Not wise, laying hands on that woman. It made him want more.
A Voyage Through the Crimea to Constantinople proved to be a trip through Crimea, and went back in place. Next came Pope’s translation of the Odyssey. It was the only poetry in the bookcase. Bold writing on the frontispiece read, “Find time to read this while I’m gone. Ned.” The pages were uncut. She kept the book, but she’d never opened it.
And who is Ned? He’d find out. “I want that woman out of my house.”
Adrian shrugged. “I want reliable mail service to St. Petersburg in the winter. We must both live with disappointment. ”
“If you care about this girl, you’ll get her out of my house. I may not have gathered all the evidence, but I’m the one who examined it and laid it out. When we hang her father, she’s going to know I was part of it. It’s going to make her sick, knowing she sat at the same table with me.” Knowing I had my hands on her.
“If Josiah hangs, Jess will be an indescribable mess anyway. I intend to see it doesn’t happen.” Adrian slid the empty drawer out and upended it, searching every side. “Nothing. Some more nothing. Ah. This is promising.”
From the bottom drawer of the dresser, Adrian pulled a slim lacquer box, half full of letters. He laid them in a row and flipped through the envelopes quickly, deliberate and engrossed.
Even from here Sebastian could see those were personal letters, and not recent. “She doesn’t keep state secrets tied up with a blue ribbon.”
“An excellent point. I shall take you along every time I ransack a bedroom.” Adrian sat on the wide bench and opened the first note.
“Then why are you reading her letters?”
“Incurable nosiness. Let me concentrate.”
Which left him to do the search. Last shelf. Still no packet from the Foreign Office, pretending to be Jottings from Arabia.
On a stand next to the bookcase was a wire cage with water dish and bedding, clean, but empty of any animal. She didn’t just have a dog or a cat, then. She kept something small and furry in there. Maybe something exotic she’d picked up in her travels.
Above the cage hung a small, bright painting, very old. A maiden stood in a garden, her hand resting upon the arched neck of a unicorn, a white hound at her feet. Jewel-colored birds perched in the branches around her and her long, golden hair was unbound, flowing like a river. “I didn’t know this was out of France.”
“Hmmm?”
“I’ve seen copies. This is the original.” He barely let himself touch the edges as he lifted it and checked behind. “It’s thirteenth century, from Arles.” That’s how powerful the Whitbys were. They owned something like this and hung it in a girl’s bedroom. “That other one, over there next to you, is a Bartolomeo Veneto. We could retire in luxury on the sale of these two.”
“Help yourself.” Adrian, cross-legged on the bench, had immersed himself in the next letter.
A Hepplewhite tallboy came next. The bottom drawer told him Jess’s taste in nightwear ran to soft batiste, silky as wind, so smooth it felt warm to the touch. Her shifts were threaded with bright, frivolous ribbon and expensive lace. But he already knew about her shifts, didn’t he? She didn’t keep stolen papers or account books among her underthings.
A jewelry box sat on top of the tallboy, in plain sight, next to the night candle. It was acacia wood with ivory, a work of art in its own right. He lifted it down and brought it to the bed. “Why doesn’t she lock up her jewelry?”
“To save me the trouble of hauling out my lockpicks.” Jess didn’t bother with locks in her bedroom. Any thief who made it this far wouldn’t be stopped by locks.
He opened the case. Dozens of rings and necklaces rested in small, blue-velvet compartments. The stones were clear, intense in hue, set in gold. Jess liked her finery bold, and she preferred glow to sparkle.
The top tray in the jewelry box lifted out. The one below held earrings and bracelets. Antiques and exotics. Baltic amber set in the Russian style, Persian turquoise, old, old Turkish enamel work, a bracelet of small cabochon citrines—everything in rich colors that would complement Jess’s honey-colored beauty. The best piece was a star sapphire, Ceylon blue, about fifteen carats. All first quality goods, but nothing remarkable. He traded a hundred stones this good every year.
He lifted out the second tray. He’d open Jess’s mind like this, layer by layer.
Below, in the last secrets of the box, he met magic.
