Hades stood and walked round the table, frustrated. They had been unable to extract anything from the man apart from what they already knew. Yes, he had helped the Viper in trying to find a mysterious book he wanted from Melissa. Yes, the Viper had an unhealthy interest in snakes. No, he had never killed anyone, yet. No he hadn’t known what had happened to the Viper’s guests that had disappeared.
“Dammit, man,” Hades roared. “You must know where he has gone.”
Pedro shook his head again and struggled against his bonds. In view of his very athletic and flexible nature, they had tied every part of his body together. They were taking no chances.
But it still didn’t stop Pedro from speaking. Pedro slid a long look sideways at Hades and said unexpectedly, “He did mention that he was looking forward to spending some more time with Miss Sumner.”
Hades stopped in his tracks, just a foot away from Pedro. “Pardon?” he said quietly.
“I said, Professor Lisle said he was looking forward to spending some more time with Miss Sumner.”
“That is what I thought you said.” With no warning, Hades swung his fist at Pedro’s jaw and connected with a loud clack.
“Ah, love,” Freddie crooned to his pistols. Bill grimaced and nodded.
“Shut up, Freddie,” Hades said through gritted teeth.
“Permission to ask one question, sir?” Freddie asked mockingly. Hades nodded grudgingly. “Where is Miss Sumner now?”
“None of your business, Freddie.”
“No, he has a good question,” Pedro said, grinning. “After all, if the Viper was after my amore, I wouldn’t be sitting around here, talking to an innocent circus man…”
“You are as innocent as the Viper in all of this, Pedro,” Hades raged. He knew Melissa was at his house. He was to meet her there at nine p.m. He didn’t want everyone with him when he went. It was a private affair between the two of them. His staff were protecting her. There was no way that she could be got at there.
But he remembered Pedro and the cake. “How did you kill our kitchen boy?” he asked suddenly. His hands clenched at the memory.
Pedro’s head shot back in the chair, and he eyed Hades’ clenched fists with disfavor. “Oh, so it did work, then. I didn’t know if it would. I knew about your liking for cakes, although I thought I might try my special cake on your lover first.”
“She is not my lover.” Hades shot a quick glance at Freddie, who grinned openly.
“Who cares?” Pedro shrugged. “I added a little something to it that Professor Lisle was an expert in extracting. He told me to take care of you at all costs. I just followed his example.”
“What did you put in the cake?”
“Snake venom.”
Hades frowned. Snake venom fitted with the way in which the kitchen boy had died. But he remembered that Trump had said it was almost impossible to die from ingesting the poison.
“It obviously didn’t work. You can’t die from eating snake venom,” he said contemptuously.
Pedro gave him a pitying look. “All the venom needs is to enter the blood stream. I was taking a chance.”
What had his cooks said? They had laughed at the kitchen boy for getting a splinter in his mouth. That must have been how he ended up poisoned; the venom in the cake entered the bloodstream through the wound in his mouth.
“So you do know what Professor Lisle was doing!” he said. “All those people, killed by snakebites. You knew everything.”
Hades advanced again on Pedro, who shrank away. “He threatened me,” muttered Pedro angrily. “He said he would send me back to my father.”
“I don’t understand what is so bad about your father?”
“Pablo Moreno?” Pedro replied disbelievingly. “You mean you haven’t heard… I can’t tell you. The only good deed he did once was letting some poor girl go with her money, and that was only because she helped him out of debt by throwing knives for him. Of course that wasn’t quite what he had planned for her—”
“Agatha Beauregard,” Bill murmured. “What a turn up for the books.”
“Agatha Beauregard, as in Lady Anglethorpe?” Hades said disbelievingly. Bill nodded slowly and went back to sharpening the sword.
“You are being misdirected,” Freddie said suddenly. “Can’t you see he is taking you away from your questioning?”
Hades glanced at the clock above the mantelpiece. The hands showed a time of twenty to nine. He needed to be at his house at nine o’ clock anyway. There was no harm in arriving early and checking on the welfare of Miss Sumner. He smiled slowly. It would be something that he would quite enjoy.
