by Merry Farmer
Trent jerked back to face her. His heart raced for a moment before he forced it to calm down. “I need to think,” he told her.
“Then think in here.” Hattie stepped back into the parlor, gesturing for him to come with her.
Trent blew out an irritated breath and rubbed a hand over his face. The last thing he wanted to do was visit with his sister. He had a feeling she was part of the reason Charlotte had left in such a hurry without saying goodbye.
“You must help me choose my costume for the masquerade ball tomorrow,” Hattie said, crossing to a table that was spread with sketches of elaborate costumes and masks. “Adrian and I want to make a splash.”
“I’m sure you’ll make a splash no matter how you dress,” Trent said, distracted. He marched right past Hattie to the window, peeking out to the street and the canal beyond as if Charlotte would be there waiting for him.
“Have you picked a costume yet?” Hattie asked, glancing sideways at him.
Trent barely heard her question. He frowned at the outside world, frustrated that it was so calm and ordinary when he felt as though his world were collapsing. He had searched for Charlotte for the last two days, venturing out into the city in the hope that he would be able to retrace their steps and find her flat. But they had taken such a circuitous route to reach her flat in the first place, and the two of them had returned to the palace in the dark. It didn’t help that the neighborhood where Charlotte lived was populated by locals who were suspicious of tourists, particularly plump English lords who didn’t speak the language and refused to hand out coins to impish young people. He had no more of a clue where Charlotte lived after two days of searching than he had before he’d started his search.
“It’s my fault.”
Hattie’s sudden comment jolted Trent from his thoughts. He turned to stare questioningly at her.
Hattie stepped away from the table, a contrite look on her face. “It’s my fault,” she repeated.
“What is?” Trent left the window to meet her halfway across the room.
Hattie glanced down, biting her lip for a moment. “You really liked that fortune-teller, didn’t you?”
An uneasy feeling formed in Trent’s gut. “Her name is Charlotte Salazar. And yes, I do like her. Very much.”
“And she likes you,” Hattie said, almost as if she were talking to herself. She winced at her thoughts, glancing sheepishly at Trent. “I chased her away.”
“You what?” Trent took a step toward her. He’d suspected as much, but hearing Hattie confess only fanned the flames of his anger.
“She’s just a fortune-teller,” Hattie defended herself. She took a step toward Trent, grabbing one of his hands and holding it between hers. “For all I knew, she could have been after your money. She could have had nefarious motives.” Her face pinched slightly and she added. “She still might. Are you certain she can be trusted?”
“Yes,” Trent said with absolute certainty. “I would trust her with my life.”
A momentary wobble squeezed his chest and shuddered through him. Could he really trust Charlotte? He barely knew her.
But yes, he could trust her. There was something about her that went beyond her circumstances in life. He’d never thought much about what he believed, but already he was convinced that he and Charlotte must have been together in past lives and that they were destined to be together in future ones. They were soulmates. It didn’t take time or circumstance to tell him that. He knew it from the moment he first saw her and confirmed it when their bodies and hearts joined in passion.
“I just don’t want you to be hurt, Trent,” Hattie went on. “You’re Father’s heir, you know. You’ll have a great weight of responsibility on your shoulders someday. You cannot embroil yourself with an impoverished, Italian fortune-teller.” She hesitated, then added, “And you most certainly can’t marry her.”
Trent smirked in spite of himself. “She’s the daughter of Lord Beverly.” Hattie blinked in surprise, her brow going up. “Illegitimate, yes,” Trent went on. “But it wouldn’t be the first time the illegitimate daughter of a powerful man married into the aristocracy.”
“True,” Hattie said slowly, overcoming her surprise. “But those daughters tend to be well-positioned in society to begin with and have a considerable amount of wealth behind them.”
“Who’s to say that Lord Beverly wouldn’t be willing to bestow those things on Charlotte once he knows that a future earl is interested in her?”
Before Hattie could answer his question, a thought struck Trent. His brow rose and he took a step back.
“Her father,” he said, mostly to himself. “I might not be able to find her flat again, but her father would know where she lives.” And he most certainly knew how to navigate to the palace in San Marco where Lord Beverly lived. He focused on Hattie, stepping forward to kiss her cheek. “I have to go,” he said.
“Go?” Hattie followed him as he headed out of the room. “Where are you going?”
“To find Charlotte,” he said. He paused just inside the doorway. “I’ve been looking for her for two days without any success. She is just as involved with everything Asher is keeping from us as we are now.” He hesitated. It would take far too long to explain the chase through Venice and his suspicions about what the dark lady had tried to take from Asher. He didn’t want to waste time telling the story when he felt closer to finding Charlotte than he had for days. “I’ll explain everything once I’ve found her.”
“But is it safe?” Hattie called after him as he strode into the hall.
“Probably not,” he said over his shoulder.
It took him less time to reach Lord Beverly’s palace than Trent would have thought. Or perhaps his focus was so single-minded that time ceased to matter. The hope that Lord Beverly would not only tell him where Charlotte lived, but that he would accept his request to court Charlotte sped him along his way. By the time he reached the square where the palace stood, he had decided to throw caution to the wind and ask for Charlotte’s hand in marriage.
