An Extraordinary Lord

by Anna Harrington

  “And destroy all honor among thieves and thief-takers?” She tsked her tongue at him with mocking exaggeration. Then she answered honestly to the undersecretary, “I do it because it helps Fernsby.” That wasn’t completely a lie. But it also wasn’t the only reason. “He has no other way to earn income, and I won’t let an old man starve on the streets. Or hurt his pride by simply giving him blunt.”

  “Told you so,” the undersecretary muttered to Merritt, although his eyes never left her.

  Merritt said nothing, but his chest rose and fell in an irritated breath beneath his still-crossed arms.

  Unease pricked at Veronica’s nape. What exactly had the two men been discussing about her? She didn’t like where this interrogation was going.

  “Still seems like an awfully dangerous career for so little in potential reward,” the undersecretary considered. “After all, if the criminal you apprehend protests that Fernsby didn’t catch him, that it was a woman who did, you’d never be able to appear in court to testify. He’d be set free, and you and Fernsby wouldn’t receive your reward.”

  “What man would publicly claim he was bested in a fight by a woman?” She glanced at Merritt over her shoulder. “I beat you tonight, Mr. Rivers. Did you tell your friend that?”

  The undersecretary cleared his throat to keep from laughing. “Now that we’ve established your character—”

  “We’ve done nothing of the sort,” Merritt grumbled.

  “Now that we’ve established your character,” he repeated, ignoring the interruption, “let me be blunt. While I might not have known you were a woman, I know exactly who you are.” His piercing gaze fixed on her. “You’re part of a criminal ring in Cheapside that specializes in theft and burglary, stealing goods from the warehouse docks and then fencing them in the market and local shops.”

  Not at all. She might live among thieves, but she played no part in breaking the law.

  “You broke into a storeroom owned by Winslow Shipping and Trade.”

  No, she’d been arrested long after the storeroom had been burgled, the goods sold, and the money distributed to the poor. After Filipe had been arrested and was awaiting trial, when she’d begged Fernsby to help prove her guilty instead so Filipe would be set free. Then she walked into Bow Street and turned herself in.

  “You were tried, pled guilty—you should have hanged.”

  “Yes.” Yet she’d been willing to sacrifice herself for the people who lived with her at the Court of Miracles, those people who had become like family to her. She would have done anything to keep them fed and protected by Filipe and his men, including surrendering her own life. She would gladly do so again.

  “But the judge has a personal grudge against Henry Winslow, so he sentenced you to five years in Newgate instead just to irritate the man.”

  “Lucky me,” she replied, deadpan.

  With a frown, Merritt interjected, “When you escaped after six months, you returned to Cheapside and took right back up with the same criminals.”

  “And then, Mrs. Fitzherbert, you caught me and brought me here.” She ignored the aggravated darkening of his expression. “But this place isn’t Newgate.” She cast a glance at the octagonal room around her and the tower that rose overhead before leveling her eyes at the undersecretary. “And it’s certainly not the Home Office. So what do you want with me?”

  “I want your cooperation with one of our investigations.”

  She scoffed. “Why should I help you?”

  “Because you’ll be granted a pardon,” Merritt said quietly.

  A pardon. Veronica’s belly tightened into a knot of longing so fierce that she struggled to hide her wince. Was he serious? God’s mercy, she’d do anything for that!

  Returning to Newgate would end her.

  Merritt Rivers knew it, too, damn him.

  She flicked a glance at him. He still stood in his original position against the wall, but now he stared glumly at the rug, not giving her a single look, as if he couldn’t stand the thought of what the Home Office was offering. But she knew his attention was riveted on her. Her skin tingled with awareness of it.

  “You live among the criminal underworld,” he said to the floor.

  Well, that was a nice way of calling her a thief.

  “Which means you have contacts who can give us information about the men who are inciting the riots.”

  “What makes you think I can help you with that?”

  “Because these aren’t normal riots.”

  She turned in the chair as far as her handcuffs allowed to look directly at him. “What do you mean?”

  His brows drew together, distracted. “Riots all have an initial reason for starting, some cause they want to draw attention to, even if the mob strays into sheer destruction once it’s underway. But these don’t.” He pushed himself away from the wall. “Not one of the rioters who’s been arrested has pled a greater moral cause in an attempt to persuade the jury toward innocence or used the docket as a pulpit to further his cause.”

  “Maybe those men who were arrested simply joined in after the riot started and didn’t care what its cause was,” she argued.

  Shaking his head, he slowly came forward, drawn into the interrogation. “Riots have targets. The Gordon Riots targeted papists. Last year’s riots over the Corn Laws targeted Parliament and the MPs. The riots this spring in Ely and Littleport targeted shops where the rioters broke in to take food to feed their families. Hell, even those so-called patriotic riots a few years ago attacked houses where the owners didn’t illuminate their front doors in honor of war victories. They all had targets. But these rioters are randomly attacking anything they come across.”

  She darted a glance at the undersecretary, whose inscrutable expression gave away none of his thoughts. But he also wasn’t looking at her; he was studying Merritt. Very closely.

