Secrets of a Lady

by Tracy Grant

  there will be DSrther OelYX. Pee tI it NYLB OIePHt OriHB Yll thiP. Hell hYTe tiFe eHISRh tI FI thYt wheH thiP iP OIHe.

  Mélanie studied the message. “That fourth word must be ‘further.’ Or ‘farther.’ So D equals f and S equals u or a. And the first word in the second sentence almost has to be ‘see.’ P equals s.”

  Charles leaned forward, elbow on the desktop. “In the second sentence there’s a two-letter word starting with t. That can only be ‘to’—so I equals o. And then we have a three-letter word ending in a double l. ‘Ill’ or ‘I’ll’ or ‘all,’ but i is already taken, so Y must equal a.”

  “Which means the fourth word is ‘further’ and S equals u.” She pulled the paper closer.

  “Wait a bit, Mel, where are we on the key word?” He reached across her and turned up the lamp. “If Y equals a, we’ve got YEL-W-AG. Looks suspiciously as though we’ve got a two-word key and it’s ‘yellow something.’ Skipping the second l, that makes O equal d.”

  Mélanie took a clean sheet of paper and copied out the message again.

  There will be further delaX. See to it NaLB doesHt driHB all this. Hell haTe tiFe eHouRh to Fo that wheH this is doHe.

  She chewed the tip of the pen. “What does Carevalo want them to ‘see to’?” A welter of uncomfortable images crowded her mind.

  Charles rested his hand on her shoulder for a moment. “Patience, my darling. Whatever it is, he can’t do it anymore.” He squeezed her shoulder, then looked down at the paper. “The last word in the first sentence must be ‘delay.’ X equals y.”

  Mélanie forced her attention back to the text. “And I suspect that word at the end is ‘done,’ making H equal n. Wait a bit, Charles, we almost have it. Look.”

  There will be further delay. See to it NaLB doesnt drinB all this. Hell haTe tiFe enouRh to do that when this is done.

  The fingers of her left hand cramped as her grip on the pen tightened. “‘NaLB’ must be a person. What were the names of the men Roth mentioned who matched the description of the man Polly saw? Stephen Watkins was the one he thought most likely. But there was also—”

  “Jack Evans, a former prizefighter.” Charles’s eyes glinted with triumph held in check. “The one who was spotted drinking in a tavern in Wapping. Which I suspect was called—?” He pulled the sheet of paper with the key-word letters toward him. “YELOW DRAGN. The Yellow Dragon. Of course. The name of Jack Evans’s favorite tavern is a key Carevalo could count on them remembering.”

  Fingers trembling with the relief of the finish line in sight, Mélanie filled in the rest of the code and wrote out the whole message.

  There will be further delay. See to it Jack doesn’t drink all this. He’ll have time enough to do that when this is done.

  “Not a very profound message,” Charles said. “But it does tell us who.”

  “But not where.” She threw down the pen. “Damnation.”

  “We know the general area—somewhere close to a tavern called the Yellow Dragon in Wapping. And we know how to communicate with them. Perhaps—”

  A crash sounded from the hall. They ran to the door and flung it open to see Edgar sitting on the chest of a prone man, while Raoul stood over them holding a pistol.

  Edgar seized his quarry by the throat. “Where is he? Goddamnit to hell, where is he?”

  “Who?” The man’s voice was thin and reedy. “I only came here because the gentleman asked me.”

  “Let him go, Edgar.” Charles pulled his brother off the man and helped the man to his feet. He was more of a boy, actually, Mélanie saw in the moonlight spilling through the hall windows, a gangly youth with a pockmarked face and a thatch of sandy hair. Charles gripped the boy by both arms. “Deal honestly with us and you have nothing to fear. Lie and I warn you none of us has much patience left.” He pushed the boy against the stair rail. The balusters shook. “Why did the gentleman want you to come here?”

  “To deliver a letter, he said.” The boy’s eyes were enormous, his face drained of color. “Same place as before.”

  “Where?” Charles’s grip on the boy’s arms tightened.

  Fear glistened on the boy’s face. “I don’t give them to anyone. I leave them.”

  Charles pulled the homespun of the boy’s shirt taut. “Where do you leave them?”

