Colin yanked the door closed, the glass panes rattling in their frames. He didn’t take his eyes from Margaret’s retreating figure as she hurried back to the dining room, her spine rigid with purpose.
Lucy spoke in a low, hurried voice. “The police went to Mr. Moreno’s law office to ask about a plot concerning the Panama Canal. They mentioned you called the matter to their attention. Someone at the law office sent a telegram to Oakmonte and suggested a shooting accident to silence you. The carriage is waiting for us; we should leave now.”
He gestured to the door on the far end of the conservatory. “We can get out this way.”
“What about Beatrice and Bianca? We need to fetch them.”
He pulled her along. “They’re dead. Don’t ask why, just move.”
But it was already too late. Through the glass doors, he spotted Tom Jr. and Mr. Sneed barreling down the hallway and toward the conservatory. Colin grabbed Lucy’s hand and sprinted outside, their steps clattering on the flagstone patio. The waiting carriage was within sight, but the others were gaining on them.
“Going so soon?” Tom said.
Lucy’s shriek pierced the night air. Tom had her by the elbow, dragging her back toward the conservatory. Colin tightened his grasp on her other arm, ignoring the panic on her face.
“Let her go,” he ordered.
They were at a standstill, Lucy the anchor between them. Sneed had the handcuffs out, and Tom pulled back his jacket to reveal a pistol in his belt. It would be impossible to escape through force; Colin had to outsmart them.
“Make this easy on yourself,” he began reasonably. “The last thing your mother wants this evening is an ugly scene.”
Tom snorted, then let go of Lucy, who staggered a couple steps away. Tom stepped in so close to Colin that their chests almost bumped. His breath smelled of garlic and wine as he flung insults. “As if my mother’s party matters when the fate of the nation hangs in the balance. Now I understand. The cops said you overheard messages coming out of the law firm, but it wasn’t you who heard them, it was Lucy, wasn’t it? The two of you have a very cozy arrangement, I see. Don’t think you’re getting out of this.”
Tom backed up a step, pulled out the pistol, and pointed it directly at Colin’s chest. Colin’s mouth went dry, and he heard Lucy gasp. The barrel of the gun was less than a yard away. Tom was a hothead, but Colin hadn’t expected this. Even Sneed looked surprised.
“Don’t be a fool,” Colin said, tamping down the rising panic. “Ten yards away are a judge, a mayor, and a bishop of the church. They are not your friends. Enough people know about those telegrams to put you in jail for decades. Or . . . you can look the other way while Lucy and I board that carriage. It will give you and Mr. Moreno plenty of time to fabricate an innocent explanation for those bizarre messages we’ve been hearing.”
Tom’s eyes sharpened, his face twisted in frustration. Lucy and Mr. Sneed stood motionless, and all Colin could do was wait. A bead of perspiration trickled down the side of his face, but he couldn’t move lest he startle Tom into doing something stupid. Finally, Tom pivoted, cocked the pistol, and fired at a potted rosebush, the blast shattering the terra-cotta pot to pieces.
Colin ducked, the blast nearly deafening him. Four more systematic gunshots smashed into the other pots, one after the other. He curled over, muscles seizing so badly he fell to his knees. Panic froze his lungs. This couldn’t happen. Not now, not when Lucy was in danger.
“I’ve still got one more shot,” Tom said silkily.
Colin gagged, the stink of gunpowder clogging his throat, making it impossible to breathe. He still couldn’t stand. Black spots speckled his vision.
Lucy sank to her knees beside him and put her hands on his shoulders. “Colin! Are you all right?” He wanted to reassure her, but he couldn’t. Not yet. He couldn’t breathe.
“What kind of man are you?” Tom sneered. “How does it feel to cower behind a woman’s skirts?”
“Shut up, Tom,” Lucy said.
Sweat stung Colin’s eyes, but he ignored it, desperate to make his immobile lungs start working again. He finally managed to suck in a loud gulp of air. Then another, the rasping wheeze sounding horribly loud. He braced a hand on Lucy’s shoulder, tried to stand, but couldn’t quite manage it.
