Blackstone's Bride (22 page)

“Did he say anything of value to our search for your brother?” Blackstone put out his hand to assist her back into her carriage.

“I believe he did.” She did not take his hand.

He understood her at once. There was just a delay while his brain adjusted to the position she’d put him in.

“I believe she has you in a bind, Blackstone,” Hazelwood commented.

Blackstone continued to look at Violet. He recognized the flashing eyes, the dusky hair, and that haughty mouth, but she was not the girl he had seen again for the first time a week earlier. The pistol in her hand did not waver.

“You need me, you see,” said Violet. “I believe that we have unfinished business. There is an established mode that governs declarations of love.”

“Did I make a declaration of love?”

“You did. You distinctly said that no matter how hard you tried not to that you did love me.”

“What did I leave out?”

“Your request for my hand in marriage.”

“Violet, you are wearing my ring.”

“It’s paste, however, and no declaration accompanied the placing of the ring upon my finger.”

They faced each other in the shadowy portico under the scaffolding. His companions looked on. Trust Violet to take charge and push him to make his proposal before two of the most dissolute men in England. Above them the usual activity of Goldsworthy’s workers continued. The coach horses snuffled and blew and swished their tales. Idle passersby glanced at the fine carriage. Blackstone’s feet were planted firmly on stone, and yet he felt as if he’d been jerked aloft in one of Rodriguez’s balloons, loosed to ride vagrant currents of the air. For a moment he had no name for the unfamiliar feeling. Then it came back to him.
Happiness
.

“I love you, Violet. Will you marry me?”

“Yes, thank you, Blackstone, I will. Shall we go after Frank? I’ve brought a vehicle that can accommodate us all if you feel there is strength in numbers.”

Blackstone stood rooted to the spot, momentarily unable to answer as he mastered the desire to seize Violet in a crushing embrace.

“Well then.” Hazelwood stepped forward. “Clare will drive. I will ride on the box. Coachman, may we borrow your cape?”

A very few minutes were consumed in making changes and taking their places before Clare set the horses in motion.

Violet began to interrogate her love at once. “Why does the countess want to meet you?”

“To tidy up loose ends. They suspect that I know too much. They believe they have already killed you.”

“In the balloon. Cahul? We always believed he knew no English.”

“A convenient ruse.”

“Have they killed Frank?”

He reached over and squeezed her hands. “We don’t know. If the countess is waiting for me at the rendezvous, she can’t be where Frank is, and likely she’s not alone.”

“They’ll take care of you first, then Frank?”

“That’s my hope.”

She elbowed him in the side.

“Well, not the hope, but if the plan is to dispose of me first, and they don’t, we have a chance to save Frank.”

“Cahul says they have kept Frank in a derelict tea warehouse belonging to someone named Waring.”

“Wilde was right.”

The countess had named a churchyard near the docks for their meeting place. When they could see the church’s white tower from the highway, Clare pulled up, and Hazelwood leapt down to help Violet from the carriage. She turned to Blackstone and pulled him to her by the lapels of his coat and kissed him with all the fierceness of her passionate nature. It took a moment to recover his senses.

“I cannot lose you again.”

Chapter Twenty

“But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence.”

—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

Blackstone drew the carriage up where his arrival might be seen from the open churchyard with its crisscrossing paths and bare chestnut trees, in bloom with spikes of pale creamy blossoms. He could see the countess in one of her distinctive gowns huddled on a granite slab where a few tall headstones clustered on the south side of the church.

Lichen-covered monuments, crumbling low walls, and gnarled tree trunks suggested places where her companions might find concealment. Blackstone kept himself in the open and took his time crossing the lawn. Hazelwood, Clare, and Violet would follow and find their own hidden vantage to watch his meeting with the lady.

The countess saw him, and, as if on cue, started up from her dejected pose, a picture of a woman welcoming her rescuer. “Thank goodness you’ve come,” she told him, extending her hands to him, and clutching his as if she depended on him to pull her from the Thames.

Mud and grass stained her cloak and her hem, and bits of thread hung where one of her usual velvet cord bands had come off. Two of the heavy bands remained.

Blackstone made a concerned face and held her at a distance. “Dear countess, what’s happened?”

She turned tear-washed eyes up to him. “I have done a very brave thing, which I will tell you soon, but you must help me.”

“Of course, how?”

“You see I don’t wish to return to Moldova. I should never have let them marry me off to Alexi, and now that I am here and I see how English women live, I want to stay in England. You will arrange it, yes? You will be my protector, is that what they say?”

