Romancing the Scot (The Pennington Family)

by May McGoldrick

  Chapter 30

  “Since the day Jo showed it to me,” Grace said, pacing across the study, “I thought the diamond was the reason we were attacked in Antwerp. But it was all about a list.”

  Rays of late afternoon sunlight illuminated the room. MacKay had escorted the men back to the inn and had not yet returned. She stopped and gazed at the intricate patterns of the Persian rug as she considered the web of difficulties that now lay before them.

  The envoys had been astounded when Hugh told them that she had the document, but both Captain Rivenhall and Sir Rupert Elliot were also clearly affronted by the viscount’s refusal to trust them. Still, according to their own account, they’d set out on what might have been a wild goose chase. They’d come to Baronsford clinging to a thin hope, and now they needed to be satisfied that she had it. If only she did have the list.

  She looked at Hugh, sitting at his desk. “How am I going to produce such a thing when they come back tomorrow? I arrived with nothing but the clothes I was wearing and that diamond.”

  “Didn’t you say that the murderers were searching the rooms at the inn when you went back upstairs?” he asked.

  The memory rushed back, fresh and painful as the day it happened. She turned to the window. Her father, sick and suffering, had been making plans for her. While Grace had been consumed with caring for him, Daniel Ware was setting into motion schemes to secure his only daughter’s future.

  “Yes, they were tearing the room apart. But they must not have found it.” She looked back at Hugh. “Mrs. Douglas didn’t want the diamond. She engineered that plan to kidnap me because she thought I had the list.”

  “Her name—or the name of someone close to her—must be on that document,” he agreed. “Perhaps even her husband’s name.”

  Grace started pacing again. “My father kept correspondence in his chest. But he was carrying nothing that he seemed overly concerned about. Nothing he mentioned or seemed extraordinarily protective of. In fact, every letter he had with him I’d read to him. And I had written every response at his dictation.”

  Hugh was leaning back in his chair, his hands steepled before him. He watched every step she took, but she knew his calm demeanor was a façade. His mind was working as fiercely as hers.

  “Your father was an experienced military man,” he began. “No successful commander approaches a battle without a clear objective. He surveys the field, considers the scouting reports, applies what he knows of the strategies of the enemy, and develops his tactics. He always has a primary and a secondary tactic to employ. That was the reason Daniel Ware sent two identical messages to the British government.”

  Grace came to a stop before Hugh’s desk. “He feared one might be intercepted. He wanted to make certain that his letter reached the appropriate people.”

  “Again, as an experienced commander”—Hugh paused, his gaze locked on her face—“he would only entrust the delivery of the final dispatch to his most capable officer.”

  “His final words to me . . .” A knot formed in her chest. “‘What a fine officer you’d have made.’ Those were his very words to me on that day.”

  Hugh pushed to his feet, his hands planted on his desk. “With your unmatchable memory, there was no need to carry a physical letter. What he knew, what was to be transcribed and delivered, he’d intended to pass on to the British through you.”

  Her talent, Grace’s father called it. If what Hugh said was true, why couldn’t she recall it? She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her temples. But there was so much in there. Information, names, faces. All the correspondence that she’d written out for him during the last months of his life.

  “Too much. I don’t know where to start, what to look for,” she said. “He never dictated any list. Nothing that he said that would lead me to such a document.”

  Hugh came around his desk and took her by the hand. “Think of anything that might have pertained to the war. The envoys said these spies operated during the Peninsular campaign. He was drawing on knowledge from those years.”

  Rivenhall and Elliot had referred to the names of British subjects. Code names.

  A chill ran down her spine. She remembered.

  Her fathers “orders.”

  “I know what it is!” she exclaimed. “What they’re looking for! I thought it was the effects of the laudanum on him. When we were sailing from America, his mind continued to wander back to his fighting days in Spain.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted me to remember his ‘directions.’ It was as if I were a member of his staff. He insisted that I memorize his orders. They were encoded.”

  Hugh laughed as he swept her into his arms. “If Napoleon had only known the treasure of your mind, we would never have defeated him.”

  He pulled up a chair to the desk and sat her down, setting pen and paper before her.

  “Write down what you recall.”

  Grace closed her eyes for a moment, trying to push the irrelevant information out of the way. The page came into sharp focus. Letters and numbers spilled out of her mind onto the paper. They made no overt sense, but she recorded the sequences exactly as they were stored in her memory.

  When she was finished, Hugh went to his bookshelves and returned with a thin, bound manuscript that he placed on the desk.

  “A treatise on cryptography by a friend of mine who worked in the Foreign Office. It’s a fascinating study.” He looked at the series of letters and numbers on the paper. “I hope this isn’t the Great Paris Cipher. If it is, it could take us weeks to solve it. There are over 1,400 numbers that could substitute for words or parts of words in a million permutations.”

  Grace knew of the failings of the French Army’s use of encoded messages. Her father had complained of it many times over the years. The Great Paris Cipher had been devised as a replacement for the failed Portugal Code.

  “It’s the Portugal Code,” she told him. “I remember my father telling me that several times. He said so even that last day as I went down to the street to see about our carriage and trunks.”

