by Gaelen Foley
Alec’s hand closed gently atop Lizzie’s.
Jacinda stared at them, taken aback, then murmured, “As you wish.” But she gazed into her friend’s eyes, communicating a silent warning to be careful with him.
“Come, my lady,” Miss Hood said, rising from her chair. She draped her knitting basket primly over her forearm and crossed the room to her. “We must pack your things for the country. We’ll leave bright and early.”
Sure enough, the traveling chariot and the entourage of servants accompanying her to Hawkscliffe Hall were ready to go by seven the next morning. Lizzie still did not change her mind, but was all the more firmly determined, it seemed, to seize this one chance to spend time alone with her dream man. Jacinda bid her family good-bye.
The journey from London to the Cumberland wilds around Hawkscliffe Hall, her family’s ancestral castle, was a four-day affair, but this time, it felt twice as long, confined inside the close quarters of the traveling chariot with her affronted governess. Miss Hood was so terse, sharp, and out of charity with her errant charge that Jacinda’s maid, Ann, finally took to riding on the roof seat for long spells to escape the tension inside the coach. As their trek progressed through the second day, however, Jacinda slowly became aware of just how much meeting Billy Blade had changed her.
She had made the journey up the Great North Road from London countless times, but only on this occasion was she truly struck by the suffering and hardship she saw throughout the realm. It was just as he had described it. They passed the lifeless, half-burned hulls of cotton mills, still and silent; heroes of Waterloo begging, crippled and drunken, in the towns. When they stopped for the night in York, she heard a fiery peasant rabble-rouser shouting to a crowd in the square about the destruction of their livelihoods by the new machines that were putting people out of work. She wanted to stay to listen to him, but Miss Hood fetched her briskly into the hotel.
And during the nights, she discovered that it was not only a greater awareness of the world that Blade had awakened in her. She lay in her hotel bed burning with the unwanted memory of his mouth on hers, his hands on her breasts. When she closed her eyes, she could still see in vivid detail the fascinating tattoos on his skin, and in her dreams, she traced each one with her lips and fingertips.
Oh, she must try harder to ponder the error of her ways! she thought, struggling against her desire for that bold, ill-mannered rogue. For away from Robert’s scrutiny, she could admit that she truly did not know what would become of her. Blade had proved to her beyond any doubt that her mother’s disastrous wantonness flowed in her veins. She was a very frail vessel, indeed, eager for a man’s caresses.
Or maybe it was only Billy Blade who had that effect on her. Somehow, that possibility was worse.
As another night passed in empty wanting, she thought in despair of the difference in their stations and the impossibility of ever possessing him. Even if he were a prince, and eligible, she argued with herself, he had already proved himself every ounce as domineering as her brothers, and that was exactly what she did not want. The thought helped to bring her back to her senses, along with remembering the coldness that had come into his eyes when she had dealt him the cut direct at Hyde Park.
Forget him.
Whatever thread of connection had existed between them that night in his room, in his bed, she had severed it that day in the park, and that, she supposed, was for the best.
A week later, Blade was finishing a cheroot and sharpening his knife for his night’s work. His decision that day coming back from Hyde Park had spawned a crime spree throughout the luxurious neighborhoods of Mayfair and St. James’s. Hearing someone coming down the hallway, he glanced warily at his closed chamber door, then quickly hid Jacinda’s diamond necklace in his boot.
He had not yet pawned her jewels, nor did he dare hide them around here, sharing the house, as he did, with a large band of accomplished thieves. Though he told himself he might keep them just to shove them down her lovely throat someday, the sorry truth was he did not want to give them up because they were his one remaining connection to Lady Jacinda. Who could say? Maybe they would bring him good luck.
A knock sounded just then.
“Aye,” he called.
The door opened, and Nate popped his curly head in. “Almost time to go.”
“Jimmy got the carriage ready?”
“Nearly.” Nate sauntered in and closed the door behind him. He rubbed his hands together as though to warm them, then cracked his knuckles.
His cheroot dangling from the corner of his lips, Blade slowly finished sharpening his favorite knife.
