“I love you,” she murmured finally, giving a contented little sigh. “Indeed, I feel as if I have loved you forever, and I know I shall love you with all my heart for the rest of my life.”
Her words were like a cold bucket of water thrown into his face, bringing him back to the reality he could not ignore, no matter how desperately he might wish to do so. But even knowing their embrace could not—must not—continue, he did not find within himself the resolution needed to release her.
“However did you manage to persuade my aunt to agree to this marriage?” Bethia asked, leaning back in his arms only enough that she could look into his eyes. “No, do not tell me. It is enough that you have achieved this miracle. Oh, I cannot believe that we will be married a week from now.”
Her eyes were filled with delight and trust and innocence, but his own heart was heavy with guilt. “Tomorrow,” he finally managed to say.
“Tomorrow?”
“Your aunt has agreed that we shall be married tomorrow at Lady Letitia’s house,” he said.
“Can it really be? Do I have to suffer through only one more night alone before we are together?” Even while she was smiling up at him, her eyes filled with tears. “Do you know,” she said, her lower lip quivering, “you have given me so much more than I could ever have hoped for, and yet I am still not satisfied. I wish we could be married this evening, this hour, this very minute.”
What had he ever done in his life that was wicked enough to deserve such punishment? Digory wondered. The fires of hell would seem a relief compared to the torture he was now enduring.
“Yoo-hoo,” a voice called out. Looking up, Digory saw Lady Clovyle standing in the doorway, smiling coyly at him. “It would appear your suit has prospered, Mr. Rendel. I vow, I have never seen my niece looking quite so happy.”
“Oh, Aunt Euphemia,” Bethia said, running to throw her arms around her aunt’s neck. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. You have made me the happiest person in London.”
“No, no, my dear, it is quite clear to all but the blindest eye that it is Mr. Rendel who has made you this happy. I am only thankful that I was able to do my small part in helping Cupid aim his little arrows.”
Lady Clovyle smiled at Digory as if he were the catch of the Season, and he could but marvel at her talent for self-deception.
“If you will excuse me, I must see about making arrangements for tomorrow’s ceremony,” he said. Only by avoiding looking into Bethia’s eyes was he able to take his leave.
Late that night, Lord Edington hosted a bachelor party for Digory, although a stranger entering the library would have deemed it a very odd sort of affair. For one thing, although the butler had produced a truly mellow port, no one was imbibing deeply.
The four men Edington had invited had been espionage agents, and during the war with France their lives had depended upon being able to think more clearly than their opponents. Even though the hostilities were over, they had not yet entirely cast off their habits of caution and moderation.
But it was not so much the lack of drunken revelry that made this evening unique, Digory realized, rather it was the lack of ribald banter and raillery that set this gathering apart from the usual such parties. Instead of needling him about the pleasures of the bachelor life he was about to give up, Digory’s companions were discussing how best to bamboozle the haut ton into thinking he was and always had been one of their own.
“It is obvious that Rendel cannot have spent his entire life in England without anyone becoming acquainted with him except the five of us,” Roger Nyesmith said. His voice was mild, but he was peeling an apple with a knife that had never been designed for kitchen use.
“But then we must perforce have met him abroad, and the problem with that is we cannot claim to have encountered him in India or Macao or Russia if we have never been to any of those places ourselves,” Edward Townsley said, wandering around the room as if possessed of too much energy to sit down. “I cannot speak for the rest of you, but the only time I have traveled outside of England was when I went to France, and that is not common knowledge, nor would the War Office be at all happy if it were to become widely known. So if I were to claim I had met Rendel on the Continent, it would raise more questions about my past than it would answer about his.”
“Such a homebody you are,” Roger Nyesmith said. “I, on the other hand, have traveled extensively in Canada and the United States. Went over in the spring of ’04 and didn’t come home until the fall of ’06. We could say we met ... where?”
“Never having been to America,” Digory answered, “I would be undone the first time anyone asked me the simplest question about that country.”
“That is the other side of the problem,” Patrick Fitzhugh said. “To avoid exposing our little sham, we must limit ourselves to where Rendel himself has actually been.”
The others all looked at Digory expectantly. “I have been to the Low Countries, and France, Portugal, and Spain, and to most of the countries around the Mediterranean,” he admitted. “But I have always stayed close to the coastline and never ventured far inland.”
“More than likely I have been to all the Mediterranean and Channel ports that you have visited,” Oliver Lord Cavenaugh said, idly swinging his quizzing glass back and forth. “Yet I must decline to tell anyone that I made your acquaintance in Cairo or Barcelona or even in Naples.”
Lord Edington immediately took umbrage. “If you do not wish to play the game,” he said, anger sharpening his voice, “then you are free to ignore us all. But you betray Rendel at your own peril.” Lame he might now be, but the reputation Edington had acquired while spying on the French was sufficient to make the others eye him with apprehension.
Only Cavenaugh appeared not the least bit dismayed. Raising his quizzing glass, he stared at Edington while the murmurs of the others died down and the room became quiet enough that the ticking of the mantel clock could be heard.
