Linda Needham (25 page)

She dropped her gaze for a moment, then wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. “Which makes me the luckiest woman in the entire world.”

“And me the luckiest man.”

Kate hadn’t felt so very guilty about anything in a long time, looking up into her trusting husband’s face, holding back still another troubling secret from him.

“I’m sorry about the wagons, Jared. An unpleasant reminder which I plan to be rid of within the next half hour. There’s Elden and Ian, now.”

He turned his broad back to the two approaching men and kissed her till her knees had turned to honey. “There’s more where that came from, wife.”

He left her then and disappeared into the house.

Elden came up behind her while Ian went to work carrying a barrel up the stairs.

“You didn’t tell him anything, my lady?” The poor man seemed to have aged in the last week.

“I do want to, Elden.” Kate slid a leather case and a canvas bag off the wagon bed. “But he wouldn’t understand.”

And though he didn’t know it, he was all tied up in the ramifications.

“When are you leaving for Liverpool?”

“After Jared’s asleep tonight. I can’t let Father Sebastian stay in that horrid jail cell another day. I’ve got to get him out somehow.”

But what was he doing in Liverpool when he ought to be in Wicklow? Drew and Ross had promised to deliver him safely. That was days ago.

“I wish you’d let me handle this for you, my lady.”

“I need you here, Elden. I’ll be careful. Hopwood didn’t say anything in his note about the League itself being under suspicion. I should be able to spring the good father and be back home by supper tomorrow.”

Elden groaned and shook his head. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

“Neither do I, but I have to take care of it myself. This whole scheme was my idea. If anything goes wrong, I’ll take the blame.”

But the man only grunted at her and started up the stairs with a battered old trunk.

“With any luck I’ll be back home before he ever knows that I’ve been gone.”

And if not, Jared would take good care of their children while she served out her long sentence in some dank old prison.

J
ared woke refreshed and contented, though his bed was empty of his lovely wife and a clock was just striking nine. He stretched and yawned, feeling more at home now than he ever had in his life. Coddled and cared for. Loved.

“Bless you, Kate.” She’d let him sleep nearly ten hours after last night’s short, but spectacularly torrid bout of lovemaking.

Kate had mentioned something about regretting the tremendously busy day awaiting her and had doubtless risen in the wee hours. She was probably halfway through her list of chores and projects.

He washed and dressed, looking forward to a day of reading up on the estate accounts and meeting with Elden, and his promise to teach the girls to tie knots the way he’d taught the boys.

Hell, his own schedule seemed downright slothful compared to Kate’s. But by the time he got to the bottom of the stairs, his schedule had changed irrevocably.

“A message for you, sir.” Ian handed him a sealed envelope. “Brought in from the village. Looks to be urgent.”

Assuming it needed an immediate answer, Jared had Ian wait while he read it.

“Damnation!” The message needed more than an answer. It needed him, in the flesh.

“Everything all right, sir?”

“No, Ian.” Kate wouldn’t be at all pleased with him leaving just now. “Would you saddle my horse, please, and bring it around the front. And have you seen Lady Hawkesly?”

“Um…” Ian’s eyes shifted to the wall and then to the floor. “Well, not this morning, sir. I’ll just go get your horse for you.”

The kitchen was empty of everyone but the three Miss Darbys, who greeted him with their usual effusion of good mornings, which he had little time to acknowledge just now.

“Do any of you know where I might find Lady Hawkesly?”

“Well…” Myrtle sliced a glance at her sisters.

“Myrtle, didn’t she say something about the orchard?”

“And checking the progress of those fir seeds she blasted the other day.”

This was not what he wanted to hear. “So you’re saying that my wife could be anywhere?”

“You know how our lady is, sir,” Tansy said as she peered up at him. “Can we help you?”

“I wanted to see her before I left, but I doubt I can spare the time tracking her down.”

“You’re leaving?” Rosemary hurried to his side.

“Can’t be helped. I’ll leave a note for Kate in our room, but please assure her that I’ll be back as soon as I can. Hopefully before supper.”

Jared was packed and on his horse fifteen minutes later, the hurry familiar and suddenly tiresome.

But he had been called to Liverpool by Customs to follow up on the great grain conspiracy.

He had no choice but to look into the problem himself. Drew and Ross had sent a message yesterday that they been called back to Whitehall by Lord Grey, with Drew about to take on a personal assignment for the queen. But the consequence was that the investigation into Grey’s missing grain now fell to Jared.

Right in the middle of a wondrous honeymoon with his magnificent wife. The beginning of the kind of marriage that he had only dared dream about and surely didn’t deserve.

Retiring permanently to the country was looking very, very attractive.

