Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  “Hanging’s too good for him.” MacDonald was expressionless as the dray horse in its harness.

  She pulled canvas over the crates in the back of the wagon and began tying the sides down with slip knots that would let go easily.

  MacDonald lifted his head. “Somebody’s coming.”

  She heard it too. Outside the freight yard, in the street, a carriage slowed and stopped. In a minute a man approached, alone, walking with light, quick steps. In a hurry.

  It wasn’t Deverney. She knew that before the sound turned from the street into the yard. Deverney didn’t click when he walked. He could teach cats a thing or two about going soft-footed.

  Robin Carlington rounded the entry to the loading yard.

  “The Mawworm.” MacDonald felt that was comment enough and went around to make a fuss over the draft horse, Bluebell.

  Robin passed through the circle of light from the lantern hung at the gate and came to her, frowning and impatient, through a stretch of darkness and into the light around the wagon.

  He seemed diminished, somehow, though she knew he hadn’t really changed. She was seeing him with new eyes tonight, knowing his uncle, the colonel, had taken looted Spanish jewels for himself. Had profited from the war. This was massive theft, illegal, unethical, and greedy. Robin had to know about it. He was, in essence, part of it.

  He was still a very pretty man, easy and athletic. He wore excellent tailoring. But she was considerably less impressed than she’d once been. His easy self-confidence came from being handed authority as soon as he stretched out a languid hand to take it. His body and mind had been shaped by a life of doing exactly what he wanted.

  Three months ago, she’d fallen a little into infatuation, not with him, but with the idea of him. It had been a heady experience to be accepted into the fashionable crowd he ran with. It had been such lighthearted fun to steal the hands off the church clock at Bobbingsworth. To balance a tall beaver hat on the statue of King Lud in Fleet Street. To race high-wheeled phaetons on the turnpike road. To do all the foolish things she hadn’t done when she was seventeen. She’d been in Spain that year, dancing with life and death when other young women were wearing thin muslin and dancing at Almack’s.

  Maybe if she’d been young and silly in the proper season for nonsense, she’d never have been fooled, even for a minute, by Robin.

  Or perhaps she hadn’t been quite fooled. In the weeks she’d played the games his set indulged in, it had never occurred to her to trust Robin with even one small secret or tell him any truth of significance. She’d never mentioned her family. Never spoken of her work. That, more than anything else, showed how little she’d cared about him.

  When he was close enough to snarl down at her, he let himself do that. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

  “Well, yes,” she said.

  “This is important. Put your hurt feelings away and listen to me.” He curled his fingers into the canvas cover she was securing to the wagon as if he wanted to peel it back and have a look underneath. He didn’t try that, but he worried away at a corner, trying to loosen the rope tie and make it look like an accident. He was not endearing himself to her in any way.

  He said, “What is all this? What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you to say anything worth listening to. I’ll spend as much as three or four minutes on it, then you leave.”

  “You’ve already wasted too much time. You.” He tossed that at MacDonald. “Go away.”

  MacDonald stroked Bluebell’s ears and ignored Robin Carlington.

  Robin raised his voice. “Get out of here, McNeil, Fergusson, O’Hara . . . whoever you are. Make yourself scarce. I need to talk to Sévie. Alone.”

  With a small gesture she sent MacDonald off. Yesterday she would have sent Robin away instead. Yesterday he’d been just another of the caltrops that scattered the fashionable world. Today he was Colonel Carlington’s nephew and Deverney had just robbed the Carlington household of what she suspected was a tidy fortune in jewels. That made the Carlingtons less dull, didn’t it? She’d give Robin a few minutes even on what was turning out to be a busy evening.

  Wordlessly, MacDonald slipped the reins loose from the hitching rail and led Bluebell away. He didn’t bother to look back, which was a testament to how harmless he thought Robin was. If it had been Deverney next to her in this deserted yard, MacDonald would have followed her order just as quickly, but he’d have conveyed a silent opinion as he left and he’d have found some secret vantage point to watch the meeting.