“You wish to leave your friends and separate yourself from your countrymen?”

“Yes.” She gave an emphatic nod. “They leave soon, but if I had a position here, I could stay. I am a wretched countess. I could be a happy waiting woman.” She leaned towards him so that her bosom pressed against their clasped hands.

“Not many women would give up marriage and a title for so modest a circumstance.”

“Oh, how can I convince you? I was so sure you would understand. You are a sympathetic man, no?” She pulled free of his hold and reached in the silk bag dangling from her arm.

It was too small and light for a pistol, but Blackstone nerved himself nonetheless. She pulled out no weapon, but a scrap of a lace handkerchief. She pressed the lace just below her eyes, so that he could see the silver tears shining against the blue. It was cleverly done. He suspected that two men had seen that bit of treacherous feminine helplessness just before they died.

Her lip trembled. She hiccupped, and with a smile she straightened her spine. “You will see, Lord Blackstone. I have done this brave thing to prove myself to you.”

“Dear lady, you have nothing to prove. I am only concerned for your honor.”

A quizzical look passed in her eyes. He had not offered the anticipated line, and it had thrown her off. She glanced over her shoulder briefly, just enough to give Blackstone a hint of where her hidden partner might be. He tilted his head to the left to indicate to Hazelwood and Clare where to look.

The next instant she recovered. Her hand came out to touch his sleeve. “You must let me tell you the brave thing I have done.”

He nodded.

“I have found Miss Hammersley’s missing brother.”

Blackstone did not have to feign surprise. “Missing? I thought Frank was merely delayed.”

“I overheard my countrymen plot against him. I listen well until I learn where it is they keep him. Here near the river. Today when they are sleeping from the ball, I go. I free him and hide him.”

It was a preposterous tale, impossible to credit. There was not an honest breath in the woman’s body. As she looked up at him, he noted again the missing cord from her hem.

“You need the foreign secretary’s help then, not mine.”

Her lids came down briefly over the startlingly blue eyes. “But you are with the government, are you not? That is why you can help me.”

“I have some connections with the government.” He wondered how much she knew. It did not bode well for Frank if the Moldovans had seen through their ruse.

“You frighten me, Lord Blackstone. I told him I would bring you here, only you, so he would be safe.”

“I would like to see Frank.”

“You must agree to help me, to keep me with you, so that Alexi cannot hurt me ever again.”

That he could agree to. He imagined separate prison cells for each of them. He nodded.

The countess climbed a sunken granite slab and waved her lace handkerchief towards the trees at the far end of the churchyard. A man emerged from the dappled shade and strolled towards them.

One minute he thought Frank Hammersley was walking towards him through the green churchyard, and the next moment he knew it was not Frank. The clothes were Frank’s, but it was the count who wore them. In the same instant the countess was on him from behind. A velvet cord passed over his head and dug into his throat, and he felt the countess twist at his back, so that her shoulders pressed against him.

Instead of pulling against the cord, he shoved back hard with long strides, using his legs and his weight to unbalance her and force her into a stumbling run. She did not let go of the choking cord, but she could not keep it taut without his resistance.

The count shouted and began to run towards him, and from behind him two pistols fired, almost simultaneously.

The countess stumbled and went down. Blackstone let himself fall with her. He heard the harsh exhalation as the wind was knocked out of her. The cord went slack round his neck. He pulled free of it and rolled off of her. She writhed on the grass, her face livid, trying to recover breath.

The count turned and began to hobble away. Clare sprinted after and brought the man down. Blackstone looked for Violet. She was coming across the grass toward him with swift, eager steps, her little pistol in her hand.

He opened his arms and folded her in them. “I knew it was not Frank, but I wasn’t quick enough to fire before she sprang.”

Blackstone sent Hazelwood a look of gratitude.

“Nothing to it. I shot all my father’s birds as a boy.”

While Blackstone directed two pistols at the count and countess and Clare and Hazelwood secured the prisoners in the carriage, Violet reloaded her gun.

Hazelwood chuckled as he used the countess’s cords to bind their feet. Her face was a cold porcelain mask, a purple bruise forming along her jaw. “You will not defeat us,” she warned. “It is you who will suffer.” The count silenced her with a harsh sentence in that other tongue. Clare mounted the carriage box, and drove off.