  Grace had a mind for puzzles, and when it came to recognizing connections and patterns, Hugh matched her step for step. They worked through the page line by line, and an hour later they had their list.

  Caesar Rising

  Black Tulip

  Spartan Rock

  Shooting Star

  Red Phoenix

  The list went on. Twenty-seven names in all.

  “Code names,” Grace said. “These names mean nothing to us.”

  “Their people in Westminster supposedly have a secondary key. A way of linking the code names to the real people hiding behind them.” He shoved the cryptography book away. “I don’t trust them. Rivenhall and Elliot. We have no way of knowing whether one or both of them are on this list.”

  Grace watched him go down the names again. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “It’s more than the fact that they failed to provide security for your father,” Hugh explained. “Days before your father was to meet with them, he was murdered. It could be a coincidence, but I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “We were traveling under assumed names. They had to be watching for us.”

  “They were. They must have known you’d disembark in Antwerp. What do you remember about the attackers?”

  Grace thought back. The cool recklessness of the killers. Their relentless pursuit through the back alleys of the waterfront. The shouts as they got closer.

  “At least one of them spoke English.”

  Hugh sat back. “These two said that when they recovered the bodies, all your personal possessions had been stolen. And what did you say happened to your trunks from the ship?”

  “They’d already been taken,” she replied. “All six of them. Probably by the same men.”

  “Exactly. The villains who killed your father took possession of everything where that list could possibly have been hidden.”

 
; Still, Mrs. Douglas had shown up here, Grace thought. They knew for a fact that her father didn’t have it.

  “They didn’t find it, so there was only one place that list could possibly be.”

  “With me.”

  “When my man MacKay arrived in Antwerp, they learned that you’d escaped in that crate. That you were here recuperating. They had to assume that you had the list, and they needed to get it before they were exposed.”

  “You were certain that Mrs. Douglas wasn’t working alone,” Grace said.

  “She was notified by her partners in Antwerp, and she came here directly. The time of her arrival in the Borders fits perfectly. But the one in charge couldn’t trust her to succeed where they’d failed.”

  “Captain Rivenhall told us that they had only the ‘slimmest hope’ that I had the document. But Sir Rupert had insisted that they come.”

  “And he insisted because he knew the list wasn’t in Antwerp.” Hugh’s scowl was dark. “He had to come here. Elliot is our man. His name is on this list.”

  Anger that had been building in her threatened to erupt. She had been sitting in the room, speaking with the very man who was responsible for the murder of her father and their servants.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” he added grimly. “If we turn this list over to them, it will never reach London. An accident or a robbery on the road will happen. Rivenhall will be killed, and Elliot will say the list was taken.”

  Grace forced herself to think calmly as she read through the names again.

  “Mrs. Douglas. If only she hadn’t escaped,” she said fervently. “She was intimidated enough to run for her life. She might have been persuaded to cooperate in exchange for leniency.”

  “She didn’t escape,” Hugh told her.

  Grace looked at him as his words registered.

  “We captured her as she boarded a ship in Greenock. Branson went to Glasgow to fetch her.”

  Chapter 31

  From the envoys’ ease in conversing with Lord Aytoun, who was present in place of his son, Grace decided that Elliot and Rivenhall must have found the older nobleman far more congenial than his hot-blooded son. She glanced around the library. Hugh’s clerk Mr. MacKay was sitting at a table off to the side and listening attentively, pen in hand, to every word. Apparently, their discomfort yesterday with disclosing the details of their mission had diminished.

  “As you know, your lordship, the Prince of Wales feels a kindred connection with the Stuart monarchs of the past,” Sir Rupert was saying. “Granting Miss Ware a pardon has never been an issue. Many of the Scottish Jacobite families have been restored to their lands and titles.”

  The envoy continued to talk, but Grace saw him constantly glancing at the folded document on her lap. She realized she was eyeing the letter in Captain Rivenhall’s hand with the same intensity. A game of exchange was about to be played.

  The earl finally interrupted. “Gentlemen, I assume what you have in your hands is a free, full, and general pardon for Miss Ware, for all treasons, rebellion, and offences whatsoever.” He stretched out his hand for the letter.

  “Quite so, m’lord,” Captain Rivenhall replied, handing it to him.

  “And it includes the opportunity for Miss Ware to request a pension in the future,” Sir Rupert added. “If she so chooses.”

  While they waited for the earl to read the document, the two men focused all their attention on Grace. If she and Hugh were right—if Sir Rupert Elliot was the man orchestrating the earlier attacks—he was doing an excellent job of keeping his expression natural. An implacable demeanor under pressure certainly had to be a requirement for a spy, she thought.

  “I was asked by Lord Greysteil,” she said, “to pass on his apologies for the unavoidable delay of joining us. I’m sure the viscount will be along shortly.”

  Captain Rivenhall’s gaze remained on Grace’s part of the bargain, still sitting on her lap. “Miss Ware, Mr. MacKay only provided us with the cursory details, but we cannot tell you how fortunate we feel that this correspondence of your father’s survived the horrifying crossing you endured.”

