The Duke of Olympia Meets His Match (14 page)

Loved.
Was that the word for this? This relief so powerful, it made her dizzy. Made the shock of having killed someone somehow bearable, if no less horrible.

“Damn it all,” Olympia said.

“I'm sorry. I know you cared for her. But I had no choice—”

“No. I mean she can't tell us where the bomb's hidden.” He picked up his own pistol and replaced it in his waistcoat pocket, which was speckled with dark blood. “Did Langley say where he was going?”

“No. But it doesn't matter. I know where she's hidden the bomb.”

“What? How the—”

“The devil do I know? Think a moment, Your Grace. I'm sure your nimble brain will come up with the answer. In the meantime, I'm off to save the damned ship. With or without your help.”

She tossed Langley's pistol into Olympia's surprised hands and raced down the deck to the stairway.

“It's the papers, isn't it?” he called after her. “The damned papers!”

“Clever chap. I knew you could do it.”

But she didn't stop. Oh no. Her blood was high, her mind sharp. Everything had come clear, and now she had only to play her part, exactly as Madame de Sauveterre had intended.

Dear old Margot.

She picked up her skirts and hurried down the stairs and around the corner, then up the promenade deck to the deckhouse entrance, holding the rail as she went. The air was full of salt spray, the wood slippery beneath her ruined slippers. Olympia reached around her to force open the door, which had fixed stubbornly in the wind and wet.

A steward came out of the library and looked at them as if they were lunatics. “You shouldn't be out!” he said, but Penelope was already running down the staircase, one deck after another, until she arrived at the saloon deck and turned down the corridor that led to Stateroom 22.

“What are we doing here?” called Olympia.

“She's got the papers. She took them last night, when she burgled my cabin.”

“
What?
Why didn't you tell me, you fool?”

But she didn't answer. She had no time for his withering ducal indignation. She flung open the cabin door—unlocked, thank God—and flipped on the electric lights.

“But I've already searched the cabin! We're wasting our time!”

She cast her gaze around the sitting room—nothing—and proceeded into the open door to the bedroom.

A male voice called out behind her, and Robert Langley bounded into the room, red-faced, having discarded his wig but not his dress.

“The papers! They're not in your room!” he said.

“I wish,” said Penelope, marching across Miss Crawley's bedroom to the invalid's chair in the corner, “the two of you would simply be quiet and allow me to work in peace.”

She turned the chair around, reached under the seat, and pulled out a sheaf of papers.

“Good God.” Olympia snatched them from her hand. “Deck plans.”

“So it seems. Dear me. Of course, I can't make heads or tails of it, but no doubt you gentlemen, with your superior strategic brains, can understand the meaning of that notation in red ink on the main deck, just beneath the first-class saloon.”

***

By the time the main saloon had been discreetly evacuated by a remarkably calm Mr. Simmons, and by the time device was located and defused—Mr. Langley had just completed a course in explosives, and was eager to demonstrate his newfound knowledge in practical application—and the tea poured out in the library, it was nearly midnight.

“I must say,” said the Duke of Olympia, accepting his tea from Penelope's hands, “you have displayed a singular sangfroid throughout the evening's events. I might even go so far as to call it a natural aptitude for this line of work.”

“Do you think so? How flattering.”

“I don't suppose you would consider a more regular association? Nothing so dramatic as this, of course, but perhaps a spot of simple eavesdropping from time to time.”

She sipped her tea and studied the wall of books to her right. She looked as serene as ever, as if she hadn't just saved a shipful of innocent souls from plunging to the bottom of the ocean. As if she hadn't just witnessed a man disable a device of prodigious explosive power with a borrowed hairpin and a wad of tobacco. Her hair winged back softly from her temples, and her too-sharp chin caught the light so beautifully, he wanted to kiss it.

“Oh, I don't know,” she said. “After all, your previous protégé appears to have come to a very bad end indeed.”

“You are not Miss Dingleby.”

“But I might be.” She turned and smiled, the kind of smile that transformed a woman's face from quite ordinarily attractive to irresistible. “How do you know I can be trusted, after all? You trusted her once.”

“My instincts are rarely mistaken, Mrs. Schuyler. And when they are, I do not repeat the error.”

