The Devil She Knows

by Diane Whiteside

  A cup smashed down into a saucer only a few feet away, followed by hisses of surprise and the screech of chair legs being pushed rapidly backward. Clearly their reunion had acquired an audience.

  Portia ignored them, something she’d learned far too well how to do, and instead scrutinized the man whose bed she’d once shared. In Arizona, she could have listened to her instincts and gone armed, however subtly.

  Like him, she offered no gesture of greeting, neither handshake nor nod. If he collapsed before the whispering crowd on this busy Cairo street edge, she’d be the first to send the notice to The Times then drink a glass of champagne in private.

  Something flickered behind his eyes and his diplomat’s mask tightened over his knife-edged features. Could he be angry she hadn’t immediately sought to placate him?

  Surely not, given she was no longer married to him and therefore no longer owed him any duty.

  Cynthia swept around her husband and linked arms with Portia to protectively flank her. Even her hat’s feathers seemed to bristle like a bull terrier.

  “Sir Graham, Lady Oates.” St. Arles gave them the same curt recognition he’d give street signs, as if they were necessary but not interesting.

  Hot words protesting discourtesy to her friends surged forward but Portia forced them back, into the familiar cavern of useless remonstrances behind her gritted teeth. St. Arles loved only his country and his land; everyone and everything else was judged in terms of their usefulness.

  “My lord.” Sir Graham’s voice was even less friendly than the other man’s, for all that he was an Army captain facing down an earl well-connected enough to crush him. “We were on our way inside when you caught us. Is there ought we can do for you before we depart?”

  “I’ll have a word with Mrs. Vanneck.” He’d have shown more consideration if he’d been ordering lunch at his club, the bastard. “She must postpone her trip to India.”

  “Quite unnecessary, St. Arles,” Portia returned, determined not to argue with him again. She was free and he had no claim upon her whatsoever. “Our lawyers have already said everything necessary.”

  “She has already booked passage with us for India and on to Australia,” Cynthia added.

  “After which, I’ll return to San Francisco and my family. Good day, sir.” Portia started to walk past the earl.

  “You might want to hear the latest news from Mrs. Russell,” St. Arles suggested and polished a fingernail with his thumb.

  The housekeeper at St. Arles Court? Why would he carry a message from her? He never troubled himself with the servants except to make their lives miserable.

  “And Winfield? Or young Maisie and Jenkins, I believe he’s called?” He shot a speculative glance at her then returned his attention to his always important manicure.

  The butler, housemaid, and under-groom? A chill, which had nothing to do with the spring breeze, or the verandah’s shade, crept into Portia’s fingers.

  She tried to kick her recalcitrant brain into action.

  What would Gareth look for in this situation?

  St. Arles had just named the ringleaders of her supporters during the divorce. How much did he know or suspect?

  Now that she was gone, they lacked a protector—unless That Woman had changed her stripes and become someone capable of considering others more than herself.

  Portia sniffed privately, remembering maids weeping after being slapped by the over-bred, ill-mannered breeding machine.

  No, she had to hear out the two-legged male rat. Her duty to her friends demanded nothing less.

  “Yes, of course, I would.” She started to move away from Cynthia and Sir Graham.

  “Surely you can’t mean to take her very far,” Cynthia exclaimed. “We’re promised to have tea together in a few minutes.”

  Actually in a few hours. What was she thinking of?

  “Why don’t you join us and share all the latest gossip from home?” Cynthia burbled, in the style most men expected from a blond of her looks but her friends rarely encountered.

  St. Arles frowned, his disgust almost tangible.

  Portia’s lips curled, despite the ice fighting for possession of her skin under the brazen desert sky. The Fifth Earl only talked to women if he hoped to bed them or tease a state secret from them.

  “No, I’m afraid I cannot stay that long,” he refused curtly. “A few minutes should see us done.”

