by Lara Archer
And then there was Sebastian, who believed himself the worst of sinners. She’d seen him that way for so long—Lord Gargoyle. But somewhere along the journey, she’d stopped calling him that. She couldn’t remember when. It just . . . hadn’t fit him anymore.
Beneath his harsh exterior, Sebastian was the better of the two men.
Mr. Rapson was nodding to himself. “Had I not dared to do what I did,” he said, “I’d have been poor to the end of my days. And there would have been no hope for us.”
“Us?” A new sort of dread crawled slowly up her spine at his words.
“Oh, God,” he exclaimed. He leaned towards her now, his eyes blazing with emotion. “Don’t you understand what I hoped for? You, Rachel. You and I might be possible. Without money, we could never marry.”
She stared, wide-eyed, as everything in her went numb.
Rachel. He’d called her Rachel.
“What are you talking about,” she began automatically. “I’m not—”
He slammed his fist down suddenly on the seat beside him. “Damn it, don’t lie to me. To me, of all people. I know your face. Your eyes. Your mouth. Different from Sarah’s, as they always were. Others may not see it, but to me, as different as letters on a page. That doesn’t change just because you put on a—a harlot’s dress.”
Her pulse hammered. So Sebastian had been right all along about Mr. Rapson’s feelings for her. This was not the simple, loyal friendship she thought she had.
When they’d met back at the baronesa’s, she’d thought his discomfiture was due to speaking with a woman of easy virtue. But it was because she’d been lying to him, and he knew it. And he was lying to her. And now he was clearly angry.
She fought down a panicky urge to throw open the coach door and leap into the street. But the coach was moving fast enough, the fall would break her neck.
“Don’t be afraid of me, Rachel,” Mr. Rapson said, squeezing her hands in his. “Everything I did, I did for your sake. I kept your secret from the French, don’t you understand that? I knew exactly who you were, the moment I heard Salomé Mirabeau had reappeared. And I was terrified to find you in their sights. When I learned du Bourge had told his masters in London about you—that they were sending a ship to attack you, I nearly went mad. I moved heaven and earth to get myself to Spain. To save you.”
She forced herself to keep her eyes level on his, to try to look at him with the openness of heart she had always shown him. “You have always been my dearest friend, John. I have always trusted you to help me.”
“I tried to save Sarah, too, you must know that. From the first moment my ciphers began to be broken, I suspected it might be she who was doing it. My own pupil—who else could? But she was kept well hidden. De Laurent got to her first.”
“De Laurent? You know Victoire de Laurent?”
“I . . . have worked with her sometimes. Not by my choice.”
Her face must have given away her horror, because he crushed her hand harder, grinding the bones. “Rachel, please, I love you. I have loved you for years. And I will keep you safe now. I’ve purchased land in Jamaica that no one knows about—a place we can go where none of them will ever find us. A new Eden.”
She squeezed shut her eyes. She couldn’t let him take her on a ship, take her across the ocean, away from everything she cared about. “You love me?”
“With all my soul.”
“Then, please, John, you must help me. I need to . . . help my friends. I need to stop Victoire de Laurent. I need to make sure that Eva is safe.”
Mr. Rapson laughed quietly then. “But Eva is safe. I wrote that message only to test you, but I do have the child.”
Her eyes flew open. “You have Eva? Where? Take me to her!”
“Not now.” His voice became more stern again. “I promise I will bring her to Jamaica to join us—”
“I need her now. Tell me where—”
“No.” His expression went cold. “I told you the truth before—the others traveling with her were to be let go unharmed. But my orders were to take the child, to ensure that you would not fight me. I know how loyal you are. I will not let you risk your own life any longer for your colleagues.” He said the word as if it were filth. “None of them is worth any danger to you.”
Her stomach clenched in knots. Was he inventing this story to frighten her into submission, or did he truly have Eva? “Where is she to be taken?”