  “There should also have been a trigger.”

  She blinked. “A trigger?”

  “An event that set off the riot that first night, that continued to generate every subsequent riot. But there wasn’t any.” He blew out a harsh breath. “These riots are unpredictable in their targets, seemingly with no reason but starting as if on cue and dissipating too rapidly… None of it’s natural.”

  “So you’re saying these riots are being orchestrated? Why would that be?”

  “That’s what we need you to help us figure out.”

  Something about the grim way he said that made her heart stutter. She wanted no part of this. Yet they’d promised her a pardon, a way to both protect Filipe and ensure she’d never go back to the hell of Newgate… She pulled in a deep breath. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

  “Work with us to track the movements of a criminal organization we’ve been following whom we believe is responsible for the riots.”

  Wariness licked at the backs of her knees. “Which organization?”

  “Scepter.”

  Her body flashed ice-cold, her breath strangling in her throat. Somehow she managed to force out in a fear-driven rasp, “You’re out of your bloody minds!”

  Merritt joined Clayton Elliott on the other side of the room. “I hate it when you think you’re right.”

  “Because you know I usually am. Including this time.” His old friend slanted him a knowing look. “She gives money to a destitute old thief-taker so he won’t starve on the streets.” Clayton’s mouth twisted ruefully. “She’s not a hardened criminal.”

  At that moment, Merritt didn’t have any idea what the hell she was.

  He’d certainly never seen another woman like her, and not just because of the men’s clothes or the arsenal of weapons she’d carried. There was a depth to her that belied her age, a sharp edge and quickness of wit that were nearly as fast as her swordplay. Then there was her intelligence. She was well educated, no doubt about that. Not with th
e way she spoke, the passing references she’d made…the accent that hinted that English wasn’t her first language and lingered just faintly enough that he couldn’t place it. She certainly hadn’t grown up near the docks on the east side of the City or the rookeries to the west.

  So who the devil was she? That is, besides the physical manifestation of everything he’d spent his professional life fighting against and his personal life detesting—a criminal, hardened or otherwise.

  “What makes you think she’s innocent?” Merritt asked.

  “I didn’t say innocent,” Clayton corrected.

  “You’re thinking it.”

  Clayton blew out a breath of irritation that Merritt knew him so well. “What I think is that she’s not an average criminal. We can use that to our advantage if you still want to go through with this.”

  “I do.” He was determined to find whoever was leading the riots, yet he was distracted by this woman and the unanswered questions about her that swirled in his head. There were too many puzzle pieces he simply couldn’t make fit. About both of them.

  “You truly think Scepter’s involved?” Clayton pressed.

  Scepter…a criminal organization that the men of the Armory had all vowed to stop after it attempted to harm two of their own and the women both men cared about. What they’d discovered, though, was that the group’s final aims weren’t criminal but revolutionary. Scepter wanted to destroy the regency and put an end to what they saw as the monarchy’s moral and financial corruption.

  But riots fermented among the lower classes. Why would Scepter be behind those? Mobs were too uncontrolled. Too bottom-up. Too…French for a group that wanted a revolution led by the aristocracy. Yet the recent riots possessed all the hallmarks of Scepter’s involvement.

  “I don’t know,” Merritt muttered, half to himself. “But I’m certainly going to find out.” And stop them before any more innocent people are hurt.

  Clayton turned his back to Veronica. From the bored expression on her pretty face, she didn’t care one whit what they were discussing. But both men knew she was alert and paying attention to every move they made, no matter how small.

  “Are you doing this because of Scepter?” Clayton shot him a hard look, the same one he’d honed to perfection on the battlefield and now used on his agents in the Home Office. But despite the grim expression, concern laced through his voice when he asked, “Or Joanna?”

  Her name hit Merritt like a gut punch. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe. He’d never told Clayton about his late fiancée or how she’d died, had never told anyone from his army days—

  Brandon Pearce…Christ.

  He’d told his best friend—once—when they were on the Continent, when he’d been so blasted drunk that he didn’t know what he was saying or how his lips had functioned enough to even form the words. Pearce must have told Clayton. Damn him.

  “Pearce had no right to tell you,” Merritt growled.

  “He’s worried about you.” A meaningful pause. “Quite frankly, so am I.”

  “Well, you can stop worrying. My interest in the riots has nothing to do with Joanna.” That was a damned lie. He loved his friends like brothers, yet he didn’t want them intruding where they had no business being. “Her death was an accident. The carriage was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The crowd frightened the team, they bolted, and she hit her head.” If he told himself that lie enough times, perhaps he could finally come to believe it and push those horrible images of her murder from his mind. “Besides, that happened over five years ago.”

  “Five or fifty—no difference when it comes to losing the woman you love.”

  Merritt kept his gaze straight ahead. Unfortunately, that meant looking straight at Veronica. “I think the best way to honor Joanna’s memory is to stop the riots and keep others from being hurt, don’t you?”

  “If that’s all you’re doing. But if you’re doing it out of some sort of revenge—”

  “I’m not.”

