The Black Mask (3 page)

“Oh, yes,” Rose said, embarrassed that they’d wandered so far from the point. “We are, I’m afraid, wasting a great deal of your time, sir, over a very minor matter.”

“Not at all, Miss Spenser. Besides,” he said with what in another person would have been a mischievous glance over his spectacles, “it is Sir Niles’s time.”

Rose, willing to acknowledge when she was in the wrong, offered Sir Niles her hand once more. “I apologize, Sir Niles. You have been more than kind.”

“A pleasure to be of service. May I?” He slipped the side of his hand under her sensitive fingertips. She felt her face heat. She’d held hands with men during dances a hundred times or more, but something about the way Sir Niles touched her seemed strangely intimate. Surely it must be all on her side, since his eyes remained cool and remote while he slid the Malikzadi on her middle finger. Besides, he would never do anything so impolite as flirt. “Rundell and Bridge would be happy, no doubt, to make it fit your finger comfortably.”

“Oh, I shall never wear it. I am not fond of rubies— or indeed of any jewelry. I wear pearls.”

“One day perhaps you will change your mind. Only a woman can bring out the true beauty of a fine stone.”

“I like pearls,” she said, determined to be contrary. She gave him a too bright smile. “Thank you again, Sir Niles, for your assistance and your opinion.”

“Both are always at your service,” he said, bowing.

Rose hated how Sir Niles always contrived to have the last word. She could hardly concentrate on the rest of Mr. Crenshaw’s legalities as she tried to think of something polite but crushing to say to Sir Niles the next time they met.

Half an hour later, when the Spensers had gone, Sir Niles entered Mr. Crenshaw’s office again. The attorney looked up from his endless paperwork. “Are you satisfied, my boy?”

“I confess I feel better.” Sir Niles, his affectations laid aside for the moment, dropped into the chair recently occupied by Rose Spenser. He smiled at the exhalation of fluff even as he leaned his head back. Sprawling there, the attorney could see the lines of fatigue under his eyes and the pale, almost transparent skin at the temple.

“You may feel better, Niles, but you look like the devil. Did you sleep at all last night?”

“No. I was a trifle busy.” Gone was the drawling, ironic voice. He spoke crisply, his words falling quickly from his lips. “The rooftops of London are not made for swift or easy travel. But that is where my path lies.”

“Surely you’ll stop now. Curtman is finished. Beringer is proving very hard to catch. As for the other...”

Shaking off his exhaustion like a dog coming out of a lake, Niles sat up, looking as alert and bright as though he’d had a blissful night’s sleep. “He’s as guilty as they are. I won’t let him escape. No, and not Beringer either. He left a letter for me. He’s ready to swallow the hook.”

Mr. Crenshaw leaned forward, trying to force Niles to look at him. But the younger man dug his finger into one of the slits in the ancient fabric of the chair, enlarging the hole, his entire attention apparently consumed in the task. “There’s no proof in his case. No weaknesses like Curtman’s record. No bait to use as in Beringer’s case.”

“I can think of one way to trap him.”

“Niles.” Mr. Crenshaw managed at last to make Niles look up. The blue eyes regarded him with affection, but Crenshaw knew how easily that blue gaze could set into intractability as hard as flint. He’d known Niles Alardyce from boyhood and he had always been just the same. Easygoing, kindly, gentlemanly, but capable of a resolution second to none. Not even those he loved best could alter his purpose once he’d decided on a course of action. Only his mother, perhaps, and she had died too young.

“Niles, I can’t help you anymore,” Crenshaw said, using the only weapon he had against that iron will. “This business with the prime minister, that cuts too near the bone. If they’d caught you, they would have shot you as a suspected assassin. The scandal...”

“He was the only one who’d expose Curtman pitilessly. The others would want to take care of him quietly. Liverpool’s no Wellington, but he knows right from wrong.”

“I won’t help you get yourself killed.”

“I sympathize, Crenshaw.”

“You’ll stop, then? Stop with Beringer.”

Niles shook his head. The confident expression he wore worried Crenshaw. He’d seen it too many times, and it always presaged heart palpitations in anyone who became entangled in one of Niles’s schemes. Niles never seemed to feel any qualms. He left those to other people. Niles had only ever worried about one person. Was, it seemed, still worried about him even now.