In a black velvet nest, dozens of pale moons glowed, not white, but the most fragile golden pink. Here were pearls the color of dawn. Mushajjar pearls, from the Gulf of Persia. The largest was the size of his thumbnail. He cupped them in the palm of his hand and they weighed no more than dreams and sea foam. You had to know a lot about pearls to realize just how astonishing this necklace was. It should have been locked in a vault.
“Something else we could retire on?” Adrian was intent on reading, but, as usual, he knew everything going on.
“You could buy Yorkshire.” He coiled the magic back into place. Beside that amazing necklace, in the next compartment, was a red brown seashell and a dried daisy chain, both of them wrapped up safe in white silk.
This is private. This is her heart. I should feel guilty about seeing this.
“What the devil would I want with Yorkshire?” Adrian tapped the letters together and looped the blue ribbon around them and made a jaunty bow. “Gods. I was never that young. I’m glad Jess was, for a while.”
“It wasn’t tied like that.”
“I’m showing her somebody’s been in here.” He set the letters carefully back in the box and closed the lid. “Not a sparkling correspondent, young Ned, but I don’t suppose she noticed.”
That was the name written in the Odyssey. “Who’s Ned?” Adrian was up, wandering the room. He stopped at the fireplace and peered in. He waited just long enough to be annoying. “The Honorable Edward Harrington, Lord Harrington’s third son. Ned. She was fifteen. He was bright, likable, ambitious, and quite sickeningly in love with her.”
“A paragon.”
“It has given me considerable satisfaction, over the years, to think of Jess, out in the straw in a horse barn, bestowing her virginity on that boy.” He shifted the fire screen. “He had the face of a young Apollo.”
Jess’s lover. The one who’d put knowledge in her eyes. “What happened?”
Adrian ran his thumb along the carving of the fireplace. The mantel was black marble and the design was scrolled leaves. “Genuinely bad luck. Josiah shipped him out as supercargo, to see what he was made of. Ned died heroically off the Barbary Coast, saving the lives of two of his shipmates. He was seventeen.” Adrian rolled up his shirtsleeves and knelt on the bricks of the hearth. “Jess spent the next year constructing Europe’s best accounting system. I don’t think she slept at all for a couple months.”
“I see.” He wasn’t sure what he saw, except that he was jealous of a boy, half his age, and dead.
“He was a better man than either of us.” Adrian twitched a knife from its sheath on his left forearm. “And I think Jess has left us something . . . Yes. Here we find bits of ash on top of a newly laid fire. You burned paper the last time you were here, didn’t you, my girl? I neglected your education, if you can make a mistake like that.” The point of his knife slid into wispy gray ash, separating layers. “I have writing here. Hand me a piece of that paper, will you? And the quill.”
They’d done this before. Stationery and quills were in the little desk. He stroked a quill back and forth across the wool of his sleeve and handed it to Adrian. They both held their breath while Adrian used the feather to tease up a fragment of ash and transfer it onto a clean sheet of paper.
“Got it. Good. See what you make of this.” Gingerly, Adrian passed it up to him. “It’s her writing.”
The fragment was dull brown and charred around the edges, the writing barely legible. A word leaped out at him. Another word. Five or six letters in a row. He could read some of it. �
��It’s a list of ships. Mary Jane . . . something. The Prosper . . . That’s either the Prosperity or the Prospero. There’s dates next to them. Lady of Swansea. The Lively . . . That has to be the Lively Dancer. One of mine.”
“She burned this just before she came to Katherine Lane yesterday.” Adrian probed in the ash again and shook his head and stood up. “Nothing else usable.” He pulled out a handkerchief and began cleaning his hands. “Ships. Why? What does it mean?”
It means she’s looking for Cinq. “She’s tracking ship movements. I’ll know more when I’ve looked through the papers in her office.”
How does the woman who created Europe’s best accounting system hunt Cinq? She makes a list of ships. Then she comes after me. Why?
Outside the window, fifty yards away, a streetlamp grew a pinprick of light, then became a soft, round glow. The lamplighter was on the far side of the square, working his way around. It was almost dinnertime. He’d go home, and see Jess.
