Bill nodded and took a step backwards. Many other women had said the same. But not many women had demanded that they meet in such an open location. The bush behind him tickled at his neck with a branch. Bloody Regent’s Park and its wildlife.
He tugged at his hand, but Celine would not let go. She pulled him playfully towards him, her heavily made-up eyes hooded, and her lips pursed. Quickly he turned his face to the side, as Celine placed a large kiss on his cheek and gasped.
She continued to hold his hand as he twisted his shoulders to see the glowering face of Edward Fiske, mounted on an elegant chestnut mare behind them. Bill tensed as a look of rage crossed the usually boring countenance of Edward’s tight face. For once, the businessman, whom Bill had only met a couple of times before at White’s, had unbuttoned his normally immaculately pressed coat.
“Edward,” Bill said, still attempting to rescue his hand. But Celine would not let him go. “How are you, old man?”
“Never better,” said Edward in a curt voice. “I can see that you are quite alright, so no need to ask.”
“Look, it’s not quite what it looks like.” Bill turned back to Celine, who now seemed to be molded to his side. Gently he lifted her and placed her away from him. He turned back to Edward. “Tell him, Celine.”
Celine lifted her chin. “No.”
No?
“Celine, I told you to speak to him.”
“That’s quite alright, Bill. I can see the writing is on the wall.” Edward did not look once at Celine. “Do not expect diamond earrings, my dear. That’s not my style. I can see that you have already picked up a new man, although surprisingly not one as rich as myself. Consider that your consolation.”
Edward wheeled the pretty mare in a tight circle, and, digging his heels into the horse, set her off at a leaping canter.
“Goodness,” Celine said.
“I was thinking of something stronger,” Bill muttered. “I thought you said you were going to speak to him?”
Celine turned to him with shining eyes. “Wasn’t he magnificent?”
“Celine, are we quite talking about the same person?” Bill said cautiously. “The man who just gave you your congé? That bean counter who mistakenly believes that you are now under my protection?”
Celine nodded, a large smile spreading across her face.
“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” Bill breathed deeply as his shoulders tensed under the still unfamiliar formal coat. “You asked me to meet you in Regent’s Park knowing that he would ride by.”
“Yes. He’s as predictable as clockwork,” Celine said proudly, gazing after the galloping horse.
“Celine!”
Celine glanced back at him. The smile left from her face. “I, I thought you wouldn’t mind. After all, you have comforted me quite a bit.”
“I told you to speak to him.”
“I couldn’t. I couldn’t get near him. Every time I saw him, he would ignore me. Especially if he was with that man.” Celine shuddered lightly. “There was something about him that reminded me of the men I met in the stews.”
Bill held his breath. It was unusual of Celine to mention her past.
“Not quite a gentleman, nor an ordinary man. They wore their clothes well, but underneath they were like animals, no morals. They would eat other men for supper.”
“I wish you hadn’t picked on me to exact your revenge.”
“Why? You are single. You positively revel in the female attention. And there is no one that you are interested in at the moment.”
You’re wrong. Bill wanted to shout and stamp his feet. Finally, when he had just got Victoria Colchester biting on his fishing line, he had landed a shark who was threatening to pull the whole business under. But he couldn’t say anything about it. It was his business. Victoria wouldn’t thank him to go broadcasting their encounter far and wide.
“Just promise me that you will keep the contents of our encounters to yourself.” Bill waved his finger at an unrepentant Celine.
. “I can’t do that,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve already told Lady Colchester about the ‘treatment’ you have been giving me. She seemed most interested.
“You told Lady Colchester that I was giving you ‘treatment’?”
“Yes.” Celine’s laugh petered to a giggle. I don’t think the young prude knew what I was talking about.”
Bill could attest to that. In fact he might be in need of some treatment by the time the episode was over.
“I don’t want anyone else seeing us together.” Bill turned on his heel and strode away.
