He would wait and see her tonight. All through the night. In her private sitting room.
With her private smile.
And that particular pleasure would have to carry him through a busy day of diplomatic jousting.
Feeling as though he’d just battled a bully in the street, he waited until the chaos in the main chamber below had settled and Sayers had slinked off. Then he dusted off his clothes and left the gallery himself, nearly late for a meeting with Lord Clarendon.
Only to be met at the bottom of the stairs by a familiar face and a familiar smile.
“There you are, Blakestone, old man!” Lord Scarborough clapped him on the back. “I thought that was you up there in the gallery, tussling with those disorderly women.”
Ross felt himself bristle, his jaw tightened for another fight. “A lot you know about it, Scarborough. They were treated deplorably, from all sides.”
“Damn, I guess I missed that part. Only just came in on the end of the fracas.”
“They were merely a group of women from the Abigail Adams, interested in—”
“Ah, yes, that new ladies’ club.” The man was grinning broadly, a cat with cream on his whiskers. “My wife joined up a few months ago. Takes classes and goes to meetings of some sort.”
“And, of course, you object to it.” Taken aback by his own defensiveness, Ross waited for the usual diatribe against the very concept of a club for and by women.
But Scarborough only chuckled fondly. “Good God, no, Blakestone. I encourage the woman.”
“That’s very modern of you.”
“To hell with modern.” The man sent a glance around the lobby as though ready to whisper a state secret. “Best thing that ever happened to our marriage.”
“How’s that?”
“Let’s just say that I don’t know what they do over there at the Abigail Adams, but ever since Arlene joined them, well, the nightly activities in our bedchamber have become more … well, exotic.”
“More exotic?” Ross drew a complete blank. Though the image of a silvery warm beach in the South Seas shimmered before his eyes.
Naked love .. .
“You know …” Scarborough twitched his brows, then clicked his tongue twice. “… more romantic.”
Ross was feeling thoroughly dense, because exotic and romantic couldn’t possibly mean what it sounded like the man meant.
Not about the Abigail Adams.
Not about Miss Dunaway.
“I’m sorry, Scarborough, but I don’t—”
“Good Lord, do I have to spell it out? Arlene and I have been married ten years and suddenly my wife can’t get enough of me. You know, old man. In bed.”
“In bed?”
“God, yes! Bless the Abigail Adams and all who dwell within. I’ve become an object of my own wife’s lust, and I don’t mind it one damn bit.”
“Well, I guess you wouldn’t.” All this just because his wife joined the Abigail Adams?
What the devil was the innocent Miss Dunaway teaching in her classroom, anyway?
Scarborough brushed at the lapels of his waistcoat. ” Yup, just like a pair of lovebirds, are my Arlene and I.”
“The more power to you, Scarborough.”
“Hell, I was just going to recommend that you have your own lovely wife join up with the ladies, Blakestone, but you haven’t married yet, have you?”
“No, I haven’t.” He’d been about to spout the usual “Haven’t found the right woman yet,” but the comment hung up on the scent of roses still clinging to his coat sleeve.
Hung up on a pair of flashing green eyes.
On a voice that had just laid bare the entire House of Commons.
“Well, enough about this old married man, then, Blakestone. Clarendon’s expecting us in Aberdeen’s office. It seems that the Russians are kicking up another fuss about the sultan’s treatment of Prince Menshikov.”
“That was three months ago. Great.” Ross followed the man’s jaunty step, doing his best to keep track of Scarborough’s prattling about the tsar’s newest diplomatic insult against the Sultan of Turkey.
But there was only one stream of thought running through his head, boiling his brain, lodging its heat in his loins.
And her name was Elizabeth Dunaway.
Chapter 10
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again.
Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and orator, 1851
“Have you any family in America, Lydia? Any good friends there?”
The weary woman looked up at Elizabeth across the small library table, her eyes wet and red-rimmed and steeped in unwarranted guilt. “No, I haven’t. I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry about anything.” Elizabeth took hold of Lydia’s trembling hands and held tightly. “You do have friends in America. You just haven’t met them yet. But you’ll find them all along the way. Waiting to help you, from the moment you disembark in New York until you’ve become comfortable in your new life.”
“Friends.” Lydia’s smile sagged at one corner. “I’m so very glad to hear that. I’d be utterly lost otherwise.”
“That’s why you came to us.”
“I thank God that I did.” Her simple face filled with gratitude. “That Helen convinced me to come. Because though I’m terrified of the future, it can’t possibly be worse than what’s come before.”
Elizabeth had learned only a portion of Lydia’s current situation. As it should be, as it always was. The husband’s wrathful nature. The beatings. An unsympathetic family. Nowhere to turn. Just enough information to help determine the best plan of escape.
And who might come looking for her.
“It’s perfectly natural to be frightened. Leaving your homeland, your family and friends, a whole new life in front of you.”
“A whole new name to learn.” Lydia smiled bravely. A spark of hope flickered in her haunted eyes for the first time since she’d arrived.
“Speaking of that, you still have a day or two to decide on your new name. The only rule is that you can’t use any name that would connect you to your old life.”
