Agent of the Crown (17 page)

She controlled a shudder and kept her eyes
downcast, hoping she looked demure and not repulsed. Much as she
was reluctant to try to manipulate the man, it might be useful to
let him believe his bizarre “courtship,” or whatever he thought he
was doing, was successful. Though after her discovery, she
really
wondered at his sexual preferences.

The Baron escorted her down the stairs,
chatting pleasantly as she tried hard not to picture him bound,
spread-eagled, with the iron manacles she’d seen under his bed. If
that’s how he liked his…ew, those red lips glistening,
stop
thinking about it before you go blind.
It was none of her
business what he did in private. Surely he wouldn’t trust a servant
to pleasure him, but Morgan? She hadn’t gotten the sense that the
darkly handsome man was oriented that way, especially since he was
paying so much attention to her. Maybe she couldn’t read him as
well as she’d thought. She managed to say her obsequious goodbyes
and get all the way down the drive to the main road before
laughing.

Summer turned to
autumn. Across the valley, the few deciduous trees turned the hills
butter yellow, fire red, dotting the evergreens like bits of
colored paper strewn across a giant’s lawn. To the south, geese
honked their distant cries as they arrowed across the brilliant
blue sky.

Telaine was drawn into the excitement
surrounding the upcoming marriage of Trey Richardson and Blythe
Bradford, to be celebrated with something called a shivaree. Sarah
Anderson, Aunt Weaver’s younger apprentice, explained this was a
party and dance and concert all in one. It was all anyone in
Longbourne wanted to talk about, but to Telaine it was simply a
distraction from the task she felt was failing at.

She made the trip down mountain to Ellismere
every three weeks, reporting on the progress she wasn’t making. She
still hadn’t gotten into the Baron’s study; she still hadn’t
explored the fort. On her second visit to Ellismere, she received
an immediate response to her message reminding her that her time
was short, that the mountain passes would be snowed in shortly
before Wintersmeet and she would be unable to communicate anything
she
did
find. There wasn’t a rebuke hidden in the hidden
message, but Telaine felt it all the same.

She was called up to the manor at least twice
a week, and her one great pleasure was being able to work on the
Baron’s curio collection, despite her impatience at not being able
to explore. But eight weeks after arriving in Longbourne, she got
her chance.

The Baron welcomed her at the door, as was
his custom after that second visit, but he was distracted. “Morgan
and I are needed at the fort,” he said. “Some ridiculous supply
problem. You can manage on your own, Miss Bricker?”

“Of course, milord,” she said, bowing. She
had to work hard to conceal her excitement beneath an expression of
pleased disinterest. Morgan joined the Baron on the doorstep, his
head lifted as if sniffing something on the cool breeze. Early
autumn in the mountains was still warm, but the crisp smell of the
air told Telaine winter was coming. Morgan turned to look at
Telaine with his pointed smile. His eyes were disturbingly intent
on her. He’d come to fetch her a few times, always without a spare
mount, always maneuvering her to clutch him tightly, and despite
her initial suspicions about him and the Baron, Telaine was now
certain he had a sexual interest in her.

She met his eyes with innocent unconcern. His
obsession might be countered for a while by her pretense at not
understanding what he wanted, drawing out whatever game he was
playing, but at some point Telaine was going to have to do
something drastic. She wished she knew what.

A groom led two horses around to the front
door. One was Morgan’s and the other was an indifferent gray mare,
not a bad horse, but suffering by comparison to Morgan’s elegant
bay. The Baron mounted and gave her a wave of dismissal, his
attention already on the fort. Morgan fixed her with a long,
intimate stare before following.

Telaine went inside, allowing the servants to
close the front door behind her. She looked around. No other
servants near. She decided to lay the foundation for her snooping
rather than go straight for the study, and went up the stairs into
the curio room. Her job today was to repair the self-focusing
binoculars, although she had no idea what the Baron used them for.
Watching non-existent birds in trees far too close to require
long-distance vision, perhaps?

