After the Scandal

by Elizabeth Essex

  He turned directly toward it, and rattled the gate, as if he had regular business there, and was surprised to find it shut. If anyone were watching, they would see a normal, typical reaction from an honest businessman.

  But he wasn’t an honest man—he was more intrigued by the brassy new padlock that hung on new iron chain, hanging like a pennant advertising that there was something within worth stealing. Like an gilt-edged invitation.

  An invitation he meant to accept.

  Tanner took himself around the corner, and then ducked against the wall, hidden in the shadow, as he waited another few moments for any signs of interest, or pursuit—there was still time to say he was lost, and walk away. Still time to avoid any cur dog they might have left loose about the place.

  Better than any lock, a cur dog—cur dogs had teeth that couldn’t be picked with a rake and file.

  But they were careless, and had no dogs.

  The place was shut up as tight as a pensioners purse.

  It was his sister who was a dab hand with a lock, but he was a rooftop man, and without so much as breaking into a sweat, he found a handhold along the far corner of the shot tower, and scaled the rickety, uneven walls as easily as if he were walking down Bond Street.

  Once on the roof, he paused again. Below him lay a small, deserted yard, no more than twenty square feet in area—crossable in a few strides—with open sheds arrayed on three sides of the tower.

  A hint of sulfur—a light tinge of the funk of heat and chemicals—floated on the stale air, even though the works were cold, and all the fires put out.

  Or perhaps they had never been lit.

  Tanner stayed put for a long moment, keeping quiet and blending in with the shadow of the tower, listening hard for any noise—there was only the steady lap of the water against the piers below, and the hissing ejections of steam, and the clatter and chatter that came from the Goodwyn, Skinner & Thornton brewery across St. Catherine’s Lane.

  He dropped silently to the dusty yard and went immediately into the tower building. The trapdoor was his first order of business—he needed to secure it should he need to make a speedy exit.

  The lock on the trapdoor was iron—rusting, old and forgotten. It took longer than he would have liked to pick it, but he was out of practice, and he wanted to make a clean pick, leave no indication—like a broken lock—that he’d been on the premises.

  “Tanner?” The low whisper slid under the planks, as he jimmied the rake in the lock.

  “Here.” Stronger pressure against the rake finally yielded results, and the iron padlock clanked open.

  Tanner threw open the trapdoor to find Claire’s face floating like a small moon just below.

  He had never been so glad to see another person, if for no other reason than it was Claire, and she was there, exactly as she had said she would be.

  And she was looking up at him as if she had never been so glad to see anyone as she was to see him.

  He’d never had an accomplice, a partner, on his illicit and illegal adventures—not since his sister.

  And Lady Claire Jellicoe was not his sister. Not by any bloody means.

  Tanner extended his arm, and without thinking, she handed him the painter to tie the skiff off. He took both the rope and her hand, and for some reason his brain had not been courteous enough to tell him yet, he hauled her straight up.

  “Good Lord—” She stifled the rest of her curse, and lowered her voice. “I thought I was supposed to stay with the boat?” she asked in a breathless whisper.

  “You were. And you did so. Now, we’re on to part two—I need your help with the search.”

  “My help?”

  “Two eyes are better than one, and four eyes are far better than two.” He was bantering—bantering with her in the middle of a bloody job. Clearly, he was the one who was mad. “Can you do that?” he whispered back.

  “Yes.”

  “Good girl.” He liked this whispering. A man had to be close to a girl to whisper.

  “What are we looking for?”

  He steered her to the doorway of the tower. “Just look. Though I think there’s only one thing worth looking at in the whole place—the shed with the new lock.”

  He stood her in front of him, facing forward, so her back was flush against his chest. Her head, just below his chin.

  Her question hummed through his torso. “How do you know it’s a new lock?”

  “Because of the difference.” He brought his arm around to point the way across the small yard to the shed tight next to one of the small stone furnaces. “Shiny. Bright. New. When everything else is dusty and dilapidated. Look at all the ovens. No ashes in the fit pits, no tongs, no buckets and ladles.”

  “But that one”—she pointed her chin toward the furnace next to the locked shed—“has been used. See the brick is blacked by the heat and charcoal of a more recent fire. ”

  “Well done, you.” His pleasure was a physical thing, stretching and rolling contentedly deep in his belly. “And look at that small stack of lead pigs, stamped Mendip for their place of origin, left in a haphazard heap against the shed.”

  He was thinking out loud, letting her into the halls of his rather encyclopedic brain.

  He took an audible sniff. “Can you detect the lingering poison vapors of lead and sulphur and arsenic in the air? It means they are smelting something. But judging from the dilapidated state of the tower, they aren’t making shot. And judging by the dead ash in the furnaces, they aren’t making much. Just enough. Just enough of the kind of work that turns an easy profit.”

  Another check of the yard, and he whisked her across the small, open space.

  “So the shiny, new padlock gleaming from its old, rusted hasp calls to us like a beacon. Like a broadsheet announcing something of much greater value than the surroundings is within.”

  “What a strange way you have of seeing the world,” she murmured. “As if everything, each and every piece of existence could be catalogued and made useful.”