“She’ll be safe,” he insisted. “In the keeping of some nuns nearby. Even if she’s still here when Bonaparte arrives, the French will assume she’s just another orphan—they’ll leave her be. She will join us in Jamaica, but only after you are safely there.”
The coach was slowing. She took a glance at the window. Tall buildings hunched along a narrow street, tightly packed, blocking most of the night sky. But the water was very near—she heard the dull clang of ships’ bells, and the murmur of waves against the docks.
The moment the coach came to a halt, Mr. Rapson took hold of her arm to push her hastily out the door, and something pressed painfully against the base of her spine. The barrel of a pistol, no doubt.
“Hurry now,” said Mr. Rapson, rapping the outside wall of the coach, which quickly rolled on. “Stay to the shadows, and don’t make a sound. Our coach may have been followed—the French have never fully trusted me, and I did not turn up where I was commanded tonight. The tide will be high in just a few hours, and we can hide here until our ship sails. You must trust me.”
Trust. This was a man who spoke of trust with a weapon pressed to her back.
The street was dark with no moon in the sky, and there was no one nearby to help her. It seemed unlikely Mr. Rapson would shoot her, but even if she tried to run, he could tackle her easily enough. She had no choice but to let him take her inside, then try to find some way to distract and disarm him.
He made her pass through an iron gate beneath the archway of one building, and into a central courtyard which was full of weeds and strung with drying laundry. Wooden staircases on either side led to second- and third-story galleries lined by shuttered windows and pockmarked doors. Probably a dozen poor families made their meager homes here. The smells of boiling cabbage and rancid beef wafted through the air.
He hurried her up two flights of stairs, into a musty, pitch-black apartment.
Rapson moved as one familiar with the room. The gun was still at her back. His free hand was around her waist, urging her forward, but it reached around her after a few paces, feeling for something in front of them. He stopped suddenly, apparently having grasped whatever it was he was reaching for.
He gave her a little shove to the left, and pinned her against a wall with his hip and the side of one arm.
With a hiss, light flared. He’d lit an oil lamp.
By its low gleam, she made a quick scan of the room.
An old desk to her left, piled with dusty books. A tattered curtain a few feet beyond that, probably cordoning off a bedroom. To her right, a cold hearth. A mouse-bitten armchair was close against it, on a braided rag rug, beside a rickety side-table holding a plate with the crumbs of what might have been a dinner a week ago.
Not much there that could serve her as a weapon.
She glanced down—a small pile of kindling and a few spindly excuses for firewood.
Ah, but in the corner, a rusted poker.
She took her gaze from it immediately, before Rapson could notice her looking at it.
But his thoughts were apparently elsewhere. In the next instant, his palms gripped the sides of her face, and the heat of his breath came against her mouth. He was kissing her.
Both his hands were touching her.
What had he done with the pistol?
She tried not to flinch or tense or push him away as he leaned into her; he’d want to believe she’d welcome his touch.
Eventually, he broke the kiss and pulled back. An urgent look was on his face, a flush on his cheeks. “You have to tell me, Rachel—they say t
he marquess is your lover, Sarah’s lover. But that’s not really true, is it?” His thumbs still pressed hard against her skull. “That’s all pretense, just as that harlot’s gown you’re wearing is pretense. I know you, Rachel, know you down to the very depths of your soul. You’ve stayed true to me, as I have to you.”
True to him? Good Lord. There was a strange intensity in his eyes, a selfish need she had never seen there before.
“Of course I have not changed, John,” she told him. “We will leave here together, I promise you.” She risked another glance at the desk under cover of modestly lowering her eyes. The pistol was definitely not there. He must have tucked it into his clothing somewhere. Where? “But, please,” she begged. “First I have a duty here to—”
“No! Your only loyalty now is to me, as mine is to you.”
“But Lord Hawksbridge will be—”
Rapson’s eyes flashed. “Forget about him. He’s as good as dead.”
She couldn’t mask her fear. “What do you mean?”