If she’s trying to trace Cinq, she’s innocent. No matter what her father’s done, she’s not part of it.
There was nothing more to be read on the burned scrap. He let it fall back in the hearth. “We’re through here. I’ll head back home and see how she’s doing.”
If she’s innocent, I can have her.
Whitby was guilty of so much foulness. Jess was clean. He had to separate her from her father before the bastard dragged her down along with him.
Adrian joined him at the window. “I’ll see you in Garnet Street at midnight, outside the Whitby warehouse. What does one wears to ransack a warehouse? Black, I think, and the charcoal waistcoat. Tasteful, yet understated.”
“I wonder what she’ll do when she finds out we’ve searched here and in her office.” He pulled the curtain closed.
“Something drastic.” Adrian sounded pleased.
Eleven
Kennett House
“TAKE THIS SLOWLY. YOU’RE MORE BADLY HURT than you realize.” Eunice had put her firmly into a wide, soft chair in the parlor. “Like that. Yes. We will wrap you up, if you don’t mind. You’re cold at the edges.”
So Jess slipped her shoes off, and leaned back, and let herself be cocooned in a big shawl. It was a wild tartan of royal blue and scarlet and dark green. They’d see you coming across the heather in this one.
“We’ll have dinner in an hour,” Eunice said, “unless Cook gets distracted. You are not to worry and make your head ache. Everything can wait till tomorrow.”
Then Eunice plunged back into the turmoil in the kitchen and left her to Quentin and Claudia. There was a new woman to take care of, down in the kitchen.
This new one had come to the back door, crying and terrified, running from her man. According to Mary Ann, who came to build up the fire and clear away the teacups, the latest girl was a pretty thing. “But soggy as a wet March. Enough to keep bread from rising, the way she takes on.”
Quentin and his sister were at the game table, playing piquet. They made an elegant pair, like something in a painting. Him, in his evening clothes, fine enough for any party in Mayfair. Her, in dark plum silk. Ten thousand bolts of cloth in London, and Claudia picked that color. No accounting for taste.
Quentin said, “And that is repiquet for me, which brings me to . . . yes. A hundred and sixty points. You really shouldn’t have discarded your diamonds.”
Claudia folded her hand together. “Perhaps.”
“There’s no perhaps about it, my dear.” Quentin led an eight of spades.
The big bow window of the front parlor looked out over the greenery in the park in the middle of the square. The curtains were flowered Spitalfields brocade. The secretaire and the cabinet were Chippendale, and the carpet was a Kashan. Old stuff everywhere. That was pure gentry, that was, buying old things, when there was new work just as good and cheaper. Five or six of Standish’s pots were lurking around on tables; old Greek pots, orange and black, very fine. The one closest to her showed a naked man skewering somebody with a long spear. She’d asked her governess, once, why the Greeks didn’t wear clothes in the old days, but she never got an answer.
A book lay open, facedown, on the back of the sofa—another of those wild-eyed political texts they favored. This morning’s newspaper was folded on the side table. A bag of needlework was tucked among the cushions of the sofa. This was where the family sat in the evening, reading and talking, vag playing cards.
Quentin said, “The play is all in the discards, Claudia. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you that.”
Kick him in the shin, Claudia, and pretend it’s an accident. But it wasn’t going to happen. The gentry didn’t act that way.
Sitting quiet, eyes half-closed, Jess could hear distant comings and goings in the kitchen. Eunice would be down there, calm and competent and matter-of-fact, dealing with problems, blunting the raw edge of fear. This latest woman, whoever she was, had fallen into good hands.
If things had gone a hair different, it might be her downstairs. It scared her, sometimes, thinking how close she’d come to ending up in a brothel. Lazarus saved her from that when he made her a thief.
She hadn’t planned to stay in bed all day. It would have felt too much like obeying the Captain’s orders. Besides, she had work to do. But somehow she’d fallen asleep, fully dressed, stretched out flat on top of the covers, as soon as he left. She had a dream of women coming in and out of the room, touching her forehead, covering her with a quilt, walking with quiet feet. When she woke up, it was almost sunset.
