by Лорен Уиллиг
Having learned the dangers of shrugging, the actor shook his head. “Not that I saw. The doctor came alone.”
“When did all this happen?” Charlotte broke in, moving around Robert to address the actor directly. “When did you come here?”
The actor smiled at her as winningly as a man could when strapped into a straitjacket. “Yesterday evening. I had just been given my supper when Dr. Simmons came for me.”
“Yesterday?” The cause of Charlotte’s distress was equally apparent to all of them. Wrothan had had more than enough time to conceal the real King.
Charlotte turned to Henrietta. “The false Simmons must have made the substitution while we were talking to the real Simmons.”
“Or later that night,” countered Henrietta, looking equally shaken. “If we’d only known — ”
“How could you have?” interrupted Robert, not liking the stricken expression on Charlotte’s face. He turned back to the man on the bed. “Did you hear where he was being taken?”
The actor affected a rueful expression. “Simmons said something about his recuperating at Kew.”
Charlotte touched a hand tentatively to Robert’s arm. “Kew is where the King recovered from his last illness. Simmons — the false Simmons, I mean — wouldn’t have taken him there.”
“No,” agreed Robert abstractedly, “he wouldn’t.”
Where would Wrothan, newly returned to England, stash a kidnapped king? Wrothan had to find someplace where he could hide the King from the French and English alike. It was no small matter outwitting the secret service of not one but two nations. The King’s face was well-known, not only from his own peregrinations across the country but from thousands of loyal prints and far less loyal caricatures. It was no easy matter to hide a King. Wrothan would need someplace secluded, someplace entirely cut off.
Someplace like the Hellfire caves.
“I think I know where he is.” Robert scarcely recognized his own voice. “And I’ll be willing to wager our Frenchie does, too. He would never have killed Wrothan otherwise.”
Wrothan always had been more cunning than wise. If the answer was obvious to Robert, it would have been obvious to the Frenchman as well. Robert made a note; the next time he kidnapped someone and held them for ransom, he would not hide them in the same place where he had held his secret meetings. It was a distinct gaffe.
“Killed?” The man on the bed looked distinctly unhappy.
No one paid the least bit of attention to him. Miles stampeded towards the door like a one-man cavalry charge, one arm upraised. “There’s no time to lose! To — er.” He skidded to an abrupt halt just shy of the door. “Where are we going?”
“Wycombe,” announced Robert with grim finality. “West Wycombe.”
“Why Wycombe?” Miles demanded.
“Hellfire Club,” said Robert succinctly. Now that the club was out of the bag, so to speak, there was no point in hiding it. “We can leave the ladies at Loring House — ”
“Oh, no,” said Henrietta. “You’re not leaving us anywhere.”
Charlotte sidled up beside her. “I’m the only one who knows the King. If we find him, I should be there. So he won’t be alarmed.”
Robert hated to tell her that the King was probably already alarmed — or so deeply drugged that he couldn’t be alarmed if they tried. From the set of Charlotte’s chin, he knew that if he didn’t agree, nothing short of a straight waistcoat would keep her from following. And, so far, her instincts had been better than his.
“Fine,” he said shortly. “We may find nothing at all, you know.”
Charlotte looked up at him as though trying to decide whether to hire him to bear her standard off into battle. “But we still have to try.”
Feeling subtly rebuked, Robert got down to business. “Can we hire a boat?” Medmenham Abbey was on the Thames, a much faster trip by water than by land.
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Miles said, barging towards the door. “Bloody good thing the Thames hasn’t frozen.”
Robert didn’t miss the longing look Charlotte cast at the dwindling embers of the coal fire as she disappeared through the door. It was going to be a long, cold trip. But, hopefully, not a fruitless one. Robert didn’t let himself dwell on what would happen if the King wasn’t at Wycombe.
In that case, he could only hope that the Frenchman would be as stymied as they were.
“What about me?” Horatio Prendergast called after them.