  “At Covent Garden Market, between the railings of St. Paul’s, at the south corner.”

  Charles closed his eyes for a moment. Mélanie let out a gasping sigh and thought she heard Raoul do the same.

  “When did you leave the last one?” Charles asked.

  “This morning, round seven. Sometimes he has me go twice a day, but today it was just once. I don’t know anything about it,” the boy insisted in a quavering voice. “I met him when I came here to fish. My brothers and I’ve always fished here. There’s never anyone about, ’cept in the summer. But he said I was poaching, only he wouldn’t turn me in if I delivered the messages for him.”

  Raoul looked at Mélanie. “Did you break the code?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we have a way to communicate with them.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Charles looked back at the boy. “You’re coming to Bow Street with us. We may have a message for you to deliver after all.”

  Even on the far side of three in the morning, the candles guttering and the smell of gin stale in the air, the Brown Bear Tavern bustled with activity. Mélanie noted that her appearance in the common room drew less attention than it had in the afternoon. Perhaps the customers considered that any woman abroad at this hour couldn’t possibly be a lady.

  Four men of the Bow Street Patrol were clustered round a table. Yes, they said, in answer to a question from Charles, Roth was there, upstairs, writing up notes. They found him in the room where they had talked before, bent over a table in his shirtsleeves, a pencil in his hand.

  He looked up at their entrance. “What’s happened?”

  Charles closed the door and advanced into the room, pulling Mélanie with him. He had his arm round her shoulders, as he had for the whole of the drive back from Chiswick. The ring, retrieved from Carevalo’s body, was once again strung on his watch chain, though it seemed strangely irrelevant now. Their hope of finding Colin lay with the sandy-haired youth whom Raoul and Edgar were holding by either arm. “Ted here has been taking messages from Carevalo to the men holding Colin,” Charles said.

  Roth’s gaze took in the splotches of dried blood on Mélanie’s gown. “Where’s Carevalo?”

  “Dead.”

  Roth’s only reaction was a brief flicker in his eyes. “Did he die in giving you the information?”

  “No, we found it afterwards.”

  Roth pulled out a chair for Mélanie. “Then I’ll assume his death was unavoidable, as I trust you would not kill the man who knew where your son was kept.”

  “Quite,” Charles said. “You’ve spoken to Addison?”

  “He gave an admirable account of your discovery of Mrs. Constable, especially as he doesn’t seem to have been present for most of the key scenes.” Roth grimaced. “Constable recovered consciousness convinced a couple answering to your description killed his wife. I think we’ve finally managed to persuade him otherwise. I have men searching for this Victor Velasquez, but we haven’t found him yet. Don’t tell me it turns out Carevalo killed her?”

  “No.” Charles recounted what had happened, glossing over Carevalo’s attack on Mélanie as drunken madness.

  Roth stared at the coded message, held down by two empty tankards on a splintery table. He raised his gaze to Ted, who was sitting quiet and wide-eyed on the cot with the blue blanket. Then he looked at Charles and Mélanie. “You could write a message in this code?”

  Mélanie nodded. “We’ll have Ted plant the message in Covent Garden. We have to make sure it’s there well before seven. We’ll cover the area and follow whoever picks up the message back to where they’re holding Colin.”

  Roth nodded. “Seemingly straightforward. But I
’ve known the most straightforward plans to go awry.”

  “Precisely. So in the letter we’ll tell them to bring Colin to a rendezvous point tomorrow night. If it comes to that, we’ll be there to take him from them.”

  Roth considered. “My compliments, Mrs. Fraser. That’s not without risk, but it’s about as good a plan as we could devise.” He pulled his coat off a chair back. “You get to work on the message. I’ll assemble men to keep watch in Covent Garden.”

  An involuntary noise of protest escaped her lips.

  “You can’t do it yourselves,” he said. “You might be recognized.”

  “If you’re going to suggest we remain behind—”

  He gave her a full, genuine smile. “Mrs. Fraser, I’ve got to know you a bit in the last forty-eight hours. I wouldn’t dream of it. You can wait in a coffeehouse on the edge of the market, as I will myself.” He moved to the door. “I’ll muster the troops. And then, Mr. Fraser, I’d be obliged if you’d give me any other information you have about the death of Elinor Constable.”

