by Connie Lane
There was a flurry of activity in the entryway, which was devilishly inconvenient. Eager to get to the bit of cavalry known as Midnight that had been saddled and waited outside for him, Nick hurried down the last few steps. He did not even bother to look at the man he sidestepped around on his way to the door.
“Lord Somerton?”
He was tempted not to answer the man’s befuddled-sounding inquiry. He might not have if he did not recognize the voice and if that recognition did not spark a memory in him.
Good lord, he’d forgotten!
“Mr. Morrison!” Nick stopped and turned to Samuel Morrison who, looking him over and noting the dust, the dirt, the grime—and the pistols—could not help but stand back and stare in wonder.
“Good to see you, Morrison,” Nick said, his words as quick as the move he made to leave the house. “Stop in again. Another time, perhaps. Then we can—”
“But Lord Somerton, you said you would call today.”
Dismayed at his lack of manners, Nick stopped long enough to grab the bag of food Simon Marquand had prepared for him to take on his journey. “I…” He scraped a hand through his hair and a shower of dust sprinkled the shoulders of his coat. He wiped off the front of his jacket and dirt fell around his feet like snowflakes. “I hope you will offer my apologies to Miss Amelia. We have had something of a household emergency, you see. If you would allow me to call upon her another day…”
He didn’t wait for Morrison to answer. He didn’t need to. If Morrison was any less interested in snagging a viscount for his daughter than he had been the night before, he would not have made the trip to Somerton House.
His words dangling in the air behind him along with the memory of the confused expression on Samuel Morrison’s face, Nick hurried out the door. The others would follow behind in his carriage and Latimer’s. He didn’t wait to see them off or to offer any last minute instructions. He grabbed the reins that Jem tossed to him, hopped onto Midnight and headed for Dover.
To say that the King’s Head was not the most elegant establishment in Dover was, in Willie’s opinion, not so much an underestimation as it was simply a complete miscoloring of the truth. The furniture, being old, was far too massive for the small proportions of the rooms. There wasn’t an inch to move, much less to breathe. The ale in the public room was not only warm but bitter as well. The mutton dished up by a serving wench with fleshy arms and—even this early in the morning—rings of sweat on her shabby dress, was stringy, greasy, and just this side of being ice cold. The air was heavy with the smoke that poured from a chimney with a bad downdraft.
The place smelled of years of unwashed bodies and she had no doubt that upstairs in the rooms that were let to the unwary, travelers were packed three or more to beds not large enough to accommodate even one in comfort.
She was glad she would be gone from the place soon enough and gladder still that when she was, she would be rid of the Reverend Childress Smithe.
“You’re not eating.” Smithe looked across the pocked and pitted table at her, pointing toward her nearly untouched plate of food with the tip of his fork. “How can you not be hungry, woman? We have been on the road all these many hours with little to eat and drink. Any normal woman—”
“Any normal woman would be less than delighted, both because of the quality of the food and the cleanliness of this place.” She did not bother to add that watching the Reverend Smithe shovel food into his mouth and chew with it open did little to add to the ambience. Nor did the fact that he had a dribble of fat on his chin. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate—”
“Appreciate?” Smithe did not so much laugh as he did bray. Like a donkey. He washed down a mouthful of food with a swallow of ale, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and reached across the table to spear the lump of mutton from her plate and claim it as his own. “You’ll learn to appreciate me, right enough, missy. Far better than you ever appreciated your sainted father, I’d venture.”
“I think not.” Willie folded her hands on the table in front of her. She had been reluctant to discuss the details of her plan with Smithe on their trip from London. They had been crammed with six unfortunate others on the top of a stagecoach and the wind whipping around them from a phalanx of ill-boding clouds as well as their proximity to strangers who had no need to know Willie’s business had made explanations not only challenging but awkward. Besides, she thought what she had to say was better delivered in private. Especially since Smithe seemed, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, to think that his unexpected arrival at Somerton House was more of a delightful surprise than it was a rather distasteful shock.
“As I was in the middle of saying before you were so rude to interrupt me, Mr. Smithe, I appreciate the fact that you were willing to accompany me this far. I must make it perfectly clear, though, that I have no intention of going any farther. At least not with you.”
“What?” Smithe’s mouth fell open. Which was not a particularly pretty sight considering that it was filled with half-chewed mutton. He swallowed it down in one gulp and slammed his knife against the table. “Are you telling me you ain’t grateful?”
“Grateful?” The word had not occurred to Willie. “I am glad things worked out the way they did and that you happened by—”
“Happened by? You think so?” Smithe’s throaty laugh caused a shiver to skitter up Willie’s spine. “You think I just happened to be passing by at that hour of the morning? That in all of the city of London, I just happened to find you?”
