To Catch a Rogue

by Amanda McCabe

  “I need some fresh air,” Clio muttered tightly. Before Calliope could question or stop her, she leaped up from her seat and hurried out of the room, a turquoise silk blur. As some of the other ladies also took that opportunity to escape to the withdrawing room, her exit was unremarked.

  Calliope stared after her, worried. She remembered how still and brittle Clio looked after the masquerade ball, bent over her ruined costume, as if she would shatter at a touch. Calliope sat there for a moment, unsure of what to do, scared of breaking into Clio’s careful reserve. Finally, though, she could bear it no longer.

  “Excuse me,” she murmured, and followed her sister up the aisle.

  There were a few groups milling about in the foyer, whispering together, speculating on the duke’s sudden appearance. Or perhaps they were just congratulating themselves on their happy escape from the boring lecture. Clio was not among them, nor was she in the ladies’ withdrawing room or the library. The study rooms and storage attics abovestairs were mostly locked tonight, so Clio would not be there.

  Her concern mounting, Calliope rushed out the doors that led to the street, peering frantically both ways. The night was quite dark and chilly, broken only by the clattering rush of passing carriages.

  “Clio!” she called out, even as she knew there would be no answer.

  “Miss Chase?” she heard Cameron say, and turned to find he had followed her outside. The chilly breeze ruffled his hair, tugged at the folds of his beautifully tied cravat, but he did not seem to notice. He watched her solemnly.

  Calliope had never felt more helpless in her life. Her family, the thief, the duke—she understood none of it. Every bit of her control was slipping away, and all she could do was grab at it frantically. Watch in horror as it slipped ever further away.

  She held out her trembling hands. “I can’t find her,” she said, hoarse with unshed tears.

  “I know,” he answered. He came down the steps to her side, taking her hand in his. How very warm he was, how strong. He tucked her fingers into the crook of his arm and led her back into the building. “Your sister is a sensible woman. I’m sure she wouldn’t just go dashing off into the night.”

  “Then where could she be?”

  “Well, at least we know the duke isn’t with her, as he is still sitting in the lecture hall being subjected to Herr Mueller. Perhaps she went to one of the study rooms?”

  Calliope shook her head. “They are locked in the evenings.”

  “All of them?”

  “I don’t know.” She glanced up the darkened staircase. The twisting corridors up there seemed silent and deserted, but one never knew. The Chase Muses were nothing if not resourceful, even in the face of locked doors. “Will you look with me?”

  Cameron arched his brow at her, in that satirical expression she was coming to hate—and to find much too attractive. “Why, Miss Chase. How shocking of you.”

  “Don’t go missish on me!” Calliope snapped. “No one will see us. And I—well, it’s dark up there. What if the duke does decide to leave the lecture?”

  “Ah, so you need protection from your friend’s ‘avenging spirits’?” he said, looking about at the thinning crowd. No one paid them any attention; they were all still too busy clucking about the main story of the night, the Duke of Averton. “Well, I’m always happy to play protective knight. Lead on, Miss Chase.”

  Before she could lose her nerve, Calliope dashed up the stairs, her slippered footsteps muffled by the thick red carpet. She didn’t know what had come over her. Usually she was not such a ninny as all that! Not as wildly fearless as Thalia, to be sure, but surely able to search deserted study rooms by herself.

  Ever since the masquerade ball, though, it was as if something had shifted in her world. The safe, cosy environs of her life had taken on new shadows, new uncertainties. Dangers she didn’t understand and had never expected. Even this dull lecture seemed ringed round with them. She was glad of Cameron’s solid presence at her back.

  As they crept down the corridor, she was reminded of their journey through the Duke of Averton’s mad house. Not that the dark, stolid Antiquities Society was much like the jumble of Acropolis House, yet there were all the statues and paintings. Shifting bars of dark and light on the red-papered walls, a hushed murmur from below them. And she was alone with Cameron, acutely conscious of the sound of his breath, the scent of his soap and starch and skin that floated over the miasma of lemon polish, dust and old books.