He arrived in Liverpool during an early evening rain and walked from the train station to the Customs House, where he was redirected to a small building across the street and met by a slightly familiar face.

“Good Lord, if it isn’t the earl of Hawkesly!” Lieutenant Nicholls grabbed Jared’s hand and shook it with gusto. “I haven’t seen you since New Delhi!”

“And you weren’t a lieutenant at the time. Congratulations, Nicholls.”

“To what do we owe the honor?”

Jared looked around the tidy office, a main room and two smaller, one whose door was barred but standing wide open.

“I’m here on behalf of the Home Office. You’re holding a suspect. I’d like to see him as soon as possible.” Because his head ached and he wanted to get back home to Kate.

Nicholls gave a laugh. “Actually, you can’t see him, Hawkesly. Nobody can.”

God he didn’t need these parlor games. “Why? Is he dead?”

“Might be.” Nicholls leaned back against his desktop and shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. He’s not here.”

Jared hated these little kings in their kingdoms. “Then who’s got him, Nicholls? I haven’t got all day.”

“Nobody’s got him. The old fellow has flown.”

“Escaped?” So he’d come all this way for nothing. “When did this happen?”

“A few hours ago.” Nicholls went to the tea cart and poured a cup of the black stuff. “You wouldn’t think an old man like him would have had the craftiness. But
damn, if he didn’t get himself sprung from his cell. Tea, Hawkesly?”

“No, thank you.” Jared hitched his satchel strap higher on his shoulder, not wanting to stay a moment longer than necessary. “How did the suspect get out? Through the window?”

“Walked right out the front door.” Nicholls took a slurping sip of his tea.

“In the middle of the day? With a room full of officers? How could that happen?”

Nicholls had the sense to look slightly chagrined. “I don’t know, sir. I wasn’t here.”

“Then have you a report on the incident?”

“Ah! Right here. I was just going to file it away.” Nicholls studied the single page. “But as I understand the circumstance, the man was caught in the early hours of yesterday breaking into one of the government’s warehouses on the Albert Dock. A guard found him cutting open a sack of Indian corn.”

“Not by chance the impounded cargo from the
Pickering
?”

“That’s right. So you’re on top of all this, Hawkesly?”

So it seemed, but tottering. An odd, unsettling coincidence. “What happened then?”

“Customs interrogated him, but he wouldn’t say a word, apparently. So they brought him here to stew for a while, and then sent for you.”

Bumbling idiots. What would he have done with an old man anyway? “How did this dangerous prisoner manage to walk out the door unnoticed?”

“He had a partner, a beautiful young woman. She came in a bit after noon claiming to have the old fellow’s medicine. Well, it was lunchtime and we were short staffed and from what I hear the woman bewitched the impressionable young Sheridan.”

“Bewitched him in what way?”

“Wiles, if you know what I mean. Helpless and charming, so Sheridan left her to visit with the prisoner in the cell. Then she asked for tea for the old man, and then water, and a warm blanket and such, one thing after another. So the fool Sheridan left the cell door open for her, and next thing he knew the pair was nowhere to be seen.”

Bloody hell. “Didn’t Sheridan go after them?”

“He searched the few blocks around, then gave up. Figured he was just a shabby old priest who muttered a lot and a faithful parishioner sent to spring him. Hardly a threat to anyone.”

An elderly priest and a beautiful young woman?

Nicholls was obviously not an investigator, or hadn’t a brain in head. The ploy had conspiracy stamped all over it. Too many common threads not to be entangled.

“All right then, Nicholls. I’ll be on my way. Notify me through Customs if you ever find the pair.”

Determined not to leave Liverpool without gathering at least some new information, Jared shouldered his satchel and crossed the street to the new edifice of the Albert Docks.

He’d watched it being built but hadn’t yet seen it completed. A huge rectangle of water and wharf, made entirely of iron and concrete. Impressive.

No wonder both Lord Grey and the government had chosen the dock for their warehouse site. Expensive, but secure.

Jared’s credentials gave him entry into the Customs warehouse to inspect the store of impounded Indian corn. The sight of a thousand sacks of grain sitting idle made his chest hurt.

Perhaps he could buy it from Customs, and see that it got to its original destination, because, as Kate had so wisely said, there were sad, starving children waiting for it somewhere.

Lord Grey’s warehouse was across the rectangle, huge and meticulously administered, making him wonder how a noticeable quantity of grain could go missing every month for such a long time without a great deal of cleverness and organization.

Not only from Grey’s warehouse, but from Lord Russell’s in Briston and Trevelyan’s in Plymouth.

