Marissa Day (20 page)

But he’d forgotten when he last spoke to his father, and he’d lost the ring given him by Queen Bess, who had once called him the prince of all her privateers. What else had gone missing?

It’s not important,
he told himself.
It’s just that you haven’t done a bit of thievery in so long that it’s got you thinking on the old days.
Which was true, but still unfamiliar emotion stirred in the back of his mind, and it felt disturbingly like a prisoner stirring when the cell door opens.

Thomas returned the ledger to the shelf exactly as he had found it. The perfectly clean bookcase was quite helpful now, because he did not have to worry that the exacting Captain Conroy would notice any dust had been disturbed.

Thomas left the study, closing the door firmly behind him. He did not hurry down the corridor. He moved deliberately and plastered a puzzled frown on his face so that anyone who saw him they would think he had lost his way. He found the grand staircase that lead to the cupola room and started down. Valuables were not the only thing a man could hide in plain sight, and no one would expect a thief to exit by the front door.

As Thomas descended, voices soft and swift, and distinctly German, reached him from below. Thomas could see nothing from where he was. An instinctive warning rose in him, but he could do nothing about it. There was nowhere to duck, no way to turn without looking suspicious. He’d have to brazen it out.

He did not actually see them until he reached the bottom of the sweeping staircase. They’d picked a good spot for secrets, sheltered from above by the curving stair and from the door by the elaborate clock that graced the center of the room. It was a woman and a man making those earnest, German whispers. The woman was Fraulein Lehzen, Princess Feodora’s attendant. Jane had pointed her out to him in the gardens walking with a young girl who wore a froth of white lace. The princess was nowhere in evidence now. There was just a gentleman Thomas didn’t recognize. Thomas nodded to the gentleman, as if he thought nothing strange about him lurking in the shadows with the princess’s attendant. He passed without breaking stride, heading straight for the door.

“Lynne, isn’t it?” said the man from behind him.

Thomas stopped—inches from the door and his escape to the gardens—and turned. The man had moved out from the shadows, and in so doing neatly blocked Thomas’s view of Fraulein Lehzen. He was tall, broad-shouldered and black-haired. His plain gray coat and burgundy waistcoat were of excellent quality, but what Thomas noticed most was the physical presence of a man who knew his own power.

“Do I know you?” Thomas asked.

“I’m think not. Corwin Rathe.” The man extended his hand. “Lady Jane DeWitte mentioned your name.”

“Did she?”
You’re lying, Corwin Rathe.
But . . . Rathe. He knew that name. Why did he know that name? “I’m pleased to know any acquaintance of Lady Jane’s.” Thomas shook the man’s hand and cursed the blinding wards of Kensington House. Outside its walls, he would have been able to know everything about this Corwin Rathe from just this brief contact. As it was, he could only hope to lose the fellow as soon as possible. He needed to get to Jane and rid himself of the papers in his pocket. Then he needed to get away from the grounds of Kensington House, back to where he could open his magics again and where he could focus properly without ancient history popping up from the back of his brain to plague him.

“Are you headed back? Tedious business this, but better to be seen, I suppose.” Rathe was assuming the airs of a bored aristocrat, and doing it well. It was the set of his shoulders that betrayed him, the way his hands stayed loose and ready at his sides even as he started for the door. It occurred to Thomas he was being discreetly hustled outside.

T
he kitchen gardens of Kensington House were laid out as neatly as any model farm, with each of the identical rectangular plots surrounded by a solid brick wall to deter scavengers. This arrangement created a kind of alley between the last row of beds and the higher wall that enclosed the whole of the grounds. Jane, believing Thomas unfamiliar with the layout of Kensington House, had suggested it for their meeting place. She didn’t know how many times she had gone through the tiny back gate in this spot when she hurried through the haze created by glamour and desire to meet him across the lane and beneath the trees outside the wall.

This time, it was she who waited for him. The sun was only grazing the treetops, but shadows already slanted thick across Jane where she stood just beside the outer wall. Uneasiness crept through Thomas, as if Jane in shadow was an ill-luck omen. He told himself not to be daft, but made a circuit around the nearest walled vegetable bed, just to satisfy himself that no one followed him.

Damn the Kensington wards. He felt deaf and blind. Damn this Corwin Rathe for setting him on edge. He didn’t want to be lost in his worries when he had a prize to present to Jane.

She didn’t smile as he approached her down the lane between the garden walls. But she held out her arms and that was more than enough. Thomas went to her at once and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and clung there, taut as a fiddle string.

“Now then, now then,” he murmured, rocking her back and forth. “I’m here, sweet Jane, and all is right.” He gently disengaged himself from her embrace and stepped back, keeping hold of her hands so he could spread their arms wide. “And see? I’ve taken no hurt from my adventure.”

“Thank God for that,” she said fervently. “I was afraid, Thomas.”

“I know it, Jane.” He reached into his pocket and drew out the papers, and the ribbon. “But let these ease that fear now.” He laid his acquisitions across her palm.

Jane picked up the ribbon. She laced it in her gloved fingers, clasping it as tightly as if it had been his hand. He could almost feel her holding his fingers, a touch strong and yet vulnerable, and filled with longing. She shook open the papers in her other hand, and as he watched, her eyes traveled down the tidy list of names and amounts. Anger clouded her face.

“So, now I will let Conroy know I have his accounts, and a complete list of those in his employ.”

“Yes.”

“And he will be very angry, but there will be nothing he can do, especially if I make a copy.”

