“We already have magisters joining the revolt. We don’t dare do that. Who else knows about this?”
“No one, Your Grace.”
“Keep it that way. I may be able to secure a loan. I’ll write to a few people I can trust, and perhaps we can get the funds back with more investigation.”
It sounded like the meeting was wrapping up, so I didn’t dare linger outside the door, even though I was dying to learn more. I hurried up the stairs to make sure I was out of sight before either man left the study.
Now I really needed to talk to Henry. I had a feeling I had just what we needed to spur even the least ardent revolutionaries into action.
Chapter Fourteen
In Which
My Fortitude Is Tested
I was so anxious that if I hadn’t managed to find Henry before I went to bed, I might have resorted to sliding a note under his door, even if that would have been quite scandalous if someone else saw it. Once the children were in bed and all the governor’s guests were gone, I played the spinet in the schoolroom, hoping that would catch Henry’s attention. I knew he played when he needed to think, so surely he would pick up on the clue.
He did come into the room, still dressed for dinner. “Did you find any good specimens today, Lord Henry?” I asked as I played a Bach étude.
“Yes, I did. Some of them are absolutely horrifying. You wouldn’t believe the size of the bugs here. I’ll have to plan another visit in warmer weather. And how was your day? I know we asked quite a lot of you.”
“The children got restless, but I believe I managed to keep them occupied.”
He came over to the piano and leaned against it. Still playing so that the music might mask our discussion, I lowered my voice and said, “I overheard something interesting today.” As quickly and as softly as I could, I told him about the conversation in the governor’s study.
His eyes widening, he sank onto the piano bench next to me. “Are you sure?” he asked, his voice barely above a breath.
“No,” I admitted. “I was missing the context entirely, and I didn’t hear everything that was said. I missed the beginning of the conversation, and I don’t know who was meeting with the governor. But the part I did hear sounded suspicious.”
“If there’s been some kind of corruption or mismanagement, that might be enough to spur the reluctant revolutionaries to take action. An empty treasury and higher taxes because of this is good reason for revolution.”
“Or is the treasury empty because someone has been robbing the government?” I asked with a smile.
“Well, if they want to keep their money, they should do a better job of guarding it, so it’s still mismanagement. The difficulty will be proving this. I can’t just tell people what my governess overheard. I need evidence.”
“He’s writing to his friends to try to get loans to cover it up until he can find the missing money. If we could just get one of those letters…”
“That sounds like a job for the Masked Bandits.”
I was so shocked that I stopped playing. “Henry, no!” I exclaimed.
Fortunately, he had the presence of mind to get his hands on the keyboard and continue the music so that my outburst didn’t ring through the house. “Robbing couriers is child’s play. You’ve seen me do that.”
“I’m not worried about you getting the documents away from the courier. I’m worried about you getting away. And you can’t go robbing people while you’re in the governor’s house.”
“The couriers may get letters in the house, but they have to go elsewhere with them, and then I can carry out a quick robbery and be back home. The governor will hardly search my room when looking for missing documents.”
“But you’re on your own. Your gang isn’t here.”
“It doesn’t take more than one person to take documents off a courier. And don’t even ask to come with me. Both of us being out would only look suspicious. I need you to be entirely aboveboard.”
“We both went out in Boston,” I reminded him.
“Yes, and that was probably a mistake, as we were nearly caught. You don’t have a friend among the staff here, either.”
“Yet. Give me time.”
“We don’t have time. The letters will probably go out soon.”
The front bell ringing was loud enough to be heard over the piano. “Or possibly tonight,” I said, gulping down the lump that had formed in my throat.
He stood up. “That would be my cue.”
I managed to catch his sleeve before he got away from me. “Be careful.”
“Of course!”
But I knew he wouldn’t be. He might play the mild-mannered amateur scientist, but Henry loved danger.
I went to the window and watched as a man carrying an attaché case left the house about ten minutes later. Almost immediately afterward, a tall, lanky man followed him. I didn’t notice the courier turning around, so he must not have realized he was being shadowed. Within moments, they were both out of my sight. I doubted Henry would do anything so close to the house. He’d have to wait until the courier was in some area where it would look like an ordinary robbery.
If I could have thought of a way to follow him or go along with him, I would have, but he was right about that being difficult in this house. There was no maid who was an agent of the Rebel Mechanics—that I knew of—to sneak me out, no friendly hall boy to let me back in, and no proper governess would venture out alone at this time of night. Henry had it so much easier because young bachelors were expected to go out on the town.
With a sigh of frustration, I returned to the piano. I had to give up playing when it became late enough that it would have been rude to keep the household awake. I retreated to my room and paced for at least an hour. Surely he’d find a way to let me know when he was home, I thought. He’d said that stealing documents from a courier was easy, so even if he’d taken precautions, shouldn’t he have been back by now?
I finally decided I might as well go to bed. I knew it was sheer superstition, but I was afraid my waiting up was keeping the watched pot from boiling. Much to my surprise, I’d no sooner settled into bed than I heard a tapping at my window. I knew there wasn’t a tree anywhere nearby, so I jumped out of bed and ran to throw back the curtains. The window glass was spattered with rain, and I thought I saw a face pressed against it. I opened the window, and a body tumbled through and onto the floor.
