The Viscount's Wicked Ways

by Anne Mallory

  Outrage warred with the funny feeling, which she was starting to suspect was that desire thing the maids talked about. Fortunately, outrage won.

  She reclaimed her curl and pushed at his chest. He moved back, but in a lazy motion that suggested he was “allowing” the move.

  She couldn’t think of what to say, outrage or not, she had kissed him back, however briefly. So she kept her response simple. “Good night, Lord Blackfield.”

  He gave her a mocking little bow, his eyes never leaving hers. “Good night, Miss Harrington.”

  Patience stepped from the library, head held high and hoping to leave before he noticed her damp and muddy slippers.

  “Oh, Miss Harrington?”

  She stopped, expecting the worse. “Yes?”

  “Weren’t you looking for reading material?”

  She turned around in time to catch the book he tossed her way. Glancing at the title she gave him a measured look.

  “Famous Spies and Thieves? How droll. Good night again, Lord Blackfield. May your nightmares come true.”

  She headed back to her room, his laughter following.

  Patience scooped some eggs onto her plate and sat down next to John.

  “Good morning.”

  She mumbled a reply, and he gave her a concerned look.

  “Good morning,” she enunciated. She had only caught a few hours’ sleep between her nighttime wanderings and trying to figure out why the viscount had kissed her.

  “Maybe you should return to bed, Patience. You look terrible.”

  She glowered. “Thank you, John. However, I need to work on the papyrus collection.”

  “It can wait.”

  “No it cannot. I want to complete it and leave this madhouse.” The last part was mumbled into her teacup.

  “Perhaps you should just try and ignore Blackfield.”

  She snorted and continued blowing on the liquid.

  “Seriously, Patience, I haven’t seen you react to someone like this in a long time.”

  She paused, then continued blowing across the surface to cool her tea. The viscount did seem to have a rather perverse effect on her.

  She sighed. “Perhaps the viscount has that special quality that makes people want to jam his tongue down his throat.”

  John looked at her strangely, and she fought the blush rising in her cheeks. Her mouth was doing that thing again.

  Patience hastily took a sip of tea, burning her tongue in the process. She made a squawking noise and jerked the cup away. So much for appearing calm and collected.

  Blackfield chose that moment to enter, and Patience examined her plate.

  No sooner had the viscount filled his plate and sat in his chair than a servant handed him a pink note. Another pink note. Patience watched him open it. She absently drank her tea, burning her tongue at the tip again. She swore, attracting the attention of both men. The viscount looked amused before returning his attention to the feminine stationery. His face grew dark and he left the room, his plate remaining full on the table.

  She caught John looking pensively at the door. She really wanted to confide in him about last night’s activities, but couldn’t. Not only would he be appalled that she had slipped out to spy, but he would lecture her on her curiosity, and she would be stuck listening to him for hours. Furthermore, she had no doubt that he would interrogate her and at some point she would blurt out that Blackfield had kissed her. And then he’d tell her father.

  No, confiding in John was definitely out. But that didn’t mean that giving round hints and vague allusions were forbidden.

  She pushed her fork casually around her plate. “How have you been sleeping? Is everything comfortable in your rooms?”

  His brow knit in confusion. “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. Have you been sleeping well here?”

  Something must have registered, because his gaze grew shrewd. “Are you finished eating? Would you like to walk?”

  Patience looked at the servants, who were waiting to take their dishes. Servants with two perfectly working ears. She nodded and grabbed a roll.

  As soon as they were on the grounds, John steered her toward one of the open topiary gardens.

  “You’ve heard the noises, too,” he said in a low tone.

  She nearly sighed in relief. She wasn’t going to have to admit to spying or be unnecessarily coy. “Yes, and felt the tremors and seen the lights. Do you know what is going on?”

  He hesitated. “No. Do you?”

  Something in his manner, the reticent but shrewd look in his eyes, gave her pause. “The maids whisper about monsters, and the villagers act extremely odd. Men walk the grounds at all hours. And I saw something from my window the other night…”

  His eyes tightened, and suddenly Patience felt uneasy. This was her cousin and good friend, but she had never seen that look in his eye. Something cold and calculating. Ashiver passed through her.

  John laughed, but it was a far cry from his normal warmth. He looked her in the eye. “Patience, some things are even too much for your imagination.”

  “No, honestly, John, haven’t you heard the servants talk? Hasn’t your valet said anything? Tilly has heard strange things as well.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Wait a moment, did you say something about men walking the grounds? Have you been following your nose for trouble?”

  “No, of course not,” she said hastily. “I saw them from my window.”

  “Patience,” he said, with a large amount of exasperation.

  “What?” she asked, a bit defensively. “I’m not allowed to look through my window?”

  “You know that isn’t what I meant.”

  “Then there is no reason for you to sound so crotchety. In fact, I was thinking that if there were a reasonable explanation, perhaps if we were to—”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “No.”

  She harrumphed and poked a toe at one of the topiaries. “It was just a suggestion.”

  “Patience, some things are better left alone.” John’s tone was dark.