Robert spared a glance over his shoulder. “You stay right where you are and play your role as though your life depended on it.” He paused for the maximum effect. “It does.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
In the light of morning, my midnight adventures appeared more than a little bit absurd.
To call it morning might have been pushing it a bit. It was more like noon. What with all my midnight meanderings, by the time I woke up, Colin was long since gone, leaving only a rumpled patch on his side of the sheets and the traditional dent in the pillow. I was wrapped like a mummy in the entirety of the comforter, having apparently taken his departure from the bed as a moment of personal triumph in the quilt war.
There was a note waiting for me on the bedside table, propped against the phone. Groping for my glasses, I squinted at it through a fringe of hair that had decided to take on a new life as a porcupine.
“Didn’t want to wake you,” it read. That probably translated as “Tried to wake you; didn’t get far.” I’m a night person, not a morning person. The rest of the note read a bit like a very modern poem. “Food in fridge. Water in kettle. Happy hunting. C.”
Happy hunting? Oh, right. My death grip on the sheet relaxed. He meant the archive. As far as he knew, I was only hunting historical spies.
And for all I knew, I reminded myself, they were the only spies on the premises. So to speak, that was.
I brushed my teeth and washed my hair and put on clothing and managed to find my way to the kitchen with only one or two wrong turns along the way.
The door to the study was closed.
I wondered what Colin was doing in there. Had he discovered that fragment of paper beneath the desk? Had he wadded it up and tossed it away? Or shredded it with his special Captain Kangaroo Secret Spy Docu-Shred Ray?
Rolling my eyes at myself, I set about making coffee in the decidedly prosaic mustard yellow kitchen, breathing in the fumes from the French press as though the magical whiff of caffeine might clear my foggy brain.
After all, what had I really seen in there last night? Leaving aside all the atmospherics of the dim light of the single lamp, the long nightgown swishing around my bare feet, the decidedly House of Usher shadows cast by unfamiliar objects. Just some dictionaries, some travel guides, some newspaper clippings, and a scrap of a larger piece of paper that would probably read entirely differently when plugged into the missing three quarters of the page.
I filled my mug with coffee, looked at it critically, and snagged the French press in my other hand before making my way carefully up the stairs to the library. Refills would undoubtedly be necessary.
Henrietta’s journals and correspondence were just where I had left them, open to a very cold boat ride on the Thames in the middle of the night. I, apparently, wasn’t the only one seized with odd impulses during the wee hours of the morning. In their case, though, Charlotte had a bit more to go on I did. I still couldn’t quite believe someone had had the nerve to substitute an actor for the King.
Wiggling my way into a comfortable position in the squashy old armchair, I flipped open my laptop and prepared to transcribe the salient bits of Lady Charlotte’s pursuit of the captured king. As far as I could tell, the Pink Carnation wasn’t involved — at least, not yet — but it was still unclear whether or not the Black Tulip, the Pink Carnation’s French nemesis, was really out of the picture. Drugging the King to effect a simulation of madness didn’t really seem his sort of thing, but who really knew? If the Black Tulip had survived the conflagration th
at had foiled his previous plot, an attempt to blow up the royal family with a three-foot-high plaster bust of George III crammed with explosives, his agenda might have altered.
But no matter how I tried to concentrate on England in winter, on a cold palace, on a mad King, on the icy Thames, my mind kept straying to blazing desert sands, to gold souks and to semiautomatic something-or-others and to unexplained trips to Dubai. Even the fascinating possibility that George III had been replaced by a decoy king failed to hold my attention. For once in my life, the present seemed a good deal more arresting than the past. I wasn’t sure that was a good thing. At least, not for the sake of my dissertation.
After reading the same page over five times without absorbing a word of it, I admitted defeat. Pushing away from the table, I fumbled in my bag for that lifeline of our modern existence, my mobile phone. I’d been too much in the archives, too much among the improbable events of long ago. What I needed was a nice, sane, safe modern voice to bring me back to my senses.
Well, maybe not entirely sane.
