The coach rattled away, to return in one hour, and Mignon stiffened as Ivor took her arm. So far was he from amorous intent, however, that he cast her an irritated glance before guiding her roughly across the dirty yard. It served her right, reflected Mignon, for reading entirely too much into a simple kiss. So far was Lord Jeffries from appreciation of his companion—who was looking her best in a brown velvet spencer, a white muslin gown and a tucked silk bonnet with lace frills—that she might have worn sackcloth and ashes.
The doors were tightly locked. They skirted the building to stop under a small window. Ivor made short work of opening it. “Feeling missish. Miss Montague?” he inquired. “I fear you’ll have to be the one to enter.”
Mignon eyed the narrow opening, well above her head. Whatever Miss Montague may have been, whatever secrets burdened her conscience, she was no coward. “Very well.”
Ivor grasped her waist. Mignon scrambled through the window. She waited only to catch her breath and to subdue the unbecoming violence of feeling roused by the Viscount’s touch, and the realization he had surely seen up her petticoats, before unbolting the back door. The impropriety of the venture struck her anew as Ivor closed and bolted the door behind him.
“Your virtue is safe, Miss Montague,” he said, absently, looking around the bare room. “These are hardly the surroundings I would choose in which to ravish you.”
Mignon turned away. The Viscount’s purpose here was not seduction, but to find some proof of his mother’s innocence. “How fares Leda?” she asked, desperate for a change of topic. “I fear that she must find time weighing heavy on her hands.”
“Not she.” Lord Jeffries moved to rummage through an ancient writing desk. “At last report Leda had offered her services to form an association for the improvement of female prisoners in Newgate. She is now in her glory penning descriptions of the Inner Yard. It abuts on the streets, and every day it is filled with a struggling mass of skinny, half nude females fighting for position near the railing. They hold out sticks with spoons attached and beg passersby for money.” He turned and frowned at Mignon. “This seems to be an extremely profitless undertaking! Have you any idea why your aunt sent us here?”
Mignon shook her head. “Dulcie usually has good reasons, no matter how incomprehensible they may seem.” The Viscount looked skeptical.
Minion wandered idly about the mean little cottage, peering into an old pot, poking into a canister of tea, and mulling over what they’d already learned. Mary Elphinstone’s man of business, who obviously had borne the old woman no great affection, could tell them only that his employer was a gentlewoman fallen on hard times whose only source of income was an allowance that arrived regularly from London. The party responsible for this munificence was, or so he claimed, unknown to him. What a hobble! thought Mignon, and not just in regard to Leda’s predicament. She glanced at Ivor, still frowning over the contents of the writing desk, and approached the room’s only closet. In it were a few plain gowns and a high shelf that looked bare. Trying hard to forget that the owner of these few poor items had met her death in a singularly brutal manner, Mignon climbed onto a rickety old chair. A dusty sewing box sat at the very back of the dark recess. She stretched out her arm.
Lord Jeffries looked up to see her teetering on the chair. “What the devil are you doing? Come down from there!” Startled, Mignon overbalanced. She, the chair, and the dusty box, went flying through the air.
Miss Montague, however, did not tumble ignobly to the floor, for the Viscount caught her in midfall. “Put me down!” she gasped, very much afraid that she would cast decorum to the winds if clasped for long against that strong, hard, and overpoweringly masculine body. Lord Jeffries complied, and with such alacrity that Mignon immediately succumbed to a fit of the blue devils.
“You have a smudge.” He reached out to brush it from her cheek, and Mignon bit her lower lip, hard.
“Look!” she cried, desperately seeking distraction, and pointed at the sewing box, upended with its contents strewn about the floor. It did not serve: Lord Jeffries’ thoughtful glance never wavered from her face.
“I think, Miss Montague,” he said softly, “that it’s time we had a talk. You, I fear, are playing a deep game.”
Mignon would have moved away, had she anywhere to go except backwards into the closet. The Viscount blocked every other avenue of escape. “And you,” she said crossly, “are talking fustian! Your coachman will be returning any moment and we haven’t finished here.”
