Lord of Fire (11 page)

That was quick, he thought with a smirk, watching their host return to mingle among his guests, moving easily through the crowd. Rollo did not fret over his own failed attempt to coax a kiss from the girl. He could hardly compete with a man of Lucien Knight’s looks and charm when it came to women, but he liked to think that at least he was his equal in craft and cunning.

They had a wary professional understanding between them, Lucien Knight and he, though they were on opposite sides of the war. Rollo was one of the few people who knew that the indulged, worldly diplomat, Lord Lucien Knight, was also the ruthless British agent whose code name, Argus, made foreign government ministers tremble and even caused Fouché, Napoleon’s spymaster, to blanch.

Rollo and Lucien could not be called enemies, for they had swapped information several times in the past, but they were far from being friends. Rollo knew that Lucien held him in distaste for his mercenary ways and his lack of lordly polish, while for his part, Rollo resented the Englishman’s physical and intellectual superiority, not to mention his arrogance. Tonight, however, Rollo savored the fact that he knew something that the omniscient Lord Lucifer did not.

Something big.

And he, Rollo Greene, was right in the middle of it all, making everything ready. Perhaps he wasn’t tough and mean enough to outplay the likes of Lucien Knight, but he was preparing the way for someone who was every inch Lucien’s equal, and possibly even a bit more terrifying.

The thought of the man who was coming fell like a cold shadow over Rollo’s heart, forcing him to tear his leer away from the sweat-covered dancing girl. There was work to be done. Scanning the crowd, his gaze homed in on the highborn young rogue he had come to hire.

The Honorable Ethan Stafford was a younger son of an earl and ideal for their purposes. With a boyishly handsome face and guinea-gold curls, he was a well-bred, fashionable young rake who knew everyone in the ton. The ton, however, did not know Ethan Stafford’s secret—that he had ruined himself gambling.

Cut off by his wealthy father,
Stafford had avoided debtor’s prison and public knowledge of his bankruptcy only by carrying out dubious deeds for shadowy underworld figures like the cutthroat moneylender who had told Rollo about the lad.

Fortunately, young Mr. Stafford was not overly drunk when Rollo shuffled over and nudged into the crowd beside him.
Stafford stood with half a dozen other young bucks, watching in absorption as the masked lady with the whip disciplined her next willing slave.

“Pardon me, sir!” Rollo got
Stafford’s attention, then lowered his voice. “I hear you might be interested in a bit of work.”

The young man’s sideward glance sharpened. Rollo nodded encouragingly. Warily,
Stafford joined him. They walked away from the others.

“I’m told you are reliable. You made a few deliveries for a friend of mine.”

“Right,”
Stafford said cautiously.

Poor little rich boy,
Rollo thought.
Can’t live without the niceties.

“What do you need done?”
Stafford demanded in a low tone, lifting his square chin haughtily.

“A good friend of mine will be visiting from
Prussia in a week or so. He will need some introductions into Society. Someone to show him around Town.”

“That’s all?”
Stafford asked dubiously.

Rollo boomed a cheerful laugh. “Yes, m’ boy, that’s all!”

“How much will you pay?”

“Three hundred pounds. No questions asked. Not a ha’penny more.”

“Three hundred pounds?”
Stafford echoed. “What’s the catch?”

“There is no catch,” he said cheerfully. “My friend is very rich and very determined to make a good impression on London Society. I’ll be in contact with you when the time comes and remember . . .
shhh
.” Rollo laid his finger over his lips like the carving of Priapus on the outer door, binding the young man to secrecy.

Stafford
nodded and returned to his friends. As Rollo turned away, he saw Lucien talking with a cluster of people a few feet ahead. He tried to sneak away, but Lucien saw him, passing an amused glance over him.

“You are looking industrious this evening,” he drawled in his low, lilting voice. “Keeping your ear to the ground?”

“I only come for the women, old boy,” he said with a harmless chuckle. “Your parties are the only place I can get laid for free.”

Lucien laughed and moved on. “Happy hunting, Orpheus.”

“Same to you.” Rollo watched him saunter on, greeting more of his adoring guests.

He let out a long exhalation, feeling like a picnicker who had just been sniffed over by a wolf and miraculously left unscathed. His business done, Rollo downed his glass of wine and looked around for any female drunk enough to have him.

It was nearly dawn when Lucien’s men cleared the Grotto of the last stragglers. The black-coated guards picked up the drunken fools who had passed out here and there and carried them back to their quarters, while Lucien met in his observation room with his staff of shrewd young rogues and savvy whores. They drank coffee and lounged about on the couch and chairs as they discussed the night’s gleanings and bandied about the information that they had collected.

Lucien leaned by the red-glassed window, his arms folded over his chest, and listened to each one’s report in turn, but it was difficult to concentrate when his thoughts kept wandering back to Alice Montague in mingled desire and irritation.

How dare she wipe away his kiss? Who did she think she was? And why, for God’s sake, couldn’t he get her out of his mind? It was absurd. He, Lucien Knight, was madly attracted to a doe-eyed little virgin. The girl was a prig. No wonder she drove Caro mad with her prudery. Her patronizing words still chafed him.
That’s what love is, Lucien. That’s what it does.
Love, he thought with a snort of disdain, and yet, an illogical part of him was wary, even a bit afraid of Alice Montague. Her clear gaze and transparent emotions unsettled his cynical nature. She was real in a way he had not been for years.

