by Kate Moore
Lucy came straight to Adam’s bench and sat on the old man’s other side, speaking quietly, assuring him that no one had been seriously hurt, not even Fishlock the wounded guard, telling him that a wagon had been sent to collect the passengers. Harry watched Adam grow easy under the influence of the girl’s sweet, steady voice.
“We must thank Captain Clare,” she told Adam, “for sitting with you. I’m sure it helped to have a friend at your side.”
Adam nodded. “Captain Clare likes cats,” he said. “Captain Clare does not run away.”
A brief alarm flashed in the girl’s eyes at the reference to running away. The key to the old man’s distress lay in that act of someone’s running away. Years ago someone had bolted in a confrontation on the road. Harry’s next duty was to find the spot where the terrible event occurred. He would start by looking at the place where bandits had stopped the Radcliffe Rocket. And he had an idea of how he could use Wilde’s help after all.
* * * *
For the moment Harry had a partner. He would take Wilde with him to the scene of the ambush, and then send the youth off to investigate Adam’s past.
As partners went, Wilde was not too bad, but he was London-bred, and though game for anything, he was no rider, so Harry took a gig from the inn stables. He wanted to reach the abandoned coach ahead of the constable and before a fresh team arrived to move the vehicle.
A wet, snowy March had given way to a bright, dry day. The budding trees wore a hint of spring color, and only the wheel ruts shone with traces of rainwater. They passed the inn wagon bringing the passengers and the wounded guard back, and it occurred to Harry that Cole wasn’t a man to be in charge of anything. Cole had left the coach behind, and surely, Radcliffe expected his employees to guard his property. At the four-mile stone they passed the last cottages of St. Botolph’s and left the outskirts of London behind. The landscape changed to open rolling heath with stands of trees and clumps of dense foliage. Beside Harry, Wilde grew more alert.
“Looks like plenty of places for an ambush,” he said.
Harry nodded. At night, too, the coach on the road with its lamps lit would make quite a target for anyone concealed in the darkness of trees or bush, but Harry thought the place wasn’t right yet, still too close to civilization, and with a well-marked, open road to tempt a bold coachman like Cole to try to outrun his assailants.
As they approached the seven-mile stone, the landscape changed again. Pollard beeches grew close to the road, their branches intertwining overhead, and the road itself narrowed and disappeared around a low rise. When they rounded the bend, they found the abandoned coach square in the middle of the road. A track split off to their right into the woods. Harry could see at once why thieves had chosen the spot. The curve of the road, the uphill slope on one side, and the close proximity of trees and bush would slow the coach’s progress and momentarily cut it off in either direction from help or escape.
He turned the inn gig into the wood and halted under a stand of trees. Wilde jumped down and walked toward the coach. “Perfect spot for a lay, sir, but what kind of thief takes near-dead horses and not the passengers’ fat purses? Seems a queer thing to me. From what I heard in the tap, there were several in the gang, but they mostly ignored the passengers. The leader knew Cole, I think.”
“One of them had experience working with teams to do the unhitching rapidly,” Harry commented.
“Right,” said Wilde. “So not your usual thieves.”
Harry agreed. Horses on the night run for Radcliffe’s Rockets would be in the last weeks or months of their lives. Most of them would die in harness. And, as Wilde pointed out, it made no sense to ignore the potential treasure of the passengers’ purses or the gold that Sir Geoffrey was reported to ship.
Harry felt he was missing something. The road made a perfect Y. From where he stood at the foot of that Y, a man could dominate the scene in front of him, while to his right the track into the woods offered an easy escape route. Someone had carefully chosen the spot but had taken the thing that had the least value. What had the robbers gained by what they did? A thrush landed on the coach box, let out a burst of song, looked at Harry, and took off again. Unless the point was just that—to separate the passengers from the coach. Only this time, the passengers had stayed put for hours.
“Wilde, search inside.”
The youth scrambled up into the coach. “What am I looking for?”
“Concealed compartments.”
Harry turned off the main road down the right branch of the Y and followed it deeper into the wood. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but he had the strongest feeling that the spot had been used before by thieves and perhaps by one murderer. Someone had swept the track with tree branches, but the scent of lathered horses lingered in the air, and scattered droppings lay in the dead leaves at the side of the track.
A few paces farther on, a deep hoofprint in the soft ground at the edge of the track made Harry stop to examine the brush. At a broken place in the screen of foliage he pushed his way into a wide clearing. The muddied ground had been trampled by hooves, and a fresh pile of dung attracted flies. The thieves had been quick but not entirely thorough. A shaft of sunlight flashed on something on the ground. With his boot he nudged a low branch aside and found a bit of steel from the horses’ discarded harness. He scanned the clearing. Nothing more appeared.
The place was quiet, and even Harry had to admit that it was lovely, better suited for a lovers’ meeting than a murder. He was daft to think it might be the place of the attack on Adam years earlier, but his instinct for danger held him there. If there were a connection, the violence of that earlier attack would have left its mark on the scene. He broke off a stout branch and circled the clearing, pushing aside the undergrowth and stirring up the dead leaves.
