“Right away, luv.”
He waited until the wench left before turning to Alf.
The boy was eyeing him speculatively and Hugh realized that he was still holding his wrist under the table.
He raised an eyebrow. “If I let go of you will you run off?”
Alf raised his own eyebrow, mimicking him. “Not till after that food arrives at least.”
Hugh sat back on a grunt of laugher and released the delicate wrist. “I suppose I ought to be glad you’re honest.”
The boy tilted up his chin. “S’pose you oughter.”
“Then I’ll be honest with you as well,” Hugh said. “I need information on the duke.”
The boy’s lips flattened. “’Is Grace ain’t a man t’ cross.”
Hugh leaned forward and lowered his voice. “He’s blackmailing the King.”
“Aww, poor Georgie. I’m that worried o’er th’ old sod,” Alf drawled.
Hugh mentally amended his estimation of Alf’s age up several years. “Even if—”
The barmaid returned with a tray heaped with two beer mugs and two plates full of steaming beef and vegetables, generously splashed with gravy. She plonked the offerings down and set her brawny arms on her hips. “Anything else?”
“This’ll do,” Hugh replied.
He watched the woman retreat and then turned back to the table to discover Alf shoveling food into his mouth as if he hadn’t eaten in days.
Perhaps he hadn’t.
Hugh picked up his beer and took a long drink as he watched the boy demolish potatoes and beef. Surely the duke paid him well?
He shook his head, glancing down at his own plate. None of his concern. “Listen. You may not care for the King, but surely you care for the country, and the King is the country. What the duke is doing is treason.”
Alf glanced up, a smudge of gravy at the corner of his lips. “Treason?”
“Treason,” Hugh said solemnly, relieved that he might have finally gotten to the boy. “But if you help me find the papers the duke is using to blackmail the King you will be stopping this treasonous activity.”
“An’ I won’t get in trouble?” Alf asked anxiously. He slipped two pieces of bread into his pocket.
“No,” Hugh said, leaning over the table. “I just need to know where—”
He was interrupted by Alf upending the entire table, beer mugs, plates of beef and gravy and all, straight into his lap.
Hugh shouted and scrambled back.
The nearby patrons looked around, some standing, some exclaiming.
Alf ducked and ran with a dexterity that Hugh couldn’t help but admire—even covered in beer and bits of carrots and beef. The lad slid under the tables through the alehouse patrons and around the barmaid—who was carrying four mugs of beer, which she raised with an oath—and straight out the door. He paused only a moment in the doorway to glance back and give Hugh a wink and a jaunty salute.
And then Alf was gone.
Chapter Four
The baby grew. When he did awful things like drowning moths in his milk or locking the palace cat in the dungeons, his father sighed, his mother wept, and the courtiers whispered. But all agreed: no one could teach a boy with no heart right from wrong.…
—From King Heartless
The woman who sat across from Bridget had given birth to her and yet the very thought of calling her mother was ludicrous in the extreme.
Lady Amelia Caire was aristocratic elegance personified. The daughter of a viscount, she’d been a celebrated beauty in her youth. Now, in her seventh decade, she was still captivatingly lovely.
Bridget looked nothing like her.
Well, except in one small, but very significant, regard.
Lady Caire wore a midnight-blue sack gown trimmed with tiny rows of black and silver lace. Her hair was snowy white—due not to age, but to an odd familial trait. Both she and her only son, Lord Caire, had gone white in their early years. She wore her hair pulled close to her head and adorned with an almost medieval triangular cap of black lace.
Bridget was sure Lady Caire knew how well the black lace contrasted with the white of her hair.
“A pity he’s returned,” Lady Caire mused, a faint line between her brows. “And to actually blackmail the King.” She shuddered. “Did you see the Daily Review this morning? All this business about a Dolphin Society. Absolute rubbish, but they did make mention of a royal connection—and now you tell me Montgomery is behind the whole thing. The man is the absolute Devil. He has no shame.”
