Wrapped

by Jennifer Bradbury

  “Explain yourselves,” he said, drawing within a few feet of where we stood and stopping abruptly. “Miss Wilkins?”

  I sighed. Nodded. “Lord Showalter.”

  “Why are you dressed so?” he demanded of me, sounding almost stricken. Then he shook his head and turned to Caedmon. “Step away from this girl. I don’t know what you are playing at, but I doubt any explanation could satisfy.”

  “Wait,” I said. “He’s a friend. And while you are quite correct in assuming that explaining these circumstances would require both a great portion of your morning and also a certain suspension of disbelief, we haven’t the luxury of either at present.”

  “I demand to know what’s going on!” he said, and turned to Caedmon again. “Move away from her!”

  “Lord Showalter!” I took a step toward him. “We have no time to explain, but please believe me when I tell you that we’ve recovered an object of great importance and must deliver it to my father at once.”

  “Object?”

  “Please, sir. I cannot tell you more. In truth, neither of us should know anything about this, and I’ll speak to you at length about it sometime soon, but for now—”

  “Perhaps you should give it to me,” he said.

  I felt Caedmon tense beside me.

  “It’s very important that we take it directly to my father.”

  “But your presence here must mean you found it in my garden? Surely I’ve a right to know what’s being removed from my lands. And I’ve no reason to trust an apparent rogue who has been sneaking about with an impressionable young woman.”

  “I beg you, Lord Showalter. Only let us pass and I will explain all.”

  He studied me, face softening, shoulders relaxing slightly. “Agnes, you can trust me. I’ve all but made an offer for you. Are secrets like these any way to begin a courtship? Now be sensible and give me the standard to convey to—”

  I staggered a step backward. “What did you say?”

  “Agnes,” Caedmon whispered, his hand on my arm.

  Showalter didn’t answer, but his eyes narrowed, and his mouth gave a twitch.

  Could it be? “I—”

  “He awake, Agnes,” Caedmon said. “The only way he could know about the standard—”

  “No,” I said, taking another step back. It couldn’t be. My father trusted him. Mother adored him. Rupert envied him, and the entire time he was pretending?

  Showalter gave a tired shake of his head. His arm reached to his own waistband.

  “Run!” Caedmon hissed, but he didn’t move. Nor did I. It was hypnotic watching Showalter transform before me. The scales fell from my eyes as his expression altered, as if the very air around him had changed into something more malevolent and sinister.

  He was not who I thought he was.

  And all at once I understood what a fool I was. My head spun as I recalled how smug I’d been earlier at how easy it had been to fall into such a fortunate match. Pathetic for not having seen him for what he really was, for having defended him to Caedmon time and again. For having worried that I might hurt him in any way.

  Because the man who stood before me now appeared incapable of being hurt. His stony expression was so foreign to me, so distant, that I might not have recognized the face that bore it in a crowd. He was someone else entirely, but he was suddenly entirely himself.

  And the pistol in his left hand—every bit as alien on his person as the strange look in his cool gray eyes—was leveled squarely at my heart.

  “No one runs,” he said calmly, the hammer clicking open to half-cock.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “This is beyond all,” I whispered, staring at Showalter as he closed in on us, pistol now trained on the space between Caedmon and me.

  Showalter laughed, a knowing laugh I’d not heard before. “After all your deceptions the last few weeks, you stand there now attired in men’s clothing and think that I’m as simple as you’ve always believed?”

  It seemed the earth began to tremble beneath my feet as it had a few minutes ago when we’d opened the pedestal. I couldn’t speak.

  When Showalter saw my confusion, he laughed anew, edging a step closer. “Wonderful. So self-absorbed that you think you are the only one capable of some deception? I always thought you pretentious, but this is more than I even realized—”

  “Speak plainly, sir,” Caedmon said, an edge in his voice at Showalter’s insult.