He was halfway around the clearing when his stick turned up something. He bent down and pulled it free of the low branch on which it was snagged. It was a mitten for a hand that would fit in Harry’s palm.
He was thinking about the mitten’s mate lying in Tom Holbrook’s drawer when he heard Wilde calling his name.
“Over here,” he yelled.
“Found something, sir,” Wilde replied. “Where are you?”
“Push through the brush. You’ll find a clearing.”
Wilde came crashing through, triumphantly holding a scrap of paper aloft in one hand. “You were right, sir. Concealed compartments all over the coach. Two beneath the forward-facing seats, and two behind the rear-facing ones. This bit was caught in the corner.”
Harry took the torn triangle of paper. It looked to be the lower corner of a letter with a portion of the signature intact. The letters twell appeared in a stiff formal script that Harry knew well.
“What does it mean, sir?” Wilde asked.
“It’s Chartwell’s signature,” Harry said. Chartwell was the source of the spies’ funding. It was he who had shut down their operation. Someone was stealing documents from under Chartwell’s nose. Harry tucked the scrap of paper into his jacket and clapped the lad on the shoulder. “It means I have two jobs for you. Are you game to ride the night run of Radcliffe’s Rockets?”
Wilde nodded.
“Good. We need to find out who’s using the Rockets to smuggle Foreign Office documents out of London.” He led the way back through the hazel screen to the road.
As they climbed back into the gig, Wilde asked, “What’s the other job?”
“You’re to go to Hartwood to find out everything you can about our blind man. He was in service there once.”
Harry turned the gig back toward the inn. He was thinking about how to approach Chartwell when he became aware of the intensity of Wilde’s silence. The whelp was also deep in thought.
“What?” Harry asked.
“A man needs a partner, sir. Can I take Miranda with me?”
Harry
shrugged. “All the same to me.”
A vexing question the husband hunter may face is whether to allow a gentleman who has once offended her to be restored to her good graces. In all her other connections with family and friends, she must surely exercise both forgiveness and forbearance and readily expects that her nearest and dearest will forgive her in their turn. The willingness to forgive in connections of long duration and firm affection nevertheless depends on an honest acknowledgment of error and a sincere apology for the offense. The husband hunter must expect no less from a gentleman who expects to continue to receive her notice.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter 7
It was near teatime when Nate entered Kirby’s. The bell jingled, and the old man looked up from where he sat behind the counter in the gloom of the shop. It was a sign of how low his spirits were that he had yet to fix the broken window at the front of the shop that Nate had boarded up before the club closed.
“Where’s Miranda?” he asked.
“In the back. She’s very down.” Kirby shook his head.
“Let me have a crack at her, sir. I’ll bring her out of it.”
The old man shrugged, and Nate pushed through the crimson velvet curtains into the passage that led to Kirby’s tailoring room, where he had measured the spies—Blackstone, Hazelwood, and Clare—and created for them the clothes each needed to play his role. Kirby had made coats for Nate, too, coats to rival those of the loftiest toffs in London.
He found Miranda sitting on the kilim-padded bench, red-eyed and hunched over a blue silk waistcoat, most likely one of Lord Hazelwood’s. She didn’t move though she had a sewing case at her side and a needle in hand, a silver thimble on one finger. The glow from a lamp on the table hardly reached her.
Nate steadied himself. For a year he’d made a study of Miranda Kirby, her looks and her moods. He knew just what made her blue eyes flash and her perfect round chin jut proudly. He had memorized the shape of her left ear and the way her white lace tucker moved with her breathing. Once, he had kissed her, an experience that left his head spinning and his heart aching.
Today her nose was red, and her bright hair looked dull and flat against her skull. She looked up at him and quickly down again. “You,” she said. “Go away. I’m busy.”
“Don’t you want to know why I’ve come?”
“I won’t be mocked.”
“I haven’t come to mock you.” He took a seat opposite her bench, near enough to touch her, but not so close as to crowd her. “I’ve come to enlist your help.”
“My help? Hah, nobody wants my help.”
“Turns out I do.”
“Why?”
“Because a...” He almost said man. That was the word he’d used with Captain Clare, but he thought the better of it with Miranda. “...a spy needs a partner.”
“What spy?”
“Me.”
“Oh, you’re a spy now?” Her eyes came alive a bit as she challenged him.
“I’ve got a job to do for Captain Clare. You could come along.” He waited while she fretted at the buttons of the waistcoat.
“Where?”
“To a place called Hartwood. It’s off the Aylesbury road near High Wycombe. A lord’s estate.” Miranda’s interest always picked up if a toff was involved.
“High Wycombe’s near thirty miles away. How do we get there?” She knew he didn’t drive, a lack of gentlemanly accomplishment in her view.
“Thirty miles of good road. We’ll travel stage.”
“And then? We walk up the drive in all our dirt and knock on the door and ask the butler, who is as high and mighty as a lord himself, if we can spy on his lordship?”
Nate wanted to laugh. “We won’t be going to the front door. No butler is going to look down on us. We go to the housekeeper.”
She appeared to consider the strategy. “What do we say?”
