Tempting the Earl

by Rachael Miles

  “Now that we know each others’ skills, we can begin our good work. If a woman comes up to us on the street and asks for our help, I want us to offer that aid, in whatever way would be most helpful to her. And I’d also like for each of us to bring causes to the group for our help.”

  All the women nodded their heads in agreement and quickly began to outline even more ways in which the Muses’ Salon could work.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Leaving us already, Lord Montmorency?” Mrs. Pier cooed. Montmorency knew he was one of her favorites.

  “I’ll be back at the end of the month, dear Pier. But until then, I must see to ditching my moors, troublesome things.” Montmorency took her hand and with an elaborate bow, brushed his lips across the back of her hand. Mrs. Pier blushed—as usual. “But I have six months left in my residency, so you will be seeing me before the end of next month. The Roman artifacts to be found in this region are exceptional.”

  “Well, and of course you have other interests that keep you from us.”

  “Ah yes, my dear, other interests.” He smiled, rubbing the thick raised scar on the back of his hand. If only they knew. “But I must be off, I’m expected at my estate tomorrow night.” With a self-satisfied air, he picked up his valise, letting his finger play along the edge of a pocket sewn into his waistcoat. He’d put the list there. All safe and hidden.

  As Montmorency climbed in the waiting unmarked hackney, Flute held out a large rag and wet it from a drinking flask. “Ready to remove those paints and become yourself again?”

  Montmorency began to wipe off layers of his face, becoming Charters with each pass of the linen.

  “Learn anything useful from playing the scholar?”

  “Ah, Flute, I have gained us a world of information, so much that I find myself losing interest in our newest client. I don’t like being lied to, and we have not heard the full story of why the names of these newspaper correspondents are so valuable. The authors we have traced so far have been zealots or fools, goading the state because it suits them. But there is no real stratagem in their essays—excepting of course those of An Honest Gentleman. If there’s something to be discovered here, it will be with him.”

  Flute looked up, intrigued. “And the new information?”

  “After a year of searching for Tom Wilmot’s papers, I have them and the code key to boot. A couple hours of work, and I’ll have it all decoded.”

  “Then you don’t yet know if your name was mentioned.”

  “It was, but it is no longer. I removed it and substituted another man’s in their list,” Charters remarked with barely contained glee.

  “But how, if it was in code? And without being seen?”

  “Flute, my father was silly and a fool. Since, as his third son, I was not to be the lord of the estate, he found no harm in naming me after a foolish whim. I believe it was even a bet, but I have never been able to prove that.”

  “What’s your name?” Flute seemed only moderately interested.

  “Let’s make it a quiz. I will tell you how I was able to remove my name and replace it with another’s. If you can guess my name, you may choose our next client.”

  Flute looked interested. “Then tell me.”

  “My first name is nine letters long, but uses only six unique letters. The first and the third letter of each triplet is the same, and there is no repetition of letters across triplets. As much as I hate the name, I spent my childhood fascinated by it—making it into anagrams and other tricks.”

  “So the pattern is one and three, four and six, seven and nine?”

  “Exactly. Assuming that the first three letters of most items would spell out Sir, I ignored those. Then I looked for a series of letters repeated as you describe. When the scholars divided the list, I chose the portion with my name in it, and I simply worked it backward. I knew what letters appeared in my name, and I used those to code in a new name—that of a dead man. Simple. It is the only time in my life I have been grateful my father was a boor.”

  “What did you learn from the list? Other than that your name was on it.”

  “I learned that having your name on that list is tantamount to a death sentence, and I want to know who the executioner is. I want to know that, almost as much as I want to know the true identity of our friend An Honest Gentleman.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The next morning, Olivia dressed while Harrison was still sleeping. She’d received a note from Mentor asking her to meet at the usual place and time, and she needed to escape before Harrison woke.

  She was torn. A disguise would help keep her safe, if Calista was in London. But with Harrison so close by, she couldn’t risk donning one without him discovering her secrets. She would have to rely on her wits instead.

  She slipped from the room as he snored lightly.

  She gave herself the luxury of a hackney, hailing one from a corner two blocks from Harrison’s London house and leaving it two blocks before her meeting place.

  Inside the coffeehouse, Mentor waited at a table in the back room.

  “Ah, I’d expected some guttersnipe with the pox,” Mentor teased. “But instead I have coffee with a beautiful woman. It is good that you could meet me. After your last letter, we felt it necessary to see that you were well.”

  “Ah, you were worried.”

  “Yes. But don’t tell the others; they already feel that we play favorites with you.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Few of the others can boast a marriage, even an invalid one, to an earl. But you are the best agent Mrs. Flint ever trained—she says it herself.”

  “How is old Flint?” Olivia watched the doorway for any sign of being followed, but she saw nothing.

  “The same. I keep thinking that some day when we meet, I’ll suddenly realize that she’s aged, but it never happens. She is still as quick with a lock as anyone, and you are still the only one who ever matched her.” Mentor crossed his leg over his knee, pulling a piece of paper from his upper boot.

  “Do you have anything for me?”

