by Juliana Gray
“Yes?” she said, in her most unwelcoming voice. But she softened by the time she reached the s, because the intruder was only Miss Crawley’s ugly attendant, whose circumstances in life seemed even grimmer than her own. That unfortunate nose! At least Penelope still possessed the nose of her youth, an elegant line that had seemed too severe when she was nineteen, but into which she had grown, as one eventually grew into cheekbones and a strong jaw, so unsuitable on a debutante.
“I was hoping to find you alone,” said the attendant, holding out her hand. “I’m Harriet Harris.”
“Penelope Schuyler.” She shook the woman’s hand. “You’re with Miss Crawley, aren’t you?”
A long-suffering sigh, one familiar to Penelope. “Yes. Our third ocean voyage this year.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind that. I enjoy travel.”
“Yes. You look like the sort who does.” Miss Harris regarded her critically through those bottle-thick spectacles that made her eyes seem twice as large and rather alarmingly goggly, like an overgrown blue-eyed insect. “I understand we have a mutual friend.”
“Do we?”
“Yes. An acquaintance back in New York. Madame de Sauveterre?”
The coincidence was so sudden, Penelope struggled not to start. “I beg your pardon?”
“Margot de Sauveterre. We went to school together, many years ago. The Hellenic Academy, in Switzerland. I believe you attended as well?” She pushed her spectacles up the bridge of her nose. “I was older than Margot by a few years, and you were younger. I don’t think our paths ever crossed.”
“How extraordinary.” It would be pointless to deny the connection, wouldn’t it? Pointless and even suspicious. “I must confess, I don’t remember you. Harris, did you say?”
“Harriet Harris. We never met.” She leaned a lank elbow on the railing. “I would have remembered.”
“But it’s always a great pleasure to meet a fellow Academian. Are you and Madame de Sauveterre close friends?”
“Not all that close, no. Our circumstances, of course, are so different.” Miss Harris made a deprecating gesture. “I never married, and she—well.”
“Yes. I attended her wedding in Paris. A prince, my goodness! She certainly outshone us all.”
“I wasn’t invited. I am a bastard, you see, and while my father’s money could buy me an education at the finest Swiss academy, it couldn’t buy me an invitation to the wedding of the Prince de Sauveterre.”
“But surely Margot—”
Miss Harris shrugged. “Oh, she couldn’t help it. And we weren’t bosom friends or anything like that, so there was no reason to remember me. Anyway, I was back in New York by then. We only met up again recently. I had no idea she was living stateside.”
“Her husband’s death, of course.”
“Very tragic.” Miss Harris levered herself off the railing and adjusted her battered straw hat, which had become a little lopsided in the draft. The ash-brown hair beneath crackled with static electricity. “Anyway. Just thought I’d say hello. Raise the flag for old Hellenic.” She lifted her fist.
Penelope lifted her own. “Hurrah.”
“I’ll see you again at lunch, I expect. We’re on B deck, stateroom twelve. If you want to find me, that is.” Miss Harris managed a dour grin and turned away. Her plain navy skirt was a little crumpled and over-mended beneath an ill-cut jacket that didn’t quite match. From across the deck, Miss Crawley’s voice carried toward them like a screeching gull, and Penelope realized she was shouting Harriet’s name.
The din quite drowned out the peal of Miss Ruby Morrison’s well-dressed laughter as she stood elbow-to-elbow with the Duke of Olympia, tucked in the shadow between lifeboats nine and ten.
***
He tracked down his quarry in the library, that refuge of ladies aboard ship. She sat on one of the long sofas lining the massive table of opaque glass in the center of the room, reading a small leather-bound book that engrossed her so completely, she seemed not to notice his entrance at all.
He came to a stop before her. “Why, Mrs. Schuyler. What a pleasant surprise.”
She didn’t look up. “Perhaps you expected to find me in the gentlemen’s smoking room, sir?”
“No. But I understand there’s a rousing game of charades taking place in the main saloon. Your young friend is carrying all before her.”
