Suzanne Robinson (8 page)

Toby leaped out of the cab and waded into the fray while Liza sat back and twisted a cloth purse in her hands. She was cold and tired and frustrated. She had an out tomorrow, that one day in the week she could call her own. After being thrown on that sofa by Jocelin Marshall, she’d been planning to use it to disappear from his household. That was before she’d followed him into St. Giles. Having tracked the viscount this evening since he left for dinner at the duke’s residence, she wasn’t about to lose him because of a thief.

She heard a loud
thwack
, then the scuffle of feet. Toby reappeared, straightening his cap and woolly scarf. He jumped into the cab, and they were off. Liza gave him a grateful glance. He had always been behind her, even when her own father hadn’t been. She remembered that time too well and the circumstances that had brought them together. Enraged that she hadn’t turned out to be the epitome of womanly graces, fragile in wits as well as body, Papa had grown more and more furious at her refusal to behave like the lady he wanted her to be so that she could catch a titled husband. Liza had known what he asked was impossible for her to do. When he threatened her, she refused to cower. She never had responded well to intimidation; it only infuriated her.

Finally he’d decided to break her spirit. He disowned her and threw her out on the streets, scoffing at her that she would crawl back to him in less than a week. But Papa hadn’t counted on Liza’s intelligence and gift for strategy. Before leaving, she persuaded Mama to give her a character as if she were
a housemaid. Taking with her valuables inherited from her grandmother, she’d gone to London.

In London it was Toby who had given her a place in the same house in which he served as butler. A tall man without much bulk, he appeared more frail than he actually was, which his employer’s eldest son discovered when Toby found out the young man had gotten his daughter with child.

Liza didn’t like to think back to those days. Toby had been convicted of assaulting the young man and his daughter accused of prostitution. The household splintered, and the servants were given notice.

In her desperation to find safe employment, she’d conceived Pennant’s Domestic Agency, an elite service that responded to the emergency needs of Society—the sudden illness of a chef just before a banquet, a miscalculation in the number of maids needed at a come-out ball. After serving his short sentence, Toby had come to her to pose as Hugo Pennant, for she soon found that Society had no intention of giving its custom to a woman, especially a young one.

“Here,” Toby snapped at her as the cab’s half door slammed shut. “You keep your little nose inside. I’m not going back to Pennant’s and have to tell the others I let our lady get herself knocked in the head in St. Giles.”

“Toby, there it is! Driver, that’s the one, the one pulling away from that boardinghouse.”

As they passed the building, Liza craned her neck to see inside. The door was closing as she went by, and all she could see was a foyer bare of furnishings. The doorman slammed the door shut and snarled at her. Liza retreated into the carriage.

“What was that place, Toby?”

Toby folded his arms across his chest and stared at the hind end of the horse.

“Oh,” Liza said. She contemplated Toby’s set features and gray hair. “One of those places. Then why didn’t they stay there? You might as well answer. I’ll ask the driver if you don’t.”

“They didn’t stay, Miss Curiosity Cat, because they picked up what they wanted and now they’re going someplace more comfortable.”

“But didn’t you say there were—well, nice places where gentlemen went for refined sin?”

“Some likes to come down in the dirt, so to speak,” was all Toby would say.

Liza thought for a moment, then glanced outside. “We’re going back west.”

Her curiosity increased as they followed the carriage past Hyde Park. The vehicle abruptly turned north toward St. Mary’s Hospital. Traffic thinned, and Liza began to worry that they would be noticed. She made the driver slow, then stop altogether when the carriage turned down a side street without lighting. Telling the driver to wait, she and Toby approached the intersection on foot, her friend grumbling all the way.

“See here,” he hissed. “You let me go first.”

The hour was late. There were few pedestrians, all of whom huddled in their cloaks and coats and paid them no notice in their haste to get out of the damp cold. Toby and Liza reached the corner and carefully looked down the street, which was little more than an alley. The carriage had stopped. As Liza peered around Toby’s shoulder, the door opened.

A man in evening dress climbed out. His face was shrouded in the folds of a white silk scarf, but Liza recognized that posture. He stood in the street
and put his fist behind his back, spine straight, as a door opened in the wall beside the carriage. He turned back to the open carriage door.