Women would be the end of him. Thankfully his next meeting was with a very level-headed man. Although judging by the man’s wedding day, it seemed even the irascible Earl Harding had a weak spot.
It had come to Bill after he had woken from his rum induced stupor, Brutus snoring gently against his knee. Following Henry’s advice had failed because he had taken the man literally. He had used people that he trusted to undertake the information gathering. And they had come back with nothing because they were not trained spies.
Harding, however, was well known as a one man band, like Bill himself. He had a strategy for every occasion. If Bill could just get him to point him in the right direction, then Bill could do the rest by himself. Hades would most certainly be at his house in London, because Celine had said that Lady Harding had been at Lady Anglethorpe’s salon the week before.
Hades, Earl Harding, greeted Bill with a surly look, and walked round him.
“At least you haven’t got Brutus with you. Freddie told me what he did to Lady Colchester’s dog. I wouldn’t like the same to happen to Arturo.”
“Granwich pointed me in your direction,” Bill twisted the truth slightly. “I’m looking for Pedro Moreno, and as you were involved in his capture I wondered if you might have some tips as to how to err, recapture him?”
Hades laughed unexpectedly. “Rather you than me. He was a slippery fellow that one.”
“Don’t I just know it,” Bill muttered.
“Come into my study. We can talk in there.”
Hades’ study was book lined and cozy. Two large chairs sat in front of a blazing fire. Bill started to lower himself into the green chair.
“Not that chair! That’s mine,” Hades said in a loud voice.
Embarrassed, Bill stood again and moved to the red chair.
“Not that one either!”
Bill stood and put his hand on his hips.
“That’s my wife’s.” Hades put a book back on the shelf and picked another up.
“So where can I sit?” Bill was tired of the games. What had Granwich said? Something about Harding making him sit on a torture chair. Bill could see one such looking item in the corner of the room, and Hades was also looking at it.
“Oh no. No, Hades. I would break it,” Bill said with relish, “and that would be the end of your fun.”
Hades sighed. “Carter!” he called. A butler appeared at the door. “Please fetch a chair suitable for Mr. Standish, please.” The butler nodded, his rounded eyes taking in Bill’s massive form. He quickly returned with a very solid armchair borne by three footmen who groaned audibly as they set it down in the study.
Bill sank into it in relief. He had walked all the way from Regent’s Park to Hill Street in Mayfair at a fast clip. It had felt a little like he was running away from Celine. He couldn’t pull the wool over his own eyes. He had been trying to escape her. The woman was positively Machiavellian.
Hades settled himself and offered Bill the plate of biscuits that Carter had brought in with him. Bill accepted a cup of coffee gratefully.
“So what do you want to know?” Hades said with a spray of crumbs.
“How would you go about capturing Pedro Moreno? Purely for academic interest of course,” Bill finished hurriedly.
“Hmm. That’s an interesting one.” Hades paused and rubbed his chin. “When I was trying to capture the Viper I hit upon this very novel line of strategies all tied to
snakes. Can’t think how that happened, but it just did.”
Bill nodded. Hades’ words sounded reasonable, but the notion of a strategy built on snakes was ludicrous. Perhaps he was wasting his time. “Where do you find your strategies?”
Hades waved at the bookshelves. “They are all there. Persian, Chinese, French, military.”
“It must be awfully difficult to decide.” Come on, Hades, softly softly.
Hades laughed. “I suppose you could go down the route of a circus-themed strategy. I was reading about one the other day. It seemed to me that all these acrobat fellows like Pedro Moreno like climbing up high in the sky and swinging around on those things called trapezes.”
“Yes, yes.” Bill bit into a biscuit. It wouldn’t do to show his excitement.
Hades heaved himself out of his chair and crossed back over to the stacked bookshelves. Without searching, he selected a small pamphlet from the shelf and brought it back to his seat. “Sun Tzu was my savior with the Viper. He has many interesting things to say.”
“What does he say about acrobats?” Bill laughed.
