Inverness was the southernmost large town in the highlands.
Scrope looked down at his plate and all but growled, “He doesn’t come from Inverness.” He flung another irate glance at Taylor. “Inverness is just the place through which the message I sent to him before was routed.”
Eliza considered that reply, then ventured, “You followed a message sent to him?”
Scrope turned his narrow-eyed gaze on her. “I like to know who I’m dealing with.”
She nodded. “Understandably. Did you learn anything more of his identity?”
“No.” Scrope’s frustration assured her that he spoke the truth. “The man’s as slippery as any damned highland nobleman ever birthed. The message vanished from the office in Inverness, and no one seemed to have the faintest clue as to where it went.”
“Hmm.” Eliza found Scrope’s tale revealing. She, Heather, and Angelica had discussed and speculated on the character and person of the mysterious laird for many hours. Given such telltale acts of power, the sort of power Cynsters intuitively recognized and understood, combined with the picture the various snippets of physical description had drawn of him, there was no denying that the figure the laird cut was one of considerable elemental and visceral attraction.
At least to Cynster females.
Nevertheless, despite her curiosity, Eliza had no wish to meet the man, at least not on his terms. Being hauled into the wilds of the highlands did not feature on her list of desirable diversions.
As for what he intended for her, that she was determinedly refusing to dwell on; Jeremy would rescue her first, so there was no need to imagine herself into a panic.
Eventually, Genevieve rose and, assisted by Taylor, cleared the table.
Scrope, reverting to his role of considerate host, offered Eliza a small glass of orgeat, which, on consideration, she deigned to accept.
“Tell me,” she said, seizing the moment when the other two were elsewhere, “why do you, who I assume was born a gentleman, take … jobs, for want of a better word, such as this.” She met his dark eyes. “I’m curious as to what drives you.”
Whoever had arranged the dinner menu had known the basics of gentle living; she was quite sure it wasn’t Genevieve, a lowly companion-nurse, who had chosen the dishes and arranged for them to be delivered in their warming pans and chafing dishes, as she assumed they must have been.
Scrope, she deduced, harbored gentlemanly aspirations. In her experience, gentlemen, if approached correctly, always liked to talk about themselves.
Sipping from the wineglass he’d kept filled throughout the meal, Scrope considered her, then, after flicking a glance toward the corridor door, quietly said, “I might have been born and schooled as a gentleman, but by a twist of fate I was left with no way of supporting myself as such.” He met her gaze. “Some men in that situation take to the tables, hoping to find their salvation in the cards. Me …” His lips lightly lifted. “Fate sent me an opportunity to perform a singular service for a distant acquaintance … and I discovered a profession at which I excelled.”
“Profession?” She arched her brows, faintly supercilious.
“Yes, indeed.” Scrope took another healthy swallow of the wine; she felt certain it was assisting with the sudden loosening of his tongue. “Would it surprise you to know that there’s a well-established trade in the professional services I offer?” When she made no reply, Scrope actually smiled. “I assure you there is. And there’s a ladder of achievement within that profession, too.”
Taking another swill of his wine, he eyed her over the rim of his glass, then lowered it and said, “And you, Miss Eliza Cynster, will take me, Victor Scrope, to the very top of that ladder.” With his glass, he saluted her. “Handing you to McKinsey will raise me to the dizzying pinnacle of my professional tree.”
She said nothing; Scrope had clearly set aside his usual, impenetrable demeanor. As witnessed by this celebratory dinner, he was beyond confident of success — of succeeding in handing her over to McKinsey tomorrow morning.
In that instant, she was looking at the man behind the coolly professional, impassive mask.
Scrope leaned forward, dark eyes fixing intently on her face. “So you see, my dear, it’s not solely the money that motivates me, although to give McKinsey credit, he has in no way skimped on my fee. Our highland laird placed a very high price on your head. But that’s not the most valuable boon I’ll secure when I hand you to him tomorrow. Put simply, Miss Cynster, you will be my salvation. You’ll give me my future as I wish it to be. With McKinsey’s money, and even more with the fame your successful kidnap will bring me, I’ll be assured of a wealthy and comfortable gentlemanly life for the rest of my days.”
