Joanna Bourne - My Lord and Spymaster

Doyle had a lot to answer for. “Why the hell didn’t you stop her?”

“Now that’s exactly what I keep asking myself.” Doyle reached up easily, hooked his fingers over the door frame, and leaned into the cubbyhole, looking from one man to the other. “The whole time she was climbing the side of that building like a fly I asked myself why I didn’t talk her out of it.” He snorted. “Next time you two come along and try.”

“No, thank you.” A slim black knife appeared in Adrian’s hands, tossed from palm to palm. “I kept her out of mischief for three nerve-wracking years. If you think she’s bad now you should have known her at twelve. Is the Irish contingent doing anything interesting?”

“Hanging around Kennett’s place, pestering the servant girls when they go out. Watching the Whitby warehouse. Following Jess. Fletcher’s boys and girls are keeping an eye on them, but there’s no sign of Cinq. Not yet.” Doyle glanced both ways in the hall. “I’d like Trevor on duty, if you can spare him. He needs time on the streets, and it’ll get him away from Jess.” There was no trace of Cockney in Doyle’s voice. “He’s unreliable when it comes to the girl.”

“We all are.” Adrian stilled. In the dimness, the knife was nearly invisible. The thin silver line of a razor edge seemed to hang, suspended. “Let Trev be gallant. We get so few chances.”

If he annoys me, I can always send him to Madras. “She’s making you into a bogeyman. Face her.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Because you arrested Whitby?”

“Mostly.” Adrian tossed the knife and caught it, two-fingered, by the blade. He’d done that a thousand times in the years Sebastian had known him. Toss and catch. “There’s more to it.”

Doyle said, “Just tell him.”

Adrian laid the knife on the table beside him. “The last time I spoke to Jess . . . I’d managed to get Josiah shot through the lung. We were old friends, and he let me use the mansion in St. Petersburg as a base of operations. A mistake on his part, as it turned out.”

“Josiah knew what he was doing,” Doyle said.

“There were three or four dead men in the salon and I was carrying one of those vital documents we always seem to have. The fate of nations depended on it, of course.” His voice was bleak as sea water. “So I walked out. I left Jess in the front hall, with the tsar’s men breaking down the door and her father’s blood running out through her fingers.” Adrian’s face was in shadow. Only his eyes picked up a gleam of light. “He lived. Jess and Josiah spent a month in a Russian prison and Jess never forgave me.”

“You never forgave you,” Doyle said. “You saved twenty, maybe thirty men’s lives. If the Russians had got that memorandum back, it would have been a thousand dead.”

“I shall wrap that warm thought around me in the long reaches of the night. She was fourteen.”

He didn’t want to see what was showing in Adrian’s face. “It’s been years. Whitby’s alive and snapping. Jess can get over being annoyed at you. I’ll set up a meeting at my house.”

Adrian picked up the knife again. “I’ll think about it.”

“You do that.”

The brass listening-funnel that extended from the wall was filled with wisps of Jess’s voice. He could almost understand. If he stayed here, he’d keep trying to. “I’ll be upstairs going through Jess’s papers. Send somebody home with her when she’s through with her father.” He put his hand on the door. “Not just a guard. She needs company, so she’s not alone.” It galled him to say it. “Send the boy.”

“Trevor?” Adrian gave a spark of amusement. “He will manfully protect her through the wilds of Mayfair, hoping for brigands. He’s green with envy that you got to kill men for her. I am very glad she is not locked up here. Sebastian . . .”

Trevor could daydream all he wanted to. “What?”

“Subdue your gentlemanly scruples for a minute. I want you to look at this.” Adrian pulled aside the curtain on the wall to show a panel set at eye level.

“I won’t spy on her.”

“But you pass the idle hour pawing through her dainty underlinens. These distinctions escape me. To be hair-splittingly accurate, I am spying on him, not her. They know I’m watching. Think of it as a sort of game. Be quiet now. They can hear us when I open this.”

Adrian closed the lantern and threw the room into darkness. The panel opened smoothly to show a square of light, filled by mottled fabric. The other side was a bland landscape on the wall of the study. He doubted it fooled the Whitbys for a minute.

Jess sat on a low footstool in front of the fire, her hands clasped together, her forearms resting on her knees. Her hair was loose from the long braid, drying. Josiah Whitby, short, barrel-bellied, heavy-shouldered, and bald, stood beside her, his hand spread on the cascade of wheat-gold hair.

