“No, thank you, my lord. Not without you.”
Dear God! The string of words had made perfect sense inside her head, but now that she’d launched them into that crackling space between her and Rushford, all she could do was ride out the flush that scorched her from her toes to the ends of her hair.
“A tempting invitation, Miss Faelyn,” he said softly, moving toward her, his face planed in the flame of his desk lamp. Then he leaned across her shoulder, tipping her backward, and turned down the wick. “But ill-advised, considering—”
“Considering, sir, that I misspoke.” She scooted the chair out from under him, stopping abruptly when the wheels caught on the carpet fringe. “I meant to say I would stay here in the library and work as long as you were staying. That’s what I meant.”
“I believe you, Miss Faelyn,” he said calmly, letting another lamp gutter out, leaving the library dark but for the gas-lit sconce by the door. “And I applaud your diligence. But the day has been long and we both need sleep. We’ll finish this tomorrow. Come, I’ll walk with you to the lodge.”
“I don’t need you to coddle me, Rushford.”
“I wouldn’t dare.” The sconce hissed, and the room darkened completely, shadowing him against the pale light from the foyer.
“I’ve walked the heathlands alone in the dead of winter, sir, and I’ve rowed myself across the Menai Strait in a carrack that I constructed myself. I can surely find my way alone through the woods.”
“Not through mine. Not until you know them better. I have no intention of losing you in the duck pond.”
“I can swim.”
He laughed broadly. “I’d have bet my last farthing on that, Miss Faelyn, my very last.”
Mairey fumed all the way to the lodge, blazing a trail ten feet in front of him.
At the lodge door Rushford lifted her hand, turned it, and kissed her palm. “Sweet dreams, Mairey Faelyn.”
But sweet dreams were no longer possible, for a stone-hearted dragon had just overrun her life, and it seemed that he planned to stay.
Chapter 6
“The Wakefield Tower is an impossible mess at the moment, Lord Rushford.”
The assistant to the Keeper of the Records offered his apology to Jack as they stood in the inner ward of the Tower of London, but the man’s gaze was fixed on Miss Faelyn, who seemed completely oblivious to anything but the stout, stumpy tower rising out of the massive main guard wall.
“I mean to say, sir, what with the Public Record’s staff in there twelve hours every day, sorting and cataloging, preparing for the transfer to Chancery Lane, it’s rather like an enormous spring-cleaning. Wouldn’t you say so, Miss Faelyn?”
“No need to explain further, Mr. Walsham,” the woman said, dragging her gaze from the tower and cutting Jack a precisely pointed frown. “Lord Rushford and I are very familiar with spring-cleaning, aren’t we, my lord?”
Her hair was drawn off her lovely neck, its pale curls caught in a loose plait and wound beneath the brim of that god-awful hat, which she had to clamp down with her hand to keep it from falling off as she stared up at him with those sparkling eyes.
“Indeed,” Jack said at last, refusing to be baited in front of the meddlesome keeper. “Proceed, Mr. Walsham.”
Miss Faelyn took off after the man, her sensible beige skirts flying in her wake.
An ordinary woman would have taken Jack’s arm and begged his guidance down the grassy slope and around the flotsam of irregular stone blocks that marked the remains of the Tower’s ancient, innermost ward. But he was fast learning that there was little about Mairey Faelyn that was ordinary.
Least of all that she didn’t wear stays beneath her shirtwaist—a fact that had raised a callow sweat and a bullish erection that morning when he found her shelving more books in the library. She wriggled where a proper woman shouldn’t, at least not outside the bedchamber. She bobbed. Swayed.
Holy hell, she was a good deal of marvelous.
It had taken two days to arrange this visit to the Tower. He had chafed at the delay, but Miss Faelyn had used the time to nest herself into a corner of his library—a process that she claimed would take another week. He was useless to her, useless to himself when he tried to simply read while she was in the same room. He did a lot of staring.
