by Lara Archer
For the first time, Lord Henry’s look of absolute confidence wavered. “But it’s why you’re here. Why you demanded to meet with me.”
“I demanded? Don’t be absurd. You’re the one who made the—”
They made the realization at the same time.
“Oh, blast it all!” Sebastian withdrew the paper he’d stashed in his pocket and shook it open with his free hand so Lord Henry could see it. “Not your handwriting, I suppose?”
Lord Henry stared at the paper long and hard, and then, to Sebastian’s astonishment, Lord Henry laughed. “No, not mine. But identical to that on a message I received. Though mine asked me to leave a door unlocked, and promised the truth about Robert Ehlert. Apparently, we have both been duped.”
Duped. Brought here to kill each other. To clear a path for . . . someone else.
Someone else was playing the Game.
Crushing frustration weighed on his chest; his knees threatened to buckle.
The two forged messages couldn’t have come from Rachel, could they? She was locked in her room when his message came.
“Please don’t tell me your information about Victoire de Laurent came from the same source,” he said.
“No,” said Lord Henry. “That I got straight from the duc du Bourge.”
“Tell me.”
“Tell me about Robert’s death first.”
“For God’s sake, why can that matter now?”
Lord Henry’s expression darkened, and hardened to granite. “I won’t breathe a word about Victoire until you tell me. I must know.”
“Fine, then. It was . . . simple enough. We knew from Victoire that he had betrayed us. She gloated about turning him. After the attack on Sal and I, we tracked him down to a safe house we had often used. He didn’t make it difficult for us.”
“He surrendered? And still you didn’t bring him back to England?” Lord Henry snarled. “You couldn’t at least give him a trial?”
“You think he would have preferred being dragged home in disgrace?”
“You shot him down as if he was nothing!” said Lord Henry, eyes blazing. But beneath the scorching anger in his eyes lay a well of grief. “Like an animal.”
Sebastian shook his head. “I didn’t take Robert Ehlert’s life. He took his own. He was waiting for us, quite calmly. Moments after we entered the room, he turned his pistol on himself.”
Lord Henry rocked on his feet as though the words were a pressure against his body. “He took his own life,” he said, softly. “Did he say anything before he did?”
“Very little.” The moment was as clear in Sebastian’s memory as the night it happened: his mentor, his old friend, sitting at little table with his hands spread on top so the men who found him could see he held no weapon, so they would not shoot on sight. But a pistol was within reach. His back was straight. His eyes clear. And anguished. “He told us he was sorry for what he’d done, and I believe he meant it.”
“He was sorry?” Lord Henry’s eyebrows rose. “Was he specific about which part he regretted?”
“How specific did he need to be? He’d betrayed us, his friends, his colleagues, his country.”
“Did he mention those things, those things in particular?”
“No.”
“He said nothing about . . . He did not mention . . . ?” Lord Henry broke off, seeming suddenly far older than he had just minutes before.
What was it the man wanted to hear? Sebastian focused on the memory of Robert Ehlert’s face. The guilt he saw there. The regret. “He was sorry. I daresay he looked . . . heartbroken. He clearly felt he deserved to die.”
Lord Henry drew in a breath so deep it seemed it might split his chest in two, and then his body slumped back against the cracked mirror. He closed his eyes for a long moment, thinking heaven only knew what thoughts. At long last he spoke. “Heartbroken?” he asked.
Sebastian remembered the look he’d seen in his old mentor’s eyes. “Yes,” he said. “That would be an accurate description.”
“Heartbroken.” Lord Henry repeated, and nodded, and it seemed some weight had been lifted from his chest. “Thank you for telling me that,” he said.
Sebastian stared at him, puzzled. That was what Lord Henry wanted to hear?
The older man straightened again, all at once regaining his former look of dignity and strength. “In that case,” said Lord Henry, “you may live.”
Sebastian blinked in surprise. And the hairs rose on the back of his neck.
