It made sense.
Perfect sense.
The party was breaking up, and as soon as it was possible he and Cecily said their good-nights and made their way to the waiting carriage.
“What was the hurry?” Cecily demanded once they were in the privacy of the carriage.
Lucas gathered her into his arms and gave her a thorough kiss.
“You’ll see,” he said with a grin.
* * *
The ride was maddening—mostly because though Cecily tried, she could not convince Lucas to tell her why he was so excited.
When they finally arrived at Winterson House, he bounded out of the carriage and bodily lifted Cecily down before the footman could even get the step down.
“Lucas,” she said, struggling to keep up with him as he pulled her by the hand behind him into the house and up the stairs to his study. “What on earth is the matter?”
“I should have done this from the beginning,” he said. “I see that now, though at the time I didn’t make the connection between your father’s journals and Will’s letters. I was a fool not to consider it, though. Especially since you told me that very first day that you were able to interpret his blasted code.”
Cecily shook her head in wonder as she watched him hunt through his desk drawers, clearly searching for something in particular.
At last, he extracted a bundle of letters and tossed them onto the desktop.
“Here,” he said, gesturing for her to come and sit behind his desk.
She complied, but it felt odd to be seated in the place from which the Dukes of Winterson ruled. Metaphorically, at least. Still, she did as he asked, if only to see what he meant about Will’s letters.
“These are all of them, I believe,” he said, untying the dark ribbon that bound them together, leaning over her so that she felt the warmth of his body where he pressed against her. “There are only four in all. I forgot the bloody things existed until tonight when you raced through the flower names. Absurd that I should have, but there it is. If this turns out to have endangered his life in any way…”
He stopped there, shaking his head. Cecily glanced down at the papers on the desk. They were letters, from Will, she presumed.
“What does this mean?” she asked, needing some context for her husband’s odd behavior.
Lucas took a deep breath, and as if needing to keep moving, he stepped around to the other side of the desk and began to pace.
“They’re Will’s letters to my mother, written during the damned expedition.”
She did not take offense at his characterization of the dig, or the swearing. He was clearly overset by the idea that by forgetting about the letters he had somehow endangered his brother’s life.
“And?”
“And they have some chicken scratch crossed through them. I thought at first that it was the foolish code we made up when we were boys. I was never very good at it, but I supposed that he might want to tell me something that he didn’t want Mama or Clarissa to know about. But it was like nothing we’d ever worked on together. And it’s certainly not any language I’ve ever studied. When I met you, I thought about asking you to look at them, but at first I wasn’t sure if you were trustworthy enough to translate them—especially given that they might contain information that implicates your father in something unsavory. And then we became so focused on finding the journals that Will’s letters fell by the wayside.”
Cecily stared down at the letters, his mother’s direction scrawled across them in Will’s bold hand.
“Go ahead,” he said to her, stopping his pacing before the desk. “See if you can figure out what it means.”
The gravity of the situation hit Cecily just then. What would she do if they contained accusations against her father? Her father, who was even now bedridden and insensible. Could she learn damning information about him and convince her husband to keep the matter secret? Or worse, would her conscience compel her to reveal whatever it was Will Dalton had to say? She hoped against hope that the message was simply some confession of an indiscretion from one brother to another. But given the trouble Dalton had taken to encode the message she doubted it.
“Why would he send you a message in a code you did not know how to decipher?” she asked, picking up the first letter and opening the folded pages.
“I suspect he thought I’d be able to ask someone at the Home Office. Being a celebrated war hero has to be good for something,” he said, with a rueful smile. “But I dared not take it to them without knowing what they actually say. If it contained something that would embarrass him, or worse, England, I would not be able to keep the news from becoming public knowledge. And whoever I asked to translate them would feel duty-bound as well. I assumed that he sent the coded messages to me for one of two reasons: either he was desperate to get the message out of Egypt and hoped I’d figure out a way to decipher it, or he thought I’d seek you out. He thought very highly of your language skills, you know. He even mentions you in one of these…”
He gestured to the letters.
Cecily nodded absently as she looked down at the page and began to examine the letters crossed through the actual text of the first letter.
“Do you have a slate?” she asked. “Or perhaps some sheets of foolscap and a pen and ink?”
Lucas gathered the items for her, and soon she was silently working through possible substitutions for the letters in the first of Will’s missives, losing herself in the beautiful patterns of letters.
* * *
Lucas finally gave up his pacing after an hour or so of it. Cecily had ceased to notice him at all after a few minutes of concentration, and he watched her work with a combination of fascination for her mind and frustration with his inability to help her.
He wondered for the millionth time how he’d forgotten about the letters. They’d been sitting here in his desk, moldering away, for nearly six months now. He should have considered asking for Cecily’s help with them from the minute they met in front of the Egyptian Club.