“This is absolutely fascinating,” Tom murmured. “You’re insane. A pathetic, shaking lunatic. And I’ve got a doctor here who can prove it.”
Colin found his voice. “And you’re a criminal. The judge inside will agree with me.” He leaned on Lucy and managed to get back to his feet.
Footsteps came running. The door of the conservatory flew open with Thomas in the lead, followed closely by Judge Mason. “What’s going on?” Thomas demanded.
Colin’s heart still raced and sweat rolled down his face, but he narrowed his gaze and kept a calm tone. “Well, Tom? Shall I tell Judge Mason, or shall you?”
By now others had gathered, standing clustered near the doorway of the conservatory, looking at the decimated rosebushes and the dirt and pottery shards sprayed across the patio. Tom’s face was twisted in fury as he opened and closed his mouth. Finally he spoke.
“Sir Beckwith didn’t think I could hit all five rosebushes. I proved him wrong.”
Colin waited to see if Tom would add anything more, but the younger man was already turning and heading back into the house. The assembled guests parted to let him through, their expressions a mix of bewilderment and disapproval. Colin didn’t care. All he wanted was to get away. He grabbed his handkerchief to blot his face, making sure his voice was once again steady.
“I’m afraid Miss Drake and I have a pressing engagement back in the city, so we will make our farewells now.”
Both Margaret and her husband looked dumbfounded, surely too horrified by Tom’s behavior to challenge his departure. He grabbed Lucy’s hand and trudged across the unlit grounds toward the carriage, feeling the gaze of a dozen people skewering him in the back, but they weren’t going to stop him.
Mercifully, the carriage was already turned around and ready to leave. The cabbie saw them coming and opened the door of the carriage. One minute later, the wheels were rolling, and they were on their way. It was still hard to believe that only a few minutes earlier he’d been discussing yachts while eating turtle soup. Now he was in a race for his life.
“What next?” he asked.
Lucy’s face was white in the dim carriage. “I have no idea.”
“You don’t have a plan?”
“Yes! My plan was to get us both out of Oakmonte alive, and I’ve done it. I don’t know what comes next,” she said in a voice bordering on hysteria. He knew the feeling well. The carriage jostled over the cobblestone path leading to the main road, and he craned his neck to peer through the back window, squinting in the darkness for any sign of pursuit. There was nothing.
He drew a steadying breath as the panic that had threatened to choke him only moments earlier began to ease. It wasn’t until they passed the road leading toward Albany with no sign of pursuit that he breathed a sigh of relief and asked the cabbie to pull over. The trains had stopped running for the evening, so they offered the driver an obscene amount of money to drive them back to Manhattan.
Over the next hour, Colin listened in astonishment as Lucy told him about the horrifying photograph of her father shackled at Ridgemoor, which confirmed Colin’s suspicions about the unholy alliance between the Drakes and Dr. Schroeder. She told him more about the telegram she intercepted and how Sergeant Palmer’s investigation had inadvertently put him in danger at Oakmonte. He told her about Beatrice and Bianca.
“Tom was smart enough to figure out we were using the birds to pass information,” he said. “It doesn’t excuse what he did, but I won’t underestimate him again. What really steams me is that I bought a very fine box of Cadbury chocolate for you, but I left it behind. Now your wretched family will feast on it, and you will still not appreciate the difference between British and American cho
colate.” He gave an ironic laugh. “This whole evening was like something out of The Three Musketeers. Fun to read about, but perfectly horrible to experience in reality.”
“I never read it,” Lucy confessed. “When I was a girl I was too engrossed in fairy tales about Prince Charming. Not very realistic, I suppose. I’m a plumber’s daughter with calluses on my hands. I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to act at a fancy ball or live in a castle.”
He ached to think she was ashamed of those calluses. He knew how she’d earned them, and they made him respect her all the more. “The castle part is overrated. They’re cold and drafty and cost a fortune in maintenance.” Just like the boys’ adventure tales, the reality did not live up to the dream.
