Reckless Rules (Brambridge Novel 4) (13 page)

“Come into my study. We can talk in there.”

Hades’ study was book lined and cozy. Two large chairs sat in front of a blazing fire. Bill started to lower himself into the green chair.

“Not that chair! That’s mine,” Hades said in a loud voice.

Embarrassed, Bill stood again and moved to the red chair.

“Not that one either!”

Bill stood and put his hand on his hips.

“That’s my wife’s.” Hades put a book back on the shelf and picked another up.

“So where can I sit?” Bill was tired of the games. What had Granwich said? Something about Harding making him sit on a torture chair. Bill could see one such looking item in the corner of the room, and Hades was also looking at it.

“Oh no. No, Hades. I would break it,” Bill said with relish, “and that would be the end of your fun.”

Hades sighed. “Carter!” he called. A butler appeared at the door. “Please fetch a chair suitable for Mr. Standish, please.” The butler nodded, his rounded eyes taking in Bill’s massive form. He quickly returned with a very solid armchair borne by three footmen who groaned audibly as they set it down in the study.

Bill sank into it in relief. He had walked all the way from Regent’s Park to Hill Street in Mayfair at a fast clip. It had felt a little like he was running away from Celine. He couldn’t pull the wool over his own eyes. He
had
been trying to escape her. The woman was positively Machiavellian.

Hades settled himself and offered Bill the plate of biscuits that Carter had brought in with him. Bill accepted a cup of coffee gratefully.

“So what do you want to know?” Hades said with a spray of crumbs.

“How would you go about capturing Pedro Moreno? Purely for academic interest of course,” Bill finished hurriedly.

“Hmm. That’s an interesting one.” Hades paused and rubbed his chin. “When I was trying to capture the Viper I hit upon this very novel line of strategies all tied to snakes. Can’t think how that happened, but it just did.”

Bill nodded. Hades’ words sounded reasonable, but the notion of a strategy built on snakes was ludicrous. Perhaps he was wasting his time. “Where do you find your strategies?”

Hades waved at the bookshelves. “They are all there. Persian, Chinese, French, military.”

“It must be awfully difficult to decide.”
Come on, Hades, softly softly.

Hades laughed. “I suppose you could go down the route of a circus-themed strategy. I was reading about one the other day. It seemed to me that all these acrobat fellows like Pedro Moreno like climbing up high in the sky and swinging around on those things called trapezes.”

“Yes, yes.” Bill bit into a biscuit. It wouldn’t do to show his excitement.

Hades heaved himself out of his chair and crossed back over to the stacked bookshelves. Without searching, he selected a small pamphlet from the shelf and brought it back to his seat. “Sun Tzu was my savior with the Viper. He has many interesting things to say.”

“What does he say about acrobats?” Bill laughed.

Hades glared at him and opened the pamphlet. “It was more along the line of the amount of time acrobats spend in the air.” He looked down his nose and flicked the pages. “Where is it? Aha!”

Bill held his breath.

“Remove the ladder when the enemy has ascended to the roof.”

Bill made to stand. Hades had been toying with him. He knew all along that Bill was looking for some pointers and so he was attempting to push Bill down some crooked path to failure.

“You haven’t finished your coffee yet,” Hades said. “But as you are in such a rush, I’ll make is short. Sun Tzu says in his art of warfare that
‘with baits and deceptions lure your enemy into treacherous terrain and then cut off his lines of communication and avenues of escape. To save himself he might fight both your own forces and the elements of nature.’
Quite good advice for all situations I would have thought with that one.”

Bill lowered himself back into his seat. It
was
good advice and made a lot of sense. Now he just had to work out how to put it into practice.

CHAPTER 11

Victoria craned her head, but still she could not see easily into the man’s face. An oversize top hat cast his face into shadow, and owing to her prominent position in the tea shop, to have squirmed and gawped would have been noticed in an instant. She drummed her fingers on the table and licked her lips.

“Teez wonderful lemon cake eez it not, my lady?” Chantelle, Victoria’s maid, blinked furiously. “I have not had better in Paris. We must ask Francesco for the recipe.”

