The Water Nymph (9 page)
Authors: Michele Jaffe
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #Romantic Suspense, #Historical Romance, #Mystery & Suspense, #Suspense, #FICTION/Romance/General
Looking down at the paper, Crispin shook his head again. Only a fool would try to bribe the Earl of Sandal with a measly one hundred pounds, and the threats had been as pathetic as the offer. He mentally wished Enterprising Jack and his cronies good luck taking on The Aunts. But the offer did confirm what Crispin had concluded at the Worshipful Hall, that Richard Tottle’s life, as well as his death, was more complicated than it seemed.
Crispin closed his eyes for a moment and pulled up the image he had stored there earlier in the day, the image of Tottle’s register. Crispin had trained himself to make a mental portrait of any face he came across in his undertakings as the Phoenix, and the same skill worked with documents. He could see Tottle’s register in his mind as if it were lying on the desk before him. Scanning its pages mentally, he easily found what he was looking for. There were seven of them, seven names, all of them listed in the register as having paid either one hundred pounds a month or a lump sum of twelve hundred pounds. Perhaps one of them would be more eager to talk than Kipper had been. Crispin had just made up his mind to send each of them a message inviting them for an interview as soon as possible, when he moved his mental eye down the remembered page and saw the last name.
Sophie Champion.
She, too, was listed in Tottle’s register, indeed, hers was the final entry. With a strange tightening in his chest, Crispin had to admit that every corner he turned in this investigation seemed to lead him right back to Sophie Champion.
Her name changed to her face in his mind, and Tottle’s register melted away. Against his will he pictured her as she had been when he left her at Lawrence’s, and against his will he felt an unfamiliar twinge that had to be jealousy. Damn her and her unnerving effect on him. He knew next to nothing about her, and what little he did know, from Elwood, suggested she was a dangerous siren capable of luring men—even possibly her own godfather—to their doom. Yet never before had he had such difficulty concentrating on anything, particularly not anything as crucial as saving his own neck in seven days. Sophie Champion was not even the type of woman he liked. For one thing, she was too smart, too independent, and too irksome. And for another, she was not small and delicate, she did not have hair the color of the finest butter, or breasts that recalled Spanish oranges. She made him feel things—anger, annoyance, and frustration primarily—that he had set aside years ago. Not to mention amusement. Or desire.
There was something completely wrong about his reaction to her, and he was delighted when he hit upon a way of quashing his disturbing impulses and investigating the real nature of her relationship with Lord Grosgrain, simultaneously. First thing the next morning, he would pay a visit to Lord Grosgrain’s widow, the lovely Constantia, who, as the perfect embodiment of a shallow, sweet-tempered, light-haired, orange-breasted sylph, could answer his questions and reinforce his preferences simultaneously. Who knew but that he might not decide to propose to her after all? Then afterward, bolstered by Constantia’s charms and information, Crispin would march back to Pickering Hall and make Sophie Champion answer his questions at last.
But first he needed something for his thirst. Before he could reach for the bellpull to summon Thurston, the man himself materialized, carrying a carafe of burgundy wine in one hand and a small packet in the other.
“Fine work with the tongue,” Crispin commended him, reaching for the carafe and decanting its contents into a silver goblet. “I never would have thought of that myself.”
“Thank you, sir,” Thurston replied, unmoved. Then he extended the packet to Crispin. “This just arrived, sir, by special messenger.”
Crispin swallowed the goblet’s contents in one gulp and took the package. Using a magnifying lens, he closely examined the wax seal, and when he saw it was red and marked with a sundial over which the north star hovered at two o’clock, his thirst was entirely forgotten. “From North Hall,” he announced to Thurston, then added, tapping the seal, “Red book, second volume.”
North Hall was the house of Crispin’s cousin L.N., Lucien North Howard, the Earl of Danford. L.N. was the most mysterious of the six men known throughout Europe as the Arboretti, and the most powerful. Not simply because he was the titular head of the Arboretti—the enormous shipping empire Crispin and his cousins had inherited from their grandfather—but because he was the actual head of Queen Elizabeth’s secret service. Crispin alone of all the Arboretti knew this. Indeed, it was L.N. who had recruited Crispin into Queen Elizabeth’s secret service two and a half years earlier, L.N. who oversaw his missions, L.N. who, in fact, oversaw every branch of Elizabeth’s vast spy network.