“Stay here and look after him,” he said, pointing at Pedro. “I’m going to see to Miss Sumner.”
Freddie and Bill exchanged a glance and each nodded. “As you wish,” Freddie said.
Hades arrived at his home to find it in uproar. The windows blazed with light, and none of the drapes were drawn. For the second time that year a crowd had gathered in the hallway and were shouting so loudly at one another that they did not notice Hades push open the already unbolted door.
He watched them wrangle for a few minutes, catching snippets of the conversation.
“Said she would be home for teatime.”
“Perhaps we should warn the earl…”
“She does have a history of running off.”
“Can anyone find Arturo?”
“I think she was meant to meet him…”
“Enough,” Hades boomed above the babble. “What is going on?”
Charles and Carlos turned to look at him with shocked faces. Mr. and Mrs. Hobbs took no notice and continued arguing heatedly about ‘love’ and ‘running away’.
Carter’s shoulders slumped and he took a step forward in front of the group. “It’s Miss Sumner,” he said dolefully. “She’s disappeared…”
“…again,” finished Hades.
“Yes,” Carter said, even more miserably than before. “She said she was going to the Royal Society. She refused to wait for me to organize someone to accompany her.”
“I would have gone after her, but when I reached the street, she was gone,” Mrs. Hobbs volunteered.
“How long after she left did you go after her, Mrs. Hobbs?” Hades asked.
“’Bout five minutes.”
That was not enough time for Melissa to have reached the end of the road.
“She was meant to meet me here at nine o’ clock,” Hades said.
Mrs. Hobbs brightened. “I was just telling her about being receptive to ideas. Perhaps she’ll come back in the next few minutes.”
Carter shook his head. “It’s passed nine already. And I can’t find Arturo.”
Hades did not want to know what Mrs. Hobbs had been saying to Melissa. Melissa was supposed to have met him in the study at nine. Without excusing himself, he left the group and walked into the study. The grate was cold, with only the ashes from the previous day’s fire in them. Apart from a few books on his desk, the study was the same as it had always been.
With a sinking heart, Hades stumbled across the carpet to his desk and sat in the chair behind it, wincing as his leg hit against the open drawers. He frowned as his eyes became level with an untidy stack of some of the books he’d bought from the Temple of Muses, a scrunched up ball of brown paper crowning the pile.
Bloody hell. She’d been through his drawers. He hadn’t had time to give her the books. He fingered the topmost book lightly, brushing away the ball of paper to reveal the author’s name, A. Sumner.
Stunned, he sat back in his chair. What a coincidence, to have picked up Melissa’s father’s book without knowing. Oh no—what had she thought about it?
He picked the topmost book up and strode out to the hall. “How did Melissa find these books?” he asked baldly.
Carter took the proffered book and looked at it. “I don’t know. But I do know that she asked me how you had got hold of ‘her’ books as she called it.”
“Her books?”<
br />
“Yes. She was quite specific about it.”
Mrs. Hobbs coughed. “She was very keen on retrieving some books of hers that had been given away by her mother,” she said softly.
“Mmm, and didn’t she talk about the fact that the Viper wanted a specific book? Perhaps she thought that one of them was what he wanted?” Mr. Hobbs added.
The Hobbs were right. Melissa had revealed that the Viper was after a book. But she had not said that she had owned a specific set of books that had been given away. Hades cursed strongly, making Mrs. Hobbs blush. Why hadn’t she been honest with him?
“Did she leave with a book?”
“No,” Carter said. “All she said was that she was off to the Royal Society.”
“Yes,” Hades said irritably. “You have already said that… wait a minute.” He stopped. “The Royal Society?”
Carter nodded. Hades turned to Mr. and Mrs. Hobbs. “Did Melissa, Miss Sumner ever go to the Royal Society when you knew her?”
“Never,” Mr. Hobbs said staunchly.
