Celeste Bradley - [The Liar's Club 01]

by The Pretender

  They walked on together, Agatha commenting on things that Simon had stopped noticing years ago, and Simon providing explanations to her endless curiosity.

  Simon bought her a bit of honeycomb from the beekeeper, and Agatha shared it with him. He made her laugh when he shuddered at its sweetness.

  Still, for her, the taste brought back Appleby and summer in the orchards, and the apple-blossom honey that she’d had on her toast every morning of her life.

  Her heart stung from homesickness, although the last thing she wished to do was return right now to place herself in unfriendly hands. There was so much to see and experience in London.

  And there was Simon.

  Simon was surprised by his own reaction to being back at the market. He’d not been back since his youth, for fear of reliving his guilt and pain.

  But although so much was the same, the same sounds and smells and sights of his childhood, he didn’t recognize a soul. Well, it had been twenty years, and the life of a street merchant was a short and hard one.

  Yet now he felt himself relax inside, as if this were a place where no one expected anything from him.

  These folk worried about war, to be sure. But fighting on the Peninsula was a distant thing next to feeding themselves and their families for the next week until Market Day came round again.

  Perhaps that was what he needed, to focus upon the immediate, short-term goal. Getting to the root of Agatha’s secrets would be a good start.

  “Tell me about where you grew up, Agatha.”

  “If you’ll tell me about how you came to be a thief.”

  Her retort was swift, and she smiled as she said it, but Simon knew she was serious. He’d get nothing from her without sharing himself first. “Very well.”

  “I agree. You tell me your story, and I shall tell you mine.” She stuck out her hand to shake on it.

  Simon smiled. “A deal in Covent Garden is never sealed unless the hagglers spit into their palms first.”

  “Ew.” She looked at her palm as if wondering if it would ever be the same afterward, then raised her hopeful gaze to his. “Must we?”

  “No, we may pass on that this once.” He shook her hand firmly. “But this deal is binding, nonetheless.”

  She nodded, and they turned to make their way onward through the labyrinth of stalls and carts.

  “Very well, then. I saved a rich man’s son from kidnapping, and he rewarded me by—”

  He almost said “sending me to school” but stopped himself at the last moment.

  “—by teaching me everything he knew about locks, and safety boxes, and making my way through the tightest fortification.”

  Agatha seemed a bit doubtful. “That was a reward?”

  “It was for a boy who kept starvation at bay by spending his days climbing chimneys and his nights sleeping in alleys.”

  “What about your mother? Where was she?”

  His mother had been closing the door on her child, desperate to feed them both, but not desperate enough to entertain her “visitors” in front of her son.

  He could still see the shame in her eyes as she pressed a copper into his hand for his next several meals and pushed him from their grimy room night after night. And it still made him ache.

  “My mother was … lost to me by then.”

  Agatha’s gentle hand on his arm pulled him from that memory. “I’m sorry, Simon. I lost my mother when I was young. I know the pain never truly leaves you.”

  Simon shook his head, a quick, fierce rejection. He didn’t want her mistaken sympathy. “She was not dead yet. Not then. Not until I—” He looked away for a moment. “I think perhaps she wished it, sometimes, but she kept up the fight nonetheless. I’m sure she thought that someday it would be over, that she would no longer have to whore for her survival and mine.”

  He waited for her scorn. It did not come. Her eyes were as gentle as a doe’s. Loneliness spiked through him, accompanied by a sudden craving for her warmth. Why couldn’t this woman be someone different?

  An ordinary sort, without secrets. A woman without ties to a man who was fast becoming Simon’s enemy.

  Agatha was watching his face. Simon looked away. “Where was your father?”

  He looked at her carefully and decided to take a chance. It was a calculated chance, not an effort to reveal his true self to her. Of course not.

  “More to the point, who was my father? As a boy, I imagined all sorts of men were my father. Gentlemen, lords, even the King himself.”

  She said nothing, but neither did she show distaste. He continued.

  “But my mother never had custom from any but the lowest of men, if they had the coin. Rat catchers, ragmen, the goose boy. That was the source from which I most likely sprang.”

  “Simon? Why were—”

  “Your turn,” he said roughly.

  “Oh. All right.” She walked beside him in silence for a moment.

  Was she preparing to lie to him some more?

  “I have lived always in the country, until I came to London for Jamie. My home is a beautiful place. Especially in the spring, when the apple blossoms make such a perfume one becomes almost drunken on it. Then, just before summer, the petals fall, and for a few magical days, it snows flowers.”

  Simon smiled at the fancy. She looked at him a bit warily.

  “You find that silly and notional, but it’s quite true. When I was young, I used to gather the petals into a pile, just as we did with leaves in the autumn, only smaller of course.”

  She smiled into the distance. “Just enough for one small girl to fling herself into and be buried in pink snow.”

  Simon couldn’t help it. He was charmed by the vision of tiny, chubby Agatha leaping into the flowers. “Were you always such a creature?”

  She glanced at him, one brow raised. “What do you mean?”

  “Running wild in the country as free as a fawn.”

