by Лорен Уиллиг
Who was he protecting by staying away? Charlotte? Or himself?
At the far end of the street, Robert could see the twin Tudor towers of the palace of St. James, location of that uncomfortable scene in the Queen’s Drawing Room. Even if Charlotte forgave him for that, what if he hurt her again? He had seen his father do it again and again, trampling over the feelings of those nearest to him, not out of malice, but just by being what he was. There was no assurance that he would be able to make her happy, in this world that was so much more hers than his.
Seeing her in the Palace wearing her diamonds and feathers with the unselfconsciousness of long custom, he had felt for the first time the true depth of the chasm that separated them. He hadn’t risen to a ducal coronet; it had tumbled down to him. He had seen feathers before, on chickens. Diamonds didn’t come into it. When his childhood companions spoke of court, they meant the sort ruled by magistrates, not monarchs. Right now, he was nearly as much a novelty as a unicorn, the rightful heir returned home, cloaked in exotic grandeur from his time in India. But it was all an illusion. In time, she would come to be ashamed of him, and regret the impulse that had made her paint him in brighter colors than he deserved.
Which would be worse? he wondered. Never having her at all, or having to witness the slow death of love by disillusionment?
There was a cheerful prospect.
Robert scowled at the shadows on the pavement. Tommy, wisely, stayed quiet. There were some moods on which a man’s closest friends knew better than to intrude.
Talk to her, Tommy had said. What if he did? What if he told her the whole of it, warts and all? Robert felt the familiar twist in his stomach at the memory of that interlude in the underground chamber. Well, maybe not quite the whole of it. But close. Enough to allow her to decide for herself. Back at Girdings, he might have worried that childhood infatuation would unfairly prejudice her opinion of him — but he had certainly put paid to that, hadn’t he? He grimaced at the recollection of Charlotte challenging the existence of his snuffbox. She wasn’t anyone’s fool.
Not even his.
As they strode down St. James Street, he heard his own voice asking, roughly, “What if she doesn’t believe me?”
“Then you’ve lost nothing.” Tommy paused to consider. “Except possibly a snuffbox or two. But you’re a duke now. You can afford those.”
Robert shook his head. “And what if she does? What then?” “Then,” said Tommy, speaking very slowly, as though to a not-very-bright child, “you live happily ever after.”
“What if there isn’t such a thing as happily ever after?”
“Then I can’t really help you, can I?” said Tommy.
Robert paused in front of a wide-fronted stone house, one of the famous gentlemen’s clubs scattered along the street. Had he been the sort of duke he was meant to be, he might have been a member. Instead, he came as guest. He wasn’t even sure it was the right bloody building. They didn’t exactly signpost these things for nonmembers.
Hoping to hell he was in the right place, Robert began climbing the shallow stone steps.
“Nothing can be done until the day after tomorrow, anyway,” said Robert, as much to himself as Tommy. “We have to catch Wrothan first.”
“Even better,” said Tommy cheerfully. “Think of it this way. You’ll be coming to her a hero, having bagged a vicious traitor and a French spy.”
“Mmmph,” said Robert as noncommittally as he could, struggling to mask the unwarranted surge of hope that Tommy’s casual suggestion brought with it.
It was a possibility, at least, the prospect of scouring away all the embarrassments of his past with one pure blaze of heroism. Once redeemed . . . well, he would deal with that when he got there. First, there was a spy to catch. And he hadn’t the least idea of how to go about it.
“Our contact said he would meet us here at seven.” Robert raised a hand to rap at the door and hastily withdrew it as the door opened of its own accord. Knocking, apparently, was yet another faux pas.
“Who is this contact of yours?” whispered Tommy as they handed their hats and gloves to a waiting manservant.
“War Office,” Robert whispered back, before raising his voice to give their names to the waiting manservant. It was hard to tell whether or not they were expected; the man’s expression remained as impassive as wax. If he poked the man’s cheek, the impression of his finger would probably remain.