  Mentor watched over her shoulder. “The list that you and Harrison deciphered. We’ve traced all the names. We don’t know what Wilmot believed they had in common when he made the list, but that was more than a year ago. Now it is little more than a roll call of the dead.”

  “We’d hoped Baldwin would know the connection, but now . . .” She hesitated, remembering the sound of the gunshot and knocking Baldwin to the ground. It had been so close. Her mouth went dry. “How many on the list are still alive?”

  “Only five. We’ve set agents to protect them, and perhaps in that way we will discover who killed the others, and why. But we’d also like someone to look into the others—the dead men. We’ve thought to give the task to Montclair.” Mentor rarely made small talk, so this was significant . . . somehow. “But we would like to give the job to you. Sometimes a woman’s skills unlock secrets more successfully than a man’s. Of course, you can sort out the question of your marriage before you decide.”

  “I’ll consider it. But what of An Honest Gentleman? Do you wish for me to continue?”

  “For the time being.” He pressed a slip of paper across the desk. “Here’s a little information you might use to good effect in your next column. If this doesn’t make the lout bite, then we will have to find another way to flush him out.”

  She concealed it in her bodice.

  “But more importantly, do you believe you can continue? Walgrave is observant, almost preternaturally so. Has he noticed your avocation? Or more to the point, does he suspect?”

  “He suspects everything now that I have been attacked.”

  Mentor put a handful of coin on the table. “Be watchful, Livvy. None of the information we have is concrete, and that means an attack could come from any quarter.” He set his hand on hers briefly, then walked away.

  * * *

  Joe Pasten.

  A traitor.

  Harrison still couldn
’t believe it.

  When Olivia had risen before the dawn, he’d pretended to be asleep so that he could follow her. Since her meeting in the graveyard, he’d been prepared to discover Olivia was An Honest Gentleman. But he hadn’t expected to find Pasten passing her information.

  Harrison brushed his hand through his hair in frustration. Why did he have to be the one to discover Joe’s treachery? He couldn’t imagine how he was going to inform Mr. James. Joe was Benjamin’s dearest friend—the man who had saved his life at Waterloo and had spent years as his valet-cum-physician. Harrison had often watched Joe and Mr. James with a kind of admiration. Each time he had seen their heads bent over a shared document, or he had watched the way their minds interrogated a problem from all directions and came to a mutually satisfying end, he had been jealous. He had seen that sort of marriage of minds with Forster and Lady Wilmot, and it was the sort of closeness that he’d grown to want with Olivia. If Harrison were a different man, he could ignore the devastation turning Joe in would cause. But he wasn’t. He only wished he had stopped looking when Mr. James told him to do so. Because now he had to consider not only his duty to the Home Office, but his obligations to Olivia as well. Did she know what she was doing? And if so, did he want to tell the Home Office that the woman he loved was the one distributing secrets through the press?

  As Harrison struggled with his duty to the Home Office, and his love for Olivia and Mr. James, another man approached Olivia’s table. She stiffened. He couldn’t hear the man’s words, but he knew what aggression looked like. Beneath the table, Olivia slipped her hand in her reticule and pulled out a pocket pistol, keeping it hidden in her lap.

  Harrison rose to help her. She didn’t think she could shoot someone, did she? And not in a coffee shop! He had to intervene, even if it meant revealing that he had followed her.

  He kept his gaze firmly on Olivia’s reactions. She seemed calm, even complacent.

  The man held out his dirty fingers, passing her a tightly folded letter. Folded several times, it was small enough to fit into the palm of his hand. He rose, saying something that Harrison couldn’t hear. Olivia’s face grew anxious and strained.

  As Harrison hurried his way forward, the man brushed past him. He was dirty and wiry. Immediately Harrison remembered where he had seen the fellow: He’d thrown him out of the actress’s dressing room not a month ago.

  Suddenly, it all began to line up: the letter from an informant addressed to An Honest Gentleman in the dressing room, the attack on Olivia in the churchyard; the shot that may or may not have been meant for her; her meeting with Joe. He didn’t know if the feeling in his gut was anger, betrayal, regret, or shame. Of all Olivia’s secrets, he’d never imagined that one of them would be that he’d propositioned her like a common whore.

  By the time Harrison reached her table, Olivia was seated alone.

  * * *

  “Tell me who’s threatening you.” Harrison slipped into the empty seat before her, reading the anxiety on her face. “I’ve got the pieces. I just need to know which game board we are playing on, and I need to know who the players are.”

  She said nothing and her silence frustrated him.

  “I followed you to your first meeting. I saw who you met with, so I’m also sure that you don’t wish to reveal anything I don’t already know. So let me lay it out for you.” He paused, but she only looked at him. “In the last few months, I’ve followed you on the street and propositioned you at the theater. I’ve discovered you are a novelist, a newspaper columnist, and after this morning, perhaps even an agent of the Home Office.”

  “I had hoped you wouldn’t put the puzzle together.”

  “Why wouldn’t I? You are my wife.”

  She held up her hand to object, but he ignored it.