  She tried to hide her unease. “Oh, John, next thing I know you will be spouting off about mummy curses.”

  He grabbed her hand. “I want you to be careful. You aren’t to go walking around the grounds at night. Nor about the castle for that matter.”

  Patience withdrew her hand. “I can look after myself, as you well know. But thank you for your concern.”

  “Yes, we all know how well you take care of yourself.”

  Hurt lanced through her. John saw it, and his expression turned apologetic, but lost none of its firmness.

  “Will I never have a clean slate?” She asked it softly.

  His lips tightened. “It’s not fair, Patience, but it is the way of the ton. You need to learn to control yourself more in conversation. And in your actions. You know that.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “If I see or hear of your being out after you retire for the night, I will write to your father. You have no idea what you are dealing with.”

  Her eyes narrowed, anger replacing the hurt. “I see. Well, if there is nothing further, Mr. Fenton, I have some scrolls to catalog. Good day.”

  John looked as if he were going to respond, but he just nodded, his lips white with tension. He had been acting strangely lately. Agitated and stressed. And he had been missing on more than one occasion, offering only a vague excuse as to where he had been.

  As she turned to leave, she noticed John’s gaze centered on the building where the meeting had occurred the night before.

  Patience entered her workroom, the smell of lemon oil so overwhelming she could nearly taste it. She suspected the new maid, Jenny, had tried to clean the armor again. She’d have to say something to Caroline. She had told Jenny twice to leave everything be, but she always seemed to be lurking about with her cleaning supplies and a feather duster. And she barely knew one end of the duster from the other, always staring at s
omething else in the room, or out the window.

  Patience snorted. And people thought she was a daydreamer. At least she could concentrate on a task.

  It took a few hours for her to get over her pique with John. A number of good scrubbings to clean her instruments had gone a long way to relieving her irritation. Even as shifty as John was being, she knew her cousin was just looking out for her best interests.

  Patience unconsciously waited for Blackfield to show up as she sorted through the papyrus and scrolls. She didn’t know why, but it felt inevitable somehow. He hadn’t grilled her last night when she had been caught in the library. He had given her the book, yes, but still, she half expected that he would cart her off to the constable and ask questions later.

  Labeling the last sixth century B.C. krater, she wondered how Blackfield would act at dinner. Would he treat her any differently? Would he have told anyone? She could already envision Samuel’s amusement and Mrs. Tecking’s gossip.

  She set the bowl with the others and absently gazed at the pieces. Tomorrow her father would be sending a padded cart to ship some of the pieces they had finished. That had been the plan at least.

  Mrs. Tecking sauntered into the room, disturbing her musings. “Freddie has finished the smallest of the Roman statuary.”

  “Good. I have the Greek pottery ready for you to record, along with the Egyptian papyrus.” Patience handed her a sheaf of notes.

  Mrs. Tecking took them with a sniff. “Mr. Fenton is nowhere to be found, and he hasn’t given me his yet.”

  Patience realized she hadn’t seen John since their tiff. “I will have him bring them to you as soon as I see him. The first load should be ready for tomorrow. Will you be able to finish compiling everything?”

  She sniffed again. “Of course I will.”

  Mrs. Tecking departed, and Patience was left to wonder how the woman had survived to the age of thirty-five without a permanent crick in her neck.

  She put Mrs. Tecking out of her mind and began wrapping and loading the bowls, drinking vessels, urns, and jars into the crates they had brought with them. They would get replacement crates tomorrow, trading them for the ones they’d fill tonight.

  Patience smoothed and packed another crate. Her task would at least give her an excuse to be out of her room that night if she wanted to take another look within the building she had hidden in the night before. Or take a look through Blackfield’s rooms. She remembered Caroline mentioning where they were during their tour. And she was pretty sure she had been in a personal study of some sorts the night the viscount had come through the window.

  Making a decision to go through with it later, John’s warning be damned, she continued packing.

  It was late in the afternoon when she finished packing the pieces. She decided to rest and explore the rose garden. The late-afternoon sun kissed her skin as she strolled across the grounds. A gentle breeze blew across the tips of the grass and whistled in the lone tree that stood in the middle of the English gardens. She had noticed the small maple before and wondered why it was planted there. Out of place in the formal rows, it nevertheless proudly stood its ground. The tree couldn’t be more than twenty years old, and she wondered if as a child Blackfield had had something to do with its planting.

  Stepping forward to examine it more closely, she was thrown to the ground as one of the buildings she had planned to investigate exploded.

  Chapter 9

  “You are wearing a path across the floor, my lord.”

  Thomas recalled an image of a caged lion pacing back and forth at a spectacle in London. He had sympathized with the beast. “It has to be one of the antiquarians.”

  Richards, the man in charge of the Hastings Building, nodded. “Maybe more than one. We found a message about their shipment tomorrow. There has to be a contact outside of their group, too.”

  They had been going over this ad nauseam for the last hour, since the Hastings Building explosion. Even though Thomas had thought Patience might be the spy, the reality of it made him furious. He didn’t know what he was more furious with; that it was she, or that he had to acknowledge that fact. The thought just made him angrier. He couldn’t let her get to him. It was a one-sided seduction. He wasn’t interested in any type of commitment, especially not with a false woman.