“Hmm,” said Tommy, looking around as though expecting the head of the War Office to burst through the door.
It had been a struggle to admit that he required reinforcements. But if the Colonel had drummed anything into him over the years, it was that fighting a battle one couldn’t win wasn’t gallant; it was irresponsible.
So he had swallowed his pride and found his way to a ramshackle building on Crown Street, where his years of loyal service to the crown had meant nothing, but his ducal title got him through the door. He was passed along to someone not so junior as to offend Robert’s rank, but not so senior as to interfere with real work. In the end, he had been given a name, a contact, someone who (the slightly bored bureaucrat said, glancing at his watch) might help him. To Robert’s surprise, it was a name he knew.
The man with their hats melted away, replaced by another black-coated functionary, who guided Robert and Tommy through a series of rooms papered in deep greens and rich reds, redolent of tobacco and freshly ironed newspapers. Up two flights of stairs, at the very back of the house, they were admitted to a square room with only one window. The walls were papered in the same hunter green as the rooms downstairs, hung with paintings of slightly lumpy horses. The heavy drapes had been drawn across the one window, muffling the room from the outside world. After bowing them in, their guide closed the thick oak door securely behind them, leaving them to the man who waited for them, sprawled in a squat leather chair before the fire.
“Dovedale!” Robert’s contact bounded out of his chair in a very un-agent-like way. “Bloody good of you to come. Sit down, sit down.”
Waving them into chairs, he promptly set about splashing brandy into three glasses. A table had been discreetly furnished with an array of decanters and a platter of refreshments.
“Ginger biscuit?” offered their host, brandishing a biscuit. “As you can see, we have everything we need. You don’t need to worry about being disturbed. No one will come unless we call.”
Robert gingerly accepted a biscuit. “Thank you for agreeing to help us.”
“I couldn’t be more delighted. London has been damnably dull since the Black Tulip was put out of commission.”
“The Black Who?” asked Tommy, punching the leather of his chair into a more comfortable shape.
“By Gad, how long did you say you’d been away?” Their host paused with the biscuit in midair to gape at them.
“Twelve years for me,” said Robert dryly.
“Well, that it explains it, then.” Their host flung himself back in his chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him. Taking a big bite of his ginger biscuit, he followed it with a long swig of brandy, swilling the two together with obvious satisfaction. Thus refreshed, he said, rather indistinctly, “There’s been a vogue this past decade for flower names for spies, English and French. You must have just missed it when you left, Dovedale. We’ve had the Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian, the Pink Carnation. They’ve countered with the Black Tulip — nasty one, that — and a rather halfhearted series of Daisies, none of that stuck.”
“You can add a Jasmine to that list,” put in Robert, as the missing puzzle piece clicked into place. “A Jasmine that might prove rather sticky.”
“So that’s it!” exclaimed Tommy. “Wrothan and his infernal sprig of jasmine. It wasn’t just for show.”
Seeing their host’s confused expression, Robert explained, “It all began in India, with a man named Arthur Wrothan.”
“Your Jasmine,” Tommy chimed in, “who was selling secrets to the Mahratta and, it seems, to the
French.”
“Wrothan,” continued Robert, “attached himself to Freddy Staines in India. It was what he did. He collected young officers with more money than sense and promised them access to all manners of Eastern pleasures.”
“Eastern pleasures?” Their host perked up.
“Usually women with a fringe of opiates,” Robert said bluntly. “Wrothan appears to have found a similar outlet for his talents here, in Sir Francis Medmenham’s Hellfire Club. He appears to be using Medmenham’s meetings as a cover for rendezvous with his liaison from France.”
“I see.” Their host frowned into his brandy. “Medmenham and Staines have been friends since the nursery. Staines would have provided your Mr. Wrothan with the introduction to Medmenham. Mr. Wrothan sounds like he would fit right into Medmenham’s infernal activities. But how does the Frenchman come in?”
“That’s what we wanted to find out,” admitted Tommy. “Wrothan must have met him in India. Or Wrothan’s French contacts in India arranged for an introduction once he returned to England.”