Now that Willie thought about it, it did seem unlikely. “I suspect,” she told him, “that you left Glasgow and were passing through London on your way to Dover and from there, to the mission in India. I suppose the Millers had something to do with you knowing where I was. If they were true to form—and I have no doubt that they were, since small-minded, self-righteous, iron-bound dogmatists are no more likely to suddenly become charitable than leopards are to change their spots—they probably said something about how wicked I was and how I was, no doubt, living a depraved life at Somerton House. They probably failed to mention—since they did not know it, of course, and if they did, they would not have bothered in any case not being as concerned with the truth as they are with the outward appearance of morality—that being in Lord Somerton’s employ was much the best thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life.”
It was the truth, and as much as Willie knew the memory would make her heart ache for as long as it lasted—and that it would last for as long as she had breath—she was glad for everything that had happened in the time she’d spent with Nick.
“Well, if it was so good to be in Lord Somerton’s employ, why were you leaving?”
She had not expected so perceptive a question from a man who was anything but and answering him, she forced herself to keep her gaze on Smithe’s. If she did not, she was certain that he would sense that she was not so much lying as she was telling him half the truth. She hardly cared what he thought of her, she simply was not yet ready to admit to herself how very much she cared for Nick. If she did, the pain of leaving him would be more than she could bear.
“I had a purpose for working with Lord Somerton. That of finding him a wife.” She congratulated herself for her even tone and level gaze. And if she pulled her hands into her lap and clutched them together until her knuckles were white? Smithe would never know and it was good practice. She would need to learn to live the rest of her life missing Nick. She might as well get started.
“He has found a suitable match and it is thanks to me, I am glad to say. My business with him is over. It was time for me to leave.”
Smithe sat up, his eyes glittering. “Time for you to repent, more like. Time for you to learn to regret the error of your ways. Turning your back on your dear father…risking your reputation and your future…You are lucky, miss, that I returned to London and heard the truth of all that was happening from the faithful Millers. You are luckier still that I have not changed my mind. About you.” As
if he were conferring an especially superb honor, he sat up straight and tall. As if he would never let her forget that he had done her the favor, his eyes glittered in the dull light. “If you change your ways and repent your sins, I am willing to forgive you. You may come with me to India. I will still allow you to be my wife.”
The thought of giving herself to Smithe as she had to Nick was enough to bring a sting of tears to Willie’s eyes. “I hardly need your forgiveness.” She stood. “Nor am I interested in going to India. With you or with anyone else. I am most especially not interested in becoming your wife. In fact, I’m leaving. Now.” She glanced around for her portmanteau, which had not only her possessions but also her money in it. It was nowhere to be found.
Smithe stood and though she expected him to be angry, he looked more tired than anything else. His shoulders slumped. His eyes lost the sheen of annoyance that usually was their only spark of life. “I am sorry you have changed your mind about me, Miss Culpepper,” he said. “I fear it is because you have turned toward wicked ways. I warned your father it would happen but…” He sighed. “Apparently even his righteous and formidable influence was not enough to save you from your own sinful tendencies.”
He looked through the smoky air toward the stairway. “I thought you would want to freshen up before we boarded the ship that is waiting for us in the harbor. I had your bag taken up to a room. Go. Get it. And leave. I cannot find it in myself to regret the loss of a woman so depraved.”
First he was insightful and now considerate. The transformation was nearly enough to make Willie feel sorry for him.
Nearly.
Before he could change his mind and start a to-do that she would be only too happy to finish, Willie hurried away in search of her traveling bag.
Though there was custom in the public rooms, there weren’t many travelers who had paid for a private room and most of the ones she looked into were empty. The King’s Head had been built into a small space, its floors stacked one upon the other and it took Willie a while to trudge from the first floor to the second, from the second to the third, and finally from the third to the fourth. She might have known Smithe would have secured for her the smallest room in the most out-of-the-way corner of the inn. She finally found her portmanteau in a cheerless room at the end of a long and narrow hallway. Her traveling bag was tucked up between a narrow bed and a battered table. The sky was more threatening than ever and the only light in the room came from the single window opposite the bed. Even so, Willie could not fail to notice that Smithe’s bags were also there.
At the same time she realized that Smithe had lied about paying for a room for her use alone, she knew she had to get away from the place, and as fast as possible.
But by that time, it was already too late.
Behind her, she heard the sound of a stealthy footfall. She turned around just in time to see Smithe already in the room with her. And he already had the door locked behind him.
The last time Nick had climbed a vine-covered trellis up a vertical stone wall toward a window where a single candle flickered behind a thin gauze of drapery was the fateful night he burst in on the young widow—and each and every one of the Blades—at the Duke of Weyne’s country home. That night, the entire escapade had been blurred with a haze of claret fumes and enhanced by the enthusiastic encouragement of friends who were no more able to see through the cloud of spirits than he was.
Nick had been so foxed as to be fearless. He had been so fearless as to not care a fig when his foot slipped, or his knuckles scraped the wall just behind the vines, or a bit of trellis snapped off in his hand. So fearless—and so thoroughly foxed—that it was all a lark. He laughed along with his friends, even when he dangled high above the ground and grappled for the nearest handhold that might save him from crashing down to the cobblestones where they stood with their faces upturned, their mouths open, their claret bottles poised as if they were waiting to see if they would be toasting Nick’s success. Or drinking to his all-too-brief life.