To Liza he appeared to be conversing with someone inside the vehicle. He leaned through the doorway, and though she couldn’t understand what he was saying, she heard the coaxing tone in his voice. He held out his gloved hand. Slowly, with painful hesitation, another, bare hand appeared and surrendered itself to the gloved one.

Liza frowned, for the arm that followed it was swathed in a patched coat sleeve. The viscount gradually persuaded his guest from the carriage.

She glanced up at Toby and mouthed, “It’s a boy?”

He said nothing, but nodded once.

Confused, Liza watched the viscount induce the boy to leave the carriage. Though he was dressed in tattered wool, someone had thrown a silk cape over his shoulders. Liza could just make out his features by the light of the carriage lamps.

Bronze hair, thick and smooth, a complexion without blemish, strongly sculpted cheekbones. The boy pulled his hand free and backed up until he hit the side of the carriage. His fear screamed at Liza.

The viscount spoke soothingly to him, but the youth started when a cloaked and hooded figure emerged from the doorway. The figure stood on the threshold, making no move toward the boy, but immediately the youth’s whole body sagged from its rigid posture. Without warning, he brought his hands up to his face.

The viscount moved then, dropping an arm over the boy’s shoulders and drawing him close. The youth was so distraught, he put up no resistance as the
viscount handed him over to the cloaked figure. Liza shot Toby a questioning look, but Toby jerked his head in the direction of the carriage.

Another man in evening dress sprang from the vehicle. In his arms he held a girl. She wore a frilly dress and bright patent leather shoes, and her lips were a too, too bright red. She also was handed over to the cloaked figure, but the moment she was released, she wrapped her arms around the youth and buried her head in his shoulder.

The viscount spoke again to the boy, touching his shoulder. The boy shrank away from the touch, but nodded. His head hung wearily, and with a last frightened glance at the viscount, he allowed the cloaked figure to pull him inside the building.

The viscount stood staring at the closed door. His companion said something, and he shook his head, turned abruptly, and climbed into the carriage.

“Quickly,” Liza said as she and Toby hurried back to the cab.

The doors had barely closed on them when the carriage turned the corner and drove past them. They were off again, this time toward the countryside beyond Fulham.

“What was that all about?” she asked.

“I don’t like it,” Toby said, chewing his lip. “And we can’t follow them out of the city much farther without being noticed. Gor, missy, this business got a foul smell to it. Watch it!”

Liza lurched forward as the driver hauled on his reins, and Toby threw an arm in front of her.

“I think they stopped again. Can’t go no farther without them seeing.”

Toby opened the door that stretched across his
legs, stood up and peered into the darkness. “They did stop.”

Several minutes passed with Liza anxiously waiting for some sign from Toby. Even if she stood up, she wasn’t tall enough to see anything, for the road descended the other side of a hill and plunged into a stand of trees.

“Gor!” Without warning Toby jumped back into his seat. “They’re coming back. Turn this cart around and scarper, lad.”

They clambered ahead of their would-be quarry and managed to pull into a busy street in Fulham before being overtaken by the carriage. Tangled in a snarl of vending carts, omnibuses, and carriages, they watched the vehicle disappear.

Liza slumped back in the cab seat. “Let’s go home, Toby.”

It was well past midnight when they paid off the cab and entered the house that served as the offices of Pennant’s Domestic Agency. Situated between Kings Cross and Shoreditch, it was near the wealthy, yet not so far from East London that working people couldn’t reach it. Pennant’s was the third in a row of terraced houses done in Grecian style with columns marching down the row one after the other.

The house was dark. Toby lit a lamp in the genteel drawing-waiting room before passing through the fictitious Pennant’s reception room to the true center of the agency, Liza’s office. Customers were never admitted here, where they could encounter the real owner. Indeed, not all of Pennant’s employees knew who Liza was.

Liza trudged into the office as Toby lit another lamp. After pulling off her cloak hood, she removed her cap and rubbed her face with it. Her eyes felt as if
they were coated with sand, and her back ached where she’d twisted it trying to wriggle away from Jocelin Marshall.