Scrolling down through my contacts, I hit the first name to come up in the Ps. If anyone could whip away the cobwebs, it would be Pammy. I had no intention of confiding my embarrassing 007 suspicions to her, but if nothing else, at least she would be a distraction. And she had the added benefit of having gone to school with Colin’s sister, Serena, in London for two years. They didn’t move in entirely the same circles these days, but if anyone knew what Colin did for a living, it would be Pammy. The woman has the instincts of a bloodhound and the scruples of a Chihuahua.
Pammy doesn’t believe in outmoded social mundanities like “Hello.” Instead, she started right in with, “You’re at Selwick Hall, aren’t you!”
“Pammy! Hi! How are you?” I have the social mundanities on autopilot. They just come out, whether I mean them to or not. “It’s me, Eloise.”
Pammy made a noise that would have sounded suspiciously like “duh!” if “duh” hadn’t gone out several years ago. Pammy is nothing if not au courant. “Who else would be calling from your mobile?”
“Good point,” I admitted.
“So?” piped Pammy. “How is it? Which flavor is he?”
As I so often do with Pammy, I removed the phone from my ear, looked at it, and put it back. It never helps. “Huh?” I said.
“Which flavor ice cream is he? It’s the latest thing. You compare every man you know to his corresponding ice-cream flavor. Vanilla is your standard City bloke, presentable, but bland. Vanilla bean has a bit more potential, but it’s still no chocolate chip. . . . You get the idea.”
Hmm. I decided to try this out. “What’s moose tracks?”
Pammy answered without missing a beat. “Vaguely outdoorsy, from the Midwest in the States or the Midlands here, on the shaggy side.”
“Strawberry?” I asked.
“Super WASP-y, always wears pink Brooks Brothers shirts, on the borderline of gay.”
“Sorbet?”
“Definitely gay. So what’s Colin?”
“Mint chip,” I said, without even having to think about it. Cool on the outside, but with all sorts of dark depths. “Listen, Pams, do you ever remember Serena saying anything about what Colin does for a living?”
“Something in the City,” Pammy said promptly. In the background I could hear the whirr of an espresso machine. It takes a lot of coffee to maintain that level of constant exuberance.
“That’s what he used to do. Any idea what he does now?”
There was a long, happy exhalation of steam in the background as the espresso maker did its thing. “Shouldn’t you be asking him?”
“It seems kind of tacky,” I hedged. “And I feel like I should know already.” At least that much was true.
“Hmm.”
I could hear Pammy thinking — and texting on one of her three other phones, but I chose to ignore that bit. Pammy texts even in her sleep; her phones are so much a part of her fingers that they have no impact on her other activities or on her brain.
“I have this friend” — Uh-oh. Pammy always had these friends. Which was this one going to be? The astrologist? The feng shui expert? The Color-Me-Beautiful woman? — “who has an agency called Man-Trackers.”
“Man-Trackers,” I repeated flatly. I had an image of Xena: Warrior Princess stalking her man through the streets of London’s financial district. It was straight out of Monty Python. Did they bring back scalps, or just suit jackets?
“They run check-ups on new boyfriends, you know, like due diligence, making sure they are what they said and all that.”
“Due diligence?”
“Well, just think about it, Ellie,” Pammy said, as though it were all perfectly reasonable and I just a little bit slow, “you wouldn’t buy a flat or a business without first having it professionally checked out, so why expend less care on picking out a man? It never hurts to do your home-work.”
“That’s not homework — that’s stalking.”
“Don’t be silly, sweetie. Stalking is when you do it yourself.”
I love Pammy, I do. Most of the time. “I think I’ll hold off on the, er, Man-Trackers for a bit.”
“It’s your choice.” A bad choice, her tone said. I could practically hear her shrug. “But I’ll just shoot you their number, anyway, yah?”
“Yah,” I echoed absently. “I mean, yes.”
Easier to give in to Pammy than to argue with her. Disagreement is a form of discourse she does not understand. Not that I ever, ever intended to use this “Man-Tracking” madness. What in the hell had happened to romance? To trust?