Hades glared at him and opened the pamphlet. “It was more along the line of the amount of time acrobats spend in the air.” He looked down his nose and flicked the pages. “Where is it? Aha!”
Bill held his breath.
“Remove the ladder when the enemy has ascended to the roof.”
Bill made to stand. Hades had been toying with him. He knew all along that Bill was looking for some pointers and so he was attempting to push Bill down some crooked path to failure.
“You haven’t finished your coffee yet,” Hades said. “But as you are in such a rush, I’ll make is short. Sun Tzu says in his art of warfare that ‘with baits and deceptions lure your enemy into treacherous terrain and then cut off his lines of communication and avenues of escape. To save himself he might fight both your own forces and the elements of nature.’ Quite good advice for all situations I would have thought with that one.”
Bill lowered himself back into his seat. It was good advice and made a lot of sense. Now he just had to work out how to put it into practice.
CHAPTER 11
Victoria craned her head, but still she could not see easily into the man’s face. An oversize top hat cast his face into shadow, and owing to her prominent position in the tea shop, to have squirmed and gawped would have been noticed in an instant. She drummed her fingers on the table and licked her lips.
“Teez wonderful lemon cake eez it not, my lady?” Chantelle, Victoria’s maid, blinked furiously. “I have not had better in Paris. We must ask Francesco for the recipe.”
Victoria nodded. Thank goodness for Chantelle. “Yes, indeed. I would be rather interested in having some more of it.” She glanced at the ceiling and nodded vigorously as Top Hat’s companion nodded his head imperceptibly across the room.
Victoria had found out about Francesco’s café by accident. He had chosen to locate his eatery in a magnificent shop built in the last century with a domed ceiling. She had been on her way to yet another boring musicale when she had seen signs for his grand opening. She hadn’t been able to resist. They had sat her in the same place as she did now. On her first visit the coffee had been excellent, and the cake as light as a feather. Except that voices had kept buzzing in her ear. Even though the room was packed with people, those surrounding her were men. These voices were female, and they kept mentioning her name.
“I can’t understand why Lady Colchester married a man so much older than her.”
“I can. He was rich. I’m looking for a rich man myself. As soon as they drop off, I can do what I want to do.”
“That’s a rather cynical way of looking at it, Rosa.”
“Guthers, if you hadn’t been such a wet hen you wouldn’t have been ensnared by that Fashington chap.”
“But still, Lady Colchester is really nice.”
“Terrible word nice. Implies insipid, boring and run-of-the-mill.”
“I wouldn’t say that too loudly, Rosa Fanthorpe. She’s sitting in the window and now she’s turning to look directly at us…. Oh dear. Do you think she’s heard what we’ve been saying?”
“Don’t be a goose, Guthers. Of course she hasn’t. She’s sat miles away. Besides. She’s far too silly to…”
“I wouldn’t carry on like that Rosa if I were you. Lady Colchester is the person who is going to help you out of your fix. You see, she’s the one that I’m going to recommend to you to investigate Mr. Cryne…”
“Lady Colchester?”
At that point Victoria had finished her coffee and closed her ears to the ensuing conversation. It hadn’t been hard to pinpoint who had been speaking. Guthers—Lord Guthrie’s daughter—and Miss Fanthorpe were sat at the back of the room, at least twenty yards away, whispering like henhouse biddies.
How on earth could she hear their conversation from so far away? A visit to St Paul’s changed that a few weeks later, the verger kindly inviting her up to the whispering gallery.
“Lady Colchester, I believe you might be able to hear what I’m saying?”
It was incredible. The verger stood on the opposite side of St Paul’s dome, high up in the gallery. She stood on the other side of the circle, the domed roof rising high above them. The verger spoke into the wall, and yet she could hear him as clear as a bell.
“I don’t understand how I can hear you so well?” she whispered.
“Acoustic dynamics.”
“Acoustic dynamics?”
“Yes, because the wall is curved, the sound bounces off it all the way round to a particular point where the listener is standing. That is how I can speak to you from so far away.”