Jack followed after Miss Faelyn and the Keeper’s assistant at his own pace, and caught up with them as the woman stopped to admire a vine of just-blooming roses that had affixed itself to a crumbling wall. Walsham cut a flower with his penknife and shyly handed it to her, a schoolboy pink blushing his already sunburned face.
“When was Wakefield Tower built, Mr. Walsham?” The woman brushed the furled petals past her nose and sniffed, a gesture so simple and yet so provocative that Jack felt it like her kiss across his mouth. The shock of it traveled like a bolt of lightning to his groin.
“Some historians say William Rufus began it back in 1093. But recent theories—my own included—lean toward 1220, about the time Henry Three began redesigning the entire complex.” Walsham seemed to be in his element now, guiding a lovely woman on a personal tour of his tiny kingdom. He spread his weedy arms and legs like a stickman, then crossed the width between the grass-bordered stones and the nonexistent walls. “By the end of Henry’s reign, he had rebuilt the Great Hall on this very site.”
Miss Faelyn listened to the fatuous little fellow with every part of herself, leaning toward him on her toes, smiling, those clear eyes catching every nuance as though she were committing the entire performance to memory.
Jack knew a courting dance when he saw it. Walsham’s was ridiculous. Misplaced entirely. Miss Faelyn couldn’t possibly be interested in the dullard.
“You are a font, Mr. Walsham.” She blinked back at Jack. “Isn’t he, Lord Rushford?”
She was bobbing, or would certainly be if he could see beneath her jacket to the linen. He could only stare, as much a mooncalf as Walsham, who continued his gamboling.
“Henry next connected the hall to the Wakefield Tower, which he then used as his apartments. In fact, the upper floor, where the Public Records are now stored, was his privy chamber.”
“How long have the records been kept there?” She was still bright-eyed with interest, still making maddening love to the rose and its copious petals.
“Since the first Edward, we believe. Thirteenth century.”
Miss Faelyn’s face fell, and she gazed up again at the tower. “That’s a lot of paper.”
His patience at an end, Jack scooped the woman’s fingers through his and fixed them into the crook of his elbow. “And we’ve so little time.”
She scowled at him but held fast around his arm as Walsham scurried ahead of them to the thick door. He unlocked a massive lock with a key from a crowded ring that must have weighed a full stone.
“Here we are, then.” Walsham shoved open the door, and Miss Faelyn followed the sunlight into the round room as it spilled onto the floor, leaving her rose scent to swirl around Jack’s head.
The room was scattered with tables piled high with wooden file crates, loose-sheeted books, and safety lamps. In the middle of the room, a thick post strained under the weight of whatever was pressing down on the floor above.
“Well now, my lord, if you can tell me what record you’re looking for, perhaps I can point you in the right direction.”
“Royal letters written in the autumn of 1642.” Miss Faelyn spared the man a patient smile, but she was already eagerly leafing through the papers in the boxes. “You see, Mr. Walsham, I’m the one who is looking for a record. My father’s family has always claimed a blood connection to Charles the First, through his queen’s cousin.”
Jack nearly laughed at the baldness of the woman’s lie.
But Walsham’s eyes grew large and his voice conspiratorial. “Ah, and you’re looking for proof! Is that it?”
“Indeed.” She lowered her thick lashes, then proceeded to unravel her impossible story. “Though I am sure I’ll find t
hat proof on the…well, on the wrong side of the bedclothes.”
The man looked scandalized. “How dreadful!”
“A royal peccadillo.”
Preposterous woman. She was a practiced mountebank, and Walsham was falling for her sleight of hand. Jack would have seen it from twenty paces—at least he hoped he would—but the defenseless little man was beguiled.
“The woman in question was the daughter of the king’s chamberlain. Once her transgression began to show itself—” Miss Faelyn demurely mimed a bulging belly, and Jack’s heart skipped, then barrel-rolled. The splendor of filling that space with himself struck him like a ball of blue thunder.
Walsham’s jaw was hanging loose.
Miss Faelyn was oblivious to the head-butting that was passing between the two men in this very crowded room.
