“So you stood here eavesdropping on our conversation instead?”
Dudley’s jaw dropped. “No sar! Never ’eard owt. Only ’ears in one ear anyroad, sar, since I fell off’n me ’orse an’ ’ee kicked me in the nog.”
Roth bared his teeth in another snarl and Vincent sighed from the door of the coach.
“For God’s sake, man, let the dog go on his way. You truly are becoming annoyingly obsessed with this Starlight business, imagining spies behind every bush, a thief lurking in the guise of every twisted drudge. I, for one, will happily launch a display of Chinese rockets when you finally catch the bastard and hang him.”
Roth’s arm lost some of its belligerence and with a snap of the wrist, the sword was returned to its sheath. “Go on then,” he said to Dudley. “Get about your business.”
“Aye sar. Yes sar. Thank ’ee, sar.”
Dudley limped past, his stride broken and uneven, his body slanting drastically to the left each time he put his weight upon the poorly mended leg. Roth continued to glare after him, watching the seesaw gait and bristling under Vincent’s coarse chuckle.
“Indeed, a dangerous-looking villain. Another moment and I have no doubt he would have knocked us cold with a roll of maps and stolen the teeth out of our heads.”
Roth eyed the bottle in Vincent’s hand. “Do you really think it wise to drink yourself into a stupor this early in the day? We still have a great deal to do and it would help to keep all of our wits about us.”
“You still have a great deal to do,” Vincent countered with a sneer. “My part doesn’t begin until the wedding night.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tyrone had his head tipped forward and his eyes closed. His body swayed gently while his hands caressed and seduced, and Renée found herself breathless again, her eyes scalded by a rush of unexpected and unwanted tears.
The room they had slipped into was the conservatory. It was as neglected and musty as the rest of the house, with paneled walls and poorly painted depictions of various musical instruments scattered about to provide the proper atmosphere. Tyrone was at the piano, his profile etched darkly against the glare from the window behind him. Renée was seated on one of the chaises beside him, her back stiff, her head bowed, her hands clasped tightly in her lap as she listened to the sweet, melancholy chords of a sonata. Her father used to say her mother played faire les anges pleurer—to make the angels weep—and it had been one of Renée’s early disappointments in life to discover she had no natural musical talent and embarrassingly little coordination when it came to playing the piano. She used to listen, however. With her eyes closed, she would be transported as Celia d’Anton played to drown out the sounds of looting and shouting in the streets of Paris.
Tyrone had called her brave, but she was not. He had told her to have courage but that, too, was an easy commodity for a reckless man to summon. He had held her and kissed her and comforted her but when she would have asked him a hundred, a thousand, questions, he had set her aside like a child whose bruises have been soothed and taken a seat at the piano, looking for all the world as if it were just another act of another play being staged for the benefit of an invisible audience.
Was that all it was to him? An act? A play? A game of chance? He was a man of so many contradictions she doubted she would understand the rules if he sought to explain them. She was still astounded by the heights of his audacity. Surveyor of turnpikes! A public servant constantly under the eye of town authorities, the military, the wealthy merchants, and the citizens of the parish who paid heavy tolls to the same man who donned a cloak and tricorn by night and robbed them of their profits. How did he do it? Where did he come by the nerve? How did he maintain two such different identities without losing himself completely?
And which part of which impersonation was she seeing now? Thieves did not learn to play the piano or speak in cultured overtones, nor did well-paid civil servants learn how to clamber up vine-covered drainpipes in the dead of night.
As if to chastise her for her thoughts, one of the long, tapered fingers struck an errant note on the keys and the music ended with an abrupt curse. Renée’s head tipped up almost at the precise moment Colonel Roth pushed the doors to the conservatory open and struck the bare flooring with the heel of his boot.
“Dash me if I am not saved,” Hart declared on an irritated sigh. “I vow m’ timing is all wrong today and there must be lead weights in m’ fingertips. The right hand is apparently blissfully ignorant of what the left is doing and the exposition is so muddled, the poor composer should have perished from mortification were he not spared the indignity by being dead already. I do most humbly apologize for the cacophony, mam’selle, but I did warn you."
