“It doesn’t matter now.”
This wasn’t entirely true.
The arc of his life didn’t allow it. It mattered that he caught the smugglers. It mattered to him, to his men, to the king, to the loved ones of the family killed. Dozens, hundreds, fanning out from there, people depended upon his wisdom and judgment and experience to bring them to justice.
And the questions he yet needed to ask her mattered. Who had taken that room on the first floor, for instance?
But he kissed her again, because he could not lie next to her and not kiss her, and apparently he was Achilles and she was the heel.
It began slowly, slowly as they dared knowing they had very little time, their hands moving over each other’s bodies, finding the hollows and knobs and angles and silky hidden places that made each other breathe swiftly, to ripple and beg for more. But in moments it was a frenzy of tangled limbs and little bites and deep kisses and urgency rather than finesse. She clung to him as he dove in her again and again; he buried his cry of release against her throat as she shook and shook beneath him, saying his name as if he’d wrought a miracle.
Side by side again, her head against his shoulder, his heart pounding harder than it had when that pirate had shot at him, Delilah sniffed.
She was weeping! He stiffened with alarm.
She smiled a little and said, “I’m sorry.”
“For biting me? I rather liked it.”
She laid her forearm across her eyes and gave a laugh which contained a little sniffle.
The reflexive ease with which he pulled her closer to his body unnerved him. The ease with which she came to him and burrowed her head into the hollow of his shoulder for comfort was unnerving, too. The realization that there was very little difference between comforting her and soothing himself was the most troubling thing of all.
“It’s that we’re given such a limited repertoire of ways to express emotions, and I’m feeling a number of complicated things all at once,” she said.
Never in his wildest dreams did Tristan think he would ask a woman the next question, or genuinely want to hear the answer.
“What are the things you’re feeling, Delilah?” He dragged his hand slowly down the luxurious satiny skin of her back.
He would never again call her Lady Derring. Knowing that she’d once belonged to someone who had not seen, appreciated, or loved her.
“I was just thinking that . . . if Derring had lived . . . I might have gone my entire life and not known what this . . . lovemaking . . . what you and I are like together. And though every day of running this boardinghouse is a veritable walk on a cliff edge of uncertainty, I can’t regret it. And yet Derring had to die for me to know it. I suppose I feel regret at what could never be with Derring, and also a sort of terrible fear, knowing that I might be nearly losing something. Isn’t that silly?”
“No,” he said shortly. He wished he had more words. “Not in the least.”
He lay there tracing the little pearls of her spine, thinking about the pearls she had sold to open this boardinghouse.
“Do you miss him?” he asked gruffly.
“No.”
He quietly, ungraciously, exulted.
“Sometimes . . . I feel like I can sense his presence here. Every now and again I think I catch a hint of his terrible cigars. Mostly in the kitchen, near the scullery, where I can’t imagine Derring spent any time whilst he was alive.”
Near the scullery.
The scullery, if he recalled correctly, was more or less beneath that mysterious suite of rooms.
And what was under the scullery?
Hell’s teeth.
All that glorious, hazy aftermath of release was burned off by reason.
He should not ask the question now. When she was vulnerable and tender in his arms. When she saw him as comfort, strength, and pleasure. She trusted him, this lovely woman who had vowed never again to trust a man, and who had been a means to an end for people her entire life.
But her vulnerability was also the reason he needed to ask the question now.
There would be no undoing it if he asked it. But he knew it was already too late, and that he was destined.
“To whom did you let that suite on the first floor, Delilah? I’m concerned, you see. More importantly, does he or she play Whist, or the pianoforte?”
“The suite on the first floor?” She smiled drowsily. “Do you know, it’s the oddest thing. A prim, supercilious, well-dressed man paid us two entire sovereigns to keep it for his mysterious employer.”
It wasn’t quite at all what he’d expected to hear. “That is odd. Did he ask for that room in particular?” His grip tightened on her. He forced himself to loosen it.
“No, he just wanted our, and I quote, ‘largest suite of rooms,’ and so we gave him that one. We were uneasy and a bit resentful about accepting the money but ultimately we did, because we had to do it, and could see no reason on the face of things to say no. He wasn’t the least threatening. Just arrogant. Two sovereigns. And we didn’t even have to feed him.”
“Hard to say no to two sovereigns,” he said, absently. His mind was working furiously now.
“Absolutely. We can keep paying our staff. And heating the house.”
“And you’ve never met this person? The person for whom you’re keeping the room? Just his representative?”
“We’ve never met him. Isn’t that odd? He said his employer likes to keep suites available all over the city, and this is another direct quote, ‘just in case.’” She stretched and pointed her toes. “I imagine a debauched lord of some sort, staggering to the nearest hidey hole after a drunken evening, but I honestly don’t know. The man—called himself Mr. X, if you can believe it—actually gave us half a token, and he said that we’d know the lord when he presented the other half. Angelique and I felt ridiculous, but so far it seems more absurd than sinister. As we promised, we clean it every day. He has yet to show himself.”
Tristan took this in. It sounded absolutely mad, but he also didn’t doubt her, because frankly mad people were rife among the aristocracy. And it was too outlandish a story to invent.