Victoria nodded. Thank goodness for Chantelle. “Yes, indeed. I would be rather interested in having some
more
of it.” She glanced at the ceiling and nodded vigorously as Top Hat’s companion nodded his head imperceptibly across the room.

Victoria had found out about Francesco’s café by accident. He had chosen to locate his eatery in a magnificent shop built in the last century with a domed ceiling. She had been on her way to yet another boring musicale when she had seen signs for his grand opening. She hadn’t been able to resist. They had sat her in the same place as she did now. On her first visit the coffee had been excellent, and the cake as light as a feather. Except that voices had kept buzzing in her ear. Even though the room was packed with people, those surrounding her were men. These voices were female, and they kept mentioning her name.

“I can’t understand why Lady Colchester married a man so much older than her.”

“I can. He was rich. I’m looking for a rich man myself. As soon as they drop off, I can do what I want to do.”

“That’s a rather cynical way of looking at it, Rosa.”

“Guthers, if you hadn’t been such a wet hen you wouldn’t have been ensnared by that Fashington chap.”

“But still, Lady Colchester is really
nice
.”

“Terrible word nice. Implies insipid, boring and run-of-the-mill.”

“I wouldn’t say that too loudly, Rosa Fanthorpe. She’s sitting in the window and now she’s turning to look directly at us…. Oh dear. Do you think she’s heard what we’ve been saying?”

“Don’t be a goose, Guthers. Of course she hasn’t. She’s sat miles away. Besides. She’s far too silly to…”

“I wouldn’t carry on like that Rosa if I were you. Lady Colchester is the person who is going to help you out of your fix. You see, she’s the one that I’m going to recommend to you to investigate Mr. Cryne…”

“
Lady Colchester
?”

At that point Victoria had finished her coffee and closed her ears to the ensuing conversation. It hadn’t been hard to pinpoint who had been speaking. Guthers—Lord Guthrie’s daughter—and Miss Fanthorpe were sat at the back of the room, at least twenty yards away, whispering like henhouse biddies.

How on earth could she hear their conversation from so far away? A visit to St Paul’s changed that a few weeks later, the verger kindly inviting her up to the whispering gallery.

“Lady Colchester, I believe you might be able to hear what I’m saying?”

It was incredible. The verger stood on the opposite side of St Paul’s dome, high up in the gallery. She stood on the other side of the circle, the domed roof rising high above them. The verger spoke into the wall, and yet she could hear him as clear as a bell.

“I don’t understand how I can hear you so well?” she whispered.

“Acoustic dynamics.”

“Acoustic dynamics?”

“Yes, because the wall is curved, the sound bounces off it all the way round to a particular point where the listener is standing. That is how I can speak to you from so far away.”

It was the same with Francesco’s café—the domed roof bounced off the conversations and if you sat in certain seats as Miss Fanthorpe, Miss Guthrie and Victoria had, then you could hear one another from far away.

Unfortunately it worked both ways, hence Chantelle’s desperate attempt at praising Francesco’s lemon cake.

Victoria took a delicate bite of the lemon cake and chewed slowly, tipping her head to one side in a very affected gesture, but one that was exceedingly good for hearing the conversation between the man she assumed to be Durnish, and her butler Carruthers.

“So to recap, Mr. Durnish, you are looking for your long lost brother Ponsonby Butterworth?”

“Yes.”

Gosh, he was a man of few words.

“And the reason that Mr. Butterworth does not share your same surname?”

“Different fathers.”

“Of course. And when did you last see your brother?”

“1772.”

“And how old were you at the time?” Victoria could tell that Carruthers was getting frustrated.

“Sixteen. My brother was thirty two. He was older than myself.”

“So that would make him now…?”

“Seventy-six.”

“And you are aware, sir…” Carruthers paused. “That he may no longer be alive?”

“Of course. But I would just like to know what happened to him.”

“Do you have any pointers that you might give us as to his interests and such?”

“No. He used to be great cronies with a man called Augustus Ballington.”

Victoria sat straighter in her seat.
Augustus Ballington
. Good God. That had been Lord Colchester’s real name before he took the title. The tart lemon flavor of the cake quickly dried her mouth. She took a quick sip of tea and spluttered as it went down the wrong way, but it didn’t stop the continued buzzing of the conversation in her ear.