But what he found at the palace cut all those hopes short and replaced them with anxiety.
“I’m here to speak with Lord Beverly,” he told the butler who let him into the palace.
The butler stared at him with nervous eyes, ringing his hands together. “Lord Beverly is not at home,” he said in thickly-accented English. “He is gone.”
Trent felt as though he’d been hit by a brick. “Gone?” He shook his head and shrugged. “Did he return to England?”
“No, my lord.” The butler wrung his hands harder than ever, glancing anxiously down the hall. “He is gone. Gone entirely. No one knows where.”
The sense of danger that had nipped at Trent’s heels since arriving in Venice suddenly seemed all-encompassing. “How long has he been missing?”
“I do not know,” the butler said, growing more agitated by the moment. “He went to bed as usual last night, but this morning—” He shrugged, his expression that of real distress.
The urge to take charge filled Trent. “First things first. I need to know where Miss Charlotte Salazar lives.”
The butler flinched in surprise. “Miss Salazar?” He shook his head, doing a poor job of pretending he didn’t know whom Trent was talking about.
“Now is not the time to keep secrets,” Trent said, pulling himself to his full height with far more confidence than he thought he possessed. “I am a friend of Miss Salazar’s, and I know all about her connection to Lord Beverly. I must know where she lives.”
Fortunately, the butler appeared to believe Trent. He nodded to a footman who was lingering nearby, listening in, then said something to the young man in Italian. “I will have the address written down for you,” he said, gesturing to the footman.
“Thank you.” Trent gave the man a grateful smile. But that quickly vanished. “Secondly, has anyone come to the house recently, anyone who might have reason to—”
Before Trent could finish his question, Ashe
r stepped out of a room farther down the hall. He said something in Italian to the butler as he walked, but stopped, his mouth hanging open, when he saw Trent.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, his eyes going wide.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Trent said. He stepped away from the butler, moving to intercept Asher before he could even think of bolting. Because something deep within Trent was certain his cousin would try to run, now that Trent had discovered him.
Asher recovered from his surprise and marched the rest of the way down the hall. He took Trent’s arm as he passed and escorted him out of the house. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said in a low voice, glancing this way and that once they stepped through the front door and out into the square. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Yes, I know.” Trent shook his arm out of Asher’s grip. “So you have constantly been telling all of us. But if it is, in fact, too dangerous, then why have you dragged the entire family into whatever it is without giving us the slightest inclination of how we might protect ourselves, or you?”
Whether it was his words or his uncharacteristic burst of energy, Asher was taken aback. His brow rose, and he stared at Trent as though seeing him for the first time. But that didn’t prompt him to answer any of Trent’s questions.
“I’m sorry that I’ve involved you all in this mess,” Asher said, speaking fast and quietly. “It was a horrible miscalculation on my part. If I could do things differently, I would.”
“But you didn’t,” Trent snapped. “And now we are all in danger.”
Asher’s expression darkened to a frown. “You’re not in danger if I have anything to do with it.”
Trent laughed out loud, though there was no humor in the sound. “Where have you been, Asher? Keep us all out of danger? You were there for everything that happened in Paris. You were there for the threats that were made against Dorothy and Damien. You witnessed the troubles Miss Solange got into. And everything Hattie and Whitemarsh went through in Tuscany.” A horrible thought struck him, and he sucked in a breath. “What if the carriage accident that caused Hattie and Whitemarsh to meet wasn’t an accident at all? What if someone from this business you’re involved in manipulated those carriages into crashing?”
Asher looked as troubled by the idea as Trent felt. “I’m sure it was just a coincidence,” he said, though his expression betrayed otherwise.
“You need to tell us what’s going on, Asher.” Trent had never been so forceful with his cousin in his life. Asher was the head of the family, after all, and even though Trent would hold a title and position someday, he had never felt himself Asher’s equal. Now, however, he knew that he was at least Asher’s equal when it came to good sense.
Asher blew out a breath and rubbed a hand over his face. “Yes,” he said, meeting Trent’s eyes warily. “I am involved in a dangerous operation. Others in the family are involved as well. But you must believe me when I say that I cannot tell you the details.”
“Dash it all, Asher,” Trent began, losing his temper in earnest. “You must—”
“I am under strict orders from the highest levels not to reveal a thing,” Asher spoke over him, his gaze unwavering and hard. “Orders from the highest level,” he repeated.
Trent’s mouth continued to hang open as his mind raced through all the things that could mean. There were very few conclusions he could come to after Asher said something like that. The very highest level he could think of was orders from Her Majesty, but that seemed ludicrous. What kind of man would receive orders directly from the queen and what could those orders possibly be about?”
He was spared having to come up with answers as the butler raced out of the house, waving a piece of paper at Trent. “Here, my lord,” he said. “The address.”
Trent took the slip of paper, relieved beyond measure to finally have what he needed to find Charlotte. “Thank you,” he told the man.
“What is that?” Asher nodded to the paper.
Trent slipped the address into the inside pocket of his jacket. “If you will not tell me your secrets, then I have no reason to tell you mine.”
