out the footman, then chasing and capturing the twins and hauling them over the wall.

  “Did you get a look at any of their faces?” Kyria asked. “Could you recognize any of them again?”

  Con shook his head. “They wore masks over their faces. You know, like you wear to a costume ball.”

  “Half masks?” Kyria asked.

  He nodded. “All black. I saw the bottom part of their faces, but…”

  “No, I realize. You wouldn’t be able to recognize them,” Reed said. “Was there no scar, no oddity about a mouth or nose?”

  Con thought for a moment, then reluctantly shook his head. “Nothing I remember, and they were all dressed in black.”

  “Did they say anything?” Rafe asked.

  “Yes!” Con brightened. “The one who dropped me said something. It sounded like an oath—the way his voice sounded, I mean. But I couldn’t understand what he said. And one of the other men said something to him. Several words. But I couldn’t understand them, either. I think it was a foreign language. It didn’t sound familiar
at all.”

  “Would you have known if it was French?” Kyria asked.

  “It wasn’t French. I’m pretty sure of that. Or German. We’ve studied both those languages.”

  “You think it’s Habib?” Kyria looked over at Rafe.

  He shrugged. “Could be. I certainly think we should have a talk with the man. But it could have been the man who escaped us, the one at the tavern. He was apparently foreign, too. And of course, the men the other night—”

  “Oh!” Con exclaimed. “There was something else. I just remembered it!”

  “What?”

  “The chap who picked me up had a medallion on a gold chain around his neck. It was under his shirt, but when he was climbing over the wall and trying to hold on to me, it fell outside his shirt, and I saw it. It was gold and round and it had this, I don’t know, a kind of symbol or something engraved on it.”

  “What kind of symbol?” Reed asked eagerly.

  “I don’t know. I’d never seen it before.” Con paused. “I could try to draw it.”

  “Good.” Reed whipped out a piece of paper and a pencil and handed them to the boy.

  Con bent over the paper, drawing, his tongue clamped between his teeth in concentration. He scratched out his drawing and started again. Finally he stopped and held it up for the others to see. They bent forward to look at the drawing.

  Inside the circle, two lines ran parallel, curving up and together and bending to the right at the top, joining in a swirl. Kyria stared at the drawing, the blood draining out of her face.

  “Oh, my God!” she whispered. “I’ve seen that. I drew it!”

  There was a moment of stunned silence, then Reed and Rafe began to talk at once.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know what it means. It’s just…something I drew. I was sketching a design for a necklace.” She paused, thinking. “Well, actually, I think I may have started drawing this design first, and then I made it into a necklace. I don’t know what it means, if anything. I’d never seen it before that. Wait. I’ll show you.”

  Kyria left the office and darted up the back stairs to her room, returning a few minutes later with her drawing pad. She opened the pad and set the sketch of the necklace down on the desk beside Con’s drawing.

  “That’s it!” Con said excitedly, jabbing his finger at Kyria’s drawing. “That is exactly what the medallion looked like.”

  “See, I drew it down here first, just the symbol, and I liked the design. Then I got the idea of putting it on metal squares and linking them into a necklace.”

  “This is too much coincidence,” Reed said. “You can’t have just happened to think of exactly the same design that is on the kidnapper’s medallion. You must have seen it somewhere.”

  Kyria shrugged. “Perhaps. But I don’t know where. I have no memory of ever seeing it before I drew it. It was an idea that popped into my head one day.”

  “Maybe you saw it someplace that we have been the past few days,” Rafe suggested, “and you just didn’t notice it enough to remember. Like at Ashcombe’s place. It has that look of something ancient, don’t you think? Where else have we been? Here, of course, and the Blue Bull tavern. I wouldn’t think there was anything like that there. The opium den…”

  “No, no, it couldn’t have been any of those places,” Kyria protested. “I drew it before we came here. I drew it at Broughton Park, not long before we left. I had been looking at the reliquary, and then I went back up to my room. I was just sitting there, daydreaming, and suddenly this design flashed into my mind. So if I saw it, it must have been at Broughton Park.”

  “It looks like the kind of things Papa has,” Con commented, tracing the whorled design with his forefinger. “Perhaps you saw it on one of his pots or bracelets or something.”

  “Perhaps,” Kyria conceded. “But it doesn’t seem exactly Greek or Roman.”

  “Byzantine, then,” Rafe suggested. “Especially if you had just been looking at the reliquary. It triggered some memory in you of Byzantine art.”

  “Or the Near East,” Reed put in. “It reminds me a little of that silver belt Theo sent you that time, the one with the tiny bells hanging off it.”

  “The harem-dancer belt?” Kyria tilted her head. “Yes. It’s not the same design, but there is a sort of Levantine flavor to it.”

  “You probably saw it in some book or other of the duke’s,” Rafe said. “But which one? And primarily, what does that mean about the men who are wearing it?”

  “No, wait,” Kyria said. “Were all of them wearing it or just the man who had Con? Because if it was only him, then it could just be some personal decoration, and he wears it because he thinks it’s attractive. But if all of them are wearing it, then it would seem to denote some sort of club or order…”

  “Like the Keepers of the Holy Standard?” Rafe asked.

