Elisabeth Fairchild (11 page)

He studied her as if she were a two-headed calf. He did not believe. Why should he?

“Why?” He fought to keep the volume of his voice in check, bit out, “Why did you not tell me more?”

“More?” The heat of his accusation caught her off guard.

“I was right there.” The hiss of his words cried anguish. He came forward in the chair as if he meant to spring to his feet, bent forward instead to hiss directly in her face. “I could have saved them.”

The implication, that she could have saved two men, through him, hung between them like a drawn sword, sharp-edged and cutting. She hung her head. “I had no more to tell.”

He remained for an instant nose to nose with her, gaze searching, the level of tension between them excruciating.

She closed her eyes, swamped for the moment by a familiar wave of guilt.  “I wish to God there had been.” Swallowing hard, she forced herself to face his anger and doubt, and did her best to explain the inexplicable. “You must understand, the impressions I get are vague--dreamlike.”

She could not read his reaction. His colors told her nothing. All emotion save a trace of anger he locked away, lips tight.

“Would you preserve mankind had you the chance, Miss Selwyn?”

Not a question one was asked every day. She answered in reflex--said what she thought he wanted to hear. “But of course.”

His eyelids flickered. His mouth twisted with a vague impatience. Canting his head to one side, he asked, “Can you do this thing you do with a stranger? A group of strangers?”

“I--I don’t know.” She shook her head. “It comes incomplete--in pieces--bits in a puzzle.”

“I am a man who has spent his life puzzling.”

She knew not what to say to that.

He sighed, sat back, released her from the pinion of his stare. Flipping through the pages of her book, he asked, “Would you notice if a cloud of death hung over a group of men who plotted murder on a grand scale?”

She thought of Lydia, wanted to laugh at the ideas that popped into her head. No laughing matter, the question. “Do you mean radicals?”

Coppery brows lifted. “I mean ultra-radicals.”

Chapter Sixteen

November 1, 1816

The Selwyn Townhouse, Wellclose Square, London

The following day, hat in hand, no disguise, he yanked the Selwyn’s bellpull, listening to the distant jangle, ears keen to the flap of canvas, the shouts and whistles and bells on the nearby London Docks. He refused to listen to the skeptical voice in his head, refused to believe his reason as clouded as the lowering sky.

He asked to speak to Mr. Selwyn when a woman came to the door.

She led him upstairs to a study, a well-lit room he had not plumbed in his illicit investigations of the house. Dominating the room, a walnut desk covered in vast sheets of paper. A sextant, caliper, mechanical lead holders, a rule; the tools of a shipbuilder’s trade, were scattered across the set of plans. A globe took up a position of prominence near the window. A bookcase cluttered with model ships backed the desk. The walls were papered in schematic cut away drawings of a ship. Through the window drifted dockyard sounds: the creak of wooden hulls, the piping of a whistle. Ordinary, predictable--safe.

He came not for the ordinary.

“Come in, come in, Mr. Ramsay,” Mr. Selwyn wore a surprised look. “Is it already five years ago you rescued my daughter at Carlton House?”

“Six, sir. I believe it is six years. I appreciate the letter you sent. Pray forgive this long tardy visit.”

“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Ramsay?” Selwyn settled comfortably behind the desk, and politely indicated a chair.

“Not you, sir. Your daughter.”

“Dulcie?” Selwyn sat forward, surprised.

“I am, sir, a curious man.” Roger pause. “Intrigued by your daughter’s talents. You must know of what I speak.”

Fear lurked in the depths of his eyes. Roger knew well the look of it.

“I would discover, sir, exactly what it is she sees, and how.”

Selwyn laughed, his serious demeanor undone. “Is that all?” He turned in his chair to catch up glasses, and a decanter. “If you find answers, Mr. Ramsay, I will be happy to declare you a clever man, far cleverer than I, who has sought those very answers for the entirety of my daughter’s lifetime. Curse or blessing, I have always trusted in the idea I would one day know for certain why and how Dulcie does what Dulcie does. Still I wait, no wiser than before.”

He poured them each a bumper of rum, handed over the glass, and downed his in a single gulp that left him wincing.

Roger sipped, savoring the fruity, aromatic burn. “Would you be averse, sir, to my asking your daughter for her assistance?”