“My husband’s life, you mean. We never had children, and my own family’s gone now. So I have no reason to hold on to my past.”
“Then look to your future for your new name. Start with women you admire the most.”
“That would make me Elizabeth Dunaway.” Lydia actually laughed.
“I’m thoroughly honored, Lydia. But it wouldn’t be wise to have two of us running around. Though I could use the extra pair of hands.”
“Then put me to work. Please.” Lydia opened her hands in a gesture of hope. “Any way you need me.”
“Ah, then, perhaps you can help me decide on the best location for your abduction.” The moment she spoke the words, a chill raced across her shoulders. A feeling that Blakestone could hear her every word.
“My abduction! How exciting! Rather like attending one’s own funeral. What kind of location are you looking for?”
Elizabeth found herself leaning toward the woman, nearly whispering. “It has to be a very public place, large and thronging with people. Lots of movement, passersby, wagons, carts, vendors. And in broad daylight.”
“Good heavens! So public? Won’t people see everything we do?”
“That’s the most important part, Lydia. I want them to see. Or think they see. The brighter the sun, the larger the mob, the blinder they are. An old Indian snake charmer’s trick that works every time.”
“But won’t they hear something? A scream or a scuffle in the street?”
“No, because you won’t scream, and we never scuffle. That’s the beauty of the operation. It’s an abduction that never really happens.”
Lydia considered the scenario for a moment and then grinned from ear to ear. “Oh, I see! How amazing! Ascot and the Derby would have been perfect, but they’ve
already been run. Now there’s a blind mob for you.”
“Exactly.” A pity that Lady Maxton’s Charity Ball was so soon. And the end of the Season was fast approaching.
“How did you …” Lydia looked around for the word. “. .. emancipate the other abductees?”
Emancipate was the perfect word.
“Well, take the first one, for example. We picked high noon on the busiest day in the mummy room of the British Museum. In the crush, Lady Hayden-Cole merely dropped a chloroformed handkerchief on the floor, then slipped secretly out a service door into the stairwell, where she dropped her bonnet and a man’s leather glove. By the time she reached the ground floor she had aged thirty years and looked to everyone on the street just like a ragged old flower seller who then hobbled off into an alleyway. Never to be seen again!”
“Oh, my! How brave!” Lydia’s eyes had widened to saucers. “Lady Hayden-Cole did all that by herself?”
“It took a crew of four, including me.”
“Four?”
“Like a well-oiled machine, Lydia. We’ll be there for you too. Everything will be worked out to the finest detail. We’ll rehearse until you know exactly what to do when the time comes.”
Because each woman needed to be an intimate part of her own liberation or it wouldn’t count, not deep down in her heart. Taking possession of her destiny with her own two hands would set her free.
“Gracious!”
“In the meantime, we’ll decide where, and that will determine how and when. I’ll need to buy the steamship tickets, design the initial escape route, and make sure you reach Southampton in time for your voyage to New York.”
“New York.” Lydia shook her head in wonder. “It sounds like so much to do.”
“That, my dear Lydia, is only the beginning of a—”
A brisk, familiar knock, low on the library door, made Lydia jump behind a chair. “Oh, dear, God!”
Elizabeth had seen that reaction too many times before; that helpless fear of being stalked and found and dragged back to her abusive homelife would haunt the poor woman long after she’d put the blue Atlantic between her and her nightmare.
“It’s all right, Lydia.” Elizabeth opened the door to her three-member crew of kidnappers.
“Cocoa!” Jessica carried in a tray of steaming hot chocolate.
Skye followed with a two-handled basket of hats and folded costume pieces. “Fresh from the seamstress.”
“And orange cakes from the tea shop.” Cassie winked at Lydia as she set the platter down on the table in front of the skittish woman.
“These three young ladies, Lydia, are your . .. shall we say, travel assistants?”
Elizabeth couldn’t have asked for three more enthusiastic and committed young women. A shopgirl, an actress, and a retired pickpocket—the perfect background for their work at the Abigail Adams. Footloose and undirected, they each took to their well-paid jobs with relish and cunning.
“Have we a plan yet, Miss E?” Skye was already picking through the basket of clothes, holding pieces up to Lydia’s chest.
“Not quite yet. We have a fortnight. That’s when Mrs. Bailey’s husband, who is currently at home in Derbyshire, expects Mrs. Bailey home from visiting an old friend in Hampstead.”
“My dear friend Helen, who told me about you courageous ladies at the Adams.”
“You know you’ll never be able to go back home again, Mrs. Bailey.” Jessica handed a cup of cocoa to Lydia, her pretty face awash in earnest sympathy. “From this moment on. Not ever. Not your home or your friends. You must leave your old life behind.”
Lydia caught her upper lip between her fingers and nodded. “Yes, I know.”
Cassie offered the woman a plate with a cake. “As my dear Irish papa so often said before he died, ‘Stick with me lass, and you’ll be fartin’ through silk.’”
Silence fell against the bookcases and settled into the overstuffed chairs.
“How’s that?” Lydia’s brows had drawn tightly together, her gaze fixed and wide at the very prim-looking Cassie’s very streetwise advice.