“Medmenham’s club must have seemed like manna from heaven to him,” put in Robert. “Think about it. You have the brothers and sons of members of the cabinet, a groom of the bedchamber to the King, and assorted peers, all out of their minds on opiates.”
“Good God,” breathed their host. “It’s the answer to an agent’s prayer. Do you think Medmenham’s in on it?”
“It’s hard to tell,” admitted Robert. “In those robes, it’s deuced hard to tell who’s who. The Frenchman might have snuck in without being passed through Medmenham. He might also be known to Medmenham without Medmenham being aware of his other activities.”
“There are certainly more than enough Royalist émigrés moving about society, any of whom might secretly be working for the other side,” said their host frankly, helping himself to another biscuit. “But if Medmenham doesn’t know about your Mr. Wrothan’s extra activities, what does he get out of all those? Aside from the women and opiates, of course.”
Robert thought about it. “Power. Influence.” He remembered the rapt look on Medmenham’s face as he called forth his papier-mâché deity. It might have been merely the opiates at work, but he rather thought it went deeper than that. He could hear Medmenham’s voice at Girdings, speaking of more things than heaven and earth. “Much as he mocks it all, I wouldn’t wonder if Medmenham half believes his own mumbo jumbo. Ridiculous as it sounds.”
“Huh.” Their host kicked back in his chair, balancing his brandy balloon on his stomach. “We have enough demons in London without his raising more. Your esteemed relation, for example.” He cast a nervous glance over his shoulder as he said it, as though expecting her to pop out at him. “The Dowager Duchess.”
“Who is, mercifully, at Girdings,” said Robert. “And will hopefully stay there until this business is done.”
“Amen,” agreed their host, and got down to business. “When is Medmenham’s next meeting?”
“Tomorrow.” Robert felt duty bound to add, “The Frenchman might not appear again. It is something of a long shot.”
“My favorite kind!” Their host raised his hand to toast and realized he was holding a biscuit instead of his glass. Philosophically, he finished it off in two large bites, adding somewhat indistinctly, “Where’s the place?”
“Upon the heath,” said Robert.
“Really?” said their host eagerly.
“No. Not really,” Robert admitted. “We’re meeting tomorrow night at Drury Lane at six o’clock and then departing the theatre at a prearranged time to be led to the ceremonial meeting place, wherever that may be.”
“Midnight?” said their host, reaching for another biscuit.
“Nine o’clock.”
Their host coughed up brandy. “What self-respecting satanical society meets at nine o’clock?”
“One with an early bedtime?” suggested Tommy.
Robert considered the liquid in his glass. The wallpaper gave it an oddly greenish tinge, like something seen through water. “Or one with other activities planned afterwards.”
Their host raised his glass to Robert. “I like the way you think. Tomorrow night it is. To the Hellfire Club!”
Chapter Nineteen
Hallways always seem longer in the dark, especially when you don’t know where you’re going.
If there was a moon out, it wasn’t doing me the least bit of good. The hallway ran along the interior of the house; the only window was the one at the far end. It was so dark that I couldn’t even make out where the end of the hall was.
I hoped Robert Lansdowne and Tommy Fluellen conducted their reconnaissance mission more suavely than I was conducting mine.
I had a vague notion that Colin’s study — and in it, the computer, the ostensible goal of my quest — was somewhere on the second floor with me. The downstairs was devoted to reception rooms on one side, the kitchen and den on the other, and the long drawing room in the back. With the carpet runner prickling against the soles of my bare feet, I started cautiously down the stretch of hallway Colin had redirected me from earlier.
That sounds nice and gothic, doesn’t it? If I were a gothic heroine that would be the signal to all attentive readers that something dreadful (and key to the plot) was hidden at the end of the West Wing. Of course, if I were a gothic heroine, I would also have had a candle dripping wax on one hand and a demented old-maid servant popping out of the shadows to moan, “Beware! Beware! Beware the curse of the Selwicks!” before laughing maniacally and bolting down to the cellars to croon to the corpses of Colin’s six murdered wives.