  The first few doors they came across were indeed locked, and when she pressed her ear to their stout wood panels she heard nothing. Not even a soft footfall or sigh.

  “How could she just vanish like that?” Calliope murmured, twisting yet another unyielding doorknob.

  “We can hardly blame her,” Cameron answered. “For not wanting to stay in there with Averton.”

  “She could have told me where she was going.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t know. Come, let’s try this room down here.”

  The next door was unlocked. It swung open to reveal one of the small studies used during the day by members of the Antiquities Society, since their books could not be taken out of the building. There were two desks and a few armchairs, a bookshelf, large pieces hulking in the shadows. The one window let in the meagre moonlight.

  Calliope peered through its thick glass at the street below. Still no Clio. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, around her waist in its thin white muslin, watching the parade of passing carriages.

  “You knew the duke at university,” she said.

  “Yes, sadly enough.” He did not come to her side, staying just inside the door, yet still she was aware of him. His heat and presence. It assured her, even as it made her nervous.

  “And he—mistreated women then?” she said. “Behaved dishonourably?”

  He sighed. “Oh, Calliope. I’m sure in many people’s eyes he did nothing ‘dishonourable’. Nothing most other young men of his rank do every day.”

  “But you don’t agree.”

  “Most of the women he, as you say, mistreated were tavern wenches or shopkeeper’s daughters, milliners or housemaids. Not fine ladies to be protected. But he took them whether they agreed or not, sometimes hurt them. One girl drowned herself.”

  Calliope gasped, closing her eyes tightly against a sudden vision of Clio sinking beneath cold waves.

  Cameron came to her side then, his hand gentle on her arm. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, you were right to tell me. I’m glad to know the truth. He’s a terrible man. Those poor girls…”

  “Yes, poor they were. Unprotected, alone. Yet they were human beings, the same as us, and he had no right to treat them that way.”

  Calliope could feel the anger simmering inside of him, the fury of his memories. Yet his touch was still soft on her arm.

  “No, indeed,” she said. ‘What could he want with my sister? She is hardly poor and unprotected!”

  “Perhaps he wants to marry her, sire an heir.”

  Calliope snorted in disbelief. “He had best look elsewhere, then. Clio would never marry a villain like him, and he must surely know that after she knocked him unconscious.”

  “It’s probably the challenge he enjoys. You Chase Muses are full of prickles and nettles. It takes a brave man to try to get close to you.”

  Calliope turned towards him, studying his face in the moonlight. How beautiful he truly was, she mused, a creature of the Greek sun and sea, so full of youth and freedom. She lightly traced the chiselled line of his jaw, feeling a muscle twitch beneath her fingers. “You are close to me.”

  “I must be brave, then. Or very foolish.” His hands circled her waist, tugging her closer. She went unresisting, overcome by curiosity and some heady, overpowering emotion she didn’t understand. It was intoxicating, dizzying, and she clutched at his shoulders to hold herself upright.

  She had never been so close to a man. How giddy it was, like too much bubblin
g champagne! Or like lolling in the grass on a hot summer’s day. All her senses tipped and whirled, and she knew only him. The feel of him under his hands, hard and alive, hot, the strength of him bearing her up.

  “Which do you think it is?” she whispered.

  “Foolish, definitely,” he answered, his voice so rough it was almost unrecognisable.

  As if in a hazy dream, far away, yet more immediate than anything she had ever known before, his head tipped towards her and he kissed her.

  The touch of his lips was soft at first, velvety, warm, pressing teasingly once, twice. When she did not, could not, move away, when she instead edged closer to him, tightening her clasp, his kiss deepened. Became hotter, damper, more urgent.

  Something inside her heart responded to that urgency, a rough excitement that expanded and expanded until she feared she would burst with it! She moaned, parting her lips until she felt the tip of his tongue seeking entrance. The world utterly vanished, and there was only him. Only this one moment, this one perfect instant.