  With difficulty he refrained from snarling. “Thanks for putting the traps in place so quickly. Excellent thinking, by the way.”

  Richards nodded. “Keeps the boys busy.”

  “Yes, well after this they are going to be plenty busy. Our hand has been tipped. The spies know we’re onto them. We can’t expect them to make the same mistake twice. Are the new measures in place?”

  “Being put in as we speak.”

  Thomas watched through the study window as the last of the flames was quenched. The building was completely intact, thanks to the way the trap had been set. The blast had been designed more for show than to do damage. A very large warning signal, of sorts. If only they had captured the person who had triggered it.

  “Did we get a tally of who was missing during the time of the blast?”

  “The Teckings were in their rooms. Not sure the man ever leaves them, to be honest. The younger man and woman were out. The woman was found on the grounds, and the man appeared roughly fifteen minutes after the blast. Apparently he walked to the abbey ruins and had no idea anything had happened. Said he did hear the blast though. Not surprising with the amount of gunpowder we used. Would have been more suspicious if he hadn’t heard it.”

  “And the servants?”

  “Much harder. The kitchens were accounted for, as the cooks and scullery maids were preparing dinner. Although it’s possible that one of them could have slipped out. That’s really the crux of the matter. We either need to interview the whole lot, or just watch them more closely in the future. If it is an outsider, then we are wasting our time.”

  “Bait another trap. Have the council meet tonight to discuss it. I’ll speak with Samuel.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Thomas watched as Patience Harrington and John Fenton whispered to each other as they, too, watched the last of the flames die away. Plotting, no doubt.

  It had been pure genius for the men to put traps on and around the buildings that morning. It was now going to take the spies more than just a saunter through the door if they wanted to steal the designs.

  Patience Harrington was going to have to work quite hard now if she was going to steal anything other than a one-way ticket to Newgate.

  After the earlier explosion, dinner was a relatively quiet affair. Blackfield gave a minimal explanation about the gamekeeper’s store of power exploding, then kept silent and didn’t antagonize Patience. Mrs. Tecking kept silent and didn’t antagonize Patience. John and Caroline picked at their meals, and Samuel had cried off, citing a previous engagement. Although where he had to go was a mystery. The coward probably didn’t want to sit amidst the doom that had seemed to embrace the castle and its inhabitants.

  But the tension was high, and even Mr. Tecking shifted uncomfortably in his seat at the thick air and darting glances.

  After dinner Patience continued packing artifacts. She had lost an hour after the explosion in recovering from the blast and talking to John. A bit shocked, but thankfully not hurt, she had watched the servants scramble to clear the smoke and extinguish the flames. Flames that miraculously never reached the structure, even though they had seemed to engulf it previously.

  Maybe the monster was a dragon. She snorted and picked up her tools. The only dragon she was likely to meet was Mrs. Tecking or Blackfield. But a part of her couldn’t forget the lifted arm she had seen from the window the other night.

  It was well into the evening when she stopped working and decided to put into action her plans to poke through Blackfield’s study. She just needed to make sure to stay out of sight, or John would give her an earful if he found out.

  Hiding in a hallway alcove, Patience waited as servant after
servant hurried past. They must have been on a task, because there were at least ten of them that had rushed past her hiding spot in the last five minutes. She waited an additional two minutes until she heard no more footsteps before venturing forth.

  Suppressing a yawn, she slipped down the hall and stairs. She was still in her day clothes, having stayed up to finish packing, and her skirts whispered across the floors and oriental rugs. She tried to retrace her steps from the first night, but still managed to get disoriented twice. Finally, she found the study where Blackfield had entered through the window.

  Thankfully, it was unlocked, and she was able to slip inside. She had never learned how to pick a lock. Although she had always wanted to learn, she had quickly discovered picking locks wasn’t a skill for her temperament. Five minutes into fiddling with a hairpin had seen her frustrated and bored.

  She held up her lamp and moved forward, taking stock of the room in a way that she hadn’t been able to when the viscount had been present.

  Bookcases and a large desk dominated one part of the room, while the other was centered around a cozy set of chairs in front of the fireplace. The area where she had sat with Blackfield on the first night.

  Complementary furniture surrounded the chairs, and the lacquered liquor cabinet sat innocuously to the side.

  Patience moved to the desk. Inkpot, a lamp, several books. It was clear of papers. Either this was not Blackfield’s main study, or he was obsessively clean about his work spaces. She opened one drawer after another, lifting and replacing papers, but they, too, were neatly filed, and nothing looked very exciting.

  Fragments of conversation she had heard the night before echoed in her mind…the government would be against it…destructive…if this gets out…entire forces obliterated…

  Ominous, dangerous words. But still, she had no idea what she was looking for, and, furthermore, the whole idea of searching for clues had seemed much more exciting and fruitful in her mind when she had devised it. Much like her trip the previous night to the Hastings Building, as she had heard some of the servants call it while cleaning up the debris. She grimaced. A pattern was developing.