  “In that case, you and I can walk in the Ezbekieh Gardens on the hotel’s other side, ahead of Sir Graham and Lady Oates,” Portia said sweetly. She’d be safer roped and tied by Apaches than alone again with him. But everything Gareth had taught her about duty in the face of danger insisted she needed to learn what the brute wanted.

  St. Arles opened his mouth to object then measured the intensity of their growing audience, spilling in waves across the hotel terrace. His gaze swung back to his former wife’s rigid determination and her friends’ wariness.

  His jaw clenched. “I’d be delighted to escort you,” he gritted out.

  “Thank you,” Portia returned with less enthusiasm and took care not to touch him. Sir Graham and Cynthia followed at a distance, close enough to see but not to hear.

  They passed through the great hotel’s shadowed dimness without speaking and into the great garden’s verdant square surrounded by massive palaces and hotels. Closely cropped hedges and green grass echoed Paris’s famous parks, while an ornate bandstand offered a place for the well-to-do to congregate. Only the ancient palm trees and the sweet scent of flowers for Egypt’s famous perfumes evoked Oriental mysteries.

  Gareth would have looked far more commanding striding across the grass, than any of the bronze statues of kings and emperors lurking behind shrubbery. Or the well-bred varmint beside her.

  “How are they?” Portia asked, without glancing at her companion.

  “Well enough—for now.”

  Exactly as she’d suspected: another bout of the haggling which had wracked their marriage. She waited, determined to hear him out then walk away. This time, she had no reason to beg her father for money to advance St. Arles’ ambitions.

  “A steamer trunk is being delivered to your rooms at this moment. You will take it to Constantinople—”

  “What?” That had to take the prize for greatest harebrained conversational topics.

  “Where you will receive instructions on who and how to transfer it.”

  She came to a complete halt and stared at him, her tailor-made suit snapping against her boots.

  He didn’t even pause but continued to stroll forward, armored as ever in arrogance—and the certainty he’d made the proper decision.

  He’d tracked her down in Egypt so she could take a piece of luggage to Constantinople?

  Fear, which she’d thought she’d forgotten, or at least escaped, bloomed in a rising tide through the hairs on the nape of her neck.

  She shook herself fiercely. A quick glare warned Cynthia and Sir Graham to stay back before she caught up with her damnably confident ex-husband.

  St. Arles planned to strand her in a very foreign city with an enormous oak box, which would be impossible to hide, and demand she wait until somebody happened along to take it off her hands? She’d carried gold into Apache country but it had been a small amount, hidden in a money belt, and taken on a scheduled stagecoach route.

  Still, if she’d survived the Apacheria, she could manage this. Somehow.

  She ignored the little voice which reminded her of Gareth Lowell’s aid.

  “Why Constantinople? Surely somebody else could take it to the capitol of the Ottoman Empire.” She deliberately kept her voice honey sweet and rational, suitable for a proper diplomat’s wife. It was one of the few weapons which had been useful during her bitter marriage.

  “It’s a woman’s piece of luggage, not a man’s. The Turks won’t pay any heed to it.” He paused to watch two little boys playing hide and seek behind a large hibiscus bush. His stern expression softened into something ap
proaching charm.

  “Why me?”

  “You’re American, not British. Touchy as the Sultan is, he won’t be looking for trouble from an upstart colonial.”

  She blinked. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Two years ago, the Sultan barred the Dardanelles to our Navy. It’s the only reason we didn’t have a full-out war with Russia—Baltic, Crimea, Afghanistan, Pacific, everywhere—at a time when India itself was at stake.”

  “The Penjdeh Crisis.”

  “Finally your tiny brain starts working.” The little boys ran off after their nanny. St. Arles sighed and turned his attention completely to her, his brief ascent into humanity completely vanished.

  “The Sultan is a bloody-fingered autocrat who looks for plots everywhere. A trunk this large in a diplomat’s luggage, especially British, would be watched constantly. That’s why you’re taking it in.”

  “Never.”

  “You’ll do as I say or every one of your so-called friends will be dismissed without a reference.”

