Marry the Man Today (34 page)

"Very well, madam, we'll take a drive past the import shop." If there was anything to it, he'd take it from there.

"Wonderful!" She grabbed his arms, lifted up onto her toes and kissed him. Then she picked up the large fabric satchel she'd dragged in behind her, grasped it in front of her in both hands and waited for him.

Not a patient bone in her body. And if she was right, if the Russian princess was locked in an attic in Huggett Lane, then she'd just possibly saved the day.

"This way, madam." He closed the lab door and led her up the stairs through a series of locked doors, a vestibule, past two guards, and finally into the back hallway.

"The Huntsman, Ross?" She stopped and touched his shoulder. "Is that where we are?"

"You're very good at secrets, Elizabeth." Too good, it seemed. "Please keep this one. Because a whole lot of people are depending on it."

She snorted as if he'd just accused her of treason. "I'll carry it to my death, Ross. As if you didn't know."

The sun was up and the morning beginning to bustle as they left in a carriage from the rear of the Huntsman.

"To the Russian Embassy, Henry."

Ten nearly silent minutes later, with his lunatic wife tucked under his shoulder and his heart rammed up against his throat, the carriage came to a halt in a narrow street a block short of the Russian Embassy.

"There, Ross." Elizabeth slipped to the seat across from him and tapped on the window glass. "I was posted in the doorway of that flower shop, just opposite the northwest corner. It was dark at the time, but that's how I was able to see the man on the roof."

He followed the point of her finger, hoping she'd been wrong about the whole thing, or delirious. Yet knowing in his gut that she was rarely wrong about anything.

Russian guards were everywhere. His own operatives posted quietly out of sight. But her story was becoming all too credible. And that could only mean trouble.

"Which direction did he go when he left the grounds?"

"Through that alleyway. There, next to the bakery on the corner."

"Then use this to tell Henry which way to go." Feeling as though he was putting his wife directly in the line of fire, Ross handed her the speaking tube, then sat back against the seat, to watch out of sight of the window.

"Thank you, Ross." She smiled at him, suddenly, suspiciously, looking every bit the commander in the field as she spoke into the bell. "Are you there, Henry?..
.
Oh, good."

The route led from the embassy along the most narrow of snickleways, perfect for a conspirator. Through two squares, then finally into Huggett Lane, a street lined with small, we
ll
-cared-for shops.

"He went in there." His too clever wife had instructed Henry to pass the shop before she stopped him, and pointed farther down the street. "With the green awning. An import shop, as I said. Foodstuff and fabric and porcelain from the continent."

A tidy, bayed display window. A floor above and an attic.

Nondescript.

It could be anything. Or everything. Making him wonder who the devil he'd married.

"Show me where the man went next, Elizabeth." He wanted to get this over with quickly. Wanted it to end without involving his wife in the danger that he felt prickling the back of his neck.

She picked up the speaking tube again. And Henry followed her directions.

But in the midst of her instructions he was struck by a thought. The perfectly logical reason that Elizabeth had felt compelled to rescue the princess!

My God! Why hadn't he thought of it? His heart gave a wild thump.

"Elizabeth . .. ?"

"Two more blocks, Henry, then to the left." She looked from the window back to Ross, the bell of the tube stuck against her ear. "Yes?"

"Princess Lenka." He leaned
f
orward, elbows on his knees, his heart slowing with relief. "Is she, by chance, a member of the Abigail Adams? I didn't think to ask becaus
e
—"

"No, no, she isn't, Ross. I've never met the woman." Yet her face went white, her eyes filled with dread again. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, her voice growing quiet as the carriage rattled on along over the cobbles. "But if you think about it, that's . . . uh
m
. . . that's a problem with this case, isn't it? The common factor among the other abductions that's missing this time."

"The Adams." Or Elizabeth herself.

She looked stricken. "It's more than that, Ross, much more."

"But if we're not dealing with
a
—
o
h, bloody, bleeding hell."

"What is it, Ross?"

He hadn't been paying attention to the route or their surroundings, but now he pressed his face closer against the window, praying he was wrong.

"Elizabeth, is that the building you saw the man go into?"

She peered through the window on the other side of the door as their carriage approached from the south. "The large limestone, with the grounds taking up the whole block. Yes."

Bloody hell! He grabbed the speaking tube, called out for Henry to stop, and the carriage swung up against the curb.

"You're absolutely sure, Elizabeth? It was dark when you were here. You might have missed him entering. It's very important that this is it."

"Definitely. Someone greeted him as he entered from the porte cochere. Why? What is it?"

His heart and his hopes fell. "The Austrian Embassy." Christ Almighty.

