Blackstone's Bride (16 page)

“If you touch me, you’re no gentleman.” That stung a little.

“Depends on where I touch you. I didn’t say yet.” His hand was still in his pocket, on the item she couldn’t see. “A gentleman’s gloved hand touches a lady’s gloved hand in a dance or when he helps her into a carriage.”

She had stiffened, and she relaxed a little. The small change made her bosom shift in interesting ways.

“Is that what you meant—a touch of hands, gloved hands?”

He shook his head. He certainly wasn’t going to settle for something as tame as glove to glove. He’d get that anyway, some day. “What I have in my pocket is worth more than that.”

“Well, what do you want then?”

“I want to touch your face with my ungloved hand.” He tried to make his voice light and careless, but it sounded a bit rough.

Her bosom swelled with a quick intake of breath. She was looking down, contemplating her options. Nate knew enough to wait. He could watch the thin white part on the top of her burnished head for hours.

“All right. What is it?”

“First the touch.”

She gave him a cool haughty look with a lift of her chin. Her smooth throat disappearing into the white lace of her collar made him swallow hard.

“Perfect. Stay just like that. Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“I won’t know what you’re thinking if you close your eyes.”

“Yes, you will. I won’t like it.”

“Close your eyes.”

“Well then. You have to be brief, you know.”

“You have to wait until I finish. It won’t be long.”

She gave him one more suspicious glance and closed her eyes.

The temptation of that mouth drawn in a stubborn, shut line was almost too much. Nate reminded himself that he wanted the final victory, that this was only one step. He’d been a thief, but now he was a strategist. He raised his hand and let his knuckles graze the underside of her chin. She was as smooth and soft as he’d imagined. He steadied his hand. If he broke contact now, she’d open her eyes and pull away. Girls had instincts, too. Even a motherless girl like Miranda had mysterious girl knowledge. He drew the back of his hand up over her chin and turned it so that he could stroke her lips with his thumb. She didn’t open to his touch, but he felt her react. She was fully alert, conscious of him. It made him a little dizzy.

He withdrew his hand. “You can look now,” he said.

She opened her eyes and pressed her lips together.

He allowed himself a brief grin before he pulled out the banknote and spread it on the counter. “What do you see?”

“A banknote.”

“From?”

She looked again. “Spain, I think.”

“
Le
Banco Espanola
de Madrid
.”

“Why does it matter that it’s from Spain?”

“Because it turned up in a taproom in Wapping where it doesn’t belong, not three days after Frank Hammersley was supposed to arrive in London from Spain. What do you see when you look at it?”

He smoothed the paper on the counter.

Miranda leaned over to look at it. “Well, I see the number one hundred and some fellow whose clothing looks medieval. Does he have a name?”

The bill was printed in two inks, one dark blue and the other faint red. The figure on the right looked like a portrait of one of the old kings with a stiff white ruff around his neck, a long face, and an inverted V of a moustache. “I don’t know. Must be one of their old kings.”

She gave him one of her disdainful looks, and he turned the bill over. The other side had a shield with a coat of arms between two pillars.

“What’s this?” She pointed to a line of darker blue ink. She rubbed it, and held up her finger to show him a faint blue smudge. “Someone wrote something on the note.”

Nate looked where her finger had been. What he had not seen in the dark taproom were lines of script hidden between the printed lines of the note. The script looked like no language he knew, which didn’t help his theory that the bill came from Frank Hammersley, but it was another oddity that needed to be examined. Someone had used the spaces in the design to write on the bill, and recently if the ink still smudged.

He snatched it from under Miranda’s pretty nose. “Thanks, Miranda.” He slipped behind the counter and headed for the back door of the shop. “You know what I like best about you, don’t you?”

She glared at him.

“Your brains.”

* * *

It was near dusk when the game finally ended in a great splashing of mud as the teams gathered to cheer one another. The blustery storm had passed, and sunlight streamed through broken clouds in long slanting afternoon rays that made gleaming patches on the wet grass. When the defeated Knightsbridge team moved off the field, Violet’s triumphant boys swarmed about Blackstone. By the end, he had mud in his ears. They trudged off the field in spattered whites and made a ceremony of presenting Violet with a team sweater.