“I thought you played very beautifully, m’sieur,” she said with quiet honesty.
He sniffed a dismissal and turned to Roth. “And you, sir! Could you not have stamped your heel any harder in remonstration?”
“A moment more,” Roth said wanly, “and I would surely have been inspired to start a country dance.”
“Quite so.” Hart rebutted the cut with a flick of his wrist. “I dare say you would, having no better knowledge of where to put your feet in genteel company.”
“One or two places come to mind as we speak,” Roth murmured.
“Dash me. A wit and not yet noon. But I see you have managed to find Dudley, so the day is not entirely lost.”
Renée had not noticed the second figure standing in the doorway, a man of medium height and slender build who instantly snatched the felt cap off his head, dislodging a thick lock of sand-colored hair in the process.
“You brought the maps, I presume?” Hart asked in a lazy drawl.
“Aye, sar. Right y’ere.” Dudley kept his gaze fixed on the floor until he had limped his way safely past Roth. After a brief, intent look into Hart’s face, he glanced cautiously around the room, skipping past Renée several times before finally seeming to muster the boldness to take a hard, lingering look.
“Must I invite the colonel to wrestle you to the ground?”
Dudley blinked and his gaze shot back to Tyrone. “Eh?”
“The maps, m’ good man.” He pointed. “Do you intend to just stand there clutching them to your bosom or do you imagine you might be persuaded to relinquish them into my care?”
“Oh. Oh, aye sar. Aye. Beggin’ yer pardon sar. Y’ere they be.”
Tyrone took the pouch and started pulling rolled sheets of parchment onto the piano. There were a score, all neatly bound with ribbon and labeled with a small wax disc. He looked at one or two, discarded another, then threw his hands up in a gesture of impatience. “Well. I simply cannot be expected to make sense of geography on the top of a pianoforte. And good heavens”—he cocked his head as a clock began chiming the hour—“you did say this would not take too long. I’ve an appointment with m’ tailor this afternoon and he can be deuced prickly if he is kept waiting. He sold me a new bolt of Banbury silk, still warm off the loom, so to speak. Seventeen guineas for the lot, but I bought every thread of it despite the extravagance. Simply would not do—would not do at all to have someone like Lord Gravenhurst with his great larded belly walking about in the same toggery. Can you imagine it?”
Roth’s teeth gleamed through a fixed smile. “It would be a veritable travesty of fashion I’m sure. Miss d’Anton”—he turned to her and tilted his head slightly through a request—“if it would not be too dreadful an imposition, might we avail ourselves of Lord Paxton’s library for an hour or so?”
“Of course.” She started to stand up, but Roth held up his hand.
“Do not trouble yourself, my dear. I know the way. I also took the liberty of telling Mrs. Pigeon we would be sequestered there and to bring us some fresh tea. If you will excuse us then?”
Hart gathered up his maps and the two men exited the room, each pausing at the door to vie for the honor of allowing the other to pass first. When they were through it, Renée continued to stare at the space t
hey had vacated, while two paces away, Dudley stared long and hard at her.
What he saw was not exactly comforting. He had expected her to be beautiful, for Tyrone rarely stayed out the entire night for anything less. The vaguely dismissive descriptions of yellow hair and blue eyes, however, had only made Robert Dudley curious to know what had sent the usually confident and complacent swordsman reaching for the bottle of brandy so early in the morning. He’d had no chance to ask, what with Roth pounding on the front door scant moments after the first swallow, but being neither blind nor celibate, he suspected the reason was shimmering softly in front of him now.
Calling her hair yellow did not do justice to the silky, silver blond clusters of curls that surrounded the pale oval of her face, and using the word blue to characterize the color of her eyes was like describing the sky as being big. Yet beauty alone was not enough to affect a man like Tyrone. She could have been the homeliest creature in twelve parishes and it would still have been the look in those eyes that would have given a man pause. Dark and quiet and haunted, it was the look of a wounded doe trapped in the sightlines of a hunter’s musket.
