To Catch a Rogue

by Amanda McCabe

  It never came. Instead she landed on what felt like a feather bed, soft and enveloping. Warm. Cautiously, slowly, she lowered her hands, peering around her.

  It was not a bed, but the sarcophagus she was laying on. And in front of her was the Alabaster Goddess, bathed in that murky green light, her bow held aloft. Like the statues in the narrow corridor, her eyes seemed alive, yet not accusing. She looked—compassionate. Concerned. That was odd, for Artemis was surely one of the least caring of the rather callous Pantheon! She had no compunction about turning men into deer and shooting them full of arrows if they displeased her.

  Don’t be foolish, Calliope chided herself, sitting up on the sarcophagus. This is only a dream. A friendly Artemis made as much sense as a grotto full of antiquities.

  “What am I doing here?” she asked.

  “I summoned you, of course,” Artemis answered. Her marble lips didn’t move, yet her voice echoed all around. She sounded just as Calliope would have imagined—young but full of authority. Confidence. She seemed, in fact, much like Clio.

  “Why?” Calliope dangled her feet off the sarcophagus’s gilded edge, but dared not jump down. She could see only darkness below.

  “You and your friends have loved and served me well,” Artemis said. “I must warn you, though. Your mission here holds many dangers.”

  “Dangers?” Calliope thought of the duke lying on the floor bleeding. Of Clio’s ruined costume. Cameron kissing her in the dark. “Surely we have already faced dangers.”

  She fancied Artemis looked pitying. “Not like what is to come, my Muse. I have many hidden enemies, you know. Enemies that are yours now. You must stay strong. Stay your course—my course—and all will be well in the end. Remember that when you have doubts. Remember this when the enemies at last reveal themselves, and you find all is not as you thought.”

  “But…” Calliope began, even as Artemis faded away into the shadows. She fell again, toppling from the sarcophagus into that waiting blackness below. When she landed, it was not on a hard floor or jagged rocks. It was a grassy summer meadow. She felt herself rolling, rolling, down a slope scented with sunshine and wildflowers.

  Her headlong trajectory was only halted when she collided with a pair of polished boots. Stunned, breathless, Calliope stared up to find Cameron peering down at her. He was outlined in brilliant sunlight, dazzling after the dim grotto, his curls tangled in the breeze.

  “Calliope,” he said, his tone coaxing. Alluring. He leaned down, smiling at her. That merry, careless grin she loved so much. What did it hide? “Please. Let me help you…”

  He held out his hand, and she wanted to take it more than she had ever wanted anything. To feel his skin on hers. But she remembered Artemis’s words. Hidden enemies.

  She scrambled to her feet, backing away from him—from what she felt. It was no use, though, for she found herself all alone in that meadow. And a cloud was passing over the sun…

  Calliope awoke with a gasp. She glanced around frantically, half-expecting to find herself back in the damp grotto. She was in her bedchamber, though, the fire burnt down to glowing embers and the bedclothes twisted and kicked away. The canopy and half-drawn curtains, so dark and heavy, red brocade so unlike her own blue-and-white chintz at home, seemed suffocating. Engulfing. She climbed out of bed, wrapping herself tightly in her dressing gown as she went to the window.

  The moon was still bright as it glimmered down on the deserted gardens. Silvery-green, it turned the fountain and statues below into shimmering, magical objects so different from their solid, daytime presence.

  Calliope took a deep breath, still caught in that dream. How very vivid it was! Usually she didn’t remember her dreams at all, or if she did they were terribly prosaic and dry. No hidden enemies or waterfall rooms. No Cameron.

  She remembered those antiquities in her dream, their empty gazes that seemed so alive. Their eerie whispers. Such objects had never really seemed alive to her before. Important, of course. Beautiful, to be sure. Symbols of something that had once been alive, of lessons to be learned. But not living, vital objects in themselves, with their own desires. Their own wills.

  Their own proper place in the world.

