“I can pretty much reconstruct the letters,” Abigail said. “If I’ve seen something in handwriting, I can often recall it exactly. In my profession, such a skill comes in handy, and I read the letters many times.”
“Don’t admit that ability to anybody else. Quinn will hire you to spy on other banks for him.”
“I think your brother dislikes me.”
Stephen resisted the urge to kiss Abigail’s knuckles and settled for wrapping her hand in both of his.
“Quinn is like that hound. He looks fierce, and he can be fierce, but it’s mostly appearances. He gets down on all fours in the nursery and roars like a bear for the children’s entertainment. When Jane is expecting, Quinn rubs her feet and her back by the hour. He reads treatises on childbirth, though he does not like to read anything that’s more words than figures.”
To honestly praise Quinn’s role as head of the family was a relief. Quinn had clearly learned from Jack’s awful example, and that was some consolation.
Abigail patted Stephen’s knee. “Your brother is protective of you. He showed me your old room.”
What the hell? “And?”
“You had read more books by age eighteen than I have seen in my life.”
“When a fellow spends most of his time in a damned chair, reading happens.”
“Walden admires you for your book learning. He doesn’t understand how anybody could devour that much knowledge, and he respects you for it.”
Abigail no longer wore her rosemary hedgehog scent. Jane must have put a stop to that. The new fragrance was soft, gardenia with a citrusy top note and a cinnamon finish. Complicated, warm, feminine…perfect for Abigail Abbott.
“Quinn said he admires me?”
“The admiration was in his voice, in his gaze as he peered around at shelves and shelves of books, some in German, some in French, many in Latin. He said you are a mechanical genius. I was flattered to be allowed into the sanctum of your adolescence and found two books on poisons that I would like to borrow.”
“You may have them, of course. Quinn is a financial genius, by the way. He reads the paper, stares off into space, moves money around, and the money has babies and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I am more pragmatic, investing in the inventions that I know will be of use.”
Abigail withdrew her hand. “You made a portable cannon that could swivel three hundred and sixty degrees. Walden showed me the plans.”
Just what a lapsed Quaker lady did not need to see. “I’ve also patented firing mechanisms, safety triggers, bullet molds, rifling processes, bomb designs, cranes, lifts, folding stairways…some of it’s useless, some of it’s lucrative. Might we get back to the letters?”
“You are quite enterprising. Walden was warning me.”
Enterprising was good, wasn’t it? “Subtlety is not Quinn’s style. His warnings are blunt, sincere, and unmistakable. What would he be warning you about?”
“Not to trifle with you, not to try to make a pretend engagement into something it cannot be.”
God spare me from meddling siblings. “What if I’d like to be trifled with? What if you’d like a bit of trifling in return? We are adults, Abigail, and I’m a first-rate trifler. One of the best in the realm. I like trifling, and because one doesn’t need two good knees to go about it, I’ve made something of a study of trifling in all its glorious permutations.”
She patted his bad knee, which was not well advised when the subject under discussion was trifling.
“You have such a keen wit. I like that about you.”
He kissed her cheek. “I am not jesting, and Quinn was not threatening. He was meddling. He thinks he’s being subtle, but he’s about as subtle as Wodin introducing himself to a cured ham. So I read a lot of books. What sort of woman is impressed with that?”
This time, her pat was more of a stroke along his thigh. “I am. I love books. I love that you used your disability as inspiration for the nurturing of your intellect.”
Love. Abigail Abbott had used the word love, and in connection with Stephen’s accursed knee. Perhaps the infernal letters of doom had best stay hidden for a good long while.
“You developed your inquiry business on the strength of a young woman’s rotten experience with romance. I don’t like that, but I admire it.”
Wodin rose and put his chin on her knee again.
“Does he want to go out?”
The bloody dog wants to steal you away from me. “He can go out whenever he pleases. I fashioned a swinging door off the pantry, like a hinged portcullis. Constance’s cats and Wodin are free to visit the garden as they need to. Please tell me the rest of what you know about the letters, Abigail, or I will succumb to the lure of my impure thoughts.”