Faintly, he could hear the man say, “. . . a job lot of woolens. MacLeish can do the bidding. There’s space on the Northern Light for the next St. Petersburg run.”

“I can buy tea,” Jess said. “I don’t know why everyone thinks I can’t bargain for tea.”

“Tha’s a fine, wise lass and I wouldn’t send thee to dicker for soap in a bathtub.”

Whitby wore the dun-colored worsted coat and old-fashioned breeches of a stout countryman and a poppy-red silk waistcoat. How had that squat, brown toad sired a woman like Jess?

After a minute, Adrian closed the panel. “That’s what I wanted to show you. Them together. Do you think he could be Cinq, and she wouldn’t know?”

It was easier to hate Whitby when he didn’t have a face. “She isn’t going to let go of him, is she? Whatever happens.”

“She won’t let go. There is no end to her loyalty, Sebastian. She might even forgive me.”

“The evidence says he’s Cinq.”

“Forget the evidence. I spread my own entrails over the rocks and took auspices. My guts are never wrong. Think about this. Just think,” Adrian said. “Would a man who wears waistcoats like that commit treason?”

IT WAS MIDNIGHT WHEN SEBASTIAN PAID OFF THE hackney. The house looked quiet under the rain, with one light in the lantern at the front door and another in Eunice’s room, upstairs. It was pouring down, cold and harsh, but he made the round of the house, unlocking the gate to the garden and checking everywhere, just to be sure. Nobody was lurking in the areaway or the stairwell. Nobody in the wet bushes in back.

There was no trace or track of Doyle’s men out in the dark. He didn’t expect to see them.

At the side of the house he shaded rain off his face with his hand and looked up. Jess’s bedroom window was dimly lit. Eunice had found a night candle for her. Good. He hoped Jess was sleeping, not lying awake, worrying.

Nobody could get to her tonight. He climbed the steps to the house that had once been his damn-hell father’s and was now his and let himself in with his key.

The foyer was piled with merchandise of some sort. He threw his sopping greatcoat over the bannister. Eunice, carrying a candle, walked around stacks of boxes toward him.

“There you are, dear.” She steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Such a night. I wondered whether you’d come home or sleep on the Flighty. I told them to leave lights in the hall, just in case. Jess is tucked up safely.”

“Thank you.” He didn’t have to say what he was thanking her for. For taking care of Jess. For telling him Jess was safe. For knowing that it mattered. It was good to be home.

“I sent for her pet, by the way, and we’ve installed him in her bedroom. That should steady her. She’s promised to keep it upstairs, so it won’t bite Quentin again.”

Now he was giving hospitality to the vermin. He’d known it was going to happen sooner or later. “Good idea.”

He dropped his hat on the side table, next to Quent’s big dispatch case. It was half-open, with fifty papers ready to slide out and get lost. Tomorrow, Quent would swear he’d locked it tight as the Bank of England. He had a mind like a sieve. God only knew what damage he did at the Board of Trade.

“That young man who works for Adrian brought her home. Trevor Chapman. I asked him to stay for dinner, and he stared at her over the lamb cutlets as if she were the Holy Grail. Very bracing for her, I should think, to have an ally there. I gave her a whiskey after supper instead of tea, so perhaps she’ll sleep. What does Adrian intend for her father?” After a pause, she said, “I’ll ask him, if you can’t say.”

“We don’t know yet. We just don’t know.” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked around. He was used to wood crates arriving, but these had an ominous shape to them. “Why is the front hall full of coffins?”

“Armor.”

He must have looked blank. She said, “Full body armor. Medieval.”

“I don’t object, but why is someone sending us armor?”

“Historical Society meeting.”

He’d forgotten. Another damn thing to worry about. “The last Friday of the month.”

“Which is tomorrow. Teddy Coyning-Marsh is giving the lecture. He’s very solid on German mercenaries, I believe, but he does tend to ramble. The men are coming tomorrow morning early to assemble the upright figures. We will arrange vambraces and gorgets and couters upon tables in the drawing room. Far too many people are coming, of course, and they’ll chatter through the lecture. I wish some nameless fribble hadn’t decided the Historical Society was fashionable.”

“If you’d stop feeding them, they wouldn’t come.”

“It’s not as if the food was reliable. They come to see what the next culinary disaster will be. I’ve bullied Jess into coming on the grounds that a minor annoyance will distract her from more important ones. You needn’t attend if you don’t want to, but I’d feel better if you were taking care of her.”