Crispin had written to L.N. asking for any information he might have about the Phoenix, and had heard nothing, until now. But when L.N. wrote to Crispin from North Hall it was always about Arboretti affairs, never Phoenix-related, so Crispin knew that this missive was unofficial. The color of the wax, however, indicated that the red cipher had been used, one of their most sophisticated business ciphers, reserved for highly confidential messages. To the naked eye, the message read:
Welcome back. I should have written earlier, but I was at my house in the country. There was a faire in town, or rather half a dozen of them, some blonde, some dark, and two luscious redheads. Twins. I will leave the rest to your imagination, but suffice it to say that I, like Caesar
veni, vidi, vici—
came, saw, and conquered—although he might have had the order wrong. Remember Cecilia? She is married now, the mother of two brave blond boys. My, how the great are fallen. Best wishes, your cousin, L.N
.
Crispin’s study with the magnifying lens had revealed an almost imperceptible shadow of red around the seal, revealing that it had been broken and refastened by an expert before its delivery, and he hoped that whichever of his enemies happened to be skimming his correspondence had enjoyed L.N.’s commentary on conquering the fair sex. For his part, Crispin was much more interested in the punctuation of the seventh sentence and the spelling of the word “faire.” Using these as guides, he consulted volume two of the red cipher and had the message translated in less than ten minutes.
‘“
Bill of Credit found on Richard Tottle’s body signed by Sophie Champion was drawn on Loundes and Wainscot
,’” Crispin read aloud, and then frowned. The bill of credit that Enterprising Jack had offered him in exchange for his silence was also drawn on that bank.
Crispin sat, glowering at the note for a space, then shrugged. It was probably just a coincidence.
“There is no such thing as coincidence,” Lawrence had told his brother, Bull, over a decanter of wine earlier that evening. “Nor luck. Nor destiny. We plow our own paths, Bull. I have told you that a thousand times.”
“Still, you have to admit it was lucky her coming here like that,” Bull had stubbornly asserted for the eighth time.
That had been hours ago, just after the soldiers left, but even now, alone in his office, Lawrence had grudgingly to agree. Indeed, for him it had been a very lucky day. Not only had his cooperation with the Crown in the matter of Sophie Champion versus Regina Britannia earned him five new licenses for gaming houses in the suburbs of London, enabling him to turn his already booming properties there from quiet illegal clubs to bustling places of public resort—he had particularly high hopes for a new place called the Velvet Slipper, where the women overseeing the tables would wear nothing but, yes, velvet slippers—but it had also been more personally gratifying.
He smiled to himself as he thought about the message he had just sent. It was certainly going to make its recipient very, very happy. He was about to ring for another decanter of his best wine, to toast himself and the success of his enterprise, when the panel in the wall behind his chair slid open and a woman came out.
She approached slowly, seeming to float toward him rather than walk, until they were facing each other. She knew he liked to watch her move, liked to watch her compact, lithe figure glide up to him, liked to see her hair, so blond it looked like the finest spun gold, fall between their faces as she dipped down to kiss him. She let him rest the wide palm of his hand against her hip and use it to guide her into his lap.
“Darling, this is a marvelous surprise,” Lawrence said when she was settled there.
“I only have a moment, but I was desperate to see you and find out how everything went this afternoon.” She brought his lips down to cover hers for a moment, then, seductively but firmly, pushed his face away.
Lawrence smiled down at her, his treasure. “Perfectly, my love.”
“You must be delighted.” She took a sugared almond from the bowl on his desk and ran it suggestively down her neck to the embroidered bee at the center of her bodice, drawing his eyes to her flawless breasts.
“I am,” Lawrence said in a voice newly husky, bending to retrieve the almond from its resting place with his tongue. “And I would be still more delighted if you would allow me to marry you right now. Tonight.”
“You know that is impossible, Lawrence,” she chided him as she kissed sugar from his lips.
“Darling, you torture me. May I at least carry you to my bed and make love to you for the next ten hours?”
She reached out her hand to stroke his cheek. “Soon, dearest. Very soon.” She rose from his lap and moved toward the staircase hidden behind the panel. “I wish I could stay tonight, but I really must be off. You know how they will talk at home.”