  They were so close, he could feel the shy fluttering of her breath against the side of his neck.

  “Ah. But it can. Everything can be useful. Remember that, Claire.”

  “I will. I won’t ever forget.”

  He was too full of buzzing energy, too full of that unruly enthusiasm that gripped him in a job, and intoxicated by the pleasure of having her with him, to do much more than carom onward.

  “The lock is good brass, but I could probably have the hasp off in a trice with a little pressure from a lever. But I want to leave no trace that we’ve been here, so we’ll have to clean pick the lock. A delicate job that.”

  “We? How could I possibly help you?”

  “I thought you said you wanted to learn?” He was teasing her. Luring her deeper into his larcenous net.

  “How to take care of myself,” she said carefully, as if she could not gauge his mood. “Not how to pick locks.”

  His mood was still too expansive to be daunted.

  “Well, you never know when you’ll need the skill. So pay heed.” He positioned her in front of him, so he had to reach his arms around her to work the lock.

  “This is the rake.” He held the slender piece of tooled steel up for a moment before he slid it into the lock. “And hold that there. Keep pressure on it. Strong. Yes.”

  “And now we introduce the pick, very carefully.” He inserted the second tool, and, leaning in to her, closed his eyes to better visualize the tiny metal serrations and tumblers within the mechanism. Feeling his way carefully.

  “My sister used to say that good locks are like old maiden aunties,” he mused. “They know how to keep secrets. But these aren’t good locks. They’re brassy bullyboys meant to serve as a warning—I’m too secure, you’ll never get by me. They’re obvious, and simple. And—there.”

  The lock fell open under the pressure.

  Inside the shed was exactly what he wanted to find—a small working furnace with small lead blanks stacked
by an anvil with a cut-out space.

  “That space is for a coin die,” he explained, crouching down to examine the surface for any remnants of gold foil.

  “The dies are metal—usually brass—cylinders upon which the two different side of the coin’s faces have been wrought. One goes here, in the anvil, and then the blank is inserted. This lead core”—he picked up one of the blanks—“around which the gold is fused. Fused hot, Elias Solomon said—hence the small furnace. Then the upper die is positioned over it, and struck with a hammer, and the hot coin is flipped into the bucket of water.”

  He held out his fists to illustrate the process.

  “There’s nothing in the buckets at all—not even water. And where the incriminating dies?”

  She poked into the corners of the shed, toeing the dirt with her boot as if they might turn up.

  There was nothing. Not so much as a strongbox for him work to show off his cracksman’s skills.

  “Maybe they are too valuable, and too incriminating to leave about someplace as badly secured as this yard. Or maybe the owner of the dies doesn’t trust the owner of the yard, and only supplied the dies when the work was being done, and then took them back—that is a far more likely scenario.”

  “Well, I must say I’m disappointed,” she admitted, with her delicate arms fisted on her hips. “Are you sure—”

  Tanner didn’t hear the rest. Because he had heard a different sound, and was already shoving Claire out the door of the shed, silently slipping the lock through the hasp and clicking it shut, and bolting across the yard with her before he thought to explain. “Someone’s coming.”

  Someone who wasn’t quite as stupid as Tanner would have liked, after all. They did have a cur dog—he could hear it thrashing and gnashing at the end of its leash as the animal was brought along St. Catherine’s lane.

  Claire was a clever girl who needed no further instruction.

  She grabbed up her skirts, was through the door of the shot tower, and sliding across the plank floor and down through the trapdoor like a seasoned, lifelong crackswoman.

  And Tanner was right behind her, stopping only long enough to slap the iron lock onto the hasp, and hope it looked bolted when he lowered the trapdoor.

  Claire already had the line free, and Tanner sprung to the oars, pulling hard to take them out into the stream of the river and away.

  The tide was just beginning to flow, but it was enough to move them far enough off that the skiff was a hundred yards off the wharf, when a face appeared at the broken widow of the shot tower.

  Tanner eased up at the oars, making it look as if he were just out for a Sunday sort of row.

  “Look at me,” he instructed, when Claire instinctively turned toward the shot tower. “Look like we’re just out for a lark. Like we’ve a thousand better things on our minds than breaking into a lead yard. Look at me as if you—”

  She came forward onto her knees, gripped her fist in his lapel, and pulled his lips to hers.

  Chapter 14

  Tanner knew what it was to be filled with the physical exhilaration of the chase, of success, and of the sheer bloody thrill of being alive. It was like an opiate in his blood, that elation, that slippery burst of joy at having done the illicit, and survived to steal and run another day.

  But this was something else. Something more.

  She was turning that happy joy toward him, tilting the pale moon of her face up to his so that she could illuminate him from within with her joy.

  It was heaven and hell, torture and bliss.

  He closed his eyes and stopped looking. Stopped thinking.

  He gave in to the pleasure of having the sublime weight of Lady Claire Jellicoe nestled against him in the narrow, close confines of the boat, and he slid down to his own knees, so the long length of his thigh was pressed to hers.

  He wanted to pull her tight against his chest, but she drew back, looking up at him with her wide blue eyes huge in her face, and he had to tell himself that this was all as new and faraway, as his sister used to say, as a West Indies island.