She was dangerous, that’s what she was,
he thought. A threat to his hard-won understanding of the world, in all its ruthlessness. Life had stripped him of his ideals and illusions—and yet, he would have paid any price to find someone who could make him believe again.

But was she really so virtuous?
he scoffed inwardly.
Was anyone?
The girl had stung him, and he had half a mind to repay her for the insult by showing her that, deep down, she was not the paragon she seemed to fancy herself. He did not want to hurt her, but he was not above giving her a good scare to prove his point—that Miss Goody Two-Shoes was just as fallible as everyone else. Her air of purity snagged at his conscience, but it was so much easier to knock her down a peg than to try, futilely, to lift himself up to her lofty realm.

A disturbing thought flitted through his mind.
What if you test her and she doesn’t fail? What if she proves you wrong?

A burst of laughter in the room drew him from his brooding; then Marc handed him the list of the various agents who had come tonight.
England’s allied nations were well represented—
Russia,
Austria,
Prussia,
Portugal, and others. Lucien studied it absently, chasing Alice Montague out of his mind for the moment by a heave of effort.

In simplest terms, the so-called Order of the Dragon was a counterespionage tool that had evolved since the days of Queen Elizabeth and her sinister mastermind, Walsingham, who had been the very father of espionage in
England and a personal friend of the original marquess of Carnarthen. The robes and all the mystical mumbo jumbo existed as part of the age-old correlation between espionage and the occult. The occult nonsense drew the rebels, adventurers, and malcontents of a society; these people, in turn, drew the spies. Smart agents knew to look for sympathetic allies among the outcasts and the dissatisfied, unsuspecting souls who could be used in their schemes—dupes who would lend them money or who could introduce them into the circles they wished to infiltrate.

Lucien’s protégés, affectionately known as North, South, East, West, and, of course, Talbert, playacted this very role. They were in their mid-twenties, all of them fairly well-born. The young men were planted in the crowd not only to keep watch over their respective quadrants of the Grotto, but also to play the part of the type of restless, hotheaded rogues that a wise agent looked for when arranging some plot.

The lads were imminently useful to Lucien, and since there was no formal training for the Crown’s agents, he had made it his postwar project to teach them what he knew, just as his father, the marquess, had taught him. They were young and still idealistic enough not to care when he warned them that it was an utterly thankless job. They were in it for the adventure and the thrill of living constantly on the edge. As their meeting wound down with little of value gained, the girls and boys began eyeing each other with recreation in mind now that their work was done.

“One more thing,” Marc Skipton, who worked the west quadrant, said.

Lucien stifled a yawn. “Yes?”

“I overheard one of the czar’s agents—what’s his name?”

“Leonidovich?”

“Yes, him. I heard him telling one of the Austrians that Claude Bardou is alive and working for the Americans.”

Lucien stared at him, feeling his blood run cold. His face went ashen, and it was altogether possible that his heart stopped beating for a moment. “Alive?” he forced out in an agonized effort to sound casual. “How can this be?”

“Leonidovich said he did not know if there was any substance to the rumor,” Marc replied with an idle shrug, “but the word is that Bardou set the fire in Paris himself. Staged his own death, then escaped to
America.”

Oh, God.
The news hit Lucien like a physical blow. At once, Patrick Kelley’s weathered, Irish face rushed up before his mind’s eye, haunting him like a ghost. He quickly dropped his gaze, rested his hands on his hips, and turned away to hide his stunned, horror-stricken reaction.

Damn it, he had heard that Bardou was dead—had not survived Napoleon’s fall from power. When he had learned about that fire in
Paris, Lucien had toasted the monster’s demise with the finest port he owned. His only regret had been that he, himself, had not been the one to slay Bardou.

Behind him, Stewart Kyle of the eastern quadrant gave a low whistle. “Bardou is a legend. If he’s turned mercenary and is hiring out his services to the Americans . . .” The lad shuddered.

“Remember the story about that merchant family he butchered in
Westphalia for a suspected conspiracy against King Jerome?” Marc added grimly. “He’s the bleedin’ spawn of the devil.”

“Enough,” Talbert ordered them crisply. “There are ladies present.”

Marc and Kyle quickly muttered apologizes to the uneasy girls, but Lucien paid them no mind. A knot had formed in the pit of his stomach, and a cold sweat had broken out over his body. He wiped his sweating palms on his thighs, pacing restlessly as he tried to think.

Claude Bardou, the French agent known as Triton, was the spymaster Fouché’s top man, his secret weapon. Unbeknownst to the young people in the room, Lucien and he had a bit of a history between them.

A bloody one.

Lucien had never told Damien, nor Castlereagh, nor any living soul of his capture and torture at the hands of enemy operatives a year and a half ago, in the spring of 1813. He had killed all of Bardou’s men during his escape; now the only two people alive who knew of his hellish ordeal were Bardou, who had inflicted the pain, and Lucien, who had endured it.