She collapsed on a settee and sighed. “Find out what that place was in St. Giles.”

“Nasty, that.” Toby stood over her, his arms folded.

“He’s up to something,” she said. “Damn him. I couldn’t find anything in the house.”

“You know he got that little girl and that boy from St. Giles.” Toby cleared his throat. “Missy, there’s goings-on you best not know about. Some things ladies shouldn’t—”

“Don’t bother,” Liza snapped. “Ignorant ladies are helpless ladies, helpless and powerless. By now you’d think you’d have given up lecturing me on delicacy. Women aren’t delicate, Toby, or they wouldn’t survive childbirth, or the slums, or husbands who run off and leave them with the children. Oh, never mind. I’m too tired to argue. Just do as I say.”

“It ain’t proper,” Toby growled.

“Go to bed.”

“I’m going. Gor, who’d have thought a miss with a father as rich as King Solomon would turn out such a witchy, bluestocking shrew.”

Groaning, Liza maneuvered herself off the settee, crossed the room, and carefully lay down on the longer sofa. She propped her head up on an embroidered pillow and snuggled down in her coat. She stared at a painting of a Scottish loch that hung above the couch.

What was Jocelin Marshall doing? Regardless of Toby’s attempts to shield her, she had learned much since coming to London to work. She knew most men frequented women of low morals. What had shocked
her was the little girl, and the boy. But if the viscount had taken the two children from that pretended boardinghouse, he hadn’t done so for the same reasons the other patrons had. Why had he deposited them like bullion, in a place far away from their employer, when he would have to return them?

Such questions would have to wait for answers. Liza turned on her side and winced at the twinge in her back. Yes, she had expected depravity of the viscount, but never had she imagined that he would conceive a passion for her coal-dusty and fulsome self.

No gentleman had ever lusted after her. Even more unimaginable, she suspected that she was aroused by his interest. Why else would she fail to run from him when he advanced, when he might be a murderer? Even if he wasn’t one, she should have run.

Elizabeth Maud Elliot, how unmaidenly. What improper conduct. How unbecoming. How dangerously foolish
. Liza sighed and turned on her back to stare at the ceiling. She was a poor creature, a poor creature indeed. If she was going to succumb to a gentleman, she might as well have stayed at home and married one of Father’s boorish, self-interested, and close-minded persons of title. But then, she’d never had difficulty conceiving a distaste for any of them.

Jocelin Marshall, now, he was different. He had but to set foot in her presence, and she became fascinated. She couldn’t claim that her interest was all due to his pursuit either. From the moment his carriage had pulled up to the line of servants that night, she had been drawn to him. Heavens, she’d been captivated by his boots.

She could govern herself, however. She could. Dear Lord, she must keep her suspicions in mind for her own sake. She had the strength to do so. She was
as strong as a house in her resolve. Therefore she needn’t quit the viscount’s household so precipitously. After all, any woman would be enticed by a man like that. Exotic, wondrous in his black-cat appearance, dangerous, he cast into shadow the effete society men of her acquaintance.

She would have to be more careful if she returned. No more cleaning his room. No more going above stairs when he was about. He seemed to have the ability to discern where she was and trap her. She would take greater care. That was all.

Having resolved most of her dilemmas, if not the mystery of her brother’s death, she took herself off to bed. The next morning she was in her office going over receipts with Toby and his daughter, Betty. They’d been running Pennant’s while she was gone.

Liza sat in her leather armchair behind the big cherrywood desk she’d found at an auction. Betty hauled out the leather-bound book of days in which they recorded their schedule by the week. While Liza gnawed on the end of a fountain pen, she detailed the activities of the past fortnight.

“And we have the Duke of Lessborough’s banquet next week?” Liza asked.

“Yes, and his secretary has been hounding me about Monsieur Jacques. I’ve assured him that he would get Monsieur Jacques, but he’s still atwitter.”

Monsieur Jacques—really Elihu Diver, ex-seaman and ship’s cook—was in great demand. He was in demand because Liza had started a rumor through her mother that his recipes had been handed down from Marie Antoinette’s chef.