Her next stroke along his thigh—a caress, really—began an inch higher. “Impure thoughts?”
His thoughts regarding Abigail were both pure and impure. She’d lost a child, for God’s sake, grieved in solitude, and climbed from a pit of sorrow to fashion a life on her own terms. She solved other people’s delicate problems with a combination of cunning, tenacity, and discretion.
That she was as physically attractive as she was formidable created a tangle of esteem, desire, curiosity, and some vague yearning Stephen could not name in any language.
“Lustful thoughts,” he said, petting her knee. “Naughty, delicious, naked, wild, lascivious, hot, erotic…Trifle with me, Abigail, please.”
He was growing aroused, under his brother’s roof, the parlor door open, and the damned dog giving him censorious looks.
“I want to be alone with you,” he muttered, stealing another kiss. “I miss you. I dream of you, and any minute, my darling sister-in-law will march in here, a pair of smirking blond footmen pushing the tea cart behind her. I will die a thousand deaths of frustrated longing while swilling scandal broth and getting biscuit crumbs on my cravat.”
Abigail gave his knee the most luscious, maddening squeeze, and then sat back. “Now is not the time or the place for your courting nonsense, my lord. We face a conundrum.”
Where to swive without being interrupted was always a puzzle. “We do?”
“If I don’t have those letters and Stapleton doesn’t have them, who does? How did that person obtain them, and what will he do with them? Why steal the letters in the first place when they are merely sentimental effusions, years old, and they don’t even mention me by name?”
When Stephen fell, he usually experienced a moment of knowing he was toppling before the hard reality of the cobblestones or floor connected with his person. That instant of rage (to be sent sprawling again), dread (cobblestones hurt, carpeted floors weren’t much better), and resignation lasted a small eternity.
So too, when Abigail sat back, all polite composure and logical pronouncements, did a small eternity pass.
Stephen’s body grasped that yet another occasion of arousal was about to end in disappointment, even as his mind acknowledged that the situation with the letters was troubling.
Between those reactions lay the truth in his heart: He desired Abigail Abbott. She was formidable and luscious. Her touch was lovely and bold, she wasn’t put off by honest arousal, and she had reposed her darkest secret into Stephen’s keeping.
What smacked him as abruptly as landing on hard cobbles was the reality that he would die for this woman. She had heard his worst confessions, taken them quite in stride, and even seen his decisions in a compassionate light.
He would lay down his life to keep her safe, and, more than that, he would kill for her too.
“Stapleton is tithing to the Temple of Venus in the person of Ophelia Marchant,” Ned Wentworth said. “He plays his games in the Lords, and he haggles with the trades, but I couldn’t find any evidence that he is being blackmailed.”
As best Abigail could tell, Ned Wentworth wasn’t a Wentworth by birth, but he had in common with the family a practical approach to life’s seamier challenges. He was dark-haired, slim, and of an age to be recently
down from university. His attire was natty to the point of dandyism, while his gaze held the shrewdness of a young man who’d matriculated in a hard school.
“Gaming debts?” Lord Stephen asked.
“He’s too busy fleecing John Bull in the Lords to sit about his clubs dicing,” Ned replied.
Various Wentworths were lounging about the library, Their Graces on the sofa, Duncan and Matilda on a love seat. Stephen had the reading chair by the fire, his foot on a hassock, while Ned had the seat behind the desk and Abigail the second reading chair.
“What about recent disruptions of routine?” Abigail asked. “Is his mistress of long-standing? Has Stapleton changed where he attends divine services? Does he no longer go to the theater, or has he discharged any staff?”
“You are thorough,” Ned said, “and those are good questions, but we don’t have all the answers yet. I can tell you Lady Champlain and Lord Stapleton don’t get along, don’t occupy the same box at the opera. One of our fellows chatted with Stapleton’s head maid over a pint. Stapleton is threatening to dispatch her ladyship to the north again after she spent the Season at the family seat, but the settlements say she must be housed in London if she so desires.”