How much they knew about Cavenaugh, Digory could not say. But what he himself knew made him sure that Cavenaugh was in truth the most dangerous and most ruthless man in the room. He was likewise the only one whose thoughts had ever been one step ahead of Digory’s.
Slender of build and not above average height, Cavenaugh was decked out tonight like the veriest coxcomb. But his present appearance to the contrary, he had for years successfully played the role of wharf rat, ready to do any job, no matter how loathsome, for the price of a bottle of gin or a flagon of brandy.
Speaking an almost incomprehensible mixture of gutter Arabic, the most vulgar Italian, and French patois, he had slunk into and out of French, Italian, and Spanish ports with the greatest of ease, and without anyone ever suspecting that he was English, much less that he was a spy. The information he had obtained had been invaluable, his methods never fully disclosed.
But it would seem that Cavenaugh’s conscience, which had been most accommodatingly flexible during wartime, would not allow him to participate in any peacetime deception.
“I cannot fault you for not wanting to have any part of this,” Digory said, but Cavenaugh paid him no attention.
“You know I must always be more than happy to meet you at dawn with a sword or pistol in my hand, Matthew,” he said, “but before you arrange for your seconds, permit me to say that I have nothing against fooling the ton. Why, I would even be willing to persuade half of London that Rendel here is the long lost Dauphin if such were his wish. But what you have overlooked in your childish plotting is that Englishmen, when they are away from these hallowed shores, cling to one another in veritable clumps, as it were, and they will only wonder that Rendel was conspicuously absent from their fellowship.”
“Then what you are saying, in essence,” Fitzhugh said, “is that we have set ourselves an impossible task.”
“Not at all,” Cavenaugh said, a bit of a smile creeping into his voice. “But you are all approaching this problem from the wrong direction. You think we must come up with answers to every po
ssible question we might be asked, but the fact of the matter is, for every question we answer, we will surely be asked a dozen more.”
“So what would you have us do?” Nyesmith asked. “Are you suggesting that we admit defeat before we have even begun?”
“Au contraire, mon ami,” Cavenaugh said smoothly, flicking an invisible bit of lint off his sleeve. “We have only to act the way we would naturally act if someone were to begin quizzing us about our personal affairs, namely we shall become highly indignant. For if I call a man friend, then who has a right to question where I have met him or how long I have known him? Observe the only proper response to an impertinent question.” He raised his quizzing glass and regarded Nyesmith with a look of frosty disdain that would have chilled the Beau himself.
Townsley was the first to laugh, and even Edington began to smile.
“Since it appears we have nothing more to do here except to wish Rendel a long and happy married life,” Fitzhugh said, “I suggest we take our leave.”
“There is one more item on the agenda,” Edington said, and he glanced over to Cavenaugh, who nodded his head as if he already knew what the viscount was going to say. “There remains the matter of the wicked cousin. I cannot feel easy so long as we remain in ignorance of his identity.”
There were murmurs of agreement from the other men, and Digory swore to himself, then spoke up quickly, in hopes that he might yet divert them all from this line of reasoning. “I have no desire for revenge. Being deprived of the fortune he sought to inherit will be punishment enough for Miss Pepperell’s cousin.”
Five pairs of eyes looked at him impassively. Although they were experienced at hiding their thoughts, in this case their very silence revealed clearly what they were thinking: Miss Pepperell had nearly been drowned. The three men who had attempted to kill her had acted deliberately and with malice aforethought. One of them had died accidentally while engaged in that wicked piece of work. The second was dead at the hands of the third. It followed therefore that the third man—the one who had instigated the plot—likewise deserved to die.
“You are good-hearted, Rendel, and I applaud your Christian sentiments,” Nyesmith said, “but in my opinion, you are making an error by discounting the danger inherent in this situation. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is never my choice when it comes to survival.”
“It is not as if we would have to hire a Bow Street Runner,” Townsley explained, beginning once more to ramble restlessly about the room. “We have sufficient expertise to ferret out the truth, and even you must agree that it will be safer to know which cousin is the viper and which two are merely harmless garden snakes.”
“Has it occurred to any of you,” Digory said, “that if you expose the villain, you will at the same time destroy Miss Pepperell’s reputation?” He looked from one to the other, but none of them would meet his eye. “Since I am the one who is most deeply involved in this affair, I believe it is, in the end, my decision. And I have decided that nothing will be gained by any attempt to unmask the murderer.”
Chapter Ten
Valid though it was, Digory’s objection did not end the discussion. “If you do not wish to have the wicked cousin brought before the courts,” Fitzhugh said, “and I am inclined to think you are right regarding public knowledge of these things—then there are still innumerable ways that the offensive gentleman can be permanently ... removed, shall we say?”
The others agreed, and with growing enthusiasm and truly fiendish ingenuity they began discussing the possible ways to eliminate the wicked cousin. That everything must be done in total secrecy was quite to their liking, and that they were proposing to take justice into their own hands troubled them not at all.
And indeed, what else could Digory have expected? These five men were not soldiers who had been trained to carry out commands.