There wasn’t much to say to that so Bridget said nothing. She stood in Lady Caire’s salon—a room nearly as elaborate as one of the duke’s, though no one could truly touch his overblown taste in furnishings. White Corinthian columns guarded the doorway, the capitals picked out in gold. Dainty settees painted in greens and pinks were scattered about the room. Overhead a beautiful blue sky was painted on the ceiling, with cherubs playing hide-and-seek among fluffy clouds.
Once, when Bridget had newly entered service at the age of twelve, she had returned to her foster home, filled with the wonders of the upper crust and its profligate spending. Her foster mother—a woman she’d affectionately called Mam—who had been listening and stirring a pot of peas porridge, had turned and laughed and said that the aristocracy would put gold on a cat’s whiskers if they could.
She wondered now what Mam would have made of Lady Caire’s salon.
Bridget lowered her gaze from the ceiling to find Lady Caire watching her impatiently. She straightened hastily, feeling like a scullery maid caught napping.
“Do you think you can still find the letters now that he’s back in the house?” Lady Caire asked.
“I can try, my lady,” Bridget said cautiously. “But it’s a very big house with many places to hide such a small thing, and the duke is very clever. And now that he knows I’m looking…” She shrugged.
Lady Caire made a moue.
“Has he…” Bridget cleared her throat. “That is… has he asked you to do anything else?” Several months before, the duke had forced Lady Caire to introduce his sister to the Ladies’ Syndicate for the Benefit of the Home for Unfortunate Infants and Foundling Children, a charitable group made up of some of the most influential ladies in London society, including Miss Hippolyta Royle, the miniature’s owner.
“No,” Lady Caire replied. “But he might do so at any moment.” She smiled very stiffly. “It’s just that my son—Lord Caire—I wouldn’t like him to find out. To know the very worst about me.”
Bridget nodded, glancing down. She couldn’t help but feel a twinge of hurt, though, even if it was silly. For of course she was the result of the worst thing about Lady Caire.
“I’ll do my best,” she promised.
“Bridget?”
She met her mother’s gaze, startled by the use of her given name. “Yes, my lady?”
Lady Caire hesitated. “Is he a danger to you?”
Bridget thought of his strange, insistent teasing.
Of the way he’d gripped her face tight last night. Forced her to rise from her chair. Drawn her across the table and toward his mouth. Of how hard and angrily her heart had beaten.
And of how a small, renegade part of her had yearned impatiently for his lips.
She looked straight into the eyes of the woman who had birthed her. Who had made sure she’d had a home and a foster mother to bring her up. Who had given her references when she’d made her way to London, enabling Bridget to reach the heights of her profession at the young age of six and twenty. “No, my lady.”
The older woman’s face softened in relief. “Good. Then continue as you are. But, please, if you feel at all worried, leave Hermes House at once. The Duke of Montgomery is a dangerous man, as I think you know. Promise me this.”
“I will, my lady,” Bridget said, feeling a shy sense of warmth because the lady had expressed worry for her safety. “Thank you.”
Lady Caire looked away. “’Tis I who should,
no doubt, be thanking you,” she said rather formally.
Bridget glanced down at her hands, noting absently that she was digging her fingernails into her palms. She took a deep breath. She owed this lady her life, her loyalty… and nothing else. “If I might go, my lady? I have duties to perform yet this afternoon.”
“Of course, of course.” Lady Caire waved an elegant hand in dismissal.
Bridget curtsied and quietly walked from the room.
She nodded to the butler and left by the servants’ entrance, wrapping her black shawl tightly about her shoulders as a gust of wind swept up her skirts. The sky was dark gray and ominous, fat drops of rain spitting in her face as she hurried through London. She passed a tiny woman singing sweetly on a corner, a baby slung on her back, another held in her arms, and fumbled out a penny to drop into the beggar’s outstretched palm. Then she crossed the street, watching both for the big dray horses pulling carts and for the odiferous piles they left behind. She made the opposite side only to be stopped abruptly by two chairmen trotting by and bawling, “Make way! Make way!” as they passed.