“Seen little Eddie today?” Nate asked, leaning in the window.
“No.”
“Nobody seems to have seen him around the past few days.”
“Maybe he fell down a sewer,” Blade drawled.
“You’re not worried?”
“Little blighter’s got nine lives. He’s probably still cross at me for making him give back all the gold he stole from that rich girl. He’ll be back.”
Nate shrugged and studied the wall for a moment.
“What’s the matter?” Blade asked him.
Nate turned to him with a frown. He scratched his head. “I’m thinkin’ we should call off the job tonight.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know. Somethin’ don’t feel right.”
Blade scoffed.
“I mean it, man,” Nate said. “We’ve hit six houses in four nights. We’re gettin’ a bit reckless, don’t you think? Maybe it’s too much.”
“Aw, don’t whine at me, Nate. If you need a night off, get Andrews or Mikey to stand in for you.”
“It’s not that! I can pull my weight as well as any man.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know.” Nate shook his head. “There’s somethin’ in the air. Can’t put my finger on it.”
Blade snorted and climbed to his feet, flicking his spent cheroot into the fireplace.
“Doesn’t it strike you that O’Dell has been too bloody quiet lately?” Nate pursued.
“No wonder. He can’t see. I damned near knocked his eye out last time we met.” Blade efficiently loaded his pistols, then pulled on his black leather coat and gave Nate a clap on the shoulder, steering him affectionately toward the door by the scruff of his neck. “Go tell the ladies it’s time for the dance.”
“You’re a proper bastard,” he muttered, pausing as he went out, “but they’d follow you through hell, and so would I.”
Blade’s raffish smile sobered. “I know it. Thanks, Nate.”
“Just bring us back alive, eh?”
“I always do,” he retorted as Nate went off down the hallway to fetch the others.
A short while later on a cobbled side street off of stately Portman Square, five black-clad figures slid out of the passing hackney and glided through the darkness at a stealthy run, leaping up to scale the garden wall, dropping down lightly upon the spongy grass of the garden.
With practiced efficiency they advanced toward the back entrance of the vast, empty, opulent town house, one pair darting ahead, then positioning themselves to provide cover for the next two, who passed them as they glided in even closer. Reaching the flagged veranda, they bounded silently over the stone balustrade. The weather, foggy and wet, made for sloppy work, but the sound of the rain muffled any slight noise they made.
Blade and Nate went for the door, Nate giving him cover as Blade drew the ‘dabbs’ from inside his coat, crouched down, and began the delicate business of picking the door’s three locks, his hands steady. Meanwhile, Sarge and Flaherty crept to the windows with Andrews, the most promising of the younger lads. The three peered inside. Seeing no one within, they signaled Blade, who had just sprung the last lock.
His heart pounded with the thrill of the game, but his breathing was even and relaxed behind the blue neckerchief tied around the lower half of his face. He pushed up to his feet, laid one hand on the d
oor, and gently turned the knob. The others waited, poised to enter, as he inched the door open. He listened for sounds of life within but heard nothing.
His information, as always, was accurate. Young Miss Daphne Taylor had been staying with her cousins until now, he had learned. Her parents, the Viscount and Viscountess Erhard, had been delayed by their younger children, who had been taken with the flu, but they were due to arrive in Town in a fortnight. The servants were to begin preparing the house for their return this week, but for now the grand house stood empty.
He threw a taut nod to his men and slipped inside. Hardened professionals all, they knew their exit route in advance; each man knew the precise moment that Jimmy would drive past the other way in the hackney in which he had dropped them off. They even had a fair idea of the layout of the house, having done this countless times before. They expected to be in and out in twenty minutes. There was no need to take undue chances by lingering. Once over the threshold, they stole through the house by the same sly method.
Blade had told them in advance that his goal was the vault, but as they searched the house, the other four made a thorough sweep of each room they came to, taking whatever of value they could find, tossing it into their sacks—silver candlesticks, fancy snuffboxes, objects d’art from the mantelpieces. Single-minded in his focus on the vault, Blade waited for them in the hallway. Watching them, however, he found himself eyeing the holland-draped furniture that sat, ghostlike, in each darkened room.
