by Kate Moore
Lucy descended, her spirits rising, instantly glad that he could think of her at all in such a time. The butler had shown him into the morning room. A branch of candles on the table made a circle of light that just illuminated him in a sober suit of mourning.
It might be the light or the shock he was under, but she had never seen him look so distant from her, not even early in their acquaintance. The sisters’ words about his situation now seemed ominous. “What is it? Have you had more bad news?”
“Miss Holbrook,” he began, and she reached out a hand, but when he made no move to take it, she placed it on the table to steady herself at the formality of it. “The change in my circumstances means I will be weeks if not months trying to sort out Richard’s affairs.”
She nodded. Apparently, they were not to touch tonight.
“You will return to the inn?”
“You needn’t worry. Cassandra and Cordelia will take me tomorrow. Only I must trouble you for one favor.” She lifted her chin to face him squarely.
“Yes.”
“You’ve kept Adam safe, but now I must ask you to bring him to me.”
“As you wish, but I must ask a favor in return.”
She waited with no idea of what he could mean. He was grieving and troubled, but he’d changed toward her in some way she could not understand.
“Will you consent to try to unlock Adam’s memory?”
“Now?”
“He may be able to identify his enemy.”
“And you suspect that Adam’s enemy will act against him?”
“You cannot protect yourself...or Adam against the man if you do not know who he is.”
And you will not be there to protect me, she thought. “I will not be alone,” she said.
“I have a second motive for asking this of you. Two young friends of mine are missing. They were taken during the most recent robbery of one of Radcliffe’s Rockets.”
“Taken?”
“The guard wounded my friend.”
“The youth with the teeth and ears?”
“Nate Wilde.”
Lucy sat down. “What can that have to do with Adam?”
“The inn is watched. Most likely Adam’s enemy sent Findlater and...took the cat.”
“Queenie was taken?”
“I suspect so. Without her, Adam loses an early warning of approaching danger.”
“How can Adam have such a terrible enemy? Adam, harmless Adam?”
“Likely, Miss Holbrook, he witnessed a murder.”
She shivered at it, and at his tone. How had she become Miss Holbrook again? But what he said changed everything. He was not after all a man taken with a girl’s charms and wooing her, he was someone else entirely. “You have been less than honest with me from the start, Cap—what do I call you now?”
“Mountjoy,” he said.
“From the start you have befriended us, not out of kindness or sympathy or affection, but as part of...what?”
“An investigation. A case. For the Foreign Office. Likely the person whose murder Adam witnessed was a British agent carrying important papers as well as money.”
“By agent, you mean spy.” She looked up and met his gaze. “You are a spy.”
“I am.”
Lucy stood again and backed away from him. “When did you plan to tell me?”
He didn’t answer. He did not extend a hand or take a step in her direction. He offered no excuse, no comfort. He had been content to play with her happiness, to lead her to betray herself with feelings she believed he returned in equal measure.
She had mistaken his intentions from the first. The happiness she had looked for not hours earlier was a lie. Her legs grew weak, her stomach churned, and she knew she must end the interview at once or disgrace herself.
She did not extend a hand again. There would be no parting touch. “I doubt we will meet again,” she said. She did not know what name to call him. “You have my sincerest sympathy on the loss of your brother and my gratitude for your care of Adam in this fortnight. Good night.”
She turned away and slipped through the door as quickly as she could.
The husband hunter may wonder at the models of marriage she sees before her in London society. Seeing couples whose glittering nuptials were the talk of town a year or two earlier barely exchange a civil word in company or speak only in such commonplaces as to suggest a dull familiarity with each other’s thoughts may lead the husband hunter to doubt the possibility of happiness in marriage. She must not let public moments of irritation or indifference between married persons of her acquaintance diminish her faith in the happiness that awaits her in the union of true hearts.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter 20
Early in the morning Nate and Miranda were summoned to a large dim salon with red-damasked walls. Velvet drapery kept out most of the light. The walls were hung with pictures of martyrs and madonnas, all of whom wore fewer clothes than seemed saintly or even proper to Nate. He knew what it felt like to be near naked around the woman he loved. It was not a saintly feeling. Their host lay on his back on a gold velvet sofa as long as a Thames barge, looking at the ceiling.
“You look reasonably recovered from your wounds,” he said, glancing at Nate, where he and Miranda stood hand in hand, facing their host.
With any luck Nate would convince the highwayman to let them return to the Tooth and Nail. He had instructed Miranda to let him do the talking. “Where we are?” he asked.
“You’re at Lyndale Abbey. You’ve been my guests. Anything to complain of?”
“Nothing, sir,” Miranda said.
Nate elbowed her in the ribs. Not five minutes into the conversation, and she was breaking the rules.
She elbowed him back. “We owe you my husband’s life.”
“You owe me a bit of truth, I’d say.” The highwayman swung his long legs to the floor and came upright. Even seated, he was a tall man. “What’s your connection to Harry Clare?”
Miranda drew a quick breath at the captain’s name.