“Very wise.”

He picked up her hand and examined it, tracing one vein softly with his thumb. “It's a shame she's gone, however. I do dislike those dangling threads that remain when one's opponent isn't around to answer questions.”

“Such as?”

“Why your friend de Sauveterre sent those deck plans with you instead of simply giving them to Dingleby before she sailed.”

Penelope gave the edge of her teacup a thoughtful tap. “Perhaps she didn't trust Mr. Langley, and wanted to be sure he wouldn't find the plans.”

“Then why not communicate her suspicions to Dingleby?”

“Who knows?” She stifled a yawn with her fingertips. “Maybe you should ask Mr. Langley in the morning. He'll have more answers than I do. I'm just the mule, aren't I?”

He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “You are a great deal more than that, my dear.”

A faint blush stained the edges of her cheekbones, and he was just rising from his chair to make it worse when the library door burst open to rebound against the wall in a thunderous bang.

“I can't find her!”

Olympia, already out of his chair, turned in a slow and exasperated half circle to where Robert Langley stood at the library entrance, dressed respectably at last in trousers and jacket, wearing an expression of shattered panic that had been wholly absent from his face during the entire episode with the hairpin and the tobacco plug.

“Find whom?” he asked.

“Ruby!” The anguish in his voice shook the books in their cases, or perhaps it was the storm, still raging fitfully outside. “She's not with her parents, or in her room. My God, if she's gone on deck and been swept away—”

Olympia stared at the man in rising horror. “Mr. Langley. Do you mean to say that you have actually
fallen in love
with your source?” As he might say,
been boiled in broth and eaten with a pinch of sage?

“Yes! God help me. She is the dearest angel—”

“I am appalled, Mr. Langley, appalled. Is this not the acme of errors, in our line of work? I suppose one should always expect this sort of unprofessional emotionalism from Americans, but I, for one, would never—”

Penelope placed her cup in her saucer with just a faint
chink
of civilization. “Mr. Langley,” she said kindly, “I believe you'll find Miss Morrison in Stateroom A.”

“Stateroom A?” he said, bewildered.

“But that's my stateroom!” said Olympia.

“Of course it is. They can't possibly meet in mine.”

“Meet?” said Langley.

“Yes, meet.” She smiled. “I believe Miss Morrison plans to conceive a child tonight, and I sincerely hope you'll be there when she does.”

Olympia felt his mouth drop open.

Langley sounded as if he were choking. “Sir—that is, madam—”

“Go on, now. You'll find the door unlocked. You'd better hurry, or Miss Morrison may have drunk all the champagne herself, which would render her incapable of—well.”

Without another word, Langley bolted from the room, slamming the door behind him.

Penelope said brightly, “Well, that's that! Everything tied off neatly, if I do say so myself.”

The Duke of Olympia closed his mouth and watched in wonder as she finished off her tea, dabbed her mouth with her napkin, and straightened her skirt in preparation to leave.

“Not quite,” he said at last.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Not quite
everything
tied off neatly. There is the small matter of my stateroom, which is presently—my thanks to you—occupied by a young couple in the throes of clandestine and possibly drunken concourse, and therefore uninhabitable by its rightful owner.”

Penelope rose from her chair and placed her fingers at the edge of the table. Her bosom was right at the level of his eyes, so transfixing that he forgot his own manners and remained seated, in his auspicious location.

“My dear duke,” she said, “you are quite right. May I offer you the use of my own stateroom, as restitution? I am, after all, without a bedmate.”

A curious sensation grew and spread within the Duke of Olympia's enormous chest. As if the sun had risen from behind his heart, full and warm, to usher in a wondrous day.

He drew himself up to his regal height and looked down into the quiet symmetry of her face. Her wide-awake eyes, her otherworldly skin, now touched with more pink that perhaps she realized.

“Mrs. Schuyler,” he said, “how kind of you to suggest it.”

Day Eight

SS
Majestic

In port, Liverpool

Penelope.

The whisper began at her ear, but she heard it somewhere in the middle of her head, like a memory. A memory of what? She was so warm and content, as if her body were made of electrified air, buzzing quietly against the sheets. She stretched one lazy arm above her head, where it landed in a smooth pile of silky thread that would, if examined, turn out to be silver.

