Passion Wears Pearls (40 page)

There was a small disorderly pile of unopened correspondence in a stack on the table just inside the entryway, but the one on top was the one she seized. The handwriting was rushed and uneven.

It’s from that man! I would stake my life on it!

It was pure instinct, and what she did next was equally driven by a growing sense of dread. She opened the seal and guiltily read the letter from Darius Thorne. While it was incomprehensible for the most part, there was no mistaking that the tone was dire—and she hadn’t underestimated the danger that Josiah faced.

Escher came up behind her, limping with fatigue. “Off to see his friends, he said, Miss Beckett. Were you to wait?”

“No. No more waiting, Escher.”

Eleanor pushed past him to return down the stairs to the waiting carriage, the note absently tucked into her pocket while an impulsive plan formed in her mind.

The private meeting room at the Thistle was on the second floor, accessible only by a rear staircase hidden by a door on a long hallway near what Josiah suspected were bedrooms for the patrons of the tables below to avail themselves of the charms of the various hostesses below. It was
a rustic establishment, but he had to admire Michael’s choice. He’d arrived hours early, within minutes of Rutherford, only to be trapped in a long, anxious wait as the appointed time for the meeting approached and none of the other Jaded had appeared.

“Where the hell is everyone else?”

Darius came pounding down the hallway and stumbled into the room, out of breath. “Hastings! Didn’t you get my note? What the hell are you doing here? Michael, it’s off!”

Michael was on his feet instantly. “Off?”

Josiah also stood, a bit more slowly as the shock of Darius’s announcement sank in. “Why would the Jackal call it off? After all his efforts to—”

“Not the Jackal,” Darius explained, even as he continued to try to gesture his friends from the room. “We’re to rendezvous at the brownstone to regroup. I’ll explain it in the carriage, but we have a new problem to—”

Screams from the ground floor cut him off midsentence, and Michael Rutherford instantly transformed into the soldier they knew well. He moved around the table, past Thorne, to open the door and assess the situation. The smell of smoke was already toxically dense on the stairs, and Michael slammed the door closed.

“It’s a fire,” he said calmly. “One way or another, Darius is right and the meeting’s off.”

Josiah marveled at the lack of fear he felt at the announcement. “Darius, the others are safely away?”

Thorne nodded. “I sent runners with notes to everyone and thought I’d managed to get my message to all, except Michael. But I knew where you lived and meant to catch you there. It’s just us, gentlemen.”

“Shall we go?” Josiah turned back to Michael. “Yes?”

“Yes, but let’s hurry. I chose the Thistle because I knew we couldn’t be ambushed, as there’s only one way up to these rooms, but … my strategy seems to be flawed.” He shrugged his shoulders, then took a deep breath. “Take in what air you can and we’ll head back down single file.”

Darius rushed to the sideboard and poured water from a waiting pitcher onto some cloth napkins. “Here, take these to cover your mouths! It will help with the smoke.”

Josiah cursed as he missed the handoff of the moist cloth, but Darius pressed another into his palm and they were ready. For Josiah, there was a moment of déjà vu as they stumbled out into the now smoke-filled hallway. It reminded him of their clumsy escape from their earth-bound prison in Bengal. With noise and chaos echoing nearby, they were once again following each other in the dark on instinct alone toward safety.

The smoke was too thick to see clearly where they were going and they could hear the fire crackling and roaring beneath their feet. It was horribly disorienting and Michael hesitated. “Damn it! It’s burning fast!”

“Who was that?” Darius gestured to the opposite end of the hallway. “Did anyone else see that?”

Michael coughed before answering. “Couldn’t be anyone! There’s no exit that direction and we’re the only ones on the second floor! I checked it when I arrived!”

Josiah shouted, “Enough discussion, men. Six doors to the left, count them and stay low and then the stairs will be there! Darius, take hold of the back of my coat, and Michael, you hold to his, and let’s get out of this!”

They made their way to the door to the narrow staircase, practically forced to crawl after opening it as black smoke and vapors poured up the structure like a newly vented chimney. They’d gone less than a dozen steps down when Josiah realized that there was someone below them on the landing.

It was a tall, broad-shouldered figure swathed in a black coat still wearing his top hat, the dim, smoky stairwell masking his identity. But one thing was clear. He held a pistol in his hand pointed directly at their midst. “At last, we meet again.”

Michael was furious. “Why burn us out? You’ll never get what you want, Jackal, roasting your opponents!”

“I didn’t start this fire! You did!” The man roared back over the din of the fire. “To hell with you! You’re the ones with everything to gain if you trap me in a public blaze! I should have known it was a trick!”

Darius stayed low against the walls, coughing, but managed to call out, “No tricks! We never—”

“Shut up! We’ll meet on
my
terms next time!”

“Your terms? Knife-wielding assassins, poison, and burglary? Your terms are shit, if you don’t mind me saying it,” Michael growled. “We’d have played nice if you had the courage to face us in the light of day, Jackal.”

“The time for negotiation is over! You’ll give me what I want and what’s rightfully mine! No more middle men or emissaries, old friends. I’ll deal with you directly from now on. But here’s a bit of an advance payment for my troubles so you’ll remember to respect your betters in the future.”