His lip curled in scorn. “I sent another message to your hawk, this morning. And one to Lord Henry Walters. Each thinks the other meant to arrange a meeting. And the meeting won’t end well for at least one of them. Hopefully for both.”
A sick feeling crept into her belly. “What? Why won’t it be?”
“Don’t you know? Walters hates your hawk, blames him for the death of another English agent, Robert Ehlert.”
Robert Ehlert? The man who betrayed Sarah to Victoire de Laurent?
“But Lord Henry doesn’t work for the English,” she said, baffled. “He’s not part of their network. They don’t even know who he works for. Why would he care about Ehlert’s fate?”
Rapson gave a sharp laugh. “Did your Lord Hawksbridge not know the more sordid details of his teacher’s personal life? You’re right that Lord Henry Walters was never an English agent—the man works only for himself. But he and Robert Ehlert were deeply attached, unnaturally so. When Ehlert fell under the spell of Mademoiselle de Laurent, it all but drove Lord Henry mad. And when Hawkesbridge hunted Ehlert down, and Ehlert died--well, Lord Henry is not a forgiving man.”
His words hit her brain with dull blows. She recalled the vicious look in Lord Henry’s eyes, the first time Sebastian met him at Lady Barham’s. It all made sense now.
And Lord Henry’s warning when he’d had her brought to his coach: Betrayal. Blood on his hands.
That was what Lord Henry meant, when he’d warned her Sebastian couldn’t be trusted. He thought Sebastian had betrayed Ehlert by bringing him to justice—no matter that Ehlert was a turncoat in the first place.
That was the only ‘treachery’ Sebastian was guilty of.
Relief and terror washed through her simultaneously, a disorienting wave. Because Rapson had sent Sebastian into a trap.
“You’re putting it all together now, aren’t you?” Rapson’s smile was smug. “Clever girl. Thanks to the messages I sent between them, Walters and Hawksbridge are no doubt dueling even as we speak, and surely one of them will kill the other. I can’t predict which, and I don’t care. One will die, and the survivor will no doubt see to killing Victoire de Laurent—both men hate her with an equal passion. That’s yet another threat to us eliminated. And with a little luck, Victoire’s followers will kill the man who kills her, and the whole wretched lot of them will be gone, and you and I can live in peace the rest of our days.”
Blind panic began to eat away at the edges of Rachel’s thoughts. She had to stop this. She had to get to Sebastian.
She might make a grab for Rapson’s pistol, but it could be anywhere in his greatcoat or his jacket. If she didn’t find it right away, he’d realize what she was about, and then it would be too late. She had to use her wiles.
“You are so clever, John,” she told him. “How could you even know how to find them all, to arrange all this?”
“That fool du Bourge told me where to find Lord Henry,” said Rapson. “And I was to meet Victoire tonight, to give her a report, as her paid servant. I merely had to bribe du Bourge to pass her location on to Lord Henry, as if du Bourge were bright enough to have learned it himself. No doubt Lord Henry paid him a second reward for the information. And when du Bourge returned to me, I . . . well, I took steps to ensure he would never give me away.”
“You killed him.” Her stomach curdled, but she kept her expression placid, admiring. “You’ve thought of everything.”
“That’s their vulnerable point, you see. All these great spymasters—none of them can work alone. The must rely on a whole series of weak idiots who inevitably betray their secrets.”
“But you don’t make that mistake. You’ve kept your secrets to yourself.”
He nodded. “This is the endgame, and I have them all in checkmate.”
“Yes, John. You’ve beaten them all, haven’t you?”
“They’re fools, all of them. Fickle and short-sighted and petty as children.” He laughed again. “Do you know what’s in that notebook Victoire’s been so rabid to get her hands on? The notebook Sarah had in her possession? Do you know why Victoire wants it so badly?”
Rachel’s head felt suddenly a little light. “No.”
