A Pursuit of Home

by Kristi Ann Hunter

  He wasn’t waiting at some prearranged meeting place? Hadn’t traded the gaudy, fancy carriage for a much less noticeable one?

  At his look of confusion, she shrugged. “I couldn’t possibly know what the best exit point from that house would be or when we’d need to leave.” She untied the dress and bundled it around the shoes before tucking the lump beneath her arm. “Besides, this is London. Walk far enough and you’ll find a hack to hire.”

  “We can risk hiring a hack?”

  Her laugh rolled over him. There was something suddenly freer about her. She even nudged him good-naturedly with her shoulder. “You think Lord Bradford has had time to replace every hack in London with his own drivers? That takes considerably more time than two days and is nearly impossible.” Jess shook her head, the artful blond curls looking more than a little wilted after the evening’s adventures.

  He liked it. As beautiful as the curls and pearls had been, they hadn’t looked like Jess. Then again, he had trouble remembering her in that severe bun she’d worn back at Haven Manor as well. This relaxed yet somehow confined style suited her better.

  “So I should hail a hack?” He’d been following her through a network of alleyways until he was thoroughly lost—not that he knew his way around London much to begin with.

  “No.” She laughed again. “Chemsford’s house is only three streets away. It’s late, but I think he’ll let us in.”

  “If not, you can simply claim to be the chimney sweep, pull a brush out of that bag of yours, sneak down the chimney, and let me in the back door,” Derek grumbled with a shake of his head.

  Her head drooped a bit. She looked . . . defeated? Surely not.

  “They bother you, then? The disguises?”

  His gut said yes, that he couldn’t stand not knowing what was going to happen next, but he paused before answering. Was he truly that bothered by the changing appearances? The old lady had been amusing, and his anger over the art student had been more about her deceit than her ability to sneak in. No, it wasn’t the disguises themselves that bothered him.

  “Which one is you?” he asked.

  Her head jerked up, and she stumbled as she looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  He continued, his voice a bit stronger as realization set in. “The disguises are simply window dressing—a new look to fit in. I’m starting to wonder, though, if I’ve ever actually met you. Has every moment been a part you’ve played?”

  Her reply was a low whisper, barely discernible over London’s night noises. “Does it matter?”

  “Yes,” he said, “it matters. I like you—at least I think I do—but I’m wondering if I merely like one of your personas. Are you truly that prickly, argumentative woman who threatened to spear me to the wall of the kitchen if I came down to look through the ceramics one more time, or are you the woman who talked to me in the hayloft?”

  “Why can’t I be both?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps you can.” The idea disheartened him, but he didn’t want to tell her why.

  The woman at Haven Manor hadn’t liked him at all, had wanted him gone, and would have been happy to lace his breakfast with arsenic if she thought she’d get away with it. The woman in the hayloft had seemed like she wanted him around.

  Was it only because she’d needed his help? Could he trust that he was getting to know the real Jess? Or did she still hate him?

  “I like you, too,” she said quietly as they emerged from the alley onto a street he vaguely recognized. “I didn’t expect to, but I do.” She stopped and looked up at him. “You’re a good man, Derek Thornbury.”

  Before he could respond, she went up the steps to knock on the heavy front door.

  He followed slowly, wondering why her admission had sounded more than a little bit sad.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  You will explain to me right now why there is a duke in my drawing room”—Daphne paused to look at the tall clock in the corner of the front hall—“at three in the morning.” She crossed her arms and tried to look stern but ruined the effect by adding, “Please.”

  Jess tried not to laugh in the face of her clearly distraught friend as the front door shut behind her. She didn’t quite contain the hint of a smile, though.

  “This isn’t funny,” Daphne said through gritted teeth. “He’s a duke.”

  “You’re a marchioness.”

  “Not a real one. Not like this. He’s scary. He got here an hour ago and has been visiting with William. Mrs. Hopkins is beside herself wanting to take in a tea tray, but I haven’t let her because we don’t know what he likes or if he’s hungry. I think she might quit if I don’t stop fretting about it.”

  Jess bit her lip. She could only assume the duke was Ryland. He’d known she was back in London, obviously, since she’d gone to his house to collect the dress and get his assistance procuring Derek’s evening clothes. She hadn’t told him she was coming here afterward. Obviously Jeffreys had, the snitch.

  “What are you doing here?” Jess asked Daphne.

  “William wrote me that you and Mr. Thornbury were here but then a servant had come to collect your trunks and he’d heard nothing since.” Daphne sniffed. “I was worried.”

  “Have you been in London for two weeks?” The smile dropped from Jess’s face as she searched Daphne’s for any sign that her friend was unwell. Daphne hated crowds. The attention of groups of people had been known to make her faint in panic. For her to voluntarily spend more than a handful of days in London because she was worried about Jess was a humbling thought indeed.

  “Daph, I don’t care if there’s nothing but water in that pot, get the tea tray in here now or I’ll—oh. Finally decided to show up, did you?”

  Jess jerked her head around as she recognized Kit’s voice. Seeing her was even more surprising than seeing Daphne. This was Daphne’s husband’s house, after all.