“What of her ladyship?” Abigail said, getting up to pace. “Has she undertaken any new relationships lately, does she have debts, could she be expecting a child?”
The duchesses exchanged a look.
“My professional activities don’t permit me to shy away from human foibles,” Abigail said. “Somebody has those letters, and Stapleton has decided that now—years after Champlain’s death—the letters have significance.”
Stephen had put Abigail’s situation to his family in plain terms, saving her the recitation: Champlain had implied a promise of marriage, though Abigail hadn’t realized he was dissembling until it was too late. Champlain’s letters had gone missing several months ago, and Stapleton had started attempting to steal them from about the same time. Stephen had omitted mention of a child, for which Abigail was grateful.
If anybody thought Abigail an idiot for succumbing to Champlain’s charms, they were too well bred to show it.
“Do you have copies of any of the letters or can you recall portions verbatim?” Duncan Wentworth asked. “Sometimes codes can be secreted in the most innocuous-sounding prose. When Stephen and I traveled on the Continent, we were approached several times with requests to carry sensitive documents, though they were always described as reports, testaments, or simple correspondence.”
Stephen stuffed a pillow under his knee. “Duncan would not allow me to involve myself in any intrigues. I could have been a dashing spy, but, alas for me, my self-appointed conscience objected.” He lounged in his reading chair, not a care in the world, when twenty minutes earlier he’d been declaring himself the best trifler in all of England.
I will miss him. Abigail set that thought firmly aside, and focused on Duncan’s suggestion. “You think Champlain was involved in some matter of national security?”
Stephen was hard to read, Walden nearly impossible to read, and Duncan’s self-possession put sphinxes to shame.
“I have no idea,” Duncan replied. “Stephen described his lordship as a fribble, but a good spy would know how to impersonate a fribble.”
Abigail considered what she knew of Champlain. “He was a fribble, the genuine article. No clandestine operative intent on the king’s business would have dallied with a gunsmith’s daughter.”
Ned spoke up from behind his desk. “Guns are items of interest to most governments. Was your papa a gunsmith or, like His Pestilence here, a designer of weapons?”
Stephen blew Ned a kiss. “No need to be jealous of my tinkering, Neddy. I will never be the pickpocket you are.”
Ned threw a glass paperweight at Stephen’s head, which Stephen caught with one hand. Something interesting passed between them, part affection, part threat.
“My father,” Abigail said, “could do simple clock repairs or fix a broken clasp on a bracelet, but he was a gunsmith, not an artificer. The mechanisms of handguns have evolved quickly in recent years. He preferred to work on the fowling pieces and long guns because the hardware hasn’t changed as much. Many a squire still carries a Brown Bess. Who are the most frequent callers at Lord Stapleton’s house?”
Ned consulted a list. “He has political dinners from time to time, a lot of fat, bleating Tories. Socially, Lady Champlain makes the usual rounds. Lately she’s been inclined more toward the artists and poets, and the staff says she’s to sit for a portrait for that fop de Beauharnais.”
“Enough, Ned.” Two words, casually rendered, from His Grace of Walden. “That fop did Her Grace’s portrait, and I rather like it. I’d have him do yours except you can’t sit still long enough. What do we know about security at Stapleton’s town house?”
“I can answer that,” Stephen said, “having been a caller on many occasions. The staff is on the older side, probably hired in the late marchioness’s day. The butler likely saw Queen Anne crowned, and the house isn’t exactly a fortress.”
“Now you’re a second-story man,” Ned muttered. “St. Nicholas, pray for us.”
“The garden wall is about five feet high,” Stephen went on, tossing the paperweight back to Ned. “The windows on the north side of the house are overdue for a good glazing. Our Neddy could be in and out in half a tick.”
“A quarter,” Ned said. “The cook doesn’t lock the kitchen door in case the tradesmen show up when she’s kneading the bread dough or stirring a pot of porridge first thing in the day. The head maid says Cook has a follower, meaning the grocer’s boy probably comes mooning about after the household’s abed.”