  Robin took MacDonald’s departure as a symbolic victory. She could have told him she didn’t deal in those.

  “Did you even bother to read the notes I sent?” Robin passed his hand over his face and pushed his hair up and away from his forehead, being dramatic and beautiful. He’d have made a fine living on the stage. “It’s probably already too late.”

  “That sounds ominous. What is this urgent matter? I have other things to do tonight.” Her hands were dusty from loading boxes. She wiped them on her skirt. “If you’ve got yourself into trouble with your pack of lies, don’t expect me to get you out of it.”

  “That’s over. It’s not important now.”

  “How nice for you.” Two men had showed an interest in her recently and they were both full of lies.

  She wanted to kick someone. Robin was closest but Deverney deserved it more. She packed her anger away to use on Deverney the next time she ran into him.

  Out on the street, MacDonald yelled at Robin’s fancy, well-dressed driver to pull the coach farther up, out of his way. A colorful conversation ensued. Words were exchanged concerning Bluebell’s ancestry and the intelligence of Robin’s matched chestnuts. A fine example of London invective. If it came to fisticuffs, she’d back MacDonald against Robin’s driver at thirty-to-one in a free-for-all. Ten-to-one in an honest fight.

  “You never listened to me,” Robin said bitterly. “You’re not listening now. You’d dance and play cards with me and go to gaming dens in places that made me nervous. But I was just an amusement. I envied you beyond belief.”

  She dragged her mind back to Robin. What was he nattering on about? “Envy?”

  “You never saw that, did you? My friends and I played at being wild rogues. Off we’d go to the dangerous parts of town to pretend we were splendid brave fellows. And you were at home there. You knew every dark corner before we turned it. We didn’t get robbed because we were with you. We didn’t even get cheated in the hells.” A glimmer of the careless, clever Robin she’d known showed through. “Useful, since I’m in debt up to my ears. You knew all those thieves and beggars and whores. And soldiers, everywhere, officers and men, right up and down the ranks.”

  “I was four years in Spain. Of course I know soldiers.”

  “They’d come over to you in some tavern and it’d be ‘Remember this’ and ‘Whatever happened to John or George or Old Athelstan the Sergeant Major?’ Eventually they’d notice me and get around to, ‘Carlington. Didn’t see you there. How are you these days?’”

  “I can see how that would have annoyed you.” But she hadn’t seen it at the time.

  “They always wanted to talk to you—the duchesses and chimney sweeps and bankers from Florence. You were game as a fighting cock and generous and a heroine in the war. My friends and I hadn’t gone to war and been heroic. We resented you to hell.”

  She’d known she was an outsider among that set. She hadn’t known how much.

  “We were an amusement to you, not as important as some army sergeant driving a hackney. I could lure you out with us because I made you laugh.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “I used to plan what I’d do. What I’d say. A challenge, really. I used to do things I knew were silly, because you’d like them. That time I hired a fiddler and we all danced a reel in the middle of Green Park in front of the starchy governesses. It made you laugh. T
hat was the only use you had for me, you know. Your licensed fool. Your buffoon. And I wanted to be your lover.”

  She shouldn’t have let him talk. She didn’t want to hear this.

  Because he was right. She’d used him as a holiday from common sense, a sweet cake, a glass of bubbly wine. She’d enjoyed him when she was with him and dismissed him from her mind when she wasn’t. She hadn’t tried to know him.

  “I didn’t plan it.” He was talking to himself, not her. Justifying himself. “It wasn’t my idea. It wasn’t my fault.”

  She stopped feeling sorry for him. “Whose idea was it then?” One of his many laughing, cheerful, vicious friends, doubtless.

  “You were supposed to leave town in disgrace, but you acted like I didn’t matter. You ignored me and everyone else despised me. Whether they believed me or not, they were on your side.”

  “You did lie through your teeth,” she pointed out.

