My Lord and Spymaster

Ten

“HELP ME WITH THIS.” GRUNTING, SEBASTIAN lifted the corner of the bed. Adrian slipped an edge of carpet under it.

“Well, that was a waste of time.” Adrian straightened up, brushing his hands.

“We had to look. Let’s get the chairs back.”

He set a wide bergère chair in front of the windows in a patch of late afternoon sunlight. The other chair, a big, soft armchair, belonged by the hearth. The table went beside it. The lamp went on the table, then the bowl of roses. When they finished, it would be like nothing had been moved. They’d done this before, when they were gathering evidence in France.

The Whitbys lived in unobtrusive comfort in this hotel when they were in England. A suite of bright, high-ceilinged rooms overlooking Russell Square were kept for their exclusive use. Whitby owned the hotel.

If Jessamyn Whitby was part of her father’s treason, the proof might be here, in her bedroom, away from the prying eyes in the Whitby offices. He found himself hoping he wouldn’t uncover anything. What did it mean that he was already looking for ways to make her innocent?

“You’re not going to find stolen papers.” Adrian stood in the center of the Aubusson rug, turning slowly, considering possibilities. “If she’s keeping anything here—which I doubt—her hiding place will be obvious. Diabolically, cleverly, unfathomably obvious. Once I find it, I’ll kick myself.”

“You do that. I’ll start on the bookcase.” He pulled stacks of books from the top shelf and began going through them. Jess wasn’t keeping letters from the War Office on an open shelf in the corner of her bedroom between Curiosities of Greece and By Mule Through Serbia, but it’d be obvious enough to suit Adrian.

He might not find stolen papers, but he was going to discover Jess. Parts of her were scattered here, everywhere, in the place she lived and the things she owned. This room was going to tell him who she was. “What does Doyle say about the Irishmen?”

“Five dead on Katherine Lane, where they have become the magistrate’s problem.” Adrian strolled over to poke into the dressing table. “One Irishman is hors de combat somewhere in Whitechapel. Lazarus has picked up another. Lazarus is not amused when men come to his part of town to maim and kidnap, that being his prerogative. That leaves four walking around loose.”

“More than I’d want after me.” Four men, hunting Jess Whitby.

“And Ireland is not yet emptied of villains, alas. I’m glad she’s sleeping in your house tonight.” Adrian lined up the comb and brush on her dresser. “Among other things, it lets me search her bedroom.” He made faces in the hand mirror, laid it down, and sniffed at a scent bottle. “Jasmine. From Houbigant in Paris. I used to buy that for her when she was twelve. She has not quite rooted me out of her life. What else . . . ?” He slid a drawer out. “No powder. No pots of rouge. No arcane aids to beauty. From this we will infer there is no man she wishes to entice. A welcome breath of simplicity in this convoluted affair.”

“There’s nothing simple about Jess.”

“On the contrary. There’s no one more candid. She is a veritable tutorial in how not to tell lies. How is she?”

“Frayed around the edges. In pain, and trying to hide it. She’s probably asleep now. Eunice will let me know if she gets worse.” He went down the stack methodically, unfurling one book after another and replacing it on the shelf. “I put her to bed. Maybe I can intimidate her into staying there for a day or two.

“Good luck on that. We’re all behind you.” Adrian began to set the contents of the drawer on the dresser top. “Handkerchief. Always useful. A fan. Ivory and lace. That’s very pretty. Pound notes. Coinage of the realm. One glove. Where do all those lost gloves go, I wonder?” He opened the next drawer. “More of her feminine mysteries.” He drew out a cuff pistol. It was small, German-made, with fine engraving on the barrel and grip. “Nice.” He inspected. “Not loaded recently. She feels safe in London. I cannot help but feel that is unjustified.”

“She’s safe with me.”

“Thereupon I do rest my constant hope and reliance. Would I feel better if Jess went about armed with small but accurate pistols? I must think upon that.”

Her books were in French, German, and Italian. One by one they turned out to be somebody’s travels in Greece, Arabia, and Macedonia, by foot, camel, and donkey. No account books. No codes. No marking on any of the pages. No secrets stolen from Whitehall.

Next row. He thumbed across the titles. Tell me about Jess . . . and the books did. These were stories from lands at the edge of the map, halfway to fable. I was right to see the Viking in your face. Samarkand and Timbuktu and Persepolis. What are you looking for, Jess? Or what are you trying to run away from?

When he left her this morning, she’d been pale and shaken, holding herself together with pure bravado. That was courage, straight and simple, and it drew him as much as the beauty of her.