The occupant of the sedan chair—a rotund man—turned his head and stared at her as he went by, his expression as bored as if she were a dog.
Bridget had a sudden urge to make a very rude gesture at the man’s back. Aristocrats treated commoners as if they were rubbish, having neither feelings nor wants. Desires nor dreams. Servants were simply there to bring the masters their food and clothing, take away their dirty plates and full piss-pots. They might as well be monkeys in aprons and mobcaps. No, worse—wooden puppets with painted-on smiles, hinged at the neck and waist to nod and bow.
Oh! Bridget swiped at her streaming eyes. She didn’t know what had put her into such a bitter disposition. It must be the cold. She quite loathed chilly weather.
She continued on her way, dodging hawkers of oranges and fish, apprentices playing dice in a doorway, an old man in a full-bottomed wig and black velvet suit, and two sailors who made quite inappropriate comments to her.
By the time she arrived at the mews that ran behind Hermes House, Bridget’s nose was cold and, she suspected, red, and she was still in a grumpy mood.
Her mood wasn’t helped, either, when she heard the loud, excited shouts of boys from the mews. Lord only knew what they were up to back there. Bridget pulled her shawl tighter and marched down the mews, wondering where the stable hands had gone. Usually they were quick to drive any loiterers off.
But it wasn’t until she heard a yip and a whine that her heart tripped over itself.
Bridget picked up her skirts and broke into a run.
Around back of the stables she saw a group of boys surrounding something on the ground. As she gasped, a boy—a great big fellow, nearly as big as a man—drew back his leg and kicked.
The thing on the ground yelped.
“No!” Bridget shouted, but she was drowned out by a gunshot.
She turned to see the Duke of Montgomery, standing in his shirt-sleeves and pink embroidered waistcoat and breeches, hip cocked, a smoking pistol held almost negligently aloft in his left hand.
He smiled, as sweetly as an adder baring its fangs, at the boys. “Won’t you please vacate this area?”
The boys seemed frozen by surprise—or stark fear.
The duke tilted his head and his smile dropped from his face, leaving it blank—and somehow much more frightening. “Now.”
There was a mad scramble and then the mews was deserted save for her and the duke.
Bridget blinked and hurried to her little terrier, tied quite disgracefully by a cord around his neck to a stake in the ground. He lay on his side in the mud, but his tail thumped against the dirt when he saw her. He jumped to his feet, shaking himself, and tried to limp toward her, but was stopped by the cord.
She knelt in the mud and tried to pull the cord from his neck, but it had been tied terribly tight and her hands were trembling.
She felt the duke crouch behind her, his arms reaching around her, warm and hard, and felt a moment’s confusion before he leaned forward and murmured in her ear, “Here.”
He placed her opened chatelaine knife in her hands.
She took it gratefully. “Thank you.”
Carefully she cut the cord and picked up the little dog, his body warm and rather smelly in her arms.
The terrier immediately began licking her chin.
Bridget inhaled on a sob, even as she felt the brush of the duke’s tongue at the corner of her eye.
“Your tears taste like salvation.” His voice was deep, resonating against her back, and he almost sounded puzzled.
She shuddered, gasping, but didn’t dare look around, and then he was gone.
Biting her lips, she smoothed her hands over the dog’s small, wriggling body, trying to feel for broken bones. As far as she could tell, the terrier was bruised, but fine, although he had a bit of blood over one eye. He gazed up at her adoringly and it came to her all at once that his name was Pip.
Pip.
She looked up.
The duke was still there, watching her in the gloaming, his beautiful golden hair ablaze in the setting sun.
She cleared her throat. “I… thank you. For saving him.”
It was hard to tell his expression in the dim light, but she thought he smiled.
She still held Pip, loath to let him go. Would the boys find him again, perhaps kill him this time? “I… er… I didn’t know you liked dogs?”
“I don’t.” He shrugged. “But you do.” He turned toward the gate, calling over his shoulder, “Bring him in the house if you want.”