* * *

Lord Chartwell read with growing irritation the report from Samuel Goldsworthy. The man was cursed, cheeky, and damned secretive. The worst thing about Goldsworthy was that he got results without ever letting his superiors know the state of his investigations. One was supposed to wait and trust in Goldsworthy’s mysterious methods no matter how one’s own superiors frowned.

Chartwell found his patience particularly thin in the matter of dead agents and missing sums of money to the tune of a hundred thousand pounds. Nothing in Goldsworthy’s report of visits to hat shops, theaters, beekeepers, and balls seemed likely to produce the essential result.

Lord Chartwell’s secretary interrupted as Chartwell stood at the window considering whether he could prod more definite information out of the laughing green man.

“Sir, there’s a woman to see you. She refuses to leave.”

Chartwell frowned at his secretary. The man was paid to deal with anything that might disturb Chartwell’s day.

“She says to tell you that Frank Hammersley sent her.”

Chartwell spun from the window. “Frank Hammersley?”

His secretary nodded.

“Send her in. Find some tea or coffee.”

Chartwell glanced at the state of his office. It would do. He removed a red dispatch box from his desk and put it out of sight on the floor.

The woman his secretary ushered in was perhaps forty and extraordinarily handsome, a great beauty. Even Lord Chartwell, who ordinarily dismissed such qualities in his fellow human beings, felt the effect of the woman’s striking looks. There was something familiar in her smile, and he thought he might have seen her somewhere before, but dismissed the notion. She stood with quiet dignity, her hands gripping a rust and gold tapestry carpetbag, the unfashionable but practical device of ordinary travelers.

“I have something I believe you are looking for, Lord Chartwell.”

Her English was impeccable, but still there was an accent. Again a sense that he should recognize her struck him.

Chartwell did not at first realize she meant the bag, but when she lifted it, he gestured to his secretary to help her.

“You’ll want to open it at once and count the money,” she said.

Chartwell signaled his secretary to place the bag on his desk. He opened it and found himself looking at neat bundles of Spanish banknotes. Lord Chartwell felt that perhaps the lower part of his jaw was no longer attached to the upper.

“How? Frank Hammersley, you say?”

She smiled. “Your countryman did me a great service.” She shrugged.

“My countryman?” Chartwell was certainly puzzled.

“Lord Blackstone. He ransomed my son from the bandit, Vasiladi.”

Blackstone
. The name brought it all back. That painting. Chartwell had not seen the actual thing, but he’d never forgotten the parodies that had appeared in the print shops for months, the lovely woman wearing nothing but her smile. No wonder she had been familiar and unfamiliar at once.

He felt himself reddening at the thought of the painting and tried to recover a professional air. He cleared his throat. “Madame
you
have done a very great service to his majesty’s government, is there any way we may do you a service in return?”

She smiled
. That smile
. Almost Chartwell thought that he had blundered in his offer.

“
Sí.
There is something you can do. It would be a great kindness.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Do not give way to useless alarm . . . though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.

—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

Waring & Sons Bonded Tea warehouse was out of the way at the end of a huddled row of derelict buildings with rubbish piled against fire-blackened brick walls. The bustle of the docks ended abruptly where the sloping rutted road turned to the river. Trade had moved elsewhere.

It was midday, but the window openings of the burned-out brick building gaped like sightless eyes, except where they glowed a lurid red like the grate of an iron stove. Violet felt her heartbeat falter and start again. The building was on fire, and she had every reason to believe that Frank was inside in some form of captivity. In the general reek of the neighborhood, where furnaces burned condemned cargoes, no alarm had been raised. No fire bells clanged.

Blackstone’s grip on her wrist held her in place in the shadows opposite the structure. His gaze scanned the building and the deserted street that led to the river.

“We don’t know Frank is in there,” he told her.

“But if he is?”

“We get him out, but we’ve still the rest of the prince’s party unaccounted for.”

“How many?” Hazelwood asked.

“Maybe three or more. Dubusari and any bully boys he’s hired. If the valet and chef are in on it, they’re likely managing some conveyance to make their escape.” Blackstone glanced at the river. Violet could see the top of a flight of stone steps at the edge of the vast muddy roll of waters gleaming dully in the spring light. “Easy enough to head down the Thames to catch a ship putting out to sea.”

Blackstone’s gaze narrowed, and Violet followed his lead. Towards the river at the bottom of the building’s southwest corner, a dark green door stood open, a heavy chain hanging from its iron door pull.

