He could feel the figure staring down at him, more than likely curling his lip in disgust.
“Good,” he drawled. “Now, make sure no one suspects you—and for God’s sake, get a hold of yourself. You look like shite. How anyone would see you as an equal is beyond my capabilities.”
His, too. But he didn’t care much about that anymore. He only cared that the figure before him held all the cards.
Literally.
The House of Cards Society had their hands around his throat, and he could do naught but obey.
He tried sitting up, a sloppy attempt at seeming human, but his muscles spasmed in that moment. He groaned, his eyes rolling back into his head. He hissed out a breath, humiliated that his body would choose just then to fall to pieces.
“Dammit!” the figure spat. The man flinched, moving his head from side to side in an effort to stem the flow of the wildfire blazing behind his eyes. “Here,” the figure ground out.
Something hit him in the chest, making him flinch again.
“Use that and get back to work. You have a week to obtain what we require. If you cannot handle this, we will send someone else—and you know what that will mean for your precious secrets.”
His secrets? What secrets? Oh—the secret of his hideous addiction. And his predilections. Perversions that would turn even the most amoral of the ton into raving Puritans.
“I will get it done. Do not worry about me,” he whimpered, reaching up to take the small pouch in hand. He could tell by the scent that the pouch contained the very thing his body was screaming for.
Opium.
His hands shaking all the more, he pushed himself off the bed, peering into the gloom of his elegantly appointed guest room.
He was alone, once again, the figure having disappeared as easily as he’d invaded. As though the night were creeping into his life in human form.
Without hesitation, he pulled his ivory dream stick from the hidden compartment in his traveling trunk. Carefully—as carefully as he could when his hands were curling in on themselves from the pain in his joints—he placed a scoop of black tar in the ceramic bowl before affixing it to the ivory pipe using a silver fastener. Then he took a candle, lit it, and used the flame to heat the ceramic bowl, turning tar into a molten mix that would eventually vaporize into smoke.
As the sweet, intoxicating taste of flowers filled his mouth, his throat, his lungs, the world seemed right again.
Chapter Five
Vic wasn’t surprised at how easy it was to sneak from the servants’ quarters—she had slipped her roommate a sleeping draught at their evening tea—nor how simple it was to descend the ivy clinging to the trellis just below the window at the end of the corridor. She’d always been a skilled climber, and it was now made all the easier because of the black jiànshēn fú—or sporting clothes, in Mandarin—she was wearing, complete with mask and gloves. She couldn’t comprehend trying to accomplish this clandestine task while wearing her maid’s uniform. She’d have fallen on her face in a trice.
She needed to make it to the earl’s study window, slip inside the room, and find what that nosy viscount had prevented her from finding on her first attempt.
Her feet landed on the marble-tiled patio without a sound, and she immediately fell into a controlled crouch, hiding from any potential eyes. No, not many would be out and about so late, but she couldn’t take a chance that someone would notice a figure clad completely in black slinking around the garden. The study was just around the building, on the second floor. It would take some doing to climb to the nearest window, but it wasn’t impossible. Vic moved along the wall, behind the perfectly manicured bushes, until she reached the spot just beneath the study window. She stopped, listening to the songs of the night, making sure that none of those songs was of oncoming footsteps or voices.
Holding her breath, she waited, her body obscured from the full moon’s light by the large hedge just in front of her. Good. No one about.
Vic pivoted on the tip of her left foot and faced the wall, craning her neck to make out the climbing surface. Bricks, mortar—a smooth surface except for a few protruding bricks. It would take some doing, but she’d had worse in training: a single pole, slathered in grease, with a sneering Master Lao-Nang perched atop it, taunting her.
She took a deep breath and stood, reaching up for the first handhold, a brick three feet over her head. Gripping it with her fingers, she pushed off with her toes and pulled herself up, thankful for her upper body strength. The next handhold was another two feet up. Vic grit her teeth and pushed off again, her feet sliding against the dew-damp surface of the wall, and almost just launched herself upward. She missed, her grip on the one brick nearly slipping.
Cursing in Mandarin, she tried again, and this time her efforts were successful. This handhold gave her a new, rather awkward foothold, but it was better than nothing. The study window was another six or eight feet up.
Groaning at the strain she’d already endured, she bit back another curse and continued upward, one slick foothold and handhold at a time, until she reached her destination.
Gripping the window ledge, she hauled herself up into the two-foot-deep casement and pressed herself against the glass. The study was still lit by a single lamp, the shadowed interior silent.
Vic tried the window. Unlocked.
She paused, tension rolling over her. For a man who locked his office door, it was strange that he would leave his window open. Then again, he probably had never thought someone would be reckless or skilled enough to scale the sheer wall to breach the window.
She smiled beneath her mask and flexed her fingers. She was skilled enough, but reckless? Never.
She pulled the left side of the window open slowly, listening for the telltale creak that would give her away.
Silence.
Grateful for small favors, she slid inside, her jiànshēn xié–clad feet making no noise as she planted them in the soft carpet just under the window. She held her breath, once again listening for any sounds heralding unexpected visitors.
