by Gaelen Foley
Daphne rushed back into the drawing room, and crossed to the large picture window just as footman John raced across the raised terrace.
He vaulted over the low stone balustrade as Max appeared mere steps behind him.
Dropping down to the flat green below, John had taken only two or three paces when Max leaped off the same stone balustrade and tackled him onto the ground.
The men rolled to the grassy area just below her window, exchanged several crushing punches before climbing to their feet, circling like lions.
Daphne gasped as footman John suddenly produced a knife. Lord, she might be angry at her husband, but she did not want to see him stabbed before her eyes.
John swung the knife savagely at Max, who ducked aside, lunged for the man’s arm, and used the force of John’s own attack to throw him facedown onto the ground.
Before he could get up, Max was behind him. He swept out his pistol and thrust it against the back of the man’s head, roaring at him not to move.
Daphne tore herself away from the window and ran outside without a word to Lady Westwood, who sat there, pale with shock.
As she rushed out the back door that Max had used, she found that the rest of the male servants had poured out onto the terrace, and seemed close to rioting over the violence that had broken out.
“Everybody, please remain calm!” Max was ordering them. “The situation is in hand! You, go get some rope to bind him.”
“What’s he done?” another footman demanded.
“This man is a fugitive,” Max declared to the rest of the servants. “He took this post under false pretenses. I’d wager my best horse that his predecessor on your staff lies somewhere on these grounds in a shallow grave.”
“He lies!” footman John yelled from the ground.
“Stay down and keep your hands behind your head!”
“Peter? He’s murdered Peter?” the servants murmured among themselves.
“Why would he do that?” the plump housekeeper cried.
“He is involved in Lord Westwood’s disappearance,” Max declared. “I’m taking him into custody. Now, would you bring me that rope.”
“Do as he says!” Daphne ordered with a sharp look.
A groom from Her Ladyship’s stables brought Max a three-foot lead rope in short order. “Will this do?”
He nodded and took it. “Daphne?”
“Yes, my lord?”
“Come here.”
Heart pounding, she went over him. “Keep the gun on him. If I say shoot him, you bloody well shoot him. Can you do that?”
She looked at him in shock, then glanced back down at the man who had tried to stab her husband, and nodded.
Max handed her the pistol. She kept it trained on the footman with both hands while her husband quickly tied John’s wrists behind his back with a wicked knot that would likely have impressed Horatio Nelson himself.
“Your husband is mad, Lady Rotherstone. I beg you, call him off!”
“Don’t you dare speak to her.”
“I have no idea what this is about!” he insisted.
“Oh, really?” Max backed Daphne off a couple of steps with a curt nod. Then he hauled the servant to his feet.
Daphne kept the pistol pointed at John, her pulse throbbing in her ears.
Max jerked the footman around to face him. He laid hold of the man’s lapels and without warning, ripped open the top few buttons of his livery coat, exposing the region of his heart. Daphne caught a glimpse of a round mark on the footman’s chest, either a brand or some sort of tattoo.
A look of disgust came over Max’s face. “Footman, eh? An odd career for one who bears the Non Serviam.”
Footman John spit on Max in answer.
Daphne’s eyes widened, but Max refused to be baited.
Giving his prisoner a cold, mocking smile, he merely took out his handkerchief and wiped the spittle off his coat. “You may want to mind your manners from this point onward,” he advised. “Where you’re going, such pranks are frowned upon.”
“Is that what the Order has sunk to?” the footman asked with a sneer. “Sending in their women as distractions? You’re all a lot of cowards.”
“At least we don’t hold old ladies hostage in their own homes,” he answered softly. Then Max glanced at the others. “The rest of you, go back to work! Check on Lady Westwood! You must guard her yourselves until I can arrange for Her Ladyship’s protection.”
“Guard her? My lord, is our mistress in danger?” the bewildered under-butler asked.
“Just be on your guard, and don’t let any more strangers into the house.”
The countess herself joined them just then, leaning on her cane. “Lord Rotherstone, what is the meaning of this?”
“Ma’am, His Lordship says footman John killed footman Peter to get his job, and might’ve had something to do with Lord Westwood’s disappearance!” the under-butler relayed to her.
Daphne hurried to steady Lady Westwood, but rather than looking overwhelmed, the old countess seemed able to make more sense of this than she could.
She squared her bony shoulders as she leaned on her cane. “Do whatever Lord Rotherstone says!” she ordered her staff. “Obey him—for my sake.”
Well, at least one woman here trusted him, Daphne thought in confusion.
Max nodded to Lady Westwood in gratitude. Having secured the prisoner, he made some of the male servants watch footman John so that he could take a moment to speak to Drake’s mother.
A short while later, the three of them had returned to the drawing room, where the tea had grown cold.
“Lady Westwood, I apologize for what happened here today. But you must not give up hope,” Max said as she took her seat again. “We have reason to believe Drake could still be alive.”
“Alive?” the old woman breathed.
“Max!” Daphne uttered.
The countess gripped the arms of her chair. “Oh, God, I knew it in my heart.” She glanced toward the mantel. “I knew those ashes couldn’t be his. I just knew it, somewhere, somehow, that my son was still alive.”
