by Jane Feather
“Of course.”
“Take a look around Vasquez’s lodgings,” Greville said, giving them the address. “There may be a clue, something…although I doubt it. The man’s a consummate professional.”
“He still managed to leave one of his men behind,” Harry pointed out.
Greville gave a short, hard laugh. “So he did…so he did.” He strode from the kitchen and out into the cool night air. They wouldn’t hurt Aurelia any more than they had already done, they would have no reason to, he told himself as he ran through the streets to his own house. They wanted him, only him. But it was false comfort, he knew. Vasquez would have no need of Aurelia once he’d got Greville, and he couldn’t afford to let her go as a living witness to who and what he was. But he would keep her alive until he had accomplished his mission.
Greville let himself into his house and stopped for a brief moment by the fallen body of the night watchman. The man was dead. Another score to settle with Vasquez’s henchman. He took the stairs two at a time, and heard Lyra’s low growl as he reached the hallway at the head. The dog was standing in a bedroom doorway halfway along the corridor.
“So that’s where you have him,” Greville observed, coming up to the hound, laying a calm hand on her massive head. The dog pushed her head into his hand, then backed into the bedroom. She stood at the side of the bed, head cocked, as if offering him some newly caught prey.
“Well, well, what have we here?” Greville murmured at the prone figure. Miguel turned his head out of the quilt with difficulty and glared at Greville. Defiance was in the glare, but also fear. Miguel knew what to expect at the hands of the asp.
Greville shrugged out of his coat, laying it carefully over the back of a chair. He stood by the bed, rolling up his sleeves with exaggerated care. “Where is she?” he asked almost conversationally.
Miguel gazed up into those merciless dark gray eyes and a shudder went through him. Then he turned his face into the quilt in a gesture of rejection. Greville sighed.
• • •
It was growing cold in the stable and Aurelia’s gauze-and-satin ball gown offered little protection. She crossed her bare arms over her breasts and tried to control her shivers. Finally she stood up and banged on the door. “Don Antonio, I’m cold.” It seemed almost better at this point to invite violence than to continue in this freezing uncertainty.
The top half of the door opened. “I told you to be quiet.”
“Yes, but perhaps you didn’t realize how cold it is. And as you can see, I’m scarcely dressed for it.” Aurelia was astounded at herself. She sounded irritated and impatient, as if she had a positive right to demand creature comforts. To her immense gratification, she saw that her manner disconcerted her captor.
“Surely there’s a horse blanket or something around here,” she said, trying to peer around him into the rest of the building. He slapped her face with the flat of his hand and she jerked her head back. The door slammed shut.
Aurelia retreated to her hay bale again. The slap had stung, but no worse than that. It was more a warning than an intent to hurt. After a few minutes, the top half of the door opened again and something landed at her feet. She picked it up and shook out the rough homespun folds of a stale-smelling horse blanket.
She wrapped herself up gratefully, then remembered another of Greville’s maxims. Sleep when there is nothing else you can do. Not that she thought Greville had expected her to need many of his maxims, those, at least, that applied to the riskier aspects of his work. But still, that one seemed to make sense in the present circumstances.
She pulled apart the hay bale and made a nest of sorts, then curled herself into it, snug in the blanket. She didn’t expect to sleep, but somehow she did.
She awoke with a start at the sound of the door opening. Lamplight flooded the stall, and she blinked from deep in her nest. Don Antonio stood above her.
“I apologize for disturbing your beauty sleep, ma’am,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “But perhaps I could trouble you for your attention.”
Aurelia sat up, then stood up, keeping the blanket tight around her. Now she wished she hadn’t slept. Somehow the calm resolution of earlier had deserted her, and all she could see was the cruel line of his mouth and the bottomless black depths of his impassive gaze. Now, she thought, now, he would hurt her.
• • •
Greville regarded Miguel with dispassion and said in fluent Spanish, “So if you didn’t come here to take the child, why did you come?”