  “If it’s revenge,” Clayton repeated, “then you need to give it up right now, because you’ll never find it.”

  An invisible fist squeezed Merritt’s chest. He forced himself to breathe slowly, to keep the darkness from his face.

  “Five years, a mob of people, an accident—” Clayton shook his head. “You’ll never find the people responsible, and even if you did, there’s no way to punish them for it now.”

  Oh yes, there was. He currently stood in the center of an armory, for God’s sake, surrounded by a cache of swords and pistols. There were hundreds of ways of punishing the man responsible once Merritt found him.

  “Even if you did,” Clayton repeated quietly, as if reading the dark thoughts whipping through Merritt’s mind, “it won’t bring her back.”

  He knew that. Christ, how he knew that! He was there when she died, and he’d watched three days later when her coffin was lowered into the churchyard. Two weeks after that, he went to the church on the morning of what would have been their wedding day to stare at the empty and silent nave that should have been filled with family and friends. When he’d left the church, he’d gone straight to purchase an army commission. Bribes were paid to secure one as quickly as possible, and within a sennight—and against his father’s wishes—he was on his way to the Peninsula, haunted by thoughts of Joanna and how he’d been unable to save her.

  After five years, he was still haunted by her. Most likely he always would be.

  “It isn’t revenge,” he repeated.

  No, it was far more than that. But he couldn’t say what he’d truly been doing in recent months. That he’d been out every night not since the riots started but long before, since shortly after returning from the wars. That it wasn’t only the riots that plagued him but all the crimes that needed to be stopped before they happened. That being a barrister wasn’t enough, because he wanted to bring the kind of justice to victims that no courtroom ever could. That he was sick and tired of dealing with criminals only after the crimes were committed, after innocents were harmed.

  Yet if he revealed all that, Clayton, Marcus, and the other men of the Armory would try to stop him and start a new fight he certainly didn’t need.

  “Despite what you hope,” Clayton warned quietly with a nod at the woman, “you might not be able to convince her to cooperate.”

  “She wants a pardon.” He’d never been more certain of anything in his life. “I saw it in her eyes.” The same look he saw in the eyes of desperate men brought before him in court.

  “But she also knows about Scepter and what they’re capable of.”

  Of course she did. A criminal turned thief-taker who lived among the worst of London by day and prowled through the streets by night—most likely she’d already seen firsthand the evils they’d committed. While Scepter might have moved on from committing crimes to starting a revolution, they’d begun this latest initiative in the crowded rookeries and gin-soaked alleys of the poorest parts of the city. The parts she would have known by heart.

  “Leave her to me.” He assured Clayton, “I’ll convince her to work with us.”

  “How?”

  When she glanced at them, he boldly met her stare full on. “However it takes.”

  Three

  The undersecretary left with a loud rattle of metal doors that vibrated through the old stone building as hard as Veronica’s heartbeat slammed against her ribs. Merritt Rivers stared at her silently. He waited for the second clang of the outer door in the courtyard to announce the man’s complete departure before approaching her.

  He turned the chair around and straddled it, resting his forearms across its back. “So…thief-taker.”

  She lifted a brow. “Mrs. Fitzherbert.”

  “Merritt,” he corrected.

  “Veronica,” she conceded grudgingly.

  “There. That wasn’t so difficult, was
it?”

  More than he realized. She should never have allowed such familiarity. But they needed each other’s help, and maintaining strict formality between them would only work to keep them at odds. He was sharp enough to realize that, too, which was why he’d just forced it upon her.

  “Now that’s been settled,” he said and leaned forward on his forearms, “let’s have a nice little conversation, shall we?”

  “I’ve told you. I want nothing to do with Scepter.”

  “Me either. But it doesn’t seem we have much of a choice. I want to stop them from hurting any more innocent people, and you don’t want to return to Newgate.”

  Her eyes narrowed. Why would he care about Scepter? “Are you with the Home Office, too?”

  He chuckled. “Only one of us here is mad enough for that.” He paused as if to gauge her reaction. “I’m a barrister.”

  She nearly laughed. He expected her to believe that? “Since when do the Inns of Court provide instruction in swordplay?”

  “You’d be surprised at what you can hide beneath those robes and wigs.” Another pause, this one with grim undertones, and he admitted, “I learned to fight in the army. With the Coldstream Guards.”

  “His Majesty’s army doesn’t teach its soldiers to fight like that.”

  “No, but some of the best fighters in the world are among its ranks.”

  “Who have nothing better to do than teach barristers how to fence a passata sotto?”

  “Lots of time on your hands in the army, you know.” A quiet distance invaded his voice. “Mostly long stretches of unbearable boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Learning to fight fills the downtime.” He tossed the conversation back at her. “Where did you learn to fight?”

  “With His Majesty’s army,” she flippantly replied. Sometimes nothing hid the truth better than the truth. “Lots of time on my hands. Boredom. Sheer terror.” She shrugged, and the shackles on her wrists clinked softly. “You know.”

  His sensuous lips curled into a tight smile. But she knew he didn’t find her at all amusing.