“Feast? The title had—” Derek snapped his mouth shut and shook his head.
His face was tilted toward the window, but she didn’t think he was seeing anything. Only the noise of the rolling vehicle kept the interior of the carriage from being tensely silent.
Instead it was simply tense.
He didn’t rant or rave or do anything Jess was accustomed to normal people doing when they felt hurt or angry. Either or both of those feelings would explain his current behavior, so she’d expected some form of attack.
But he just stared out the window, face stern, arms crossed over his chest.
Because she was watching him so intently, she saw the moment he came out of his mind and returned to the carriage. Those hazel eyes blinked and the stern, grim line of his mouth turned down into a frown.
“Where are we going? This isn’t the road to Lincolnshire.” He turned his gaze on her, pinning her to her seat. “Another part of your contingency plan, I assume?”
Jess swallowed. On this, at least, she felt confident, even if her decision not to tell him could, possibly, deserve questioning. “Yes. We’ll hide for the evening somewhere safe and assess whether or not we need to change the rest of our plan or continue on.”
“Hmmm.” He gave a pointed look at his seat and then hers before dropping his gaze to the floor.
Jess sighed and gathered her skirts, preparing to make the slightly awkward change of seats in a moving carriage, but he didn’t move. His gaze caught hers briefly before he laid his head on the back of the seat, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.
“Based on his prior involvement, we have to assume he is a part of the other claim to the throne. They have to have some connection to those who fled, so we also have to assume he knows the paintings are somehow important.”
Derek listened to Jess with a growing sense of awe. Her voice was even, calm, matter-of-fact. There was no tension, no worry, no haste in her tone as she spoke.
“If he has given up,” Jess continued, “making a change in our plans won’t matter. If he hasn’t, he’ll start moving to put whatever paintings he can out of our reach. We need to prioritize those he’s most likely connected to and hope we can fill in the holes.”
As Jess and Jeffreys bent over a table in the hayloft of a barn, Derek reclined on a pile of hay covered in a rough blanket. He’d been listening intently, but so far he had no assistance to offer. It had all been about strategy and potential problems.
Derek shifted to adjust a bit of hay that was jabbing into his back. He’d never been in a hayloft before, but he imagined most of them weren’t like this. Blankets, a table, four chairs, three methods of departure, two guns, and a map of England marked with the fastest routes to the nearest known smugglers’ ports didn’t seem like the average hayloft inventory.
That last item didn’t make sense, even after Jeffreys had explained that sometimes the safest place for a spy wasn’t their home country.
Jess hadn’t been willing to explain anything. She’d simply spread their map on the table, along with his diary translations, and gotten to work.
“Is it time to enlist some help?” Jeffreys asked. “We could send other people out to these paintings.”
Derek leaned a bit closer in order not to miss Jess’s response. It was true. They had some semblance of an idea what they were looking for. A sudden discomfort in his gut had him pressing a hand to his middle. Was he disappointed at the prospect of not continuing to be a part of this? After the way his heart had nearly exploded on that short walk across the lawn this afternoon, he should be delighted at the idea of going home.
If it was all about placing the setting and establishing a direction, that didn’t require any deeper understanding of art or symbolism or anything else. He could return to his normal existence and not worry about whether the side that eventually won this quietly fought battle was the one that actually should.
No, they didn’t need him now that they knew what they were looking for.
Except that today’s painting hadn’t been the same. In the other paintings, it had been obvious—a place, a path, a journey. The Feast of Future Fortune had been set inside a building. No one was going anywhere.
Yet he knew this one was part of the map. It had been the clearest of all the diary entries. Obviously, he’d missed something when it came to what they were looking for in the paintings.
He closed his eyes and pictured the painting: the crowns without jewels, the bare platters, toasting cups tilted at various angles and as empty as the serving bowls.
He needed to sketch it while the details were still fresh in his mind and before they lost the light of the setting sun. It was unlikely that Jess and Jeffreys intended to light the lantern sitting on the corner of the table. Even Derek knew that a light in a barn at night could draw notice.
As his pencil moved over the paper, he searched for lines, some indication that this painting, like the others, was sending them somewhere.
There was nothing.
With his new knowledge of where The Six had come from and why, he had to assume that this painting was one of hope. They were celebrating the future freedom of their homeland. Were the people in the painting The Six? Had Derek ever seen a portrait of Fournier?
Perhaps Jess had recognized one of the people.
He looked back toward the table in time to see them packing away everything and planning the path they’d take toward London tomorrow.
“I’ll take first watch,” Jeffreys said, stretching his arms over his head. “That way I can sleep before I have to drive.”
Jess shook her head. “Better to split it into three. I’ll take the first and third. I can sleep in the carriage tomorrow.”
The last edges of sunlight slid over the windowsill on the far side of the hayloft as Jess lowered the main ladder and climbed down, supposedly to keep an eye on the surrounding area.
“I didn’t think anyone followed us,” Derek said.