“Well, your mothering instincts may prove as correct as your memory did. You were right when you said I knew your son. I knew him very well. We were like brothers when we were young. The fact is, I believe I caught a glimpse of Drake myself in London about six weeks ago.”
Both women marveled.
“We don’t know why he refuses to make contact with the Order,” Max continued with a taut expression. “We assume he’s in some sort of danger, but our goal is to find out who has him, and get back him safely. Do you understand what I am telling you?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, yes.”
“I don’t!” Daphne broke in, glaring at him.
He ignored her, for Lady Westwood’s eyes had filled with tears. “Oh, if my son could be alive, Lord Rotherstone…What would you or Virgil have me do? Anything!”
“If Drake makes any effort to contact you, send for me first before you answer him, lest it prove to be a trap,” Max instructed. “You must write to me at this address.” He went over to her secretaire, helped himself to a sheet of paper, and jotted down a few lines. “My contact at this location will make sure I get your message within twenty-four hours. Give no answer until you hear from me first. Will you do that?”
“Yes, yes.” She took the paper, read it, then looked up at him in confusion. “A hat shop?”
He gave her a rueful smile. “A busy shop helps conceal our comings and goings.”
“May I talk to you?” Daphne finally interrupted when their exchange seemed about at an end.
Max looked over warily at her, then nodded. She walked into the next room, a dim and empty music room. He followed. She sincerely wanted to shake him, but when she turned to him, she could not escape her most pressing emotion: worry.
“What is going on? What is this Order you’re talking about?”
He stared at her.
“Were you hurt at all in that fight?”
Daphne shook her head, confounded. “Who is Drake, why did the footman attack you, and how could you get an old woman’s hopes up before you know for sure if her son is alive?”
“I’m as sure as I can be at this point, and it looks to me like hope is all she’s got left to live for. Didn’t you see the shrine in there—the urn, the portrait? Those are not his ashes in that vase.”
“How do you know?”
“Never mind that. I have to get to London. If the people who planted footman John into Westwood Manor make another move against the countess, she needs to be aware of what she’s dealing with.”
“Unlike me?” Her swift riposte appeared to take him off guard. “Do you intend to keep me in the dark, husband?”
He lowered his head, pausing. “Do I have a choice?”
“Not if you still want the same kind of future between us.”
He looked up angrily again. “Is that a threat? Of what? Divorce?”
Daphne’s eyes filled with tears. “How are we supposed to have any kind of life together if you don’t tell me what is going on?”
He grasped her forearm pleadingly. “You have got to trust me. Daphne, please.”
“How can I?” she cried, shaking off his touch. “I don’t even know you! How dare you ask for my trust when you are up to your eyes in deception!”
“You don’t understand—I have a duty!”
“One that apparently matters to you more than I do!” she yelled in his face as tears flooded her eyes.
“No!” He grasped her arms. “Daphne, you are the most important thing to me in this world. I am trying to protect you by keeping you out of all this! You’ve got to believe me. Please,” he whispered.
She pulled free of his hold. “No. We’re past that, Max. I’m sorry. You can’t have it both ways. I’ve come too far with you to have the door slammed in my face. I will not accept this. At this moment, I have no idea who you really are. I can’t take it. You’re my husband and you’re acting like a stranger. I’m trying to love you, but you need to decide. You can either have it like you did last night with me,” she told him slowly, meaningfully, reminding him with a potent stare of the seduction, “or you can go back to being essentially alone. The choice is yours.”
“Ruthless,” he whispered, shaking his head as he stared at her. “You have learned well, my lady.”
“I was taught by the best,” she answered. “So, what is it going to be?”
He stared at her for a long moment; Daphne refused to back down. He had to know the love they shared was hanging by a thread. It was in his hands.
At last, he gave her a grim and barely perceptible nod. “Very well. You’ll be safer with me, anyway. Let’s just hope we both don’t soon regret it.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
“We’re taking him to London.”
“What for?”
“The usual, Daphne. So we can beat the hell out of him until he breaks down and tells us what he knows—in this case, who has Drake.” He sent her a sharp look. “Aren’t you glad you asked, Little Miss Curious?”
Chapter 19
Don’t speak in front of the prisoner unless it’s absolutely necessary,” Max ordered her at the start of their very long—and quiet—ride to London.
They had swapped carriages with Lady Westwood temporarily, leaving the phaeton Daphne had driven there in exchange for the countess’s closed coach, the better to conceal and contain the enemy agent Max had captured.
Lady Westwood had also lent them the services of her trusted head coachman, who had been twenty years in her employment, unlike footman John. The latter now sat bound and gagged and blindfolded next to Max; Daphne sat across from the two men on the opposite seat.
Max and she spent most of the long ride just gazing warily at each other. The three of them rode in silence for hours, reaching London as daylight waned.
Daphne was not sure what instructions Max had given the driver, but he took them down to a lonely quay a stone’s throw from the Strand. There they stopped and transferred from the carriage into a little waiting rowboat.
“Sit in the front,” Max ordered her.