He glanced quickly into the mirror behind Lord Henry, and upwards—and saw the muzzles of two muskets propped on the rail of the gallery, both trained right at his back.
Damnation.
They’d been watched this whole time. Apparently, Lord Henry’s definition of “honorable man” was a bit on the flexible side.
At a wave from Lord Henry, the muzzles disappeared from sight. Sebastian lowered his blade.
“Tonight,” said Lord Henry, “at nine o’clock, you will find Victoire de Laurent in the Church of Saint Theresa, not a mile from here.”
Sebastian slid the weapon Lord Henry had given him back into the rack of blades. He would need subtlety more than force tonight.
Oddly, the moment he did, Lord Henry made him a formal bow, just as if they had sparred as friends. And, just as oddly, Sebastian could not resist bowing in return.
“Be sure you kill her,” said Lord Henry, as Sebastian turned to go. “And if possible, don’t make it an easy death.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Rachel sat on the floor in the last gleam of twilight from her window, listening for noise from downstairs. Everything had gone quiet in the house.
She’d heard nothing more of Sebastian’s voice all day, and nothing of Rosa or Eva or Will since they drove off that morning. Where was everyone?
Dull fear throbbed inside her.
She prayed Eva was still with Will, that wherever he’d been taking her, he wasn’t bringing them back to this house, that he was taking her out of Vigo, out of Spain.
Will, at least, would never hurt his own child.
The rest of her brain—while she was locked in here, helpless to do anything—was engaged in memorizing every ink stroke of the paper Sarah had hidden inside the doll. Sebastian had not noticed it when he took the notebook away.
Beneath the heaps of clothes and books scattered about the room, she’d found a few other papers Sebastian had not seen, some of the intercepted Black Cipher messages which Will had given to her yesterday. She could indeed read them now, for all the good it did her—mentions of rendezvous and the names of men she didn’t know. Useful information, no doubt, to the British. But who was there to tell?
Despair was a heavy weight, growing more leaden in her chest as the darkness fell.
Had she been wrong to hide the notebook from Sebastian? Lord Henry had seemed so fervent in his belief that Sebastian was a traitor. But then there were all the things she had seen of him firsthand. The memories wouldn’t seem to stop coming: His hand gripping hers outside of Lady Barham’s tavern. His body shielding hers when cannon fire erupted in Corunna. The fear in his voice, the desperation in his kiss after Victoire pointed that pistol at her.
Oh, God. And the look of anguish on his face when he saw her with the notebook—the shock and disbelief at her betrayal of him.
Well, she could do nothing about any of it now. She’d made her choice. The very same choice Sarah had made, to protect Eva. And Sebastian had made his choice in return: he’d locked her in here. And he hadn’t come back.
She hugged her arms around her knees. The room was nearly black now, and the walls loomed dark and heavy, closing in. Terror welled up deep within her; her lungs tightened.
And then something bumped against the shutters of her window. From the outside.
A scrabbling sound.
She jumped in fright.
And then the scrabbling came again. Like claws.
No—not claws. Something thrown against
the casement. Pebbles, maybe. Or clots of hard dirt. Followed by a more human sound—a very soft whistle, just at the edge of hearing.
Someone was out there, trying to get her attention.
Cautiously, she crouched by the window and looked out into the dark street. A shadow stood below.
“It’s me,” breathed a voice. The shadow was holding something—a length of something pale, and was swinging it back and forth as if to build momentum. “Catch this. Quickly.”
Numbly, she watched the paleness sweep up towards her. She had nothing to lose; she caught it. It was rope.
“It forms a ladder,” hissed the shadow. “Secure it quickly, and climb down. I have a coach.”
All at once, she recognized who it was: John Rapson.
Her heart soared. Mr. Rapson!
Mr. Rapson had found her. Mr. Rapson had come for her.
She made quick work of knotting the rope-ends to the balcony railing, tested the ladder’s strength, then swung herself out and scrambled down before anyone could see her. Mr. Rapson caught her in his arms as she jumped the last few feet into the street, and hugged her hard.