Had Melissa possibly made a connection between the Viper and the Royal Society? If so how? Hades hadn’t told her… no, he hadn’t, had he? He had been as guarded with the truth as she had become with him. It was his fault. If only he had had the ability to trust her earlier.
“What was she doing before she left?” he demanded.
Everyone looked blank.
“I heard her come down the stairs and open the under-stairs cupboard,” Carter volunteered. “Arturo stood on the street barking after her for quite some time.”
“She was awake long into the night,” Mrs. Hobbs said with a piercing gaze at Hades. He slid his glance away.
“She took those books you brought back in the saddlebag. She took them upstairs with her, Miss Sumner did, I mean.” Carter stumbled over the words.
Taking the stairs three at a time, Hades ran towards Melissa’s bedroom, Carter behind him, hot on his heels. He slammed open the door and took in the books on the dressing table. He leafed through them, but they all seemed very ordinary. One of the authors was Mr. Leonard Trump. Hades grunted. He should have seen this coming.
He caught sight of a small glass bottle on the desk. Its stopper was sealed closely with wax. So that was why she had gone through his drawers—she had been rummaging for wax to seal the bottle. But he had no idea what was in it. He picked it up and slipped it into his pocket. She had left it in a prominent position on the dressing table. It was therefore important to her for some reason.
“There were more books than this in that sack,” Carter said, examining the pile on the dressing table.
Hades swept the room with his eyes. First he noticed the collapsed candle on the bedside table and then the counterpane which was rumpled as if someone had slept on top of it but not in it. He moved closer to the bed and immediately the location of the last book became evident, pushed slightly under a pillow, still open at the last page. With a swift movement, he swept it up and looked at the author. Professor B. Lisle. He might have known.
But the book was not what he expected. Opening it at the first page, he gazed surprised at the bold hand written across the elegant printed script.
“5th December 1800—I hate him…” it began. Hades blinked and turned to the last page. “BERNARD LISLE IS A TRAITOR”
Oh dear God. He pushed the book into his pocket and strode quickly to the door of the room.
“Get the carriage ready, Carter. We need to go to the Royal Society.” He prayed that Melissa was still there, had even reached there at least.
As Hades waited in the cold hall for the carriage to be brought round, he flicked quickly through the pages, starting from the beginning. As soon as the owner of the bold handwriting mentioned Melissa, he knew that he was reading her father’s words. Hades shifted impatiently from foot to foot. Where the hell was his carriage?
Reading on, his eyes lingered on the wish of Professor Lisle to buy Sumner’s house in Buckinghamshire. But that was not all. The mention that Whites was a hotbed of government intrigue and discussion disgusted him. It disgusted him that his peers could have been so indiscreet that this man could pick up and overhear state secrets.
He knew that Melissa’s father had died when she was younger, but he hadn’t been aware that foul play might have been involved. It was clear in the way the diary was heading. His heart ached for Melissa reading this by herself.
A rap on the front door broke his intense concentration. “Go away!” he shouted.
“You can’t say that to your own mother!”
Hades threw his hands in the air. His mother? She was the last person he needed to talk to right at this moment.
“Wait, I’ll come out and speak…”
But it was too late. His mother swept into the hall. “You know if I don’t want people coming in, I normally lock the door,” Dowager Lady Harding said dryly. “Although God knows what your staff are doing outside. They seem to be rather upset.”
“She’s gone,” Hades said brokenly, closing the book, “and it’s my fault.”
“Nonsense,” his mother snapped, placing her pelisse on the hall table. Hades noticed that she didn’t use her cane. In fact, her cane was nowhere in sight. “She probably just wants some time away to think. I was exactly the same with your father.”
Hades grimaced. Through the open front door he could see the stamping hooves of the horses that pulled his carriage. His staff were clustered around one of the wheels of the carriage, pointing and gesticulating. Thrusting the book into his pocket, he edged round his mother towards the front door. “You don’t seem to understand, Mama, a man called the Viper has in all probability taken her.”