He thrust a hand through his disarranged hair, and reached up to remove his neckcloth. Since it appeared that Cecily would not be asking for his help for a good while, he poured himself a brandy and dropped down into a chair before the fire. And waited.
Lucas was drifting into a light doze when he heard Cecily give a little squeak. Immediately he was on his feet.
“What is it? What have you learned?”
“I’ve broken the code,” she said. “Now, I’ll need to go through and decode the messages.”
Seeing that he had resumed pacing, she said, “You can help with this part if you like.”
He nodded, and pulling another chair around next to hers, he waited while she showed him the substitution code his brother had used. “Now you simply go through and replace the letters.”
Within a few minutes they were finished. They took turns reading the letters aloud, each one giving them more reason to be anxious about Will’s fate.
In the first of the letters, Will had written:
Am convinced that a member of our party is stealing artifacts and selling them to French encamped nearby. Hurston and I have hatched a plan to flush the thief out. We will pretend to have a falling-out, and I will accuse Hurston publicly of appropriating my finds as his own. Then I will ally myself with the group from the British Museum, making it known that I will act as go-between should any member of Hurston’s team wish to sell their finds for more than Hurston is willing to pay. Hurston has heard from David Lawrence and the museum expedition in Alexandria that they are experiencing thefts as well. Wish we could catch the blackguard.
“So Papa and Mr. Dalton were not actually fighting,” Cecily said when Lucas had finished reading. She hadn’t liked to think of her father and William at odds with one another. Especially given how close they had been to one another in the past. “But who could this thief have been? Who would have the audacity to steal artifacts right out from under Papa’s nose?”
&n
bsp; “I think if we knew that, we’d have unraveled this whole puzzle by now,” Lucas said with a weary sigh.
“True,” Cecily said. “This next letter is dated three days before your brother disappeared.”
The ruse is working, thank God. But we are still unable to catch the thief. It’s as if our attempts to draw him out have simply made him more wary than ever of revealing his identity. Still, I have every faith that we will find the fellow soon.
“The difference in tone between that letter and this one,” Lucas said, holding up the next letter, “is extraordinary. Something must have happened in the days between that made the situation seem more dire. Listen…”
Though it may seem foolish of me, I will ask you, brother, to take care of Mama and Clarissa should anything befall me that prevents my return home. I pray this letter finds you safe and well. And I beg that you not cast blame upon yourself should the worst happen. You were much better suited to the army than I ever could have been. And in the end I have found more joy with my position as Hurston’s secretary than I ever would have discovered on the Continental battlefields. If I do not return, information about the thief’s transactions may be found in the blue cat. Hurston will know what I mean. And if not Hurston, then David Lawrence at the British Museum.
“It’s as if he’s in fear for his life,” Lucas fumed, pushing his chair back from the table. “Bloody hell.”
Cecily was silent, watching her husband’s strong back as he stood staring into the fire. She rose to offer him comfort.
“We do not know that the thief discovered him,” she said, taking him by the hand now, and leading him to the comfortable settee on the other side of the fire. “We know nothing now but that he and my father were engaged in a deception to flush out the thief.”
“We know enough,” he said. “We know that Will is missing and your father is unable to speak. I would not be at all surprised if somehow your father’s apoplexy was brought on by this whole business. Whoever this man is, he has been clever enough to keep his identity a secret from even the people he did business with in Egypt.”
“But now we have someone else to question, at least.”
The thought of facing David Lawrence again made Cecily’s stomach roil in protest, but if they were to find out what had happened to Will, then she would force herself to suffer through it.
“Under no circumstances will I let you question David Lawrence. For all we know, he is the thief,” Lucas said fiercely. “I’ll speak to him myself.”
Cecily shook her head. She appreciated Lucas’s wish to shield her from contact with her former fiancé, but if they were to learn anything more regarding Will’s disappearance, she would have to swallow her distaste. David wasn’t honorable in the least, but as far as she knew he had never stooped to theft. “It is doubtful he’s the thief. He has no reason to be. He has plenty of wealth of his own. And there is no way he will consent to speak to you alone. Besides, he owes me. I can use that to force him to reveal what we wish to know.”
Lucas clenched his jaw, and looked as if he would argue, but finally, acknowledging her point, he nodded. “Then we will pay a call on him. I wonder if he knows about this blue cat. What the devil does Will mean by it?”
“Cats were worshiped as gods by the Egyptians. It sounds to me as if there were some artifact that they brought back with them that is either engraved with a blue cat or in some way resembles one. It may even be a sarcophagus. If I recall correctly a blue cat was on the list of items recently received by the Egyptian Club. The list they were reading from on the night of the secret meeting we spied on.”
They were silent for a moment. Each lost in their own thoughts as they reflected on the news they’d gleaned from Will’s letters and the implications their proposed visit to David Lawrence would have on their partnership.