He turned to walk away. Perhaps it was petty of him to hide what he was up to from his cousin, but at the moment, he was so irritated that Asher was shutting him out of the very thing that had put the whole family in danger that he didn’t care.
Charlotte’s heart felt as heavy as a lodestone in her chest as she hurried through the streets of Castello. Her nerves bristled, knowing how dangerous her current mission was. She held Lord Addlebury’s coin in her hand, not trusting it to the pocket of her skirt when so much was at stake. She’d spent days poring over the symbols the coin contained. If she could just figure out what the symbols meant, perhaps she could be of some use to the McGovern family.
Not that she thought they needed her help, exactly. But the more she tried to settle her mind to the idea of letting go of Trent and putting him out of her thoughts forever, the harder it became to stop thinking about him or the danger she felt, with every fiber of her being, he and his family were in. She might not be able to love him the way she wanted to, but if she figured things out, she could keep him safe.
It just so happened that the only way she could think of to learn more about the coin and keep Trent safe meant that she had to put herself in danger.
The neighborhood where her mother’s kin lived was darker than the part of Venice where she lived, though it was surprisingly close to her flat. It wasn’t so much that she feared being robbed or harassed as she gathered her courage and approached the entry to the courtyard where her relatives’ houses stood. Those relatives refused to claim her as one of their own, though. They’d warned her several times not to so much as look at them as they passed on the street. It was all a punishment for her mother, who dared to leave her family out of love for an Englishman, but the warning extended to Charlotte as well.
Her fears seemed to be founded as she approached the gate that lead into the courtyard. A middle-aged man who she was fairly certain was her Uncle David, though her mother had never confirmed it, stood straight from where he had been leaning against the wall beside the gate at her approach.
“What do you want?” he asked with a scowl.
“Please,” Charlotte said, keeping her head lowered. “I need your help.”
“My help?” David grinned as though she were a weak-headed child.
“Yes.” Charlotte summoned her courage and showed David the coin.
David took an immediate interest, avarice glowing in his eyes. “What’s this then?” His smile grew, and he snatched at the coin.
Charlotte held it out of his reach. “It’s not currency. It’s a cipher. I need to know what language the symbols are.”
“It looks like silver to me,” David said. “Give it here.” He held out his hand.
Charlotte clutched the coin in her fist, wariness spreading through her gut. It was a bad idea to come to her mother’s family after all. “If I give it to you, you’ll only keep it.”
“Why would you say a thing like that?” David laughed.
“Because she knows you better than you think,” an older woman said, stepping out of the doorway several yards down from the gate. She was stooped over, with white hair wrapped in a scarf, and she walked with a limp, but David straightened immediately and lost his smug grin.
“I was just teasing her,” David defended himself. “Nothing to scold me for.”
“There is always a reason to scold you, little Davy,” she said, shaking her head at David. She sent him one more, exasperated look, then turned to Charlotte. “What can I do for you, my little one?” she asked with a smile.
Charlotte’s heart thumped against her ribs. The old woman was her grandmother. Her mother had taken her to visit the woman several times when she was a child. Her grandmother had even come to visit her once. But always under cover of dark and with the greatest secrecy. Her Uncle David wasn’t the only member of the family who didn’t app
rove of Charlotte and didn’t want the family contacting her.
The kindness in her grandmother’s eyes was enough to make Charlotte risk trusting the woman. She presented the coin, letting her grandmother take it, even though David glared at her when she did.
“I need to know the language on the coin, what it means,” Charlotte said. “I’ve looked in every book I have and I’ve found nothing. But I figured, since you have traveled so widely, you might have seen something that isn’t in my books.”
“Give it to me,” David said. Charlotte gasped as he tried to take it from her grandmother’s hand.
Her grandmother was faster than David, in spite of her age. She closed her gnarled hand over the coin and frowned at David. “Don’t you have a goat somewhere to woo?” she snapped.
The comment surprised Charlotte so much she nearly laughed. But that only caused David to glare at her. Without another word, he disappeared through the gate.
Charlotte let out a breath of relief once she was alone with her grandmother. Her grandmother glanced at the coin again, humming as she turned it over. “Anything you can tell me would be helpful,” she said.
“I know these symbols,” her grandmother said. Charlotte’s spirits soared in triumph. “They are Coptic,” her grandmother went on.
Charlotte frowned. “Coptic?”
“From Egypt.” Her grandmother nodded. “That much is clear. They make no sense, though.”
“I believe the coin is a cipher,” Charlotte said. “It can be used to decode a message.”
“Ah.” Her grandmother smiled and returned the coin to Charlotte’s hands. She wrapped her papery hands around Charlotte’s instead of simply handing it over, though. “My little one, you are in great danger to have such a mystery in your hands.”
“I know,” Charlotte whispered. “It isn’t my danger, though. A family I know, an English family, are the ones in danger.”
Her grandmother shook her head. “You are in danger with them,” she said. “Your fate is tied to theirs. In more ways than you know.”
Charlotte’s brow flew up. Perhaps it was the romantic in her, but she desperately hoped that her grandmother meant she and Trent were meant to be together, and therefore she would be a member of the McGovern family.