  She nodded. “Oh, yes, for a while. Then, when I realized that I wasn’t safe at all, I stayed properly close to home.”

  “Why weren’t you safe?”

  “Repulsive Reggie is the son of a neighboring lor—landowner. He’s a horrid man and he was a horrid boy.” She walked in silence for a moment. “He caught me alone once when I was a child. I couldn’t have been more than eleven, so he would have been about seventeen.”

  Simon didn’t want to hear this. He didn’t want to know that the little girl of his vision had not had a life that was all apple blossoms.

  “I was running wild, just as you said. Staying out in the orchards all day, swimming in the brook in my knickers.”

  Her pace slowed, and Simon found himself pulled nearer by the way her voice dropped to a whisper. She was looking down at her hands, toying with the orange he had bought for her.

  “I didn’t realize he had been watching me. Following me, possibly for weeks. I was very young, but I appeared … well, older, you understand? I wasn’t tall, but I was quite mature.”

  Sick dread began to twine like poisonous vines in Simon’s gut. A child-woman, still lost in a child’s world while a man watched her with lust in his black heart.

  “Did he know your true age?”

  She seemed startled that he spoke but nodded. “Of course. We’ve known each other all our lives.”

  The bastard. If Simon let her continue with her story, he was very much afraid he’d have to kill someone. Someone named Reggie.

  “Be that as it may, he cornered me one day in the ruins. We’ve an old castle there—well, not really. It’s simply the shell of an old manor, but I used to think of it as a castle. I played there often. He knew I’d be there eventually, I suppose.”

  She abruptly handed him the orange and turned to look at a display of dried figs. Simon looked down at the sticky fruit in his hand. She had thoroughly mangled it as she had told her story, although her tone had been almost casual.

  Agatha returned with a packet of the figs, seemingly quite repaired. Should he ask her to
continue? He had no right, but he thought if he didn’t learn the truth, no matter how terrible, he might never rest again.

  But she continued on her own.

  “He sprang upon me, and pushed me to the ground. Then he tore my bodice.… He was so much larger there wasn’t a thing I could do. He held me helpless as he … touched me.”

  She paused to tuck the figs into her reticule. When she turned back to him, she was a bit pale but calm.

  “It must have only lasted a few moments, but it seemed like hours. He would have gone further, I think, but my screams frightened him. I can be very loud when I choose to be. And Reggie always was a coward.”

  She fell silent then, and they walked on. It was as if there was a circle of privacy around them even as they moved through the crowd.

  Simon was quiet as well, but his was an enraged silence. The child, assaulted and betrayed, had grown into a woman who was still being used and dishonored.

  Simon had always thought that James had agreed with his stance on prostitution. Yet here was evidence to the contrary. A woman, kept by James for pleasure, whom he had made clear he had little feeling for.

  “You don’t have to marry a woman, Simon. You don’t even have to love one.”

  Yet Agatha loved James. It was in the gentle way she called him Jamie. The way she focused her considerable determination on finding him.

  Was James really any better than Reggie?

  Agatha turned to him, her smile a bit shy. “I never told anyone before, not even Jamie. I don’t know why I’m telling you. Perhaps it is because I think you know something about people like Reggie.”

  Simon met her gaze and nodded. There was no denying it, so he didn’t bother.

  Satisfied, Agatha continued walking. “I never felt truly safe again, although it is better since I came to London. The world had become a darker place for me.”

  She took a deep breath. “There is foulness walking this earth. When this foulness touches you, it changes you. You lose something precious. If you are strong, you may gain wisdom as well, but mostly, you simply lose.”

  It was as if she’d read a page from his past. Simon felt a twinge of something that felt suspiciously like gratitude. A man wasn’t supposed to put these things into words. A man was meant to soldier on.

  For the first time, he saw that a woman might have her own strength, in that she wasn’t afraid to speak her heart.

  And sometimes, his.

  * * *

  Agatha couldn’t believe that she had told Simon about Repulsive Reggie in the open marketplace. It was mortifying to think that she might have been overheard.

  But then, Simon had found it necessary to lean quite close to her, so perhaps she need not be embarrassed.

  As far as Simon knowing, she was not uncomfortable with that at all. It seemed right that he should know.

  When he’d asked her to share her story with him, she’d been prepared to lie. It was a little worrisome, how she lied so easily now.

  Then when he had told her about his mother, the stark pain that had shone from his eyes for that one moment had made her want to give something back to him.

  A truth for a truth.

  “Are you ready to go home, Agatha?”

  A misty rain had begun to fall on the market and Agatha watched those vendors not fortunate enough to work under permanent shelter scurry to cover their wares against the wet. Simon was smiling at her. And Repulsive Reggie was far, far away.

  Agatha smiled back. “Are you ready to talk about our plan?”

  That white lightning smile crossed his face, the one that sent shivers up her spine and into her hair. Then she went entirely warm when he took her hand in his, fingers entwined.

  “Very well, Agatha. We will discuss our plan in the carriage.”