Leaning back, a gloating, almost manic smile on his lips, Scrope raised his glass to her once again. “To you, Miss Cynster — and to what tomorrow will bring.”
Scrope downed the wine in one gulp.
Eliza stared and fought to suppress a shiver.
A sound at the door had them both glancing that way.
“Trifle or apple pie.” Genevieve carried two dishes to the table.
“And there’s clotted cream, too,” Taylor said, setting a smaller bowl down and retaking his seat.
“So.” Silver serving spoon poised, Genevieve looked from Scrope to Eliza. “Which will you have?”
“Both,” Eliza said. She needed to take her mind off what she’d glimpsed in Scrope’s eyes, and dessert was the only distraction available; it would have to do.
All three of them escorted her back to her prison not long afterward. Scrope allowed her request for fresh candles; he glanced around the room as if assuring himself she had adequate comforts, then he waved Genevieve outside and closed the door.
The last sight Eliza had of her captors was Scrope’s face, demonically lit by a candle from below, his dark eyes glinting, and fixed on her.
Once the door shut, she allowed herself the instinctive shiver she’d until then suppressed. Almost as if someone had walked over her grave.
Shaking the sensation and all thought of graves aside, she finally turned her mind to what might happen next.
She had no assurance that Jeremy even knew where she was. He might have lost the trail of the coach, or he might have missed their route through Edinburgh. She had to be realistic and at least try to think of some way to escape if he didn’t rescue her that night.
After pondering the likely opportunities, she realized her first decision had to be whether to try to escape Scrope’s clutches, or wait until she was handed over and then try to escape from the laird.
It wasn’t, she reasoned, a question of which one would be easier to outwit, so much as which one was more likely to make a miscalculation and give her the opportunity to flee.
Scrope had yet to give her any opening at all. And no matter how overconfident he was, how certain he would successfully hand her into the laird’s keeping, no matter how overweening his gloating, she couldn’t imagine him stumbling at the last hurdle.
Conveying her into the laird’s hands tomorrow would be a carefully orchestrated and tightly monitored event. Scrope would not make any mistake, not with so much money and pride riding on the outcome.
As for what she knew of the laird … it was possible that if he was a nobleman, as seemed increasingly likely, then he might well suffer from the same male assumptions, the same male blindness when it came to females as she was used to dealing with in her brothers and cousins.
That would give her a chance. A chance she might be able to convert into an opportunity to slip away.
Against that, however, was the strong likelihood that he would cart her off into the highlands, and that was one landscape in which she would be totally and impossibly out of her depth.
In the English countryside, she would have managed somehow; she might not enjoy hiking over hill and dale, but she knew she could do it. Hiking through glens, around lochs, and over possibly snowcapped peaks was another matter altogether.
/>
People got lost in the highlands and weren’t found for years.
She sat on the bed and stared unseeing at the door, and thought and thought as the candlelight dimmed, then flickered. Before she lost the light, she used the cold water in the pitcher to splash her face. As the candles started to gutter, first one, then the other, she toed off her slippers and got into the bed.
Pulling the thin blanket over her shoulders, she curled on her side.
There was no way out. None at all. There was nothing whatever she could do.
Whichever way she looked at it, her future depended on a man.
Scrope. The laird. Or Jeremy Carling.
Her fingers locked about the rose quartz pendant her sister had passed to her with such hope and assurances of happiness to come, Eliza knew who she hoped fate would choose for her.
Even if he was an absentminded scholar, she would cope.