Jeffreys shrugged and gathered two blankets before moving to the haystack beside Derek’s. “Not that we saw. The chances of them finding us are small, but it’s often a slight crack in your guard that sends it tumbling down.”
Derek nodded, but before he could think of something else to say, the other man had thrown one blanket onto the hay, lain down, and covered himself with the second. In moments, his breathing steadied into the smooth flow of sleep.
Derek hadn’t even had time to pack away his pencil and sketchbook.
He got up from his pile of hay and moved to the window to look down. Of course he couldn’t see Jess. She knew what she was doing too well for her to allow that to happen. Then again, she could be on the other side of the barn.
Pulling back from the window, he looked at the shadowy lump that was Jeffreys. He and Jess worked well together, as if they shared a single mind. Jeffreys, though he looked a good bit older than Jess, would make a much better partner for her than Derek.
Not that he should care. He didn’t care. Jess’s not needing him was hardly a surprise. All she needed was a walking history book who could translate Italian. He just happened to be the conveniently available one.
As quietly as he could, he packed away his sketchbook and resettled onto the hay, biting his lip to hold in his body’s groan of protest. Eventually, he wriggled his way into a somewhat comfortable position and dozed off, but not so deeply that he didn’t hear Jess return up the ladder and gently wake Jeffreys. Whispers of sound accompanied the vague shadows as the driver made his way to the ladder and Jess settled into his abandoned bed of hay.
“I could take a turn,” Derek offered before she could drift off to sleep. There were three shifts and three people. It wasn’t right that Jess should take two while he took none.
She chuckled. “What would you do if you found someone?”
That was a very good question. “Scream, I suppose.”
Hay crinkled as she shifted. “That would allow Jeffreys and me to get away. You would be dead or
captured by the time we could get to you, of course, so we would just grab the papers and run.”
“That doesn’t sound like good team camaraderie.”
“We don’t help anyone if we all die.”
Her pragmatic view of death drew Derek’s curiosity enough to have him shifting in his hay pile, turning toward her even if there was nothing to see but varying shades of darkness. “I’m not sure I’m helping now.”
She didn’t immediately reassure him he was wrong.
A piece of hay tickled his nose, and he grabbed it and twirled it about his finger. As Jess had mentioned in the carriage, his job was to interpret the paintings. He couldn’t find the direction in today’s painting for the life of him.
That was an expression that suddenly carried a bit more meaning than it had a month ago.
“You are.”
Her voice came as such a surprise that he jerked, nearly falling off his hay. Did she truly believe that? “Jeffreys was right. You could send others.”
“No,” she said quickly. After a moment of silence, she spoke again. “There’s something we’re missing. The writing is too poetic to be that simple.”
The pounding of Derek’s heart eased a bit. That was solid reassurance, coming from Jess. He could rest on that for a while, couldn’t he? He let the silence return, knowing she needed to grab her sleep while she could.
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”
“Of course,” Derek said automatically. Jess was too practical to start a fight instead of sleep, so whatever she was going to ask him must have been weighing on her mind for a while, brought out by the safety of the night and the unique circumstances.
“How did you know it was me? In all my disguises, how did you know? Even Ryland doesn’t see me.”
The duke was her benchmark for who knew her well? Someone she hadn’t seen in three years? “I looked at you like a painting. Meaning is in the smallest details in art.”
“What do you mean?”
“Art isn’t a slice of life—not real life, anyway. It’s an interpretation of it. You see what happened but also the effects of it, or perhaps it’s the representation of a feeling, like a dream or desire or fear.”
He shifted onto his back and stared at the dark ceiling. “Before you, I never thought of looking at people that way. In that carriage to London, though, something kept nagging at me. I didn’t understand it until you pointed out the serving girl at the inn. It’s changed people for me.”
Her laughter was light. “Is that a good thing?”
“I suppose.” He grinned. “It’s certainly not convenient, though.”
The hayloft fell quiet again. This time Derek prolonged the conversation. “You could do it, too, you know. You could look at paintings the way you look at people.”
“Paintings don’t move,” she muttered. “I can’t see where the people are going.”
“Have you tried?”
There was a long pause before she took a deep breath and admitted, “No.”
A surge of triumph went through Derek, similar to the kind he felt after identifying a particularly quarrelsome painting. “I could teach you.”
“I’m not a very good student.”
There was more to that statement than an excuse. Derek wished he could see her, that he could study the details, look for the little nuances that told him what she wasn’t saying. In the dark he could only guess at what was behind her words, and it frustrated him.
“I doubt that,” he said. “I’m sure someone taught you how to handle that knife you were holding earlier.”
“That’s different,” she whispered.
“Not really. The mind is a tool, just like a knife. Imagine me flipping that thing about like you did this afternoon.”
Her chuckle made him smile. “You would probably cut your own finger off.”
“I have a feeling you will make a better art student than I would make a knife student.”
“Care to see?” she asked.
“What?”
“You and me. We’ll trade lessons. You tell me about art, and I’ll teach you how to sneak about. Knife lessons might be a bit difficult in a carriage.”