“You don’t use them, do you?” I demanded incredulously.
It was hard to believe it, even of Pammy. Especially of Pammy, who went through enough men per year to form her own private army. I didn’t like to think what the bill for that would be if she was having each one checked out individually. Sufficient to put a down payment on a London flat, no doubt. Fortunately, Pammy had a very large trust fund from a very guilty father.
“Of course! If they were publicly traded, I would buy stock.”
That answered that, then.
“They’re really great,” said Pammy seriously. “They check out his financial records, whether he pays his bills promptly, his taxes, his properties, his exes. Total full service.”
“Great,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. At least, nothing positive. What next, going through their garbage to see if there were unexplained used condoms? That wasn’t the way it was supposed to work. You were supposed to grow to know someone through mutual interactions, communicating with them, not with some bizarre surveillance agency about them. What had happened to trust, for crying out loud?
I was a fine one to talk about trust. There I was scrounging around in Colin’s desk drawers in the middle of the night. How was that any different?
Because it wasn’t systematic, I told myself. Because I’d felt guilty doing it. Because I wasn’t paying someone else to do it.
“It’s a jungle out there,” Pammy said seriously. “You have to protect yourself, Eloise.”
She didn’t know the half of it. What would she say if I told her that I suspected Colin was a gun-toting, license-to-kill-carrying secret agent? Not much, actually. That wasn’t the sort of thing Pammy worried about.
Pammy’s voice was still streaming through the little holes in my mobile. “I mean, you’d be surprised by how many men say they’re single but really aren’t — and you can’t just tell by looking for a tan line on their ring fingers! And then there are a lot of them who lie about their financials, or who’ve cheated on their ex-wives, or — ”
I have to admit, I tuned out somewhere after ex-wives. I just didn’t want to know. Dating was hard enough. Why create more things to stress about? I was about to say, You don’t seriously worry about all these things, do you? when I remembered: Of course she did.
Pammy doesn’t just come from a broken home; she comes from broken homes, plur
al. In fact, her mother had practically made a career out of it, trading up husbands. Some of the trading had been done of her own accord. Husband One, a reasonably successful attorney, had been ditched for Pammy’s father, a wildly successful King of the Universe, Bonfire of the Vanities investment-banker type. Some of the trading had been thrust upon her. After Husband Two did his own trading up, Pammy’s mother had moved on to his English equivalent, Husband Three. I was still unclear as to what had happened with Husband Three, but Pammy’s mother had come out of it with a choice town house in London, and a “cottage” in Dorset with fifteen bedrooms and its own tennis courts. The Palm Beach house was courtesy of Pammy’s father, as were the various Monets and Renoirs that now decorated the London and Dorset properties.
It’s not like Pammy went around talking about it — other than in the most matter-of-fact of ways — and she had never, to my knowledge, sought psychological counseling, or ever, in any way, given anyone to believe that she was anything but perfectly well-adjusted. Mildly crazy, but perfectly well-adjusted. But sometimes even perfectly well-adjusted can cover a multitude of scars.
Maybe it wasn’t fair to call them scars. Call it a different worldview, then. Talking with Pammy could be like one of those Twilight Zone episodes where you get a peep into a universe that operates on laws entirely differently from your own. Visiting Pammy-land was like traveling through a totally foreign country, one where they didn’t take Visa and none of my own expectations applied. Which was funny, since we’d grown up together. We’d gone to the same private school together from kindergarten till her mother whisked her off to England in tenth grade, the same ballet classes, the same skating lessons, the same hideous middle school dances; but our home situations were different enough that we might as well have hailed from different planets.
It was true: I did take for granted having two parents who had met, fallen in love, married — and stayed married. Sure, they’d had their moments, but for the most part they were a united front, aligned against the world, two heads with the same brain, and on and on. My sister, Jillian, and I always joked that telling one something was tantamount to telling the other because after thirty years of marriage, information went back and forth between the two of them like some Discovery Channel program on osmosis.