The Water Nymph: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book Two

by Michele Jaffe

  For a moment Lord Grosgrain thought she had not heard, but when he looked at her more closely, he saw that she was biting her lower lip and that there were tears running down her face. “I do not have a name,” she said finally. “I am no one. I belong to no one.

  “You belong to yourself, young lady,” Lord Grosgrain had told her, wiping her face with his wet sleeve, “and there is no one finer to belong to.” That was the first of many wise lessons she learned from him, although Lord Grosgrain always claimed he had learned more from her. He called her Sophie, after the ancient goddess of wisdom, and gave her the surname Champion because she had saved his life. From then on, Sophie had striven to live up to both her names.

  When Lord Grosgrain was recovered enough from his near drowning to walk, he led her to the ramshackle cottage he used as both home and laboratory, and watched with a mixture of amusement and concern as she devoured every edible item in the place. He had tried to refuse the gold coins she offered him in recompense, but she would not let him. Finally, they hit upon a bargain: he would accept her money, so long as she agreed to stay and help him eat whatever he bought with it.

  “Leverage,” Sophie had proclaimed to him with a smile and her mouth full of burnt sugar pudding as she scattered the coins on the table. “I am forcing you to keep your door propped open for me.”

  They were both so satisfied by this bargain that they never terminated it. Those were the terms of her relationship with Lord Grosgrain when it began, and those were the terms they maintained. Sophie felt that she owed everything to Milton Grosgrain, who she was, what she was. He had taken her in when she had no one, given her a home and a name even when he had nothing to share, had nurtured her and taught her and been kind—so kind—to her. He had believed in her and made her believe in herself.

  Together, they had built an empire of coal mines and waterworks, with a mill here and there to remind them of how they had met, consolidating all of these in their company, Leverage Holdings. During his life, Lord Grosgrain’s happiness had been Sophie’s foremost concern, the foremost source of her own joy. She could still remember the day he proposed to Constantia and was accepted, the way he had danced into her apartments at Peacock Hall. She had never seen him happier, had never felt happier herself. He had thanked her for making the marriage possible, knowing full well that Constantia would not have been interested in him without his money, but not caring at all, and Sophie had loved him even more for that, for his unflinching honesty.

  Thinking about Lord Grosgrain made Sophie feel both better and worse. Better because those were happy memories. But worse because he was gone, she was more alone than ever, and instead of turning in his killer, she had fallen into bed with him.

  Just the thought of it made Sophie feel hot, hot with rage at herself and him and everyone, and queasy. Air. Air was what she needed. She rose from the bed and crossed the room toward the two large windows that looked down into the garden of the house, tripping over a large volume that appeared to be a journal. Bees buzzed around a flowering tree just outside the window and a breeze toyed with its leaves, but Sophie could neither smell the flowers nor feel the breeze because the window would not open. She moved and tried the other window but found it bolted shut as well.

  She felt a moment of apprehension but realized that this was probably just a chamber that did not get much use and the owners of the house feared that it could be broken into. Indeed, the branches of the tree outside, she had to admit, would give very easy access to the room, even though it was on the third floor of the house. She would just call a servant and have them unbolted. Or, better yet, she would go for a walk in the garden. She crossed to the door and tried to open it.

  It was locked.

  Sophie’s apprehension returned. She tried the door again, then began banging on it. After a minute she heard a key turn and saw a wide man standing in front of her.

  “Thank you,” she breathed with relief. “I seem to have lost my key.” She made to brush past him, but the point of a dagger against her throat stopped her.

  “I doubt that,” the man said. “I would be surprised if you had one, given that my orders are to see that you do not leave this room.”

  Sophie looked at the man’s face for the first time, and her apprehension and queasiness reached a new high. It was one of the men she had seen peering into the cellar at Sweetson’s. One of the men who had been at Lawrence’s the night she was arrested. One of the men she had assumed was a constable. Just one more man she had been mistaken about.

  “You work for Lawrence Pickering, don’t you?” she stammered.

  “Sometimes,” the man conceded, sliding the dagger against her throat. “Now I—”

  He was interrupted by a voice from somewhere down the corridor. “Kit,” the voice called out. “I’m going to the warehouse now, Kit. Be sure to keep Miss Champion well guarded, so that no one disturbs her.”

  Sophie knew the voice instantly, knew it belonged to a friend, someone who would clear up this misunderstanding and let her out of the room. She opened her mouth to call for help, but the dagger was pressed more forcefully against her throat, silencing her.

  Kit smiled at Sophie as he replied to the voice. “It will be a pleasure.

  “Good. I will return for her at two bells,” the friendly voice went on. “But if I do not—”

  “I know,” Kit interrupted, keeping his eyes on Sophie and the dagger against her trembling throat. “If you do not, I am to kill her.”