“My coachman,” retorted Ivor, a dangerous gleam in his brown eyes, “will not be back for at least three-quarters of an hour, being engaged in imbibing ale and gossip at the local inn. It is a puzzle that you can, er, respond to me so warmly one moment and the next behave as if you are totally indifferent. Or is it your habit, my darling, to go around casting out lures?”
“I didn’t!” wailed Mignon, looking everywhere but at the Viscount. Surely he must hear the beating of her heart, for he was standing very close and it was very loud. “Oh, why must you make such a piece of work of it? It is the height of absurdity! We both suffered a, um, moment of weakness and would come under the gravest censure were it to become known. But it will not, I assure you.”
“No?” Lord Jeffries sounded oddly amused. “Have you forgotten your aunt’s untimely entrance into the room?”
“You needn’t trouble yourself over Dulcie.” To her horror, Mignon’s voice was husky. She blinked rapidly.
“Do you suffer ‘moments of weakness’ often?” inquired the Viscount. “What a farrago of nonsense! Mignon, look at me.”
“No,” retorted the uncooperative Miss Montague.
“I see,” murmured Lord Jeffries, “that talking won’t pay toll.” Without another word he drew Mignon even closer still. Miss Montague, despite her fine words and noble resolutions, offered him not even a token protest.
“Oh, Ivor!” she gasped, when at length she was permitted to speak again. “Believe me—there are things you do not know—this simply will not do!”
“Moonshine, my darling.” The Viscount smiled down on her in a most dizzy-making manner. And then his glance fell upon the shattered sewing box. With an oath, he released her and moved away.
“What is it?” cried Mignon, dropping to her knees beside him on the floor. Strewn among the wreckage, scraps of material and spools of thread, was the unmistakable gleam of jewels. “Oh, no!”
“Oh, yes, I fear.” Grimly, Ivor extracted a handful of gems. “From the robbery of Rundle and Brydges, I’ll wager.”
Stunned, Mignon sank back on her heels. “Bow Street surely searched here. How did they come to be overlooked?”
“Bow Street,” mused Lord Jeffries, searching through the wreckage. “I am rapidly coming to rue the day when Henry Fielding was forced to turn from the penning of political satire to the practice of law.” He flicked a piece of broken wood. “Here’s our answer, I fancy. A false bottom. Apparently whoever planted these items here gave Bow Street credit for more initiative than they displayed.”
Mignon’s head was whirling. “You think the jewels were placed here in hope they would be found?”
“What other explanation is there?” asked Ivor, his face grim. “Other than that Leda is somehow mixed up in the robberies? Think how it must look! Mary Elphinstone was financed by someone, and in her cottage are discovered the proceeds of robbery. What would seem more obvious than that she was paid to keep silent?” He picked up a piece of paper from amid the rubble and scanned it, his lips compressed into a thin line. “Paid by Leda,” he added somberly.
“What is it?” Mignon asked feebly.
“The deed to this cottage.” Ivor’s glance was searching, as if he meant to seek out her loyalties. “We were sent here to help Leda, and it seems we have opened Pandora’s box instead. Things would be bleak indeed if these things fell into the wrong hands. You see, this property is in my mother’s name.”
Chapter 18
It was midnight. T
he woman crept along Piccadilly until she came to an elegant complex of buildings set one hundred feet back from the street and protected by a high wall topped by ornamental lamps. This magnificent structure—once Melbourne House, later York House—was the Albany, a most luxurious and convenient hotel that was sacred to bachelors and widowers. Among its illustrious residents was Lord Byron, complete with his macaw and his silver funerary urns from Greece. Also in residence there was Monk Lewis, a gentleman who possessed a taste for the supernatural and macabre, as witnessed by his phenomenally successful book, The Monk, and his play, The Captive, so convincing a portrayal of madness that it threw Covent Garden into hysterical confusion during its sole performance. The woman thought she’d as lief not encounter either of those gentlemen.
