Marry the Man Today (19 page)

She hung her oil lamp on a sconce hook in the corridor where it would cast just enough light to be a beacon when she returned, and then stepped into the long storage room. She worked her way through the dimly lit alleyways of crates and barrels to the large cabinet against the back wall.

The tallboy was empty inside, where she'd conveniently cleared it of its shelves. Which made it much easier for her to climb inside, slide the back off the cabinet, then push open the inmost and then the heavy, rusted iron outermost door that led through the cabinet into her secret passage.

She closed up the doors behind her and started forward into the long, dark passage that stretched out for an entire block under the street. It jogged and twisted and turned its way beneath what must have been some ancient medieval system of croft arches, until the passage finally ended at the backside of still another wooden door.

She put her ear to the panel, listened for a long time, but heard nothing of the footsteps or voices that she'd heard the first time she found her way through the odd passage.

Since then she'd learned that the vast complex of rooms beyond the panel were generally deserted after midnight, and her panel opened up into a tailor's shop behind convenient rows of clothes hanging against the back wall.

Still, she cracked open the door enough to make sure that the shop was dark, before pushing through and heading for the telegraph room.

Gaslights were burning low along the paneled passageways, as they usually did this time of night, softly lighting the various rooms in the elaborate underground installation.

A nameless headquarters of some sort. Probably a secret government building that she shouldn't be skulking around in. But she was hardly a risk to the security of the Empire. Besides, she was just borrowing a few services.

Because there was so much here to borrow.

What with a tailor's shop and a huge printing office, three different laboratories, and who knew what else locked behind heavy metal doors......

Still, she was grateful to have discovered the bank of telegraph machines. She could send private messages to her underground contacts without having to worry about the local telegraph operator remembering her or the subjects of her messages.

Secrecy was imperative in her activities. So was obscuring the trail of paper and plans and all the other clues that followed after her runaway heroines. Because their already miserable lives depended solely on her ability to camouflage and misdirect every step along the way.

Failure meant an angry husband or father or fiancé following the hapless woman to the ends of the earth. And then dragging her back to her own private hell.

She slipped into the telegraph room, vowing once again that she simply could never let that happen.

She'd learned telegraphy from the station master in her little village of
W
averlock. He'd been a sweet-natured, childless old fellow who was everyone's grandfather. She'd often taken his place at the key when he was feeling under the weather, and had manned the station for a full month after he died.

But tonight she sent three messages, to three different contacts: one to Southampton, one to be sent via steamship to New York, and the third to the owner of an elegant but very private boardinghouse in Winston Quay. Each would reply to her in code, to any one of a dozen telegraph offices across London.

So far, so good.

But just as the thought slipped through her brain, she heard a door open somewhere above her.

Then a pair of male voices, then three of them, their words unclear.

But the sound of one of them made her pause and listen dangerously long to the rumble of something oddly familiar.

And in the next moment she was too terrified to stick around and find out why. So she slipped silently out of sight through the wall of the tailor shop. But not without grabbing a boy's cap on her way out.

After all, she could always use another disguise.

******************

"Wait, did you hear that?" Ross came to a halt at the bottom of the stairs, the hair at his nape lifting on end as he listened.

Jared stood stock-still beside him, and Drew on the step behind, both listening without comment until Ross broke the silence himself.

"Damnation, I could have sworn . .. no, wait!" He moved forward into the oddly moving air, sniffed at it, at the out-of-p
l
ace scent. "There. Do you feel that?"

"Feel what exactly?" Drew raised his palm.

"That breeze. Where the devil is it coming from?"

Jared snorted lightly, then clapped him on the back and started toward the library. "Phantoms, Ross."

"Oh, phantoms is it, now?" Ross would have teased Jared further, but he recognized the sudden melancholy that had set into his jaw.

A phantom named Thomas. A past they would share until the end of their days.

"You know, he would have been thirty at the end of the month," Jared said, wrenching out of his jacket and hanging it on the coat tree. "Thirty, by God! That's makes me old."

"See here, Thomas!" Drew dropped his attaché case onto the table with a thunk and looked up at the chandelier. "If you are the one who's been bumping around here at night, we'd appreciate you raising a fright under that bastard Nicholas in St. Petersburg."

"Along with his bloody ambassador here in London," Ross said from the map wall, yanking at the cords of two different maps before finally rolling down the map of Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

Jared laughed. "Frankly, I'd settle for old Thomas shutting down the
Times
for a few days. Delane has everyone on the street taking sides in a conflict they know nothing about."

"And suddenly all things Turkish have become the height of fashion."

"What the hell is Stratford up to, Ross?" Jared stuck his fists into his pockets as he stared at the map. "Is he truly whispering into the sultan's ear to reject anything Russia throws his way?"

"Bloody hell, Jared, if he isn't, he should be. Why would anyone advise the leader of a country to hand over his empire to his enemies?"

"Because the war is, after all, inevitable, Ross. Because the Russian tsar has equipped hundreds of thousands of soldiers with the most modern weaponry and they are perched on the sultan's backside?"

"Modern weaponry, Jared?" Ross dug around in his attaché for the folio with his report. "Are you sure? Where do you suppose they bought these cannons? I haven't found a source, and I've looked in all the usual places."

"Like Jared said, Ross, the war is going to happen, sooner or later. At least according to Caro, who knows all the players."

"Because she's related to all of them," Jared said.

"Now there's a brain you should pick, Ross," Drew said. "We'll be at the charity ball."