  They’d be destroyed. They’d never be able to find another job, at least not a decent one.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” she countered. “Your wife would be left to fend for herself, with no one to cook or clean for her.”

  “Only until I could replace them. It would be worth it, if it meant the traitors were gone.”

  Traitors?

  “Most of them have served generations of your family,” she countered, striving for logic.

  “They should have testified against you when I told them to.”

  “They’d have lied.”

  “What of it? I wouldn’t have needed to pay that greedy actor, plus witnesses at the coaching hotel to do so. Every other man can rely on his staff at all times; why couldn’t I?”

  Because you’re a brute and I tried to protect them.

  “Now it’s time for them to be of some use.”

  As bait?

  “The trunk can’t be worth enough for that kind of blackmail.” She flogged her brain for a way out of this impasse, as if she were riding through an endless thicket of cactus with no water in sight.

  Think, Portia, think. You must have learned something from Gareth.

  Perhaps if she sent word to her solicitor in London, he could do something in time. But she’d wager her best pearl necklace St. Arles was having her every move watched, including every cable she sent.

  “The Turks will think it’s jollier than old Humpty Dumpty.” He snickered. “Don’t try to open it; you won’t have the key, of course.”

  “You need an American woman,” she said slowly. Was this clue a glimpse into an oasis or a mirage? “Is this for yourself or the Crown?”

  He stilled, like an angry rattler ready to strike.

  “A matter of state?”

  His hand shot out for her throat. She automatically jerked away, trained by far too much practice, and Sir Graham growled.

  St. Arles dropped his hand an inch short of her jugular. He glared at her, the promise of gory death lurking behind his slitted eyes.

  Old terror tried to climb back into her veins but she shook it off. She was not his puppet any longer, required to spout the prattle he fed her whenever she walked among other diplomats’ wives.

  “Good God, St. Arles, what are you planning to do? Buy conspirators for some harebrained scheme?”

  “It’s none of your affair. Simply do as you’re told and there’ll be no trouble from me for your friends.”

  What was in that trunk to evoke such a sharp reaction?

  “Why me? Surely you could have found somebody else, perhaps paid a man to take it there.” If she understood better, surely she could convince him to change his mind. He usually did, given enough money.

  He laughed harshly, the noise as jarring as a crow’s cry heralding death among these scented gardens.

  “Not at all, my beloved former wife. You see, this is how you will work off your debt to me.”

  “I don’t owe you a penny, St. Arles. You know perfectly well my dowry wiped out your father and brother’s gambling debts on our wedding day. After that, you spent the spare change on cleaning up your home.”

  “A million pounds.”

  Even her heart stopped beating at the far too familiar sum.

  “Yes, I thought you might recognize the amount. Or should I call it five million dollars? You owe me that much for rushing our divorce through.”

  “I owe you nothing!” Portia violently swept petals off a planter’s rim.

  “Remember the trust from your mother that you inherited on your twenty-fifth birthday? Townsend should have told me about it.”

  “What of it? Mother inherited it from her mother and it would pass only to her daughters. Father had nothing to do with it, so of course he didn’t think of it.” Her heart was beating like one of those erratic drums in a bazaar.

  Stay calm, Portia. Gareth always remained poised during battle. Oh, dear Lord, if only he could walk by right now…

  “If you’d contested the divorce, if it had taken the usual amount of time, we would have been married on the day you came into it—and all of that wealth would be mine. I would have the gold and Amabel’s fertility a few days later, rather than your useless barrenness.”

  “You’re…” She wet her lips at the deadly poison in his eyes.

  “Angry? Logical? Exactly so, my dear,” he sneered. “Don’t think to tell anyone, even your precious companions here in Cairo. You’re holding a Crown secret once again, as you’ve already surmised. Whitehall deals very harshly with loose lips and the ears they pour foolishness into.”