After a few more entreaties and denials, Lawrence lapped the last grains of sugar from her cleavage and walked her down the stairs to her waiting litter. Ensconced there among the rich velvet pillows, each embossed in gold with her personal emblem, she looked like a goddess of love, the embodiment of wealth and privilege and beauty. The embodiment of all that Lawrence wanted in the world.
“You fool,” the golden-haired woman told Sophie. “You forsook my precepts, and look where it has gotten you.”
“I am sorry,” Sophie said, bowing her head. “I did not mean to, Your Excellence.”
“Your intention does not interest me. It is your actions. You allowed a man to touch you. You kissed him. You enjoyed it. What of the chastity that you swore to me in exchange for your strength?”
“I do not know what happened,” Sophie pled to the angry goddess. “It was out of my control.”
“You mean,” the goddess Diana went on from her golden throne, smirking, “you mean that you lost control. As I knew you would. As I always predicted.”
The goddess’s voice changed now, becoming deeper and thinner, and her face and her throne were covered in shadow. It was as if a large hand had closed over them, obliterating them, but the new voice rang out clearly. “You were wicked. You were wicked and evil, just as I told you, just as—”
“No,” Sophie interrupted.
“We both know what happened that night, what you did,” the thin voice whispered in Sophie’s ear. “I will tell everyone.”
“No,” Sophie begged. “No, please. I didn’t—”
“Save your pathetic protests,” the voice went on. “No one will believe you. You are nothing, nothing at all. I hold your life in my hand.” Sophie felt a hand at the waist of her gown, where Octavia had made the secret pocket, and then saw a small, gold disk flash before her eyes. “I have this,” the voice went on. “It is all the proof I need. You cannot escape me. I love you.”
“No,” Sophie cried again, this time stridently. “NO!” she shouted, shouted with so much force, so much strength, that she jolted herself awake, jolted herself out of her nightmare.
It took her a moment to figure out where she was and what had happened. She shivered as she looked around her, the thin streak of dusty morning light that entered the cell barely adequate to illuminate its four rough walls and dirt floor. But it was enough to show that the space was empty, that Sophie was alone, that the voices had been part of a dream. Her breathing slowed as this thought seeped in, but her hand was unsteady as she reached for the small pocket in her gown.
Her fingers slipped in and her heart stopped. The pocket was empty. The medal was gone.
There had been someone in her cell with her after all. He had been there. The conversation was real. It was not a dream, not even a nightmare. It was much, much worse.
“No,” she said aloud, her voice uneven. “No.” She steadied herself against the stone wall as she rose to her feet, horror overtaking the numbness that had filled her since the previous night. Indeed, she was so overwrought that she did not hear the soft thud of the medal falling from her skirt to the dirt floor. But from the corner of her eye she saw the gleam of gold as it landed on its edge in the anemic beam of sunlight, and she had retrieved it with unsteady fingers before it could settle in the dust. It lay in her palm, the goddess Diana, goddess of the moon, of the hunt, and of chastity, seated on a throne, with a hawk seated next to her. It was the only memento she had left of her past, the only reminder of her former life, her former self.
She rarely let herself think about her life before the fire, before her parents died, before… before everything changed. She chose to blot out all memories of her past uniformly, in an effort to keep the horrible ones at bay. But as she stood in the dreary cell, feeling more alone than she had in years, recollections from her childhood came flooding back to her. Sophie recalled how her beautiful mother used to chastise—but not punish—her when, instead of paying attention to the details of household economy, she had buried herself in her brother Damon’s mathematical texts. A shudder went through Sophie as she remembered the happy hours she spent with her brother, teaching him the rudiments of algebra or the latest mathematical theories out of Italy, providing him with easy translations of famous Greek texts and simple explanations of complicated proofs, so he had more time to indulge in his real love, making foulsmelling, goopy substances in a shed he called his laboratory.
But as interesting as the math texts were to Sophie, her father’s ledgers were even more fascinating. She remembered poring over them, trying to understand why prices fluctuated and how you could invest in a crop that would not exist for ten months and turn an enormous profit in five. When she was thirteen, she secretly instructed her father’s agent to use the hundred pounds she had been left by her grandmother for her dowry to buy shares in a mining company. The hundred turned to five hundred, then a thousand, and by the time of the fire, when she was fifteen, she had amassed a personal fortune of five thousand pounds, more than many a nobleman’s entire holdings.