One moment burned in his memory like a live coal. He’d taken the curve of her cheek in his hand. Jess stared back at him. He could have seduced her, gently, carefully, taking account of that collection of bruises. She was so bloody desirable, and she wouldn’t have stopped him.

But she could be that beautiful, and still be part of her father’s filthy business. So he’d snarled and let her go. The other choice was laying her down in bed and stripping that borrowed dress off her.

Not wise, laying hands on that woman. It made him want more.

A Voyage Through the Crimea to Constantinople proved to be a trip through Crimea, and went back in place. Next came Pope’s translation of the Odyssey. It was the only poetry in the bookcase. Bold writing on the frontispiece read, “Find time to read this while I’m gone. Ned.” The pages were uncut. She kept the book, but she’d never opened it.

And who is Ned? He’d find out. “I want that woman out of my house.”

Adrian shrugged. “I want reliable mail service to St. Petersburg in the winter. We must both live with disappointment. ”

“If you care about this girl, you’ll get her out of my house. I may not have gathered all the evidence, but I’m the one who examined it and laid it out. When we hang her father, she’s going to know I was part of it. It’s going to make her sick, knowing she sat at the same table with me.” Knowing I had my hands on her.

“If Josiah hangs, Jess will be an indescribable mess anyway. I intend to see it doesn’t happen.” Adrian slid the empty drawer out and upended it, searching every side. “Nothing. Some more nothing. Ah. This is promising.”

From the bottom drawer of the dresser, Adrian pulled a slim lacquer box, half full of letters. He laid them in a row and flipped through the envelopes quickly, deliberate and engrossed.

Even from here Sebastian could see those were personal letters, and not recent. “She doesn’t keep state secrets tied up with a blue ribbon.”

“An excellent point. I shall take you along every time I ransack a bedroom.” Adrian sat on the wide bench and opened the first note.

“Then why are you reading her letters?”

“Incurable nosiness. Let me concentrate.”

Which left him to do the search. Last shelf. Still no packet from the Foreign Office, pretending to be Jottings from Arabia.

On a stand next to the bookcase was a wire cage with water dish and bedding, clean, but empty of any animal. She didn’t just have a dog or a cat, then. She kept something small and furry in there. Maybe something exotic she’d picked up in her travels.

Above the cage hung a small, bright painting, very old. A maiden stood in a garden, her hand resting upon the arched neck of a unicorn, a white hound at her feet. Jewel-colored birds perched in the branches around her and her long, golden hair was unbound, flowing like a river. “I didn’t know this was out of France.”

“Hmmm?”

“I’ve seen copies. This is the original.” He barely let himself touch the edges as he lifted it and checked behind. “It’s thirteenth century, from Arles.” That’s how powerful the Whitbys were. They owned something like this and hung it in a girl’s bedroom. “That other one, over there next to you, is a Bartolomeo Veneto. We could retire in luxury on the sale of these two.”

“Help yourself.” Adrian, cross-legged on the bench, had immersed himself in the next letter.

A Hepplewhite tallboy came next. The bottom drawer told him Jess’s taste in nightwear ran to soft batiste, silky as wind, so smooth it felt warm to the touch. Her shifts were threaded with bright, frivolous ribbon and expensive lace. But he already knew about her shifts, didn’t he? She didn’t keep stolen papers or account books among her underthings.

A jewelry box sat on top of the tallboy, in plain sight, next to the night candle. It was acacia wood with ivory, a work of art in its own right. He lifted it down and brought it to the bed. “Why doesn’t she lock up her jewelry?”

“To save me the trouble of hauling out my lockpicks.” Jess didn’t bother with locks in her bedroom. Any thief who made it this far wouldn’t be stopped by locks.

He opened the case. Dozens of rings and necklaces rested in small, blue-velvet compartments. The stones were clear, intense in hue, set in gold. Jess liked her finery bold, and she preferred glow to sparkle.

The top tray in the jewelry box lifted out. The one below held earrings and bracelets. Antiques and exotics. Baltic amber set in the Russian style, Persian turquoise, old, old Turkish enamel work, a bracelet of small cabochon citrines—everything in rich colors that would complement Jess’s honey-colored beauty. The best piece was a star sapphire, Ceylon blue, about fifteen carats. All first quality goods, but nothing remarkable. He traded a hundred stones this good every year.

He lifted out the second tray. He’d open Jess’s mind like this, layer by layer.

Below, in the last secrets of the box, he met magic.

In a black velvet nest, dozens of pale moons glowed, not white, but the most fragile golden pink. Here were pearls the color of dawn. Mushajjar pearls, from the Gulf of Persia. The largest was the size of his thumbnail. He cupped them in the palm of his hand and they weighed no more than dreams and sea foam. You had to know a lot about pearls to realize just how astonishing this necklace was. It should have been locked in a vault.