“Maybe it’s just as well, then,” Lucy said quietly in the darkness. She didn’t need to elaborate. They came from different worlds and could only briefly savor these fleeting, golden moments when their lives intersected. It was impossible to know what lay before them, but it was a certainty they would travel very different paths in life. To try for more would never work.
But it hurt. With everything he had, Colin longed for the freedom to carve out his own destiny rather than be responsible for the one he’d inherited.
“What happens to us once we get home?” she asked. The unquenchable yearning in her voice made it impossible to misinterpret what she was really asking.
“We go our separate ways. I marry some privileged heiress and wish you the very best.”
Her chin dipped and she looked away, but in that fleeting moment, he’d seen the flash of disappointment in her eyes, and it hurt, knowing that he was the cause of it. How perfect they could have been together. He closed his eyes, already dreading his return to the real world.
“Lucy, I wish it could be you,” he said in an aching voice.
“Me too.” Her gaze was luminous as she looked at him in the darkness, a sad smile brimming with wistful longing on her face.
This was what he loved about her. They could be themselves without artifice or apology. The carriage bobbed and rocked over the jutted country roads, and they held hands in companionable silence as the moon rose high. Sometime in the early morning, Lucy slipped into a doze, her head resting on his shoulder and the weight of her body oddly soothing as she slept.
There wasn’t another woman on this planet with whom he could simply be silent and not feel compelled to make clever conversation. Soon they would have to part ways, but the memory of his summer with her would never fade. She would forever be his greatest regret.
It was dawn when the cabbie let them off on the outskirts of the city, and they took a streetcar the rest of the way to Greenwich Village. After disembarking a few blocks from her home, he could not resist walking with her the rest of the way. He wanted to prolong this bittersweet interlude as long as possible. A gaggle of youngsters grew impatient with their slow, meandering walk and darted around them, their laughter echoing down the street.
His pace slowed even more as they reached the front steps of her brownstone. She turned to face him, and he smiled down into her face, wishing he were a poet so he could find the right words for what she meant to him.
A man wheeling a coffee pushcart struggled to angle around them, and Colin stepped back to make room on the sidewalk. His eyes followed the vendor as he trudged down the street, the scent of freshly ground coffee beans wafting in the air.
“Sometimes I wish I were a man with no more responsibilities than tending a coffee cart. I would have been free to follow wherever my heart or ambition led.”
“You don’t really understand,” Lucy said as her gaze followed the coffee vendor down the street. “That man isn’t free. He probably has a wife and children whose next meal depends on what he sells today. Bad weather or an overturned cart could land him in the poorhouse.” Her smile was gentle as she touched his arm. “We’re going to be okay, London. Sometimes it hurts to hanker after things that can never be, but I suppose that’s the nature of dreamers. Thank you for going to Oakmonte for me. Twice! You were like a hero straight out of the storybooks. No one has ever gone out of their way for me like that, so thank you. A thousand times . . . thank you.”
He touched the side of her face, loving her even more for the way she could smile as her heart was breaking. “Take care, Lucy,” he said, then turned to walk away.
Lucy was dragging with exhaustion as she unlocked the door to her apartment. A bottle of milk had been delivered to their door, and every muscle ached as she leaned down to pick it up.
Nick must have been at Sunday services, for the apartment was empty when she let herself inside. It was a shame, because she was anxious to tell him everything she’d learned at Oakmonte and had been imagining his astonishment as she unloaded the wealth of information Colin had collected.
She carried the milk to the kitchen and unscrewed the lid. A rancid odor hit her, and she held the bottle at arm’s length. It must have been sitting there more than a day for it to have gotten this bad. How could Nick let the milk spoil like this? She dumped it down the drain, running the faucet to rinse the stench away.
Despite her exhaustion, she needed to go to the police station to tell Sergeant Palmer what Colin had gleaned about Mr. Moreno’s interest in the Nicaraguan canal. It didn’t matter that her feet hurt from wearing these boots for the past twenty-four hours or that she was so tired she thought she could probably sleep straight through next week. If the president’s life was in danger, she needed to do something about it. The irony was huge. Ever since he had taken office, Lucy had resented President Roosevelt and his high-handed tactics, but now she couldn’t sleep for worrying about him. He was their country’s leader, and she’d step in front of a bullet to protect him.