Still, Cecily sensed there was something else on her husband’s mind. Something that had nothing to do with Lawrence.
“It was supposed to be me, you know,” Lucas said finally. “I was supposed to be your father’s secretary. As a younger son, my father’s fortunes were not so great that he could afford to pay our way. So Will and I knew early on that we would need to embark on some profession or other. The Duke of Winterson, my father’s elder brother, was friends with your father and had secured the position of secretary for me.”
The lines of his face were stark in the dim light, his eyes bleak.
“But I was full of my own importance then, and had my heart set on a career in the army. I’d saved just enough to purchase a commission. But Papa did not wish to anger his brother. He owed his own living to him, you see. And as the eldest I was expected to embrace the wonderful gift of the position with Hurston. We argued about it for weeks that year. Finally I’d had enough and bought the commission anyway. I didn’t even have the decency to tell my father in person. The next thing I knew I was on the way to Portugal and Will was on his first expedition to Egypt.”
“But he seemed so happy in his position,” Cecily said, covering her husband’s hand with her own. Wanting to offer him comfort, but unsure of how to do so. “I never once got the impression that he had not chosen it on his own.”
Lucas smiled, though his eyes were still shadowed with guilt.
“It simply wasn’t in him to be spiteful or bitter. He accepted the world for what it was. With all its flaws. I think he’d have been suited to the church if he’d only had the inclination.” His lips quirked in a wry smile. “Alas, like his elder brother he was a bit too fond of the ladies and carousing for that.”
Cecily stood. “Come, Your Grace. Let me take you to bed.”
The flash of desire in his eyes sent an answering thrill zinging through her solar plexus.
Silent, he took her hand and led her upstairs.
Sixteen
The next day Lucas sent a note round to David Lawrence at the museum requesting an appointment, but was informed that Mr. Lawrence was away on business and would not be back for a sennight.
Cecily, nervous about the coming meeting, spent the week unable to relax around Lucas for fear that he might guess her agitation stemmed from the fact that she’d soon be seeing David again. It wasn’t that she feared falling under his spell again. It was more that she feared what David might say or do. And if she were completely honest with herself, dredging up the feelings she’d endured so long ago with David had reminded her just what she was risking if she allowed Lucas to take possession of her heart. She simply could not incur such a risk.
To spare herself the discomfort of Winterson’s too-knowing gaze, and to gain some much-needed distance, the night after they had translated the letters, she pleaded a headache and requested that he allow her to sleep in her own bed.
Alone.
“For I am liable to toss and turn all night and keep you from your rest,” she told him from the doorway that divided their chambers.
Barefoot and coatless, her husband had been preparing to bathe when she knocked on the door. His shirt gaped at the neck where he had already discarded his cravat, and Cecily could not help but let her gaze linger on the vee of exposed skin there. She knew from experience how hard the muscles of his chest would feel pressed against her own softness. Embarrassed at the wave of desire that coursed through her, she closed her eyes in what she hoped would seem like a reflex against the pain in her head.
When she looked up again, Lucas’s brows were drawn together in concern. “Is there anything I might do to make you more comfortable?” he asked her, stepping forward, hand extended as if to caress her.
“N … no!” she stammered, taking a step back, which seemed to surprise him. “That is…” she amended, “I … a night’s rest is all I need, Your Grace. I will be quite well tomorrow.”
His expression was inscrutable for a moment, but then he offered her a crooked grin. “I suppose I haven’t given you much opportunity for sleep of late.”
Unable to suppress her answering smile, Cecily nodded. “Thank you, Luca
s,” she said softly, before closing the door between them.
Climbing into her empty bed, she sighed. Keeping her distance from him had not proved as easy as she had hoped it would be.
Unbidden, the memory of David Lawrence as he had looked at their last meeting rose in her mind. A little part of her brain insisted that Lucas was nothing like Lawrence, but she ignored it. She had loved and lost once before. She had no intention of behaving so foolishly again.
* * *
Cecily seemed to be over her headache the next day, even going shopping with her cousins that afternoon, so Lucas was surprised that evening when he found her once again standing at the connecting door, requesting another night to herself.
“For I’m afraid the headache has come back and I would not care to keep you awake,” she said, the shadows beneath her dark eyes attesting to the fact that she was indeed fatigued.
Still, there was something about her request that rang false. Suddenly an explanation occurred to him that brought him to the blush. They had been married nearly a month and she was a lady. He cursed himself for a fool for not thinking of it sooner. She was probably shy about speaking of such things with her husband.
“My dear,” he began, wondering just how best to approach the subject, “there is no need … that is to say … I know nothing of such…”
He shifted from one foot to the other, suddenly wishing for the masculine comforts of his club and an enormous snifter of brandy.
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