After the fire and the nightmare that followed it, the five thousand pounds in gold that Sophie had carefully buried in an iron box in the garden was all she had in the world, that and the medal of Diana. She opened her palm now to study it and was almost sure that Diana was smirking at her.
You are a fool
, the goddess seemed to be saying, as she had in the dream, and Sophie had to agree with her. Only a fool would have fallen for the Earl of Sandal. Only a fool would have trusted him.
Sophie jammed the medal into the small opening at her waist, cursing the smirking goddess, cursing the Earl of Sandal, cursing, above all, herself. As she began pacing her small, bare cell, she tried to decide which was more unpleasant, the physical pain of hunger or the equally gut-wrenching emotional pain of betrayal. Not betrayal by Sandal, that would have been no match for hunger. No, what was making her suffer so forcefully was her betrayal of herself.
In the dim light of her dismal cell, it was all so clear, the earl’s mockery and contempt, his trickery and deceit. There was no question that he had saved her as a prank and had been planning to turn her over to the Queen’s guards all along. They had said as much when they arrested her, quoting his words back to her, letting her hear them as if for the first time. It was then that she realized she had allowed herself, even willed herself, to be misled, then that she saw what she had resolutely overlooked, only then, when it was painfully clear that he had set her up.
And she had played right into it. She had been grateful, damn it, absolutely grateful. All that time she had looked at him with new respect he was laughing at her, and sending her to her death. With this realization, Sophie felt her embarrassment give way to anger. She may have behaved like an utter brainless aphid, but he had no right to toy with her. Only someone with the heart of a bristlebug would treat a fellow being like that. It was inhumane, and cruel, and undeserved.
“Bastard,” she said aloud, half wishing the numbness would return. The comments of the guards the night before about readying herself for a speedy visit to the gallows suggested that she had little time, but she would use what little remained. Her opponents had been thorough, very thorough, in their attempt to frame her for Richard Tottle’s murder, but there had to be some loose thread, someplace where their plan was likely to unravel. Something nagged at Sophie, and she cast her mind over the events at the Unicorn and at Sandal Hall afterward, until she found it.
The gun. Her gun. It was always kept in the library at Hen House, on a shelf with other gifts given to her in gratitude for her help. Surely it could not have been removed without someone—Octavia or Emme or Annie or Richards or one of the other servingwomen—noticing. With this thought, Sophie felt positively triumphant because she saw a way to foil her enemies. Whoever had stolen the gun either was, or knew who was, Tottle’s murderer. All Sophie had to do to learn that person’s identity was send a note to Hen House asking who had visited her library and what, if anything, they had taken.
Which, she realized with a renewal of the sinking feeling, was tantamount to saying that all she had to do was find a way to walk through the wall, fly over the city of London, and spot the murderer by dint of some funny glow given off by his guilt. Because her cell did not contain so much as a chamber pot (which she sorely needed), let alone a scrap of paper, a dab of ink, or a messenger to carry a note. She knew that money could buy her all those things, but she had none, her purse having been lost in the pointless scuffle with the guards on Pickering’s Highway. Or, perhaps it had not been pointless. Perhaps that had been its point. In any event, she had nothing of value at all. Except the medal.
Sophie once again placed it on the palm of her hand to study it. She had scrupulously carried it with her for eleven years, the only piece of her past she possessed. And now, it was also her only link to the future. Sophie ran her thumb over it once, lovingly, then moved to the solid plank door of her cell, put her mouth close to the seam where it joined the wall, and yelled, “Guard!”
Sophie had some difficulty persuading the man to accept her commission. If he had known then what he discovered later that night when the tall man approached him at the tavern, that the strange medal with the naked woman and a bird was worth four hundred pounds in real gold, he would not have hesitated for a moment. As it was, he finally agreed, returning as the clock outside the prison chimed ten, with an ample basket of food, and a scrap of paper.
Sophie read the note first, and immediately lost her appetite. “Lord Grosgrain borrowed your pistol,” the paper said. “There have been no other visitors to the library.”