Dudley had not known what he would find at Harwood House and he had made his approach cautiously through the woods hoping to avoid being caught in a trap if one had indeed been sprung. He certainly had not expected to find Tyrone tinkling a sonata on the piano. The piano for God’s sake. The complete incongruousness of the situation aside, they had been together seven years and in all that time, Dudley had never once known Tyrone Hart even to admit to possessing the ability, much less to play the instrument for anyone outside his own four walls. It was an intensely private passion, his only connection to a past he had forsaken along with the name he had used for the first twenty-one years of his life, The fact that he had been playing Mozart here, now, for her, was nearly as staggering as the announcement he had made while he had been pouring the brandy that morning. He had said they were going to steal the rubies anyway, despite the fact Roth would likely be ready and waiting for them.
He, Robert Dudley, was getting too damned old for personal vendettas. This business between Roth and Tyrone had definitely become personal, and if Hart wanted to torment and humiliate Bertrand Roth, that was his prerogative, of course, but Dudley had responsibilities now. He had a wife—well, he would as soon as he and Maggie Smallwood could say the proper words in front of a priest—and in a few months, he would have a child. They certainly did not need the money the rubies would bring; they had acquired more than enough lucre to live out the rest of their days in luxury. Although he did not think it likely he would hear the words from Tyrone’s mouth any too soon, it was well past time for both of them to retire. It was only a matter of time before Roth’s sheer, dog-like persistence paid off. He was arrogant and cocky and too brutish for subtlety, but he had been in the military longer than Tyrone had been on the highways. He had seen service in Austria and Flanders and had returned to England a wounded hero, lauded for his victories in the war with France.
And while Tyrone had certainly modified his activities in the past months since Roth had come to Coventry, he had only laughed at the colonel’s open declaration that he would not rest until Captain Starlight was caught, hung, and his corpse left to rot on the gibbet as a warning to all who sought to follow in his footsteps.
Over the past seven years, Robert Dudley had come to know Tyrone as well as anyone could. As well as anyone was allowed to know him, which was not admitting to a great deal. Tyrone Hart was as much an enigma now in his clownish wigs and powdered eyebrows as he had been the first time Dudley had seen him curled on a bed of mouldering hay in a fetid, stinking gaol cell in Aberdeen.
He was as capable of cold, killing violence, as he was of dancing a gavotte with the proper turn of ankle. He could drink his way to the bottom of a rum barrel without batting an eye, or he could nibble on crumb cakes and crook a delicate pinky while sipping tea. He fit everywhere, like a chameleon, yet belonged nowhere, and he seemed content to live for the day, cavalierly dismissing the likelihood that he had no place to go when it was all over and done, except a gibbet and a shallow grave.
Dudley himself had almost had his heart stop when an ebullient Tyrone Hart, newly fitted out in satin breeches and a tailored coat had blown through the door of their rented rooms and announced he had purchased the position of Surveyor of turnpikes for the shire of Warwick. The gold they had taken from the young whiplashed lord, combined with the results of several profitable robberies had not only provided enough cash to deck himself out like a proper gentleman, it had given him the where-withal and brashness to bribe his way into the coveted appointment as Surveyor of roads. For the ludicrous sum of a hundred pounds a year, he had been given free reign to chart every road, every hill, every forest, every stream, and in return was not only paid a portion of the tolls collected along the turnpikes that crossed his territory, but in his guise as the supposedly bored scion of a distant and disapproving nobleman, he was welcomed into society with the gaiety and oblivion that seemed to be a singular trademark of the aristocracy.
It had been as ridiculously easy, in his paints and powders, to ingratiate himself with the lords and ladies of Warwickshire, as it had been in his greatcoat and tricorn to win the sly cooperation of innkeepers and courtesans.
Dudley felt a cool prickle down his spine and realized Renée was staring at him.
“Have you … worked … for m’sieur Hart very long?”
“Seven years, miss.” He raised a hand and respectfully touched his forelock.