  “Yes,” Kyria said, “I suppose so. But this doesn’t seem like something they would do. After all, they rescued us last night. Why would they turn around and try to harm us? They presented their case to me, and I told them that I would think very carefully about it. I am rather inclined to return the box to them.”

  “Yes, but they don’t know that,” Rafe pointed out.

  “All right, then,” Reed said. “Shall we start with them? These Keepers?”

  “If we knew where they were,” Rafe said. “Unfortunately, they just seem to pop up now and again. We don’t know where they are located.”

  “I’m not at all sure that finding the Keepers would help,” Kyria argued. “I don’t think they are the ones who kidnapped Alex. That symbol doesn’t look like a religious one. Wouldn’t it be more likely that they would have a medallion with the Chi-Rho emblem on it rather than this? That was what was on the front of Brother Jozef’s garb last night.”

  Rafe shrugged. “You’re probably right. As for Alex’s kidnappers being foreign, that does not give us much direction, either. This whole affair is crowded with foreigners—the Lebanese dealer, the Frenchman, the Russian, even the man who originally brought the reliquary to you. Then there’s the man who hired Sid and Dixon, and we have no idea whether he is the Frenchman, the Russian or someone else altogether.”

  “Well, we can’t just sit here. We have to start somewhere,” Reed said pragmatically.

  At that moment, there was a knock on the door, and one of the parlor maids came in. “There’s a letter here, my lord. My lady.” She looked from Reed to Kyria. “A boy just delivered it. It has no address on it, and when I asked who it was for, he said he didn’t know. They just told him to deliver it to this house.”

  “‘They?’” Reed repeated, rising. “Who exactly is ‘they’?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I made the boy wait here, in case you wanted to talk to him—I mean, what with all that’s going on.”

  “Quite right. You were smart to do so.” Reed took the letter and ripped it open, his eyes running quickly down the page. “You were right, McIntyre. They want the reliquary.”

  “What does it say, Reed?” Kyria asked anxiously. “Don’t keep us in suspense.”

  “Sorry.” Reed began to read the letter aloud. “‘We have the boy.’ Obviously they wrote this before they actually accomplished the deed—they have written ‘boys’ and then crossed out the ‘s.’ ‘We will give him to you in exchange for the box. Tomorrow. We will send you time and place.’” His jaw tightened. “Damn! They intend to keep him all night!”

  “Poor Alex! He will be so frightened!” Kyria said, sucking in her breath in a sob.

  Rafe wrapped an arm around her, pulling her against him comfortingly. “Don’t worry, darlin’. We’ll get him back.”

  * * *

  “We certainly will,” Reed agreed grimly. “Bring the messenger in here, Milly.”

  She bobbed a curtsy and appeared a few minutes later with a street urchin in tow. The boy’s face was pale beneath his dirt, and he looked as if he
would have run if it had not been for the firm grip Milly and another maid had on his arms.

  “I din’t do nothin’,” were the first words out of the boy’s mouth as soon as the maids let him go and stepped back out of the door.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to accuse you of anything,” Reed told him calmly. “I just want to hear about the person who gave you this message to deliver here.”

  “I din’t know ’im or nothin.’ ’E just give me a couple o’ coppers and told me to bring it ’ere. ’E din’t say nothin’ about yer grabbing me and all.”

  “Yes, well, I don’t intend to harm you.” Reed fished a half crown out of his pocket and held it up in front of the boy. “In fact, I plan to give you this if you will think very hard and tell me everything you can about the man who gave you the message.”

  The boy’s eyes widened. “All right. I’ll tell you everythin’. Uh, ’e was shorter than you, like. Regular lookin’, I guess.”

  “Was he foreign?” Reed asked.

  The boy looked surprised. “No. ’E sounded like you. You know, upper crust, like.”

  “Really?” Reed cast a glance at Rafe and Kyria. “What color hair and eyes did he have, do you remember? What sort of complexion?”

  The boy shrugged. “Regular. Not dark or nothin’. Brown ’air, I thinks. ’Is eyes…” The boy seemed to cast back in his mind, then said, “I don’t know. Sorry. I didn’t notice ’em much.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “Like a gentleman. Like you or ’im.” He looked toward Rafe. “Dark-gray sort o’ jacket, it was, and trousers the same. White shirt. Bowler ’at.”

  “So, a well-spoken, well-dressed English sort of chap,” Reed summed up.

  The boy nodded. Reed cast a look at Rafe and Kyria, both of whom shook their heads. They could think of nothing else to ask. Reed gave the lad the coin and sent him on his way.

  “All right,” Reed said. “So now, what do we know?”

  “That at least one of the kidnappers is English,” Kyria began, “and apparently dresses and talks like a gentleman. And the others, or some of the others, are foreign. We know of at least four people or groups who want the reliquary—the Keepers, Prince Dmitri, Monsieur Brulatour and Mr. Habib.”