Jeremy, Cobby, Hugo, and Meggin sat gathered around the table in the dining room of Cobby and Meggin’s town house in Reids Close. The scene, Jeremy thought, looked like an artist’s impression of exactly what it was — a convivial dinner hosted by a young, well-to-do, and well-connected Scottish couple for two of the husband’s bachelor friends. Illuminated by the comfortably cozy glow of the chandelier suspended above the mahogany table, the room was well appointed, with dark wood paneling on the walls, and richly hued paintings of misty landscapes above the heavy sideboards. Silver candelabra and a matching multitiered fruit dish added their gleam, while the stag’s head mounted above the fireplace, flanked by two massive, mounted trout, screamed Scotland to anyone with eyes.
In the great carver at the head of the table, Cobby’s eyes danced and his smile was wide as he spoke with Hugo, seated on his left. With hair a similar color to Jeremy’s middling dark brown, with hazel eyes and regular features, and now garbed in his habitual townsman’s clothes, Cobby looked every inch the scion of a venerable Scottish clan.
Seated in the smaller carver opposite her husband, with tumbling black curls, twinkling blue eyes, and a dark blue silk gown, the very epitome of a sophisticated young matron, Meggin watched her husband with open affection.
The covers had been drawn, the dishes cleared away. It was time to get down to business.
Jeremy tapped the table. When the other three cast questioning glances his way, he stated, “We need to go over our plan.”
They’d assembled it in bits and pieces — one making a suggestion, another seeing how it could be altered to better fit — like a giant cerebral jigsaw, titled “The Rescue.”
He was rather pleased with the outcome.
Hugo, a chameleon of sorts with his Byronicly handsome features and artistically ruffled dark hair, his slender bones and slighter build often rendering his movements gracefully effeminate, was a good friend to have at one’s back; he was equally at home trading supercilious barbs in some lady’s drawing room as trading punches in a barroom brawl. Leaning back in his chair, Hugo waved at the clothes and wig he’d left on a straight-backed chair by the wall. “Now we have the last of our disguises, by all means let’s review our campaign.”
That was exactly what it felt like: a military campaign. One with a clear goal to attain.
“Just out of interest,” Cobby said, “where did you find those?” With his head he indicated the clothes on the chair.
“The little theaterette at the palace.” Hugo winked. “Don’t tell.”
Hugo’s family, root and all its various branches, were longtime legal counselors to the palace; Hugo therefore had the entree to areas few others did.
“Let’s start at the beginning.” Clasping her hands on the table, Meggin looked at Jeremy. “How do you plan to get Miss Cynster out of that basement?”
The practical one, Meggin forced them to go through their plan step by step, insisting they fill in the gaps, all the minor details that, in their scholarly fashion, they were apt to take for granted.
“Are you sure they won’t have drugged her again?”
Jeremy hesitated, thought. Eventually, he said, “I don’t think so. In both cases — Eliza’s and her sister Heather’s — the kidnappers were under strict orders to keep their prizes in good health. I suspect Scrope wasn’t supposed to keep Eliza drugged at all.”
“So if they’re to hand her over to the laird tomorrow, they won’t have drugged her tonight, so she should be able to walk out on her own.” Meggin nodded decisively. “All right. Go on.”
They did, rehearsing in their minds each act of their grand plan. After releasing Eliza from the basement room, the next stage was to whisk her out of the city.
“We’ll leave here just before first light,” Jeremy said, “and go down and hire horses. There’s no point trying to ride out before there’s light enough to see.” From Niddery Street, they planned to bring Eliza there, to Reids Close. “Once we’re away, we should be able to reach Wolverstone in a day — well, at least by evening.”
Meggin looked doubtful. “That’s hard riding by anyone’s standards.”
Jeremy grimaced. “Perhaps, but as long as we’re over the border before nightfall, I know the roads from there to the castle well enough to navigate in the dark.”
Meggin hesitated, but then nodded and let the matter slide.
Jeremy appreciated her tact. He’d realized, as she had, that in order to preserve Eliza’s reputation from the socially damning slur of spending a night entirely alone with a gentleman not related in any way, they would need to cover the distance from Edinburgh to Wolverstone Castle in a single, nonstop journey. Normally that would be easy enough, but in this instance they had to take a circling, roundabout route the better to avoid any effective pursuit.