Did he want to learn more of Jess’s world? The affirmative yearning that answered that question surprised him.
“Yes,” he said, “but on one condition.”
“What?”
“We’re partners. We do this together. You teach me, I teach you, and we find this coronation bowl together.”
He had to wait for fifteen heartbeats for her to answer. He counted each tense one, wondering if it would be the last one he made as part of this endeavor.
“You have a deal. We’re going to London tomorrow. If any of the painting owners is a cohort of Lord Bradford, it will be Count Rashido. He’s an ambassador from Russia. He’s not completely trusted, even though he’s never been caught doing anything nefarious. He’s watched.”
“I don’t suppose Russian is one of the languages in your repertoire, is it?”
“Ya robaryu tolka shtobyi ostatsa v jhivyix.”
He really hoped that meant she knew enough to keep them from getting killed.
Chapter Twenty-One
True to her word, Jess spent the ride to London sharing her plans, though nothing was certain except their return to London and her intention to take the bowl back to Verbonne once it was found.
Admittedly, there had been times when Derek had felt a bit superior mentally, but that notion died as she discussed the many angles and contingencies that depended on what she found around the next bend. By the time she paused long enough for him to ask a question, he was overcome by a bit of awe.
“Do you intend to take the bowl to Verbonne alone?”
She nodded. “It’s difficult enough to sneak one person onto a ship and then into a country.”
Somehow Derek had thought the danger to Jess would be over once they found the bowl, because then his part could—would—be completed. For her, though, the danger would just be beginning. She’d be in possession of the treasure itself, not just the map.
She couldn’t be allowed to face that alone. He’d purchase his own passenger ticket before he’d let that happen.
Jess continued, unaware of his newfound resolve. “How quickly do you think you could teach me about art examination?”
Derek frowned, dragging his mind back to the present. “Why?”
She sighed. “Because this is dangerous, Derek.”
“More so than I ever imagined,” he agreed, “but you aren’t getting rid of me.”
The fact that she was trying to do so stung. What about the something more they were missing? What about needing him? Had everything she’d said last night just been to placate him while they were still close enough that he could have made his way back to Lord Bradford’s?
“I know how to handle it.”
“How many people do you know who have gone up against a danger they knew how to handle and lost despite their skills and abilities? I don’t think one can go to war and not lose friends.”
She swallowed and dropped her gaze to the floor. “No, you can’t.”
“I’ll do whatever you tell me to. I’m not an idiot. I won’t stand between you and your adversary in some misbegotten idea that I can be a hero, but I will have your back.” He wanted so very much to be there for her. The more he learned of her, the more he pictured her as that woman on the rocks from The Grace of Oceans Breaking, watching the storm throw the ocean into turmoil. Lonely, desperate, but somehow still hopeful.
He didn’t want her to be alone anymore, but even if she didn’t want him, he needed her to stay safe. “If not me, take Jeffreys.”
She snorted. “And leave you alone? I don’t think so.”
“I’m not a threat to anyone.”
“Bradford, or anyone else looking for me, doesn’t know that. Anyone helping me is in danger. Physically you are the weakest link, and that is always the easiest to pull.”
The sadness on her face left him wondering how many weak links she’d pulled in her days. Her gaze moved to the window. “I’ll not watch them take away anyone else I care about.”
Derek smiled at Jess’s confession of caring and then pushed his lips up into a grin because the maudlin emotion filling the carriage wasn’t one he was accustomed to getting from her, nor one with which he wanted to become overly familiar.
“Aw, Jess,” he said, hoping his teasing tone would pull her away from the heavy, dark feeling. “I didn’t know I meant that much to you.”
She groaned, but that look, the one that reminded him that a lost child still lurked inside her, fell away. In its place was an expression he thought might be a hope she was afraid to admit she held. He wanted to feed that hope.
“When this is all over and you don’t have to look over your shoulder anymore, what will you do?”
Her face went blank, invalidating his idea that picturing a worry-free, normal life would lighten her mood further. Instead, she looked like she was experiencing some sort of shock. Hadn’t she dreamt of such a day at some time? Wasn’t that the point of what she was doing?
“I don’t know.”
He searched her face for a sign that she was lying. If it was there, it was too well hidden for him to see. The very real possibility that Jess had always assumed her future didn’t extend much past the current moment stayed with him until they reached the inn, both lost in their own thoughts.
Jess was trying to be honest with Derek—really she was—but a lifetime of keeping secrets made it more than a little difficult.
Opening up to him had left her more vulnerable than she’d thought. No one in her world asked about the future. They all knew it wasn’t guaranteed. The only thing she had was the task ahead of her, so that was where she would direct her attention.
Her current task was to determine a way into the ambassador’s house. During the war, it had been watched constantly, along with the residences of a few other suspicious people. Nothing untoward had ever happened at the ambassador’s house. Nothing much happened there at all.
A Pursuit of Home Page 21