He saw her eyes widen slightly and the blue actually deepen as she stared at the shiny stub where his baby finger used to be. His face had been hidden behind a mask the first time she had seen him on the moonlit road, but he had made a point of drawing her attention to the stub and she had marked it then the way she marked it now.
“I see. And has he always been this … foolhardy?”
“Foolhardy, miss?” There was a surprising lightness in his step as he walked back to the door. At the threshold he paused and glanced over his shoulder. “Up to today, I would have said there wasn’t a foolhardy bone in his body.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Renée noted the decreasing rumble of the wheels as the coach began to slow. She suspected Finn would have preferred to keep the horses at full gallop and not stop until they were on the docks of Manchester, but Antoine was still at Harwood House and even though Roth and Edgar Vincent had remained behind at Fairleigh Hall, Renée had no choice but to go through the motions of keeping her meeting with Captain Starlight tonight.
Tyrone Hart had been much in evidence at the soiree this evening. A blaze of silver satin and fountainous lace, he had managed to amuse nearly everyone with his antics, instigating a game of charades after supper that had rendered most of the ladies insensible with laughter. The men had, for the most part, tolerated him and were content to entrust their wives to his company while they focused their attentions on card tables or dicing boards.
Fools, Renée had thought. They considered him a harmless buffoon, yet she could clearly see the rapt look in several of the women’s eyes that suggested they knew better. Just how much better, Renée did not want to speculate. She deliberately avoided whatever corner of the room he was in and, apart from the odd, fleeting glance she sent his way, attempted to ignore him as thoroughly as he ignored her.
Not that he would have had much opportunity to approach her. When Roth was not by her side, Vincent’s eyes and hands were on her. He acted as if she were already his wife, his property, his chattel, and led her around like a dog on a leash. When the clock passed eleven and chimed the half hour, she was thankful it was time for her to make her excuses. She left Vincent settling into a game of cards and Roth debating politics with their host. Her last glimpse of Tyrone Hart, taken while she waited for Finn to bring around the coach, put him strolling quite casually on the terrace with the buxom and flirtatious Lady Victoria Roswell.
No one had consider
ed it unusual for Renée to depart early or alone. Apart from a few perfunctory invitations to join in on a conversation, most of the ladies had preferred to treat her as if she only spoke French and understood no English words above a single syllable. If it wasn’t for the fact that Edgar Vincent’s black market trade supplied their husbands with contraband wines and cognac, she likely would have been snubbed as a common whore. And in truth, she probably would not mean much more than that to him if she married him.
Renée drew the lap robe high under her shoulders. The windows were locked against the rush of cool night air but she was chilled to the bone anyway. She had not eaten anything all day. Wine, on the other hand, had taken a smooth and willing path down her throat and the combination of too many glasses of burgundy together with an excess of forced civility had left her feeling on edge. And cold enough to wish she were burrowed under a mound of warm blankets.
This was undoubtedly the most foolish charade of the night, riding out to meet a man who would not be there. They had said all there was to say last night. Moreover, he would not risk drawing attention to himself by leaving the party so soon after her. His nose was probably nestled snugly in the cleft between Victoria Roswell’s bosoms by now, resentful of any interruption that might delay his next conquest.
Just as two warm spots of anger started to prickle in her cheeks, she heard Finn call to the horses and felt a noticeable change in the speed of the coach. It was slowing. The churning of wheels rolled to a deliberate halt and a second voice, deep and bristling with authority, advised the driver to remain in his box and do nothing that might invite an unpleasant expenditure of a bullet.
Renée peered anxiously out the window but could see nothing through the distortion of the thick glass. It wasn’t possible, was it?
As the brisk crunch of footsteps approached the side of the coach, she shrank back against the cushions and stared at the door. A moment later the latch turned and the panel swung open to her soft gasp, for she was half expecting to see a man standing there dressed in a powdered wig and silver satin. Instead, she saw only somber darkness. It was him; she recognized the scent of wind and moonlight and saddle leather. But he looked much like he had the first time she had seen him, his tricorn pulled low over his forehead, the upper collar of his greatcoat standing tall against his cheeks to guard against any stray light from the riding lamp.
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