“As you can imagine, Mr. Walsham, the poor girl was married off to a yeoman of the guard, a man whom, according to family legends, the queen trusted with the transfer of the royal treasury whenever the king’s army needed weapons. If I could locate the name of that yeoman, then perhaps I could discover where the young woman went, and follow her branch of the family to my own.”
Jack’s head was spinning from lack of air.
“Fascinating.” Walsham’s cheeks were blazing.
“Indeed, Mr. Walsham. To that end, I’m looking for Queen Henrietta’s private letters here in the Tower, where I might find mention of the names of her guards.”
“Queen Henrietta?” Walsham clicked his tongue and scrubbed at his chin. “Not good. Not good at all.”
“Why?” She stopped her paper rifling, a ruthless cant to her brow.
“William Prynne, to put a pinpoint on it. One of my predecessors. A staunch Puritan: hated the queen and her papist ways.”
“Do you mean that he destroyed her papers?”
“More wretched than that—he purposely neglected them when he took office. 1662, it was. Cromwell’s papers were protected to the fullest, but according to Prynne’s logbook, he dropped Henrietta’s into a barrel and sealed the lot with tar.”
“So her papers are here?”
“Possibly.” Walsham rolled his eyes skyward, to the sagging ceiling of the floor above. “Up there,” he said. “What’s left of them.”
He motioned them to follow and disappeared up the curl of stairs.
Miss Faelyn grinned at Jack, obviously pleased, or at least used to this labyrinth of shifting fortunes. He preferred looking for outcroppings of coal. It was there, or it wasn’t.
“It’s going very well, my lord.” She stuck her nose in the middle of that damned rose. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, princess.”
She gave Jack a mocking curtsey and hurried up the stairs in a flounce of skirts and trim ankles.
Jack followed and emerged in the darkness of an octagonal room that smelled sharply of damp rags. The ceiling was vaulted and ribbed, and the plaster was cracked, its paint long ago flaked off. The floor sagged dangerously and was indeed supported by the timbered post from the story below.
The rest was a rabbit warren of ironbound chests, crates, and barrels. Miss Faelyn looked right at home amid the clutter, smoothing her hands across every surface as though she could read its history with her touch.
She was in a windowed alcove, staring up at the water-stained ceiling, her hat in her hand, her hair twisted and fastened as always by a pencil.
“Henry Six was murdered right there where you’re standing, Miss Faelyn,” Walsham said as he lit a sconce lamp beside the door.
“Here?” A proper woman would have scurried away in fear, but Mairey Faelyn knelt and spread her fingers against the planking. She closed her eyes. “Does he haunt these rooms?”
“Never heard it said. I hope not. As soon as all these records are gone, the plans are to fix up the Wakefield to display the crown jewels to the public. Can’t have a ghost scaring off paying customers.”
“Where do you keep the queen’s barrel, Walsham?” Jack asked, done with the man’s endless tour.
“A very, very good question. This quarter of the chamber to the left of the stairs would be about right for Charles the First. I’m afraid it’s all badly labeled, and of course, not all of it’s here.”
Jack glanced at Miss Faelyn, and his heart gave a sharp thud against his chest. Tears were starring her lashes with bright points, and there was an unsteadiness about her chin. Changeable woman.
“Leave us, Walsham.” Jack caught up the man’s elbow and turned him toward the stairs.
“But, my lord, I was told to be at your service for the entire day. To see that you got whatever you needed—”
“I need you to leave us. Immediately.”
“Well, all right. Here’s a key which should fit nearly every lock. But do come for me should the lady ask. I’ll be at the White Tower.”
Jack listened to the man scurry down the stairs, and stayed to hear the door close before he turned his attention to this partner of his, who was swabbing tears from her cheeks. Great puddles of sorrow, and he could do nothing about them. He had felt just as helpless whenever his sisters had cried, and even more so when his mother had. He didn’t need this from a business associate.
“What the devil’s gotten into you, madam?”
She snuffled and touched her finger to the softly arching bow of her lip as she looked around at the mass of records. There was a smile there, too, rueful and turned inward.