“A good thought,” Thomas agreed, but uneasily. She was still too angry. He had expected relief, and thanks, perhaps a showering of kisses that he could fend off. Instead, Jane just clenched his prize in her fist.

“He will look for ways to destroy me for this impertinence. I will still have to be on my guard.”

“I’m afraid that is also true.”

“So, we’ve accomplished exactly nothing with this.”

Thomas frowned. What was the matter with the woman? He’d run a considerable risk for her. She might show a little gratitude. “Was there a choice? He would have gotten you dismissed.”

“Yes, there was a choice, and I’m making it now.” Jane slipped paper and ribbon into her reticule. “I am leaving.”

“Leaving?” But Jane just held up her hand. Thomas felt himself jerk back, as startled as if she’d slapped him. Leaving? Leaving. She couldn’t leave him. Not now.

Jane turned her face away, staring down the lane of sunlight between the looming brick walls. “I’ve been thinking about it for some time. There are private schools for girls of the
ton
, you know, and for those with wealthy fathers who want to enter into society. They teach etiquette and polish. I’ve served at court. I’m well-traveled, I can make polite conversation with royalty in three languages . . . I think a school would be glad to have someone of my experience, don’t you? There will not be much in the way of a salary, of course, but I’ve lived on nothing before. Georgie will take me in for a while until I find something, and Her Grace will give me a reference . . .”

With each clipped, bitter word, the sun rose higher in Thomas’s heart, blossoming bright through the whole of his being. The warmth sent a laugh bubbling to the surface.

Jane glowered at him. “What have I said that’s so amusing?”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry, Jane. I thought you meant you were leaving me.”

She stared at him, like he’d started speaking in tongues. “Leave you? Oh, Thomas. Don’t you understand? I’m leaving so I can be with you.”

It was dawn in his soul. Not just any dawn, but a full, glorious summer dawn with a fair wind and not a trace of cloud in the sky. Jane wanted to be with him, but it was more than that. She was not just wanting, she was acting. She was walking away from her shelter here behind the walls and wards to be with him.

“If I stay here, I’ll have no choices,” Jane was saying. “It doesn’t matter what I know about Conroy, or anyone else. I’ll always be watched, always looking over my shoulder, especially if the babe becomes the heir. Everyone will want to be part of the household, and they’ll be tearing at each other to get inside. It’s started already.” She was thinking about the crowds around the Dukes of Clarence and Kent while their elder brother York watched them all with anger simmering in his protruding blue eyes. “Outside, I’ll have to be discreet, but a teacher has no power. No one has anything to gain by trying to make a pawn of her. She may be safely and comfortably ignored. I think it will be most enjoyable to be ignored for a while.”

He needed to say something. She was waiting for him to say something. But he could barely think. She wanted to be with him. It was not just the passion. It was more than that. She might truly love him, as he loved her.

He loved her. He loved Jane.

Thomas’s mouth went dry. He should tell her. Now. But something held him back, a buzzing in his mind like an angry fly. He was forgetting something vital. He couldn’t speak until he remembered.

“What of your family?” he asked instead. “What would they say?”

“My family?” Jane looked at him blankly for a moment. He watched as it occurred to her that they had spoken only briefly of her family. The broken expression that overcame her then slid between his ribs like a knife. “I have none. I have nothing. That’s why this has been so difficult, do you see? I’m one of those penniless
ton
women who must make shift for themselves.”

“How did this happen? You cannot tell me you are not a gentlewoman born.”

“Oh, I was that. The Honorable Miss Jane Markham, if you please. But my father was a gambler. Only instead of faro or piquet, his game was stocks, and he borrowed heavily to play. Sometimes we were rich as pashas. Sometimes . . . well, let us say I’ve learned to keep up appearances on very little. We were in one of those distressed times when I turned seventeen. Father announced I was going to have a London season regardless, and the wife of his friend Lord Islington had agreed to sponsor me. My mother didn’t want it. I should have realized that something was wrong. Mother had always been the one to keep us from foundering, and I knew my father’s ways well enough by then. But I was young and I was foolish, and I did so want a season . . .” She gathered a pinch of muslin skirt in her fingertips and rolled it back and forth. “What I didn’t realize then was I was going to London to be inspected like a filly at auction.

“The winning bid was Lord Octavius DeWitte. His sister had kept house for him, but she had died, and he needed someone else for the task. The cheapest option was to find a wife, and I was to be had without much trouble at all. I didn’t want to marry a man three times my age, but father . . . he explained his situation to me, and pointed out that my marriage would solve all the family difficulties. I would go with Lord Octavius, and I would sign my jointure over to Father so he could pay his debts. Our debts.”

“I resisted. And then . . . we got the news. While we’d been gone, there was a typhus outbreak in the village. My mother, my sister and my brothers . . . they were all sick. We couldn’t even go back to them. It wasn’t safe. They all died.

“I’m so sorry, Jane.”

She didn’t look at him. She faced the outer wall. He watched her shoulders stiffen as she tried to hold herself together, to be as strong as the stones in front of her. “Father pointed out he would have to borrow more money to have them decently buried. What was I going to do? Lord Octavius advanced the money for the funerals, and I was married as soon as I was out of mourning.

“Father was in debt again less than a year later.”

“God Almighty, Jane . . .” He laid a hand on her shoulder.

“No, please. Just give me a moment.” She tried to shake him off, but he stepped closer.

“Look at me, Jane.”

She turned, and he saw the tears spilling down her cheeks. He went to her. Nothing on earth could have held him back. He wrapped his arms around Jane and pulled her against him. She rested her cheek against his chest, and felt the drumming of his heart.