Nevertheless, he thought through the various points again but still concluded, “There really isn’t any other way to accomplish our aim.”
With that stage settled, Cobby and Hugo took over the discussion, going over their subsequent roles in “The Rescue,” namely as decoys designed to lead Scrope and his team, and the laird, too, if he became actively involved, in the opposite direction from Jeremy and Eliza’s route.
Jeremy and Meggin shared a glance at the exuberance Cobby and Hugo seemed determined to invest in their roles.
“Just be careful,” Meggin finally said. “There’s no need to call attention to yourselves as yourselves — I would remind you that you’re both respected members of Edinburgh society now, not high-spirited schoolboys.”
Both Cobby and Hugo contrived to look abashed, but their eyes were twinkling.
Meggin eyed them, then softly snorted, cynically unimpressed; she turned once more to Jeremy. “This is all very well, but I do have reservations about Miss Cynster’s journey south. I’d accompany you myself if I could, but with the bairns to watch over, I can’t leave.” She glanced down the table at her spouse. “Especially not if Cobby’s gone, too.” She looked back at Jeremy. “Are you sure you shouldn’t take a maid, to lend Miss Cynster countenance, as they say?”
All three men frowned. All gave the suggestion due consideration.
All valued Meggin’s insights; they knew they were, all three of them, wont to ignore aspects they deemed irrelevant, such as society’s strictures.
Eventually Jeremy pulled a face. He looked at Cobby. “I still think taking a maid is too problematic. For a start, if they don’t take your bait and instead mount a wider search for us around town, our having a maid will call attention to us, which is precisely what we’re striving to avoid. Secondly, a maid will mean we’ll have to drive, and quite aside from then having three people, one a maid, in a carriage — precisely the combination of bodies they’ll most likely be searching for — we’ll need something bigger than a curricle or phaeton to accommodate the maid, and that will slow us down.” He looked back at Meggin. “We would definitely need more than a day to cover the distance, and that will give them more time to come at us.”
Meggin scrunched up her nose.
Jeremy shook his head. “No
— I think our plan as we have it is our best option.”
Both Cobby and Hugo nodded agreement.
Meggin sighed. “Very well.” She glanced at the clock on the wall.
The others all looked, too.
“It’s getting late.” Jeremy met Cobby’s, then Hugo’s, eyes. “We should go.”
No one demurred.
They rose from the table; in the front hall, the three men shrugged into their greatcoats and collected lanterns.
Meggin stood ready to unbolt the front door.
Jeremy looked at Cobby, then Hugo, then nodded to Meggin to pull open the door. “Let’s get moving — it’s time to get ‘The Rescue’ underway.”
Time to get Eliza Cynster out of her captors’ hands.
Chapter Five
he night seemed interminable. Eliza didn’t even try to sleep. Once the candles guttered, darkness so intense she couldn’t see her hand before her face closed in.
It weighed on her like a suffocating blanket.
She wasn’t normally afraid of the dark, but this dark had a menacing quality. Despite the covers, she found herself shivering; the basement was cool, but the chill gripping her owed little to the temperature.
Time quickly lost all meaning.
She tried to keep her mind from the question of what would happen if the laird came for her before Jeremy did. What should she do? What could —
Rat-tat.
She blinked, glanced toward the door, but there was no sign of it opening. Not that her captors were likely to knock.
Not that they were likely to come for her at this hour, whatever hour it was.
Rat-tat.
Slowly sitting up, she frowned. The darkness was disorienting, but she thought the tapping was coming from … under the bed.
Rat-tat.
The rhythm was regular, a man-made sound. Throwing off the blanket, she groped on the floor, found her slippers, and slid them on.
Rat-tat. Rat-tat.
“I’m coming,” she whispered, although she couldn’t imagine …