“Christian wouldn’t want you to risk your life for a quixotic quest.”

Niles laughed shortly. “He’d be the first to urge me on to greater folly, Crenshaw, and you know it. Next to Christian, I always looked like a demmed respectable citizen.”

“I cannot persuade you to give it up?”

Niles shook his head, but seemed more interested in extracting one feather at a time than in answering his man of affairs’s questions.

The attorney sighed and changed the subject. “A charming young couple, the Spensers,” he said. “The boy is a trifle immature.”

“No more so than some others I could name. Like most young men on their first visit to London, he has a certain amount to learn. A pity the lessons so often come at a price.”

“He gambles?”

“Incessantly. And badly.”

“From what he said, I infer you hold some of his debts?”

“Almost all of them.”

“May I ask why?”

“Better me than a Captain Sharp. There are many who see such a fellow as no more than pigeon for plucking.”

‘You have taken him under your wing, then. Why him in particular? There are a great many young country fellows in the city at any time. You’ve never shown any interest in protecting their feathers from plucking.”

Niles flicked at few feathers at the attorney. “Perhaps he reminds me of the son I never had,” he said flippantly.

“Or the brother-in-law?” the attorney suggested slyly.

Crenshaw congratulated himself on surprising the unflappable Sir Niles. For a moment, the brilliant blue eyes stared at him, frozen. Then the handsome, high-nosed face thawed as a chuckle broke from his lips. “Is it that I am being obvious?”

“I have known you a very long time. May I say I am glad to see you are considering doing your duty by your name and rank?” Crenshaw wanted to express his relief that Niles still had a heart, but there were some subjects one did not raise with a client, however long guarded and well loved.

“You go too fast. Miss Spenser is the merest acquaintance; nothing more.”

“Yet you protect her brother from the consequences of his folly?”

“Someone has to. He’s not equipped for the task.”

Mr. Crenshaw drummed his fingernails on the desk. “Miss Spenser is a very lovely girl.”

“Yes, I suppose she is. I, however, admire Miss Spenser for her independence of mind. She is one of the few who have not fallen under Sir Niles’s rather stuffy spell.”

“She doesn’t like you.”

“She doesn’t like Sir Niles. She has never met me.”

“I simply don’t understand you, Rose. Everybody
else
likes Sir Niles.”

One thing about Rupert, Rose thought. He was tenacious. Let him grab hold of a subject, and he’d shake it to death like a terrier with a rabbit. “Then he hardly needs my approval.”

“But he’s really the best of good fellows. Not at all high in the instep.”

“I would say that is exactly what he is. Proud, superior, and overweening.”

“Just because he isn’t falling over himself to set up as one of your flirts.”

Rose, heedless of the interested housemaid sweeping the steps, turned sharply toward her more than usually aggravating younger brother as he stepped down from the carriage. “I do not have ‘flirts.’ Of all the vulgar...”

“Please yourself. I suppose Manbridge wasn’t flirting with you last night at Lady Welsh’s?”

“He was telling me about shooting.”

“Is that why he had his arm around your waist? And I suppose that Italian, what’s-his-name, was telling you about astronomy in the garden?”

“If you remember, it was very hot last night. Perhaps you didn’t notice, busy as you were in the card room.”

The housemaid hurried to open the green-painted front door, dropping a curtsy as they passed in. “How are you, Mary?” Rose asked. “Is my aunt in?”

“Healthy as a horse, miss, ta. Her ladyship’s in her boudoir.” She giggled as Rupert gave her a wink.

“Coming up?” Rose asked him as she unbuttoned the sleeves of her jaconet muslin pelisse. “Aunt Paige will want to hear all the details.”

“I’d better change first. I’m dust all over from that office. Can’t go out like this.” He indicated his disarray with a wave of his hand, but Rose thought he looked very handsome in his tight blue coat and fanciful tie. She at least owed Sir Niles a little gratitude, for, profiting by his example, Rupert had toned down his love for the wilder fields of fashion.

“Will you be out very late tonight, Rupert? I wouldn’t ask, only there’s a breakfast tomorrow and Mrs. Lane made a special point of asking if you could come.”

“Is that spotty daughter of hers going to be there?”

“I imagine she will. It is being given in her honor. And she doesn’t have that many spots.”