  “Don’t say it. What matters is that you have been threatened. At least three times by my count. If I’m right, you’ve been assuming that the threats have been coming from the same quarter . . . or are at least rooted in the same cause. But what if they aren’t the same? Yours is the elegant solution, but is it the correct one?”

  Olivia thought for a minute, realizing he was right. But by her count the threats came from at least three quarters: the threats to An Honest Gentleman, those springing from her investigations into her father, and those from Calista. “You are suggesting that I could have different sets of people threatening me for different reasons?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m simply not that interesting.”

  He barked a laugh. “Think about it. It’s too easy to see this all as tied together. But if you haven’t found a connection, perhaps it’s there isn’t one. Tell me what the man in the churchyard said.”

  “My memory of that meeting is fuzzy.” She thought for a moment. “I know that he knew things about me and my father that he said that I didn’t want you—or the ton—to find them out. But I can’t remember much else.”

  “What did the man say today?”

  “That’s easier to remember. He said, ‘My master knows you won’t stop until you have answers, so he’ll meet you once. Tonight. At that address.’”

  “What answers do you seek, Olivia?”

  She turned her face away. “You never believed me when I told you I was a woman of many secrets.”

  “I was wrong. Perhaps if I had listened, you wouldn’t be leaving me.” The idea of her leaving him made him feel both inexpressibly sad and a bit frantic. Without meaning to, he’d come to depend on her, on the regular receipt of the letters he read in secret, wishing, and not wishing, they had held more of her heart. At first he had pretended not to read them on principle, angry at being married, then later, he had pretended not to read them because it had become a pattern, a dance between them. If she believed he didn’t open the letters, then perhaps she might reveal some part of herself unintentionally. Even as he pushed her away, he always wanted to draw her close.

  “The problem is that I have so many secrets, I’ve even forgotten some. If I knew why I was attacked, then I could predict the what and the where.” She lifted her hands, then let them fall.

  “What might they be angry about?” Harrison waited. “You owe me this much, Olivia. I have a right to know at least as much about you as you discovered about me in those blasted interviews you held before our marriage. Start at the beginning.”

  She gave a rueful smile. “The beginning is not as clear as you might imagine. I have only the vaguest memories of my childhood. My mother died when I was an infant; my father, though I loved him, was a thief and a swindler. My father entrusted me to your father when I was only five. Sir Roderick used to joke he won me by losing a bet.” She smiled, a sad smile that pulled at his heart. “I loved your father. He sent me to a somewhat unusual boarding school, where the headmistress taught us how to make our way in the world. I became a governess. That failed. Then, your father decided I was the perfect wife for you, and I let him convince me to marry you. The rest you know.”

  “Then why are they threatening you?”

  “My father had enemies, and because I knew that, I’ve made sure to investigate him under an assumed name. So I don’t understand how this man had made the connection. He appears to wish to punish me for my father’s sins.” She looked away. He took the note from her hand, and she did not resist.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s the time and place for a meeting.”

  “With that man?!” He read the message. “I’ll never let you go. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Harrison, I’m not your wife.” She plucked the note from his hands, and rising, put her hands on her hips. “I can come and go as I please.”

  And rising, she left.

  * * *

  Several hours later, Olivia arrived at the abandoned building described in her directions. She arrived two hours early, as Mrs. Flint had trained her, to find and occupy a position of strength.

  As she mounted the stairs of the porch, she found Harrison sitting behind a large
column, hidden mostly from view.

  “I suppose you thought that by intercepting me here, I will let you stay.”

  “If you can come and go as you please, I can stay or go as I please. I thought you might like some help.”

  She rolled her eyes and harrumphed but did not demand he leave her. Mentor had told her Harrison was a good agent, and Mrs. Flint always cautioned her girls never to work alone if they could help it.

  Harrison escorted her to the door. “It’s locked, but we can break in around the side if you are amenable.”

  “Here. Let me.” She nudged him out of the way and knelt in front of the lock.

  “What?”

  “Shh.” She pulled a pin from her hair and put her ear to the lock. He watched, stunned.

  “There.” She smiled broadly. “Not so hard with the right tools.” She stuck the pin back behind her ear. “After you?”

  “We will discuss your ability with locks later.” Stepping in front of her, he led them both into the darkness. “Keep your hand on my back. I want to know where you are.” Together they explored the house, ensuring that no one had arrived before them. The upper rooms had been used for storage, the lower most recently for a milliner’s shop.

  “We should wait here.”

  “For how long?”

  He opened his pocket watch. “Another hour.” He sat on the floor, his back to the short end of the closet.

  She settled in across from him, knowing that the last thing either of them wished to do was talk.

  She watched him, listening to the rise and fall of his breath. She noticed the muscles in his chest, the strength of his arms. If this would be their last night together, then she would make the most of it.

  She crept to his side.

  “I thought you preferred distance.”

  She shrugged.

  “What is it that you want, Livvy?” His voice was tired, almost bored.

  She reached out her hand and placed it on his thigh, then slid it up slowly. “I haven’t decided yet, but I thought you might deserve a bit of turnabout.”