Miguel’s bloodshot, pain-filled eyes gazed up at him. “A lock of her hair,” he croaked. “Something to prove I had been close to her.” He began to babble as he saw his tormentor reach again for Miguel’s own little box of diamond-tipped tools. “He didn’t want the child…too much trouble…just something to get her mother to cooperate…to be afraid for the child.”
Greville nodded as if in complete understanding and agreement and inquired pleasantly, “So, where is Vasquez holding my wife?”
Miguel groaned. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, come now, my friend, you can’t believe I’m such a fool. You were to take him the token…so where were you to take it?”
“I was to meet him outside the house…back of the house, when Don Antonio brought the woman out to the carriage. But that damned dog…” Miguel coughed, turning his head into the coverlet.
“But you know where they are now.” Greville reached down and twisted the man’s head so that he faced him and Miguel stared into the inexorable dark eyes. “Tell me,” Greville murmured gently, before saying something softly to Lyra.
Miguel shrieked as the hound leaped astride him.
• • •
Aurelia looked at the parchment on the rickety wooden table in front of her. “This is a begging letter. My husband will know immediately that these pathetic words are not my own.”
“It makes no difference,” Vasquez stated. “It will bring him. Sign it.”
“It won’t bring him,” she said quietly. “It won’t convince him that I am alive. Only my own words can do that. He won’t step into your trap unless he believes that my life is at stake.” And maybe not even then.
“Oh, make no mistake, my lady, it most certainly is,” Vasquez said barely above a whisper. The knife was in his hand once more and he saw her quick shudder. He had hoped that while he waited on the off chance that Miguel would finally appear, apprehension would soften her for him, but she’d given him no signs of it. But the knife frightened her. “And the asp will know that by now.”
The asp? But then Aurelia lost all interest in such a name as Vasquez ordered Carlos to hold her hand flat on the table.
“You will sign in your blood,” Vasquez stated, laying the tip of the knife against the nail bed of her forefinger. “We shall see how long it takes to slice the skin from this pretty finger…about ten minutes, I should think. Ten very slow minutes.” The knife point slid beneath the skin at the base of the nail and the world spun around her.
“Wait,” she gasped. “I’ll sign, but not this. If you want him to believe it’s worth trying to save me, you will let me ask him to come.” She flicked the parchment with her free hand. “He will think you forced me to sign a blank piece of paper and then wrote your own words above my signature. He will assume I am already dead.”
Don Antonio regarded her in frowning silence. Then he dipped the quill in the inkpot on the rickety table in the stable and scribbled through his own lines. He turned the paper over. “Very well, write your own appeal. And I suggest you make it heartfelt.” He dipped the quill again and handed it to her.
Carlos still held her left hand flat to the table, blood seeping from the tiny nick where a fold of skin was loosened. Aurelia’s free hand shook as she wrote a few lines, signed the letter, and looked up at Vasquez. He took it, scrutinized it, still frowning. Nothing was amiss that he could see, and it had a satisfactory ring of desperation to it.
“One more thing. Press her finger against it
, Carlos.”
Carlos lifted her hurt hand and bent the finger, pressing the cut against the parchment below her signature. Vasquez nodded his satisfaction, folded the bloodstained sheet over another one that he took from his pocket, and gave the package to Carlos with low-voiced instructions. The coachman left the stable, and Don Antonio gave Aurelia a push back into the stall. The door locked behind her.
• • •
Greville left the bedchamber, Lyra on his heels. There was no need for her to guard the man on the bed any longer. Greville was hurrying down the stairs when the doorknocker sounded loudly. He opened it to let in Alex.
“Any luck?” Alex asked, his gaze skimming over the body in the hall. “Is that him?”
“No, one of his victims,” Greville said shortly. “But he gave me all he knows.”
“This was on your doorstep.” Alex held out a small package. “Harry’s gone after the man who brought it, but I doubt he’ll catch him, he was turning the corner into the square as we came up. We found nothing at the lodging either.”