  Chapter 35

  M élanie forced another sip of lukewarm coffee down her throat. Her eyes smarted from peering through the smoke-stained glass of the coffeehouse window. She could just glimpse the south corner of the basket-hung railings of St. Paul’s. The man in the anonymous brown coat and hat, leaning against the railings reading a newspaper, was a Bow Street Patrol. So was the leather-aproned coster with the applecart. Roth and Edgar were in one of the paper-screened coffee stalls under the columns of the Piazza. Raoul and Addison were in a tavern on the opposite side of the square.

  Covent Garden Market was a blaze of color. Morning sun limned the scene with russet and gold, burnishing booths and carts, sieves of vegetables and bunches of flowers, kerchiefs and aprons and hampers. An ideal place for a man to lose himself, but Roth had promised that his men knew how to track a quarry in a crowd.

  Charles shifted his position in the chair across from her. “It’s early yet. If they only check the railings once or twice a day, they may wait until later.” He picked up his coffee and stared into the dregs.

  “Darling?” She scanned his drawn face. “Is something…?”

  “Wrong?” A bleak smile pulled at his mouth. “Just about everything, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Granted.” She reached across the rough wood of the table, then stilled her hand, because such a gesture seemed to push beyond the boundaries that still lay between them. “But you look as though you’re brooding on something besides what’s in front of us.”

  He shook his head and set down the cup. “No. There’s nothing else.” He laid his hand over her own. “At least nothing else that’s worth brooding on.”

  A man in a dark green coat and shirt points that obscured half his face slipped between a donkey barrow and a bird-catcher’s stand, making for the railings. Every muscle in her body went still. The man moved on. Then she noticed the woman half-hidden behind him. A woman in a drab-colored gown with a shopping basket laden with cabbages and broccoli on her arm and a faded straw bonnet covering her apricot-colored hair. Another matron doing her marketing. And yet—

  Mélanie clenched her husband’s hand. “Charles.”

  “What?” His voice went sharp.

  “I think Jack Evans’s partner may be a woman.”

  The donkey reared up in its traces. Its owner grabbed the reins to calm it. The surge in the crowd round the barrow obscured the railings. When the press cleared, the woman was gone. It was impossible to tell about the letter at this distance. Mélanie pushed herself to her feet. Charles’s hand closed on her wrist. “We can’t do any good. And if we’re seen, we may do harm. Roth will find us.”

  Mélanie subsided into her chair, hands gripped together in her lap. Each second tightened the knot in her throat and chest. The Bow Street Patrol in the brown hat and coat had gone, though the one with the applecart was still there. Perhaps it was her imagination, but his shoulders seemed to have a dejected droop. At last, Roth came into the coffeehouse, followed by Edgar, and by Raoul and Addison, whom he must have collected from across the square.

  One look at Roth’s face told all they needed to know. “You lost her?” Charles asked.

  Roth grimaced, then frowned. “How did you know it was a woman?”

  “Mélanie spotted her. It was too late to do anything.”

  Roth dropped into a chair. The others did likewise. “Hilton and Renford didn’t realize it until they saw the letter was gone. By that time she was lost in the crowd—I suspect she caused the commotion with the donkey, though I can’t be sure of it. Hilton and Renford were looking for a man. We all were. Even so, they should have been more watchful.” He struck his palm against the tabletop.

  “It’s done.” Charles drew the frayed remnants of his self-command about him. “We proceed to the next part of the plan.”

  On Roth’s suggestion, in the coded message they had instructed the people holding Colin to bring him to St. Albans Court, off Salisbury Street, near the docks, at midnight that night.

  “It’s a good setting,” Roth now said. He had recovered from his burst of anger. He pulled his notebook and pencil from his pocket, tore out a sheet of paper, and spread it on the table. “There was a bad fire last summer, and it’s not a part of town where repairs are done quickly. The houses are unoccupied. The two at the front form a passageway. Their front doors open onto the street, their back doors onto the court.” He inched his paper toward the light from the window and drew a quick sketch. “Two more houses front on either side of the court, two at the back. Once we get them to bring the boy into the court, my men can close off the passageway and we’ll have them pinned.”