It meant ruin, of course, for any lady to be seen entering these male premises. She slipped through the gate, beneath its tall classical pedimented arch, and then ducked into the shadows as a porter passed by. He was an impressive figure in his coat with scarlet cuffs and collar, scarlet waistcoat and leather-lined velveteen breeches. Indeed, she reflected sourly, the porter was a great deal finer than she.
Even though it was late, and the night windy and tempestuous, traffic roared past the entrance, filling the air with the load clacking of wheels on stone. The woman shivered, not entirely from the cold, and made her way to a certain ground-floor apartment near the entrance. Gaining entry was no problem; she had her own key. She knew at once that he was present. Cigar smoke hung heavy in the air.
This was not his home, splendid enough as it was, possessing not only kitchens and cellar in the basement, a living room which connected by fine double doors with a bedroom, a dressing room with water closet and hip bath, but a garret on the top floor. He was doubtless in the bedroom that looked onto the Rope Walk. As she moved quickly through the living room, sparing a glance for the silks stretched on the walls, the woman pulled off the wig that concealed her lovely hair.
“You’re late,” he said. The bedroom was almost in darkness, lit only by a single candle in a massive silver stick. He had a mania for such things, taking no chances that his true identity might become known, for he had long ago taken these apartments, under an assumed identity. The woman looked at him as she stripped off the drab clothing that was so repugnant to her. The cigar burned in a saucer on a table by his chair.
“I could escape no sooner from my watchdogs.” She reached into the wardrobe for a frilled, beribboned dressing gown. “Faith, but I’ll be glad when this thing is done.”
He tapped off the cigar’s long burning ash. “Did you come alone? Or were you followed by a strong force of Bow Street Runners, with a company of Guards in reserve? I trust I needn’t tell you what discovery could mean. We could all be committed for trial on the capital charge.”
The woman tied her dressing gown, so loosely that it threatened at the least provocation to slip off her shoulders and probably to the floor. A far cry from her usual appearance, she thought smugly, as she gazed into a gilt-edged mirror and effected certain changes to her face. “You know as well as I that Bow Street is ineffectual. At any major disturbance, the military is called. Don’t you want to know what I’ve learned?”
“By the statute of the 3rd and 4th of William and Mary,” he murmured, as he crossed the room to stand behind her, “all and every person and persons that comfort, aid, abet, assist, counsel, hire or command any person to rob another shall be hanged, and without the benefit of clergy. It seems of little consequence who brings us in.”
She met his eyes in the mirror. “Since when have you concerned yourself with the clergy?” It was a bitter pill to swallow, for she knew perfectly well that a gentleman of his birth and position was not likely to marry her, for all the pleasure he derived from spitting in the faces of his venerable ancestors. “While I sneak about with my ear to keyholes, you have other fish to fry. I congratulate you that you have found so agreeable a way of passing the time.”
His hands rested on her shoulders. “Jealous, my pretty? You must know by now that I far prefer sluts without morals to insipid Society chits. Tell me what you’ve learned.”
“Everything went off perfectly well.” She completed the repairs to her face, then turned and threw her arms around his neck. “There! Do something for me?” Her voice was husky. “Open the safe?”
He looked down at her, wryly amused, then turned to swing aside one of the many paintings that hung on the walls. These were of an inflammatory classical nature: Lucretia struggling in the arms of Tarquin; Andromeda lashed naked to a rock. His visitor found far more titillation in the sparkling gems that glittered in the safe’s dark recess. Her eyes glowed.
“My avaricious little beauty.” He draped her about with jewels. “I fear I have taught you extravagant tastes.”
The woman had moved back to the looking glass, there to stare greedily at the diamonds and pearls, rubies and sapphires that hung around her neck. “Please,” she whispered, “let me keep just one thing.”
“The devil!” he retorted. “Did I but leave matters to you, we’d quickly be brought to a standstill. You’ll have jewels aplenty in time, but you must wait.”
“That’s what you always say!” She sulked. “I’m tired of waiting. Don’t I deserve some reward for all the help I’ve given you?”
With a pair of silver scissors, he operated on a fresh cigar. “What you deserve is a whipping. May I remind you of the small matter of Warwick’s banknotes?”