  And he had to take his time.

  Lady Claire Jellicoe was in his arms. And he meant to keep her there.

  So Tanner raised his hand carefully, and turned it slowly, so the back of his fingers caressed the sweet curve of her bruised cheek.

  He had never thought the back of his hand could have been such a repository for sensations, but now he knew it could contain a world of feelings—of softness and warmth, and fragile strength.

  “Yes.” Her voice was all cotton wool, soft and tangled as if in sleep. As if she were suspended on the nebulous remnant of some dream.

  Open and guileless, and his.

  His to hold. His to treat with wonder and care. His to adore.

  He saw the almost imperceptible tilting of her head, as her soft gaze fell to his mouth. He saw the parting and subsequent pleating of her lips, as she made her untutored decision.

  Her decision.

  He said the words over and over in his mind—he would let her take the lead.

  Just as it needed to be. Just as it should be.

  Because it was a decision he could not have made in a hundred years, no matter how soft and plush and enticing her lips looked—he could no more kiss her than he could ever have danced with her.

  The gulf was too wide. The chasm between them too deep.

  But she was coming nearer. And nearer still.

  He ducked his chin stupidly, trying foolishly to hide himself from her solemn, angelic regard.

  But on she came, and he made himself still before her, though the effort cost him to control himself, especially when she reached the soft tip of her finger to draw across the line of his lower lip.

  But her touch was not a burden, a thing to be momentarily endured.

  Her touch was so exquisite, a feeling of intense pillowed pleasure stilled his mind and bound his breath up in his chest so that he could not have spoken if he had wanted to.

  But he didn’t want to—he wanted nothing but the warm contact of her hand against the side of his face, and the warming heat that spread rapidly from his chest throughout the rest of his body.

  He opened his eyes to savor the moment, to take this small sign of her favor as the gift it was, before they fell shut—pushed closed on a wave of longing.

  Though he was a man with appetites, he had never done this—this intimacy, this kissing.

  His carnal adventures had always been conducted as transactions—strictly business with no time or coin spent on osculation.

  Ah, but what had he missed?

  He felt the change in the air between them, as the subtle heat of her body came ever nearer. He opened his eyes just in time to see her lids fall closed, and her mouth land like a butterfly upon his lips—soft, tentative and fleeting.

  Her kiss was light, the barest brush of her lips against his, and for a long moment he wondered if this was all that there was? If he had been right to think kissing for all its storied mention in poems and novels and songs was an overrated figment of the carnally excited imagination.

  But her lips settled more thoroughly upon his, and a whisper of something more promising shuddered down into his chest when she took his bottom lip between hers and tugged gently.

  And then again, upon his upper lip.

  And again at the corner of his mouth, where the skin was surprisingly sensitive.

  And he was following her lead, and kissing her back, moving his lips upon hers in the same fascinating fashion. And breathing in the fresh water-laden scent of her—spring and rain and lavender all in one.

  And then she was within his mouth, and the taste of her, of wine and water, and sorrow and joy suffused his mouth, and he was lost to the rising need to take another taste, to take another kiss, another breath.

  His hands had moved from his side to her arms, and up around her back, and into her hair—her soft glorious, halo of hair—pouring it through his fingers, surrendering to the need to touch
and taste and experience all of her, every part of her small supple body that he could reach without losing track of himself in the process—without losing track of the fact that he was meant to be a gentleman and treat her like a lady, when all he wanted was push her down in the boat and take her six ways from every Sunday.

  He had to loosen the fist he was beginning to make in her hair and stroke down the silken length gently, softly.

  It was only a kiss.

  Only a new world.

  He was no stranger to carnal knowledge—he had had many a game girl. And he remembered every last one of them, the Kaths and Bettys and Annies who gave and took comfort in the messy friction of their bodies. But he had always wanted to get to the heat of the matter, never ever lingering over the soft curve of a lip, or the sweet, tart taste of a tongue.

  Kissing Lady Claire Jellicoe was nothing like he thought it would be, and everything he had dreamed.

  Every sense was engaged, every muscle in his body was singing with purpose, every part of his being was consumed with the sweetness and pleasure and pure, unstinting bliss.

  Her kiss was everything he had never had, and always wanted.

  He had wanted to kiss her—soft, sweet Claire Jellicoe —and no one else in the world.

  But he couldn’t lose control. Not now. Not with her—she must have had enough of men trying to do more than kiss her.

  But she was the one who was kissing him.

  She was the one to hold him. She was the one to run her agile questing fingers up the back of his neck, and around the contours of his skull and pull him close.

  She was the one who made animal pleasure and seraphic delight course through him in a way that he never could have imagined—not in a hundred nights of dreaming of his soft, sweet Claire.

  He could only be both grateful and jealous for however many kisses she had let other men steal in darkened gardens, if it meant she could kiss him so, in a way that nearly made his soul rise out of his body with sheer unbridled, unfettered joy.

  He was stunned—helpless to do or say anything, but look at her in wonderment when she slipped away from him on a sigh, and sat back upon the distant stern seat.