It was the same with Francesco’s café—the domed roof bounced off the conversations and if you sat in certain seats as Miss Fanthorpe, Miss Guthrie and Victoria had, then you could hear one another from far away.
Unfortunately it worked both ways, hence Chantelle’s desperate attempt at praising Francesco’s lemon cake.
Victoria took a delicate bite of the lemon cake and chewed slowly, tipping her head to one side in a very affected gesture, but one that was exceedingly good for hearing the conversation between the man she assumed to be Durnish, and her butler Carruthers.
“So to recap, Mr. Durnish, you are looking for your long lost brother Ponsonby Butterworth?”
“Yes.”
Gosh, he was a man of few words.
“And the reason that Mr. Butterworth does not share your same surname?”
“Different fathers.”
“Of course. And when did you last see your brother?”
“1772.”
“And how old were you at the time?” Victoria could tell that Carruthers was getting frustrated.
“Sixteen. My brother was thirty two. He was older than myself.”
“So that would make him now…?”
“Seventy-six.”
“And you are aware, sir…” Carruthers paused. “That he may no longer be alive?”
“Of course. But I would just like to know what happened to him.”
“Do you have any pointers that you might give us as to his interests and such?”
“No. He used to be great cronies with a man called Augustus Ballington.”
Victoria sat straighter in her seat. Augustus Ballington. Good God. That had been Lord Colchester’s real name before he took the title. The tart lemon flavor of the cake quickly dried her mouth. She took a quick sip of tea and spluttered as it went down the wrong way, but it didn’t stop the continued buzzing of the conversation in her ear.
“Look, I was told I was going to meet a woman. I don’t understand who you are, but do you have any more intrusive questions you want to ask me?
Victoria held her breath, and let it out slowly as Carruthers calmly answered.
“Not at all, Mr. Durnish. All that we ask is that you sign a confidentiality agreement… here and… here, and then we will keep you updated every two weeks here in this café
.
“If that is all? I must be going.”
“Of course.”
Victoria turned her head and gazed out of the window as the man in the outsize top hat pushed past her table. As he pushed open the door to the café, she whipped her head round and looked into the mirror by the door and gasped.
The man looked directly at her. There was no way that he was in his sixties. The hair may have been powdered white underneath the hat but the eyes that looked out were those of a young man. He winked and licked his lips lasciviously. He threw his head back and laughed as he reached for the door and slid through it faster than an otter.
Victoria was stunned.
“Madame, your mouth is still open!” Chantelle hissed.
She tried to form a word, molding her lips into shapes, but nothing would come out. A prickle coursed down her spine. That man was dangerous. Victoria sat still as Carruthers paid the bill and left the café for Upper Brook Street. She watched as he stood back to let some gentlemen in through the door of the café. They exchanged some easy words, although her butler looked disconcerted as he left.
“Madame!” Chantelle flapped her hands. “Are you quite alright?”
“I…” But Victoria did not have a chance to answer. Oh how she wished she had never come to Francesco’s. She should have trusted Carruthers to report back to her. She should have known that she was an easy target sat in the front window of a café popular with both men and women of the ton.
“Lady Colchester. What a delightful surprise. May we join you?”
Victoria sighed and looked forlornly at her half-drunk cup of tea and the almost untouched slice of lemon cake that she had yet to consume.
“Certainly, Lord Lassiter… Mr. Standish… Why don’t you sit down next to my maid Chantelle?”
“Oh, I’ll sit next to Chantelle,” Freddie said cheerfully. “Such a fine looking woman. Comment ça va encore?”
Chantelle giggled inanely and looked into Freddie’s eyes. Victoria sniffed.
“That just leaves me to sit next to you.” Bill smiled and shrugged his shoulders. The seat was built in a banquette style. Throwing out the tails of his coat, Bill slid along the seat. He nodded at Chantelle who smiled coquettishly back at him.
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