Nate squeezed her hand to steady her. “We work for him, sir. He asked us to investigate a former footman from Hartwood Manor. We were returning from our investigation when the Rocket was stopped. We’re grateful for your assistance and don’t wish to trouble you further.” He’d rehearsed that line and hoped it was truth enough for the highwayman without giving away the whole.
Their host appeared to consider his own well-polished boots at the end of his very long legs. The pause was disconcerting. The man was obviously thinking. When he looked up again, his dark gaze was sharp but also amused.
“Not the whole story,” he said.
Again, Miranda sucked in a telltale breath, and Nate steeled himself, running through possible answers in his head. He’d obviously lost some quickness of wit while he’d lain in bed with a fever.
“Captain Clare came looking for us, didn’t he?” Miranda blurted. She bounced a little on her toes.
Their highwayman host grinned. He probably appreciated Miranda’s bounce, just as Nate always did.
“I knew he would,” she said.
“I wonder then,” said their host, “that you tried to leave Lyndale in the middle of the night, on foot, while your...husband still suffered from a bullet wound.” The highwayman rose, fixing his gaze on Nate.
He really was a tall fellow. “Apparently, you were to meet Captain Clare at the Tooth and Nail. Is that right?”
Nate nodded. He was glad the highwayman had met Harry Clare. That meant the man knew they were not entirely defenseless.
“If you’ve recovered sufficiently to endure the jostling of a carriage ride, let’s return you to the Tooth and Nail. This investigation of yours intrigues me.”
Again Nate nodded. They’d got their wish to return to t
he inn, but they’d be bringing a curious and not altogether predictable gentleman with them. He’d like to be sure Captain Clare would be there to meet them at the other end.
“Sir, may we send an express to my...wife’s father? I have the blunt to pay for it.” Nate reached for the leather pouch he’d hung around his neck.
The highwayman waved away the offered money. “Send directly. We leave within the hour.” He strode off.
* * * *
Lucy sat next to Adam on his bench with a basket of worn linens beside her and her needle in hand. Lamb and rosemary from the kitchen mingled with pipe smoke and ale from the tap and quite erased from Lucy’s memory the delicate scents of Brook Street. Loud talk and laughter from the bench sitters filled her ears. Everything and nothing was the same. She herself was different. More different than she ever imagined.
She had a letter in her pocket from her father’s solicitor. It had been waiting for her at the inn with a bundle of things her father had wanted her to have. Her father had never married. There was no Mrs. Holbrook, no mother who had died giving birth to Lucy.
A long, thin envelope had slipped from the solicitor’s bundle. Inside was a receipt. At first she could make little sense of the names on the paper. Then she understood. It was a receipt for the portrait of her lady. Her papa had paid the artist the shocking amount of four hundred pounds for a painting of a stranger, and apparently not even an English stranger. The lady’s name was Madame La Comtesse de la Neuvillette.
One didn’t question love. Papa loved her, and Adam loved her. She had never doubted either of them. She had never longed for a mother while she was so loved. But Papa’s desire that she become a lady went far beyond what she’d imagined. That her frugal papa, who economized on candles and coal and made sure not to be cheated with a hollow cheese or sprouted malt, could spend so staggering a sum on a painting was a wonder. The day he’d hung the painting in her room, he’d urged her to think of her lady as a friend and model. “Whatever they say at your school,” he’d told her, “about your papa, know that your lady is on your side.”
Papa’s extravagant faith in the portrait of a foreign countess and his utter silence about her real mother now struck her as ominous. All those years ago Amelia had suggested that Lucy was better off knowing nothing about her mother, and perhaps it was true.
The thread that had connected her to the Tooth and Nail had been snipped, as easily and finally as she herself snipped the thread at the end of her needle. Adam sat calmly beside her, polishing candlesticks. Earlier he had repeated his question about the missing Queenie until Lucy thought she must lose all patience with him. His fortnight in London had not harmed him, but it had made her forget the old habit of talking with him. It required the patience of needlework, the steady repetition of even stitches, the careful piecing together of parted seams, and a willingness to break off threads going nowhere.
This morning she had set herself the task of mending table linens. Later she must face the account books. She drew another cloth from her basket, held it up to the light, and discovered a gravy stain the size of a butter dish. She turned the cloth several ways, but the stain could not be concealed. She put aside her thimble and needle and began to tear the ruined linen into strips.
Her people had welcomed her home. Mrs. Vell made a treacle tart, the bench sitters toasted her with their ale, Will Wittering grinned at her, and Hannah babbled for an hour about all that happened in her absence. It was Hannah’s account of the inn that now troubled Lucy. In spite of Queenie’s mysterious absence, the inn remained as it had always been, comfortable and warm, and noisy. In the midst of the daily comings and goings of neighbors and guests, she could not credit Mountjoy’s warning of danger from spies and murderers. What did spies have to do with the Tooth and Nail? But all morning Adam had repeated his question about Queenie, and a thing that Hannah said stuck in Lucy’s mind. A fine gentleman had come to the inn every afternoon while Lucy was away. He was the one who had come once, before Lucy had left for London, the gentleman who had ordered a fish dinner and disappeared without eating it. When Lucy had asked Hannah what sort of gentleman he was, Hannah told her he was a gentleman doctor, with a fine coat and hat and a black bag. Hannah was sure he would come again and glad for the coin he gave her each time he came. She promised to be on the lookout for him.