This time, he was stone cold sober and he wasn’t laughing.
Inch by careful inch, Nick climbed a vine-covered trellis up a vertical stone wall toward a window where a single candle flickered behind a thin gauze of drapery. He was halfway to his goal when his foot slipped at the same time a bit of trellis snapped off in his hand and he dangled high above the ground and looked down to where his friends stood far below on the cobblestones, their faces upturned, their mouths open, their claret bottles poised. Much to his astonishment he found that he didn’t care a fig. Not about his scraped and bleeding knuckles. Or the fact that he had to struggle to find another handhold. Not even about his all-too-brief life.
Damn it, he didn’t care about anything except Willie and the fact that she was up in the room where that single candle flickered behind the threadbare draperies and the grimy window.
That, and the gut-wrenching fact that had been confirmed only a short while earlier by the innkeeper: Willie was with the Reverend Childress Smithe.
Nick’s stomach clenched but he paid it no mind. He didn’t have the luxury. It was late in the afternoon and the sky threatened rain and it was not easy to see through the gloom. Still, he managed to find the growing end of one of the vines and he looped it around his hand, again and again. Using it like a rope and hoping it was secure, he hoisted himself up an inch or two, his arm muscles straining, until he found a slat of trellis where the wood wasn’t rotted. His feet solidly planted again, he looked up at the window, still ten feet above his head, and wondered as he had wondered every minute of every hour he’d spent searching for Willie, if she was safe.
Dover was a sizable place and this day like every day, it was packed like herrings in a barrel with travelers. Even with the help of a number of young men he hired from the stables where he’d left his horse, it took Nick hours to locate Willie, so long that the carriages that had followed him out of London and had taken so much longer over the roads than he did, were already in town. As planned, he met his friends at an establishment considerably finer than the King’s Head and from there, they plotted a line of attack and began the campaign.
Thanks to a well-placed shilling or two provided by the Reverend Smithe, the proprietor of the King’s Head—a man of dark disposition and equally sinister reputation—was reluctant to bother the man of the cloth and the woman he thought to be the reverend’s missus. A little of Nick’s friendly persuasion convinced him otherwise. It helped, no doubt, that he had Rooster and his toughs with him as well as Latimer, Hexam, and Palliston—who were nearly as worried about Willie as Nick was himself—and Mr. Finch, Simon Marquand, and Madame, who, after the breakneck trip, were in no mood at all to be kept longer from Willie and were not reluctant to let the world know it in explicit terms.
“No answer to my knock,” the landlord informed them when he returned to the cramped and dirty space he had the nerve to call a public room. “And the door, sir, it is certainly locked.”
A certain edginess had taken up residence in Nick’s stomach the moment he realized Willie was missing. With the landlord’s words, the tension had turned to dread.
Even he was not sure what worried him more. Was he afraid that Willie was a prisoner? Or more afraid that the truth might be uglier still? Though he tried a dozen ways to understand it and failed miserably each time, he would have been a fool not to consider the possibility that she had gone with Childress willingly and that even now, they were planning the marriage Willie’s father had arranged. Perhaps even now, they were sealing the bond between them much as Nick and Willie had done when he thought their feelings for each other solid and even more unshakable than—
Another slat snapped, this one beneath Nick’s left foot. He would have plummeted to the ground if not for the fact that his right foot was planted firmly. That, and the sheer force of a will that made it impossible for him to believe that Willie could ever agree to a match with Smithe.
Which meant she needed Nick’s help.
The thought burned through him like fire and fueled by it, he made his way slowly up the wall. When he slipped again, he heard a collective gasp from the people gathered below in the inn’s dank stable yard. He paid them no mind. His eyes on the prize, his fingers just inches from the stone sill that bordered the window, he paused to catch his breath and let his screaming muscles rest.
He heard the sounds of a struggle before he saw the shadows that twitched behind the curtain.
A man’s voice raised in anger. A woman’s, just as angry but not as out of control, steely as a blade and so willful as to twist around his heart as surely as his hand was coiled through the greenery. The sounds of the voices were followed by a crash of furniture. And Willie’s muffled cry.
Nick covered the last few feet of his climb in one push. At the same time he propped one knee on the window ledge, he banged his fist into the spot where the two window panes closed against each other. They were meant to swing outward and did not oblige. He wasn’t about to let that stop him.
Another punch and Nick was through the window. He landed on his feet and pulled one of the pistols out just in time to see Willie standing over the prostrate form of Reverend Smithe. She had a knife in her hands.
“I’ve killed him, I think.” She was in too much shock to look surprised to see Nick. Her eyes glittering, her breath catching over every lungful of air she struggled to take in, she glanced from him down to where Smithe lay in heap on the floor.
Nick thought it impolite to smile while another was suffering but he could hardly help himself. He grinned like a Cheshire cat at the same time he poked Smithe’s ribs with the toe of one boot. “Only if a dead man squeals like a stuck pig,” he said.