“Ask what you want. I need to clean up.”
Blood from the fight had dried on his skin. His clothes were sticky with it. Jess’s blood. And blood from the men he’d killed for her. He unbuttoned his waistcoat and tossed it in a corner—that was ruined—and eased his shirt off over his head, gritting his teeth. He’d gotten himself hit with a crowbar, protecting the girl.
“Need that strapped up?”
He rotated his shoulder, letting loose slashes of pain. “It’ll do.” The water in the bucket was still warm. He slopped it into the basin. The dried blood washed off, disconcertingly red, as if he were still bleeding. He took a towel from the floor, the one he’d used to dry her hair. It smelled like spices when he washed with it.
He poured the last clean water over his head, getting some of it in the basin, some on the floor.
Jess slept with her hand tucked at her cheek, like a child. The curl of her fingers was as beautiful as a seashell. I wouldn’t have touched her if I’d known what she was. But, holy God, I would have wanted to. He’d been gut-deep certain this woman belonged to him. He couldn’t remember the last time his instincts had betrayed him. “Your brilliant Jess is a fool if she thinks she can play that game with me. She has no idea the kind of man I am.”
“She has plans,” Adrian murmured. “What? Probably something that involves risking her neck. I’ve got the only man who can stop her locked up. Even Doyle can’t do it. How very much I wish she and I were on speaking terms.”
“Save it. Listen.” Under the clank and rattle of the Flighty and the racket of rain hitting the deck, he heard wheels on the wharf. “Someone’s here.”
Adrian cocked his head. “That’ll be Doyle with the hackney. ” He studied the girl on the bed with a remote intensity. “You won’t ever forgive me for arresting Josiah, will you? I don’t generally betray my friends. But then, my dealings with you Whitbys have always been exceedingly complex.” He touched her cheek. Her head rolled to the side, completely lax. “Out of the hunt. She never did have a head for liquor.”
“A concussion is more to the point.”
“How right you are. Between the knock on her head and the potent powders of the East, she won’t even remember being here. When I take her away, she won’t remember you at all, mon vieux.”
Adrian always thought he was being subtle.
Jess Whitby had got herself wound up in his blankets. Her leg was bare to the thigh, long, with a down of golden hair. Erotic images started rolling around his mind like badly stowed lumber.
He pulled on a clean shirt. The linen was salty from being washed at sea, a good, familiar smell. Nothing exotic and woman-scented. “Get her off my ship.”
“Oh, I will. I will. Carry her for me, will you? I threw my knee out, fighting.” Adrian wrapped the blanket around Jess with a proprietary air. “And no clothes at all. You are so . . . thorough. It always complicates matters when they don’t have any clothes.”
You’re not funny, Adrian. “Where are you taking her?”
Adrian found her shoes. “I’m in the process of deciding that. Let’s proceed, shall we? I want her out of here before more gentlemen with knives show up.”
It was mostly blanket he felt when he picked her up. But a bundle of blankets wouldn’t have shaped itself to fit his arms or leaned, confident and accepting, against his shoulder. Her hair blew back in his face when he pushed through the companionway door and the outside cold rolled over them. He recognized the spice on her now. She smelled of cardamom.
She won’t remember me. He wanted to shake her and wake her up and make her look at him so he’d be sure she wouldn’t forget him. He wanted to see her eyes dilated, huge and dark, with his image inside. Most of all, he wanted her gone.
The dock was empty. Adrian pulled his throwing knife and went first. They crossed the gangway and headed toward the coach that waited in the drizzle, side lamps lit. If Adrian’s knee was playing up on him, it didn’t show in the way he leaped up into the coach. He reached down impatiently. “I’ll take her from here. Hand her up to me.”
All he had to do was hoist her up and walk away. You abandon damaged ware. You mark it off the inventory, and toss it away, and forget it.
He couldn’t do it. Adrian, damn him, knew that.
It should have been awkward, climbing into the coach, carrying a girl snuggled against him. But she didn’t weigh much. He set her in his lap, wrapped in his coat, keeping her steady when the coach lurched forward. “What are you going to do with her?”