Mountjoy had told Lucy the inn was watched. She had not asked him how he knew or what that meant. A fish-ordering gentleman who skipped without paying did not seem like a potential enemy, but a doctor who came every day and went out of his way to befriend Hannah bothered her.
She wanted to rail at Mountjoy for cutting up her peace, for disconnecting her from the familiar world in which she belonged. She, who had been content to dream of being a lady, had had a taste of it now. She had opened the box of London pleasures, beside which the pleasures of the Tooth and Nail looked small and shabby, everything plain, worn, and loud. Doors banged and men shouted. She, Iron Tom’s daughter, was someone else, someone she didn’t know. She had only Adam left to connect her to the inn. She had believed his past to be past, and yet apparently it was present, and what little she had, what she was left with after the London dream crumbled, could be taken away from her.
She would not let that happen. She would fight it. On one point she and Mountjoy had agreed. He thought, as she had thought years earlier, that Adam’s sayings made sense, told a story, and that unraveling the story might help Adam overcome the past. She looked at her childhood companion now. He was not as calm as he first appeared. In Queenie’s absence, his hands paused in their work every few minutes, and he tilted his head to listen to the sounds of the inn as if there might be something amiss. He was not in distress, just slightly unsettled. If there ever were a moment to try to help him, it was now before Hannah’s gentleman doctor returned.
“Adam.” She put a hand on his sleeve. “Will you come with me to Papa’s room?”
He put aside his polish and his rags and took her hand. They made their way to the back of the inn, and Lucy let them into the familiar room. Adam turned as if to go to his bed under the stairs, but Lucy steered him to her papa’s chair. She lit the lamps that Adam never needed.
Once she had him seated, she was not sure how to proceed. “We’re going to have a talk, Adam,” she told him. “Here in this safe place, about what happened to you long ago when you came to the inn.”
“Adam stayed,” he said.
Lucy took a steadying breath. “I know you did, Adam, and Geoffrey ran away.”
Adam began to tremble, shaking his head from side to side. “No, no, no, no, no,” he murmured.
Lucy knelt at his feet and took his large, familiar hands firmly in hers. “A terrible thing happened, Adam, but we are going to face it. We’re going to name it. We are not going to be afraid any longer.”
He stopped his murmuring, his head tilted to listen to her.
Lucy gave his hands one last squeeze and rose and crossed to her father’s wardrobe, taking the key from the ring at her waist, kneeling, and opening the drawer where her father had long ago put away her list of Adam’s words.
The key turned. The drawer was stuffed and the wood swollen with age, but as Lucy pulled, it came open. Her father had saved a sheer white dress with raised dots, a sampler with her first alphabet in colored stitches, a package of her letters to him from school, a lock of her hair, a bundle of school bills, and a pair of tiny shoes. There was an old quilt and a limbless doll. Everything smelled of cedar and lavender and long ago. There was nothing to answer her suddenly pressing questions about her mother.
She pulled the letters into her lap and untied the ribbon around them. These were her letters from school, but the list she’d made of Adam’s words was not among them. She put them aside and dug deeper into the drawer. An old edition of the peerage made her shake her head. Her father had so wanted her to be a lady. She put aside a primer she remembere
d as one of her first books, another book of the Adventures of Tom True, and a box of pencils and chalks. She was sure she had watched her father put her list of Adam’s sayings in this very drawer.
Beneath the books lay another bundle wrapped in thin, yellowing crepe, the fabric brittle at the edges as she lifted the bundle from the drawer and set it aside on the rug. There was no sign of her list at the bottom of the drawer, only the faint smell of cedar and old things. She had counted on her list, sure that if she could see it again, she would discern the order in the narrative that she had missed as a child.
She pulled the bundle into her lap and began to unfold the crepe. Adam stirred slightly. “Adam stayed,” he said.
In the folds of fabric she found the white lace cap of a child of perhaps two and a white knitted mitten for a tiny hand. Beneath the cap and mitten was a gown of the finest white muslin, elegantly embroidered. She unfolded the gown, and stopped, shocked by a long brown stain from the smocking to the hem. She put the garment aside and unfolded the last item in the bundle, a child’s coat in pale blue wool with knotted silk embroidery to match the gown, stained with the same terrible dark stain.
She knew with utter certainty that her father had hidden these things to keep them secret because they had come with Adam to the inn. Adam had brought them from the terrible scene he had witnessed. An image that could not be stopped sprang into her mind of Adam holding a bleeding child. He had held Lucy often enough as a girl. She knew his strength and the way he cradled her in his arms. She had always felt protected in his hold.
She laid the dress and coat back in the yellowing crepe and put the bundle next to the other things she had taken from the drawer. Lined up across the floor they made a sort of history from the most recent items in her life, her letters from school, to items from perhaps before her life, from Adam’s arrival at the inn. She shook each one to see whether it might hold the missing list, but she didn’t find it.