“I’ve never liked charades.”
He studied the part of her hair, neat and sharp in the exact center of her head. As if Moses himself had stood at the top of her forehead and commanded the angels to separate the two rich waves. “Neither have I.”
“Really, sir?” Mrs. Schuyler looked up at last, eyes bright, brows pointed with amusement. She laid a long finger in the crease of the book and closed it in her lap. “I had the impression that you enjoy such games above everything else.”
He flicked a speck of dust from his cuff. “I can’t imagine why.”
She smiled. “To what do I owe this honor, sir? A summons from the Morrisons? I wouldn’t have thought they’d dare to send you.”
“Americans will dare anything, I find. But no. I came of my own accord. May I sit?”
She made a gesture with her hand. They spoke in hushed library voices, even though the room was otherwise empty. The allure of charades, he supposed; God knew why. There was only one parlor game he enjoyed, and he was playing it now.
“My thanks.” He settled himself on the sofa, a few correct feet away. “Ah, what a relief.”
“A relief?”
“To sit down for a moment’s conversation with someone rational.”
“Oh, Miss Morrison is pretty rational, most of the time.”
“Yes, for a girl of her age. But then, one knows everything one needs to know about her in five minutes.” He released a sigh of ennui.
“What’s this? I thought the two of you were making progress.”
“Why, my dear Mrs. Schuyler. Dare I hope to detect a note of jealousy?”
“You can hope whatever you like, of course. You have the luxury of being able to make as much a fool of yourself as you please. I, however, do not, and I hope”—she allowed a little drawl on the word—“you’ll remember that.” She made as if to rise.
“Tut, tut, Mrs. Schuyler. I had not the slightest intention of offending you.”
“You haven’t. I’m simply not in any position to return the flirtation, however kindly it was meant. I haven’t got any more relatives left to take me in, and the Morrisons aren’t really all that bad.”
She was sincere, he realized. Absolutely sincere. There was nothing coy about the expression in her face, no amusement dancing in the eyes and all that. Perhaps a wry little twist to her mouth, which was full and a very pale pink, as if she’d been drinking lemonade.
Her brows began to take on a quizzical slant, as he remained helplessly silent.
“I’m a widow, you see,” she went on. “My husband lost everything in the late financial panic, and then he decided that wasn’t enough, so he shot himself. He tried to make it look like a hunting accident, but the insurance men weren’t fooled. So I’m what’s called a dependent, though of course you knew that already. A pretty miserable thing to be, most would agree, but at least I knew what it was like to be otherwise, once. I know what happiness is, which is more than most people can say.”
“Yes,” he said softly, staring at her hair.
“But I can’t lose my standing with the Morrisons, as I said before. That would be the last stroke for me. So you really must leave.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You must leave.” She was smiling gently, the way one smiled at children and idiots. “I’m sorry to interrupt the fun, but off you go. Amuse yourself with one of the lovely young matrons we’ve got on board—I don’t think their husbands will mind—or better yet, with Ruby. Ask her about
Miss Austen. She’s read those books a dozen times. Persuasion is her favorite, but if you come on like Darcy, you’ll win her for life.”
Dismissed. She was dismissing him.
It occurred to him that he didn’t want to leave, that leaving this room—abandoning this attractive and unexpected and scintillatingly intense woman for the pleasant unmarked skin of Miss Ruby Morrison—was the last thing in the world he wanted to do. After all, he had business with her. A few questions to put to that queenly face. He couldn’t quite remember them now, but they were still there, waiting to be asked.
He laid his hands on his knees and rose. “I quite understand your position, Mrs. Schuyler. But as it happens, I’m here to find a book.”
“A book?” As if to say, A Bengal tiger?
“Yes. We are in the library, after all. A handsome room, isn’t it? What are you reading, if I may inquire?”
She held it up. “Collins.”
“Ah! A sensational novel. You surprise me again. I had you pegged for something more serious. Enjoy your book, Mrs. Schuyler, and pay me no attention at all.” He bowed and strolled off to stand before one of the nearby shelves. “Simply browsing.”
