The Spy's Kiss (23 page)

He struggled up to a sitting position. His lips were a hard, straight line. “You are not ruined. That was a girl's mistake. This is different. And even if you were far less innocent than you are, I would not wish for a son of mine the life I have led, as a fatherless boy. I won't risk it, for you or myself or the child.”

So, he was a bastard. She should have guessed that. Otherwise he would have been a duke, like his uncle and cousin. He was a bastard, and he had planned to ask the ward of an earl to marry him. Or rather, he hadn't planned to marry her. Which was more insulting? She wanted to be angry again, but instead she felt light-headed, frail, empty.

He tugged the nightgown out from under her leg and put it gently back on, pushing her arms through the sleeves as though she were a sick child.

She started to cry then, silently, huddled on her knees, her face in her hands.

“Serena,” he said a third time, sounding lost and helpless. He lifted her in his arms, carried her over to the bed, and held her while she wept, stroking her hair until the sobs died away and she lay, half-dozing, and then dozing, and then asleep, her head in the hollow of his shoulder and her hand lying lightly over his wrist in case he might try to slip away without saying good-bye.

 

 

He felt her stir against him as the sky was turning faintly gray around the edges.

“Are you awake?” he asked softly after a minute, pulling his arms away from her.

“Yes.” She shivered a little.

“I must go. The servants will be coming in soon to make up the fires.”

She sighed. “I suppose if they find you here my uncle will have you shot.” She sat up and looked at him, her face still soft with sleep, her hair tousled, and he gritted his teeth to keep himself from grabbing her and retracting his earlier decision. “Are you truly a spy? Trying to steal government secrets?”

“Dammit, no!”

“Then why did you trick your way into my uncle's house?”

He was silent for a minute. “He didn't tell you what I said?”

She shook her head. “He said you had made up some absurd story, but that it was clear what, in fact, you were after.”

“He's my father.” He saw her stiffen. “He denies it, but I have proof. That's why I came to Boulton Hall. To be certain. And then to make him writhe for what he did to my mother. The Condés locked her in a convent for the rest of her life as punishment for producing me, you know.”

She was struggling to take all this in. “What proof?” she said at last.

“My mother wrote me, when she was dying. She said her seducer was heir to an English title called ‘Bassington'—this at a time when the fourth earl was still alive. I have bank drafts of payments sent to my mother's convent, authorized by the fourth earl. I have a miniature done of me at the age of eight which is the spitting image of the portrait of your uncle as a boy at Boulton Park.” He made a sound of disgust and frustration. “Your uncle claims he was in the West Indies and couldn't possibly have sired a child in France in 1784.”

She reached out and touched his arm. “But he was in the West Indies,” she said. “He was. I know it. Everyone knows it. Coughlin, one of our servants at Boulton Park, was indentured there. He was transported for stealing a fish. My uncle rescued him from the most dreadful master and brought him back to England. It will be thirty years next spring; Coughlin talks about it all the time.”

“I think my evidence is a bit more concrete than some old servant's grateful recollections. But it makes no difference now.” He stood up, picked up his jacket, which was lying crumpled on the floor, and put it on. Then he looked down at the woman he could have married had he not been so focused on the man his mother should have married.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I am sorry for everything. I know that is rather inadequate, under the circumstances, but it is all I have to offer. You deserve happiness, Serena, and I have faith that you will find it.” He tucked her shawl around her so that it hid the tear in her nightgown. “Good-bye,” he said softly. “I shall think of you every time I see a butterfly. And I will not be picturing worms with wings, either.”

She smiled a little at that.

He went out through the dark house and the dark garden and the dark passageway by Barrett's house, seeing that half smile and wondering bitterly if anyone else in the world would have been stupid enough to continue with a sour, spiteful plan for petty revenge when they had stumbled onto Serena Allen.

“Light, guvner?” called a sleepy link-boy in Harland Place.

It was nearly dawn, and his lodgings were not far away, but at the moment, any forlorn-looking child had his sympathy. He paid the boy double and followed the bobbing torch down Duke Street.

