Wrapped (11 page)

“I need no rescuer,” I said evenly, “but I do need your help.”

He turned and looked at me.

“We will work together,” I said finally.

Stowe squared his shoulders, lifted an eyebrow. “Together?”

“Only until Father returns.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “So long as you promise to ask him to speak on my behalf.”

“Agreed,” I said, extending my free hand. “And if we are to work together, please call me Agnes, Mr. Stowe.”

“If you like,” he said. He eyed my hand, still hanging out in the air, but he didn’t move to take it.

I pulled it partway back. “And I’ll go on calling you Mr. Stowe, then?”

“Oh!” He closed the gap between us, tugged off his glove, and placed his palm against my own.

“Caedmon. My name is Caedmon.”

His touch was warm and dry, slightly calloused at the fingertips. “This could be dangerous,” he pointed out.

“Shaking hands?” I said.

He released his grip. “You know what I mean.”

I nodded. It was already dangerous. I’d already taken the jackal’s head. The man at the party had already been murdered. My neighbors had already been vandalized. I was already in too deeply now to abandon the cause. And if it was possible that Napoleon was after something that we could prevent him from getting, then I was obligated, wasn’t I?

“You’ve pluck about you, Agnes,” he said, releasing my hand. “I’ll give you that.”

I almost blushed. In truth, I surprised myself. As dangerous as all this might be, as inconveniently as it might have been timed, part of me was grateful. Grateful that I’d been given the gift of something important, something exciting, perhaps something that mattered more than cotillions and curtsies. In a part of me that I would never reveal to anyone, it felt like a last blessed grasp at living before I settled into the life everyone else was planning for me. That same part of me silently thanked heaven that Father had been as busy and unavailable as ever.

After too long a silence, I cleared my throat and spoke again. “Where should we begin?”

He looked at the jackal’s head resting in my other palm. “It seems we have two challenges: divining the meaning of the message on that scrap, and sussing out who might have been meant to receive it.”

“It could be anyone,” I began, “anyone at the party—”

“A guest, or a member of Showalter’s household,” Caedmon mused. “Or even the rum ned himself.”

“Don’t be absurd,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “It is far more likely to be someone working with the museum if the body was meant to come here in the first place!”

“Then we begin with the message itself. Shall we have another go?”

He did not wait for my reply as he turned and grabbed his tablet. “W’s standard,” he read aloud. “That seems to be the first order—” But he caught himself, looking over my head toward the entrance to the room. I turned to follow his gaze. A man in a black suit wandered in and began a circuitous path between the cases. The point of a finely carved cane tapped the wooden floorboards with a muffled thud.

“Perhaps,” Caedmon whispered as I turned back, “perhaps we should continue this somewhere more private . . . at another time?” He quickly replaced the lid on the case he’d been cleaning and began to secure the items on his cart.

I knew he was right. We couldn’t risk discussing the jackal’s head in front of anyone, and if I didn’t get back home soon, I’d face more questions than I could come up with answers for.

I stared at the jackal’s head, reluctant. If someone truly was looking for this, they’d come looking for it at my door soon enough. I wasn’t sure I could hide it properly at home.

“Will you keep it for me?” I whispered hastily.

He looked taken aback. “I—I—”

“It will be safer for all of us if you do. No one knows I’ve been here.”

“Now you would trust me?”

“I already have,” I said, folding the jackal’s head into his hand.

He nodded gravely. “All right.”

“I’ll come tomorrow. I should be able to slip away in the afternoon,” I said.

“Not here,” he whispered. “Meet me at the south gate of the Tower,” he said, referencing the old fortress on the Thames. “I know someone who can help.”

“Can he be trusted?” I asked, rankling at how already he was taking charge.

“He served with my father,” Caedmon said quietly, in a tone that made me realize I should ask no more.

Chapter Ten

Mother hadn’t even noticed my absence the morning before, and Clarisse was as discreet as I knew she would be. But keeping my appointment with Caedmon the next afternoon presented a greater challenge.

“But Aunt Rachel is out,” Mother said when I begged her to allow me to go to the dressmakers to see about a bit of ribbon for my presentation gown. Aunt Rachel’s absence was precisely what I’d counted on. She met with her missionary alliance from the church on our at-home day. I told Mother that the shopgirl had informed me that it would be the last shipment from the Continent for some time—so little was making it through the blockades of late—and that if I didn’t go now, there’d be slim chance of anything being left by tomorrow.

Mother considered this.

“You
will
need something for the train.”

“All four feet of it,” I agreed, trying not to sound too eager. If I overplayed this, Mother might suspect I had other reasons for the errand. I rubbed the wing of my jade butterfly nervously.

“And maybe a little something at the waist—just on the fifth rib where we agreed it would hit.”

“Yes, Mother.”

I didn’t care if it hit the fifth rib or my second knuckle so long as she let me go.

“But why such interest now?” she said, setting aside her embroidery.

“It
is
my presentation dress. And I am making more of an effort, Mother. After I saw what Caroline Hallishaw wore at the unwrapping . . .”

She rolled her eyes. “So inappropriate for a garden party . . . now what will they have her wear for her debut?”

“Exactly,” I enthused.

Mother hesitated. “Very well, but don’t be long, please. The Martins are to call later, and I can’t be made to endure her comparisons of her own silly daughter to you if you are absent.”

“Back before you even know I’ve gone,” I promised.

Mother relented with a wave of her hand. I popped down and kissed her cheek, dashing out the door before she could change her mind.

The ribbon was the only believable errand that would put me in distance of my rendezvous with Caedmon. Woolsey, our carriage driver, deposited me at the curb in front of Boulton’s dress shop. While most of my contemporaries would be crowding the shops in Bond Street, Mother swore by the dressmakers near the river and London Bridge—and conveniently, the Tower.