  Calliope crossed her arms tightly against the late night chill. The disturbing shift of something inside herself. Was this, then, what Cameron meant when he spoke about art? When he sent his father’s collections back to Greece? She had not understood then. Truth to tell, she did not understand now. Modern Greece was not the Greece that produced such objects. But still…

  Her roiling thoughts were interrupted by a ripple in the shadows below her window. Calliope leaned closer to the cold glass, peering down. Was she still dreaming? Seeing things that weren’t there? The next thing she glimpsed could be the Alabaster Goddess herself, marching down the walkway!

  But the figures that appeared, detaching themselves from the shadows to step into the moonlight, were all too real. A tall, lean person in a greatcoat and wide-brimmed hat, and a smaller figure swathed in a cloak. They lingered next to the fountain, heads bent close together as they talked.

  Slowly, Calliope opened her window, careful of squeaks and creaks as the old latch gave way. Surely it was just a couple out for a rendezvous. But it wouldn’t hurt to eavesdrop, just a bit. Artemis had warned about hidden enemies.

  There was little breeze to carry voices to her ears, unfortunately. All she could make out were soft, indistinct murmurs, unidentifiable. Just a few words carried—”…soon”, “…tide”, “…here.”

  Calliope frowned. Even she could make nothing of such meagre scraps! She still watched, listening closely to see if anything else would be revealed. After a few moments, the cloaked figure handed the other a letter, a pale square in the darkness. “Wait,” Calliope heard. Then the hatted one hurried away, and the cloaked one turned back towards the house. For just an instant, the hood fell away and a silvery beam glinted on the glass of spectacles. A long braid of auburn hair.

  Calliope gasped, drawing back to the concealment of the draperies. Clio! As she stared, disbelieving, her sister drew the hood back into place, rushing towards the house. She disappeared, and the night was silent once more.

  Calliope pressed her hand to her mouth. What was Clio doing? Who was that person in the hat? Some sort of illicit romance? Yet the scene had not had a romantic quality. No furtive embraces, no passionate kisses. Clio surely had been behaving strangely of late. So solemn and short-tempered. Yet who could blame her, after what happened with the duke? Did this, then, have something to do with Averton?

  Hidden enemies, Artemis had whispered. Calliope foolishly clapped her hands over her ears, but the words were still there. She feared they would never leave again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The next day dawned bright and clear, as if in mockery of Calliope’s late night. She opened the window of her bedchamber, leaning out to breathe deeply of the clear, misty air, the cold, clean tinge of earth. The cold breeze lashed at her cheeks, reviving her after the strange dreams of the night. The image, equally dreamlike now, of Clio in the garden.

  She scowled as she watched the gardens come to life, workers hurrying out on their morning tasks, the distant bleats of sheep. Had she made a mistake last night, showing Cameron that list? Especially since Clio was now somehow involved. She remembered his unreadable eyes, his non-committal response. And yet he had asked to keep the list, so the names must mean something to him.

  She rubbed hard at her itchy eyes, trying to stop her thoughts from spinning so endlessly, trying to erase the vestiges of her dreams. She almost wished she had never seen that list at all, never heard of the Lily Thief or his deeds!

  Oh, but then she would never have gotten to know Cameron, a treacherous little voice whispered in her mind. Would never have seen what he was truly like. She would still be caught in her old notions of him. Her old impressions of carelessness and empty drama.

  But what was it she thought of him now? What had she seen be
hind the charming façade that convinced her to ask for his help, to show him that list?

  He was a puzzle, and one she didn’t have time to decipher this morning. She had to get ready for today’s picnic, for more of Herr Mueller’s lectures—even when the ancient world was so far from her mind. For once, the here and now seemed far more important. More urgent.

  She reached out to close the window, to block the morning wind, but paused as she heard a door below open. Clio again? She leaned back out, watching in surprise as Cameron came into view. After her dreams last night, she could almost believe her thoughts had summoned him.

