by The Impostor
James poked his head through the opening, eyes tightly shut. “Are we all quite decent?”
“We are,” Dalton said tightly. “It remains to be seen about you.”
“Ah.” James swung Clara’s case into the room, careful not to make a thump on the floor. He then passed through the opening carrying a thick folio and another hamper.
“Here are your things, Mrs. Simpson. Agatha told me to tell you that she sewed your notes into a false bottom. It wouldn’t pass a real search, but it’ll keep them from the light-fingered.”
He handed her a stiff card, printed with two passages on a ship leaving that night for Scotland. “This is for us. I thought we’d travel as brother and sister.”
She carefully put it down on the desk. “Thank you.”
James dropped his heavy file next to the ticket and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Dalton, I think you’d better see this.”
Dalton reached for it, but James shot Clara a glance. “Outside.”
Clara waved them on. “Go. I need my privacy for dressing anyway.”
Dalton gazed at her for a moment, then followed James through an entirely different panel in the wall. Clara blinked. What a maze of secrets this place was.
After she was sure they were gone, she shed her damp wool cloak and pulled clean clothing from her case. She was just tying the waistband on a fresh set of knickers when she accidentally knocked James’s file to the floor.
Sir Thorogood’s cartoons flew in a scattered swath onto the rug. Sighing, Clara knelt to pick them up. The last thing she wanted at this moment was to be reminded of what she’d already lost.
As she gathered them up, she absently named off the faces she’d drawn. Mosely… Wadsworth… Nathaniel…
She stopped. Nathaniel? She’d never lampooned Nathaniel. Flipping back through the stack in her hand, she pulled out the drawing. Then she laughed.
The sheet was upside down. At this angle it only looked like Nathaniel. Shaking her head, she turned the Fleur cartoon upright to sort it into a neat stack with the others.
The face did not change. She held it closer. The jaw… the brow …
Clara had only seen this mysterious character once, during one of Wadsworth’s meetings. The three men had bored her silly by arguing over some woman. She’d avenged her boredom with a scathing drawing that had made quite a splash when published ten or twelve days ago—
The same time Dalton had been ordered to find her.
She sat back on her heels, thinking furiously. Someone wanted her found. Someone wanted her dead. Could it be Nathaniel?
In her mind she saw that brief flash of intensity in his eyes when he’d watched her draw.
He’d known. Right there in the park he’d known. Heavens, she’d even presented him with the evidence herself!
And then he’d pursued her. Calling on her, gifts, extending invitations… as if a man like that would be seriously interested in her.
Dalton is. The obnoxious little voice was back. He wants to marry you.
“No,” Clara muttered. “He wants to bind me up in cotton wool and preserve me, like a boy collecting a butterfly.”
But what could Nathaniel want, other than to lure her out where he could stop her pen forever?
She placed the drawing on top of the others and finished dressing quickly. As she dug through the case for a warm gown, she pulled out her servant’s dress. She held the simple muslin in her hands for a long moment.
Nathaniel was dining with his cousin tonight. He’d be out for hours. She could investigate—find out for certain before accusing the man to this half-mad spy guild.
She impulsively pulled the garment over her head. She needed out and away from Dalton at the moment, and this would help him in his goal as well. Not to mention, it was certainly an improvement on being shipped off like an embarrassing relation.
Clothed and shod, she pulled on her own thankfully dry cloak and moved to the first panel in the wall, the one that James had come through. She pressed on a bit of carving the way she’d seen James do to the other on his way out and the narrow door popped open.
She’d made her way out of the attic study. Now how was she going to get out of the club?
Miss Kitty Trapp threw herself down belly first across her mattress and glared at her sister’s tidy bed across the room. Bitty was already petitioning their parents to move into Aunt Clara’s room—which was larger and had a lovely big window—even though poor Aunt Clara had only been gone for two days.
Her sister would likely get the room too, for Mama and Papa were still angry that she hadn’t told them immediately when Aunt Clara left.