God, he thought, it’s as still as a tomb.
The hairs on his nape prickled slightly in man’s most ancient warning signal of danger, but he could see no source of threat. He glanced behind him and ahead down the hallway, suddenly beginning to dislike this crack intensely. He couldn’t say what was wrong. But it was too easy.
“Come on, you buggers,” he muttered.
They followed him upstairs. Blade moved quietly out of habit, but the others were growing overconfident, unmindful of the steps that creaked beneath their weight as they mounted to the second floor, then the third. They moved in a tight V down the hallway, searching for the master’s chamber, where the vault would most likely be situated.
They found His Lordship’s quarters at last in the west corner of the main block. The door to the suite opened to a large sitting room. Moonlight glimmered along the sleek lines of the Sheraton highboy and illuminated a Chinese vase displayed on a pedestal near the window. Sarge and Flaherty immediately began searching the sitting room while Andrews stole ahead of Blade into the adjoining bedchamber. Following him, Blade paused in the doorway, gazing at the enormous four-poster draped in gold cloth. The kingly mattress was set so high off the ground that one had to climb the four polished wooden steps to lie on it. He shook his head in disgust, thinking of the children in his neighborhood who had to sleep on the pavement near open sewers. At least tonight’s work would keep a few more of them alive a while longer, he thought just as Nate called to him in a taut whisper from the sitting room.
“Found it!”
Blade was stalking through the sitting room and crouching down by their side in a moment. Before him sat the safe, poorly concealed within His Lordship’s writing table. The safe was a no-nonsense affair, a simple, drab iron box about three feet square. Blade ran his hand over the key-lock with a wily smile. All thoughts of his earlier uneasiness forgotten in the thrill of imminent victory, he finessed the lock with the dabbs, then held his breath with anticipation as he pulled the small door open. He reached one hand inside the smaller inner shell and felt cool metal.
There was a small chain. Something round. “What the hell?”
“Is it empty?” Nate whispered urgently.
“No, there’s something….” His hand closed around the strange object, catching something else, too, something rough, like…rope.
Andrews was at the window looking out for Jimmy and the carriage, but Sarge and Flaherty came over to him and Nate and bent over his shoulder, waiting eagerly to see their take. Blade pulled it out, and his eyes flared with horror.
“What the devil?” Nate said.
“Run,” Blade breathed, but all four men could only stand frozen for that split second, staring at what had been placed for them there in the safe—a pair of manacles and a length of rope tied in a noose.
“Run!” Blade roared, leaping to his feet and whirling around to face the enemy even as the holland-draped furniture came to life.
Twenty Bow Street thief-takers threw off their shapeless cloth coverings and rushed them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The sweep of the sun-splashed fells and folded valleys wrapped around her in an endless vista, with the blue foothills of the Pennines in the distance. A steady wind, invigorating but not cold, drove the high-piled clouds across the cerulean sky. It riffled through the gorse and tufted heather on the moors and molded the twilled woollen skirts of her dun-colored sporting costume around her legs as Jacinda waited, her fowling musket braced against her shoulder, while her Brittany spaniel flushed the pair of red grouse feeding on the tender shoots of new heather.
The plump, mottle-plumed birds flapped into the air; the silky-coated spaniel immediately dropped to its haunches, crouched and waiting for the order to retrieve. Jacinda’s gaze narrowed as she trailed the swift, veering game birds with her gun. The first birds into the air were the older, stronger ones; since grouse turned sterile after one breeding season, these could be conservatively culled without damage to the breeding population.
Boom!
Her shot released a puff of drifting smoke and echoed down the valley. The larger bird fell. She nodded to the gamekeeper, who gave the order to the dog. The expert spaniel moved at a springy glide through the shrubs and grasses, the sun glancing off its long, liver-and-white coat. The younger dog, however, a flashy tri-colored pointer, was still an apprentice at her trade and dodged about with exuberant energy, barking with excitement over the kill and altogether irritating her more experienced bracemate, who took its duties as seriously as any upper servant. The spaniel carried the grouse back gently in its jaws to the gamekeeper. Mr. McCullough accepted the grouse with a chuckle and placed it in the bag, then glanced up at her, squinting against the sun. “A fine bird, my lady.”