“If I said it’s not your concern . . . ?”
“Don’t try my patience.”
“I can’t take her to Meeks Street.” Adrian stretched his boots out casually across the strawed floor. “I might as well turn her over to the Foreign Office, neatly trussed. They’ve hatched several asinine schemes that involve her.”
Sebastian wasn’t going to ask why the Foreign Office wanted Jess Whitby.
“They don’t quite dare to arrest her openly—they are so very discreet, our diplomats—and I’ve been refusing to do it for them. I am unpopular with the Foreign Office at the moment. ” Adrian stashed the knife in his sleeve. “Colonel Reams at Military Intelligence is also full of plans for Jess. We’re agreed, are we not, that Colonel Reams will not get his hands on Jess?”
“Fine. Forget Meeks Street.” He already knew where they were going. He wondered how long it would take Adrian to admit it.
“There’s the hotel in Bloomsbury. That’s where the Whitbys live when they’re in London. I could take her there, I suppose.”
“So she can be kidnapped more conveniently.”
“Unfortunately, true.” Adrian lifted the leather curtain on the window. They were already away from the alleys and warehouses of the docks. Ahead, in the distance, a necklace of tiny bright dots marked Westminster Bridge. “I’m sending her home with you.”
It was the logical choice. “I don’t want her.”
He was cold, except where he was wrapped around the girl. He’d been in the Mediterranean too long. Jess would be cold, too, in this gray fog. He pulled his coat more tightly around her. Strange how distinctly he could feel her breathing.
So much bright, nonchalant courage in this small package. She let herself be her father’s tool for betraying England. God alone knew how much damage she’d done.
Adrian pretended to watch the street. “Eunice will coddle her cracked head, and that motley crew of pirates you call footmen can guard her. Even Military Intelligence won’t touch her if she’s under Eunice’s wing.” He let the curtain fall. “I need someone I can trust to take care of her. You’ll do.”
“Do you think I’ll change my mind about Whitby because you toss his nubile daughter in my lap?”
“Toss her in your lap? My dear Sebastian, I—”
“It’s not going to work.”
Five
Meeks Street
JOSIAH WHITBY LAID COAL ON THE FIRE. A POOR-HEARTED, stinking fire coal made, but they didn’t put firewood in this study they’d set aside for him. You could scrape and strop a scrap of wood to make a weapon, if you were desperate and determined and didn’t have much else to do with your time. They didn’t underestimate their guests here at Meeks Street.
That was what Jess wouldn’t see. She’d never admit Josiah Whitby was a fine candidate to be this traitor. She’d never admit any possibility of it. The Service knew what kind of man he was. Jess had never seen it.
He was cold in the mornings, nowadays. A man got old without noticing it.
He didn’t concern himself greatly with his own hanging. He’d been in the East long enough to know a man couldn’t dodge his fate by so much as a hair. But he didn’t want to leave Jess alone. Not now, when Cinq was taking an interest in the Whitbys. Not in England, where the carrion crows were already circling.
So he worried. There wasn’t much else to do here. Oh, Jess brought him manifests and cargo lists to keep him occupied. A good lass, his Jessie. But the counting ho
use was her bailiwick. He liked goods a man could hold in his hand and sell face-to-face. There was no savor to these numbers on paper.
Hurst—he called himself Adrian Hawkhurst these days—didn’t quite apologize for arresting him, but he felt badly about it. They both knew he’d been forced into it. The bars at the window kept Military Intelligence out as much as they kept him in. Without them, he’d be talking to Colonel Reams in a cellar in the Horse Guards. That was something else Jess wouldn’t see.
She’d do something daft, his Jess, she was so furious at Hawkhurst. His girl wasn’t made for anger. She didn’t know how to do it well.
Hawkhurst sent in the newspapers every morning. They were laid out on the desk right now: the Morning Chronicle, the Times, the London Gazette. Good as a coffee shop. In a while the boy would bring buns to eat and stay to chat and drink tea. The other men from the Service would drop by, in and out, all day. They didn’t leave him on his own to brood.