They’d let that tall man into the house and called him “my lord,” but darling Lord Reardon hadn’t been allowed to so much as put a toe over the threshold when he’d come calling yesterday afternoon. Kitty didn’t think that Papa really believed all that talk about treason, but still he’d canceled all outings and callers until he could decide what to do about it.
So here she was, banished to her room when she could be sitting in the parlor with the handsomest man on the face of the earth.
Kitty sat up and moved to the dressing table she shared with Bitty. Turning her chin this way and that, she wondered if Lord Reardon liked blondes. She fancied her hair was ever so slightly shinier than Bitty’s, for she brushed it one hundred times every night, while Bitty sometimes skimped.
Other than her hair, what had she to compete with Aunt Clara? Her aunt was very smart and talented, but her figure was only adequate, while Bitty’s and Kitty’s threatened to be nearly as rounded as Mama’s …
Kitty sighed. There was no point in deluding herself. Lord Reardon had never so much as glanced her way when Aunt Clara was in the room.
Bored, she wandered to the little desk and sat down to finish tracing the cartoons that Bitty had claimed first. Bitty always claimed things first, just because she had been born a few short minutes earlier than Kitty …
As she began to trace a very scandalous drawing that she was sure Mama would confiscate if she ever saw, Kitty wished she had thought to ask Aunt Clara to draw Lord Reardon for her. He was so divine, with his noble brow and his perfect jaw and lips that quite frankly fascinated one—
Kitty frowned down at the paper before her. Her tracing of one of the faces in the cartoon looked very much like Lord Reardon. Hmm. If she filled in here and drew this line a bit longer—there! She had her own portrait of his lordship and she’d done it herself.
With the help of the cartoon, of course. Silly, though. Lord Reardon couldn’t possibly have anything to do with a cheap hussy like this Fleur person. Mistresses went for those rich men who didn’t have wives and whose titles made them so important that they didn’t care what anyone thought and …
Men exactly like his lordship. Kitty’s hp trembled as she looked at the drawing of her Lord Reardon—a lewd, immoral, awful womanizer!
Tears welled up in her eyes as she contemplated her betrayed love. Deceived by a scoundrel, a blackguard! Well, he wouldn’t get away with this! Hiding his face behind that fat hussy’s rear wouldn’t keep him safe when Beatrice Trapp got through with him. Mama knew everyone who was anyone. She’d fix that worthless rake!
“Maa-maa!”
Dalton stood very still in the secret office, hating himself. She was gone. Gone into the night and the rain without leaving a clue. He had lost his maddening, magnificent Clara. He should not have left her. He should have stayed by her side until he could see her to permanent safety.
Dalton stared down at his desk where lay the one sodden slipper he’d found on the floor this morning. He gently laid his hand over it. His palm and fingers outstretched the small silken object by a good inch.
He’d lost her. His fingers slowly curled into a fist, crumpling the soft slipper until a puddle formed on the desk beneath his fist.
James stood silently watching him. The stolen cloak lay over one arm of the chair, wrinkled from its stay on the floor of the office
and its turn beneath their tangled bodies.
Clara. Dalton knew that he must stay in control, must quell the wildness in him that was part panic and part rage. His hands clenched more tightly, desperate to wrap themselves around the throat of whoever was threatening Clara.
James cleared his throat. “Just tell me where to start, Dalton. You know I’ll help.”
“If I knew where to start, I would be there now,” Dalton whispered.
James laid his hand on Dalton’s shoulder. “Then we must think. She must have left on her own. Who could have known she was in the club?”
“Agatha and Simon. You and I.” He’d been so bloody careful. “And whoever has been reading my files.” He’d been so bloody stupid not to see the hole in their plan. The rogue player knew too much, and knew it as soon as Dalton did. He’d thought Feebles the leak, or even Stubbs.