  “Yes, it was fortunate for all of us that I happened to be carrying it in my reticule. As you know, Colonel Ware had complete confidence in me. During the years leading up to his passing, he entrusted me with everything of value when we traveled.”

  Both men looked at the earl when he shifted in his chair and then settled back again. He was clearly taking his time reading the pardon.

  “I should tell you that I did break the seal when I arrived at Baronsford,” she told them. “But the list of names—the code names—meant nothing to me until you arrived looking for it. I’m quite overjoyed that I didn’t dispose of it.”

  The two men glanced at Lord Aytoun, and Grace noticed that Sir Rupert’s foot was beginning to tap on the floor. Captain Rivenhall’s knuckles were white from the grip he had on his chair; he appeared no less impatient with how long it was taking the earl to finish his reading.

  * * *

  Hugh motioned to his clerk to continue recording the conversation as Mrs. Douglas began to rant about her supposed ill treatment.

  “I was forcibly removed from the ship, defying all conventions of dignity and courtesy. I was thoroughly humiliated before other passengers, who looked on aghast as that twit sitting over there read out false charges against me.”

  “You registered for that voyage under a false name,” Branson commented.

  “Is that a crime?” the woman snapped. “Because of the high-ranking position of my dear, departed husband, and the invaluable service he provided our nation at a time when it was most needed—service that caused him to damage his health irrevocably, I might add—I have always traveled under an assumed name. You don’t know how difficult it is to constantly be celebrated for the work I was a part of. Yes, a part of! I held him up, supported him in every way. And this is what I am now subjected to? Brutishly manhandled. Publicly humiliated. Dragged through the streets in shackles. Shamed to the point that I don’t know if I shall ever recover.”

  “No shackles, m’lord,” Branson noted. “We used no shackles.”

  “Don’t you know who I am? Who my friends are? Let me tell you, the Prince Regent himself will hear of this. And when he does, the wrath of God will descend on your miserable heads. You will grovel in the depths of the filthiest prisons in the land. You will beg for my intercession with the courts, and I shall spurn you like the dogs you are.”

  “May I speak now?” Hugh finally had enough of it.

  His tone was sharp enough to silence the woman momentarily.

  “You were taken into custody on my orders,” Hugh started. “You were brought here where you will be charged with crimes related to the attempted abduction of Miss Grace Ware and the grievous injuries sustained by my blacksmith, Mr. Darby. Your manservant has been identified as—”

  “This is madness. If he was involved with this at all, the man acted alone. I have no connection with him. Upon my departure from Nithsdale Hall, he left my service. I’ve not seen him since and have no desire to. He worked in my employ as a manservant. That’s all. No, you have no reason for holding me. I demand that you release me immediately.”

  Hugh leaned back in his chair, studying the woman’s sour expression.

  “The charges I’ve mentioned are nothing compared to what you will face when I transport you to London. The ill use you have allegedly been forced to endure will not hold a candle to the treatment you will receive on the gallows.”

  Whatever blood remained in her pale face drained completely away.

  “Let me explain to you what we already know.” Hugh pointed at the door. “Just down this hallway, Miss Ware has in her possession a letter containing more than two dozen names of English subjects who provided information and assistance to Napoleon as he pursued his dreams of conquest. The British government plans to ferret out each and every spy whose treasonous efforts cost the lives of our soldiers. Your name is on that l
ist, Mrs. Douglas, as is the name of a gentleman who has traveled here from Brussels, a friend of yours.”

  As Hugh looked at her, it occurred to him that if her face had not been painted so carefully, her very features would have fallen to pieces and landed in her lap.

  “In my library at this very moment,” he continued, “this friend of yours is providing testimony intended to save his neck from the hangman’s noose. The gentleman has accused you of masterminding the attack in Antwerp that resulted in the murders of Colonel Ware and his servants. By the time you leave here, you will not only be facing charges of high treason, espionage, kidnapping, and assault, but murder, as well. I believe the courts in London will only be sorry they can hang you but once, and the Prince Regent will sign your death warrant himself.”

  “This is all a lie,” she gasped. “You cannot do this. It’s a lie.”

  Hugh motioned to Branson to go, then pushed to his feet.

  “Who?” she demanded, trying to keep the note of panic out of her voice. “Who is inventing such malicious lies?”

  “You know who it is,” he replied coolly. “But perhaps you’d prefer to read for yourself Sir Rupert Elliot’s testimony, as recorded by my clerk, Mr. MacKay, and witnessed by his lordship, the honorable Earl of Aytoun.”

  * * *

  Grace felt her heart drumming a tattoo as she saw Mr. Branson come into the library and move over to stand by Hugh’s other clerk. She prayed their deductions were correct, but there was still a chance that the names of both men were on the list.

  With the entrance of the clerk, Sir Rupert stood and stalked to the window, no longer trying to hide his impatience.

  “Since you gentlemen are staying in the village, perhaps you heard about the attack on the road to Baronsford last week,” she said.

  “No, mistress, we haven’t been here long enough to hear any of the local news,” Rivenhall replied and turned to the earl before she could continue. “M’lord, we appreciate your thoroughness in this matter, but the pardon is quite clear and straightforward.”