  If she was sixteen again and this was only a prank, Gareth would appear to tell her how to deliver the ugly chest to the Sultan. Instead, he’d walked out and she had to outmaneuver her poisonous rattler of an ex-husband by herself.

  She had to agree. It was the only way to play for time.

  “Very well.”

  Blast the man, he’d undoubtedly have her watched every second from now on. But maybe a carefully phrased cable to Uncle William and Aunt Viola would make it through.

  And surely the Constantinople police would not be as ridiculously fearful as St. Arles implied. It was far more likely her fiendish ex-husband simply wanted to make her miserable yet again.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Saladin’s Citadel, Cairo, two days later

  The wind pummeled Gareth the instant he stepped outside the ancient stone fortress. Saladin, the mighty leader who’d thrown back Richard the Lionheart’s armies from Jerusalem’s walls, had first fortified this steep hill. Mamelukes, that legendary warrior caste, had fiercely defended this castle for centuries until the last ones sallied forth from this gate to meet their doom less than seventy years ago. Their corpses paved the road to the future, while their tortured prisoners’ skeletons no doubt cheered their ambushers.

  Sand hung in the sky like a deadly disease, filthy brown and eager to send the unwary to a graveyard. The Nile’s blue ribbon was only a vague smear on the western horizon past the tattered tenements. Green growing things were a vague memory, their scent trapped on the wind’s fringe to be pounded against the southern desert.

  Gareth flung his burnous around his head and shoulders to protect himself from the worst of the upcoming storm, grateful he’d chosen to wear native dress, including the full, heavy cloak.

  He could have worn European attire but that would have cost him infinitely more baksheesh, the golden grease which kept Egyptian commerce moving in more or less efficient channels. The Suez Canal was a far faster route to Europe from Asia but Egypt held the perfume industry’s heart and soul, with its vast profits for tiny, fragile parcels. The art was paying the minimum in bribery, while still staying alive.

  He smiled faintly, remembering all the dead assassins who’d tested themselves against his blade before his business costs had become measured only in coins. Oddly, the natives seemed to award him greater respect after he learned the local language.
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br />   Gareth shifted his shoulders, settled Portia’s knife’s neck sheath more comfortably into place, and headed for his hotel. A hot bath, a good drink, and at least one willing woman couldn’t arrive too soon.

  Ranks of alabaster columns faded behind him, hidden by their guardian stone bulwarks. Two great minarets lanced the dirty air, while the mosque’s great golden dome impassively observed both the songbirds fleeing for safety and the scarlet-coated British sentries. Last night, its halls and the entire city had rung with Lailat al Mi’raj, the Festival of the Night Journey when Muslims remembered patience, perseverance, and prayer.

  A few tourists fluttered like ragged pieces of paper inside their open carriages. He ignored them, memories of his hotel chef’s chicken rasping his throat more powerfully than the sand.

  “Mr. Lowell!” A man shouted at him from the British Army barracks.

  His ears pricked at the aristocratic drawl but he didn’t break stride. The hot bath was far more important than answering a stranger’s call, especially since Donovan & Sons now had other agents in this country.

  The British consul general and his staff—everyone who meant anything in actually operating Egypt’s government—had their offices in Cairo’s Citadel. The British army was headquartered here, including the large force charged with retaking Khartoum and retrieving the wildly popular General Gordon’s body. That very upper-crust bloke could have mistaken him for anybody.

  “Gareth Lowell!” A woman’s voice this time.

  Gareth slowed, his feet dragging to a stop. An American female, here in Egypt, who knew him?

  “Mr. Lowell, I’m Cynthia Oates, Portia’s best friend.” A small blond whirlwind hurled herself at him and grabbed his shoulders.

  “Yes, I remember hearing of you.” Vaguely, from scrapes she and Portia got into years ago at boarding school.

  “This is my husband, Graham.”

  “Sir.” Gareth exchanged a bare nod with the other.

  What was going on? The fellow wasn’t offended by his wife hanging onto a stranger in a public street, even though her attitude was that of an anxious sister.