Then the burly coachman got down from his box and helped to shepherd the bound captive into the bobbing wherry. Max shoved footman John down in the middle of the boat and covered him over with a tarp.
“Stay still.” Max sat down in the back of the boat and nodded to Daphne with a hard look. “Hold on.”
Then he shoved off from the quay with an oar, leaving the coachman watching after them on the dock.
Daphne’s heart pounded as they drifted downstream and began to zoom faster down the Thames. The cold breeze from their motion blew her hair behind her. Holding on tightly to the boat’s wooden edges, she glanced back and saw Max’s face fixed with grim resolve.
He plowed the oars into the waves, slowing the wherry about a half mile downstream. Within another hundred yards, he guided them up to the back of one of the old riverside buildings. They glided under a low brick arch, and then came to a heavy wooden river gate.
The boat bobbed as Max maneuvered closer to a weathered rope that hung down with a weight tied to it. Meanwhile, footman John groaned in protest from underneath the tarp. He sounded a bit seasick. Daphne cast a worried look over her shoulder, but Max opted to ignore the man’s suffering with stony indifference.
He pulled on the rope in a distinct series of tugs. It dawned on Daphne that it was some sort of bellpull signaling to someone inside to open the gate.
The response came swiftly. There was a loud noise that gave her a jolt, a bang and a creak, and with that, the wooden river gate began to rise before them like a portcullis, dripping Thames water.
Max rowed under it quickly, advancing into a dark, cavernous area ahead underneath the building. The river gate began to close behind them a moment later. Daphne looked all around her in wonder.
What is this place?
No longer controlled by the current, still waters swirled all around them as Max rowed on, until, in short order, they glided up to a small stone dock lit by a single burning torch.
“Where are we?” she started to ask, but the second she spoke, the dark, hollow space was filled with savage barking. With a clank of chain, a huge black dog charged out of the shadows barking its head off, snarling, baring its teeth like some cousin of Cerberus, the three-headed dog of Hades.
Max shouted at the black beast in a foreign language, and it suddenly stopped. He spoke to it again, and its whole demeanor changed.
Daphne stared, wide-eyed, as the dog shook itself and began wagging its tail, jumping eagerly toward Max. Her heart was still pounding with fright, though the beast was now wagging its tail and sitting tamely, as ordered.
Max gave her another firm, steadying look. “Stay here while I see to him. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t move.”
Daphne looked uneasily at the dog with no intention of crossing that thing’s path. “Don’t worry, I won’t.”
Max pulled the tarp off footman John. “Get up.” He untied the man’s blindfold so he could see where to step without falling into the water, but he kept his hands tied.
Daphne did her best to be helpful, reaching out to steady the boat against the dock as the two men got off the boat. The dog bristled and stared at the male stranger with a low snarl, but at another order from Max, the beast lay down on its stomach and began panting.
Max marched footman John across the small dock and up a stone tunnel that had been dug beneath the house, or whatever it was above them. With gooseflesh on her arms, she stared into the darkness in the direction they had gone. She still had no clear notion of what in heaven’s name was going on. She was doing her best to keep her terror at bay, but she was beginning to wonder, truly, what manner of man she had married.
The dog’s ears pricked up at a loud metallic bang from deeper into the darkness. Daphne swallowed hard, but a moment later, Max reappeared, all in
black, emerging from the shadows. The torchlight sculpted his angular face.
He gave the dog an order, pointing to the wall. It got up and trotted back to where he had told it to go. Then he came to the edge of the dock and reached down to her, holding out his hand.
She took it warily and climbed out of the boat.
“What have you done with the footman?” she asked with an uneasy glance around.
“He’s in a holding cell. Come on.” When he started once more up the limestone tunnel, she had no choice but to follow him into the darkness.
“What is this place?” she whispered.
“You are in, or rather under, Dante House.”
“Dante House,” she murmured as the tunnel ended in a sparse stone chamber with a rough-hewn wooden table, a colorful floor mosaic of St. Michael the Archangel as in the stained-glass window, and a white Maltese cross suspended on a chain from the living rock. It matched the one in the Rotherstone portraits, the family chapel, and the signet ring she had found.
She turned to him all of a sudden. “The Inferno Club?”
“Yes.”
“Max—”
“You’ll get the answers you seek, Daphne, but first I must speak to Virgil.” He walked away from her, crossing the dim, clammy chamber. “Can you climb?” He laid his hand on a ladder that ascended into a dark chute.
She nodded, and stepped onto the first rung.
With Max a few rungs below her, they climbed to the pitch-black top of the ladder. From what little light there was, Daphne could just make out an oval opening, a sort of doorway. Max told her to get off the ladder and go through it. Groping around nervously in the dark, she managed to find her way. She stepped off the ladder, through the opening, into a narrow, lightless passageway.
When Max joined her, he took her hand. “Follow me.”
Daphne did so gladly, staying close to him. He led her through some sort of blind maze, but at last, he opened one more hidden door, and she breathed a sigh of relief. A moment later, they emerged from what proved to be a closet in some bedchamber.
Max pulled the hidden door shut behind them, and then closed the closet door. He cast her a glance. “This way.”