“Treasure, Rushford. Piles of it.”
Jack snorted and handed her a kerchief. “If there’s treasure here, Miss Faelyn, you’ll have to point it out to me. I see broken-down chests, sprung barrels, and damn me if I don’t smell a…Christ, I don’t care to know what that is.”
“I’m a weeper, Lord Rushford.” She pocketed his kerchief. “Pay me no mind.”
Like hell. “What now, my dear?”
She paged through her field book, passing the rose stem that now stuck out from the binding. “I brought a map.”
“Of what?”
Her eyes met his, and she paused momentarily before sighing. More hedging. “I told you that a number of items from the stolen treasury have turned up over the last two hundred years.”
“I remember.” Jack held the lamp as she spread out a map of Northumberland on a chest. “What are these red numbers?”
“That is a bejewelled sword pommel known to have belonged to James the First. It was recorded in a will here at Bowton in 1729. And in 1817, the Whitehall Firedog was found hanging over a dartboard in a public house in Todhorn. This number seven is the churching brooch of Joanna, wife of Llewelyn Fawr. There are at least a dozen other historically significant pieces known to have been among the royal treasury as late as 1641. Notice how they concentrate around Donowell?”
“What I notice, madam, is that you knew about all this two days ago, and yet told me nothing.”
“The information was meaningless without full access to the records.”
“I want to be informed, madam. Completely.”
“That’s what I’m doing now, sir. My father suspected that whoever waylaid the caravan lived in the area where the booty turned up. He combed the parish records in each of these towns, and this is all he found. Once we find the name of the men in the treasury detail, the next step will be to scour the records of Cromwell’s Court of Probate.”
“Why those in particular?” Jack still felt as though he was being danced around the Maypole.
“Probate includes the inventory of the deceased’s estate, his debts and duns, and also records how those goods were distributed.”
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“But few people know that during the Interregnum, Cromwell’s probate court had jurisdiction over the entire realm. Nothing was kept in the parish records.” The woman began unbuttoning her high-necked scholarly jacket as she spoke—one small, round button and then the next, in a long line of gray pearl. “So if the Willowmoon Knot came into the possession of a man i
n Northumberland—as the other items from the stolen cart seemed to have done—then when that man died, his last will and testament would have been probated here in London, not in his home parish. That’s where we’ll find his name. I hope.”
Jack had managed to follow her logic even as his eyes had followed the progress of her unrelenting unbuttoning.
“Miss Faelyn, how many men do you suppose died in Northumberland between the years 1642 and 1660?”
“Hundreds at least.” She shrugged out of the jacket, and left Jack to stare at her finely pleated shirtwaist. And beneath the white, nothing but a vest of some sort. And all that buoyant swaying. Her breasts were small, barely a handful each, but God bless them, they were perfect handfuls.
Jack’s palms itched for them. He cleared his throat. “And how do you propose to sift through that many records?”
“Word by word, my lord. It’s the only way.”
“That could take years.”
“It already has.” She closed her fingers around his in a startlingly unexpected intimacy, then lifted the forgotten key from between them—a caressing brush, a flash of eye—and then she was gone with her map.
Years. Years of clearing a path for the woman, of watching over her shoulder as she deciphered faded documents, as he waited for her to unearth his vein of silver.
Waiting. He’d spent the last eighteen years waiting for his life to begin, waiting for joy to replace the ever-present dread, the loneliness. The prospect of waiting for his nymphish partner to lead him to a silver mine should have pressed hard upon him. But she had clambered over a chest and disappeared through a thin opening between two iron-strapped wardrobes, and he wanted desperately to follow after her.
“Prerogative Court of Canterbury, local to London,” she said from somewhere in the room.
“Is that good?” He tried to locate her from the sound of her voice.
“Not particularly. But the labels look recent. If I can just move this”—she started shoving at something, which caused a tower of crates to shudder.
“Watch it, woman!” Jack took a shortcut over the top of a chest and landed just in time to keep the crates from falling onto her.
Linda Needham Page 8
