A Necessary Deception (21 page)

A clear path opened between the farmer’s wagon and the curricle’s remains.

Not just the curricle’s remains. Human remains lay there amidst broken wheels and wine casks. A face shone waxen in the sunlight.

George Barnaby.

“Murdering frog.” The shout rang from the back of the crowd around the smashed curricle and Barnaby’s body. “Seize him, constable.”

“Yeah, take him to Newgate.”

Others picked up the cry. “Arrest the foreigner.”

The tumult brought a halt to what little traffic managed to pass the wreckage. If a constable were in the crowd, he’d made himself scarce.

Lydia grasped Christien’s arm and tried to pull him away. Perhaps someone would give them transport into town, preferably in a closed carriage. Or away from London. Right then, either sounded like a better prospect than staying.

But staying was what Christien did. His arm didn’t budge. If anything, the muscles hardened under her fingers. His face grew stony and cold enough to freeze the spilled wine. “I have lived in this country since I had—since I was ten years old. I have served the king—”

“What? Frog legs?” The original heckler had moved closer, a man with a barrel for a belly. The belly rolled beneath his workman’s smock. “It’s all you Frenchies are good for—eatin’ what isn’t natural to eat.”

“Which is why Napoleon’s managed to keep the country at war for over a decade,” Christien muttered.

Lydia gave his arm a warning squeeze.

He covered her hand with his. “Someone left that body there after we went for help. I had nothing to do with—”

Catcalls and jeers drowned his denial of guilt.

“Go back where you came from.”

“Let them guillotine all you aristos.”

“Kill him for killing an Englishman.”

Those were amongst the most polite of the remarks. The others rained down like filth, like venom. Hostility toward the French. Hostility toward Christien in particular. The scene rang of the incident in Hyde Park, only magnified. Civil unrest as Lydia had never experienced.

Fomented by someone wanting a revolution in England, as in France.

For a moment, the sun blackened before her eyes. A pain like a knife wound stabbed through her middle. In that moment, she wished they were running away from a gunman rather than facing a mob.

“We’ve got to leave here,” she told Christien. “Any minute now, they’re going to—”

Her words broke off in a scream. Two men with arms like sides of beef lunged forward, grabbing for Christien. Lydia flung herself at the nearest one. With a flick of his wrist, he sent her sprawling. She snatched at his leg, wrapped her arms around it, yanked. With a roar, he toppled backward. Lydia kept hauling up, up, up. The man struck the road like a felled mainmast, and she stepped on his chest.

“Stay there,” she shouted over the yells and cheers. “I am Lady Lydia Gale, widow of Major Sir Charles Gale. Christien de Meuse is my friend and more loyal to England than any of you with your seditious talk of killing aristocrats.”

Beside her, Christien had sent his second attacker flat into the dirt, where he nursed a bloody nose.

Seeing others crowding close, Lydia plunged on. “Do you want this country to turn into France?”

“Frog lover,” someone shouted.

Others took up the chant. The man on whom Lydia stood heaved her off.

Christien caught hold of her, lifted her over his shoulder, and headed for the line of vehicles. “You are either brave or foolhardy,
mon amour
.”

“Can I be both?” Lydia raised her head to see the crowd, disorganized around the fallen men and the corpse.

The corpse of a man who had flirted with her in her own parlor, who had talked of his work to stop dissension in England.

She dropped her head, let her hair obscure her vision, and concentrated on not being sick down Christien’s back.

“This way!” someone shouted loudly enough to be heard over the bellowing throng. “De Meuse.”

A friend, a savior.

Christien halted and set Lydia down on the step of a carriage. “
Merci bien.
”

Before she turned to see who their rescuer was, Christien headed back the way they’d come.

“Where are you going?” she called after him.

“The horses.”

“You can’t go alone.” She leaped from the step.

Strong hands caught hold of her waist and lifted her into the vehicle. “I’ll go, my lady.”