And what had Drew mentioned about all those relief committee warehouses they’d found here in Liverpool? Jared searched his notes in the fading evening light and found the list of a half dozen of them on a variety of docks.

He walked across the street to the Salthouse Docks, finding an additional three relief committee warehouses, two of them completely empty, but little of interest until he came to the Ladies’ Charitable League. One of those on Drew’s list.

Though early evening sky was a steely gray, he saw no lights burning anywhere in the building. He would have knocked but noticed that someone had left the rear door open an irresistible inch.

Not wanting to announce his presence, Jared pushed the door open to the vastness of the warehouse, then closed it just as he’d found it. He stood quietly in the hulking dimness, letting his eyes adjust, listening to the building, the cry of the wheeling gulls outside the door.

But the creaky old warehouse seemed to dip and rise with the incoming tide, stiffly shouldering its roof and open rafters, its lofts and the few small rooms, the neatly organized rows of grain sacks.

A haunting voice, a melody of wood and iron.

And a soft, familiar fragrance in the midst of the salt and the creosote.

He wasn’t alone here in the pale gray light from the clerestory windows. Probably only a clerk closing up after a long day. But he quieted his pulse, trying to localize the other sounds.

Clunk.

The noise came from somewhere ahead of him, in the front of the building that faced the cobbled streets instead of the wharf behind him.

Then a few soft footfalls. A shifting. Then nothing.

He found a silent floorboard and walked along its center until the first seam, then found another and another, past plump grain sacks and fat barrels until he had made it across the warehouse floor and was standing at an office door.

Banking on the element of surprise, Jared shoved the door open, ready for anything.

But the room appeared unoccupied. It was long and windowless and dimly lit by a single lamp on the table nearest the door. Crates were stacked in a jumble, filing
chest drawers hung open, a disorder of papers spread out at the long worktable at the center.

Someone had either just left in a hurry, or he was still there.

He held his silence, listened for the telltale sound of breathing, the rustle of clothing, the scrape of a shoe.

He heard nothing at all, yet felt a presence, the unmistakable sense that someone else was in the room.

“I know you’re here.” He heard the faintest gasp from the far end of the room, and then a bump. “Come out, please. I just want to ask you a few questions.”

An unintelligible, anxious whisper, and then that palpable silence again.

“I’m not going to hurt you. In fact, I apologize for entering the premises without knocking. My name is Hawkesly. I’m with the Home Office, making inquiries of the relief committee warehouses, and your door was open.”

He thought he saw a cloaked shape slip between two sets of shelves. Small statured, obviously not too keen about him being there.

“You ought to realize that I’m not leaving here until I talk with you face to face. Do you understand that?”

The figure stepped partially into view, the movement loosening a long sprig of hair from beneath the hood of the cloak.

A woman? Possibly the one who had released the old man from jail. The perfect connection: a priest, a poor relief warehouse and a store of impounded Indian corn.

Not above prompting a response with little threat, Jared said, “I’m investitgating a major theft ring, which
puts you squarely in the midst of a great deal of trouble, madam. Whether you’re a knowledgeable partner in the crime or not. Things will go far better for you if you cooperate.”

Silence. And that familiar fragrance again. Tendrils of lavender and lemons.

Kate’s scent, doubtless carried on his jacket, his collar, finding him in the dimness, but waiting for him back at Hawkesly Hall.

Impatient to return home in time to slip into bed beside her tonight, he snapped, “Dammit, woman, you’ll come here and tell me what you know, or you’ll find yourself back in the same cell you visited earlier today.”

His shout must have shaken her loose of her obstinacy. She stepped from behind the shelves, shapeless in her large cloak, her head down as she moved toward him.

“A wise decision, madam.”

Though there was an unsettling sway in her bearing, and in the shape of her arms as she reached up behind her head and pulled back the obscuring hood.

A glorious cascade of hair tumbled across her shoulders, burnished gold in the pale candlelight, loosely curled and shimmering.

The color of Kate’s hair, the same dancing flame and lace, the delicious scent of her caught up in his clothes, in his nostrils.

Familiar and intimate.

The woman raised her nose and then her chin and finally her piercing blue eyes. Until he was looking into the face of the woman he loved beyond his life, who haunted his days and his dreams.

“Kate?” But that made no sense. Not here in Liverpool.

She was at home with their children. She couldn’t be here in this obviously suspicious warehouse, embroiled in a political conspiracy against the prime minister and the most powerful members of his cabinet.

Not his Kate.

“Jared, I’m so sorry….” But that was her voice, the lilt and smoke of it. Those were her blue eyes, beseeching him as she came fully into the brightest boundaries of the candle flame.

Kate!

He reached out to her, but the world had shifted, rocked him backward.