Greville scarcely seemed to hear as he opened the package and took in the contents on both sheets. His eyes hardened and his mouth grew grim as he saw the bloodstain. But he ignored it, concentrating on the words she had written. They were in her own hand, so she was still alive, even if she was hurt. But the hurt had not prevented her from thinking.
“About half an hour due north from here,” he murmured with a low whistle of appreciation. “Clever girl.”
“I lost him.” Harry entered the house somewhat breathlessly. He glanced at the body. “Anything to be done here?”
“No,” Greville said. “It’s a little late in the day. Our friend upstairs…”
“Ah.” Harry nodded his comprehension, then gestured to the package. “What is it?”
“Instructions from Vasquez and a note from Aurelia.” Greville passed one of the papers to him. “Written under duress, but she’s managed to pass on some information that fits quite well with what I got out of that piece of vermin upstairs.”
Harry and Alex poured over the parchment. “I don’t understand,” Harry said as he finished reading. “She says she’s frightened, she’s exhausted, afraid they mean harm to Franny, and afraid for her own life. She begs you to follow their instructions or they will kill her. Where’s the information?”
Greville half smiled. “She also says she’s being held about half an hour due north from here.”
“How is she telling you that?” Harry, the master of code, frowned at the letter. Then his face cleared. “Of course, each n is faintly underlined. Hence ‘north.’ But where’s the half hour?”
“Look at her signature…the o.”
Harry chuckled. The letter was neatly bisected. “Clever. She could draw a straight line at any point through the o without it looking like anything more than an idiosyncratic touch to her signature.”
“May I?” Alex took the letter and nodded. “Of course. Even a quarter, or three-quarters could be done. Was this a trick of yours, Falconer?”
Greville shrugged. “One of several I taught her. I have to admit I didn’t think she’d need most of them.” His expression was dark.
“So, how does this information fit with what you learned from our friend upstairs?” Harry asked.
“An abandoned stable block outside a hamlet is as concrete as it got,” Greville said. “He hasn’t been there himself, and he wasn’t expecting to have to find it for himself, since his instructions were to meet Vasquez at Mount Street with some proof that he had access to Franny. He was to travel in the carriage with Vasquez and Aurelia. But it has to be on a main highway, or just off one, for them to get anywhere outside the city in only half an hour.”
Greville tapped the second sheet of parchment against the palm of his hand. “Vasquez’s instructions are for me to meet him alone before dawn at the crossroads in the village of Islington. Aurelia’s life for mine.”
Greville’s nostrils flared. “Of course he has no intention of letting either of us live. But before he gives me the coup de grâce, he’ll use Aurelia to get information from me. Even though he’s lost his Inquisition assistant, he’ll still know how to do the job, just rather more crudely.” A shudder ran up Greville’s spine. They wouldn’t touch Aurelia…his Aurelia. And Vasquez would pay by inches for the hurt he had already caused her.
“They won’t risk losing her until they have what they want from you,” Alex said. “If we can find her first, and presumably this stable block must be close by, then we can get her out while you deal with your friend.”
Greville nodded. “As long as she’s conscious, she’ll be able to help herself.” He spoke with a dispassion that concealed his fear for her. She still had her wits about her, or she would not have managed to write her own letter. That was all he had to keep in mind to keep a clear and objective focus. Aurelia’s safety first, the death of Vasquez second.
“Horseback to Islington,” he said. “We’ll find the stable building somewhere around the crossroads. Vasquez doesn’t have time for a lengthy journey from where he has Aurelia to the rendezvous with me.”
“What about upstairs?” Harry asked with a rather delicate gesture in the direction of the staircase. “Should I send Lester to clean up?”
“I’d be grateful,” Greville said. “I don’t have time myself. When he comes around, I’m sure they’ll be interested in him at the ministry. He’ll be a mine of information under the right questioning.” Greville’s mouth twisted in a grim smile. “We’ll see how well the Inquisition stands up to having its own techniques used upon itself. I’ll change and meet you in Grosvenor Square in thirty minutes. We’ll take the North Road. We have two hours until dawn.”