“I’ve got it figured. Do you want to come?”
She plucked at the silk in her lap with her thimble-covered finger. “You go.”
“You want the club to open again, don’t you?”
She looked up, and if Nate read her rightly, she looked stricken with guilt. There was something his Miranda was not telling him.
He knew she suffered from more than the closing of the club, for she had developed an unreasonable expectation that the most charming of the spies, Viscount Hazelwood, would marry her. It was Hazelwood’s love for another girl, Jane Fawkener, that had brought disaster down on the club.
Nate didn’t blame Hazelwood. If anyone knew what it meant for a man to be well and truly hooked by a woman, Nate knew, had known from the moment he’d met Miranda with her haughty airs and shop-girl accent, her fiery chestnut curls, blue, blue eyes, and creamy skin. She was like him, caught between two worlds, neither the lady she wished to be, nor a creature of the gutter like the girls of Bread Street.
Unreasonably, he wanted her to come with him.
He’d travel quicker alone, and alone, he’d pass unremarked. Alone, he wouldn’t have to worry about enemies they might meet. But he wanted a chance to make her forget unattainable lords and remember that kiss. And he wanted her to see that they worked well together. So he played a little unfairly.
“You’re too busy for adventure, I see.” He stood up and moved toward the door. “I’ll let you put away your needle and get your father’s tea on.”
She glared up at him. “As if I didn’t know my duty.” With a few rapid moves she tucked her needle and thimble away in the little case beside her on the bench.
Nate stopped at the door and looked back. “Is it what you want—doing for your father, putting the tea on and tidying the rooms—or do you want to come on an adventure with me?”
She stood up and tossed the bit of blue silk aside. “Oh very well, I’ll come with you. When do we leave?”
Whatever her disposition, the husband hunter will want to consider her laugh. It is not necessary that she, herself, be a wit, capable of astonishing a room with clever repartee, but she must be seen to catch and understand the wit of others. It is chiefly through her laugh that she will reveal the liveliness of her mind and spirits. Is her laugh warm and spontaneous? Is it cruel or artificial? Is it dry, hollow, or insincere? There must be nothing of the titter, the squeal, or the cackle in her mirth. If she laughs with delight at the genuinely ridiculous and refrains from laughing at what is small and mean in the conversation of others, her laugh will please whether it sounds like the chirping of birds or the wheezing of an old bellows.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter 8
When Harry returned to the inn, he found Lucy and Adam on the high-backed bench laughing. The cat stalked back and forth in front of them, her orange-and-white tail twitching in offended feline dignity.
Hearty gusts of mirth shook the old man’s torso. Lucy’s lighter laughter skipped and danced in bright bursts between soft catches in her breath.
Those throaty breaths hit Harry squarely in the gut. Lucy would laugh in bed, and her breath would come in little gasps of a different sort.
“What’s the joke?” he asked. Apparently neither of them felt his nagging sense of danger at a second stage robbery or at Findlater’s attempt to remove the old man from the inn. The mitten tucked inside Harry’s jacket said they were wrong.
Lucy looked up at him, wiping a hint of dampness from her eyes. “I was telling Adam about the stage passengers, and he said they were like Queenie. I’m afraid she took exception to the comparison.”
Harry thought their laughter a bit daft. Lucy’s disgruntled stage passengers must have kept her jumping with demands for food and altered travel arrangements, and he marveled that after bearing the brunt of their dissatisfaction, she still laughed.
The cat, evidently regarding Harry as the sensible
one of the bunch, rubbed once against his boots and sat down to do some grooming. Lucy looked up. “You have something on your mind?”
“I think you should leave the inn.”
“That’s plain speaking. Why?” Her expression sobered, and she glanced at Adam. “More threats of imminent marriage proposals?”
“You would not stay if you thought Adam in danger.”
“You think he’s in danger?” She spoke slowly, a studied calm in her voice.
“I do.”
She stood abruptly. “More plain speaking. From whom is he in danger?”
“From those who once injured him.”
“Why should they hurt Adam now?”
“Your father kept him hidden. Now they know where he is.”
“Are you suggesting that I have exposed Adam to danger?”
Harry shook his head. He would not burden her with his suspicions. “You can protect him. Take him away from the inn.”
“Take him where?” She crossed to the hearth and heaped a shovelful of coals from the scuttle into the grate.
“I know a place where he can be perfectly concealed.”
She stared into the fire. “You take an eager interest in Adam, but we hardly know you. What brought you to us? Why do you stay?”
He studied her profile, both unmistakably female and strong. “Call it kindness from a stranger.”
“Kindness?” She turned back to him. “What sort of kindness is it to send Adam away from his home?”
Her frame shook almost imperceptibly. Harry moved to take the coal shovel from her hand, and the cat leapt into Adam’s lap, turned in tight circles, and settled between Adam’s big hands.
The old man spoke. “You like cats, Captain. You like your ale dark like coffee.”
Harry kept his gaze on Lucy. “When you leave the inn, you won’t want to leave him behind.”
She drew a sharp breath. “When I... Captain, you overstep your authority. Why should I leave my inn?”