She cradled the exquisite Device, brass
wrapped in leather with finely-ground glass lenses, then left the
room and, ostentatiously sniffing, went back down the hall. She
encountered no one; she kept on playing her part anyway.
Always
assume you have an audience.

She made a show of going into each room in
the southeast hall, admiring the billiards table, wrinkling her
nose at the trophy heads. Still no one. Where were all the
servants, anyway? She almost never saw the same servants twice. It
must be hard, working for the Baron.

The study door was locked. Telaine glanced
both ways, tucked the binoculars under her arm, took her lock picks
out of her boot, and worked at the lock until it clicked. It took
far too long. She was falling out of practice.

The study was as she’d seen it before: desk,
chair, bookshelves, drinks table. None of the drawers in the desk
were locked, a bad sign. She went through all of them quickly but
thoroughly. No correspondence from Harroden, no records of
mysterious shipments. She closed the last drawer, looked around the
room, and thought.

The room had been locked. The Baron had
things in here he didn’t want disturbed. Things he didn’t want out
in the open, even if the open was a desk drawer. Telaine checked
the bookshelves, ponderous things of oak with gilded finials that
looked like they could kill a man if they fell on him, though that
would mean getting them to move at all. They were thoroughly
dusted, so she wouldn’t find any suspiciously clean books marking a
hiding spot.

She surveyed the shelves, hoping she wouldn’t
have to check every single book in the room. Grandmama Alison the
Royal Librarian would have been able to cast her expert eye on the
collection and tell exactly how many there were. Telaine had to
settle for “a lot.”

There. Something had caught her attention,
something so subtle her conscious brain hadn’t noticed it. She
scanned back over the shelves. A hair, a short, fine brown hair,
lay lengthwise across two books as if it had been overlooked by the
maid in her vigorous dusting.

Telaine grinned.
My dear Baron, if you’re
going to employ this old trick, you shouldn’t let your maids be so
thorough.
She gently laid the hair well to one side and lifted
out one of the books, checking first to make sure it
had
been thoroughly dusted. Leaving her finger marks behind would be
bad.

Inside the front cover lay a handful of
folded letters. Telaine removed them one by one and scanned their
contents. Ah, the letters from Harroden. Naturally there would only
be one half of the conversation here. They were sorted in
chronological order, oldest first.

The first was noncommittal, free of details,
just some general hand-wringing about having to do favors for the
Baron. The second was more interesting. Harroden had developed a
spine and—
so
that’s
what hold the Baron has on him.
Harroden was a seqata addict. That explained why he’d been so quick
to suspect her at the ball and probably why he was working with the
Veriboldan rebels, since the plant grew abundantly in Veribold. It
altered the body at the cost of the mind—built muscle, improved
heart and lung function, but made the user paranoid and manic by
turns, eventually to the point of total psychosis.

Harroden claimed in this letter that he
didn’t care if Steepridge revealed his “little problem.” He must
have been in the irrational stage of the drug to say anything like
that; seqata addiction could ruin his social standing and get him
stuck in a forced rehabilitation hospital. That was part of her
assignment fulfilled. Telaine moved on.

The third letter. Harroden repented of his
earlier outburst and fawned over the Baron, promising anything he
wanted if he’d only keep his secret. Telaine thought briefly of
young Roger Chadwick, whose father was going to ruin both their
lives. Harroden, the idiot, laid out all the details of his
industrial connections and royal appointments and how he could
abuse them for Steepridge’s sake.

Telaine was disgusted at the man’s belly-up
toadying. She wished she dared steal these letters, but her word
swearing to their existence and contents would have to do. The word
of an agent of the Crown was supposed to be equal to evidence in
court, but she’d never seen it tried. With luck, her uncle’s
soldiers would be able to retrieve these when they finally arrested
the Baron.

The fourth letter referred in a more general
way to “shipments” the way the letters she’d found in Harroden’s
study had, but the fifth letter referred to a shipment that was
“the fourth part” of something bigger. The letter was written in
response to a probably infuriated letter of the Baron’s, because
Harroden came across as even more spineless and toadying than in
the other letters. It seemed the shipment had been damaged in
transit and Harroden promised not only to replace it, but to
increase the rate of the other shipments.