  Crispin could scarcely stop himself from gnashing his teeth in impatience. He could barely stand the fact that he was sitting in a courtroom, doing nothing, while the counterfeiters went about their business unimpeded. The trial and the evidence that supported it were a complete charade. The entire thing had been designed to ensure that he, the Phoenix, would be detained, so that the counterfeiters would be able to get their operation under way without worrying about being apprehended. He had no doubt that at this very moment sacks of the gold coins were being loaded onto wagons to be distributed to selected agents around the country and exchanged for real English coins. He could just picture Sophie—or was her name Diana?—just picture her—

  Crispin was so struck by the thought that popped into his head then that he nearly shouted. Three things kicked into place simultaneously in his mind, and he saw at once that he had not been wrong. Not about the counterfeiters. And not about Sophie.

  Crispin was no longer in the courtroom listening to his life being bandied about by the foxy advocate, but was in his privy, the morning his bed had been burned, listening to Sophie’s terrible story. “I cannot tell you who he was,” she had said when Crispin asked her to identify the man, but, unwittingly, she had. He closed his eyes and heard Sophie’s voice again, somber, pained. “So he set fire to the house. He said that our parents deaths were my fault, that I killed them with my lustfulness.” She had said, “our parents.” Hers… and Damon’s. It could have been merely a slip of the tongue—that was what Crispin had taken it for at first—but now, suddenly, with a clarity that stunned him, he knew it was not. It was Damon, her brother, who had tormented her that way. Damon, her brother, that she feared. That she still feared. She had been convinced that he had set the fire that burned the bed and convinced that he had tried to kidnap her from prison. Which meant she did not know he was dead. And that she was not out for revenge, that she had not cheated at dice, that she was not the head of a counterfeiting ring, that she was not anything but Sophie. His Sophie.

  The bells of Saint Paul’s had just begun to chime midday when Crispin rose to his feet, interrupting Advocate Fox’s very interesting discussion about the culpability of the foreign aristocracy, and said, “My lord, I ask permission to address the couraaaaarrrghhhh.”

  The first shot, in Crispin’s shoulder, turned him around, and the second hit him squarely in the stomach. His mangled body hung in the air for thr
ee beats, his face contorted into a horrible mask of pain, and then he collapsed to the floor.

  As guards ran out to apprehend the gunman, the bailiff pushed through the crowd that gathered around the body and kneeled next to it. He shook his head as he looked at the blood pouring out of the hole in Crispin’s stomach, but he put a finger under Crispin’s nose and one on his neck anyway. He stayed that way for half a minute and then, still shaking his head, addressed the chief justice and Advocate Fox. “He ain’t moving, he ain’t breathing, and I can’t feel his heart beating.”

  “What does that mean?” the chief justice demanded fiercely.

  “It means, sir,” the bailiff said, standing and wiping his bloody hands on his leggings, “that Lord Sandal is dead.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The verdict was confirmed, half an hour later, by the coroner. “Definitely dead,” he pronounced with distaste over Crispin’s body. “Take him away.”

  Using the deceased’s cloak as a makeshift shroud, the remains of Lord Sandal were carried through the reverently hushed crowd and loaded onto the back of a cart. It was an unceremonious removal for such a great personage, but the necessity of getting the body out before it began to putrefy in the summer heat meant that the delay that would have been caused by sending to Sandal Hall for a proper equipage was unacceptable. Instead, Crispin Foscari, the famous and infamous Earl of Sandal, was taken from the Courts of Justice in the back of a farmer’s cart, hastily hired by the warden. The farmer had been hired, too, as chauffeur, and he had not put the gates of the court far behind him before he cleared his throat.

  “Good afternoon, my lord,” Thurston said over his shoulder without moving his lips, as if there was nothing the least bit unusual about conversing stealthily with the bloody remains of his dead master laid out in the back of a hay cart. “I trust the shots were not too painful.”

  Crispin spoke from under his makeshift shroud. “Not too bad. My shoulder hurts a little, but the stomach worked like a dream. I am a bit out of practice on the heart stopping, but it went over all right. I thought the hour of escape would never come. The blood, by the way, was superb. It’s not the normal recipe is it?”

  “No, my lord. Miss Helena suggested a slightly different combination of ingredients. I am glad it met with your approval, my lord.”

  Crispin made a mental note to at some point learn more about Miss Helena and the fact that she had apparently captivated his completely uncaptivatable steward. But now he had more pressing things to deal with.

  “Have you heard anything from Miss Champion?” he asked, still under the shroud. “Has anyone seen her?”

  “I did not get the feeling from your comments last night before your arrest that you wanted any search made for her, my lord.”

  “I take it there has been no news.”

  “None, sir. Would you like me to take you home to inquire?”

  “No, there is not time for that. Take me—” Crispin hesitated for a moment. What he wanted more than anything was to go all over London looking for Sophie. But he knew he had a duty to perform. “Take me to Saint Martin’s Fields. To the warehouse.”

  “Yes, sir. There are some clean clothes under the straw to your left. I brought both sets, both yours and the set you have been wearing to those secret meetings. And also the scar for the forehead and the tooth blackening.”

  “I think I will go as myself. There is no need for dissembling anymore.” Crispin slipped out of his doublet, taking care not to let his motions be seen over the sides of the cart. “Did the messages get delivered? Were there any problems?”

  “No, sir. Everyone is in place.”