“Assistance? In what regard? What is it you do, Mr. Ramsay, other than build yourself a reputation as a ladies’ man? I would not have you add yet another plank to the decking of your disgrace at my daughter’s expense.”

“What man would be so bold, sir, as to openly approach a young lady’s father, with such a goal in mind?”

An awkward silence hung between them. Mr. Selwyn eyed him dubiously. “A devious man might, Mr. Ramsay, and I judge you to be far more devious than the average. Dulcie would have it that you are the notorious Gargoyle,
agent provocateur
, informant extraordinaire to the King.”

Accustomed to guarding his expression, Roger guarded it now.

With a throaty laugh, Selwyn poured another drink. “I take it she is correct?”

Roger swirled his rum, studying the way the movement of the liquid seemed to suck light into the glass. “And if I am devious, sir, but have no interest in disgracing your daughter?”

The fullness of Roger Ramsay’s presence set Dulcie’s heart racing in the moment before he pulled the doorbell. She knew it was he. Martha’s voice rose in the stairwell, along with the masculine rumble of their visitor’s. Like bubbles in a fine champagne, the voices tickled her nose, rose giddy within the confines of her chest, a nameless, floating sense of expectancy. Roger Ramsay, the King’s Gargoyle, needed her. He went to the trouble of seeing her father, as she had insisted.

The house swelled at the seams in making him welcome. A servant tramped past her doorway with unusual haste. Footsteps skittered on the stairs. She watched shadows move. The dank, wet chill of the Thames crept up to the landing. Her eyes closed as she savored a faint whiff of sandalwood and wrapped herself in light from the windows in the memory of their past. The great sun-washed Gothic confection of the conservatory roof at Carlton House.

Light poured through fan shaped panels, stained glass glittering ruby, sapphire and topaz on the crystal and china lining the Prince’s table. Reason for a riot, that long, royal table with its perfect miniature serpentine stream bed winding under doll-sized hump-backed bridges and around an island.

A carved temple peeped through the trees, in the tiny, perfect tabletop kingdom for the newly named Regent.

Colored light passed over Roger Ramsay like ghostly jewels.

“There were live fish,” he said.

“Dulcie?” Martha stood at the foot of the stairs. “Your father wishes to see you.”

She jumped up, smoothed her skirt. The wispy fog of the past drifted away as she descended the stairs with bouncing steps, toward the low murmur of masculine voices. Her hand trembled in turning the cold, porcelain knob. Would her father understand? Would he consent to her working with a gentleman of Ramsay’s reputation?

Breath held, she opened the study door, temporarily blinded by the light.

“Live fish. Dace, roach, gudgeons--flashes of silver and gold. Royal fish for a royal meal. Pretty--until halfway through the main course they turned belly up and died.”

 
She pictured fish flopping, death’s struggle. Like the women who had been trampled. Like . . . something yet to come. Roger Ramsay stood silhouetted against the window’s fogged glow, goldfish bright, the blue of him blending with the sky, the room laced with the cool hue.

“Miss Selwyn. We meet again.” He had always been polite, the man of her daydreams and nightmares.

“Mr. Ramsay.” She could not pretend herself surprised to see him.

Her father nodded, a weighty inclination, as if to impress upon her the importance of his consent. “Mr. Ramsay has a request to make of you Dulcie. There is danger involved. I leave it to you to decide if you would help him, for the King’s sake, for England’s safety.”

Her eyes widened. What magic was this?

“Perhaps you could take Mr. Ramsay to the sitting room to discuss this?”

Dulcie’s eyes widened. Her heart leapt as she nodded obedience, stepped to the door and led Mr. Ramsay across the hall.

He drew the door shut behind him on entering and leaned against it, as if to hold back the world. He smiled a tight little smile. “Satisfied? He knows me for who and what I am. It is more than my own brothers know. My fate rests in his hands, and yours.”

She crossed to the window to stare out at a familiar landscape. The pane reflected the blue glow of her newfound companion. “As you would hold mine in yours, sir.”

Deep in her soul she felt the future stir.

Chapter Seventeen

Nov 15, 1816

London

From a foxed and fogged peer glass the face of a troll regarded Dulcie with angry eyes. Her face. Her strange, knowing eyes.

“Ugly thing!”