The moment proved his undoing. She smiled at him, a smile like the winter sun. And then, because she looked so pleased and grateful, hugging the sweater to her chest, he kissed her. Surrounded by the cheering, mud-splattered boys, it had been a kiss with nothing of desire in it, just joy and recognition, a moment of shared happiness, as fleeting as one of the shifting patches of light on the grass. She looked at him for a moment as if she truly saw him. That look induced a moment of dangerous distraction in which he missed the departure of the two carriages with the duchess’s and the prince’s companions. He didn’t like the separation of their party. As a precaution, he directed their coachman to take a different route back to London.

“We’ll talk tonight,” he told Violet as he handed her into the vehicle. Once again he was muddied and damp. He chose to ride back on the coachman’s box, wrapped in a carriage rug, while the prince scrambled happily into the carriage, babbling in English and his own tongue, pouring flattery over Blackstone’s betrothed.

Chapter Fifteen

. . . she went boldly on with him alone.

—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

Blackstone stripped off his ruined clothes. He was going through Kirby’s finery as fast as the club could supply it. Being involved with Violet Hammersley was hard on both a man’s dignity and his wardrobe. Twickler, the competent valet who tended the three members of Goldsworthy’s club, had laid out new clothes and left two buckets of hot water. Blackstone poured a pitcher over his head. The mud he could wash away, the foolish kiss lingered.

A knock interrupted him, and he shrugged into a wrapper. “Enter.”

It was Wilde. His glance took in the pile of ruined clothes. “Brought you something of interest, sir.” He held up a Spanish banknote.

Blackstone took the note, a hundred Spanish pesetas
.
“Where did this turn up, Wilde?”

“In a taproom in Wapping. Not the usual place for a Spanish note, is it, sir?”

Blackstone didn’t like it. If it came from Frank, it tended to support Goldsworthy’s theory of a disappearance not a kidnapping, a man in hiding rather than in captivity.

“Someone’s written on it. Ink’s still fresh.”

“Written on it?” Blackstone laid it on his bureau, drawing a branch of candles close. Wilde showed him the looping lines of some unreadable script in the spaces of the printed design. The hand was unrecognizable as Frank Hammersley’s, he was pretty sure, but it should be possible to compare the ink to that used to write the note to Violet. The writing changed everything.

“What do you think, sir? A message?”

“One that his captors can’t read. How did he get it to the taproom?” Blackstone was sticking to his theory that Frank was a captive. Certainly, if he were free, Frank would not be so foolish as to walk into a public house and flash a Spanish banknote.

“I’d wager Hammersley offered one of them a bribe.”

“Makes sense. He needed something. What did he get in exchange?”

“Pen and ink?” Wilde suggested.

“He has the pen and ink already. He wanted something else.” Blackstone thought of Vasiladi’s cave. If he could have bribed any of his captors, what would he have asked for? He had been intent on freedom for his fellow captives, most of them young and helpless. If he could have, he would have bargained for them to be spared, but to signal to Vasiladi that he cared about the sufferings of the others would have been to increase them. Vasiladi would have enjoyed tormenting some helpless child just to watch Blackstone endure it. Above all he had had to be careful to show no feeling for his young half brother, taken in one of Vasiladi’s raids on the youthful idealists who had gone to free Greece from the Turks and found themselves mired in mud and quarrels. So he had made it seem a rich man’s whim, his ransoming of twelve captives. He had told Vasiladi he wanted a harem of his own.

“Does Hammersley need food and drink?”

Blackstone shook his head. Frank’s guards were probably feeding him even if the kidnappers meant to kill him in the end. They would not want to signal their intention to their henchmen.

Wilde voiced the question Blackstone had already asked himself. “Why would kidnappers provide a man pen and ink?”

“They want him to write something. They tested him with that note to Violet to see whether he would follow orders. Now he’s testing them. He wanted to see if he could get a message out.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

Blackstone nodded. “It did. Whoever got the note off of Hammersley took it straight to the nearest taproom without detecting the message. Where is this taproom?”

“It’s on the high street, not far from the pawnshop where I found the buttons.”

Blackstone could see the layout in his mind, the river, the warehouse, and the warren of lanes off the high street. “So not far from the burned-out tea warehouse where the
Madagascar
’s cargo was headed. But you’ve seen no sign of anyone in the place?”

“Goldsworthy’s night man thought he saw lights last night in the southwest corner. Easy enough to keep my eye on the taproom, sir, to see if one of the prince’s people shows up there.”