  He seemed so much a part of this wild place, with his dark greatcoat, his hair tumbling free, no hat or cravat to restrain him. She remembered hearing gossip, vague drawing-room whispers that he had run with bandits in the Greek hills. She could believe that now, as he strode across the lawn, his boots scattering the morning dew on the grass. There was something not of this world, the everyday English world, about him. Maybe that was why she trusted him with the list, trusted him to see what it all meant. A Greek bandit would never react as any other man of her acquaintance, men of convention, would.

  He was different, and that was what had both scared her and drawn her in from the first moment she saw him. Yet what would a man like him see in a woman like her?

  “Cameron,” she called softly.

  He spun around, and saw her there in the window. His expression, one of serious thought, did not alter, but he lifted his hand to wave to her. She gestured at him to stay where he was and shut the window. Catching up her cloak from where she left it after their walk to the falls, she swirled it over her shoulders as she hurried downstairs. No one else was about so early, except for the maids with their firewood and buckets of water, and no one questioned her as she slipped outside into the fresh morning air.

  Cameron waited for her on the gravel walkway near the fountain, the same place where Clio had met her mystery man. “You’re up early,” he said. She could still read nothing in his countenance, in his cognac-coloured eyes, not surprise or pleasure—or irritation that she had interrupted whatever errand he was on.

  “So are you,” she answered. “I couldn’t sleep for thinking about everything.” She couldn’t tell him about the dream. About his place in it.

  “The list,” he said. “Yes. It puzzled me, too.”

  “Have you been able to decipher it yet?”

  He shook his head. “It does seem to be a code of some sort. Without the key…”

  “A list of some criminal circle?”

  “Led by the duke?”

  “Well, it was found in his statue. Would it surprise you to learn he led some sort of illegal antiquities scheme? That he was up to criminal deeds?”

  Cameron laughed ruefully. “Not at all. But, really, why would he? He can gain any piece of art he wants by more straightforward means.”

  Calliope remembered the glow in the duke’s eyes as he gazed at his Daphne. As he stroked her cold marble cheek, comparing her to Clio. “The thrill of the chase, perhaps. The frisson from doing something forbidden, when so little is denied a duke.”

  Cameron smiled at her, that serious, flat look vanishing like the mist. “Forbidden—like talking to me alone in the garden, before the rest of the house is even awake?”

  Calliope laughed. He did have her there, and it was yet another sign of how things had changed between them. The old Calliope would never have done this! “It is hardly on a level with stealing art. But I do suppose I understand a bit better now the attraction of the—unconventional.”

  “I knew you would be converted eventually,” he said, and reached out to touch one long curl of her loose hair. His touch was light, teasing, yet there was something in his gaze that made her breath catch. Her stomach lurched nervously.

  Silly, she told herself. It’s because you haven’t had breakfast. She batted away his fingers and stepped back. “I haven’t been ‘converted’ to the unconventional that thoroughly, sir,” she said lightly.

  Cameron shrugged, tucking his hands into his pockets as if to prevent them from touching her hair again. “It’s only a matter of time, you know, Calliope. Freedom once tasted is addictive.”

  “Is that what you have found, Cameron?” she asked quietly. “Do you miss freedom?”

  He smiled, yet she could see it was not his merry grin. It was a mere shadow. Like her dream. “Am I not free?”

  “They say that in Greece you lived with bandits.”

  “So I did. For a time. They needed money for their causes, you see, and I paid them to take me to ancient sites most people never see. Temples and tombs, far from civilisation.”

  Calliope could almost see it—broken pillars, hidden gods in faraway caves, dusty, sun-drenched valleys, scrubby olive trees. “That is what I mean. It must be hard to go from that to—this.”

  “Being an English lord, you mean? We all do what we must. What we’re born for. Is that not so, Calliope?”

  Do what we must. Yes. For was that not what she always did? What was expected. What was her duty. “Do you never miss Greece? Want to go back?”

  “Perhaps one day I will.”

  There was a noise behind them, a shutter opening, the splash of water pouring down the old abbey wall. The house beginning to stir in earnest.

  “I should go in,” she said reluctantly. She didn’t want to go inside, she wanted to stay here and hear more about Greece. About sunshine and bandits.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “But we do have to talk more about the list,” she insisted. “At the picnic.”