I swallowed my instinctive scream of shock, but I couldn’t stop myself from scrambling back, away from the intruder. I heard a gasp that sounded like pain, and then there was a rough whisper, saying, “Verity, it’s me.”
“Henry? What on earth?” I asked as I moved to kneel beside him.
“I’m so sorry, Verity, but I didn’t dare go through the front door, there’s a watchman on the street and he’d have seen me, and your room is the one at the rear, there’s a trellis nearby, and I need your help.” All the words came tumbling out at once, as if he was verging on hysteria.
“What happened? Did something go wrong? Did you get the documents?”
“I got them, but there was a little problem getting away.” His voice shook as his teeth chattered. He was soaking wet and chilled, probably from having been out in the rain, but there seemed to be more than that wrong. I realized what that must be when I noticed that the hem of my white nightgown where I’d knelt next to him had a dark stain on it.
I conjured a small light in my hand, the way he’d taught me, so I could get a better look. “You’re bleeding!”
“I think this one might be a little worse than the last time you helped me,” he admitted.
It was too dark, even with my light, to examine the wound. “Should we send for a doctor?” I asked.
“How would we explain a gunshot wound?” He sounded more like his normal self. “The first thing we need to do is get me out of your room. I don’t want there to be any evidence that I was ever here.”
I pulled myself together. I prided myself on being go
od in a crisis, and this would be a test of my fortitude. “First, some towels, so you don’t go dripping down the hall.” I grabbed some from my bathroom and blotted him as well as I could. It was alarming how much blood ended up on the formerly white towels. I’d have to figure out later what to do about that. “Can you walk?” I asked.
“I’ll need some help.” He held his right arm out to me, and I pulled with all my might to get him to his feet. As soon as he was upright, he fell against me. I got my arm around him, and he draped his arm around my shoulders. He seemed to be trying his best to carry his own weight and walk, but I felt like he was doing well to move his feet as we made our way to the door.
I propped him against the wall and checked up and down the hallway before hauling him across to his room. There, I threw one of the towels that was still draped around him onto the floor in front of the fireplace and lowered him to the ground. With a wave of my hand, I made the fire flare up because I was afraid he was going into shock, he was trembling so badly.
I was less worried about a light causing suspicion in his room—being an eccentric young bachelor covered so many behaviors—so I turned on the lamp and moved it closer to him. “It’s the shoulder,” he said.
I eased his overcoat away from his shoulder. The white shirt underneath was dark red with blood. I lifted him somewhat to check his back, but the shirt was all white. “The bullet must still be in there,” I said.
“You’ll need to get it out,” he said through clenched teeth. “Look in my trunk. I have a medical kit.”
“You brought a medical kit on this trip?”
“I’m notoriously accident-prone. And isn’t it good that I did? Improvising this sort of thing with tools you might find lying around would be difficult.”
I didn’t think it would be easy with the right tools, but I forced myself not to think so I wouldn’t panic. I found the kit, which looked like a doctor’s bag, and brought it over to him. He motioned for me to help him sit up, and he rummaged through the bag, bringing out a bottle. “Open this,” he ordered. After I did, he took a long swig from it and handed it to me. “For the pain,” he explained. “I suspect I’m going to need it.” He took out another bottle, some instruments, and a great deal of gauze, then lay back down, breathing heavily, like the effort had cost him a great deal.
“You’ll need to take those forceps and probe the wound for the bullet,” he said. “Do you think you can do that?”
“Of course I can,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as him.
“Of course you can,” he echoed, a faint smile on his lips. “I should never doubt you, Verity.”
I used the scissors from the kit to cut his shirt away from the wound, forcing myself not to think about seeing that much of his bare skin, and moved the lamp closer to light my work. He clenched his jaw and squeezed his eyes shut as I put the tips of the forceps into the wound. I immediately came upon something solid. “I think I have it,” I said and tugged as gently as I could. He gasped and went limp. Working quickly before he could regain consciousness, I pulled the bullet free. Remembering a novel I’d read about stagecoach robbers, I put the forceps back into the wound and probed for a scrap of cloth that might have come with the bullet. I was surprised to find it, and it seemed to match the hole in his shirt. “See, Father, pulp novels are good for something,” I muttered to myself. I poured a generous amount of disinfectant over and into the wound, then pressed a wad of gauze onto it, putting on pressure to slow the bleeding.
He moaned and stirred then. “Are you done?” he asked groggily.
“I need to get you bandaged, but I removed the bullet and the cloth it took with it, and I’ve cleaned the wound.”
“You have a future in medicine if you get tired of being a governess,” he mumbled.
“Especially if I keep working for you. I’m getting plenty of practice.” I wrapped a bandage around the wad of gauze, holding it tight against the wound. “Now, we need to get you warm and dry.”
