by Kate Moore
“Pamela, I warn you. Obey me in this matter, or I won’t pay your gaming debts.”
There came a gasp, a ringing slap, and swift footsteps retreating. Emily didn’t move. She was pressed tight against Lynley’s body in the dark. He was perfectly still, alert, waiting.
At last a second set of heavier footsteps moved away. Lynley’s tension eased. He turned her toward him in the dark as the footsteps descended the stairs. She had thought little until now of the space between doors. It was an architectural quirk of grand London houses, these pockets of darkness the thickness of the wall’s stone blocks between the inner and outer doors of grand rooms. She had passed through them hundreds of times without a thought.
“Awkward, isn’t it?” he said. “To catch a glimpse backstage of our hosts’ unhappiness.”
“We could hardly help it, could we?” He’d gotten her into this. If he hadn’t left her, she would have stayed in the ballroom. She had not deliberately set out to listen to a private conversation. She tilted her face up. She could see nothing of Lynley in the dark, but she sensed he was amused. His flawed mouth would be smiling, exposing that gap between his lips.
“Handy space for escaping, isn’t it?” he said.
Maybe she had misjudged him. Maybe Lynley did not like being stared at any more than Chunee had. “Is that what you were up to?”
“It certainly is what you were doing.” His hands moved up from her waist to cup her shoulders and pull her closer against him. Her head fit just under his jaw, her ear pressed to the white linen at his throat. For a moment she seemed to breathe him in.
“After you left me at the mercy of London’s most cutthroat husband hunters.”
“Were they hard on your black gown?”
She nodded against his chest and his arms tightened around her. “And on my engagement at such an advanced old age to a man with an obscure title.”
“Ouch. Did you defend me at all?”
“I said that you are very rich.”
“Good for you.”
“Are you going to tell me what you are really doing, hiding in here?”
One of his hands moved languidly down her spine. “Besides waiting for you to find me where we might be alone?”
“Yes, besides that.”
The hand moved up again. “Hmmm. Are you going to tell me why you chose your mother’s black gown?”
“A woman wants to know that a man appreciates more than her...beauty.”
“Her wit, for instance?” The hand on her back kept up its lazy drift. Her thoughts narrowed to the path of his fingers along her spine. The movement of his hand seemed almost idle, without intention, and yet her pulse began to race and in a confused moment she pressed more closely against him, as if seeking something from his solid bulk.
She started to pull back, when his hands captured her head and tilted her face up to his, and his mouth came down on hers in the dark. The kiss held her suspended weightless as air, neither breathing nor moving, caught in a swift upward flight of exhilaration. Then, as they had in the dance, they plunged together deeper into the kiss.
Emily could not say how long it went on, or how it ended. His arms were tight around her. He felt as solid and immovable as stone, while she was light-headed and giddy.
“Can you help me?” he was saying.
“What?” Emily tried to yank her wayward thoughts back to the moment. She was lurking in a closet, or nearly a closet, the sort of place where a footman might sneak to steal a kiss from a housemaid.
“I think it’s time to restore marital harmony to the house. Will you help me?” he asked.
He meant Lord and Lady Ravenhurst. Emily thought marital harmony unlikely between the pair they had overheard. “What do you mean to do?”
“We’ve got to stop the search. Will you help me create a distraction?”
We? How had they become we? “How?”
“Can you drop something over the balustrade?”
“Like what?” He still had his arms around her, but it was clear that his mind was somewhere else.
“Something that will need to be mopped up.”
“You’re serious.”
“Give me ten minutes. Are you willing?”
“Yes,” her kiss-disordered brain answered.
He cracked open the door to the hall. A sliver of light exposed the black of his evening clothes and the bright gleam of adventure in his eye. Then he was gone, and Emily heard his footsteps on the stairs. He was leaving it to her, trusting her to act.
She slipped back into the ballroom behind the potted palm. The leering fiddler, in the midst of a lively country-dance, did not notice her. Emily moved easily along the edge of the room, looking for something to drop over the balustrade.
She saw just the thing when a harried-looking footman set a tray on one of the side tables and began loading it with empty drinks glasses. While his back was turned, Emily snagged the tray, turned away, and headed for the open doors of the ballroom.
She stepped to the edge of the balustrade and peered down at the expanse of marble floor below her. Once again the angry voices of her host and hostess filled the air. Emily held out the tray, and let it go. For a moment she thought she’d gone mad. The silver tray and the glassware separated in air into a noiseless glittering stream. Emily held her breath. Then tray and glass shattered against the marble floor below with an appalling splintering, jangling noise that echoed off stone, the noise of things breaking that could never be put together again. A terrible silence followed. Emily stepped away from the balustrade.
Chapter Four
Nothing the husband hunter encounters in the Season is as potentially misleading as a kiss. It is wise to avoid as much as possible those locales, which favor such expressions of feeling. The very circumstances in which the husband hunter is likely to succumb to the promptings of her heart or the persuasions of a gentleman, if such a man may retain the title, do not make for clear thinking. Moonlit gardens, dark balconies, and fireworks displays by their very nature obscure sight.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Lynley silently applauded Emily’s resourcefulness as he stepped from the library into the entry hall. The shattering glass had just the desired effect. His own head, still muddled by the kiss in the closet, cleared, and the Ravenhursts’ servants came running. Brooms and dustpans were fetched, and the work of sweeping up the glass, tiny fragments of which glittered from one end of the hall to the other, began. No one noted the odd direction of his entry on the scene.