It hadn’t once occurred to him that his secret office had been compromised. James had found the kill order right in the Liars’ files downstairs, phrased in the usual euphemistic way. “Mrs. Clara Simpson is to be accorded the greatest of courtesies” meant the honor of meeting Kurt’s knife in a dark room.
What’s more, the order had finished with Dalton’s name, signed in his own handwriting.
Someone knew everything about him, and the club, and very likely Clara. Now she was out there, foolishly running from the very people who could keep her safe.
He shouldn’t have pushed about her leaving. He certainly shouldn’t have proposed! God, what had he been thinking? She didn’t need him, with all the complications in his life. Her own was entirely too problematical as it was.
He rubbed his face. “If only someone on the street had seen something. Then I would know if she’d been kidnapped, or fled, or…”
“Or disloyal?” James’s tone was reproachful. “Dalton, you can’t possibly still believe that.”
Dalton did believe in Clara. How could he not, after the last tempestuous twenty-four hours? “The important thing is to recover her.”
But recover her how? He still didn’t know who had ordered him on the case, or who had ordered the kill. Damn, but he was sick of fighting blind! He felt like a puppet who couldn’t see his own strings. Or the ground below his feet. Or the sky above.
Who was pulling those strings and why?
He unclenched his fists and rubbed the back of his neck. “Until we find who took Clara, we have nothing.”
And there was nowhere to begin.
Things were going well until Clara tried to get into Lord Reardon’s house.
She had managed to work her way quietly out of the club by peeking around corners and had finally followed a whistling young man who was obviously carrying out the rubbish. She’d ended up in the alley behind the building, probably the very one she’d walked through the night before.
Getting to Lord Reardon’s exclusive square had required a good bit of walking, but it was still fairly early. She didn’t think he’d be done with his visit to Cora Teagarden yet. A servant scurrying on his way had pointed out his lordship’s house and Clara had entered the rear delivery gate without causing any suspicion.
The house was quiet, with only a few rooms lighted that she could see. Of course, the house was very large and grand and extended all the way to the street. It was twice as wide as the Trapps’ house and likely three times as deep. As she took stock of the situation from her hiding place behind a box hedge she was stumped.
She couldn’t pose as one of Reardon’s servants without considerable cooperation, which she didn’t think forthcoming. She certainly couldn’t climb the wall and enter through the attic the way Dalton had. The parlor-level windows to the garden stood rather high for her to climb into, but it seemed she had no choice. Eyeing them carefully in the dimness, she thought she saw a slightly wider dark line between the two swinging panes of one window. Well, it was as good a place to begin as any, she supposed.
She made her way to crouch at the foundation of the house but there she hesitated. Something was different and it was not simply the fact that she was quite literally breaking in. There was something different within her.
Although she was resolute, she was without her former assurance, that blithe confidence of one who has never been tried. “Well, Dalton,” she whispered. “You’ll be glad to know that I no longer believe in my own immortality.”
Breathing deeply to steady her nerves, Clara began to climb the wall, pressing her fingertips and shod toes into the even breaks between the great rectangular stones. The window was just above her head, so she needn’t climb too far—
With a very unladylike grunt, she managed to slap one palm onto the stone sill of the window, then the other. Using every muscle in her body, she pulled herself chest-high to the window and balanced herself on her elbows, toes precariously wedged between the stones.
She hadn’t climbed anything since childhood, and even then only the rare conveniently branched tree. Clara took a moment to inhale a congratulatory breath and to inspect the unlatching possibilities of the window.
It was latched, but poorly. Clara leaned her torso on the biting stone edge of the sill and inserted her fingertips into the gap. She pulled steadily. The window remained latched. She pulled harder, almost groaning in frustration.