“As you wish, sir.”
For perhaps half a minute, the room was perfectly still, except for the slow tick of the grandfather clock and the distant grind of the twin screw propellers, thrusting the Majestic across the surface of the North Atlantic. As a young man, Olympia had traveled the ocean aboard the earlier steamships, and he sometimes forgot how noisy and dirty and rough they were, how cramped and smelling of oil and smoke, how devoid of ornamentation. How one was occasionally pitched across one’s cabin in the middle of the night, without the slightest warning. Steaming across the seas now resembled a stay at a fine hotel, except for the occasional lateral tilt and the fact that you couldn’t decamp for another establishment if the company didn’t suit. Also, there was the democracy. Passengers traveling in the same class of cabin treated each other—and were treated by the crew—more or less alike. They ate the same food, they enjoyed the same entertainments, they slept under the same linens. The Duke of Olympia and the widowed Mrs. Schuyler of New York City were, for the space of five or six days, equals.
And yet they were not.
A few feet away, Mrs. Schuyler exhaled quietly and rose from the sofa. “Good day, sir,” she said, and her skirts rustled against the carpet as she left the library.
He waited about twenty seconds before he followed her out of the room.
A round of faint applause greeted his entry into the hallway, drifting up the main staircase. The charades match, reaching its thrilling climax in the saloon, two decks below. Was Mrs. Schuyler off to join them? His eyes caught the edge of her disappearing dress around the corner of the staircase as she skimmed downward to the upper deck, and he moved after her, leaning his head a few inches over the balustrade to see if she was continuing her journey down to the saloon deck or walking forward, where (he knew) her commodious shared stateroom with Miss Morrison lay on the starboard side of the ship.
But no flash of dark aubergine wool appeared on the staircase to the saloon deck. To the privacy of her cabin, then.
Olympia drummed his fingers on the balustrade. There was no point in following her; on the other hand, the charms of the smoking room—his usual refuge—seemed rather flat at the moment. He might return to his own spacious suite on the promenade deck (Stateroom A, as it modestly appeared on the deck plan). He had, after all, a forbidding stack of paperwork to sort through before the train whisked him off to London from Liverpool.
But he was still no closer to discovering the identity of the agent on board the ship, despite an hour spent dissecting the final first-class passenger list in the meticulous company of Mr. Simmons. Any one of them might be a suspect, of course, but he had no means of investigating their lives and fortunes, no vast official and unofficial archives at his disposal. At the moment he had no recourse except to eliminate all two hundred and nineteen souls, one by one, using the old-fashioned methods of observation and deduction.
Which left him only one real option; the thing he dreaded most.
Charades.
Olympia expanded his chest like a martyr going to the stake and descended the stairs. Possibly it wouldn’t be so bad. The teams were already formed, the game afoot. He wouldn’t actually be called upon to perform, God forbid. No, no. He could simply lurk about unnoticed at the back of the saloon, eyes half-hooded, six-and-a-half-foot frame half-hidden by a convenient pilaster, balancing a cup of tea in his palm as if he’d just stopped by for the refreshments. He might not even be required to applaud.
So why did the task—a duty he’d performed countless times in countless settings, the kind of thing he used to relish—seem so damned onerous? The last place in the world he wanted to be. Had he finally grown weary of the game? Was old age at last settling down upon his shoulders? He would really rather sit in civilized conversation with an impecunious American widow of half a century than track down a dangerous opponent hidden among the passengers of an ocean liner, armed by wit and instinct?
Yes, by God. Yes, he would.
Perhaps God heard his plea. He had just set his toe on the rubberized floor of the upper deck landing when the noise reached him, through the gust of another round of applause: a gasp, followed instantly by a small and strangled cry.
The familiar outraged noise of a lady whose modesty had just been offended.