Still no mention of what those other
shipments were. The one Harroden and the Baron had discussed had
involved weapons, but Harroden had fingers and a couple of toes in
so many pies it would be foolish to assume that was all Harroden
was shipping him, especially since Harroden had access to so many
other, more valuable trade goods.

Telaine put the letters back exactly as she’d
found them, replaced the book and the hair, then stared a moment at
the heavy desk. Something didn’t seem right about this. She needed
to find out what the Baron was receiving from Harroden, which would
tell her whether he was smuggling goods for his own use or
reselling them elsewhere. Barony Highton adjoined Steepridge to the
west and was as cut off from the plains as Steepridge during the
winter; there’d be a good market for trade goods there.
Silverfield, where her Aunt Catherine was Baroness, was also a
possibility, though less likely, given that winter would cut that
trade route off for almost six months. The chances of the Baron
bringing in supplies to help provision Thorsten Keep out of the
goodness of his heart were vanishingly small. At any rate, she’d
learned enough to know she should look elsewhere for further
information.

She checked to make sure she hadn’t left any
traces of her presence, such as her own hairs, then left and
crouched to relock the door, far too slowly. She needed more
practice.

She’d just made the lock click back into
place when someone said, “What are you doing there?” She concealed
the lock picks in her sleeve and turned slowly, not a trace of
guilt anywhere on her.

She waved the binoculars at the maid who had
addressed her. “Looking for a source to imbue this,” she said. “I
think I smell one in there, but it’s locked. I don’t suppose you
have a key?”

“Milord’s got the keys,” the woman, a plump
lady in her thirties, said. “You best not poke around there. That’s
himself’s study and he don’t like it over much when we do.”

“Oh. Well, that’s all right, I’ll find
another one. Happen he’ll let me use it when he’s back.” Telaine
smiled and saluted the woman, who shrugged and proceeded down the
hall toward the front doors. Wait. The woman had been between
Telaine and the near end of the hall, but Telaine knew she hadn’t
passed her, and the only other door at this end of the hall was
directly behind her.

Telaine approached the end of the hall and
looked at the paneling, which looked like all the rest of the manor
walls, but on inspection proved to be cheap pine stained and
distressed to look expensive. Behind it lay steep, narrow stairs
going up and down. Servants’ stairs. Now that she was paying
attention, she could smell something cooking. She decided to
investigate the ground floor.

The narrow, uncarpeted stairs led down to a
hallway that turned sharply to the right. The smell of food was
stronger now, boiled vegetables and roasted pork and chicken broth
mixed with spices. The air hummed with movement and the murmur of
pots boiling.

Telaine poked her head around the corner and
saw two giant ranges, each twice the size of Aunt Weaver’s stove,
fire glowing behind their grates. Slabs of six-inch-thick oak,
scarred with cuts and burns, lined the walls between them, and
another took up the center of the vast room, bristling with blocks
of knives and a rack of carving forks. Women in dark dresses and
brown aprons hurried between counter and pot, fireplace and stove.
One small girl stood on a stepstool in front of a sink big enough
for her to sit in, scrubbing a china platter.

“What are you doing here?” said an elderly
woman with a loud voice who was standing at the central counter.
She came toward Telaine, wiping her hands on her apron. “This place
is off limits.”

“I’m sorry to intrude, but I was following a
source for this,” Telaine lied, holding up the binoculars.

The woman eyed them with suspicion. “Don’t
know what that means.”

“I’m a Deviser. I’m fixing the Baron’s
Devices. This one needs…it’s a kind of energy Devices run on. I can
smell the source down here.”

“Surprised you can smell anything but roast
chicken,” the woman said, her face still filled with suspicion.

“I’m sorry to have bothered you.” Telaine
turned to go.

“You from Ellismere?” the woman asked.