  “What are you doing here?” Jess asked, a thread of worry creeping into her thoughts. Kit had been so busy gallivanting about England with her new husband that Jess had thought her safe from whatever might happen. Even Daphne had been distant enough at Haven Manor for Jess not to worry.

  Now both of them were here in London. The last thing Jess needed was more people she had to convince to stay out of danger’s way. Daphne would have been easy enough to handle. Kit was a different matter.

  “Me?” Kit pressed a hand to her chest. “I’m visiting with a friend, as I often do when passing through London. Graham and I always check to see if Daphne is in Town.” Her gaze narrowed and her hands propped on her hips. “And you are avoiding Daphne’s question.”

  “I’m not, actually,” Jess said, shifting her bundle to balance against her other hip. “She hasn’t asked me a question, only demanded an explanation. But in the interest of expediting this rather annoying middle-of-the-night gathering, Ryland will eat anything and will drink any form of black tea. Whatever you have on hand. He won’t complain.”

  Daphne paled. “You call the Duke of Marshington Ryland?”

  “Most of the time, yes, though at the moment I’m considering using something more along the lines of Meddling Mamie.”

  Her friends looked at her in stunned silence. “I’m finally realizing,” Kit whispered, “just how much we don’t know about you.”

  “Yes, well, you’re better off. He’s in the drawing room, you said?”

  “Er, yes,” Daphne said with a nod. “I’ll send up that tea.”

  Jess turned to follow Kit to the drawing room and found Derek standing off to the side of the hall watching her, his head cocked to the side as he slowly cleaned his spectacles with a handkerchief. His forehead was slightly wrinkled from his lifted eyebrows as he glanced at Daphne’s retreating back.

  This was getting out of hand. How was she supposed to protect all these people if they simply refused to stay away from her?

  Emotion, something that normally dallied about the fringes of her consciousness, moved through her in an unrecognizable, un
controllable wave. Apparently she’d decided to make up for a decade of tepid feelings in a single night. She could do without that, thank you very much. The entire mess made her want to lash out at something, to attack something, to make the problem about something, someone other than herself.

  Perhaps there was something convenient about Ryland’s presence.

  Jess pushed past Kit and stomped toward the drawing room. Ryland would hear her coming and, if he knew what was good for him, tremble at the thought.

  Both men watched her silently as she strode into the drawing room and dropped her satchel and clothing bundle onto a chair. Slowly, they stood, but Jess had a feeling that courtesy had been for Kit, who’d followed a few steps behind Jess.

  She shouldn’t care, but Derek’s treatment the past two weeks along with the many roles she’d had to take on had left her a bit mixed up. The irritation put her in the perfect mood to take on a duke who’d forgotten he’d retired from the spy life.

  “You are determined to put yourself in the line of danger, aren’t you?”

  Ryland cocked an eyebrow and glanced around the drawing room. “Are you telling me you just willingly put Chemsford and his wife in danger by coming here?”

  “Of course not,” Jess bit out. She hated when he used logic to refute her. No matter that she had learned a great deal about logical thinking from him over the years, he still managed to be just a little bit ahead of her.

  “Jeffreys told me the game has changed,” he continued. “They may not know where you are, but they know where you’ve been and where you’re likely to go.”

  “We have to see the rest of the paintings,” she said. “We don’t know enough to determine the map.”

  “You don’t have to see anything,” Ryland said quietly before pointing at Derek. “He does.”

  “You are not asking me to sit here and eat biscuits while he puts himself in harm’s way. I know you aren’t suggesting such a thing.”

  Her tone was cold, icy enough that even she was a little taken aback by the implied threat under her words. There weren’t many people she considered true friends, but most were currently in this house. The last time everyone she loved had been in one place, the door had been broken in, and every last one of them had been carted off to potential death.

  “No,” Ryland said gently, using the voice he reserved for animals and scared bystanders. “I’m not suggesting that. I’m simply saying you are the one they’re looking for. You are the one who can’t be seen.”

  “I’m never seen.”

  “Are you willing to bank his life on that?”

  The question was a rock that threw the room into stillness. She wasn’t, of course she wasn’t. But if she didn’t go, who would? She would still be asking someone else to risk themselves for her. She couldn’t do that either. She wasn’t worth it. At this moment, she wasn’t even certain Verbonne was worth it.

  “We may not have to,” Derek said, stepping up to her side. He stood, his arm pressed to hers, a solid wall of support.

  She glanced at him from the corner of her eye, expecting to see sweat or to feel him tremble, to find some sign that he was nervous about the confrontation. There was none. He was disheveled from their earlier adventure, but that honestly made him look more like himself. He looked like he had at Haven Manor when he talked about art and the potential findings. He looked confident.

  “Explain,” Ryland demanded.

  The housekeeper entered with a tea tray then, looking flustered and exasperated. Daphne trailed behind her with a second tray.

  Jess smiled. She couldn’t help it. There were probably maids giving in to fits of the vapors in the kitchens right now, just as aghast as the housekeeper was that a marchioness would consider carrying her own tea tray.