The man stepped over her, then sprinted after Christien. His coat flapped open to reveal a short sword and a pistol. The latter he pulled free and pointed into the air. A single crack ricocheted around the road and vehicles and crowd. Like a slamming door, it subdued the rioters.

“Go home,” the man shouted. “I’m a magistrate and will see to the Frenchman and the unfortunate man in the wreckage. If nothing else, have respect for him.”

His speech worked. People released their missiles of small stones and dried manure and began to disperse. Traffic recommenced moving along the open part of the road.

Lydia leaned out the far window of the carriage and was horribly, embarrassingly sick. By the time the men returned, walking the horses, Lydia had seated herself, chewing a handful of pine needles, the only green thing she could reach from the vehicle. They tasted bitter and sharp but cleansed her mouth and cleared her head enough to feel as composed as a woman could in a ragged gown and loose hair.

“Are you a magistrate?” she asked Christien’s friend, as if nothing untoward had brought her into his coach.

He smiled, showing her the most perfect teeth she’d ever seen. “In Sussex, yes.”

“Mostly,” Christien added, “he’s my watchdog. Allow me to introduce Mr. Elias Lang.”

Lydia had never been to Whitehall, that former palace of the Stewart kings now full of soldiers, sailors, and other government officials attached to the business of war. If she’d ever thought to go, she would have dressed appropriately. But she traversed the dank corridors looking like a waif from a shipwreck, not the widow of a respected military officer.

The mysterious Mr. Lang wasn’t such a conundrum after all. He was a quietly dressed individual of early middle years, with sandy brown hair and no-colored eyes. In Sussex, he owned a small estate and sat as the local magistrate when he wasn’t in London playing spy master.

Lydia learned all that on their way back to London, then on to Whitehall. She also learned he was not, in fact, the man in the garden in Portsmouth.

“The accent is all wrong. He was most definitely a London man or possibly Westmorland.”

“Could he, in fact, be George Barnaby?” Lang asked her from behind a battered oak desk.

Lydia cradled the cup of tea he’d prepared for her and considered his question. “You’d think if he were, I would have recognized him straight off.”

“Unless he disguised his voice,” Lang suggested.

“You could have done the same.”

“I could, which is why Christien didn’t introduce you to me sooner to prove he was telling the truth.” He slanted a glance at his colleague. “That, and perhaps he wanted his lady to believe him on his own merit.”

Christien emitted a rumbling noise like a growl, then shrugged. “
Peut-être.
”

The look he cast Lydia threatened to melt her bones. She sipped her lukewarm tea and fixed her gaze on Lang. “Being from Sussex, you have the sort of friends who can get you back and forth across the Channel without questions asked, I presume? Which is how you got those messages to me.”

“Yes, some of my friends escape prison helping me.” Lang shot a glance at Christien. “But when this reprobate Frenchman got himself captured by English sailors, I needed help getting him out of that prison without exposing myself or his role.”

“You took a risk having him walk into my parlor that day.”

“We didn’t think it was a risk,” Lang said.

“We thought you’d been fairly warned of further help needed,” Christien added. “But someone interfered with the message and blackmailed you instead to muddy the waters, we presume.”

“Barnaby?” Lydia posed the question, then shook her head. “But who would kill him?”

Lang sighed. “Whoever was using him.”

“Frobisher seems obvious,” Christien said. “Too ob—”

“Frobisher.” Lydia sprang to her feet, adding tea stains to her bedraggled gown. “I can’t stay here. I’ve got to get home and get ready for that ball. Honore has likely already gone off with Frobisher. And he could be a murderer.” She slammed her thick earthenware mug onto the desk. “Please, someone take me home.”

Christien and Lang were on their feet in an instant. “I’ll take you,” they said in unison.

“Of course, I’m not done questioning you about today,” Lang added. “I could do so in the carriage.”

“Unless you’re detaining Chris—Monsieur de Meuse, I suggest you both take me.” Lydia smiled at the gentlemen and led the way to the door.