“It contains all Victoire’s secrets. The secrets of the French. Because she was too confident, let Ehlert learn too much. So Ehlert tricked her, too, in the end. Wrote it all down, using the code I designed for them, and left it for Lord Henry to find. A sort of revenge, I suppose, for the fool she’d made of him. Just one last nasty thumbing of his nose. That’s how they think. That’s how they work.”
Rachel no longer cared about the book—time was running out for Sebastian. She had to try to appeal to whatever decency might still exist within Mr. Rapson’s heart. “You value loyalty, John,” she told him. “And you’ve been the most loyal friend imaginable to me. I’m more grateful for that than you can possibly know. Well, Lord Hawksbridge was Sarah’s loyal friend. And he saved my life more than once—”
Rapson leaned forward, grasping her shoulders and shaking her hard. “Saved your life? He endangered your life, Rachel. And you were nothing to him but a tool, a weapon.”
His chest and arms now crowded her against the wall. The orange lamplight lit his face with a hellish glow.
“John, please—”
“Don’t you dare plead for him,” he snarled. “He’s a spy. A liar by profession. The whole lot of them are rabid dogs, and it’s only right to set them on one another. Let them rip one another to shreds, and end the corruption.”
He was staring with a horrifying intensity into her eyes. The look on his face she might not have fully understood just a few weeks ago, but she recognized it now. It was desire—desire mixed with an ugly streak of jealousy. He wanted her. For himself. And he would be more than happy if Sebastian died.
She had to get the pistol from him, and she had to get it now.
What had Sebastian taught her about fighting an opponent larger than herself? Fear clouded her mind—she could remember only vague things about eyes and feet and fingernails.
“You’re right, John,” she said, placing a tentative hand on his breastbone. “About how corrupt they all are. I’m just a little overwhelmed right now, trying to take it all in. The—the scale of what you’ve done, it’s astonishing.”
“Rachel,” Rapson murmured, his voice gruff. Despite the restraint he’d always shown in years past, he ground himself against her now, crushing his mouth to hers. He clutched at her, his fingers digging roughly into her ribcage, pulling her so close she felt his arousal, hard against her belly.
And that gave her the opening she needed.
She wound her arms around his neck, sensuously, as a true Salomé Mirabeau might have done. She slid her tongue against his.
His body jolted, and he sucked in a shaky breath against her lips.
Her hands slid down his chest, as if trying to entice him further. Where was the damned pistol?
At that moment, he seemed to realize he
r intentions. He pulled himself back from her, his expression suddenly dark and angry. “What are you doing?”
There was no time left.
His arm blocked her access to the poker, so she flung her left hand at the oil lamp, knocking it hard to the oaken floor.
Rapson turned to look as it shattered, and at that moment, she kicked out with all the strength she had, striking him in the shin. Ah, yes—stamp on his foot, the instep. She remembered Sebastian’s lesson all at once, and brought down her heel with all the force she could muster. And then a knee to his groin.
He doubled over, grunting in pain.
Where the lamp had shattered, a rippling circle of orange flame was spreading as far as the oil had splashed—including the thick rag rug near their feet. Some had spattered the toe of Rapson’s shoe and the hem of his trousers, and fire licked there, too. His focus shifted—he still clutched himself between his legs with one hand, but the other flailed at his legs, trying to smother the flames.
By the low and eerie light, she reached to her right, feeling for the chill of metal—the fireplace poker. There.
She could afford no mercy—she gripped the poker, swung it hard, angling it upward, and it struck with a satisfying smack against Rapson’s shoulder.
He staggered, and looked at her, enraged. He’d snuffed the flames on his clothing, but the fire around him was growing—a stack of books on the floor caught fire, and the rag rug, soaked with oil, was lighting up like a wick, smoking and sizzling and giving off an awful stench of burning wool.
She swung the poker again, this time connecting with his elbow, which he’d raised to defend himself. As his jacket swung up along with his arm, she saw a flash of filigree silver and wood—the pistol.
Rapson lunged at her, seizing the poker, but she didn’t care about that weapon now. She slipped her free hand beneath his jacket, found the gun, and pulled it free.