Rupert sighed and kicked lightly at the black and white checked floor of the foyer. “I’ll go if you want me to.”

“I always enjoy being escorted by handsome men. Didn’t you just say so?”

He raised his hand as though he’d strike her. Rose just wrinkled her nose at him. “Don’t worry; you won’t be called out to defend my honor. If I lose my good name, I’ll just drown myself so politely even your precious Sir Niles will approve.”

She danced away before he could catch her, laughing. When she put a foot on the bottommost stair, he called her. Hearing a serious note in his voice, she turned back.

“Don’t forget your inheritance,” he said, reaching out, box in hand.

“Oh, thank you. Aunt Paige will want to see this.” Rose looked up into his face. “Do you mind very much that I didn’t receive a fortune?”

Rupert could hardly shrug in his tight coat, but he pulled a shrugging kind of face. “A few thousands would have come in dashed opportune. The dibs aren’t in tune often these days.”

“Bad luck?”

“I wish it were only bad luck. That would be an improvement.”

“Rupert... I could sell the ring. It’s not much, but Sir Niles said it would bring something.”

“That’s what I mean about your poor taste in men, Rose. You’d throw everything away on a wastrel like me and never look twice at a chap like Sir Niles. He’s got the ready in sackfuls, dashed if he doesn’t, and the devil’s own luck with it.”

“You’re not a wastrel,” Rose said, seizing his arm and shaking it. “If Father would let you join up, you’d be the finest soldier ...”

“What’s the use of talking about it? He’ll never let me go. And the war’s over, anyway. Maybe your old godfather had it right. India’s the place for someone like me. But, by God, I would have liked to see it in the Army.”

He pushed past her, taking the stairs two at a time with the air of one who outran his thoughts. Rose followed more slowly. By the time she reached the top, Rupert had gone into his room. The lustily sung and off-key strains of the latest comic song burst forth.

Rose hardly had time to unpin the hat from her head before a light tap on her door heralded her aunt. “May I come in?”

“Of course,” Rose said, swinging the door wide. “I’m sorry I didn’t come directly to your room, but that office was amazingly dusty.”

“Lawyers’ offices always are,” said Lady Marlton, twice a widow and therefore conversant with the law and lawyers. “I should have warned you not to wear that dark red. It is more than becoming, my love, but it shows every smudge. Turn ‘round. Let me unbutton you.”

Rose smiled as she turned obediently, bending her knees to bring her topmost button into reach. Her mother’s sister was what men called a pocket Venus. Barely five feet tall, she was perfectly proportioned, even though her second widowhood and the boxes of bonbons she consumed to alleviate her boredom had put some weight on her. Or at least she claimed to have been bored.

Since her niece and nephew had come to stay, they had hardly spent two consecutive nights at home. Rose hadn’t imagined there could be so many parties. The knocker at Aunt Paige’s elegant town house was never silent for long, and though Rose came in for her share of attention, more than a few bouquets and treats had been for the widow. Lady Marlton moved in the first circle of London society, and her friends waited breathlessly to see which of the competing eligible older gentlemen would be her third lord and master.

“Colonel Wapton called while you were out. He was amazingly sorry to have missed you.”

“I shall make it up to him with a dance this evening.”

“Perhaps you should make him suffer. Along with Mr. March, young Lord Duchan, and the Right Honorable Member from Preffendale.”

“Did all those gentlemen call while I was out?”

“Yes, and were like to wear out the furniture. Why must you attract such outsized suitors?”

“They only seem like that to you, Aunt.”

“Wicked!”

Rose laughed as she picked up her dressing gown. “Don’t you want to see what my godfather did leave me? Besides a hundred pounds.”

“A hundred pounds is a hundred pounds,” Aunt Paige said consideringly. “Not a fortune, but enough to make a journey into the City worthwhile. But you said
besides
... he didn’t leave you a plantation or any such thing, did he? Really, you mustn’t even think of going to India. A dreadful place, by all I hear. Is that what Rupert was saying in the hall? You children must learn not to have arguments in public. I honestly thought he meant to strike you!”

“Rupert hasn’t struck me since he was seven years old, Aunt. Even that was an accident.”

Picking up the case, she relished the look of anticipation on her aunt’s face. Certainly nothing could prepare her for the wonders of the Malikzadi.