Crispin knew something was wrong long before he crossed the threshold of Pickering Hall at half past eleven that morning. His uneasiness had started much earlier, when he awoke after only three hours of troubled sleep. Sophie—what she knew, who she was—had taken over not only his waking thoughts but also his dreams. His mind kept revolving around Sophie, Sophie cheating at dice, Sophie smiling, Sophie frowning, Sophie arguing, Sophie speaking French, Sophie speaking Spanish, Sophie kissing him, Sophie in a mustache, Sophie with Lawrence, Sophie blackmailing her godfather. He wanted to go to her immediately, but he knew the longer he stayed away from her, the better off they would both be. Right now he could not think clearly about her at all, and clarity was what he required most. Constantia would provide the perfect antidote to all this, he knew, but somehow, despite his decision the previous night, he could not bring himself to go and see her.
In his uneasiness he had resolved to skip his visit to Grosgrain Place, but before he had passed by its polished doors, he heard a heart-stopping shriek from inside and a sound like breaking glass. Dismounting in a hurry, he had rushed into the entrance hall, then mounted the stairs until he found the source of the screaming.
Constantia, beautiful in a sapphire blue silk robe, was standing stiffly beside a fiery-orange divan, staring with horror at a collection of pastries scattered at her feet. A plate lay in shatters on the floor around the divan, and as Crispin reached the open door of the room, he saw Constantia stomp on one of the pastries, reducing it to crumbs.
“I told you I never wanted to see these again, Nan,” she wailed at a trembling serving girl standing on her right.
Nan bowed her head. “But cook says, ma’am, as how he don’t want to make any new cakes, since it would be a pity to waste all these beautiful meringues—”
Constantia gave a kick and sent a meringue skidding across the floor into the far wall. “Tell the cook his opinion is of no interest to me. I instructed him to destroy these and I demand that it is done at once. At once!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Nan replied, bending to collect the offending pastries in her apron. “Yes, ma’am,” she repeated, brushing past Crispin and hurrying out the door.
Having discovered that no one was being murdered, Crispin had decided to sneak away before he was recognized and proceed to Sophie, but he was too late. Constantia saw him standing in the doorway and appealed to him with outstretched arms.
“Crispin, darling, when did you come in?” she said, her voice soft now, her face no longer a mask of fury.
“I heard shouts from the street, and I feared for your life,” he explained, not moving from the threshold. “But now that I see you are all right—”
Constantia ran to him and threw herself into his arms. “Crispin, I am nothing like all right. Milton’s death has completely destroyed me.” She pressed her face into the silver lining of his doublet, so that her golden hair tickled his chin. “Oh, Crispin, hold me, hold me like you used to. Let me lose myself, my grief, in your arms like I did before.”
Crispin kept his eyes glued to the table clock behind Constantia, which said a quarter past ten, as she sobbed into his doublet. They were still standing like that, her pressed against him, him monitoring the hands of the clock, when a tall, fair young man burst into the room.
“Tia,” he said with alarm. “Tia, what is it? What is wrong?”
Constantia withdrew herself from Crispin and turned to the newcomer. “Basil, they did it again. They brought meringues again. And you know how they remind me of your father, of everything I have lost, of…” Constantia swallowed hard to keep back the tears that glittered in the corner of her sapphire eyes. Then, noticing the way Basil was eyeing her companion, she stepped forward to make introductions. “Basil, this is my dear friend and our neighbor, the Earl of Sandal.” She turned to Crispin. “Crispin, this is Basil, my stepson, now Lord Grosgrain.”
The young man clearly did not like Crispin, but Crispin was delighted to see him, because it meant he could leave the comforting to someone else and get on with his business. Before he could take his leave, however, Constantia pled with him to stay “just a little longer” and steered him onto the orange divan next to her.
Crispin’s eyes flickered in a continual relay between Constantia’s beautiful face and the face of the clock, ticking off the time, time he was not spending with Sophie. He did not initially notice how tightly Constantia was gripping his hand, or how closely she was pressed up against him, or how often she directed her comments, and her lovely smile, in his direction. When a constable was shown in at just before eleven, he tried to rise and leave, but almost instantly sank back down into the chaise. This was due not, as Constantia thought, to a certain pressure she was exerting on his thigh but rather to the constable’s announcement that he was there to ask questions about Miss Sophie Champion.