“No!” Josiah knew it was up to him to avert the shot that was surely coming, but with his failing eyes, he felt helpless. He lunged forward as Rutherford grabbed Darius and tried to shield him from harm with his own body. Josiah instinctively moved to close the gap between himself and the shooter, but the world slowed to a nightmare crawl of flickering images that flashed in front of him in rhythm with his heartbeat.

He saw all of it in a strange cascade of horror: the dull gleam of the gun barrel and the flash it made as the man pulled the trigger just as he struck his wrist upward. The noise was deafening and Josiah fell to the floor, the momentum of the blow and his efforts to stop the Jackal forcing him to his knees. By the time he looked up, his ears ringing, the Jackal was gone.

“Thorne? Rutherford?” He looked back at his friends, hating the acrid taste of fear and smoke in his mouth. “Is anyone shot?”

Michael reached up to wipe blood from his cheek. “No. I think my face is cut from the splinters that went flying when that ass shot the wall next to my head, but I’d say we survived this round.”

Darius straightened up from where Michael had pushed him down onto the stairs. “If no one is shot, then I suggest we keep moving! I swear, for men of action, you are wasting a good deal of time in discussion while we suffocate in this stairwell!”

“The professor’s right!” Michael said, his humor returning. “Lead on, Hastings!”

Josiah stood and realized that it wasn’t just smoke obscuring his vision. His ears were still ringing and the adrenaline from their confrontation with the Jackal made the world skewed and strange. But the worst of it was that he couldn’t really see anything. All he could do was feel the warm weight of the tangle of Darius and Michael behind him as Michael put a hand on his shoulder. “Yes. We should go.”

The staircase was too narrow for Michael to get around to take point and Darius was nearly incapacitated with smoke, so Josiah’s first priority became getting them out alive. He counted the steps and tried not to fall, ignoring everything else, and just as the timbers of the old hall began to creak and sway, the men reached the first floor, tripping over overturned chairs and tables.

“Where’s the door?” Darius called out.

But Josiah didn’t have the breath to answer him. Instead, he grabbed Thorne’s coat, trusting that Michael wouldn’t have let go of the chain, and used the map in his head he’d habitually constructed upon arrival to lead them in a race toward safety.

Flames licked up the walls around them and the noise was deafening, but at last, the haggard group limped out of the front entrance and out onto the street, where citizens were beginning to bring what buckets they could to help until the fire brigades arrived.

“My God! What a nightmare!” Darius exclaimed, his voice ragged from the smoke. He began to cough as his lungs seized on the fresh night air. “Damn!”

Rutherford pounded him on the back, doing what he could to help his friend clear his lungs. “What the hell was
that man saying? ‘We meet
again
’ and something about being ‘old friends’? Do we know him? Is that possible?”

Josiah pressed his fingers into his eyes, uselessly trying to see if his condition were temporary. “Not a chance of it! I’ve not a friend in Christendom who would go to that kind of trouble to—”

A man approached their small band and interrupted the conversation as Darius staggered over, doubled with coughing from the smoke. “Rutherford! You’re safe, thank God!”

“Lawrence! What happened?” Michael answered, then turned to his friends. “Lawry owns the Thistle and was in my regiment an eon or two ago.”

“I can’t say the cause of it,” Lawrence answered, his eyes turned back to his beloved Thistle’s ongoing destruction, but then his gaze narrowed and his focus returned with renewed concern. “Did the young lady find you? Is she with you, then?”

“What young lady?” Josiah asked, his head snapping up at the unexpected question.

“A woman arrived a while ago and asked for the Jaded and knew of the meeting, so I assumed it was all right. I directed her up to the room but couldn’t leave the card tables. Did you not see her?”

“What the—” Josiah started, but Michael stopped him with a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Red hair? Very pretty?” Michael asked.

“That’s her. I sent her up just twenty minutes ago, but—”

“The hallway. Darius thought he saw someone. It’s Eleanor!” Josiah pulled away from Michael’s hold on him and sprinted back inside the building, ignoring the roar of disapproval at his back.

“Damn it! Wait!”

But Josiah wasn’t going to wait, not if the Devil himself tried to bar the door. Nothing could stop him, and as Darius had reminded them, there was no time for debate and discussions.

The fire was growing worse by the second, and the roaring howl of it made it hard for a man to think. But he could hear
the faint alarm bells of the fire brigade and took some comfort in the notion that help might not be far off. He raced through the deserted ground floor and returned to the stairwell leading up past the first floor to the second, where they had hoped to have their momentous meeting. The smoke was thicker, but Josiah hardly noticed it. He crouched low to the ground where the air felt a little cooler, and began to recite an ancient Hindu prayer as he made his way up through the unsettled, swaying structure.

O God, lead us from the unreal to the real.

He closed the door behind him and knelt in the hallway to regain his bearings. She had never come to the room they were in, which eliminated it as a choice. Josiah knew she must have mistakenly been waiting for them in another private meeting room and wracked his brain to recall which direction Darius had been looking when they’d stepped from that doorway and seen someone.

O God, lead us from darkness to light.

The smoke was growing thicker and it was harder and harder to breath, forcing him to accept that there wasn’t much time left. But at last, logic overpowered terror and he surmised that she’d have been nearer the staircase since they’d been at the far end from it when Darius had spoken. “Lawrence directed her and the last door on the left could have been misunderstood as the first door,” he ground out, the sound of his own voice steadying his nerves. “Come on, Hastings. Try it and then try them all if you have to.”