 

 

Half an hour later, on the verge of falling back to sleep, Serena was hazily considering for the tenth time the odd contradictions between her uncle's story and Clermont's. She had been puzzling over it since his departure, torn between his vehemence and his undoubted resemblance to Simon on the one hand and her belief that her uncle had been nowhere near France twenty-nine years ago on the other. Who was lying? Her uncle? Julien's mother? Hewitt? Coughlin? A collage of bank drafts, letters, miniatures, portraits, and indentures drifted by beneath her closed eyes. She wondered sleepily what her uncle had looked like at Julien's age. There were no portraits of him as a young man.

Portraits.

She opened her eyes.

Simon, at the age of eight. Simon with dark eyes and dark eyebrows at the age of eight. Julien's hair. Simon's hair.

She sat up, suddenly wide awake.

Vernon should have been gloating. Julien had expected little sidelong glances, perhaps even a few more quotations from the Bible. “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” That would be a good one. Or, “One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.” Instead his servant was dutifully packing, folding shirts and neckcloths and jackets as though each item was made of spun glass and demanded his entire concentration. That way, he didn't have to look at his master and feel sorry for him.

Julien hadn't slept at all. When he had arrived back in Brook Street it was nearly six, and all he wanted to do was run and hide. He had woken Vernon—a rare turnabout, that—and informed him, in the most neutral tone he could command, that they would be leaving as soon as possible. It must not have been a very neutral tone; Vernon had actually patted him briefly on the shoulder as he climbed stiffly out of bed. Julien had washed, though, and shaved, and put on clean clothing. At the inn tonight he would have a bath, he decided. A long bath. Maybe he would just sink under and never come up. Terminal baptism. It was one way to make a fresh start.

When the bell rang downstairs he assumed it was one of the porters, come to make arrangements to take the larger trunks away. Instead of the gruff accents of East London, however, he heard a very familiar voice. The owner of that voice was supposed to be in her bed in Manchester Square, where he had, with considerable nobility (in his opinion) left her, alone.

He tore down the stairs, furious at her for being so reckless. The wild notion that she had come to ask him to take her away with him suddenly took hold of him, and he wondered if he would be able to say no. The thought only redoubled his anger.

What the hell are you doing here?
he started to say as he reached the entry hall. He stopped just in time. It was Serena, of course. In sharp contrast to one of his more recent and more memorable views of her she had virtually no skin or hair visible at all. A very proper bonnet covered all but a few curls; her pelisse was buttoned up to just below her chin; her slender fingers were encased in gloves. She wasn't alone, however. Next to her was a maid. He emended the question slightly. “What are you doing here?” he said harshly.

The maid seemed to be asking the same question. She looked terrified. Vernon wasn't happy, either.

“I came to return this.” Serena drew his pistol out of her reticule. A few tiny square flakes of paper came with it. She looked at the maid. “Emily, wait here for a moment. I need a word with Mr. Clermont in private.”

He took her into the parlor, leaving the doors conspicuously open.

“For God's sake, Serena,” he hissed. “Do you want to be forced into a convent like my mother? Are you mad?”

“Emily won't say anything. I told her my uncle would sack her if he found out I had been here, and he probably would.” Her tone was calm and utterly ruthless.

“What of the pistol? Did anyone see it in your room?” If someone knowledgeable—the earl, for example—had found the very distinctive weapon in his niece's bedroom, he might have to elope with her after all.

She shook her head. “I found it shortly after you left. I told Emily Simon had stolen it from you and I had to get it back to you.”

“You could have sent it round with a footman.”

“No,” she said, still calm. “No, I couldn't. Because I wasn't willing to write down what I'm about to tell you. I thought you should hear it in person.”

“What is it?” He was impatient, nervous. She needed to leave. Her maid could be bribed. Someone might see her coming out of the house. He wasn't expecting her to say anything very important. She had used the pistol as an excuse; she wanted to see him, perhaps; it was only natural. For his part, he had been sternly suppressing fantasies of climbing into her room every night for the rest of his life since leaving at dawn. But one last romantic farewell wasn't worth the risk she was taking.

He was wrong, though. She did have something important to say. She led him into the farthest corner of the room, away from the maid and Vernon and the open door, and said, very quietly, “My uncle isn't your father. He wasn't lying to you.”