But Jess . . . He was damned uneasy. Jess was up to something.
She never could fool him. To give her credit, she didn’t try—not till now when he was caged up and couldn’t stop her. She brought him apples and sat talking about indigo and porcelains, and then she went out hunting spies. She had her nose to the ground, like that ferret of hers, chasing the biggest rat in London.
Unless he missed his guess, that was what Adrian Hawkhurst had been planning all along.
Six
Mayfair
SHE WANTED TO STAY IN THE DREAM. THERE was nothing but pain out there, past the borders of the dream. In the dream, she was safe and warm.
The Captain lay beside her in the ship’s cabin. He had enchantment in his hands, the Captain did.
He said, “You’re worrying. I told you to stop that.” He stroked her hair and down her neck, down to the blanket. It was a Greek blanket, from Valletta.
There was something she should do. Something important . . . “I’m not thinking very well.”
“That’s the brandy. Almost guaranteed to stop you thinking sooner or later.”
Her thoughts swirled away under those patient, skilled hands. She let him flow over her like a river.
There was something she had to do . . .
The Captain’s fingertips slid light, light across her skin and the thought slipped away. It was raining, up on deck. Water falling from the sky, across the ship, into the sea. She was flowing downhill, becoming water.
His hair hung down, straight and black and heavy. Under the blanket, he stroked her back, up and down, where she was naked. He was being careful with her. He was like fire, being careful with her. He said, “Are you warm enough? I have more blankets.”
“Be warm in a snowdrift with you doing that to me.” It didn’t frighten her, the hard, masculine fortress of his chest. Made her feel safe. She’d have been afraid, otherwise, with everything whirling the way it did and nothing familiar around her.
Ned had been solid, like this man. But thinner. Younger. And Ned had been golden, every hair on him. Ned stroked her and made her feel this same way, until he . . .
“What’s the matter?” The Captain set the tip of his finger to her forehead. “You thought of something. What was it?”
She didn’t want to remember Ned. Ned was gone, eaten up by the sea, and it hurt to think about him.
Wind blew rain against the glass in the cabin windows, chill and dark. It brought memories. She was dizzy with them. Circling and circling. She remembered Ned beside her in the straw, both of them naked, and the door of the barn open with the moon hanging in it.
She said, “He was warm everywhere I touched him.”
“Tonight, I’ll keep you warm. You’re safe with me, Jess.”
A sailor would know about being safe. Getting back to harbor.
The Captain breathed in her hair. It set music plucking on her nerves. That funny thing in Russia. A balalaika. That’s what they called it.
She seemed to have edged over some point of no return without even noticing it. “Maybe I’ll go to sleep.”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
Milk pails clattered outside, and a dog barked.
Jess opened her eyes and woke up in an attic, feeling bereft. The dark streamers of the dream released and dissolved.
It was a nice enough attic with a slanted roof and whitewash on the plaster walls. The mahogany washstand was Chippendale and held a bowl and pitcher from the factory in Staffordshire. Whitby’s shipped that pattern, the one with the peacock on it, all over the Baltic. The Swedes loved fancy china.
Dream images and knowledges slipped away. This was morning. God alone knew where she was.
The sun in her eyes told her it was early. Her ears told her she was in London. When you hear someone in the street crying, "Milk-O. Fresh milk,” in that accent, you’re in London. She was in bed, between fresh linen sheets, wearing an old cotton nightgown that buttoned up to her chin and her mother’s locket. It wasn’t obvious how she’d got here.
She crawled out from the covers, being careful of her head, and padded over to the window. It was open to the morning. The curtains were the sort of pretty chintz that sells for six shillings a yard. When she stuck her head out and looked left, she saw the back of the house, all grass and untidy garden and a kitchen yard with dish towels hanging to dry on a string. Somebody in this house got up early indeed to wash out her dish towels, or else they’d been left in the air overnight. When she looked right, to the front of this big house, she could see a slice of street. Beyond that was a garden with iron railings. She could hear birds out there, having fits of singing. Working that out—and she unraveled harder knots every day—she was in the West End. Mayfair.