Ravenhurst and his lady stood watching in silence. Ravenhurst saw Lynley first.
“Lynley, what are you doing here?”
Lynley lifted the coat draped over his arm. “Came to collect my coat and say goodnight, old man. Couldn’t help but overhear. Are you missing something?”
Lady Ravenhurst gave a dry laugh. “His wits.”
“Vital Foreign Office papers, if you must know,” Ravenhurst snarled.
“Where should we look?”
Ravenhurst tightened his jaw. “Someone’s taken them. I’ll have everyone searched.”
Lynley held his arms out and assumed an expression he hoped would pass for imbecilic. “Well, you can start with me, old man, but I often find the thing I’m looking for in some place I’ve forgotten. Shall we search your library?”
“Do,” said Lady Ravenhurst. “Take my absurd husband away to his precious library.”
“You know, Ravenhurst,” Lynley said, “we really should talk about your cellar.”
“My cellar?”
“The sherry’s execrable.”
Ravenhurst shot his wife one last glare, then stalked to the library. Lynley trailed after him.
* * * *
Emily hurried down the stairs. On the strength of a kiss in a closet she had done something outrageous. Ever
since Lynley had raised his head above that wretched sofa in Rosalind’s drawing room, she’d been off balance. She needed to regain her senses. She could hear footmen talking, the tinkle of glass fragments being swept up, and the rumble of Lynley’s voice in conversation with their hosts.
As she turned to descend the final run of stairs, a footman held up a hand to stop her. “Best to wait, miss. Broken glass about.”
From below Lady Ravenhurst looked up and shuddered as her gaze took in Emily’s black gown.
“Sorry to disturb,” Emily murmured. Her black gown, which had seemed a good joke at the start of the evening, now appeared to be a piece of utter folly. “I’m looking for Lynley. We were about to leave.”
“He’s in the library with my husband.”
“Oh.”
Lady Ravenhurst appeared lost, her violet eyes staring blankly, her hands hanging limp at her sides. She was one of those females Emily could never be—the helpless and fragile kind that compelled men to rush to their sides offering all manner of assistance. From above came the music and laughter of the ballroom. It was hard to stand saying nothing, offering no comfort to the woman before her, not knowing what exactly was wrong, but Emily knew it was what she must do, until the footmen withdrew.
When they did, she came down the steps, trying to think of what to say beyond the inadequate commonplaces of leave-taking. She could hear Lynley’s voice from within the library and ventured a thank-you. She added, “Tonight Lynley and I enjoyed our first waltz.”
Lady Ravenhurst’s gaze returned to Emily’s gown. “Betrothed, are you? How fitting that you wore black. I can’t imagine a worse fate for a woman than gaining a husband.” She turned away but stopped as Ravenhurst and Lynley emerged from the library.
“No need to search the guests, after all, Pamela,” Lord Ravenhurst declared. The anger had gone out of his voice, replaced by a puzzled tone. He shrugged. “Lynley found the missing papers.”
Lady Ravenhurst started and directed a searching look at Lynley. “Thank you.” She recovered some of her composure. “I did not care to have our guests treated like common thieves.”
“Of course, Lady Ravenhurst. Easiest thing in the world for papers to get out of order. Mine do so all the time,” Lynley assured them affably.
Emily watched her fiancé. His expression was cheerfully blank, as if he did not see his hosts’ misery. She recalled his words in the dark about seeing backstage at the play. What they had overheard together was only part of the story. The other part was a mystery. To Emily his disappearances over the course of the evening now appeared connected, and missing papers, not a broken marriage, seemed to be the heart of the matter.
“Lady Emily?” He crossed the hall and extended a hand to her. “Shall we take our leave?”
Without apparent hurry, he wrapped Emily in her cloak and led her out to their waiting carriage. His servant leaped to open the door and let down the step. Lynley helped her inside, tucked a rug over her skirts, and stepped away. He held the carriage door open with his back, watching her, making no move to enter.
“Lynley,” she said, “are you going to tell me what you were really doing at that party?”
“Dancing with my betrothed, sharing our happy news with the world.”
Emily shook her head. “You managed the return of those missing papers. Why? Not out of a deep concern for the state of the Ravenhursts’ marriage.”
“Anyone who knows them must be concerned,” he said. “I must take my leave of you.”
“What? Am I missing something?”
“Yes. This,” he said. He pulled her forward to the edge of the seat and kissed her with an almost ruthless fierceness. He pulled back, and Emily tried to recover her breath and wits.
“Changes everything, don’t you see?” He shut the carriage door and signaled the coachman to drive, and Emily fell back on the seat, her senses in a flurry, her thoughts in turmoil.
* * * *
Lynley returned to the club near three. He handed his hat and coat to a yawning Wilde, who relayed Goldsworthy’s request for a report.