“Look, I was told I was going to meet a woman. I don’t understand who you are, but do you have any more intrusive questions you want to ask me?

Victoria held her breath, and let it out slowly as Carruthers calmly answered.

“Not at all, Mr. Durnish. All that we ask is that you sign a confidentiality agreement… here and… here, and then we will keep you updated every two weeks here in this café.

“If that is all? I must be going.”

“Of course.”

Victoria turned her head and gazed out of the window as the man in the outsize top hat pushed past her table. As he pushed open the door to the café, she whipped her head round and looked into the mirror by the door and gasped.

The man looked directly at her. There was no way that he was in his sixties. The hair may have been powdered white underneath the hat but the eyes that looked out were those of a young man. He winked and licked his lips lasciviously. He threw his head back and laughed as he reached for the door and slid through it faster than an otter.

Victoria was stunned.

“Madame, your mouth is still open!” Chantelle hissed.

She tried to form a word, molding her lips into shapes, but nothing would come out. A prickle coursed down her spine. That man was
dangerous
. Victoria sat still as Carruthers paid the bill and left the café for Upper Brook Street. She watched as he stood back to let some gentlemen in through the door of the café. They exchanged some easy words, although her butler looked disconcerted as he left.

“
Madame!”
Chantelle flapped her hands. “Are you quite alright?”

“I…” But Victoria did not have a chance to answer. Oh how she wished she had never come to Francesco’s. She should have trusted Carruthers to report back to her. She should have known that she was an easy target sat in the front window of a café popular with both men and women of the ton.

“Lady Colchester. What a delightful surprise. May we join you?”

Victoria sighed and looked forlornly at her half-drunk cup of tea and the almost untouched slice of lemon cake that she had yet to consume.

“Certainly, Lord Lassiter… Mr. Standish… Why don’t you sit down next to my maid Chantelle?”

“Oh, I’ll sit next to Chantelle,” Freddie said cheerfully. “Such a fine looking woman.
Comment ça va encore
?”

Chantelle giggled inanely and looked into Freddie’s eyes. Victoria sniffed.

“That just leaves me to sit next to you.” Bill smiled and shrugged his shoulders. The seat was built in a banquette style. Throwing out the tails of his coat, Bill slid along the seat. He nodded at Chantelle who smiled coquettishly back at him.

Victoria gasped as a hand snaked round the base of her spine, and a hot leg pressed up against the silk of her dress. She stared straight across the table at Freddie, who was still chatting to Chantelle in French.
Rescue me,
she tried to project, wanting to catch Chantelle’s eye. But her body was saying something different.

Good God. The hand had begun to move, stroking her bottom where the silk pulled tight against her drawers.

“My lady,” Bill whispered, turning his head slightly to her.

“Stop it,” she muttered, trying to push Bill away, but only succeeding in grabbing his magnificently muscled thigh.

Bill bent his head to look into her eyes. His hand stroked softly across her lower back.

“Treatment—”

Victoria jumped and turned her head so that her nose bumped Bill’s. He jerked his head away, unwinding his hand quickly, holding onto to his own nose with a squawk.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I was saying, Lady Colchester, that my horse Lindsay requires some definite treatment. I believe she has laminitis.” Freddie frowned. “Are you both quite alright?”

Victoria stopped moving and curled her hands into a fist.

“Ow,” Bill said quietly. “Victoria…”

A warm hand covered hers. Without realizing it, she had left her hand on Bill’s thigh, and in the stress of the situation had held on and squeezed tightly. One by one, Bill delicately levered up her tense fingers and moved her hand into his large palm. For such a large man, his fingers were so deft—

Chantelle’s unlined face creased slightly as she watched Victoria reach out with her left hand and shakily take a drink of the cool tea. As much as Victoria tugged at her right hand, it was most definitely caught in Bill’s.

“Let me call for another pot,” Freddie said cheerfully. “Can’t have Francesco serving customers cold tea.”

Victoria nodded. Was this the second part of the treatment? Seduction in a public place? She licked her lips as Bill’s thumb started to circle around her palm. This was worse than earlier. There was no longer a layer of silk between her hot flesh and his cool touch. Celine was most definitely wrong. A lady did not feel more together after or even during treatment.