Needing to do something quickly to smooth the situation, Elizabeth put her arm around the woman’s shoulder. “What Cassie means is—”
“Through silk? Oh! Oh, my!” Then Lydia started laughing. And kept laughing. And laughing.
Absolutely roaring, until they were all convulsed in tears, holding their stomachs.
“Cassie, really!” But Elizabeth hadn’t laughed so much in months and months. Laughed until her stomach ached and her eyes were flooding, until suddenly she felt a breeze at her back.
Lydia and the three young women had stopped laughing and were now looking over her shoulder at the door.
Blakestone! She’d know that devilish scent anywhere. That steamy presence.
She turned to him, carefully steeling herself for the sight of all that smoldering maleness.
It didn’t work this time either; he was just too overwhelming.
And there was Lydia, standing beside Skye, as big as you please. All the evidence the man needed in his investigation of London’s fiendish kidnapper.
“Can we help you, my lord?” she finally asked against the rise of her pulse.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt, Miss Dunaway,” he said with that dark, quirking eyebrow, those intelligent eyes that swept the room and caught up every nuance.
“Actually, you didn’t. We were just finishing up.”
In a flash her three keen-witted assistants had cleared the library of the cocoa and cakes, the costume basket and Lydia, the changed woman.
“Are you sure I didn’t interrupt something, madam?” He reached back and closed the door behind him, clearly curious, amused. “I could hear your laughter all the way from the back stairs.”
“Just a bit of humor between us women.”
“With us men as your bull’s-eye, of course.”
“Of course. Turnabout is fair play.”
“Turnabout is it?” He was looking quite smug at the moment. As though he’d just learned something highly personal about her, but was going to savor the secret power for a while, before using it. “Are you implying that men are in the habit of making jokes about women?”
“Come now. You must admit that men rarely take the opinions of women seriously.”
“That might be true of some men, however—”
“Excess baggage. An anchor around the husband’s adventuring spirit. A brood mare. A cash cow. Livestock. Chattel. It’s all very funny, isn’t it?”
“Hardly, madam.” He furrowed a dark brow at her, a forged injury.
“You saw for yourself this afternoon, my lord. That little entertainment in Parliament. By the time our contingent left the chamber, the members’ protests of outrage had turned from derisive laughter to a thundering celebration of the male intellect triumphing absolutely over an uppity, feather-headed female prank.”
The sharp planes of his jaw hardened as he came toward her. “Do you really believe what you’re saying?”
“I believe in what I have observed my whole life long, sir. Just as surely as I believe in the course of the sun and the stars.”
He narrowed his eyes. “If that’s true, then you purposely went with your ladies to Parliament, with your trap baited and set, fully expecting to snare your quarry?”
Had she really?
“Possibly. But I was truly hoping against hope that the members of your sex would prove me wrong this time around. We would have loved to have been left to our harmless mission in the gallery; to observe for ourselves the workings of government. To be defended by our men folk instead of publically reviled by them.”
He had made his way to her end of the worktable. “Not all men are as intolerant as that idiot Sayers.”
“But there are enough of them for the rest of you to hide behind.”
“Me? You’re calling me a coward?” He leaned back against the edge of the table, arms crossed over his broad chest. “Including me in you
r blanket condemnation.”
The poor man looked more stricken than angry. And he was, in truth, generally undeserving.
“To be honest, sir, I was surprised and quite impressed when you came so quickly to our defense in the Commons.”
“Sayers is a madman.”
“Yes, but you forcibly held him back from reaching his wife. And that took courage.”
“Nonsense. Sayers is a scrawny bastard, for all his blustering, and I—”
“Yes, and you could have pounded him into the ground with a single blow. But that’s not the kind of courage I am talking about.”
He seemed suddenly pleased with himself. “What other kind is there?”
“The most important kind. Moral courage. You stood up for us in front of your peers. That says a great deal about the strength of your character.”
“Madam, I merely stood up to a bully.” He shrugged those massive shoulders as though to dismiss her compliment, which had so obviously pleased him, then left her for one of the walls of bookshelves. “Any man would have done the same thing, in the same situation.”
“Pardon me, my lord, if I don’t count on it next time. You did the courageous thing, and the ladies of the Abigail Adams agreed that your behavior was exceptional.”
“Did they?” He turned back from his browsing and arched a brow at her, then went back to scanning the shelves.
“They talked about you all the way home. And told me to thank you the next time I saw you.” She’d been giddily hoping he would come tonight. “And here you are, so … thank you. From me, as well.”
“You’re all very welcome, though I’m not nearly as deserving of praise as you are.”
“Me?”
He stopped in front of the neat rack of newspapers and turned back to her. “For your grand exit from Parliament this morning.”
“Are you mocking me?” His comment stung. Though she’d only known the man for a week, she’d come to expect so much more from him.
“I would never.” He leaned against the bookcase strut, appraised her for a long sweep of his dazzling gaze. “I thought you were … spectacular.”
Spectacular? Me?
She tried to calm her heart, tried not to read anything into his admiring eyes, because there was danger here, of untold dimensions. “In what way, sir?”
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