"I might just do that. Maybe your wife can give me a hint about those bloody Austrians. They're as slippery as a box of newts."

Drew laughed and leaned against the edge of the table. "Say, Ross, how's your beautiful little revolutionary?"

Jared turned back from staring at the map. "What's this, Ross? A revolutionary what?"

"Nothing." At least he'd thought it was nothing. That she was nothing. An impossibility.

Drew wiggled his eyebrows like the utter devil he was. "Ross has been seeing a woman."

"Really? Which woman? Not Captain Tyson's daughter from last season? I couldn't bear that laugh. Please don't make me live through Twelfth Night and Easter and every last holiday of my life with that laugh."

"This one's much better than the hyena, Jared." Drew, the lout, knuckled Ross in the upper arm. "He met her in a jail cell at Scotland Yard."

"A jail cell?"

Ross sighed, knowing he'd been trapped again. "It's a long story."

Jared narrowed his eyes at him. "Sounds serious, Ross."

Drew answered for him. "I think it is."

"It's not."

"Sit." Jared pulled up a chair and shoved Ross into it. "Tell me all about it. Everything. Because Kate will have my head if I don't wrench every last detail out of you."

Somehow he thought Jared would say that.

Kate was that kind of woman.

Caro too.

Sublimely perfect in every way.

And until recently, he believed there were only two such women in the world.

Now it seemed there might be three.

Chapter 12

A king is always a kin
g
—
a
nd a woman always a woman; his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse.

Mary
W
ollstonecraft,

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“And I'll have another copy of that perfectly
shocking
Mary Wollstonecraft, please," the elegantly dressed woman was saying to Skye as Elizabeth entered the bookshop from the street. "I want to take this one to my sister."

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Farnham.
"
Elizabeth sat the box of books on the counter beside the woman, then exchanged a quick embrace with her.

"Oh, indeed it is, my dear," Mrs. Farnham said from under the massive brim of her lavish hat.
"A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Ha! That ought to send my blockheaded brother-in-law right into a fit of apoplexy. Doesn't like his wife getting above herself, you know. If my sister doesn't stand up for herself, then I'll just have to do it for her."

Dear Mrs. Farnham, the crusading widow, with all the force of a cyclone and all the money in the world to spread her newfound cry of freedom.

"Knowledge is power, Mrs. Farnham."

"From your lips to Parliament's ear, my dear Elizabeth! See you at the charity ball!" The woman took her paper-wrapped package by its silk ribbon handle, then dashed out of the shop, nearly colliding with Jessica and Cassie as they entered, each with their own boxes.

"Thank God, you two made it safely across that bloody street." The traffic was a gauntlet of London's most lunatic drivers. Crossing at any time of the day or night, especially with an armload of boxes, was a risk to life and limb. "I really need to move the bookshop into the Adams. Maybe connect it to the tea shop, or at least have it on the same side of the street. I can't have you dodging death every time you take a simple trip to the bookshop."

"Now, where'd be the fun in that, Miss E?" Skye was already two steps up the ladder, unloading the new books onto the shelves.

"You three already risk enough for me and the Adams." Prison time the least of it.

"All in a good day's work, right, ladies?"

As usual, Cassi
e
's cheery disposition drew a raspberry from Jessica.

"Oh, Miss Elizabeth, before I forge
t
—
t
his came for you just moments after you left your office." Jessica handed her a telegram, then set to work dusting the display in the front window. "Good news, I hope."

"It very well could be, Jess. It's from Mrs. Frederick, in Winston Quay." Elizabeth unfolded the telegram and quickly read through the elaborate handwriting. " 'Eagerly awaiting special package. Send anytime. Will forward per instructions.' Excellent. At least Lydia will have a safe place to stay before sh
e
—"

"Oh! Why, look, Miss Elizabeth! We have a customer!" Skye spoke overly loud, then jerked an eyebrow subtly toward the sunlight glaring in through the doorway.

But it wasn't a real customer.

It was him. Blakestone. The amazing man she had tried to seduce three nights before, bits of sunlight lighting his broad shoulders, making a halo of his hair.

"Good afternoon, Miss Dunaway." Such a rumbling, compelling voice, reaching out for her from across the bookstore.

She'd missed the sound of him, the encompassing sense of him. Three nights, three days, with only the briefest contact, had been too long to be without his teasing banter, his taunting smile.

"Good afternoon, my lord." Elizabeth tucked the telegram into her apron pocket, her fingers afire with the sudden need to hide it from him. "Welcome to the Bookbox."

But he was turning away from her, gesturing behind him. "Come in, my ladies, if you want to meet the remarkable Miss Dunaway ..."

Remarkable?
With that odd introduction, two of the most enchanting women Elizabeth had ever seen swept into the bookstore, locked eager eyes with her, grinned at each other, then made a beeline toward her.

"Miss Elizabeth Dunaway," Blakestone said, standing directly behind them, a most charmingly fond smile tucked into the corners of his eyes, "it's my great pleasure to introduce Princess Carolin
e
—"

"Lady
Wexford!
"
the young woman at his left said sweetly, from between her perfect white teeth. "It's Lady Wexford, Ross. How many times do I have to remind you?"

"Sorry, Princess." He didn't seem at all sorry; as though he was as perfectly used to teasing the woman as she was to teasing him right back. "Miss Elizabeth Dunaway, this is Lady Wexford, the ex-Princess of Boratania."