After several heartbeats, she let out her breath and set to work. The desk drawers were locked. Vic pulled her lockpick set from the pouch inside her jiànshēn fú and bent to unlock the first drawer. Voices, lowly murmuring, moving quickly, made her stall.
Blast!
She looked behind her to the window, but she knew she didn’t have enough time to climb through and make it to the ground safely. Thinking quickly, she rushed to the window, pulled it shut, and slithered in behind the tall, thick curtains in front of the window alcove. And just in time, too, because the moment she pulled her feet up under her, the door to the study unlocked and the voices echoed in the room beyond her hiding place.
“Damn it, Harold,” one voice growled to the other. “How could no one see who put that letter on my desk? My office was locked, for God’s sake.”
It had been, before she’d picked the lock. Had she bothered to lock it again on her retreat? No…she’d been too flustered by her brush with that man to think of putting the lock back to rights on her way out. Apparently, someone had unknowingly used her to complete their deed—and that rankled. She was a tool for justice, not villainy.
Gāisǐ de. She wanted to groan; the weight of that mistake was like a millstone strapped to her ankle, pulling her down into the blackness. She should have locked that door behind her, but that stranger had ruined her flawless escape—though, if she were honest with herself, she could only blame his interference on her inability to infiltrate the household. There must have been something about her in her maid disguise that made the man suspicious. Why else follow her?
Blast, blast, blast!
“I cannot say, my lord. The household have been busy with the party—even the help we hired from London have been doing double duty to see to the guests’ needs,” the other man said, his voice low and groveling.
He must be the butler.
Silence ruled, and Vic could feel the sweat gathering al
ong her nape. She wasn’t warm, but rather strained and anxious. Master Lao-Nang would make her perform a thousand squat lunges if he saw her like that. To be a skilled and deadly warrior, one needed to be perfectly centered at all times, especially when perched in a window alcove, eavesdropping on a suspected traitor.
An inarticulate curse broke through the strung-out silence, and then the sounds of the desk chair moving and someone sitting in it filled the air.
“Find Reynolds for me; tell him the matter is urgent,” the man, most certainly the earl, ground out. The opening and closing of the door told Vic the butler had left to do his master’s bidding. And Vic stayed, crouched behind the curtain, on the edge of a two-foot-wide window alcove, trying not to groan at the cramps in her legs.
I have got myself into a mess, haven’t I? And it would be an utter disaster if she made any noise. The earl was just on the other side of the curtain. If he found her there, he’d call for reinforcements—and she’d hate to hurt them all.
The clock in the study continued ticking in the silence left by the butler, which told Vic fifteen minutes had passed before the door opened again, and a man wheezed into the room.
“Took you long enough, Reynolds!” the earl roared.
Gasping for air, the other man burbled, “I am sorry, my lord. I came as quickly as I could—”
“I don’t have time for your apologies, man. Take a look at this,” the earl said, and Vic could hear him pushing something across his desk.
After a moment, there was another gasp, though this time it held a note of terror.
“My lord, what is this?”
The earl growled. “Some upstart is trying to blackmail me, Reynolds. That, you dolt, is a blackmail letter. For two hundred pounds.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Blackmailed? Had someone else discovered the earl to be a traitor, and if so, had they already confiscated the information she’d been sent to retrieve?
A sharp, insidious thought formed. Did Lord Richard have another motive for following her into the earl’s study? She’d picked the lock, practically opening the way for him, and then she’d left him in there, alone, when she’d fled. Could he have used that opening to find the evidence she’d been searching for, and then left the blackmail letter behind?
Anger tore at her, making her heart pound.
Had Richard used her to aid his criminal activities?
“How in the hell did they find out about those letters?” the earl spat. “I assume, Reynolds, you haven’t been loosing your lips around your cronies.”
Vic could hear the man clap a hand to his chest in shocked rejection of that accusation. “No, my lord. Of course not.”
“How else could these curs have learned of my wife’s affair with that damned groom?”
Reynolds sputtered, “I—I cannot know, my lord.”
A grunt followed that effusive response. Then another long moment of silence.
An affair? So not the evidence Vic was sent to retrieve. Though…it was still possible that Richard was the blackmailer they were speaking of. In the short time she’d been a part of Operation Imperial Twilight, she’d learned many ugly truths about the nobility; the bluest of bloods could commit terrible acts.
Finally, the earl drawled, “Visit our man of business in London. Have him gather the required monies. Tell him…tell him it is for her ladyship’s new wardrobe. He won’t think anything untoward of that—the woman is always purchasing more dresses than anyone can wear in a lifetime. God…” He groaned, the sound of a human soul being flayed open. “I never should have kept those letters.”
“My lord?” Reynolds muttered, sounding all the more like a man lost at sea.
A heavy sigh sounded before the earl intoned, “Nothing, Reynolds. Get this done with the least amount of attention. I absolutely cannot have anyone suspect.”
“And what would you have me do with the money once I’ve obtained it, my lord?”
“The letter says to leave the money in a bag at this address…” Vic could only assume the earl was pointing to the address written on the blackmail letter. “Leave the money and make haste back here. You only have forty-eight hours, Reynolds. I need not tell you how important this is. If anything were to get out…”
Was the earl protecting himself or his wife? The pragmatic Vic believed the earl to be acting to save his reputation, but the oft-ignored romantic Vic wanted to believe he loved his wife, despite her indiscretions, and was saving her from ridicule.