Outside, night was taking over the neat trees and scythed grass of the park. Shadows bled into shadows till they made one big darkness. She didn’t want to be out in that.
I’ll see Papa tomorrow. I’ll tell him what I’ve been doing. Papa’s going to yell at me till my ears fall off.
The bright, strong fire in the grate kept her knee and her shoulder and the side of her face almost too hot. She laid her cheek against the nubbly brocade of the wingback and watched Quentin and Claudia play piquet. It was an interesting game. Quentin cheated.
Claudia didn’t glance up from her cards. “Ladies do not remove their shoes in the parlor, Miss Whitby.”
“I know. It’s your aunt’s idea. Maybe you can say no to her, but I haven’t managed it yet.”
“Eunice is a law unto herself. She is also the daughter of a duke.” Claudia chose a discard. “You, Miss Whitby, are in no position to copy her eccentricity.”
“Lord, no. Prosaic as a hen’s egg, that’s me.”
“Ladies also do not use barnyard metaphors. I suspect you are capable of considerably more decorum than you practice.” Claudia selected a card carefully, played, and lost again. No surprise, with Quentin dealing.
The wingchair Eunice had put her in was sturdy as a tree. This would be the special property of the Captain. She could see Kennett coming home from business at the docks, tossing his hat on that table next to the front door. He’d shed his coat and leave it draped over the banister. Then he’d walk in here in shirtsleeves and drop into this chair with a sigh and stretch his boots out to the fender at the fire. She could almost feel the imprint where his body had relaxed, day after day. Curling into this chair felt like being held safe in a big hand.
Kennett’s rich house folded around her, giving her shelter the same way it protected that poor woman down in the basement.
In Egypt and the dry countries of the East, they took hospitality seriously. A guest didn’t root through his host’s saddle-bags, planning betrayal and death. A man’s own family would boot him out for being contemptible. She didn’t like to think what Mahmoud and Ali and Sa’ad would say if they could see what she was planning. They’d turn away in disgust, most likely.
There was no virtue in her. If there had been, she’d have traded it for the sailing date of a ship or a stray rumor from France or one scrap of proof against any of the men she was watching. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to save Papa.
Quentin felt her eyes on him and loo
ked up. “You must be bored, watching the play. You should join us.”
“Not today. Maybe when I’m feeling better.” Maybe when the moon turns green and jumps up and down in the sky like a frog.
“Soon, then. We’ll try a bit of whist. Claudia might have more luck with whist.” He did a top shuffle of the cards, leaving the bottom quarter unchanged. Planting the book, they called that where she came from. He wasn’t clumsy exactly, but she’d learned from experts.
She’d given up cardsharping forever when she was fifteen. It was a promise to Papa—her present to him on her birthday—that she’d never cheat at cards again. Papa was just determined to reform her.
There was no flavor to card games when you couldn’t cheat. “I don’t play much.”
Quentin finished his deal, smiling secret and superior. “I’ll teach you. It’s not too difficult for a woman to learn. I promise I won’t be too hard on you.” He’d lined five little towers of copper up in a neat row in front of him. He was raking in his sister’s pin money, ha’penny by ha’penny, cheating for farthings. What was she supposed to make of that? There were men living in round, black, goat-hair tents in the desert she understood better.
He dealt for himself and Claudia, taking some from the top of the deck, some from the bottom.
Claudia picked up the hand and studied it, selecting her discards, looking glum, as well she might. “I’m sure she knows how to play, Quent. She probably does it with a vulgar avidity.”
Why can’t I ever think of insults like that? She snuggled into the shawl. “It’s vulgar then, winning at cards.”
“To a lady,” Claudia sniffed, “winning or losing is a matter of indifference.”
“Ah. My governess never said a word, and she was supposed to be cousin to some marquis or other. I’ve long suspected that woman diddled us finely.”
“My trick.” Quentin helped himself to the cards on the table, neatened the corners, and stacked them in from of him.
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