  “Plainly?” Showalter repeated. “If I must. That bit of bronze I saw you take from that pedestal is what I was sent here to await some five years ago.”

  “Sent here?” I asked. “Then that means you’re in the employ of—”

  “Good God, are you that dense? The emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, yes. They thought of pulling me from the field during the last exile, but felt it in France’s interests that I maintain my position.”

  “You’re a spy!” I whispered, feeling suddenly as if I needed to sit down.

  His gaze was cold. “Of course I’m a spy.”

  He had known the message would be in the body, had been expecting it. Deacon was right—the import of antiquities had been the perfect means for the French to smuggle information into London.

  “You’re—you’re—a traitor!” I sputtered.

  He laughed. “Again, you oversimplify me, Miss Wilkins. To be a traitor, one must have at one point held allegiance to the country in question. I was never such a man. Lord Showalter is a fiction, my past invented prior to my arrival here. Before taking up residence in your neighborhood, I served the Republic in Spain.”

  “But—but you’re—” I found I couldn’t settle on a word awful enough for what he really was.

  “I’m what?” He edged closer. “I’m Showalter? The silly man with a taste for fine Egyptian antiquities? Your would-be fiancé? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m neither of those things. I’m simply very good at my job.”

  “A job that included pursuing me?” I asked, overcoming my shock to experience another emotion: indignation.

  “Vile, isn’t it? But it couldn’t be helped. Even your precious A Lady was right about one thing. What’s that first line of the one you like so much? Something about a man of good fortune needing a wife? Seems it wouldn’t do for a man of my means and character to continue on as a bachelor.”

  The story began to take shape in my mind. Showalter had been ordered to court me. And he would have required as long an engagement as possible. During such a courtship, he’d have ready excuse to be in our home, ready means to keep track of Father’s work, his sensitive conversations. If a girl with no formal training could glean as much as I had about Father’s work, how much more could a trained spy make of such an opportunity?

  “It was Father you were after,” I said, simultaneously relieved and insulted. “You didn’t feel anything for me at all.”

  He laughed, the sound cruel and sharp. “Irritation, mainly. You seemed so tolerant of my attentions, thought yourself so much better than me. It is the price I pay for performing my duty so well—I’ve never enjoyed appreciation from my audience for my work.”

  “That must be very hard for one whose ego is so prodigious,” I said.

  He smiled. “Oh, my dear girl. I was to be rewarded by my superiors if I did have to go through with the match.” He arched an eyebrow. “They intended to make me a widower within the first few months of our marriage. I believe they planned your untimely end on the Continent during our honeymoon.”

  “You bastardly liar!” Caedmon roared, half lunging for him before Showalter straightened his arm and made ready to fire.

  “I’m a liar? What of Agnes, then?” His eyes darted back to my face. “Pretending to be someone else for all these days. Pretending you didn’t take that message and my key from the wrappings that night, manufacturing stories so you could slip off and consort with this.” Here he gestured dismissively at Caedmon. “Truly, if I were who I pretended to be, this dalliance would be an insult I could not abide.�
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  “You are not the only one who’s suffered insult,” I said.

  “Of course not. I’m just the one for whom it doesn’t matter. But nothing will matter in a few days’ time. I’ll deliver the standard to the emperor, his armies will enjoy certain and swift victory, and then perhaps one will finally be able to find a decent glass of wine in this swamp of a city. . . .”

  I stared at him, but his words were just noise as a thought struck me. He was enjoying this. It was clear that finally unveiling himself to me, finally unmasking his intentions, was satisfying in some way. It infuriated me to think of him toying with me, with us, even to the last.

  And if he was enjoying it, it meant that at least one small part of his personality hadn’t been manufactured for the purposes of playing Lord Showalter.

  The man—whatever he was really called—did love to hear himself natter on. Did love to bluster, as Caedmon had pointed out, and did love an audience, even if the audience was one he intended to shoot in due course.

  Perhaps I could keep him prattling long enough to engineer an escape.