“I understand. Leave it to me, my lord,” Reynolds said shakily. Doubting the man’s confidence, Vic wondered about the address for the money drop. She wondered who—if not Richard Downing—had sent the blackmail letter and what the earl had written in his letters that would be worth blackmailing him over.
She had to get a look at that letter.
But how? Though Reynolds had beat a hasty exit, the earl was still there, no doubt hanging his head in his hands, bemoaning his circumstances. Vic could almost feel sorry for the man. Almost. Whatever he’d done in the past, he was paying for it now. She hadn’t enough mercy to feel compassion for those who sought their own destruction.
Her toes began to cramp, but she couldn’t move an inch. And her back was screaming for her to stretch it, to twist it and loosen the bunching muscles. But she daren’t.
Just on the other side of the curtain, the earl let out a pained sigh, and Vic heard the distinct smell of paper burning.
Blast! He was destroying the letter. Double blast! Now she’d have no way of knowing where Reynolds was to leave the money, which meant she had no immediate method to determine Lord Richard’s involvement.
Vic closed her eyes, willing her body to relax so that the agony moving through her wouldn’t cripple her in a moment of crisis.
The smoke from the burning blackmail letter hit her nose, sucked into the alcove by the air escaping through the slight opening she’d left in the window. Gāisǐ de. She thought she’d closed it all the way. If she continued making missteps, she’d never be able to raise her head around her father again.
You cannot let Papa down. She bellowed that phrase in her mind and listened to the clock continuing to tick and the scraping of the desk chair against the carpet. Then the moans of a man battered by invisible enemies. Then the opening and closing of the office door. The lock clicking into place was the sound Vic had been waiting for.
It took her longer than she’d hoped to uncurl herself from her position, but once she was standing, she made her way to the earl’s desk. The smoldering remains of a letter sat in a silver dish beside the blotter.
Retrieving her lockpicks once again, she made short work of the drawers in the earl’s desk. They were empty of anything incriminating.
She had nothing, no evidence of the earl’s involvement in treachery. She’d have to report what she’d heard, though Leavenson would have preferred hard evidence of the earl’s activities on which to base their next moves. It couldn’t be helped. The man may be a cuckold, but she couldn’t pin him with crimes against the people without something damning in his possession.
Turning from the desk, Vic made her way back to the window, hopping up onto the casement. She pushed the window open and turned to climb back out onto the thin ledge. Maneuvering to close the window, she slid over the ledge and carefully made her way down the wall. She leaped the last few feet to the ground and immediately landed in a crouch, hiding behind the hedges once again. Vic breathed a sigh of relief, though even that was strained, and allowed herself to feel a moment of elation.
She hadn’t found anything that would make her believe that Banebridge was part of something nefarious—regarding the Crown, anyway. Not in the study, at least. Perhaps he kept his incriminating materials in his bedchamber.
Beside his bed, right next to his bloody knife and smoking pistol? She huffed at her own absurdity.
It was time to go home.
Vic slipped into the house through the same window she’d left through an
d made her way back to her room. Her roommate, Willa, was snoring away on her narrow bed in the corner, making Vic quirk her lips in a grin. Lord but she’d enjoyed slipping that draught into Willa’s tea; the woman had been nothing but critical and beady-eyed disapproval since she’d met Vic that morning on the ride in from town.
Having taken on the guise of Berta, Vic had ridden the household carriage train from the employment offices on Fleet Street all the way to Clouster Hall. It had been a bumpy, frustrating, noisy ride with eight other women crammed into the space meant for only four. But she’d endured, because this was her first operation without her father’s direct oversight. He’d put his faith in her, and she hadn’t disappointed him.
Her smile for herself now, she changed into a riding habit—Lord but she hated those things—and threw the rest of her clothes into her carpet bag. She pulled out the note she’d penned before leaving London and left it on her pillow. The note was a simple missive that said she, Berta, had changed her mind about working the party and had headed back to town on her own. Mrs. Maisey would get sour-faced about it, but she seemed perpetually sour-faced.
Shrugging, Vic slipped out the fourth-floor bedroom door, tiptoed back to the window above the trellis, and climbed down. It was more difficult in the riding habit and half boots, but she made do. Once on the ground, she pointed herself in a southwesterly direction, where Leavenson assured her a horse would be waiting for her throughout the week at a small crofter’s cottage—in case of emergencies.
“Getting home with this information about Banebridge’s blackmailing is a decided emergency,” she mumbled.
And off she went, not once looking back at the large country house where a certain handsome potential blackmailer, with his beautiful lips and thick, muscular arms, was sleeping, a slight indent from her dagger point just under his chin.
Chapter Six
It had been a week since his return from the dreadfully dull country party, during which his boredom was only broken by interesting, if a little awkward, conversations with his aunt and cousin, Elizabeth, and his run-in with the maid-not-maid in the earl’s study.
A Lady Never Tells (Women of Daring) Page 5