He gave her a cold, disbelieving stare.

“Wait; hear me out. You were right as well: you are a Piers. But not my uncle's son. Your father is his cousin, Charles Piers. The boy in the portrait—with the fair hair and dark eyes—you thought it was my uncle, didn't you?”

He had, of course.

“My uncle is the smaller one. His hair was brown when he was a child, and it stayed brown until it began to turn gray. You were looking for the older boy, and you saw two boys, one of whom was taller, the one with fair hair and dark eyes, and you assumed it was my uncle. But Charles was always taller, apparently, even though he was a bit younger. And Charles Piers
was
in France in 1784. He was forced to leave England as a young man and spent most of his life on the continent. When he died recently his diaries were sent to my uncle; supposedly they are very shocking. I was never allowed to see them. He often told people he was the heir to the Bassington earldom. I think he even believed it sometimes; he was sure my uncle was going to die childless. The late earl was constantly paying his debts for him and bribing foreign officials to keep him from going to prison.”

It all made perfect sense. The payments to France that Bassington had never heard of were just another debt taken care of by the exasperated head of the Piers family.

“I'm sorry,” she added gently, “but from what I hear he was not a particularly pleasant person.”

“Like father, like son,” he muttered.

“I tried to see my uncle this morning, to explain that you had, in a sense, been right. You do have a claim on him. You were not inventing something out of whole cloth. But the minute I mentioned your name, he refused to hear me.” She looked down, biting her lip. “You must leave right away. He told me he means to have you arrested.”

He gestured at the piles of luggage in the hallway. “Behold, I hear and obey.”

She held out her hand. “Good-bye, then.”

“Good-bye.” He didn't kiss it. He just held it.

Then she drew it away and a minute later he heard the gentle, implacable sound of the front door closing behind her.

 

 

“It's gone.” Barrett shook his head in disbelief. “I take full responsibility, of course. It was entrusted to me.”

Bassington was thumbing through the papers in the dossier lying on Barrett's desk, examining each one carefully.

“I already went though them,” said a third man. This was Nathan Meyer. “But I suppose it doesn't hurt to have someone else make certain Barrett and I haven't overlooked it somehow.”

“You're certain it was in here?” Bassington asked, still turning sheets over.

“Certain.” Barrett ran his hands through his thinning hair. “I put every single letter, and all the drafts of the replies, into that packet and locked it in the safe. That was about midnight. Then I locked the door of the study and went up to bed. The door was still locked when I came down this morning, and there was no sign anything had been disturbed, until I opened the safe and found the letter missing from the top of the pile in the dossier.”

Meyer got up, crossed over to the door, and knelt by the handle. He stayed there for a moment, pressing and releasing the catch, and then vanished into the side room. “No sign of tampering with either lock,” he said, returning. “Who else in your house has the keys, Barrett?”

“No one! And since the arrival of these letters, both keys have been on my person at all times.”

“I have a key,” Bassington interjected. “But only to the safe, not the room.”

“Where is it?” Meyer said.

The earl patted his waistcoat pocket. “Here.” Then he went back to the papers.

“Quite the little mystery.” Meyer sat down next to Barrett and grimaced. “A very inopportune time for a puzzle of this sort.”

Barrett sighed. “I'll resign, of course. But that isn't the real question. The real question is, who has the letter?”

“I already told you who has it,” muttered Bassington. “That damned French trickster Clermont. I should have had him arrested last night as soon as he confessed his lies.”

“Colonel White has sent someone to keep him under observation,” Barrett said. “It's true one of my footmen saw him near this room on the night of the ball. Suppose he doesn't have it, though. Suppose the thief is someone else. What is he likely to do with it?”

“Sell it,” said Meyer promptly. “That letter would be worth a fortune to either Metternich or Napoleon. Whoever has it can name his price. It's clear proof the Tsar is planning to double-cross Austria once Napoleon formally cedes his eastern territories.”

“No, it isn't clear proof,” said Bassington, looking up from the folder. “It isn't signed.”

Barrett made an impatient gesture. “What of that? We have other letters in the same handwriting on the same subject with the signature appended.”