For a moment, she allowed herself a luxury she hadn't known in twenty years: the slow intimacy of waking up in bed with a man. There was the familiar scent of tobacco and soap, the solid bulwark of the chest behind her, the stir of his breath at her temple. How had she lived without this?

Olympia,
she whispered back.

“It's almost dawn,” he said. “The ship has stopped.”

Of course. The background drone of the twin-screw propellers had ceased; the ship no longer pitched on a restless ocean. They had slid into port as quietly and surely as Olympia had made love to her during the night, and the result was the same: satisfaction, completion. The happy climax to a thrilling journey, so right and perfect that you forgot, afterward, that it hadn't simply been inevitable.

“So it has,” she said.

He stroked her hair with his knuckles. “I must return to my cabin. Evict the interlopers before anyone suspects.”

“And I must pack.”

“Yes, that, too.”

His knuckles went on rubbing. She closed her eyes again; there was nothing to see anyway. Nothing to do, in this instant, except to savor this last caress.

He went on. “I'm afraid I shall have to disembark immediately. My men in London must know of this incident without delay. I shall wire them from the docks and board the first train.”

“Of course.”

Stroke, stroke. With her eyes closed like this, she could feel all of him, she could concentrate on everything at once. His smell, his touch, his low English voice. The way she fit into the zigzag of his body. She remembered her first sight of that body, so lean and energetic beneath the stiffness of his shirt and the gloss of his dinner jacket. A mere six days later, and she was waking up in its shelter.

“And you?” he said. “You will, of course, be making your way to London.”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly?” The knuckles came to a halt, mid-stroke. “What the devil does that mean?”

“My dear sir, I have a world to explore. I have so much to catch up on. I might like to see Paris.”

“Paris?”

“Yes. I haven't been to Paris since I was a schoolgirl.” She yawned. “And Florence, I think. Yes, Florence, before the tourists descend. But Paris first.”

“Why Paris?”

“Because Paris is always a good idea. Don't you think?”

“I thought,” said the duke, in that rumbling tone she recognized, “we had agreed to make this journey together.”

“And I thought I told you I wasn't going to become anyone's mistress.”

“That's not what I meant.”

She yawned. “Well, whenever you decide what you
did
mean, be sure to write. I'll be collecting my mail at the American Express office on rue Halévy.”

“But how will you live? What will you live on?”

“Oh, I'll think of something, I'm sure.”

He sat up, overturning the covers, and reached for his shirt. “If I didn't have to go up to London at the earliest moment—”

“My dear sir, don't think anything of it. I've had a lovely time, truly. The loveliest. Go off and do whatever business it is you do. I hope we shall encounter each other again, by some happy coincidence.”

“By God, we shall,” he said, again in that delightful growl, thrusting his legs into his trousers. “You cannot possibly elude me, Mrs. Schuyler. I have the entirety of Britain's intelligence at my disposal.”

She snuggled under the comforter. “How formidable.”

“Look here—”

“You're going to miss your train, Your Grace, if you're not careful.”

Without warning, he seized her face between his hands. “Listen to me, Penelope. Listen to me very carefully.”

She opened her eyes to an intense and familiar blue gaze, framed by bones and skin that might have been hewn from a New Hampshire cliff, and she thought,
I will never forget this sight, I will think of him always the way he's looking at me right now.
“Do I have a choice?” she said.

“I am not, at my age, in the habit of making casual love to women. I am not nearly done with you. I have only just begun, as a matter of fact—”

“Oh, for God's sake,” she said. “Just kiss me good-bye and put the rest in a letter, when you get the chance.”

He made a noise of exasperation and kissed her, long and hard, and kissed her again. When he rose and slipped through the door, she hardly heard him.

“Not nearly done,” he said again, before closing the door.

She waited a minute or two, counting the beats of her heart. Imagining him climbing quietly up the stairs, deck by deck, until he reached the top.

Then she slipped her hand under the mattress and pulled out a leather portfolio. Her fingers spread across the cover, as far as they could reach.

“My darling fellow, I'm afraid you probably are.”