But was this Mr. X involved in smuggling, somehow?
Perhaps it was just a coincidence that he took that room.
Or . . . perhaps Tristan was on the entirely wrong track.
The very idea formed a small, icy knot in the pit of his stomach.
All today he’d gone into cheese shops, tailors, pubs, confectioners and asked, “Big bloke with a scar promised me more cigars, has he been in? Has a friend, smaller, looks a bit like a fox.” That sort of thing. Variations on that approach.
Not one of them he’d spoken to today had seen or spoken to men who looked like that.
But he’d told his men to keep asking anyway. And to send word to him straight away if they got even a single viable response. “Use another language, Massey, if you send a message. Portuguese. I can read that, if you can write it.” Both he and Massey had acquired the rudiments of a number of languages throughout their careers.
He refused to surrender to that tight feeling in his chest of encroaching doubt.
“What does the token look like?” He realized he’d pulled his arm out from beneath her. As if touching her while he did what amounted to abusing her trust was dishonorable.
“Like maybe a crest of some kind. A half of a crest. A lion’s leg, a unicorn leg, perhaps? It’s not fancy and it’s impossible to know what it is, really.”
He frowned. Neither a crest nor a token struck any bells at all.
Bloody hell. He still needed to get into that room.
She shifted away from him a little. He’d gone tense as a board, and likely she’d noticed. She was watching him worriedly now.
It got even more tense when there was a knock at the door.
They both froze.
She pulled the coverlet over her head.
“Yes, may I help you?” he called.
“Captain Hardy?” It
was Dot.
“Yes, Dot. I’m afraid I can’t come to the door just yet.”
There was a silence. He hoped Dot was too naive to reason out why, apart from the fact that he’d had a bath, which involved a state of total undress. “A man came to the door with an urgent message for you, Captain Hardy. It’s all sealed up.”
His heart stopped.
Good man, Massey, to seal it. “Slide it under my door if you would, Dot, thank you. And if you would please wait.”
There was a little rustle as she shoved it into the room.
He all but dove out of bed to retrieve it. Massey had sealed it with a blob of wax.
In Portuguese, he read:
Halligan spoke with a tobacconist four streets over who was angry because huge man with scar didn’t bring in anticipated cigars. Waiting outside for orders.
M.
Feelings and impressions rushed at him like leaves in a storm: Triumph. Vindication. Exultation. Hope.
Regret.
Injustice.
Dread.
The last three were directed at life and the destiny that required him to leave this woman now.
But when they all blew away, duty remained.
Tristan didn’t know how long he’d held still, but he could feel Delilah’s eyes on him.
He turned and found her expression worried. And wary, and he instantly wanted to make it light again.
He realized he’d basked in her trust and optimism even as he’d taken advantage of it. He was accustomed to those eyes glowing when they saw him.
He strode to the little writing desk, lately the scene of a torturously written poem, and scrawled, in Portuguese:
Gather men. Meet me at Cox’s Livery Stables in fifteen minutes.
Massey would know why.
He blew on the ink, willing it to dry. Behind him, he heard Delilah gathering her dress, her slippers, her hairpins.
He still hadn’t looked at her.
He slid the message back beneath the door. “Dot, if you would be so kind as to hand this to the gentleman waiting outside.”
“Of course, Captain Hardy!” she said cheerily.
He heard her thundering down the stairs.
He finally dared a look at Delilah.
Her eyes were fixed on him unblinkingly. Worried, but still trusting.
“Delilah, I apologize, but I’m afraid I must go out straight away.”
“Is aught amiss? Can I help?”
He watched her pin her hair. He thought how fortunate the man would be to watch her pin it up and take it down every day.
He didn’t want to tell her a placatory lie.
“Yes. Something is amiss. But it will be put to rights.”
They held each other’s eyes.
Her posture was rigid. Her expression was searching, and then it went subtly guarded. And perhaps even a little cynical.
He moved to her swiftly, laid his hand against her cheek. And perhaps he hadn’t the right, but he kissed her again. So she would close her eyes and he wouldn’t have to see that guarded expression, so that he could instead feel her body softening in surrender. Because this might be the last time, and this was how he wanted to remember her.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mr. Cox, the current foreman of the livery stables, was weathered and so strapping no one would be surprised if he regularly lifted horses up and out of his way to get to where he needed to go.
He couldn’t lift a group of soldiers up and out of the way, however.
The only one currently in well-tailored street clothes was obviously in command.
“Cox, have you ever let a horse to or stabled a horse for a Miss Margaret or Jane Gardner?” Tristan asked.
“Nay, sir. I swear on it. Ladies do not often come in here on their own, you see, for obvious reasons. Especially not in this part of London. Though it isn’t entirely out of the question.”
“Are you quite certain?”
He drew himself up to his full height. “Sometimes it gets busy, like, sir, and I cannot always see every person who enters or leaves. You may feel free to speak to the stable boys.” Tristan gestured with his chin, which sent three soldiers off to question the staff. “But I can tell you for certain I did not see a woman arriving or leaving.”
“Did the Earl of Derring keep a horse or a team here?”