Several years had passed since the Duke of Olympia had occasion to bolt—he delegated such indignities to chaps of fresher blood—but he bolted now, around the newel post and down the corridor like a Derby winner swinging past the final post. A rectangle of daylight beckoned ahead, beaming from the open door of an outside stateroom, exactly where Mrs. Schuyler’s cabin should lie.
A peculiar rage overtook him in that instant, a white fury he hadn’t felt in ages: the protective passion of a much younger man. He pounded down the final yards to the open stateroom and swung under the doorway, curling his right hand into a preparatory fist, only just remembering to duck his head, and the words Mrs. Schuyler! Who’s there? shot from his throat, just exactly as if he had some right to pronounce them.
But only one figure stood in the room, bent over the steamer trunk at the end of one of the beds. She leapt up at once and swiveled around to meet him, and the look on her face could only be described as accusatory.
“Someone,” she said, stabbing her finger at his chest, leaving the identity of this mysterious someone in no doubt, at least in her mind, “has been searching my room.”
***
He wasn’t shocked; she saw that at once. As soon as the words searching my room left Penelope’s mouth, the wild light in the Duke of Olympia’s blue eyes dimmed—or perhaps intensified was a better word—yes, that was it—intensified into something keener. He cast an experienced gaze around the stateroom, taking in the two brass beds, neatly made; the stately mahogany washstand, set with Pears soap on one side and two toothbrushes in a fixed jar on the other, protected from spillage by a railing around the rim; the dresser, quite bare; the two trunks set at the bottoms of the beds. The sunlight flashed on his hair, turning it white. He altogether filled the room. He was so tall, he nearly brushed the deck above.
For an instant, she allowed herself to admire him.
His gaze fell back to meet hers, blue and inscrutable, faintly curious. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Schuyler,” he said, “but may I inquire why, exactly, you believe the room has been searched?”
She pointed to one of the beds. “I am not in the habit of arranging the bedclothes in such a slovenly manner.”
He followed her finger. “No, of course not.”
“And my trunk. It has clearly been disturbed. Do you not see how it has moved at least three inches from the center position? And there is a corner of . . . of clothing escaping from the lid.”
The clothing was, in fact, of the strictly unmentionable variety, a fact that Olympia’s eyebrows seemed to comprehend instantly.
“Indeed,” he said. “Has anything been taken?”
“I was about to make an inventory.”
“Hmm. And are you certain the perpetrator wasn’t simply Miss Morrison, hunting about for a hair ribbon? I note that her belongings appear—correct me if I am mistaken, Mrs. Schuyler—quite undisturbed.”
“How observant you are.”
“Attention to detail, Mrs. Schuyler, is one of the guiding principles of my life.” He paused. “We seem to be of kindred spirit in this regard, if you will allow me the liberty of observing it.”
“I don’t think I can stop you,” she said crossly.
He made a short bow, a mere inclination of the head. “Then if you are quite intact, Mrs. Schuyler”—there was just the slightest hint of innuendo on the word intact, making her belly go all inconveniently warm—“I will leave you to make your inventory while I inform the necessary authorities of this intrusion.”
“There’s no need. I’ve already rung the bell.”
“Nevertheless. I feel quite certain that Mr. Simmons, in particular, would wish to hear about the matter at the very earliest instant. May I be of service to you in any other way? A glass of water, perhaps?” His hand was already reaching for the door handle.
“No, thank you,” she snapped.
The duke’s expression moved from bland watchfulness to reproach. “Mrs. Schuyler! You are very cold. Am I correct in surmising—good Lord, I hardly dare to pronounce a thing so absurd—am I correct in surmising that you suspect my involvement in this little affair?”
Did she? But who else on board could possibly have an interest in her affairs? The necessary skill to unlock her door? On the other hand, now that the red mist had dissolved from her eyes, she couldn’t quite imagine the Duke of Olympia leaving behind such obvious signs of his handiwork as an improperly tucked coverlet, or a trunk left off center.
“I don’t know what to think, sir. It’s such a dreadful thing, to have one’s privacy violated in such a crass and dishonorable manner.”