“You’re safe. Thank God,” said his voice against her ear. “But I have to get you out of here.”
Before she could so much as think, he pulled at her arm, and they ran together to a coach that waited in the shadows several houses down. Mr. Rapson signaled to a coachman, and the moment the door was shut behind them, they were rattling away.
He lit a small lantern that hung beside the door, and their questions tumbled over one another.
“Are you hurt?” he said. “Did anyone hurt you?”
“How did you find me?”
“Why didn’t you come to me this morning?”
“Where are we going?”
Mr. Rapson laughed, and squeezed her hands. “One of us at a time,” he said. “I was terrified they might have hurt you, but you are safe. No one can harm you now.”
“Mr. Rapson, please—”
“John.”
“Yes, John.” He had set her free, but she needed to move. She needed to find someone—Eva, Will, Rosa. Victoire de Laurent. “Please, there are things I need to explain—”
“Shh. You don’t need to explain. I understand already.”
“No, you can’t possibly—”
“Miss Covington,” he said firmly, in the voice he once used to correct her Latin grammar, though now there was a hint of humor behind it. He drew something out that had been tucked inside his jacket. A bundle of papers. “Look at these.”
He spread them out across her knees.
She looked down at them, and, instantly, her heart kicked: the pages were covered in the Black Cipher.
“Dear God, John. Where did you find these?”
“I stole them.” A mischievous smile lit his face. “From the duc du Bourge. The man’s in league with the French.”
She almost couldn’t remember how to make words form. “What? Yes, I—but how on earth did you—”
Mr. Rapson looked very pleased with himself. “Du Bourge has a bad habit of boasting. He thinks he’s only dropping clever hints, but for anyone with a brain who pays attention, it adds up easily enough.”
She simply gaped at him.
“Come now,” said Mr. Rapson soothingly. “Have you really forgotten me? You know how my mind works. I learned something else very interesting: du Bourge was on most familiar terms with Salomé Mirabeau.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “And he implied she was a spy.”
Her heart began to thud.
Mr. Rapson drew one sheet out slowly from the stack on her lap and held it just beneath her gaze. “I believe you are able to read this now, are you not? Show me.”
He was silent for a long moment, regarding her seriously across the coach. The lantern sent long streaks of light and shadow bouncing across his features; he looked suddenly very unfamiliar.
Blankly, she lowered her eyes to the black runes. The cipher yielded itself up easily to her now. Letter by letter, the words in French this time: My Lord, we have overtaken them on the road, this one read. As you instructed, the tall English and the old woman are dead.
Horror swept her as the message registered fully: We have taken the child to deliver her to Madrid.
Her sight went nearly black. “No!” she cried, clutching her belly against the panic that rioted there. “John! We have to turn the coach around. We have to go east. They’ve taken her—taken a child. Eva!”
But Mr. Rapson was unruffled by her fear. “So you do know how to read it,” he said, regarding her calmly from his side of the coach. “And that answers another question—you know about the child.”
“What?” The world seemed to be growing very still.
“It’s all right,” said Mr. Rapson. And, of all things, he was smiling, a self-assured, gentle smile. “Evangelina is safe. I wouldn’t hurt her. I just needed to know the truth about you.”
Her blood thickened to ice. “John? What are you talking about?”
“I told you, don’t worry.” His finger tapped the paper. “I didn’t steal this particular message. It’s a fake.”
A fake.
“I wrote it myself,” he said.
“You what?” She glanced down at it again, at the weight of the line markings, at the distinctive curves along the edges. The hand was the same as in the messages that had been delivered to Sebastian. The same person had written them all.
She gasped. “You sent those messages to the house.”
“To the hawk, yes.” His voice was disdainful.
The hawk.
If he sent those messages, he knew who and what Sebastian really was. Astonishment and confusion washed through her—and fear.