  “They will follow my instructions? It has to be handled exactly as I laid it out.” Crispin hated working with others, but on this he had no choice.

  “Yes, sir. That has been explained to them.” Thurston paused as they came fairly close to an orange-seller’s cart, but resumed when they moved past. “Her Majesty herself wrote to wish you luck. She commended you and said that your work on this mission has far surpassed your earlier efforts on her behalf.”

  “I take it Her Majesty does not think my plan stands a chance of success, then,” Crispin said, trying to wriggle out of his breeches without showing signs of life. It was well known that Elizabeth only sent commendations to operatives she deemed were about to die.

  “She considers it risky, my lord. Very risky.”

  “It is the only way to do it, Thurston,” Crispin said urgently. “Otherwise we shall never destroy the operation.”

  “Of course, sir,” Thurston replied, and Crispin wondered if there had been a note of doubt in his steward’s voice or if he was simply imagining things.

  There was no question that the plan was dangerous. But it also had the highest chance of success. He repeated this to himself as he lay in the back of the cart, imprinted it on his mind, because he needed to remember it in order to chase out the thoughts and worries about Sophie that threatened to distract him. He had tried during his blindfolded meetings to ensure Sophie’s safety by making certain that, one way or another, she would end up in his custody, and he had redoubled his efforts once he learned that his adversaries had spies inside Sandal Hall. Her disappearance yesterday was worrisome, but he knew that she would be fine. The people with whom he had been dealing would not do anything to her, he assured himself, because she was still too valuable to them and because they did not know that he was the man they had been bargaining with. Certainly they would not hurt her before the operation was concluded, and after, with any luck, they would not be in a position to.

  Crispin had just resolved this to his satisfaction when Thurston slowed the cart. The bells of Saint Martin’s tolled once as they rolled to a stop near a clump of trees.

  “I count twenty men, sir,” Thurston told the corpse at the back of the cart. “The other detachment must already have left to follow the coins. The counterfeiters began emptying the warehouse this morning, just after news of your arrest was announced, as you had predicted.”

  “Good.” Letting the counterfeiters move their coins out and deliver them to their agents so that the Queen’s guards would be able to catch everyone involved in the operation, not just the principals, was the first part of the program—facilitated by Crispin’s public arrest and trial, which lulled the counterfeiters into complacency. That part was moderately risky, but not in any personal way. It was this second part, the part that Crispin now had to face alone, that contained the real peril. So far, however, everything was going just as he had planned.

  Which made him very nervous. Quashing his uneasiness, Crispin sat up in the back of the cart and brushed the hay from his clothes. “Well, Thurston. I am off. See you in an hour.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The words, words that Crispin had heard a hundred thousand times in his life from his steward, always sounded different to him right before he walked into danger.

  Crispin slid from the cart and mingled himself with the trees. He skirted by one contingent of soldiers unseen and rounded the field until the warehouse was in sight. It was a long wooden structure with no windows and only one door, a massive slab attached with huge iron hinges. It had taken Crispin almost an hour the other night to break through it and the complex lock that sealed it, but today, when he reached it, he found it unlocked.

  It made a slight noise as he pushed it open, but not enough to alert anyone to his presence. He heard the sound of voices, at a distance, coming from behind a closed door at the rear of the room in which he was standing. He knew from his researches two nights earlier that this larger room had been used for making and storing the coins, but that was not apparent anymore. The place had been emptied. The walls that had formerly been lined with sacks of glittering coins now were bare, and the coin presses that had been arrayed around the room had been dismantled, their parts left in a h
eap at its center. Around them, indeed covering the entire surface of the floor, was a dark powder that gave off an acrid scent which Crispin knew too well. Gunpowder.

  Crispin stood stock-still as he waited for his eyes to adjust. He did not know what kind of gunpowder the counterfeiters had used, but there were several varieties that could be ignited by the slightest friction, say the friction of a man walking across it. If that was the case here, the people belonging to the voices still coming from the other end of the room would have had to leave a path for their retreat. Crispin scanned the floor in the half-light that filtered in through a skylight in the roof and found what he was looking for. It began four arm’s lengths to his right. Pressing his body alongside the wall, he crossed the distance on the balls of his feet.

  From there, the path led directly to the door at the rear, the door behind which Crispin would find the head of the counterfeiting operation. Knowing whom he would see when he opened the door, he knew he needed to prepare himself well. It was going to be the fight of his life. With this in mind, he pictured the room to himself, pictured the two immense fireplaces that had been used to liquefy the metals so they could be molded, pictured the enormous iron tools that hung alongside each fireplace, pictured the well of liquid quicklime—caustic enough to burn the skin off a man in less time than it took him to say his name—at its center. He made sure he could recall every detail in his mind, should he need it. Then he strode across the floor and let himself in.

  -

  Beauty exalts those who possess it. It raises us up, makes us as gods and goddesses, endows us with the power of gods and goddesses, with the power of law, which is the power to make money. We are above the law, and all those who oppose us will be punished. Those who stand in the way of Beauty must will die. Beauty shines when those who oppose me her perish.