“Does he ever sleep?” Lynley looked at the beckoning couches of the coffee room.
Wilde shook his head. “He had a message from Chartwell at midnight, sir. Woke him right up.”
With a last look at his favorite couch, Lynley headed up the stairs to Goldsworthy’s office.
Inside the big man’s lair, the air was cold and the lamps, dim. A desk the size of a Thames barge dominated the room with a pair of green leather chairs facing it like bits of flotsam floating in the great barge’s wake. Canvas from the supposed renovation project draped two of the walls. A third was covered in maps of London and the surrounding country. The last was lined with cabinets of various sizes and many drawers.
“Lad, what news?”
Lynley had a fleeting thought that the drawers contained information the spymaster was reluctant to share. He took one of the chairs opposite and had the satisfaction of seeing Goldsworthy straighten in his own chair so that they sat eye to eye.
“I take it Ravenhurst and Chartwell intended to bait a trap with some minor document.”
“Did they get their man?”
“There was a complication when Lady Ravenhurst objected to having her guests searched as they left the party.”
“Ah.” Goldsworthy moved a pile of papers from one side of the vast desk to the other. “Did this fellow slip through the trap then?”
“The ‘bait’ is back in Lord Ravenhurst’s library.”
“What?” That got the big man’s attention.
“In the coat closet I found two pages rolled up and stuffed in a finger of a man’s glove, tucked in the outer pocket of a greatcoat.”
“Our man’s glove? How did he slip through?” Goldsworthy frowned.
“The fellow’s name is Archer.” Lynley watched to see whether Goldsworthy reacted to the name. Not a twitch. “His pocket, but not his glove. Archer’s not our man.”
“You’d best be certain of that, lad.”
In Lynley’s mind it wasn’t as simple as Ravenhurst and Chartwell had supposed. “Archer is one of Lady Ravenhurst’s flirts.”
After Lynley had sent Emily Radstock home, he followed Archer and his friend to a gaming establishment, where they entered into several rounds of deep play. Archer never touched the gloves in his pocket. “If he has a role to play in the game, my guess is that he’s a courier, and an unwitting one, at that. I doubt he has any idea that he may have been used to move documents.”
“But he was not used to move them, as apparently you intervened.” Goldsworthy’s voice was a roar of displeasure probably heard all the way to Piccadilly. His large hands hit the table, making inkpots and pens bounce.
Lynley shrugged. He objected to clumsiness and cruelty. Ravenhurst’s ruse would not have worked because Lynley was certain that the papers had been taken some time earlier and hidden in the cloakroom. No search of guests descending from the ballroom would have turned up the papers in the glove.
“Did I mention that there were two papers rolled inside the glove?”
“Two papers?”
Lynley reached into his waistcoat pocket and withdrew the scrap of paper he’d found curled up inside the document he’d returned to Ravenhurst’s library. He tossed it onto the big man’s desk. Goldsworthy snatched it up and spread it out under his big hands.
“I depend on you,” Goldsworthy read. He looked up at Lynley. “What do you make of it?”
Lynley had been pondering that question with the part of his brain that remained functioning after Emily Radstock’s kiss. He doubted that Archer was the “you” upon whom the writer of the note depended. Archer had left the party to spend an evening in careless play and deep drinking. Nor was there anyone at the gaming club with whom Archer had exchanged a word other than to place his bets or summo
n more spirits.
The “I” of the note was still more of a mystery, given the number of guests and servants present at Lady Ravenhurst’s party. What Lynley could be sure of was that a degree of intimacy existed between the sender and the intended receiver of the note. No names were required between them. They had a plan, and they trusted one another.
“Depend on our mystery man to do what?” Goldsworthy asked.
“There must be an expected return. The documents must be in exchange for something.”
“Money?” Goldsworthy quirked a shaggy brow. “The Russians pay well.”
“Only if one of the guests is rather desperate, I’d say.”
“We have to find those papers, lad, and we can’t have our men...”
“Thinking on their own?”
“…bolloxing up the job when the traitor was ours for the taking.”
Lynley hid a smile. He thought he’d handled Ravenhurst’s wrong-headed scheme rather well. It was the kiss he’d bungled. He had meant to kiss Emily Radstock, lightly, playfully, to plant a distracting but forgettable peck on that quick mouth of hers. Kissing was supposed to be fun. He had not meant to get himself so worked up. He was no monk, but he was not his uncle, either.
“Our man is out there.” Goldsworthy frowned. “He came to the party and took the bait. We need to lure him back to Ravenhurst’s library.”
“Do you have the guest list, sir?” Lynley asked.
“I do.” The big man managed to extract a paper from the piles around him and hand it across the desk.
Lynley stood, accepting the list and glancing at the names. “It’s through Lady Ravenhurst that guests have access to the house. We’ll watch her in the park or at home to see which of her particular friends might have connections to the Russians.”
“You think our man is going to go after papers at a hen party?”
“Gentlemen call as often as ladies, and the library opens from the entry, very accessible.”
“You’ll call then?”
“With my betrothed. Perfectly acceptable. And we’ll go for a drive in the park.” At least in the park there would be no danger of getting Emily Radstock alone in a dark corner and kissing her senseless.