  Ryland shifted in his seat and Derek waited patiently as Daphne bustled about, handing out cups of tea. Then Derek turned to his friend. “William, have you a magic lantern by any chance?”

  Derek owed everyone he’d ever met the largest of apologies if this was how they felt when he started talking about how fascinating a piece of art was.

  As it turned out, William did indeed possess a magic lantern, though no one had used it in years. The Argand lamp inside provided a significantly brighter beam of light than the candle had in the closet.

  Instead of looking at the slides of the paintings as Derek had assumed they would do, Jess and the duke were obsessively working their way through the coded slides, marveling at the ingenuity but also the fragility of such a method. With every code revealed, they fell into a discussion of the possible significance.

  “Most of them are clearly meeting times,” Jess said as she took down another paper holding a decoded message. “Why not destroy the slides after reading them?”

  “He might not have trusted the person sending them and wanted to hold on to them in case something went poorly.” The duke flipped through another few panes of painted glass, as if he could tell just by looking what ones might hold an interesting message.

  “Perhaps,” Derek said slowly, “it might be a good idea to look at the slides that might be the paintings? Surely most of these meeting times are in the past, whereas the mystery of the paintings is a bit more pressing.” He swallowed as the duke’s grey eyes landed heavily on him. “Marshington.”

  Despite the fact that he’d been told to call the duke Marshington last time they’d met, it still felt strange, even wrong to do something so socially inappropriate.

  Not that anything about this evening could be considered normal.

  Perhaps he was dreaming. That would explain it.

  Actually, no it wouldn’t. His mind could never come up with this night’s sequence of events.

  He could just return to his resolve not to call the man anything. It should be simple enough to do since the other men in the room were asleep.

  The wives had left long ago to seek their beds while William and Lord Wharton had stayed, only to succumb to the natural order of things anyway. Their heads lolled back against the chairs. One of them let out a soft snore.

  The duke didn’t seem to think a thing of Derek’s use of his name as he abandoned the basket of coded slides and pulled the second basket closer to him. “Are the paintings in here?”

  Derek pulled a slide from the basket and slid it into the magic lantern. “I’m not sure if they’re the paintings we’re seeking.”

  A simplified representation of the ambassador’s painting appeared on the wall. Considering the size of the slide, it held a great bit of detail. Whoever had painted it had been as careful as possible.

  Jess came nearer, rubbing one hand up and down her arm. “I should have remembered what was important.”

  Her voice was quiet, guilty. Derek tried to make his shrug as unconcerned as possible, even though he quite agreed with her. “I think it’s rather like me getting distracted by a painting. It happens. Fortunately, we aren’t distracted by the same things.”

  “No, we aren’t.” Her voice was pitched low, almost to a whisper. “I suppose that makes us a decent team.”

  Before he could react, she moved past him to approach the wall and look at the painting. “They know the paintings hold some significance. It would seem they’ve been trying to collect the images over the years as well.”

  Derek joined her to look at the image on the wall. “This seems a strange way to document them. Why not simply keep sketches? They allow for considerably more detail.”

  “There was already a system in place for hiding slides and presumably for obtaining them. Continuing those methods is less suspicious.”

  The duke pulled the slide and inserted another one. “What about this?”

  “That’s the painting from Lord Bradford’s house,” Derek said. “I’ll have to get my sketchbook to compare them, but I think the painting in the background is significant. Nothing else could be specific to a location.”

  The painting disappeared, replaced for a moment by a harsh, bright circle of
light. It flooded over the angles of Jess’s cheeks and revealed deep shadows beneath her eyes that were not solely the product of a direct light source.

  They all needed to sleep. Besides, it was likely the servants would be rising soon, destroying any hope of privacy.

  The next picture slid across the wall. It wasn’t a painting Derek had seen before, and without being able to see the styling and the details, he couldn’t say for certain that the work had been done by one of The Six. It did, however, fit the method of the paintings they’d seen for the most part.

  An archer, with a just-released arrow flying toward an animal that was little more than an indistinct blob near the woods, took up the foreground of the picture. That was certainly a directional indicator. In the back was a castle that was probably distinctive, but on the slide it was simply a series of towers.

  “Could be a number of tower keeps,” the duke said. “They all sit on a hill and possess a similar shape.”

  Derek frowned. That didn’t seem to fit the other paintings. While there were certainly details missing, he couldn’t see any indication of where that identifying detail would be. Perhaps this was one of the decoys.

  They looked at two more paintings, one of which was most certainly a decoy painting and the other a carriage with high mountains on either side and a flock of birds crossing overhead.

  “Either Cheddar Gorge or the Peaks,” Jess said. “Hard to say.”

  “Those are both large areas,” Derek said. “It will be hard to determine where it is exactly and find the direction.”

  The last painting slid onto the wall.

  “That’s not one of them,” Derek said. “That’s by John Michael Wright. I’ve seen it. It’s signed. Same time period but definitely not one by The Six.”

  “So it’s not one of the ones we’re looking for?” Jess asked.

  “No,” Derek said with a shake of his head. “But it also means they don’t really know what they’re looking for either.”