“I won’t have crimes committed on my behalf,” Abigail said. “We needn’t contemplate any housebreaking. Stapleton doesn’t have the letters, or he didn’t two weeks ago.”
“You don’t know that,” Stephen replied, lifting his foot off the hassock. “Stapleton might have them and believe there are more. He might have stolen them from you and suspect you stole them back, when instead one of his political detractors has them. We need to take a closer look at his lordship’s domestic situation.”
Abigail cast a look at the duke and duchess, expecting Her Grace of Walden to object to housebreaking. Their Graces were holding hands, and the duchess was sitting close enough to the duke that their joined hands rested on her thigh.
“We also need to go to the opera,” Lord Stephen said, pushing to his feet. “Stapleton favors the opera. Jane, does Miss Abbott have suitable attire for Friday night’s performance?”
Ned rose as well. “I hate the damned opera.”
“Language, Ned,” Her Grace murmured. “Miss Abbott will be appropriately dressed for an evening engagement.”
“Neddy, if you’d rather not attend,” Stephen said, “I will escort Miss Abbott unassisted. Stapleton should have word by now of her arrival in London, and I don’t want him getting any untoward ideas.”
“I have an untoward idea,” Ned replied.
Stephen smiled. “I knew I could count on you.”
“No housebreaking,” Abigail said, though clearly her words were falling on deaf male ears. “We have no reason to believe Stapleton has the letters.”
“We aren’t looking for the letters,” Ned said. “We’re looking for why he’s desperate to get his manicured, beringed paws on them.”
“Lady Champlain does not favor the opera generally,” Stephen said, “and she stays in when Stapleton attends—you are not to seduce her, Ned. She has gallants aplenty for that. I must take myself off for a spot of contemplation. Miss Abbott, I’d like to escort you on a round of the shops tomorrow. You’ll want your own pair of opera glasses.”
Abigail had no intention of spending a single farthing on opera glasses she would use only once. “What time should I be ready, my lord?”
“Walk me to my coach, and we’ll sort that out.”
That was about as subtle as Wodin’s enormous pa
w on her knee. Abigail excused herself and accompanied Stephen down the steps to the main foyer.
“Ned doubtless knows what he’s doing, but I have no wish to impose on your time, my lord, and no interest in enriching Mayfair’s shopkeepers.”
Stephen took her hand, hung his cane on the edge of the sideboard, braced his back against the wall, and pulled Abigail in close.
“To blazes with the rubbishing shopkeepers, Abigail. To blazes with Stapleton, and if Ned makes sheep’s eyes at you one more time, to blazes with him too. You’re driving me mad, d’you hear me? Mad.”
Then he fused his mouth to hers, wedged his bad knee between her legs, and drove her mad too.
Chapter Eight
“This is half of them,” Abigail said. “I can’t promise I’ve recalled them word for word, but I’ve read them dozens of times. Much of the language is verbatim.”
Stephen accepted the copies of the letters and all they represented. “I promise they are safe with me. May I show them to my family?” He tucked them into an inside pocket, though he longed to read them. He would rather keep Abigail’s secrets to himself, but only a fool would muddle on without the aid of keen minds eager to help.
“Read them first, then decide. You look splendid.”
They held this exchange in the foyer of Quinn’s home, for the hour had come to accompany Abigail on a shopping expedition. The outing was for show—Stephen hated shopping and suspected Abigail wasn’t much for idling about in commercial venues either.
“I am supposed to look besotted.” He’d spent five minutes choosing a cravat pin and eventually settled on plain gold. “Somebody waits in the carriage whom I’d like you to meet.”
Her gaze grew wary. “Not another one of your sneak thieves in dandy’s clothing?”
“Neddy is not a sneak thief. He’s a loyal and highly skilled family retainer, and I was so jealous of Quinn’s affection for him I nearly shot young Ned in the leg. Quinn hugged him, just the once, when Ned was a boy, and I happened to see it. I should not have been spying—Ned would die of mortification if he knew I’d caught that moment—but I was overcome with jealousy.”
How to Catch a Duke Page 12