Dowager Lady Harding put her hand to her mouth. “Not the one that is all over the papers, the vicious killer of at least twenty men?”
Hades twisted a grin. His mother had parroted the headlines easily. But his grin faded quickly. “Yes,” he said tiredly. “And I don’t know where he is holding her.”
“What about one of your famous strategies? You can’t let this woman get away,” his mother said urgently.
“The Viper is definitely a man, Mama. I have to go, Melissa was heading for the Royal Society but she was meant to meet me here. I need to follow her.”
“I don’t mean the Viper, I mean your woman, Melissa. You can’t let her get away.”
At the front door, Hades stopped. “But I thought you would disapprove…”
“Nonsense. She has shown backbone and grit. And she hasn’t given up on you. That is the main thing.”
“But she keeps running away from me!”
“Oh, dear boy. Why do you think she chose to hide in your home and retrain your staff? She hopes for the future. That is not much of an escape tactic. Despite your namesake, Melissa is no Persephone. Abducted though the wife of the underworld might have been in the beginning, this one wants to stay.”
Hades nodded. His mother was right.
“You don’t think that she’s at the Royal Society, do you?” Lady Harding asked. Hades shook his head, numbly watching his horses shake their magnificent heads.
Carter rounded the carriage and hurried up the steps to the house, waving a slip of paper. “A note has come for you, my lord,” he said breathlessly. “There wasn’t time to catch the messenger, what with the broken wheel on your carriage and your mother turning up…” Carter looked from Hades to Lady Harding and gulped visibly. A red flush rose up his neck from his immaculate wing collars.
“Get me Cloud,” Hades snapped. Impatiently he slit open the note.
‘I have Melissa. Do not come after me or I will kill her. You know the way that she will die. We won’t meet again. Viper.’
With a roar, Hades slammed his hand into the wall of the hall. He hadn’t needed the proof in the message, but it was like a slap in the face nevertheless. He supposed a small part of him had hoped that she had run away after all and that she would come back of her own accord.
He wouldn’
t obey the note. Knowing the Viper as he did, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill Melissa.
“He’s got her.” Hades nursed his hand. Dear God. Where had the Viper taken her?
“Do you have any other leads?” Lady Harding said suddenly.
“Only one.”
“Then why are you not pursuing it?”
“He professes not to know any information.”
“Perhaps you haven’t asked him the right questions?”
Hades looked at his mother in admiration, and drew out Melissa’s discarded book from his pocket. There was perhaps one thing he could ask Pedro.
Striding back to his mother, he bent and kissed her gently on the cheek. She blushed in surprise and pleasure.
“Do get her back safely,” she said. “I would like to know her more.”
“There will be plenty of time when she is your daughter in law,” Hades said, smiling slightly.
“Oh!” Lady Harding said, her rigid posture relaxing for just a few seconds. “How lovely.”
“Just tell me one thing. When did you decide you didn’t need a cane to walk anymore?”
“Oh, at the same time when I met Melissa. I only used it in the hope that you would think that I was getting older and that you would please me and get a wife before I died. It seems to have worked, hasn’t it?” Lady Harding smiled delightedly. “Now then where’s that delightful dog of yours?”
Arturo! They’d already mentioned he had disappeared and Carter had heard the dog barking in the street. He’d known that Melissa was in trouble. Knowing the persistent spaniel, he had probably run after Melissa.
“Mama, I have to go.” With a quick kiss to his mother’s cheek, Hades pushed past the milling servants and ran to the corner of the street. Quickly he relieved Carter of Cloud’s reins and with a loud “Hah,” set the horse back to Freddie’s residence.
Willson the butler greeted Hades with his customary enthusiasm and quickly directed him towards the back of the house. Bill and Freddie still sat in the dining room, but now they were rather disheveled and panting. Pedro was no longer in the same chair, but looked furious. He was tied to a chair, a table leg, and the fireplace. He had a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth and a hat pulled down over his eyes.
Dangerous Diana (Brambridge Novel 3) Page 23