Sergeant Palmer was not in his office. The frazzled clerk at the front desk took her written report and promised to get it before the sergeant’s attention “right away” on Monday morning. Given the way the clerk smirked when he said it, Lucy was not terribly optimistic.
Nick still wasn’t home by the time she got back to her apartment, and it was after lunchtime. A niggling worry unfurled inside her. Maybe she was being paranoid, but what if Tom and Mr. Moreno had associates in Manhattan? And sent them after Nick? After all, the lamppost leaner had a key to her apartment until Nick pried it away. Maybe others had a key, too. It wasn’t like Nick to let milk sit outside their door.
She locked the front door but still didn’t feel safe. Blocking the door with the coffee table made her feel better. Though it wasn’t heavy enough to stop a determined burglar, it would give her a little advance warning if someone tried to break in.
She plopped onto the sofa. She was exhausted, her heart ached, and her stomach felt full of acid as she worried over Nick. Her anxiety ratcheted higher as the sun set and the apartment darkened. Nick was never out this late on a Sunday evening. Something had happened to him, and she grew paralyzed with anxiety. Even the thought of going to bed was terrifying. How could she undress and sleep with the fear that some unknown force was out there?
It was cold and pitch-dark in the apartment when Lucy heard a scrape in the front door lock. She jerked into standing position. She’d fallen asleep on the sofa! The clock tower on the bank across the street said it was two o’clock in the morning, and someone was breaking in to the apartment. She darted to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and squatted down behind the counter.
The doorknob twisted. A crack of light from the hallway slanted into the apartment as the door opened, silhouetting a man’s shape in the darkness. He muttered a curse as he tripped over the coffee table. She recognized that voice.
“Nick?”
“What in all that is holy is this table doing here?” he groused, rubbing his shin.
“Where have you been?” she asked. “I’ve been worried sick.” Her worry got even worse when Nick turned on the lamp and she got a look at him. A huge bruise darkened one side of his face and a fresh cut split his lower lip.
It proba
bly hurt when Nick grinned, but a gleam lit his face. “I’ve been following up on the address we pried out of the lamppost leaner. And surprise, surprise . . . it led me straight to old Jacob Drake.”
Lucy listened with amazement as Nick relayed the story.
Far from the extravagant mansion he had expected, their great-uncle lived in a modest townhouse in a respectable neighborhood in Albany. Nick had thought it looked a lot like their own brownstone building here in Greenwich Village. That illusion came to an end when he knocked on the front door, and it was answered by a brick-shaped man wearing shirtsleeves and brass knuckles. He gruffly demanded Nick’s name and business. Nick wasn’t intimidated.
“Go tell your employer that Nicholas Drake is here, and I want to know why he’s been spying on me.”
A few minutes later, the old man himself had come into the foyer, propelling himself by pushing on the rims of his wheelchair. He displayed surprising vigor for a man of ninety-two. One might think that a rail-thin man confined to a wheelchair was no threat, but his iron-hard face and fierce eyes made it impossible to underestimate him.
“What do you want?” Jacob had barked.
Nick had glanced at the two henchmen standing on either side of the old man, plus the brass-knuckle-wearing butler who’d opened the door. He wasn’t stupid enough to enter the lion’s den on his own, and suggested a chat on the front stoop. There was plenty of room for the wheelchair, especially once Nick moved down a few steps toward the sidewalk. It let him be at eye-level with the old man, plus it would be easier to escape should the henchmen get any ideas. Nick wanted an audience, and there was enough foot traffic on the street to provide it.
He had waited until they were outside to tell Jacob that the lamppost leaner’s cover had been blown, and demanded to know why Jacob had been spying on them.
Jacob’s eyes had narrowed. “You’ve got a high opinion of yourself if you think I’m so fascinated by you that I’d pay good money to learn more.”
“You have a copy of my work schedule, a list of the women I’ve courted, and the books my sister checked out from the library. You had some photographer follow Lucy around all day and take pictures of her. And that’s only the things we know about.”
A Dangerous Legacy Page 19