Jacinda smiled and glanced into the leather pouch at her quarry, nodding in answer to the gamekeeper’s compliment, then handed off her musket to his boy, whose duty it was to reload for her.
Except for the loneliness of being without Lizzie, she had always found it very easy to settle back into the leisurely rhythm of country life.
“’Twas an admirable shot, my lady,” said a prim voice behind her.
With one leather-gauntleted hand, she shaded her eyes from the sun and turned to her governess. “Why, thank you, Miss Hood.”
The woman was only now just beginning to warm up to her again.
The hunting party continued on, walking upwind across the open moor in a broad line. The dogs scouted the terrain ahead of the gun, their keen noses sniffing out the quarry amid the aromatic wild thyme and yellow cinquefoil. Behind Jacinda, servants in the dark green Hawkscliffe livery rounded out her entourage, three footmen following with their picnic hampers and a large parasol, and a pair of grooms leading the ladies’ saddle horses. As they neared the boundary of her family’s property where the low stone wall followed the sinuous curve of the ridge, the gamekeeper nodded to her. The Brittany had pointed another grouse.
Jacinda accepted her reloaded musket from the boy and cocked it, then lifted the gun to her shoulder, awaiting the bird’s rush from cover. The spaniel pounced, scaring the pair of startled fowl skyward. She trailed the larger bird on its crazy, zigzag path.
Boom!
She missed. The bird swooped in a miraculous escape toward the trees. It flew over the wall; then Jacinda’s eyes widened as the daft pointer tore off after it through the field, ears flapping. Before anyone could stop it, the dog had scrambled over the stile and disappeared into the trees, trailing a bark
ing echo.
“Blast,” she murmured.
“Get the dog, boy,” McCullough ordered the lad, who bobbed a nod and ran after the animal.
“Is that Lord Griffith’s estate?” Miss Hood asked with a speculative lift of her eyebrows.
“No, ma’am,” McCullough answered. “Lord Griffith’s holdings border His Grace’s lands to the northwest. We are looking southeast. Those woods are part of the park of Warflete Manor, the home of the earl of Drummond.”
“The politician, Lord Drummond?” Miss Hood asked in surprise.
Jacinda nodded. “The same. I imagine he’s quite elderly now. I haven’t seen him since I was a wee thing.” She petted her impeccably behaved spaniel’s head. “Robert says he is a curmudgeon. Of course, Robert says all Tory politicians are curmudgeons. I believe Lord Drummond is a special adviser to the Home Office.”
McCullough grinned. “Did you hear the old gent has built a golfing course on his estate?”
“Has he?” Jacinda asked with interest. The Scottish sport was becoming all the rage.
Suddenly, crazed barking erupted from inside the distant woods. Jacinda drew in her breath as a human voice joined in, shouting furiously at the dog. She heard the boy’s high-pitched voice, as well. She and McCullough exchanged a startled look.
“I’ll see to this,” McCullough declared, already running toward Lord Drummond’s property.
“Wait for me!”
“My lady!” Miss Hood cried in exasperation.
“What if Lord Drummond thinks the boy was poaching?” she called back, then ran after the gamekeeper, still carrying her gun. At the wall, she hitched up her skirts about her ankles and nimbly scaled the wooden stile. She jumped down and raced on, a minute or so behind Mr. McCullough.
At the edge of the woods, she found a deer path between two tall, brushy stands of yellow-flowered Scotch broom and plunged into the dappled woods. She followed the sound of the pointer’s eager barking over the soft soughing of the wind through the trees. Hornbeam, ash, and oak swayed gently, with an occasional black mulberry posted here and there, ancient and imposing. The sounds were getting louder. She could hear several dogs barking ahead, a man’s blustery tirade, the boy shouting, and Mr. McCullough trying to take control of the situation.