If they didn’t follow, she would never find her way out of the building. And she must reach Honore, wherever she was. And with Frobisher? A murderer?

Too obvious, as Christien said. He’d arrived with Barnaby, who claimed he didn’t know Frobisher until they’d met at an inn. Barnaby claimed he worked for England’s good.

“That has many connotations.” Lydia spoke her next thought aloud.

“What do you mean?” Christien tucked his arm through hers, a possessive gesture. But then, the way she’d kissed him back gave him reason for possessiveness.

“Barnaby insisted he was working for England’s good. But that could so easily mean that changing England is what’s good.”

“You accused me of something similar, did you not?” Holding her close to his side with their entwined arms, Christien headed down the narrow dark passageway without a flicker of hesitation, Lang behind them. “I could be working for France out of revenge for England canceling the Peace of Amiens that got my father killed.”

“I’m a beast for doubting you, Christien.”

“Christien, is it?” Lang sighed. “I should have known. I suppose I’m too old for you.”

“Never, sir.” Lydia flashed him a smile over her shoulder. “Shared danger simply makes formality seem obsolete.”

Not to mention an interlude in one another’s arms.

She touched her fingertips to her lips before she realized what she was doing. Her face went warm in the chilly, dank corridor. An empty place opened inside her, a longing, a wish that the idea of them being something more than comrades in arms—military arms—didn’t make her want to run screaming as far from Christien as she could get.

She could remain at his side to help find the sort of person who would stir up a crowd like the one in the park, like the one on the road, like others who might turn things into outright revolution—mobs capturing the poor mad king or beheading the prince regent, looting Cavendish, Grosvenor, and Berkley Squares, or smashing up shops along Bond Street. But repeat that kiss and its implications of a deeper relationship? No, she wouldn’t trade her current freedom, however poor, for the control of a man like her father again. She could keep the wolves of true poverty from the door with her painting.

“Oh, no.” She halted in the center of the hall. “My portfolio is still in the curricle.”

“I’m sorry.” Christien sounded as though he meant it.

“I have men collecting Mr. Barnaby’s remains.” Lang spoke up from behind. “They’ll bring anything else that was in the wreckage.”

“I’d rather not have it after—after it was beneath . . . Barnaby.” Lydia tamped down nausea and resumed their walk to the exit and the waiting closed carriage. She wanted to run. But because they passed men in regimental red, rifleman green, and naval blue, she maintained her sedate pace alongside Christien. The walk took mere minutes. It felt like an hour.

Outside, the sun was already dropping behind the buildings. Night was about to fall. Soon carriages would be lining up before the great houses of the haut ton, disgorging bejeweled men and women for a night of revelry.

And the person who wanted to bring it all to an end.

She opened her mouth to ask why bringing the frivolity of London Society to an end would be so awful, then closed it before the words escaped. She might find herself a guest of the Tower of London without her blackmailer if she spoke those words in this hotbed of men managing the war.

But her blackmailer might be dead. Even if he was not, she was free from the threat. She always had been. Nothing stopped her from abandoning Christien to his own devices.

Yet more than the warm strength of his arm held her to him. She wanted to help, make her mark on a fragment of history, beyond the pages of what would one day be written of her time.

Or perhaps she simply wanted to have an excuse to be with him.

A warning bell clanged in her head, resounded in her heart. She stopped up her inner ear against it. Not now. Now she needed to catch up with Honore.

The coachman drove them at breakneck speed through the streets of London. Torch lights and lanterns blinked on as they passed other vehicles and houses. Shops grew dark.

Number Thirty Cavendish Square glowed with its light above the front door and several candles blazing inside. The light beckoned Lydia. She leaped from the carriage the instant it stopped and raced up the steps.

Lemster himself opened the door. “My lady, whatever happened?”

“Never you mind that now. Where is Miss Honore? Please tell me she hasn’t left for Vauxhall yet.”