Harry and Alex left. “I’ll leave Livia with Cornelia,” Alex said as they walked swiftly to Mount Street. “I’d rather she wasn’t alone.”
“You might find she has her own opinions on the matter,” Harry said drily. He surveyed the scene on the street outside his house. Linkboys and footmen were running up and down calling for carriages as the guests swarmed out of his house at the end of the evening. “We’ll go in through the back,” Harry decided. “I can’t afford to get caught up in bidding farewell to our guests.”
With Livia as an able aide-de-camp, Cornelia was holding the fort, glossing over her husband’s absence and murmuring all the obligatory pleasantries. Harry made no attempt to distract her, and he and Alex had left the house again, Alex in borrowed riding britches, before the last guest had departed. Lester had gone to pick up a couple of good men to aid in the cleanup on South Audley Street.
“Where did they go?” Cornelia asked rhetorically as the last guest drifted down the stairs to the open door.
“Where’s Ellie?” Livia countered.
“Harry might have left a message.” Cornelia turned away from the stairs, suddenly aware of her bone-deep fatigue and aching feet. “Lord, I’m tired.” She made her way into her own sitting room and fell into a corner of the sofa.
A discreet knock announced a footman with a folded sheet of paper on a silver tray. Cornelia recognized her husband’s writing and snatched at it eagerly. “Thank you.” She waved a hand in dismissal.
“Is there anything else I can get you, my lady?”
“No…no, I don’t think so. Thank you.” She opened the sheet while Livia waited intently. The footman departed and Cornelia said, “They’ve gone to get Aurelia back. That’s all he says…isn’t that just so typical, Liv, and so infuriating. Nothing about what’s happened, or where she is, or why any of this…” Cornelia tossed the sheet onto the low table in front of her.
Livia leaned forward and picked up the note to read it for herself. “You forgot to mention that Alex suggests that I stay here until they return. Has he forgotten that his son is in Cavendish Square? I can’t possibly stay here all night while little Alexander is half a city away.”
“Send someone for him,” Cornelia said. “You have your own carriage outside. Sen
d them to bring the baby and his nurse. We might as well be all together in this, don’t you think? We have Franny in the nursery already.”
Livia required no persuasion. The carriage was sent to Cavendish Square, and the two women sat in the parlor as the bustle of the house quieted around them and the clock ticked, and the first faint gray of the false dawn appeared on the horizon.
Chapter Twenty-six
“THAT MUST BE IT.” GREVILLE spoke barely above a whisper as the three men sat their horses on the outskirts of a tiny hamlet just outside the village of Islington. In front of them stood a tumbledown building, its thatch wearing thin, the stone gateposts to the yard crumbling. Faint lamplight showed through the slatted walls.
“And we passed the crossroads a half mile back,” Harry murmured.
Greville glanced up at the sky. Polaris was fading but still as due north as ever. “I’m getting into position.”
His companions merely raised hands in acknowledgment, and Greville backed his horse onto the lane, before picking his way through the trees alongside the cart track that led from the crossroads to the building. At the crossroads, he took up his position to the side, behind a gigantic oak tree. He wanted to catch Vasquez off guard for a vital moment before they brought out Aurelia.
He sat quietly, waiting. Clearing his mind of everything, everyone. And most particularly of all thoughts of Aurelia. She had the power to distract him, to muddle his purpose with emotion. He knew what had to be done once Vasquez appeared, and it was never fruitful to revisit a plan.
• • •
When the stable door opened, Alex and Harry were standing beside their mounts, keeping calming hands on bridles and necks. They were well hidden, but the slightest movement could alert the man who stood now in the yard, his eyes on the reddening sky, his body alert, poised, listening. A rapier’s silver sheath glistened in the light from the open door behind him. Then he spoke softly over his shoulder, and another man led out a broad-shouldered gelding.