“Correct,” said the earl. “
We
have them. I've gone through and counted. They're all here. Clermont is missing a crucial piece of evidence. Everyone suspects the Tsar is negotiating with us; an unsigned letter cannot do much more damage than rumor has already. What will Clermont's employers do? Compare the letter with samples from every man in the Russian court they suspect might be acting as the go-between? And, I might add, our man is one of the more unlikely candidates. So far as we know, only my cousin discovered his identity, and he died ensuring that it remain secret.”

Meyer said slowly, “Does anyone know that the letter is missing, Barrett? Besides White and the three of us?”

Barrett thought for a minute. “I asked Crosswell to ascertain if anyone had been seen lurking near the house last night, but I didn't tell him why. What are you thinking?”

“I am thinking that the thief has not read the entire letter carefully. He may not even realize it is not signed. He saw the first paragraph, which admittedly is damning, and grabbed the letter and ran, thinking he had his prize.”

“And?” Bassington said impatiently.

“And, if he has no notion we have discovered the loss, he may come back for more.”

 

 

The luggage was all packed; indeed, everything except a small cloak bag was already in the dispatcher's office at the White Horse Inn, ready to be loaded into a post chaise early tomorrow. Julien should have been in the White Horse Inn as well, sleeping in the very expensive room he had hired for the night. Instead he was halfway across London, his coat collar turned up against the rain, staring at the narrow passageway which ran between Sir Charles Barrett's house and the adjacent one in Harland Place.

This morning, racked with guilt at the wounds he had inflicted on Serena and Simon, he had thought himself cured of the obsession which had ruled his life. He had looked back at his misguided quest to find and confront Bassington and had sworn to forget about the past. Then Serena had appeared and presented him with a new and rather unappetizing candidate for the role of father, and within an hour he was wondering what the man had really been like. By midafternoon he was trying to recall every scrap of information about the mysterious Charles that he could. By dinnertime he was dwelling on the thought of those tantalizing diaries. He even knew where they were, as it happened: they were in Barrett's study. Was it not at least worth attempting to open the window-door with his knife, as Simon had? What if the diaries described his mother? What if this Charles, blackguard though he was, had really loved her? He had spent every night since learning Bassington's name in the belief that his father was an honest, respectable man who had done one bad deed. What if the reverse were true? What if his father was a villain who had briefly dreamed of marrying a good woman? Wasn't that something he ought to know, for his own sake and the sake of the dead man?

He looked around the little cul-de-sac. It was deserted. Moving slowly, he sauntered past the front of Barrett's house. There was still no one in sight. He hesitated one more moment, and then turned into the black gap between the houses.

It was much darker than it had been the other night, and the passage was full of puddles. Rain dripped off the eaves and windowsills on both sides and somehow managed to find the back of his neck. He almost walked past the little window, it was so hard to see anything, but his eye caught the shimmer of glass and he stopped.

He looked up. There were no lights in the upper windows on either side. No lights that he could see at the back of the house, by the kitchen. It was past midnight, after all, on a Sunday night. He felt for the join between the window and the wall and after a few false starts managed to insert his knife into the space. He slid it along, slowly. Nothing happened. Again, in the opposite direction. Still nothing. He tried poking the knife farther in at various intervals. No good. Instead of frustration or disappointment, he realized that what he was feeling was relief. That made him angry. All very well to pursue a father who was a respected statesman, a scholar, a sire to boast of. But now, when it appeared his father was in fact a criminal, he was happy to abandon the search? That was cowardice. Gritting his teeth, he stuck the knife in as far as it would go and dragged it across, scraping his thumb on the stone until it bled.

When the door came open, he was so startled he nearly shut it again as he flinched. The muted click of the spring releasing had been inaudible in the noise of the rain. As before, the side room was dark and silent. He hoisted himself in, this time leaving the outer door open; he didn't want to be locked in again. Quietly, he crept across and opened the door into the study. There were no lights in the hallway outside tonight. He would have to use his small lantern. It took him a minute to get it lit; the wick was a bit damp. Then he swung the light up in a circle, looking around the empty room.