She heard Hazelwood chuckle. “Does your villain think we’re idiots, Blackstone? He leaves the door open and might as well put up a sign—‘Come on in, dearies, I’ve set a sweet trap for you.’”

“It looks that way, but Dubusari’s not expecting us. He’s expecting the count and countess with a report of my demise. But his fire is burning too slowly. The open roof has let in the heavy rains and dampened the timbers. Opening the door is like opening a flue in a chimney.”

“Where’s Frank then?” Violet felt the hard restraint of Blackstone’s hand. She knew he was right that they needed to be patient and cautious, but her heart was beating madly at the thought of Frank trapped in a fire.

“I’ve an idea, Blackstone. Let me go up the stairs to spring the trap, if it is a trap, while you two go around along the river’s edge.”

While Blackstone and Hazelwood debated the plan, Violet studied the building. It was four stories tall and shaped like an L with the long wing extending to a rounded end like the stern of a ship above the river embankment. The glow of the flames seemed strongest on the topmost floor right in the center of the long wing. At either end of the building, the windows had their lifeless gray aspect. She tugged Blackstone’s sleeve and reported what she saw, asking him what it meant.

He squeezed her hand in his. “It means they don’t know where Frank is. They are trying to smoke him out. That’s why the door is open. They’re waiting for him to bolt.”

“Why hasn’t he?” She didn’t want to think why Frank couldn’t escape.

“He can’t or he knows they’re waiting.” Trust Blackstone to be direct with her. She could appreciate that honesty of his now.

Hazelwood shook his head. “If someone is watching that door, he’s likely seen us, friends. I say we go boldly forward.”

Blackstone looked at Violet. She saw that fear for her was holding him back. She smiled and pulled her pistol from beneath her cape. He smiled back, a gleam of admiration in his eyes.

They entered the building and found wooden stairs that turned around a dark narrow well. A layer of smoke hung in the air.

“I’ll take a quick look, shall I?” Hazelwood bounded up the stairs without waiting for an answer.

Blackstone had Violet’s hand in his, keeping her close. Stinging smoke curled down the stairs and out into the main section of the building. The fire was taking hold. They could hear wood popping and beams collapsing.

Hazelwood called down from above. “There’s some kind of office here. Look’s like a makeshift jail, but Hammersley’s not here, Blackstone.” They heard him stomping about, dragging something heavy. Then he appeared again at the top of the stairs. “It seems our countess has been here. Two dead fellows inside. Local citizens by the look of them, one strangled with a velvet cord, still around the fellow’s neck.”

He tossed a bit of cloth down the stairs, and Blackstone caught it. A wool tweed cap. He kept his expression blank and stuffed the thing in his pocket.

“No sign of Wilde,” Hazelwood shouted. “What do you want to do next?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but disappeared again.

What Blackstone didn’t want to do was to take his love up the wooden stairs of a burning building. Nor did he want to leave her alone where Dubusari or his hirelings might find her. Violet had edged as far as his hold would allow to peer into the murk of the first floor.

Blackstone leaned forward and shouted up the narrow stairwell. “Hazelwood, let’s regroup.” As he pulled back, he was aware of a warning squeeze of his hand from Violet.

He turned and found himself facing a very different man than he expected. Dubusari blocked the way, but he was not the quaint elderly gentleman of the powdered wig and steepled fingers, but a powerful man of little more than twoscore with short-cropped black hair. He pointed a pair of lethal dueling pistols their way.

Blackstone kept his gaze on Dubusari. The man never blinked. The frame was just as lean, but without the effeminate loose clothes, the sinewy strength of the man was evident.

He could hear Hazelwood moving about above.

“Where are my companions?”

“In custody. Why are your hirelings dead, Dubusari?”

“Because they failed.”

“They let Hammersley get away.” Blackstone hazarded a guess.

“It doesn’t matter. You’ve made a mistake, Lord Blackstone. England has made a mistake, and history is unkind to those who back the wrong player, as you have done.”

“You mean Prince Andre?” Blackstone could hear Hazelwood moving somewhere up the smoke-filled staircase. It sounded as if he were dragging something down the stairs. Blackstone needed to keep Dubusari talking and keep Violet from moving. He had her left wrist in his left hand, but he could feel the tension in her, the desire to bolt up those stairs to look for Frank.

Dubusari sneered. “Moldova deserves better. We will see that she has a prince who can truly defend her, not an English puppet.”

“By selling out to the tsar? That’s your plan, isn’t it?”