Inside, I hastily picked out ribbon as promised.

“It’s lovely, miss,” gushed the clerk as she handed over the ribbon. “I only saw the fabric once, but from what I recall, this color ought to be perfect.”

Boulton’s had imported the silk, but like the gown I’d worn for the unwrapping, Mother insisted that this dress be made away from prying eyes, and fitted at home when the time came. “All this secrecy is nonsense,” I offered.

“We had a girl last week who insisted we bury her gown underneath piles of scrap muslin when we weren’t working on it,” the girl said, smiling. “Your mother’s not the only one afraid of spies.”

I couldn’t help but smile to myself. “No,” I said, turning, “I suppose she’s not.”

Outside, Woolsey leaned against the carriage, staring into the shop windows for a glimpse of a certain seamstress I knew him to be sweet on. I’d requested him—and not our other driver—for precisely this reason.

I told Woolsey I’d walk awhile and inquire about a volume of poetry at the booksellers up the lane. He made no attempt to conceal his delight at having the good fortune to stay behind and stare at the pretty golden-haired girl through the windows of the shop.

I made for the Tower. It was as lovely to be alone on a busy street today as it had been yesterday morning. But as I drew closer to the point at which I’d agreed to meet Caedmon, my thoughts occupied themselves with how best to proceed with this young man.

While I was brave enough to flout convention with my appetite for education and my penchant for shirking a chaperone, I confess that even in my most rebellious of moods I had not conceived of spending time alone with a young man. Even close conversations with Showalter made me more than a little nervous, despite the constant presence of Mother or Aunt Rachel. So going to meet Caedmon—though an indiscretion born of necessity—was all the more unsettling. An indiscretion complicated by how very attractive and very irritating he managed to be at the same time.

But there was nothing for it. Until I spoke with Father, there was little else I could do but follow where fate had led me.

I found Caedmon sitting cross-legged like a child at the corner of the lawn, the gray-brown stones of the Tower piling up behind him, oblivious to the pungent smell rising from the stale waters of the moat behind him. He was staring intently at the scrap of paper on which he’d recorded the translation of the secret message yesterday.

I thought of what it might mean if someone saw us together unescorted. Girls’ reputations had been ruined for less. Mother would lock me away for the rest of the season, perhaps longer. Showalter might withdraw his interest. And the fact that this prospect bothered me gave me even more pause. Could it mean that I was developing feelings for Showalter? Or that I was already so conscious of my pride that even the possibility of his refusal was difficult to stomach?

But the fact that neither was enough to make me turn around and scurry back to the carriage meant something else entirely, I suspected.

“Good afternoon,” I said. He looked up at me and scrambled to his feet.

“H’lo,” Caedmon said. “Wasn’t sure you’d turn up.”

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

He nodded. “Thought you might have second thoughts is all.”

I’d had third and fourth thoughts, but didn’t bother telling him that. He held the paper bearing his translation of the message out to me.

“Honestly, I think if it were a proper code or cipher or hieroglyph it would almost be easier to make out.” He shook his head.

“You’ve had no luck, then?” I said.

“Maybe one bit. I think ‘standard,’ because it apparently belongs to somebody”—here he pointed to the possessive
W
—“can only be one thing.”

I waited for him to finish. He waited for me to ask him to do so. I won.

“I think it’s a standard like a king’s standard,” he said finally.

“Like colors?” I asked, thinking of the ceremonial banners the guards carried at the front of a royal procession.

“Spot on. Given the other possible meanings of the word, it’s the only one that really squares. Each pharaoh and even some of the generals had their own standards smithed. What Napoleon, if he is indeed the emperor referenced, might be seeking would be some carved or wrought-metal job they could affix to a wooden pole. Deacon can tell us for certain.”

He steered me past the Tower grounds and into an alleyway with a hand lightly touching my elbow. I almost objected when his fingers landed there. Such a gesture by anyone other than my father or brothers was considered highly inappropriate, but Caedmon didn’t live in my world.

And if pressed, I might have been forced to admit that I rather liked it. There was something familiar in the gesture, something comfortable.

“Who is Deacon?” I asked, to pull my mind back to the matter at hand. A pack of ravens scattered as we approached.

“My godfather. He was a military man, but his knowledge of Egypt and the artifacts outstrips even the most senior of men at the museum. My father served with him in Egypt. Pa thought he was tip-top, used to bring me along on visits to his place when I was younger, after they both returned to London. Of course that was before . . .” Caedmon trailed off.

“Before what?”

He hesitated. “Deacon was more than just a soldier, and he distinguished himself when my father served under him in Egypt. Pa was never clear about what Deacon was up to or how he helped him, but I have my notions.”

“Notions?”

He looked away. “You’ll think me cork-brained,” he said.

“I might, if we weren’t having this conversation the day after finding a secret message attached to an ancient ornament.”

Now he smiled. “I think Deacon was a bit of a spy,” he said slowly.

I stopped. “A spy?” Suddenly I felt as if I were listening again at my fireplace.

“Something like. When we visited him in the Tower, Pa told me Deacon worked for the ordnance board, devising explosives for the army and navy.”

It was true the Tower had since fallen to this purpose, a strange evolution from its years as a prison so long ago. It also held a zoo, the crown jewels, and half a dozen other odd things.

“He and Pa always talked about their time in Egypt or some new book or discovery. But other times, my father would send me from the office out to the grounds to chase the birds. Still, I heard enough. But short afore Pa died, something happened and Deacon was dished up. He shifted here.”