Threads of memory began to draw together in her mind: Mr. Rapson was a scholar of languages. He had taught her and Sarah how to write codes, how to break them. And he was, as Sebastian had warned her, a man of deep strategy. Understanding dawned, cold and terrible. “You’re . . . the code writer. The French cryptographer. You’re Le Merveil.”
He sketched a half-bow. “At your service, mademoiselle.”
“You’ve been working for the French.”
He looked suddenly pained, and impatient. “It wasn’t like that. You don’t understand.”
“Make me understand, then.” Her mind was working frantically. If he was Le Merveil, she needed to get away from him, and quickly. The salt scent of the ocean increased, growing closer; they were moving towards the wharf. Toward a ship, no doubt. And she couldn’t let him take her away from here. She had to find Eva. She had to stop Victoire de Laurent.
“It was perfectly innocent when it started,” he said. “Several years ago, an old classmate from Cambridge—a wealthy one, not a scholarship boy like me—came to visit me in Rookshead. He remembered my gift for languages and ciphers, and requested a favor—a silly thing. He wanted a way to communicate with a friend, he said, something their wives could not read.”
“And you made one for him.” She kept her voice calm, told herself to act just as she once did when they met together for their studies. A purely cerebral conversation. She had to make him relax his guard.
“Of course,” confirmed Mr. Rapson. “Why not? It was perfectly harmless. And then a few weeks later, he returned. Said his friend had been in the army, knew a bit about codes, and found my first far too simple. They’d made a wager whether I could write a code the army man couldn’t break.”
She forced a small smile of her own. “And how could you ignore such a challenge?” The road the carriage was taking began to slope downwards. They would be at the wharf soon. “Indeed,” said Mr. Rapson, “it was an excellent intellectual exercise. Of course, I won that wager for my friend, and he insisted on splitting his winnings with me. Two hundred pounds—more money than I’d had in my pocket in my life.”
Ah, money. Even the purest-hearted of poor clergymen could not entirely resist its lure.
“And I’ll wager more work followed,” sh
e said. “More requests for ciphers.”
“Yes. For the British army, I assumed. Not that I was ever much of a Nationalist in my personal views. But they paid me for it. The ethics seemed perfectly sound.”
Another mystery suddenly resolved itself in her mind. “But eventually they paid you with more than coin. Lord Fairholme?”
His face fell somewhat. “Ah, that. That was not my choice. I really was a distant relative of the family. I thought quite sincerely that it was nothing but a string of bad luck.”
A shiver went through her. “But it wasn’t bad luck, was it?” she said before she could stop herself. “Your relatives were murdered.”
“By the French.” Genuine anguish crossed his handsome features. “I did not realize until they asked—until they demanded my help breaking British ciphers.”
It was treason, then. Mr. Rapson had committed treason.
How could this be the man she had known and respected since she was a child of twelve? It was hard work to frame her expression to something like sympathy. “And by then you were in too deep to resist.”
“Yes!” He looked relieved at her words. “You know how it is when you fall in with these kinds of people! They reward with one hand, and threaten with the other. They don’t let you walk away. They said they had proof that I’d set the fire that killed three of the Fairholme heirs—manufactured proof, or course, and well-paid witnesses who’d swear they’d seen me riding from the estate just before the flames engulfed it. If I didn’t stay in their employ, I’d have swung for murder.”
She made herself nod earnestly. “I know how devious they are. They’re utterly corrupt.”
“The whole world is corrupt.” He gestured restlessly towards the neckline of her dress. “You of all people should know how true that is. Even the best of us can find ourselves . . . contaminated. Survival is scarcely possible otherwise. And as Fairholme, I had wealth, real wealth. Influence. As a penniless cleric, I was helpless. The world was grinding me to pieces. I couldn’t protect myself, much less you and your sister.”
She forced herself to take his hand. “You always deserved a better life than what you had. I do understand, John.” She gazed into his eyes, showing him all the sympathy she could muster. Pain she did not have to manufacture. The Mr. Rapson she’d known was gone, so very different from this man struggling to justify himself to her now. He had always seemed so good. He clearly still believed himself to be good.