To succeed as a spy—and often success was measured simply by whether or not one lived to see the next sunrise—one had to be able to decide for oneself the proper action to take. An English spy could not have survived in Napoleon’s France if he had attempted to follow precise instructions from the War Department in London, no more than Wellington could have won the Battle of Waterloo if he had allowed Parliament to decide where he should make a stand against the French forces and how he should deploy his troops.
Moreover, a good spy needed to be willing to do whatever had to be done to reach his goals. And he had to be able to keep dangerous, even deadly secrets.
In short, a successful espionage agent was not particularly good at listening to whoever was in charge, which in this case was Digory. He, on the other hand, was quite accustomed to having his every order obeyed instantly by his crew.
His patience at an end, he interrupted the others, saying firmly, “I repeat, I do not wish anything to be done about exposing Miss Pepperell’s cousin—or disposing of him, as the case may be.”
As if Digory had not spoken, Townsley asked, “Is anyone here acquainted with the Harcourt brothers? For if I have ever been introduced to them, I disremember it.”
Digory felt a mounting frustration—quite like Pandora must have felt after she opened her box. It had been his decision to ask Lord Edington for his help, and Edington in turn had seen fit to involve the other four men. Now there did not seem to be any way to set limits on their actions.
“If I am not mistaken, they manage to cling precariously to the fringes of Prinny’s crowd,” Nyesmith said.
“Then that narrows our search to the more disreputable gambling hells, wouldn’t you say?” Fitzhugh said with a mocking grin. “And here I had thought the hunting season over. Do you come with us, Cavenaugh? There is bound to be great sport in it.”
Fitzhugh’s tone might be light, but there was a gleam in his eye that made it abundantly clear to Digory exactly why he had no control over these men. Despite appearances, they were not coming to his assistance because of any deep and abiding friendship for him or any true concern for Miss Pepperell’s well-being.
The war with France had brought together people of diverse station—people who would normally never have met. Extraordinary times had indeed called for extraordinary measures.
But Digory was a realist. The war was over, and he strongly doubted that even one of these men had spared a thought for him during the several months of peace following Waterloo.
On the other hand, just as he had been bored in his retirement, it was quite clear that the others had likewise been finding life in peacetime England a trifle flat. Lord Edington had summoned them for this meeting, and he had dangled the lure of excitement and adventure before them, and now it was clearly impossible to deflect them from their self-appointed task.
“I am afraid I must decline,” Cavenaugh said with a smile. “I am engaged for the opera tomorrow, and my valet will be most put out with me if I show myself in public with bags under my eyes. I shall just stay a moment or two with Matthew and then toddle along home to bed.”
“But if you have good hunting,” Edington said, “send me a note detailing what you have discovered. Since we do not normally frequent the same circles, we cannot afford to be seen together too often, else people will begin to gossip.”
The three younger men promised to keep him informed, and after a few minutes they departed, leaving only Digory, Cavenaugh, and their host, whose face was now deeply lined with the pain he had done his best to conceal while the others were there.
Wordlessly, Digory filled a glass with port and passed it over to him, but Edington pushed it aside. “I would be a drunkard by now, were I to allow myself to seek respite from pain at the bottom of a bottle.”
“Then we shall not take advantage of your hospitality any longer, Matthew, but be on our way,” Cavenaugh said smoothly, “and leave you to the tender ministrations of your good wife, who doubtless has better means of taking your mind off your bad leg.”
Edington’s protests were a mere formality, and he made no real attempt to detain them, so it was not long befor
e Digory found himself walking down the street with Cavenaugh. The moon had already set, and Mayfair was shadowed and silent. Only a few carriages still rumbled by, carrying the last of the ton home from their revels.
Despite the dozens of times Lord Cavenaugh had been on Digory’s yacht, where he had joked and acted as if he were part of the crew, here in London Digory did not feel at ease with him. Digory was, in fact, amazed that he’d had the temerity to ask a peer of the realm to help him deceive other lords and ladies.
But Cavenaugh did not appear to feel the slightest bit of self-consciousness or constraint. Falling into step beside Digory, he began to speak as if they were equals, which they were not and never could be.
“How much do you know about the Harcourt brothers?” Cavenaugh asked bluntly.
“Nothing that will help us discover which one is the villain,” Digory said. “Miss Pepperell knows her cousins far better than I, and even she has no way of knowing which one has been trying to kill her.”
“But what is this, Rendel? Have your wits gone begging? We may not know much about two of the brothers, but we can certainly deduce from his actions a great deal about the particular Harcourt whom we seek.”
As much as Cavenaugh’s words rankled, Digory could not deny the truth in what he said. “You are right. To begin with, we know the murderer is completely ruthless.”
“In addition, he is reasonably clever, else he would not have been able to react so quickly when his plans went awry,” Cavenaugh pointed out. “We must therefore assume that he has covered his tracks well.”
Three men were coming toward them, obviously foxed from the way they were staggering and holding onto each other. Cavenaugh waited until they were past and out of earshot before he continued.
“Our best chance to identify the villain would be if he were to try again to murder Miss Pepperell. But as you say, he is not lacking in wits. Once his initial rage is over, he will realize that such a deed would avail him naught.”
The Counterfeit Gentleman Page 14