  A moment that was shattered all too soon. A shout from the street below broke into Calliope’s dream, dragging her back down to earth, leaden and heavy. She tore her mouth from Cameron’s, tilting her head back to suck in a deep breath of chilly air.

  He stepped away, breathing hard. “Calliope,” he said hoarsely. “Calliope, I—”

  “No,” she managed to say, though her chest was tight, her throat aching. She longed to cry, to burst into silly tears, and she didn’t know why! Because she had kissed him? Or because they had stopped? “Please don’t say you’re sorry.”

  “I’m not. How could I be? But—”

  “No ‘but’, either. I can’t—that is, I…” For once in her life, Calliope Chase had no words at all. She spun around and ran out of the room and along the corridor, dashing down the staircase and into the empty ladies’ withdrawing room as if a demon was at her heels. And surely a demon was—the spectre of her own wretched emotions. Her weakness.

  She stared into the mirror that greeted her as she slammed and locked the door behind her, hardly believing she saw herself in the glass. Her cheeks were a hectic red against white skin, her hair mussed, and her eyes fever-bright. She looked…

  She looked like Clio, as her sister fled from the Duke of Averton.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Calliope leaned forward to peer out the carriage window, scarcely daring to breathe as she waited for some new wonder to appear. It had been such a long journey to Yorkshire, days in the carriage with Clio and Thalia, reading aloud or playing cards. Not talking about what was truly on their minds. But it all must be worth it now, she thought, to see such a strange and glorious landscape.

  Calliope had never really been much for the current craze for “nature” and wild emotion, fed by the fashionable poets. Classical order was what she craved, and in town, hemmed in by houses and shops, the neatness of squares and gates and parks, it was easy to believe that such order was possible. Here she could imagine no such thing. Here, she could begin to think the poets had a point. Could remember that the Greeks were not just about order, either, but about insanity and blood and monsters.

  This country was beautiful, to be sure, but it was not the white beauty of a marble statue. There was such a wildness to it, a feeling of remoteness and profound solitude, a sense of being alone at the end of the world. Even Thalia had fallen silent, staring over Calliope’s shoulder as the land rolled past. Crooked stone walls climbed bare hillsides, dark grey on greenish-purple, rugged squares and rectangles that disappeared over the summits.

  Those old walls, clotted with moss, were one of the few signs of human life since they had changed horses at the last village. Only the occasional farmhouse, a wandering band of woolly sheep, spoke of present life. Past life there was in abundance—Romans, Vikings, Saxons, Normans had all passed this way, leaving their mark on the land. Even pirates, not too far away in Robin Hood’s Bay. And perhaps something earlier, something even from beyond time, hidden in the hilltop tumuli and barrows.

  Calliope lowered the window, letting in the cool breeze, the heavy, peaty scent of the earth. In the distance, she saw a narrow trail, a pale scar on the grey earth, leading to a ruined church. Its empty windows stared back, beckoning. Yes, the past was certainly alive here in this country, not just cold, dead stone. She could just envision Cameron here, galloping his horse over the windswept landscape…

  Calliope slumped back in her seat. Why was it that he kept springing into her mind at every moment, no matter what she was doing? Reading, walking in the park, planning menus with the cook, playing cards with her sisters—it didn’t matter. There he was. Yet she had not seen him since that night at the Antiquities Society. She had heard he had fled town, gone to see to business at his country estate.

  It was so hard to think of anything else but that kiss they had shared, to concentrate on the things that usually made up her days. She would begin to forget him as she read a book on, say, the Trojan War, but then a mention of Hermes brought him right back. The glow of his eyes in the moonlight, the soft, hot press of his lips on hers, the smell of his skin. She had listened to her married friends whisper of their physical passion for their husbands, of course, had even read some of Lotty’s silly novels, but had always thought such things must be exaggerated. How could a man’s mere touch make one forget everything else?

  Now she knew it was not exaggerated, for she had surely become as silly as any of them. Sighing over a man’s kiss; longing for him to kiss her again, yet fearing it at the same time. What if it swept her away entirely, and she was lost, drowned, in him? All over Cameron de Vere, of all people! It was ridiculous.