“Something else we could retire on?” Adrian was intent on reading, but, as usual, he knew everything going on.

“You could buy Yorkshire.” He coiled the magic back into place. Beside that amazing necklace, in the next compartment, was a red brown seashell and a dried daisy chain, both of them wrapped up safe in white silk.

This is private. This is her heart. I should feel guilty about seeing this.

“What the devil would I want with Yorkshire?” Adrian tapped the letters together and looped the blue ribbon around them and made a jaunty bow. “Gods. I was never that young. I’m glad Jess was, for a while.”

“It wasn’t tied like that.”

“I’m showing her somebody’s been in here.” He set the letters carefully back in the box and closed the lid. “Not a sparkling correspondent, young Ned, but I don’t suppose she noticed.”

That was the name written in the Odyssey. “Who’s Ned?” Adrian was up, wandering the room. He stopped at the fireplace and peered in. He waited just long enough to be annoying. “The Honorable Edward Harrington, Lord Harrington’s third son. Ned. She was fifteen. He was bright, likable, ambitious, and quite sickeningly in love with her.”

“A paragon.”

“It has given me considerable satisfaction, over the years, to think of Jess, out in the straw in a horse barn, bestowing her virginity on that boy.” He shifted the fire screen. “He had the face of a young Apollo.”

Jess’s lover. The one who’d put knowledge in her eyes. “What happened?”

Adrian ran his thumb along the carving of the fireplace. The mantel was black marble and the design was scrolled leaves. “Genuinely bad luck. Josiah shipped him out as supercargo, to see what he was made of. Ned died heroically off the Barbary Coast, saving the lives of two of his shipmates. He was seventeen.” Adrian rolled up his shirtsleeves and knelt on the bricks of the hearth. “Jess spent the next year constructing Europe’s best accounting system. I don’t think she slept at all for a couple months.”

“I see.” He wasn’t sure what he saw, except that he was jealous of a boy, half his age, and dead.

“He was a better man than either of us.” Adrian twitched a knife from its sheath on his left forearm. “And I think Jess has left us something . . . Yes. Here we find bits of ash on top of a newly laid fire. You burned paper the last time you were here, didn’t you, my girl? I neglected your education, if you can make a mistake like that.” The point of his knife slid into wispy gray ash, separating layers. “I have writing here. Hand me a piece of that paper, will you? And the quill.”

They’d done this before. Stationery and quills were in the little desk. He stroked a quill back and forth across the wool of his sleeve and handed it to Adrian. They both held their breath while Adrian used the feather to tease up a fragment of ash and transfer it onto a clean sheet of paper.

“Got it. Good. See what you make of this.” Gingerly, Adrian passed it up to him. “It’s her writing.”

The fragment was dull brown and charred around the edges, the writing barely legible. A word leaped out at him. Another word. Five or six letters in a row. He could read some of it. “It’s a list of ships. Mary Jane . . . something. The Prosper . . . That’s either the Prosperity or the Prospero. There’s dates next to them. Lady of Swansea. The Lively . . . That has to be the Lively Dancer. One of mine.”

“She burned this just before she came to Katherine Lane yesterday.” Adrian probed in the ash again and shook his head and stood up. “Nothing else usable.” He pulled out a handkerchief and began cleaning his hands. “Ships. Why? What does it mean?”

It means she’s looking for Cinq. “She’s tracking ship movements. I’ll know more when I’ve looked through the papers in her office.”

How does the woman who created Europe’s best accounting system hunt Cinq? She makes a list of ships. Then she comes after me. Why?

Outside the window, fifty yards away, a streetlamp grew a pinprick of light, then became a soft, round glow. The lamplighter was on the far side of the square, working his way around. It was almost dinnertime. He’d go home, and see Jess.

If she’s trying to trace Cinq, she’s innocent. No matter what her father’s done, she’s not part of it.

There was nothing more to be read on the burned scrap. He let it fall back in the hearth. “We’re through here. I’ll head back home and see how she’s doing.”

If she’s innocent, I can have her.

Whitby was guilty of so much foulness. Jess was clean. He had to separate her from her father before the bastard dragged her down along with him.

Adrian joined him at the window. “I’ll see you in Garnet Street at midnight, outside the Whitby warehouse. What does one wears to ransack a warehouse? Black, I think, and the charcoal waistcoat. Tasteful, yet understated.”

“I wonder what she’ll do when she finds out we’ve searched here and in her office.” He pulled the curtain closed.

“Something drastic.” Adrian sounded pleased.