  “Won’t they be suspicious when they don’t see Carevalo in the court?” Edgar asked.

  “They’ll think they do see him.” Mélanie looked at Raoul. “Let’s see if your Carevalo impersonation is as good as it used to be.”

  Raoul turned to her, his voice slurred, his shoulders set with Carevalo’s swagger. “My dear Mrs. Fraser, I’d hardly call it an impersonation.”

  “Good lord.” Surprise momentarily overcame Edgar’s distaste for Raoul. “That’s him to the life.”

  Charles nodded. “Before dawn, with O’Roarke in a dark cloak, in the doorway of one of the burned-out houses, it should be enough to draw them into the court. He won’t have to keep it up for more than a minute or so. They won’t have weapons drawn. We’ll get Colin safely away.” He looked at Roth. “Then you can arrest them, though that’s the least of my concerns.”

  Roth nodded. “It’s as foolproof a plan as we can devise.”

  “Quite.” Charles’s gaze swept the five of them with the level intensity of a commander before a battle. “This is the night that makes us or fordoes us quite. We all know the parts we’re to play. There’s no room for error.”

  St. Albans Court was a comforting mass of shadows, lit only by the cloud-shrouded moonlight that slipped between the tall, close-set buildings and shone against the cracked, grimy cobblestones. Mélanie shifted her shoulder against the charred wall and twisted her neck so she had a better view out the window. She and Charles were in the left-hand of the two houses that fronted on the street and backed onto the court. The interior was little more than a burned-out shell, half the first floor missing, fragments of wallpaper clinging to charred beams, floorboards rotted away to reveal gaping holes beneath. It was difficult to tell what the room they were in had once been, but it had a wide window that afforded a good view of the court. Half of one of the panes was gone, letting in the chill air and the creaks and stirrings of the night.

  Raoul leaned in a doorjamb on the far side of the court, swathed in a hooded cloak, his posture aping Carevalo’s casual sprawl instead of his own catlike elegance. Roth and Edgar were in a house to the right. Addison and four of Roth’s men were scattered about the other buildings, while another Bow Street Patrol kept watch on the street at the mouth of the passageway.

  A pigeon flutter
ed from the broken rafters, flapped its wings, and settled again. A gust of wind rattled through the window, ruffled the clouds over the moon, bit through the thin velvet of her cloak. It wasn’t possible to talk, let alone look at a watch, but surely it must be past midnight. She felt as if she were being pulled a dozen different directions at once.

  Time dragged on, grating on her nerves, fraying the already frayed threads of her sanity. She felt the vibration of Charles’s breath on her neck, less regular than it had been a few minutes before.

  And then a foot thudded on pavement, and a shadow and a flutter of cloak flashed into view at the far corner of the window. The breath froze in her throat.

  Raoul turned his head. “Evans?”

  “No, it’s me.” A woman’s voice, low and clear. She walked a few feet farther into the court, fully visible now from their vantage point. No small person stood beside her. Mélanie suppressed a stir of agony. Charles squeezed her shoulder, part comfort, part reassurance, part warning.

  “I see.” Raoul’s voice had just Carevalo’s note of frustrated impatience. “I believe I asked for the boy. Where is he?”

  “Jack’s waiting with him off yonder. We want our money.”

  “But of course.” Raoul held up a bag.

  The woman took a step forward.

  “Not so fast, my dear.” Raoul’s voice stopped her, the lazy drawl giving way to sword-cut sharpness in a way that was pure Carevalo. “I don’t entirely trust those pretty hands of yours not to be armed. And if you think I have any intention of handing over this money before you deliver the boy, you’re very much mistaken.”

  The woman stopped ten feet away from him. Her back was to them, but Mélanie could see her fold her arms over her chest. “It’s not so simple, your lordship. Seeing as how bloody much work we’ve been put to, the price’s gone up.”

  “Damnation,” said Raoul, though they had in fact anticipated such an eventuality.

  “Seems to me the boy’s worth a king’s ransom, given the fuss you’ve made.”

  “Seven hundred pounds.” It was a guess, rounding up from what they thought Evans and his partner might have been offered. Raoul had a thousand with him, procured that afternoon from their startled banker.