  Every intelligent idea had flown from her head the moment he touched her, and all she could think was how much she wanted to kiss him again, this time in truth.

  Her heart was growing somewhat attached, she feared. She resolved that she would think of Simon as she did Jamie. A brother, someone on whom she could depend, someone she could trust.

  Not someone she could fall in love with.

  * * *

  The next morning, as they formed their plan in the blue parlor, Simon found out precisely what he had gotten himself into. Agatha had strategic abilities that some generals lacked and more than enough nerve to carry them out.

  As usual, she was at her most attractive when she was using that surgically sharp mind of hers. At the moment, she sat on the floor next to where he sprawled in his customary chair. She was essentially ignoring him.

  He hated that.

  She was surrounded by a circle of opened invitations, with a calendar on her lap, writing in a notebook that contained the occupations and social connections of most of London’s elite.

  Even he had to admit that her information was excellent, if limited. When he remembered to think at all.

  Her hair was down, pulled back into a simple braid that made him remember the way she wore it while she slept. She was clad for comfort, in an old flowered dress with a full skirt that didn’t quite cover her white-stockinged ankles when she sat tailor-fashion.

  He tried not to notice the free and delightful movement of her breasts under the muslin that proved she had abandoned her corset as well.

  He wanted to take her hand and pull her down on the carpet with him, then roll around down there for the rest of the day. He blinked and cleared his throat.

  Business.

  “How did you come by those dossiers?”

  She barely glanced at him, lost in concentration, twisting the end of her quill. “What’s a dossier?”

  If Simon weren’t half-convinced that they would end up on opposite sides, he’d be in love. A woman with the mind of a master spy, the role-playing ability of a stage actress, and the body to make a man believe anything—

  If only she would not choose the treasonous James, what he could do with a woman like her in his organization.

  “A dossier is a file of information about someone, full of official and unofficial facts, gossip, et cetera.”

  He had finally gained her full attention. She was gazing at him with a puzzled but impressed expression. Somewhat belatedly, he realized that reciting definitions wasn’t precisely in character.

  “Button told me,” he blurted desperately.

  “Oh.” She seemed to ponder this for a moment. “Perhaps we ought to bring Button in on this. He knows so much already, and there is no one like a valet for golden gossip.”

  “Really? How do you know?” Digging, always digging.

  “Oh, James had one, before he joined the army.”

  Had Agatha known James that long? Or was this something that James had simply shared with her?

  Damn, he wished he could simply question her for an hour, to hear every word James had ever told her, words that might tell him things she didn’t even know that she knew.

  An hour, a bright light, and a dose of opiate …

  No, he wouldn’t stoop to violating women, no matter how desperate he was for information.

  And he was getting desperate. Something was brewing with the enemy, he could feel it like an itch under his skin.

  A hunch was what people called it when the mind put information together in an inexplicable way, a way that didn’t seem likely or possible. Most didn’t trust it.

  But he knew better. His information was very good, and usually he could reason things out consciously. But sometimes the facts came together in a feeling that he had learned to rely on over the years.

  Something was most definitely afoot. He was very much afraid that he had work to do.

  However, Agatha wanted to go housebreaking.

  “I think I have our first victim. An adviser to the Prime Minister. If we can get into Lord Maywell’s study, he may very well have information we can use to prove that Etheridge is the Griffin.”

  Always the bloody Griffin. “N
ot to mention the famous Maywell rubies.”

  Agatha scowled at him. “Simon, you are not to take a thing. I must insist. You’ll endanger everything I’ve worked so hard for.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you get caught, it may come out that we aren’t married and—”

  “No, I mean why work so hard to find James? Perhaps he left you willingly. Perhaps he has decamped and is living high somewhere, not thinking of you at all.”

  She tilted her head and studied him for a moment. “I suppose I shouldn’t expect you to understand. You’ve been alone for so long. James would never desert me. And I shall never abandon him.”

  It bothered him, all that strength and loyalty directed to another man. Especially one who was seeming more guilty by the hour.

  He wished she had less faith in James.

  And more faith in him.

  Agatha rose from her seat on the carpet and rang the bell-pull for the butler. Pearson appeared as if she’d rubbed his magical lamp.

  “Pearson, would you kindly ask Button to join us?”

  Simon had to admire how Pearson could invest such wealth of meaning in one raised brow. When the butler left, Agatha turned her head to grin at Simon over her shoulder.

  “Do you think they teach that in butler school?”

  Simon nodded. “The right brow is for disapproval.”

  Agatha returned to sit on the floor before him. “What is the left brow for?”

  “Severe disapproval.”

  She nodded. “And both brows?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Pearson returned, opening the door of the parlor and intoning, “Mr. Button is here to see you, madam.” When he spied his lady employer’s unseemly sprawl on the floor, he raised his left brow nearly to his hairline.

  Both Simon and Agatha broke into snickers, sending Pearson away with an offended sniff.

  Button was obviously uncomfortable. He stood before them with hands twisted together, growing paler by the moment.

  Agatha was all concern. “Button, whatever is the matter?”