  “You walked through scandal like it didn’t exist. Your reputation was as leathery tough as your maidenhead. I barely dented it.” Robin looked peevish. Handsome, but peevish. “I barely dented your reputation. I didn’t get near your maidenhead.”

  She could have told him that was long gone.

  “If I had,” he said, “you would have married me.”

  “There was never any chance of that.” She’d never, not once, thought of him that way.

  “It’s not an unequal match. I’m well born. I’m English. And you’re not exactly young, you know. Your reputation is questionable at best.”

  “More questionable than it used to be.”

  “I would have treated you like a queen.” His hands curled into ineffectual fists at his sides. “But you didn’t see me. Didn’t care. Some women are like that—cold as ice, right to the heart. I loved you and you felt nothing for me.”

  Oh, nonsense. “Right now what I feel is disgust. Go away. I’m through talking to you.” She turned her back on him. There was work to do, places to go, and offices to rob.

  Robin called after her, “Wait. This is important.”

  Once, when the world had seemed very black, Robin had made her laugh. She owed him one minute. She looked back.

  It wasn’t just the dim light that made him look haggard. The gold had washed out of his hair. His skin was blotched and pasty. He looked wilted and old and desperate. “If you’d married me,” he said, “I’d have taken you to Paris, to Rome, to Vienna. I’d have kept you away from England till it was safe to come back.”

  “Safe?”

  “You never think about that, do you? You just go traipsing around, digging into things you don’t understand. Stirring up old crimes. Old mistakes.” His voice got higher. “They can get you killed.”

  Dramatic enough for Drury Lane. Almost certainly nonsense. “Killed by whom and for what? Digging up what?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “You’ve gone this far. You might as well finish.”

  He breathed heavily and shook his head.

  He was a Carlington. This did not require complex deductions. “Crimes from the war? From Spain?”

  “I didn’t say that.” But he might as well have. “You don’t understand.”

  She could read every line of this story. Robin had panicked over threats he’d heard across the family breakfast table. She could imagine them at it. Haughty Lady Carlington pouring tea and sneering. His lordship planning to wield the political weight of a minor baron. That damned idiot Colonel Carlington, huffing and puffing.

  “Your uncle had sticky fingers in Spain.” The Deverney jewels were probably only part of it. “It’s going to come out. Some cats can’t be stuffed back in a bag.” She gathered up her cloak from the loading dock.

  Robin said, “I’m trying to—”

  “Robin, go away. Stop writing me notes. Stop chasing me across London. Stop telling lies about me. If you want someone to leave London, you do it.”

  “You have to listen to me.”

  “No. You listen to me, Mr. Carlington. Go home and get drunk or go to the park and put a hat on some statue. Nobody cares about crimes in Spain, years ago, in a war everyone wants to forget. Nobody, frankly, cares about the Carlingtons. And nobody dies of scandal.” She let herself be tart about it. “I know.”

  “I’m not responsible for that.” Robin ran his hands up and down his jacket sleeves, as if he were scrubbing her away. “It’s not my fault.” She imagined him in the nursery, running to lay his head in Nanny’s lap and deny breaking the lamp in the study.

  “You’ve convinced me. Now go away.” She swirled her cloak around her. She’d be glad of it later in the night when it got cold. On a sudden impulse, she called to him, “Where is the amulet?”

  “What?” He didn’t look bewildered. He looked scared. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He seemed on the verge of saying more, but he didn’t. He hurried away from her. He was running by the time he reached the big doors and went out onto the street.

  Thirty-three

  SÉVIE entered Thomas Hayward’s office in a manner not precisely free of niggling legal problems. It was three rooms and a tiny hall. The front room was for visitors to wait in, uncomfortably. The first door off the hall was where a pair of clerks sat on high stools and copied papers on their slanted desktops. There was a row of file cabinets and tall windows, now covered with thick velvet curtains. Next came an awkwardly shaped space dedicated to making tea. At the end of the hall one came to the office of Mr. Thomas Hayward himself. It held a Turkey carpet, legal books behind glass doors, three leather chairs, and a big desk where Hayward could sit and impress clients. Also a large safe in the corner.