  “But there are no instructions on how to use the standard,” I heard Caedmon point out. “Boney just going to heave it up on a pole and hope for the best?”

  “The emperor recovered a scroll covered with incantations and images of the standard years ago during his Egyptian campaign.” Showalter’s voice took on the tone of a lecturer delivering an address.

  “But it can’t work, can it?” I said. “Not as it is supposed to—ghost soldiers, an unbeatable king . . .”

  He shook his head slowly. “Oh, it will work,” he said. “I’ve seen things that defy description. It is real, this power that he seeks, and I am to be the man who delivers it to him.”

  If that was true, if Napoleon already had the means to awaken the standard . . . if it was all as real as it suddenly seemed it could be, then the standard really could decide the fate of England. We needed time, time to think, to figure out what to do next—

  “But how did you know we’d be here?” I flung the words out as soon as they entered my mind.

  He shrugged. “Serendipity, I suppose. Tanner was meant to have returned by now. I was about to dress to go out to look for him when I overheard one of the maids telling the housekeeper that she’d seen a pair of young men trespassing in the garden.”

  “You knew it was us?” I asked.

  “I suspected. The servants were a bit surprised when I elected to see to the trouble myself, but they don’t question me.”

  “Tanner’s your man, then?” Caedmon asked.

  “On the surface. It’s far more a partnership. But for appearances’ sake, it was imperative that he assume what in the eyes of the public was an appropriate role. Have you killed him, by the way?”

  My mouth fell open. “Killed him?” The fact that he was so casual in asking about the death of Tanner was somehow more terrifying than the gun he held. He appeared to have no affection or concern for a man who’d apparently been his only confidant for five long years. And I realized that if that life meant so little to him, mine wasn’t worth a farthing.

  “Certainly not!” Caedmon said. “We trapped him.”

  He winced. “Pity for him. Our superiors will not be pleased to find he was bested by a pair of amateurs.”

  “How long have you known I had the key?” I asked.

  “Almost since the night of the party.”

  “But who was the waiter? The dead man?”

  He nodded. “Tanner recognized him as a British agent he’d tangled with in Prussia some years ago. Tanner couldn’t let him report back, so he acted quickly.”

  “The waiter followed me when I took the key from the wrappings.”

  He gave an appreciative nod as if a final piece of the puzzle had just clicked into place. “I told Tanner we should have interrogated him, learned how he knew that I was receiving something in that mummy when I didn’t. It would have saved us ever so much trouble if we’d been able to work out the location of the key sooner, but Tanner has a bit of bloodlust. And then he bunged it up even further when he loaded the body into a coach he thought was one of my spares.”

  “Then when you stopped the unwrapping,” I asked, “that wasn’t because the museum sent word?”

  “Of course not. My contacts at the port have a signal—they have a particularly rare bottle of Scotch delivered a night or two in advance so that I know to be on the lookout for something extra in a shipment of goods. But the staff must have intercepted the bottle, mixed it in with the other provisions for the party that had been piling up all week. Tanner noticed it too late.”

  I was confused. Why hadn’t he confronted me? Why had he let Deacon and Caedmon get involved? “You could have taken the key from me by force,” I pointed out.

  “A spy is nothing without his alias. If I revealed myself, or Tanner himself, any further work in the positions we’d carved out would be jeopardized. No, it was far safer to follow and wait for you to find the standard for us. If we’d taken you and interrogated you, perhaps we could have found the key after a time, but this worked out far better in the long run. Mr. Stowe turned out to be unexpectedly helpful.”

  “You didn’t know where the standard was?” Caedmon asked.

  “Annoying, isn’t it? If they knew it was in London, they certainly should have been able to tell me it was in my own bloody backyard,” he said, “and then maybe your very promising career wouldn’t have to be cut so short.”

  “How very careless of them,” I muttered.