Blackstone nodded. “Wilde, keep the banknote between us for now. Not a word to Goldsworthy.”

“Sir? Yes, sir.”

* * *

As Violet descended for dinner Granthem handed her a message that Blackstone had news of Frank. Violet was aware of the wording—
news
did not mean that Frank was found. Dinner became an unbearable interval. She wished she had told Mrs. Hill to cut the menu in half. Their guests, a pair of bankers and their ladies, sat quietly awed by the presence of royalty. To Violet’s right the prince offered repeated congratulations on her team’s success. Flushed and bouncing in his seat, he delighted in recounting the cricket match bowl by bowl, getting tangled in his account of the scoring. To her left the count drank sullenly. Across the table the countess leaned towards Blackstone, and Papa engaged his fellow bankers and Dubusari in a discussion of wheat price fluctuation and its effect on the value of the pound. She was impatient for the dinner to be over, and then impatient for the interval between dinner and coffee to end.

Her female guests easily followed the countess’s lead, taking up the topic of Violet’s benefit ball. Violet was obliged to explain in some detail the arrangements she and Penelope had made. She was relieved that the men lingered a shorter time than usual over their port. Blackstone gave her the briefest of greetings and no hint of his news when she offered him a coffee. He returned to the countesses’ side.

Violet straightened over the tea tray and smiled at the banker in front of her. Blackstone’s withdrawal was probably wise. They had forgotten the barriers that should separate them already twice in one day. Acting like partners was more dangerous than acting like a betrothed pair.

When Violet entered Frank’s room, a candle burned dimly on the trunk next to their bench. Blackstone had not waited. Maybe there was no news after all. They had been together most of the day, and no one had attempted to kill them or the prince. A twinge of disappointment made her cheeks warm. She had wanted to see him, and she could not lie to herself that the disappointment she felt was for Frank’s sake.

She crossed to the trunk to see whether he had left a note and found none. For a moment she stood absorbing that second disappointment. He had withdrawn not only from the past, but from the partnership they had entered into to find Frank. Well, he would be back in the morning. He might let her down, but not the government. Whoever Blackstone worked for, he would complete his mission.

She leaned to blow out the candle he’d left. She should be grateful that he had thought the better of meeting her at night. He had ridden back on the carriage box, soaked and dirty, avoiding her, she suspected, because they had kissed again, and most unwisely.

All the way home, in the carriage that smelled of wet wool and the prince’s cologne, she’d pondered what Blackstone meant by that kiss. Jolted along uneven roads that brought her knees against the prince’s, she felt that happy kiss. It was unlike the kiss in her bedroom. She thought it tasted of friendship, if not of love. At the same time, that kiss had made her realize something she had long ignored. As a girl she had envied his freedom, to come and go from Hammersley House to his other life among London’s titled families, where she could not follow. She had imagined that when they parted he had simply stepped out of her life into that other life, but now she knew he had not. He had left her behind, but he had not been free to enter the drawing rooms and ballrooms of London as he had before. His name had been sullied as if there, too, he had been covered in the mud of a soggy cricket field.

She blew out the candle on the trunk. As she straightened and turned, her light picked out his form through the curling smoke of the snuffed candle. He lay on Frank’s bed, leaning back against the bolster as if he’d just meant to close his eyes for a moment, but the evenness of his breathing and the slackness of his hand against the counterpane told her he was deeply asleep.

She approached slowly, quieting the rustle of her skirts and holding her candle to one side. His long legs stretched nearly the length of the bed, legs that had often been entwined with hers when they lay together. He had shed his neckcloth again, and undone the collar of his shirt. His dark hair fell back from the peak at the center of his brow.

She should wake him at once. The thought was immediately replaced by a sense of the advantage of the moment. Blackstone awake was a formidable noticer of detail. Where the prince and Rushbrooke stumbled or charged down narrow paths, Blackstone moved at ease taking in everyone and everything around him. For once since his return, she could look at him without being observed and work at the puzzle of who he had become.

She stood at the edge of the bed and let herself look. There could be no danger in it as long as she held back in mere contemplation, studying her adversary.

The candle’s golden light gilded one side of his face, all bones and hollows, his mouth defined by a sharp valley above his lips. He had a Greek nose, straight and symmetrical as a sculptor’s dream. His brows were dark slashes across his forehead. Again the leanness of his face struck her. His Adam’s apple made a sharp ridge in his throat. His cheek and jaw had unfashionable edges and angles rather than the smooth curves of the polite male face. Byron, celebrated for his sensuality, had had a rounded fullness of face that Blackstone lacked.

