Lady Killer (9 page)

Said
he loved her.

Elwood had tried to caution her, but he had been able to give her no concrete information—Greeley starting with a “G” and therefore being outside his provenance—and so she had believed every word Justin had spoken. When he told her that he wanted to be with her forever but first needed a small loan, she had given it willingly, even happily. It was only once he had disappeared that she learned he had taken her bill of credit and used it to secure an even larger loan, in her name, with Captain Black, London’s most dangerous and notorious thug and a man she had sworn to destroy if she ever had the chance. It was only after Justin was already living with another woman in Paris that she had learned she now owed an enormous debt to the person she considered her mortal enemy, who refused to delay its repayment from ten days hence except under terms of exchange—Toast—which were unacceptable to her. It was only then, when relief mixed with her anger, that she knew he had been right, that she was a silly and foolish girl. It was only then that she knew how stupid she had been.

But that was her problem and her fault and she would not get anyone else involved. For the moment, anyway, she had a far more pressing matter to distract her. According to her previous night’s rereading of the news sheets about the Vampire of London’s last appearance, he never went more than a day without killing. Apparently no body had been found that morning and since the Vampire seemed to go to pains to ensure that his kills would easily be located, that meant there had been none the previous night. Which meant, in turn, that there was a very good chance that tonight, unless she found him first, a girl would die.

“Read that,” she said to Elwood, holding out one of the three-year-old news sheets she had been studying the night before and letting Toast curl his tail around her finger.

“Comtesse Helèn DuPont held services for her beloved dog Wilimena last Monday. As in life, the corpse of Wilimena was dressed in a delicate pink tulle skirt—”

“No. Above that.”

Elwood’s eyes moved up the page. “Serena Mayhew became the Vampire of London’s most recent victim,” he read aloud, then met Clio’s eyes with a questioning look. “That one?”

“Yes.”

“But that happened three years ago. Why are you interested in it now?”

“Because, as you no doubt have heard, the Vampire of London is back.” She slid into the chair behind her desk, into the familiar relief of work. “I want you to tell me everything you know about him.”

Elwood frowned. “You are not proposing to find him, are you?”

“That is exactly what I am proposing. I already have a client. Why?” Clio looked at him challengingly, and her look was mirrored by Toast. “Don’t you think me capable of it?”

Elwood sank into a seat opposite her. “I think you capable of anything, Clio. It is just that the Special Commissioner will not like your involvement.”

“As a matter of fact, I have had a message from him this morning on that very topic.”

“Then he knows? And he does not mind?”

“Not terribly,” Clio said. Her eyes slipped away from Elwood’s and she went sort of sideways in her chair. Toast, deciding things were getting dicey, leapt from her shoulder to the bust of King Henry the Eighth that stood behind her, and sat on his head. “He said something about my ‘getting any help from his office’ I might desire, and him wishing me the best of luck if I should choose to undertake the inquiry.”

Elwood eyed her. “I assume the word that proceeded the phrase ‘getting any help from his office’ was ‘never’ and that his wishing you the best of luck was intended as more of a threat than an encouragement.”

Clio shrugged and tried to look innocent. “Who can say. Words are so tricky and I am just a stupid woman.”

Elwood sat forward, genuinely concerned. “Look, Clio, I know how you feel about the commissioner, but this is not the sort of investigation to undertake as a personal vendetta. I know he said some dreadful things to you—”

“He said that I was not fit to find anything besides puppies and even those might prove too taxing for me,” she quoted. “He said that women should stay at home and look lovely, and since I did not have a proper home and could not look lovely if I tried, then I should throw myself into the Thames.”

Elwood winced. “Yes. Well, you have to admit you provoked him.”

“By solving six of his last eight cases before he even had any idea where to look?” Clio demanded.

“I was more thinking of the part when you described him as a corrupt and contemptible cur—”

“I only did that because of what he said about the dogs,” Clio interrupted, sitting up straight.

“—whose powers of observation were worse than those of a tit mouse, and whose mind made caterpillars look intelligent,” Elwood finished the quote.

“I do not see how he could be annoyed with me for that. If he had an ounce of sense he would admit it was all true. Anyway, in the interests of not overtaxing what little mind he has, I thought I would direct my questions to you rather than him. He must be very busy.” She smiled convincingly at Elwood. Behind her Toast, who shared his mistress’s estimation of both the Special Commissioner and dogs, clapped approvingly.

Elwood cleared his throat and tried to seem stern in the face of her smile and the monkey’s encouragement. “What did the commissioner’s message say, Clio?”

Her shoulders sagged. “Everything I already told you, plus what you guessed about him never helping me, and, for added measure, that they had a ‘very good man, a very special man’ working on finding the vampire, who would work better and find the fiend faster without any ‘infernal assistance from foolish and meddling females.’ He closed by suggesting that there were probably puppies lost in London that needed my help finding their way home.”

Elwood pressed his lips together for a moment, deep in thought. Then he sighed, looked into her lovely face, and said, “What do you want to know?”

Miles had awakened with a pounding headache and a gnawing feeling of unease, neither of which he could recall acquiring. Nor was he quite sure how he found himself in bed. Or, for that matter, who was breathing deeply next to him.

He threw open the bed curtains and was blinded by a wave of brilliant sunlight. Squinting, he looked over at the adjacent pillow. Golden hair curled over a small face, from which one brown eye peeked at him. His companion seemed to smile, then started to pant.

“Corin,” Miles shouted into his room. “Corin, who put this bloody hound in my bed?”

“It’s not a hound, sir, it is a retriever,” Corin corrected in the tone of an authority. “And a very fine specimen; if I might commend my own self in selecting him.” He moved to the bedside, holding out a bowl filled with steaming brown liquid, which Miles grabbed and gulped down. “He crawled in by himself when I went out this morning. Although it doesn’t speak too well for his intelligence, I think he likes you.”