“The Earl of Derring, sir, rest his soul, kept a team here. Well, two teams, in truth. Fine animals. Sold some time ago.”
“They’re better off,” Tristan said grimly.
Mr. Cox was left to wonder what that meant as Tristan and his men convened upon the now-empty set of stalls.
“My next question, Mr. Cox. Have you seen a man in here, burly, flat nose, small eyes, scar beneath his—”
“—ear? Oh, but of course. That be Mr. Garr. Worked for the Earl of Derring. Drove a cart in and out from Sussex. Changed their spent team and went out again. Helped transport his statues, like. Derring was a collector.”
Triumph and vindication was like a sunburst in Tristan’s chest.
“His statues?”
“Great lot of naked people made of stone. I ask you! Who would want such a thing in their house? They delivered them to that building round the corner. Thought it had summat to do with the whorehouse. Who knows what the quality get up to.”
And like another burst of sunlight, Tristan recalled what the drunk man leaning against the building had said. Brought ’is friends, now and again so ’e did, in a cart. They was half-naked and couldna walk on their own, I s’pose, and he had to drag them in.
Statues. Bloody stone statues.
Tristan knew, somehow, that the insides of all of those statues had reeked of cigars. Or perhaps the cigars had been stored in the bases.
“It’s a boardinghouse,” he said absently. “Not a whorehouse. The Grand Palace on the Thames.”
“If you say so, guv. All I know is that you oughtn’t go in there.”
Tristan’s men scoured the stables with their eyes, dragged their gloved fingers along the joins in the wood floor of the stalls where the earl had kept his team.
They nearly missed the handle. It was clever and unobtrusive; it was of carved, sanded wood, flush with the wood floor nearest the wall of the stable.
Once they found it, they could see the seams of what was likely a hatch of about three feet by three feet.
Tristan curled his fingers beneath it and pulled so that he could hook his fingers around the handle.
And then he yanked.
The hatch came up easily.
Exclamations and oaths from his men greeted this.
Cox was white. “I swear, sir, I’d no idea, sir . . .”
Tristan wasn’t sure whether he believed him, but they would certainly find out whether or not he was innocent.
“Lantern,” he called grimly.
One was passed to him.
He seized it and peered down.
It was about a ten-foot drop, if he had to estimate; a narrow ladder was affixed to the wall with bolts and stretched all the way to the bottom; he could see a dirt floor, packed smooth. He reached down and gave the ladder a testing tug. It seemed securely affixed to the wall.
And if Miss Margaret Gardner—Mr. Garr—had climbed down this ladder—and something told him that she had—it ought to hold him.
“I’m going down. Lower that lantern down along after me, will you?”
He handed the lantern back to Massey, who hooked it to a rope.
Tristan transferred his pistol into his hand and rapidly descended, landing on the dirt floor. He caught hold of the lamp they’d dangled in after him and inspected his surroundings.
He gave a stunned laugh.
Ah, yes. Smugglers took to England’s crevices, baseboards, crannies, caves.
And tunnels.
It was actually, more specifically, a segment of a longer tunnel. Very old, well-constructed, supported with ceiling crossbeams above, narrow, tall enough for a man of six feet to t
ravel comfortably, wide enough for contraband to be ferried through.
It was impossible to know if this had been its original purpose. England was crisscrossed with tunnels used for various purposes. He thought of the tunnel in Brighton alleged to connect the king to his favorite pub and secret rooms where he kept a mistress. And if The Grand Palace on the Thames had once been a whorehouse, well, then. One could begin to draw conclusions.
He pivoted.
About five feet in from the hatch was a studded oak door, heavy as a drawbridge.
Behind, he was certain he’d find all those cigars that various merchants, aristocrats, and the occasional adventurer like Delacorte had been waiting for in vain. Because all around him was the faint, vile scent of those cigars, and there was no sign of them where he stood.
Outside of the door, tucked against a wall, was a small trunk, blackened with age. Spilling from it looked like old dresses, costumes, perhaps, that had been rifled through and tossed about.
He was no expert on fashion, but the dresses certainly looked like the sort that Jane and Margaret Gardner favored. It must have been a challenge finding ones they could actually fit into.
How had he not known immediately they were men? And yet, he believed some part of him had. Some part of him had always known something was amiss. He had never seen them through a filter of trust, the way Delilah had, because he saw virtually nothing through the eyes of trust. Unless it was her.
He dropped to a crouch and aimed the light through the keyhole, and peered.
It didn’t reveal much other than more darkness. But stacked within that darkness were little dark boxes. He’d wager everything he owned on what those boxes contained.
He stood again and grasped the door handle and twisted. It was, unsurprisingly, locked.
He pulled hard on the knob. The door shifted forward, bowing a very little inward in its frame. But it remained closed.
He released the knob and the door sank back into place with a dull, reverberating thud.
And upstairs in the drawing room of The Grand Palace on the Thames, the heads of the three ladies shot up from mending—Mr. Farraday had a rent in one of his shirts, Mr. Delacorte had lost another button, and they were setting about making them feel whole again.
Lady Derring Takes a Lover Page 25