His overcoat had actually kept his body fairly dry. It was just his hair that was soaked. He seemed to have lost his hat somewhere along the way. I wished his valet had come with us because Matthews was far more experienced in this sort of thing. I might not have quailed at removing the bullet, but I was very uncomfortable with the prospect of undressing him. I found a dry towel in his bathroom and gave his head a vigorous rubbing, pulled a nightshirt over his head to hide the bandage, then wrapped a blanket from the bed around his shoulders and made him lie down again.
“There should be a teapot and some tea and sugar in the trunk,” he said.
“Do you pack expecting to encounter a tea emergency?”
“Strong, sweet tea is very good for shock. Get water from the bathroom, and you know how to boil it.”
“Do you think it’s safe for me to use so much magic?”
“They’ll think it’s me if they notice anything.”
I filled the pot, then concentrated on the ether surrounding it. Soon, the water was bubbling, and I added tea leaves. After the tea had steeped thoroughly, I strained it into a cup I found in the trunk and added a generous dose of sugar. Kneeling beside him, I helped him sit halfway up and held the cup to his lips for him to drink. When he’d finished, I lowered him back to the ground. “You should probably have a cup, yourself,” he said, his words starting to slur, perhaps from the painkiller he’d taken. “You’ve had a bit of a shock in dealing with this.”
“I need to clean up first. We don’t want that blood to set.” I gathered the towels and his overcoat and took them into the bathroom. I set the towels to soak in the bathtub in cold water and attempted to dab the blood out of his coat. It looked like the worst of it was on the lining, so the real problem was the obvious hole. He only had the one overcoat with him on the trip.
After draining the water from the tub and giving the towels another rinse, I realized that my white nightgown looked as though it had been through a war. I managed to rinse the blood out of the hem, but by the time I’d done that and wrung out the towels to leave them to dry, my thin cotton gown was so damp as to be transparent. I couldn’t go out to face Henry like that, so I took his dressing gown off the hook on the back of the door and wrapped it around myself.
I returned to the bedroom to find him dozing. I checked his pulse and found that although it was weaker and more rapid than would be considered healthy, it was stronger and steadier than it had been earlier. “Yes, I’m still alive,” he said sleepily without opening his eyes. “Now, have some tea and let’s see if it was worth all my spilled blood.”
I didn’t need urging to pour myself a cup of tea and add plenty of sugar. Now that the immediate crisis was over, I could feel the shock setting in. My legs felt watery and my hands shook. I downed the whole cup before picking up the packet I’d found in Henry’s overcoat pocket. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what’s in it,” I said, trying to keep a light, teasing tone in my voice to hide the tremor.
“I was too occupied with fleeing for my life to stop to look. It would be just my luck if it’s nothing more than birthday greetings to a friend.”
With trembling fingers, I opened the package and pulled out several sheets of paper covered in bold handwriting. When I saw Henry trying to sit up so he could read, I moved closer to him and held the pages so that he could see by the light of the fire.
The contents were more astonishing than I anticipated. The governor admitted that there had been some kind of fraud or mismanagement that was about to bankrupt the colonial government and begged his friend for a loan to tide the colonies over until the matter could be investigated and resolved.
When he’d finished reading, Henry let out a low whistle. “And to think, it’s in his own handwriting. This is exactly what we needed, worth every drop of blood. Even all those fence-sitters should be up in arms about this. I need to take this letter around to all those who denied me before.”
“You won’t be doing that for a couple of days, not if you d
on’t want anyone to find it suspicious that you’ve got a bad shoulder right after the governor’s courier shot someone who stole these documents.”
With a sigh, he said, “I’m not sure I can safely do it ever. Being specifically linked to this letter would put me in great danger.”
“So, it takes large doses of pain medicine to make you think rationally,” I teased. More seriously, I added, “I can get it to the Mechanics, to go in their newspapers. We know there are magisters who read them.”
“You can’t be linked to it, either.”
“Liberty Jones is willing to cede this scoop to some other reporter.”
“We need to put this directly into the hands of people we know we can trust. As dangerous as it may be to hold on to this news, let’s wait until we get back to New York.”
“You can’t keep this sort of thing all that time, in the governor’s house!”
“I know. But you can.”
“Me?”
“No one is going to search your room. Why would a governess who’s never out of sight of her charges have incriminating evidence in her possession? And you’re less likely to have servants pawing through your belongings in the name of being helpful.”
He closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath through clenched teeth. “Though if you are to remain above suspicion, you should probably get back to your room and make sure it shows no signs of intrusion. I’ll need you to help me up and into bed first, though.”
As I got my hands under his good shoulder to help him sit up and then get to his feet, I said, “You know you’re not going to be anything like back to normal by tomorrow. How will you explain your condition?”
He leaned heavily on me as we walked around to the head of the bed, where I pulled back the covers and allowed him to fall onto the mattress. “I have come down with a terrible case of the flu.”
“You really do need a doctor,” I said as I pulled the covers up over him.
“Believe it or not, I’ve had worse. Armed robbery is a dangerous business.” He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Thank you for being my rock. We would all be doomed without you.”
Rebel Magisters Page 17