“That wasn’t my fault!” she cried, stung. “Take the blame for someone else’s carelessness is a thing I will not do!”
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” he murmured, and lit the cigar. “It is entirely your fault that the notes are not again in our possession—though I believe that failure may yet work to our advantage.” He looked at her. “I do not mean to argue with you, my pretty, but there is very little that you will not do. For instance, you will leave here tonight and return from whence you came, much as you dislike the notion, and you will continue to play to the man in the pit and to make the best of a bad audience.”
Perhaps it was due to the priceless jewels she wore that the woman grew so bold. “What if I refuse?”
“Refuse?” he repeated, his voice cold. “You have no choice, being much too deep in this thing to turn craven now. To be perfectly blunt, I will wring your neck myself before I give you a chance to turn King’s evidence.”
She stared at him, chilled, for she knew he spoke the truth. No matter that she loved him, to this man she was merely a convenience, and easily expendable. “I spoke in jest,” she whispered through cold lips. “Good God, you must know I wouldn’t inform on you.”
“Come here,” he said, and smiled. “Don’t you want to know what I next plan?” Slowly she walked across the room. He pulled her down into his lap. “What would you say,” he murmured, “if I told you I meant to join the hordes of hopeful aspirants to extinct titles and dormant funds that keep the courts so busy?”
“I’d say it was a hubble-bubble notion,” the woman retorted, a trifle waspishly. She was feeling sadly unappreciated and the cigar smoke made her head ache. “You already have one title, isn’t that enough?”
“There is no such thing as ‘enough,’ “ he reproved, as he toyed with the tie of her robe. “Although the laws do enjoin scrupulous fulfillment of the dispositions of the deceased. Did you know there is a counting house here in England where a fully dressed corpse has been standing at a window overlooking its former property for twenty-five years?”
Despite herself, the woman’s flesh crawled. She liked this talk of corpses no more than she cared to look on them. She was firmly caught, as he had said; if she rebelled, he would see her, too, dead.
“I should not tease you,” he murmured, as he pushed open the robe, “but the temptation is so great. Very well, my pretty, think instead of the Bank of England, that marvelous institution governed by men of enormous power that has mobilized capital, helped make currency reliable, giv
en strength to the whole structure of banking.”
“What of it?” she asked absently. Perhaps there was some way to make off with a single strand of pearls, so fitting to her youth and apparent inexperience in the world of crime.
“I have a plan. And I have a key, borrowed long enough from a certain unsuspecting porter for wax impressions to be made. All that remains is to await the proper time.”
It was, the woman thought, the proper time for her endeavors to be repaid, if not in jewels then in coin of another sort. She sat up, allowing the robe to fall to her waist, then placed her hands behind her head and arched her back provocatively.
“The Society for the Suppression of Vice still thrives,” he said, his voice suddenly deeper. “I wonder what Wilberforce would say to you! But you distract me. I have not yet told you of my plan.”
She stretched her arms into the air, sighed, and let them fall. This one was a devil, with his scheming and his ruthlessness. He lifted the cigar and she shrank back. It would not do to rouse his temper, lest that glowing tip come into contact with her skin. “Go on,” she whispered, all passion fled.
“A plan to rob the Bank of England,” he murmured, “and every bullion merchant in the City of London. A plan that, with your cooperation, must inevitably succeed.”
Chapter 19
Lady Bligh swept like a spring breeze into the stuffy Bow Street Public Office. “Dear John!” she said, and bent to give him a hug. “Don’t trouble yourself to rise. I would have come sooner, had I not been positively overwhelmed with trivial matters. You will overlook my tardiness, I know.”
The Chief Magistrate looked regretfully at the papers spread across his battered desk, then raised his tired eyes to study the Baroness. She wore a pelisse of deep red satin, a Vandyke double pereline, its flat collar spreading to her shoulders, and a chinchilla border and muff. On her golden curls was a black velvet hat, and on her feet light walking shoes.
Maggie MacKeever Page 14