“I can’t do that,” she said, appalled.
He stopped and looked back. “Why not?”
“I’m a servant in your house. We don’t keep pets. There are rules.”
She saw him cock his head quite clearly and he laughed softly, as the snake in the garden must have at the beginning of time. “Fuck the rules, Mrs. Crumb.”
A CLOCK CHIMED three in the morning as Hugh crept up the master staircase of Hermes House. He’d entered via a door left unlocked by his paid inside man. Too bad he didn’t trust that same man to do this work tonight, but some things must be done by oneself if they were to be done well. Which was why Hugh now moved by memory alone—having earlier memorized a sketched map of the interior of the house. He daren’t chance a light. Not yet. Already he’d passed a footman in the hallway—fortunately dozing. He eased up the stairs on the balls of his feet, carefully judging each step, pausing and listening as he went. All was quiet, but many people lived in a great house, any of whom might by happenstance decide to go for a midnight stroll.
The upper floor was silky black. A movement. Hugh jerked back—and then felt a fool. It was his own reflection in a mirror along the upper hall. He made his way down the hall and to the door at the end. According to the sketched map, this was Montgomery’s library.
The door creaked when he opened it.
He blew out a breath and closed the door behind him quickly.
Inside he found a candle and, taking flint and steel from his pocket, lit it. The library was huge—it must run across almost the entire back of the house—and it was filled with books. The papers he was looking for might be in any of them.
But Hugh was beginning to know his quarry by now. Montgomery didn’t like the obvious. He was a clever man—perhaps too clever for his own good. And Hugh’s informant had told him Montgomery was frequently to be found in front of the fireplace—at the far end of the room.
Hugh strode the length of the room.
The fireplace itself was black tile but the mantel and surround were white marble, magnificently sculpted and gilded. Winged cherubs held aloft a central oval medallion. Behind that was a huge baroque mirror. Around the fireplace was wood paneling, painted a light green.
Hugh set the candle down and began running his hands over the paneling, gently feeling and pressing with his blunt fingertips. This sort of thing took patience and an i
ron control of one’s nerves. He knew that the longer he stayed in Hermes House the more certain it was that he would be discovered. But if he rushed his search he ran the risk of missing what he’d come for.
Patience and attention to detail were paramount for success.
And he had to succeed. Already Montgomery had sent letters to a broadsheet hinting at the damnable secret society and the King’s son’s, Prince William’s, link to it. Montgomery obviously wasn’t afraid to use his blackmail material. Discreet enquiries had in fact borne this out: only a year previously Montgomery had ruined a wealthy tobacco importer who had kept a second wife in the country. The man had apparently refused to yield to whatever Montgomery’s demands had been and as a result the duke had released his blackmail material. The man had been forced to flee England when the truth of his bigamy had been revealed.
Therefore Hugh took a deep breath and began searching a new section of the fireplace. Half an hour later his back was beginning to stiffen when he heard a distinct click. Oddly it was on one of the cherub’s wings, not on the wood paneling itself. At first he couldn’t figure out the mechanism. The marble wing didn’t seem to swivel or tilt, but when he pressed inward, something gave and the wing shifted aside to reveal a cavity in the cherub’s back. He peered inside. The space was no bigger than a child’s fist.
And it was empty.
Behind him someone tutted, and the hairs stood up on Hugh’s neck.
He turned.
In the dim light of the single candle, Montgomery’s patrician good looks took on near-satanic aspects as he smiled. “Now, that must be very disappointing.”
A POUNDING ON her door jolted Bridget awake.
Pip, who had insisted on sleeping at her feet on top of the bed, leaped up and began a frantic barking.
Bridget staggered upright, dragging a wrapper about her. She had the wits to check in the little mirror beside the door that her nightcap was tied firmly beneath her chin, and then she flung it open.
Outside, Bob, in only breeches and shirt, barefoot and holding a candle aloft, was white-faced. Behind him stood several maids and Cook, wearing a voluminous yellow-and-orange-printed wrapper.