  He nodded, and she spun around and dashed into the house. More servants were on the stairs now, carrying clothes to be pressed for the day, water for washing, breakfast trays. She hurried past them to her own chamber, chased by visions of those dashing bandits.

  Cameron watched Calliope run away, watched even after she disappeared into the house, leaving only a whisper of rose perfume in the air.

  He had never seen her hair down before. It was beautiful; long black curls spreading over her shoulders, down her back in untamed spirals and whorls. She didn’t resemble Athena with that hair, but a wood nymph, running free, laughing with abandon among the primeval trees.

  Primeval trees? Blast it all, he was in trouble now if he had resorted to such whimsy! Such cheap poetics. Calliope Chase was just a woman, a lady, and yet he was finding she was a woman like no other. A woman who wouldn’t leave his thoughts, his fantasies.

  New fantasies of walking with her, hand in hand, on a Greek shore, the turquoise waves lapping at their bare feet. Of kissing her under the hot Mediterranean sun, tasting the salt and light on her lips.

  Cameron turned away from the house, striding off down the pathway as if he could walk away just as easily from her. From the memory of that night at the Antiquities Society, and the soft press of her body against his in the darkness. She wouldn’t be so easily abandoned, though, her pale ghost trailing beside him. What about the list? she whispered.

  Ah, yes—that list. Those odd names, exactly like silly young men in a secret society would devise. Charlemagne, the Grey Dove, the Purple Hyacinth. It did seem rather like a gambit that would appeal to Averton, with his flair for the dramatic, the archaic. Yet to what purpose? Why write such a thing and then hide it in the Alabaster Goddess?

  Cameron considered himself to be rather a straightforward person. Subterfuge was so very time-consuming. The duke surely had money and artwork aplenty. Why indulge in some kind of game of theft, unless it was just for the thrill of it? And what role did Clio Chase play in all of this?

  He had to confess he couldn’t understand it—yet. But he soon would. He was determined on it.

  As the long afternoon advanced, the feast of their picnic put away, Calliope felt the lassitude of the day wash over her. The sun was warm on her head, her stomach happily full, and the sleepless night suddenly too much. She leaned back against the rough bark of a tree trunk in perfect lazines
s, closing her eyes as she listened to the murmur of the stream, the voices of the others as they strolled by the water. Their laughter rose and fell, an indistinct hum, soothing, familiar. How lovely this was, she thought, how easy, with dreams and worries far away for now. Just to be for a few minutes.

  “‘By the blue and shining lake, where the grasses trail, I hang my purple robes in golden rays of sunlight,’” she heard Cameron say.

  She opened her eyes and smiled at him. He lounged at the edge of their picnic blanket, his face turned up to the light, hair falling back from his brow, his beautiful cheekbones. One finger reached out to touch the hem of her skirt, and she kicked at him playfully, not quite hard enough to dislodge him. He merely tightened his clasp, feigning to tug her down next to him.

  Laughing, Calliope said, “I thought you were going walking with the others.”

  He shook his head, eyes still closed. “Not at all. I’m far too full of that excellent lemon tart to even think of moving. Besides, we should enjoy the sun while we have it. The sky will be grey again soon enough.”

  “Very true.” Calliope tipped her head back against the tree, watching, mesmerised, as he stroked the fabric of her hem, smoothing it, caressing. “It’s a splendid day. All blue and yellow.”

  “The ancient Greeks measured colours not as we do, in shades, but in light.”

  “‘Violet-crowned Athens.’”

  “Exactly. I never knew how true that was until I saw it. Such a strange luminosity.”

  Calliope lazily gazed at the others, who sat now by the side of the stream, singing, their shining hair and pastel muslins like flowers. She could believe that about colours and light today. The grey-green of the earth, the silver of the water. It glimmered in the sun, something so alive and vibrant. “Tell me more about Greece,” she said, remembering the living statues. “I have studied it my whole life, yet I don’t know it at all. Not as you do, not as a living thing. Full of bandits and such.”