Blackstone’s sensuality was a wiry sensuality of taut bowstrings vibrating deeply, of curving stone or hammered steel. His long lean fingers curled lightly against the counterpane, but corded veins stood out on the backs of his hands.

At times since his return, he looked like a starving man. The pallor of his skin added to the impression. Tonight a rosy band of sun-warmed color crossed his cheeks and nose. Below the dark lines of his lashes, he looked boyish. In sleep he looked as young as he had been when she’d first known him. She told herself it wasn’t so. He was a jaded rogue who had returned to England with a harem, but on the cricket pitch, he had moved with bursts of speed, quick turns, and deft tosses of the ball as if he had been a boy himself. He had been unafraid of mud on his clothes or in his ears.

She had thought herself modern and rational when she had announced to him at nineteen that she would not marry a man without knowing what intimacy with him would be like. They had been lying on their backs on the floor of the attic schoolroom looking at a waning moon. He had immediately rolled on top of her and advised—
Then you’d better lie with me, Violet, because you are going to marry me.

His words had changed everything. She’d gone still, knowing that her future had been decided. Marriage, which had seemed as distant as the yellow half moon from the window, had suddenly been as close as the roof next door behind which that heavy-lidded moon was setting. She would marry not some stranger waiting in her future but the man in her arms. Weeks later she had accepted his ring. A brief period of giddy joy passed until he came to her wearing that other ring with its distinctive capital, and she had ended their engagement.

She looked at his beautiful sleeping face.

Today she had seen joy in his eyes and kindness in his acts. He had known instinctively what her boys needed. Without Rushbrooke at her side, she had seen them differently. It was Rushbrooke who had insisted that they be neat and proper, while Blackstone understood that they needed to dirty their uniforms to win the match. She saw now that Rushbrooke’s insistence on fine uniforms for the boys had not been charity at all, but disapproval. He didn’t really like poor children as they were. He needed to disguise them and clean them up and make them respectable before he could support them. He had tried to clean Violet up, as well.

She reached out to touch Blackstone’s shoulder, and the candlelight fell on his face. He started and his dark eyes flew open, blue as the night sky. In that unguarded waking moment she might have thought his eyes full of love.

He caught her wrist in his grip. She pulled back, and the candle trembled in her hand, spilling wax into the brass pan. A drop ran over the edge and splashed on the back of his hand where the splinter had left its jagged mark. Her heart pounded. She had come too close. She’d let herself linger and enjoy looking at him instead of getting straight to the business of finding Frank. She steadied the candlestick and brushed the cooling wax from his hand. At her touch he stilled.

“Violet, you are living dangerously.” He shifted upright and swung his feet to the floor. Neither moved. The candle flickered and sent up acrid curls of smoke and hot wax. In the past at this hour, alone, so close, they would have fallen into the available bed, helpless in the grip of mad desire. Tonight she reminded herself to think of Frank.

“How long have I been napping?”

She shrugged. She would not admit to studying him. “You wanted to tell me something about Frank?”

“Your brother may be trying to get a message out.” Blackstone’s eyes were still the color of longing.

A carriage rattled by in the street.

He released her hand and stepped around her. “Right. Your brother’s message. We need someplace with more light and a magnifying glass.”

“My father keeps a glass in the gunroom.”

“The gunroom it is.”

He strode to the door, and held it open for her to pass. In silence they made their way down through the darkened house. Violet waited inside the gunroom with her candle while Blackstone lit a pair of table lamps to make a bright space. “Sit.” He handed her a banknote. “You can see that this is a Spanish note.”

“Yes. I’ve seen them before. Hammersley Bank has dealings with the
Banco Espanola de Madrid
.”

“It turned up today in the Wapping neighborhood where we found your brother’s coat buttons.”

She turned to look up at him. He sounded grim when the clue seemed helpful. “So, he’s in Wapping? It should be easy to find him then.”

“Turn it over.”

Violet did as he suggested. He leaned over her, his coat sleeve brushing her shoulder, to point at the central image of a coat of arms flanked by a pair of columns. “If you look in the spaces between the pillars and the shield, there’s script. The ink came off on one of our associate’s hands.”