As if to prove the truth of this statement, the puppy climbed up on Miles’s bare chest and began licking his nose. Setting down the now empty bowl, Miles lifted him off gently and put him back on the bed, where the dog set to work on his fingers. “Would it bother you terribly to explain what the hell he is doing here,” he asked finally, but not as gruffly as he would have liked.

“He is to be a gift from you to Lady Mariana. Unless you want to keep him. I can find another. It seems that puppies are not much in demand today.”

“I do not want to keep him,” Miles said with only partial finality as the ball of fur nibbled playfully on his pointer finger. “I would bore him to death. And I think one will be enough in the household.”

“You might reconsider. It’s so rare to find someone who will put up with you.” Corin answered the look of death Miles sent his way with an innocent smile. Then the smile faded and he added in a more serious voice, “Besides, another one of your guard dogs was killed last night and we still can’t figure out how.”

Miles’s jaw clenched—that was the fourth one in two weeks—and his eye flitted to the wall behind Corin. To his left was the large clock that led to his attic offices and which showed the correct time. And to his right, on the mantelpiece of the fireplace, stood another clock, the duplicate of the one in the other room. This one’s hands pointed at three.

Corin noted the direction of his master’s gaze. “That is why I woke you. Something has come up.”

Miles was out of bed and half-dressed by the time Corin had the clock open. He finished dressing as they ascended, and was tying the last of the laces on his leggings when they reached the landing just below the roof. Without pausing, he followed Corin through an inconspicuous door into a large room, that, despite the absence of windows, was filled with light flooding in from the opaque glass panes that made up its ceiling. Those who had heard of the extraordinary knot-garden Viscount Dearbourn had installed on his roof to please his new mistress three years ago little guessed that the birds its plants attracted were carrier pigeons winging messages across England, or that many of the shrubs were elaborate fakes, below which lay a nerve center far more delicate and far reaching than any set of roots.

Eight desks were occupied by young men, all of them in the yellow and gold livery of the Dearbourns. They were dressed as footmen, but the papers over which they were poring were not instructions for the running of the household. They were instructions for the preservation of a kingdom. England.

This was the realm of one of the most trusted of Queen Elizabeth’s advisors. His official title was Lord High Commissioner for Security of the Kingdom but he was referred to by the few who knew of his existence only as “Three”—and then only in whispers.

The naval victory over the Spanish armada was widely credited to Sir Francis Drake, vice admiral of the navy, and Lawrence Pickering, the hero, but both of them, and everyone at the highest levels of government, knew the real credit belonged to Three. It was Lawrence Pickering who sailed the
H.M.S. Phoenix,
but it was Three who mapped its course, Three who organized the deployment of the English forces, Three who—by spreading the word that England was five times stronger than she really was and vulnerable in two places that she really wasn’t—managed to lead the English to triumph despite being massively outmanned and outgunned by their enemy.

But while many English cheered their victory, those at the top knew that the war was far from over. Realizing that they could not outmaneuver the English at sea, the Spaniards had very cleverly begun undermining the country from within. Shortages of vital supplies from food to coal were natural during a war, and with such shortages came dissatisfaction. The Spanish took advantage of this, liberally distributing the gold they brought back from their American territories to anyone who would work for them within the borders of England, using it to sow discontent and encourage smuggling, particularly of high-quality English gunpowder. They thus created a second front to the war, and a much more difficult one. Unlike armor clad soldiers or ships of war, these enemies were difficult to spot, and, once spotted, even more difficult to subdue. For the past half year, Three’s attentions had been focused on this invisible war, a delicate game of chess whose board was the island of Britain and whose stakes were the life of a real queen and her subjects.

Three was not a spy—although he did occasionally venture out to collect his own information—but rather the man who decided what to do with the information Elizabeth’s spies procured. Three knew from personal experience that people believed what they saw and he designed the defensive strategy for England based on this knowledge, fortifying her against her enemies by working to create illusions of strength and weakness, preparedness and vulnerability. His men monitored sales of gunpowder and poison, carefully watching for any signs of instability within the kingdom of England. He was a problem solver, a strategist. And Queen Elizabeth’s most potent secret weapon.

Speculation about his true identity abounded among both those friends and enemies who were privy to his existence—he had discovered the week before that his enemies called him “The Wasp” in honor of the pain and destruction his work caused them—but only the queen and the men in this light-filled garret knew who he really was.

Miles Fraser Loredan, Viscount Dearbourn, the third person behind the queen in charge of England’s security, saluted each of his men as he passed by their desks on the way to an open door at the rear of the room. In the country the operation occupied the entirety of his wine cellar, but when he was forced to relocate to London because of his wedding, his headquarters were jammed into a much smaller space. Despite the somewhat cramped atmosphere, Miles felt an enormous sense of freedom as he entered, as if, only here of all the spaces in his vast town house—in these hot, crowded attics, stuck above even the most humble of his servant’s quarters—was he actually at home. He took a deep, satisfied breath, and looked toward the broad man with gray hair sticking out of his head like a bottle brush standing in the open door of his private office.

The man’s tan and the wrinkles around his eyes were his badges of honor from having served Her Majesty’s Navy for three quarters of his fifty years of life. They were the only such badges he had, being one of the most irascible seamen in that organization, whose most notable career achievement was having spent more time in the Brig than any other sailor alive.

Most men, even those unaware of his reputation, steered clear of Tom Furious on sight, but then most men did not know that Tom’s visits to the Brig were precisely timed, or that he was actually the brother of the current minister of war and closely related to seven other royal advisors, or that for thirty years he had been the Navy’s most confidential and successful courier of information.