  Sévie went through the clerks’ room first and filled three of her smaller crates with papers from file cabinets there. Six minutes through the front door and she’d already proved her point. Hayward hadn’t turned over Deverney’s papers. She left the boxes filled with her first take beside the front door. The tea room contained no secret compartments that she could find. Nice brand of tea, though.

  She carried the rest of the boxes back to Hayward’s office and piled them in the middle of the floor. This was where he’d be hiding his secrets, the ones too incriminating to keep in those files in the clerks’ room. She’d find them.

  She went around lighting lamps, then sat on the floor next to the desk, tailor fashion, and loosened her skirts up over her knees to make herself comfortable. The desk drawers were locked, every one of them. Hayward apparently took his desk keys home with him every night instead of leaving a set on the top of a bookcase or under the pot of ivy at the window. She was put to the trouble of picking the lock in each drawer.

  A careful, honest man would lock these drawers to keep his clients’ business private. A sneaky embezzler would be keeping his own secrets private. Before dawn, she’d know which Hayward was.

  This was a solid, well-built desk but there was nothing special about these locks. They were more decorative than anything else. A matter of click click and she’d be in. The challenge lay in that safe in the corner behind her. If she’d been in a hurry, she’d be working over there. As it was, she left it for last.

  A soft tap sounded on the street door, followed immediately by the sound of the door opening. She leaned to the side and looked around the desk, down the hall. Deverney was walking toward her, quite as if he belonged here. Deverney took a lot for granted.

  She wasn’t as angry at him as she’d thought she’d be. Perhaps she was learning wisdom. Or maybe she was just very busy. There could be other reasons she didn’t want to look at closely.

  She went back to doing what she’d come here to do, which was picking away at a lock, the next mundane task in finding Pilar. Breaking and entering was not nearly as exciting as it sounded to the uninitiated.

  “I expected you earlier,” she said when he’d walked the length of the hall. “Generally you’re waiting fo
r me at the scene of breaking and entering.”

  “My apologies. I was busy with machinations and plots elsewhere.” He folded himself down on the carpet next to her. “Good evening, Miss de Cabrillac.”

  “I should tell you to go away and leave me in peace.”

  “You should. But I’d go join MacDonald in the wagon and pepper him with pointed questions. Who knows what he’ll let slip?”

  “MacDonald wouldn’t let slip that water is wet or the sky is blue. A man of unfathomable mystery, MacDonald.”

  “Or I might chat with Peter. He’d be a fount of information and he’s young enough to be indiscreet. But I’d rather sit by you.”

  “I wondered where Peter was.”

  “I have dropped him in the wagon beside the stolid MacDonald. Peter is very slightly damaged. No.” He touched her arm, brief and light about it. “Not badly hurt. No worse than he’d get in a scuffle on the street. A bloody nose and some bruises. He won’t thank you for running out to hover over him.”

  “What happened?”

  “In brief, he followed me into a dangerous place. Bad judgment of mine to be there. Worse judgment on his part to follow me in.”

  “You have been busy.” She rested her cheek on the upper drawer of the desk and fiddled away some more with her chosen lock. “Where were you being unwise?”

  “Covent Garden. I went to see Lazarus.”

  The last pick turned and she pulled out the drawer. “Lazarus.”

  Deverney, wine grower and aristocrat, would have nothing to do with Lazarus. Deverney the thief, the Comodin, was part of that world. When he sat beside her in the midst of a burglary he was so very much not a wine merchant.

  He said, “I had questions for King Thief. I didn’t get answers.”

  “One doesn’t.” She laid the drawer—it was the bottom drawer—across Deverney’s lap. “Since you’re here anyway, you might as well make yourself useful by glancing through these papers.”

  “My pleasure.”