Perhaps it was a good thing I wasn’t a gothic heroine.
At any rate, Colin’s injunction about the hallway hadn’t been anything sinister or even suggestive; he had merely meant to indicate that the library was in the opposite direction. But I did vaguely recall that he had gone off that way himself once I’d finally been set on the right path library-wards, hence leading to my logical deduction that therein lay the study.
It would have been easier to wait till morning and just ask him, but easy never seems like the appropriate choice at three in the morning when the pipes are moaning and the floorboards are creaking and the very shadows seem to have eyes. Nothing was going to put me to sleep but finding out where on earth 971 was, and then sending a long email to my friend Alex telling her how silly I was being, at which point it would all be out of my system and then I could go back to being a normal (all right, passably normal) human being.
Tomorrow, I knew, I would feel extremely sheepish about the whole thing and wonder why it had seemed so imperative. But that was tomorrow.
With one hand on the hip-high molding that ran down the length of the wall, I felt my way down the hallway, groping my way by touch through the darkness. I encountered a door frame and kept going. Ahead of me, I could see a faint distinction in the quality of the darkness. Ah, glass. That was a window, one of the windows that looked out over the front of the house (the bedroom had windows on the garden front).
Doubling around, I blundered back to the last door frame. It was only a frame; the door itself had been left open.
Surely, that made any ideas about Colin being double-0-something-or-other even sillier. Any self-respecting agent in any novel would have left his study door both closed and locked. A good thing, too. Unlike the heroines of those sorts of novels, I (a) don’t wear hairpins, and (b) wouldn’t know how to pick a lock with them even if I did.
Oh, well. I had never really thought Colin might be a spy. It was just one of those titillating what-ifs, a harmless little daydream, like fantasizing about suddenly inheriting a castle from a long-lost relative, or being asked out by Sean Bean after accidentally stepping on his foot in the Marks & Spencer food hall (many was the happy hour I had spent with that one). You know they’re make-believe. Even if my heart did always beat a little faster when I entered that Marks & Sparks sandwich aisle. But it was all harmless fun, like imagining that my not-always-m
ild-mannered boyfriend might secretly be an international man of mystery.
And, hey, as daydreams go, it was at least slightly more likely than winning Sean Bean’s undying devotion over an egg and cress sandwich. Hadn’t at least three of Colin’s great-great-great-great-great-grandparents been in the business? (I was still excited over the whole his-being-descended-from-Miles thing.)
There I went again.
Shaking my head at myself, I shimmied my way through the door of the study, patting down the wall in search of a light switch.
Blinking in the avalanche of light, I twisted this way and that, like a comical cat burglar in one of the Pink Panther movies. What if Colin saw? What if it woke him up? Never mind that the bedroom was down the hall with the door closed; I dashed over to the desk, pulled the chain on the small brass desk lamp, and hastily switched off the overhead.
A gentle light diffused over the scarred wood of the desk and the reddish brown carpet. Ah, that was better. As my heart rate slowed to a reasonable pace, I looked around, taking stock of my surroundings.
It was larger than I had imagined it would be, more of a combination study-sitting room-library than my apartment-bred definition of a study. Bookcases had been set against the walls on three sides of the room, breaking only for the two long west-facing windows and another that looked south, towards the front of the house. On the right was Colin’s desk, facing out towards the door, with the promised computer crouching on it like a big, beige gremlin. If the desk faced out, that meant the computer faced in, where someone walking into the study couldn’t see what was on it.
The other side of the room featured a well-worn sofa, a squashy chintz chair, and a table with drink rings all over the top. Perched on top of a file cabinet sat an electric kettle, one of those white plastic ones without which no British kitchen seems complete, a battered French press with squished coffee grounds on the bottom, and a stained mug, off of which the lettering had been mostly washed by repeated use over time. There was also a biscuit tin with the lid half off.