  “Not really. They likely knew that as soon as I saw the key”—he nodded at the jackal’s head in Caedmon’s hand—“I’d immediately recognize what to do with it. We knew already that the standard had been hidden somewhere in Ptolemy the Ninth’s temple, which is why we went to such trouble to get all those artifacts out of Egypt. We were sure we were on to something with those obelisks, but it never occurred to us that one might be hollow. But that’s the way of these things,” he said, shrugging. “Secrecy, codes, making do with what’s at hand . . .”

  “Don’t you mean who is at hand?” I said. I couldn’t tell if it was fear or rage that made my face grow hot and my blood boil under the surface of my skin. To have been used, exploited, and all the while he was looking forward to the way he might shed himself of the burden of me . . .

  “You flatter yourself,” he said. “But I must credit you for the find. So for that I—and the emperor—will be forever grateful. Of course forever for a pair in your position is a very, very short time.” He aimed the gun at Caedmon’s chest and pulled the hammer back to full cock. “Now, give me the standard.”

  Caedmon reached behind him and pulled the standard slowly into view. Showalter’s eyes fixed on it.

  But mine were on the pistol. For the first time, I saw the gun, saw the hollow eye of the carved eagle staring at me from down the length of the barrel.

  It was the very one I’d shot that afternoon in his garden.

  The very one with the nasty tendency to backfire.

  “Caedmon, don’t,” I said, trying to remember exactly what the gamesman had said about how long it took for the powder and ball to slip back behind the flint. “He cannot shoot us. Even Lord Showalter won’t be able to play stupid enough to explain away the corpses of his murdered neighbor and a stranger in his back garden.”

  “I won’t have to. You’re going to hand me the standard and walk down to the river. There, you’ll tie each other’s hands and jump in.”

  “Bollocks we will!” Caedmon shouted.

  He sighed. “No. It’s perfectly logical. And what a lovely, tragic, romantic story will emerge. Young Agnes Wilkins falls for her impoverished museum dustman, shuns her life of wealth and privilege as they seal their love in a suicide pact in the river. You’ll be the heroine of lovesick girls all over England,” he said.

  “And if we don’t?” Caedmon asked.

  “Then I’ll kill you both where you stand. At a glance, it will
look as if two thieves vandalized a priceless artifact on my property and then killed each other over it. Though I might have to stab you, Agnes, since I doubt you’ll give me time to reload. At any rate, once investigators discover that one of the thieves is a parliamentarian’s daughter in men’s clothing, either the entire affair will be hushed away or explode into such a scandal that no one will know where truth begins and the stories end. Either way, I’ll be free.”

  “Not free,” Caedmon said. “Deacon, he knows—”

  “Easy enough to remedy,” Showalter said. “People die unexpectedly in those wretched public hospitals all the time. No one will even blink an eye at a washed-up old soldier.”

  He was a monster. I felt sick at the times he’d touched me, smiled at me, at how eager Mother had been to see me settled with him. Tears stung my eyes at the thought that this might be the end of things. That my life might end before it had even properly gotten its start.

  But I was angry, too. Angry with myself for being taken in, for ever worrying that I might hurt Showalter, for dismissing Caedmon’s suspicions. But something gave me even more reason to be furious: He presumed to write the end to my story . . . to manipulate the way the world remembered Agnes Wilkins.

  But I had to keep a clear head. I had to keep him talking just a bit longer.

  “Shall we, then?” He motioned toward the river, sounding as cordial as if he were inviting us to join him for a picnic at the water’s edge.

  “No,” Caedmon said firmly.

  I tore my eyes from Showalter and the gun and looked at Caedmon. “Step away from him, Agnes,” he said evenly.

  Showalter squared his shoulders and leveled the pistol at Caedmon’s chest. “Stupid boy.” He narrowed his eyes.

  “He said himself he can’t shoot us both,” Caedmon reassured me. “One of us can run—maybe even keep him from getting his filthy hands on the standard.”