“England is weak. Nicolai will be a strong ally to Moldova.”

“Nicolai?” Blackstone could not help his surprise. “You mean Alexander, don’t you?” At the moment Alexander was the Russian tsar as far as Blackstone knew.

“Nicolai.” Dubusari’s certainty was chilling.

Blackstone had a fleeting thought that if they lived, the foreign secretary would find that piece of conversation most interesting.

Dubusari turned his gaze to Violet. “How convenient that you have come, Miss Hammersley. Your brother has eluded us until now, but now I think he will come out of his own accord when he hears your voice. Will you be so good as to ascend the stairs and call his name?”

“No need for Miss Hammersley to come up, Dubusari, I’ll call.” Hazelwood’s cheerful voice came down the stairwell. He bellowed into the burning building. “Frank Hammersley. Your sister’s come to find you. Now would be a good time to turn up.”

Hazelwood came back to stand above them, choking and gasping in the smoke, a red glow outlining his dark figure. “Nothing. I suspect he’s got away.”

Blackstone could see they were at an impasse. The heat was growing. The stairs could go up any minute. Hazelwood might be plunged to his doom, and they had no idea where Hammersley had got to. Plainly he’d escaped the room at the top of the narrow stairs and eluded the now dead guards. He’d had nowhere to go but down the stairs or out into the shell of the building. They had no way of knowing whether he had heard them, though Hazelwood was making enough noise to wake the proverbial dead.

Dubusari broke the impasse. “Call your friend, Lord Blackstone,” he said quietly. “Tell him to come down the stairs at once or I shoot Miss Hammersley.”

“I’m unmoved, Dubusari. You intend to kill her anyway.”

“Blackstone,” Hazelwood called. “Tell the bastard not to shoot. I’m coming.”

Dubusari allowed himself a thin smile of satisfaction. The smile, more than anything, threatened to crack Blackstone’s patience.

Hazelwood’s heavy-footed steps came thumping down the stairs as if he weighed eighteen stone or more. At his back, Blackstone felt Violet shift and position her pistol so that she could slide it around his ribs and fire. For the moment he was all that stood between her and a bullet from Dubusari.

“Blackstone?” Hazelwood’s voice rasped now with the smoke. He spoke in an exaggerated stage whisper. “I think I’ve found Hammersley. Can you come up?”

The words broke Dubusari’s concentration. His gaze flew up. Violet shifted her gun and fired. The bullet caught Dubusari in the left shoulder and threw him off balance. He staggered back, and the gun in his left hand discharged into the floor.

Blackstone had time to draw his own pistol as Dubusari righted himself. Violet was exposed now, and Dubusari turned his pistol on her when Hazelwood shouted again. “I’m sending Hammersley down. Give him room.”

Again Dubusari glanced up. Blackstone shifted to stand in front of Violet at the side of the stairs. There was a pause, a loud thump, and a body plummeted feet first between Blackstone and Violet, and Dubusari. As Dubusari sprang back, Blackstone fired. Dubusari crumpled, his pistol clattering to the floor.

Blackstone sent Violet outside. He sat her in the grass, and went back in. Hazelwood had heard a faint cry. The smoke was the worst of it. Though it was still day, the inside of the building was like the worst of a London fog, and hot besides. They soaked their coats in a pool of rainwater and laid a beam from the stair landing across the uncertain floor to the exposed top of a brick column. Blackstone scrambled across. The cry came again, and when, gasping for air, he leaned his head out of a gaping window frame, he found Frank Hammersley lying below him on a hollow ledge.

They broke in to the opposite end of the building where Hammersley said he had found a lift, and found ropes with which to lower him to the ground. During the painstaking process, Violet paced the weedy grounds.

A groan from behind a pile of rubbish caught her ear, and when she investigated, she found a young man lying in the weeds with a bloody gash across the back of his head.

She knelt and touched his shoulder.

He groaned and rolled over onto his back. His eyes opened and blinked against the light. She shifted to put his face in shadow. “Who are you?”

“Nate Wilde, Miss Hammersley.” His voice rasped dryly.

She rocked back on her heels. “You know me?”

“I’ve been looking for your brother. He’s here, isn’t he?”

“We found him. Alive,” she said.

The youth’s eyes closed. “Good.”

She touched him gently. “What happened to you?”

“I fell, must’ve broke something. I was running from . . .” He drifted off.

“Don’t worry. We’ll get you help now.”