The window sprang open. Clara jerked her head back to avoid being struck in the face—and overbalanced. As she felt herself slip, her heart stopped and she went back to that dreadful moment on the roof, but there was no one to catch her now—
She landed hard on her rear on the soft lawn beneath the window. Stunned for a moment at the brevity of her fall, she sat unmoving. Then she chuckled at herself. No one to catch her? How overly dramatic. “Let’s not be too hasty with the symbolism, shall we?” she muttered as she rose from the grass. Her rear throbbed and she’d bitten her tongue, but she looked up at the open window in triumph and began the slow climb upward again.
A few moments later she threw one leg over the sill, then the other, and then let herself slide to the delightfully firm floor. Dalton could keep the climbing, she decided. She was going to leave by the door if she could manage it.
She shut the window but left it unlatched, just in case. Then she turned, dusting her hands. There, safely in.
Abruptly Clara had never felt more unsafe in her life. She was in the grandest house she had ever seen. Even in the darkness she could see the gleam of real gold on the plaster walls and hear the chime of the chandelier crystals as they moved in the breeze she had allowed into the room. Nathaniel’s place in Society was made clear by the very beauty and luxury of his home.
She did not belong here. Reprisal for being found in this place illegally would be swift and certain.
Then again, Mr. Wadsworth would have been rather unhappy with her as well. She shrugged away her intimidation and stepped quietly through what looked like a small music room.
There were several parlors in a row, each grander than the last. She smiled as she imagined the butler sorting guest’s by status into their respective rooms. She wondered into which one she would have been placed had she come calling?
The house was empty enough—it nearly echoed—so the servants were likely gathered in the kitchen enjoying an evening off from his lordship’s demands.
The next room was the one she had been looking for. The study. And yes, there was the handy candle in its stick next to the door. She had to stir the coals vigorously to find a live one, but then she had her light.
Quietly she circled the room. There was little to see other than good paintings and lovely subtle wallpaper of a green-on-green pattern.
What was it about men that all studies looked the same? Same big desk—size dependent on the importance of the man, of course—same blotter, same oversize chair before the fire, same shelves of the same books, same paintings behind the desk covering the—
The safe. Oswald kept his safe box covered by a painting behind his desk, as did Wadsworth. Clara quickly stepped around the desk t
o haul the large painting to one side.
Behind it was the largest safe box she had ever seen.
She dipped to reach beneath the hem of her skirts. Tucked tightly in her garter were her own homemade picks. She hurried to the safe box, levering the heavy painting out of the way with one shoulder. The lock resisted her every effort, until she was cursing most obscenely under her breath. This might require more than a hatpin and a scissor blade.
Then she remembered the trick she’d discovered in Oswald’s study. Perhaps if she thought of Dalton in some improper way, she’d be able to manage the lock.
“Lord Etheridge,” she swore in a whisper. “I vow if my very life did not depend upon this, I would never think of you this way again as long as I live.” She rubbed her forehead on her upraised wrist, as if to rub the thoughts from her mind.
Then she let herself dream. Nay, not dream… remember. She remembered his large hands on her skin, the way his heat had jumped to her as if by a live spark, to ignite her own increasing need.
She remembered the way her heart had opened for him, and the way her body had softened for him. She remembered the way she’d taken his breath into her own lungs as they’d mated like beasts on the floor. The way she’d clung onto his shoulders as he’d lunged within her and the way his muscles had rippled under her hands.
She remembered how deeply she had fallen for his dark and lonely soul. How she missed his rumbling voice, and the way he’d seemed to see right into her, the real woman, not the lady, not the maid, but her secret heart.
And she remembered how it would never be again. …
By the time the lock went snick, Clara’s face was wet with tears.
She wiped them away, pulled a number of files from the safe and began to read, sitting in a small circle of light in the large darkened study.
Chapter Twenty-three
“I’ve got it!”
James’s jubilant voice rang through Dalton’s office, startling Dalton from his thoughts.
Dalton had been reading a message from Liverpool that James had brought with him. It had been very clear. He’d been ordered to drop the entire mission and any inquiry into Thorogood’s location.