Her head ached. She felt like she’d been in strange dreams and been jerked out of them, sudden. She hurt, everywhere. When she lifted the nightgown and took inventory, there were bruises everywhere she could see easy. She had a long cut on her arm.
That’s from the fight. I was in a fight. I was on Katherine Lane poking my nose in Sebastian Kennett’s affairs, and . . .
He wasn’t Captain Sebastian. He was Sebastian Kennett.
Kennett was at the center of that huge knot of dark and pain and fear that she couldn’t untie. She was with him in the fog and the rain. Then she was in his bunk, wearing only her skin, listening to him explain why that was sensible as bread and cheese. Kennett was a man who could talk fish into a bucket. She’d fallen asleep beside him at some point.
There must have been just a whole wandering tribe of incidents after that, because now she woke up here, wherever here was, tucked into this chaste, narrow, reassuring bed. No telling how she ended up wearing a nightgown.
Somebody’d put clothes for her, folded neat on the chair, and her shoes, cleaned and set side by side. That was a piece of delicate reassurance. Whatever she got involved in this morning, she wouldn’t have to face it in her nightclothes.
The dog took up barking again, somewhere down the street, being enthusiastic about it. The sound carried crisp in the cool morning air. Made her head hurt in a couple different ways.
Sebastian Kennett had a house in Mayfair. She knew that from the thick file she had on her desk, all about Captain Kennett. Maybe this was his house. She had to wonder what his family thought about him bringing her home.
The comb by the washstand and the hairpins were meant for her, obviously, so she stood in front of the mirror and went to work braiding her hair soft and loose and brought it over her shoulder, the way she would if she was staying home, just her and Papa, and they didn’t expect to see anybody.
Kennett had been gentle when he dried out her hair. Like a cat washing a kitten. Could she think this way about that big, rough man? It seemed to fit.
Cinq would have tipped her overboard just to hear the splash.
Or maybe not. Maybe Cinq was laying deep plots. She wasn’t a good judge of villains, having spent her youth being one. She lacked that sensitive moral barometer.
I have
to get to Papa. He’ll worry about me if I don’t come.
When she tried the door, it was unlocked. A locked door wouldn’t have kept her in, of course, but it was heartening not to start the morning picking locks. The attic corridor made a turn on one side. The wall held a diamond-shaped window.
She went down the steps, keeping one hand on the wall, feeling a little dizzy, off and on. The attic flight was bare, clean wood. The next was covered with cheap green runner. Kennett must have carried her up all this way last night, up three flights, and put her to bed. It had been an evening chock-full of activity for him.
The main upper floor was lush as a peach. She walked through, on soft blue carpeting, heading for the front of the house. These doors were bedrooms. She could have sorted them out by smell—clean linen and flowers and expensive perfume—and known which ones to sack if she was making this little peregrination at night and feeling larcenous. Between the doors they’d hung groups of Persian miniatures, framed in carved ivory. At the far end of the hall was a big, wide, open window with the curtains pulled back.
I never get used to living in a fancy house, owning rich things. It’s gentry who live this way, not me.
Even now, she couldn’t walk through a house like this without picking out what she’d steal. It wasn’t like she laid hands on anything, after all. She was just looking.
She came to the iron railing and looked down the curve of the staircase to the entry hall. The floor was black and white squares of marble, Carrara marble and Dinan, like a chessboard. The house she and Papa owned in St. Petersburg had a checkered floor like this and columns around the sides.
Whitby’s shipped Carrara marble out of Livorno when the port was open and nobody was shooting at passing ships. Fine profit to be made on marble, but it was a three-legged sow to stow.
The crystal chandelier must be six feet tall. Beautiful thing. She held her head high and floated down the staircase, running her finger along the banister, letting herself pretend she was making an entrance to some grand party. You couldn’t help doing that with a staircase this fine. It spoiled the mood a bit to have somebody pounding away at the front door the whole time.
My Lord and Spymaster Page 6