  He didn’t seem to feel the same way, though, leaving town like that. She didn’t even know if he would be at this house party, and she dared not ask Emmeline. She couldn’t let anyone else know of her absurdity. Not even her sisters.

  Would Clio even hear her if she did tell? Clio had also been so distant since the lecture, as if she was always thinking of something else. Something no one else could even fathom.

  And Calliope and the Ladies Society were no closer to finding the Lily Thief. There had been no more thefts, no clues. This party, so near the duke’s lair and the Alabaster Goddess, seemed to be their best chance.

  “We should be almost there,” Thalia said. “Oh, I can’t wait to go walking over these fields! Do you think we could even go swimming in the river we drove past earlier today?”

  “If you want to freeze your blood in its veins, Thalia,” Clio answered, peering out the window as they lumbered up a steep hill.

  “Pooh! It’s not as if this is January. I’m sure the water is fine. Invigorating.”

  “As long as no one sees you,” Calliope said. The Chase sisters had surely courted enough scandal of late. They were just fortunate they hadn’t yet been caught.

  “I am the picture of discretion. Oh, look!” Thalia said, pointing indiscreetly. “I think we’re here.”

  They turned through a pair of open gates and rolled along a gravel lane, lined with wind-bent trees. At the end of the long, straight sweep was Kenleigh Abbey, the home of Emmeline’s parents, the Earl and Countess of Kenleigh.

  It was just as Emmeline had described at the last meeting of the Ladies Society, a medieval abbey half-converted for domestic life and gifted to one of her ancestors by Henry VIII, along with the title. Built of the local grey stone, it was weathered and harsh, overlaid by ropes of greenish moss. The upper floors boasted modern glass windows, while the lower still consisted of antique arches and walkways. In the watery sun of the afternoon, the light of the pale blue sky, it was odd and charming. At night, though, would the ghosts of old monks peer out from those empty arches?

  That is it, Calliope, she told herself sternly. No more novels! First Byronic heroes galloping over the moors, now ghostly monks. Whatever would she conjure up next?

  Around the front of the house circled a modern drive with a covered entrance, shelter
ed from the wind. The coach rolled to a stop just as the doors opened and Emmeline appeared, wreathed in welcoming smiles.

  “You’re here at last!” she cried as Calliope alighted, closely followed by Clio and Thalia. “It has been so dull waiting for everyone these last few days.”

  “Dull? With Herr Mueller to listen to?” Calliope teased.

  Emmeline laughed. “He is very knowledgeable, to be sure, but I will be glad when he has a larger audience on which to impart his wisdom. Where is your father, by the way? Papa is most anxious to show him a new funeral stele he just purchased.”

  “He stopped in the last village we passed to examine their little museum,” Clio said. “Something about Saxon arrowheads.”

  “Ah, well, no matter—you are all here now! Come inside and have some tea, you must be exhausted by your journey,” Emmeline said, leading them through the open doors. They had barely a glimpse of drafty stone corridors and arches before she led them up a narrow flight of steps to a modern, firelit sitting room. Lotty was already there with her family, watching as the maids laid out a tea service.

  “I have to tell you of everything I have planned,” Emmeline said, pouring out the tea, slicing cake. “So many ruins to see! We can even go to the seaside, if you like. Robin Hood’s Bay is a bit of a journey, but not too far, and terribly exciting.”

  “Where the smugglers are?” Thalia cried. “Oh, yes, we must. I have never seen smugglers’ caves before.”

  “You probably wouldn’t this time, either,” Clio said. “Aren’t smugglers notoriously choosy about who they let into their tunnels?”

  “Clio, you are simply determined to ruin all my fun,” Thalia answered. “When have you become such a fussy old lady?”

  As she spoke, there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs, a woman’s voice and the click of dog’s claws on the stone floor. “It’s just Mama,” Emmeline said. “Shh! Don’t let her hear you talk of smugglers, or she’ll never let us go to the bay.”