She tugged at the ugly white mob cap, scowled and retied the puce neckerchief at her throat. Hardly an outfit to endear her to any gentleman of quality, much less a rogue of Ramsay’s stamp.

With a tap upon the dressing room’s door, her father called hopefully from the far side, “How goes it, my dear?”

 She voiced an irritable, “Come, see.”

In they traipsed, eyes narrowed, heads at a tilt, two more trolls and a Gargoyle in the mirror: her father, Quinn, and Ramsay--spurring her heart--his expression inscrutible.

“Well?” she asked defensively, convinced she looked the frump, and yet, undeniably excited by this disguised adventure in the making.

Her father spoke first. “It is very plain.”

“The better to blend in unnoticed,” Ramsay’s gaze, like a brush of hands, passed over her.

“Fits well enough.” Quinn, the valet, nodded his satisfaction.

Again that tactile gaze, assessing the mentioned fit. The Gargoyle’s paint-stained fingers busied in buttoning a threadbare, figured vest over a poet-sleeved blouse, the cuffs dirtied with what looked like clay. “A hat? And sleeve protectors. Quinn? She is too fair to go without them.”

Quinn set to work searching.

The room, an orderly warren, contained, besides the peer glass, a wall full of chests, above them cabinets stuffed full of odd bits of clothing, on the floor: trunks, band boxes, several rows of boots. A dressing table, lamp lit, stood thick with makeup pots, enough hare’s feet to keep two rabbits hopping, and a stack of wooden trays, sprouting different hued hanks of hair. Here, an
agent provocateur
might dress himself as anyone but himself.

“I cannot stay, my dear,” father said. “I’ve business to attend to. You will take care? Obey Mr. Ramsay?”

Dulcie nodded.

“We will watch over her most keenly,” Ramsay promised, no hint of mischief in stony Gargoyle eyes as he walked Mr. Selwyn to the door.

Quinn extracted a limp straw hat from a row of hatboxes. Crushed and stained, he would have plunked it forthwith on top of her mob cap had she not ducked from beneath it.

“Not on my head, you don’t,” Dulcie objected. “No telling what vermin have taken possession of that dreadful thing.”

With an offended lift of his chin, Quinn said, “No vermin, miss. I take precautions with all of the master’s disguises, fumigating every stitch. The master would not like it in the least if I brought fleas or lice into the house.”

Feeling much chided, and more than a little itchy, she scowled at the sadly abused hat. “It looks as if it has been sat upon.”

“That it has, miss,” Quinn confirmed blandly.

She blinked in surprise.

“Gives it just the right well-used quality.”

Roger returned, rolling his sleeves high, revealing well muscled, sun-browned arms, sunlight trapped in the golden brown complexion. Diverting arms, the sort to make a woman wonder at the strength of a man, the sort to make Dulcie forget sat-upon-hats. She would never have imagined such arms resided beneath the exquisitely tailored superfine in which Roger customarily dressed. These arms would well serve a working man: a sailor, a farmer, a coal-heaver.  His clothing declared him an artist, a sculptor who strapped a wicked little dirk beneath his clay-speckled sleeve.

“Might I assist in the finding of something, sir?” Quinn enquired.

Roger nodded. “Low brimmed hat with leather tie. The Garrick coat. A belcher, too. Red.”

“Yes, sir.”

The faintest hint of a smile lifted the left side of Roger’s mouth. Dulcie grew fond of that slight quirk.

“Quinn takes great pride in achieving the right note of authenticity,” he said. “Prince or pauper, he has had the dressing of me.”

“Very kind of you to say so, sir,” Quinn’s voice came muffled from the depths of a trunk.

Roger eyed with favor her ugly dress, the bedraggled hat that dangled from her neck. “You begin to look the part.”

With such pride were the words delivered, that when he lifted the offensive headpiece and asked sweetly, “Shall I demonstrate the recommended tilt?” she shrugged, completely taken with how close he stood.

“If you please.”

Bathed in the blue of him, pulse racing, Dulcie watched by way of the mirror. With concentrated expression he adjusted the ribbon--fastened securely at the nape of her neck. A thrilling sensation, his fingers, wafting tendrils of azure blue, lifted straying strands of hair, smoothing them out of the way of the knot, a sensation provocative beyond measure.