The Austrians had invaded the Russian Embassy and kidnapped a princess of the blood.

And, bloody hell, he would never have known about it if his confounding wife hadn't pointed the way.

"That's the Austrian Embassy?" She peered more closely, then looked back at him, her forehead deeply fretted. "How do you know? There's no sign."

He couldn't help staring at the building out the window, a catastrophe in the making. "I had dinner there two weeks ago."

"What does it mean, Ross?"

He leaned back against the seat, exhausted by what was to come.

"War."

Chapter 20

Man with the head and woman with the heart:

Man to command and woman to obey;

All else confusion.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
Song

“Dear
God! Then what happens next, Ross?"
His
usually unflappable wife's voice cracked on his name. She was sitting across the carriage from him, upright against the seat back.

"The inevitable, my dear, when this whole thing blows up." He crossed his boot over his knee, assumed an air of aplomb he didn't feel. "Russia will declare war on Austria, followed by the British declaring war on the Russians and possibly the Americans, piling on the French, then the Turks, resulting in a massive wa
r
—"

"Then would you like to hear my idea, Ross?" Panic darkened the emerald green of her eyes.

"Go right ahead, love. You've cracked part of this case wide open all by yourself." And he could use the help. Every idea he'd entertained in the last few moments had ended in a global disaster.

"All right, then, from what I know about the current mood between all the parties, Russia will use any excuse to invade Austria and take over the Danube Territories completely."

"True."

"The fact that the Austrian Embassy is involved in any way in the kidnapping of a Russian princess is excuse enough for the tsar to overrun Vienna this very afternoon."

"Also true." His remarkable wife even knew her current affairs.

"If, at any point during the rescue of the princess, the Russians discover that the Austrians are involved, it means war."

"Indeed." A lit match flicked into a mountainous stack of powder kegs.

"So the sticky part of the operation, Ross, is going to be rescuing the princess and returning her to the Russians without them guessing that the Austrians were involved."

"That's it in a nutshell." A direct hit on a complex political truth that few in the government even understood. "A secret rescue without involving a horde of police or the army or the press, or, God knows, the idiots in the Foreign Office. Not possible."

"Are you sure?"

"Diplomatic secrets are like so much smoke."

"So, really, Ross, the operation is left to us, then." She shot a sober smile at him, one that only confused him. "You and me and my three stalwarts."

"You, wife?" His neck tightened suddenly at her inference, that he would even consider sending her out on a dangerous mission. Whatever her plan. "I have seasoned operatives who know how to keep secrets."

"So do I, Ross. But the difference is that I have a plan." She scooted forward into the seat well, wedging her knees between his. "You see, the trick to a successful abduction is to do it in broad daylight, in public
.
"

"In case you haven't noticed, love, the princess has already been abducted."

"And we're going to abduct her back. From right under the noses of her abductors."

"An interesting fantasy. You mean we just walk into the import shop and take her?"

Her smile brightened. "Exactly. Except that we create a whole fiction and play it out in front of whoever is holding her in the shop. Dodge and distract. And then we have her."

"Just like that." Ross sat back and studied her, suddenly deeply suspicious of the strength of her certainty. As though her strategies were well-practiced, timed right down to the minute. As though she'd done this sort of thing before.

As though she had already donned a costume and would have set her preposterous plan into motion if he hadn't caught her in the catacombs of the Factory.

"What the devil are you wearing?" Those weren't the breasts he'd spent the last two days making love to.

"Well, it's my ..." She caught her lower lip between her teeth as she lifted a bulging satchel into her lap. "That's what I have to tell you."

They were already eye-to-eye across the carriage, her breath breaking against his chin. "Go on."

"You're not going to like it, Ross, but here it is."
 
She took a huge, worried breath then sighed through it. "The first three women weren't kidnapped. Lady Wallace and the other two."

His heart went still. "What do you mean 'not kidnapped.' Has someone contacted you? Are they dead?
"

"Of course not. They're very much alive. All three of them."

A bloody odd thing to say. "How could you possibly know this?"

She straightened her shoulders, growing taller in the seat. "I know they weren't abducted because . . . well, because ..."

"Because . . . ?"

"Because
I
.. . because I helped each of them plan and execute an escape from her husband."

Her words had become a wall he couldn't see past. Dizzied him with its height. Or maybe he was just tired to death.

"You did what, love?"

"I had to make it look like the women had been taken against their will and never found, otherwise they might look like a runaway wife." When he could only nod, the impossible woman pushed on. "That's how I knew that the princess wasn't kidnapped by the same person who had kidnapped the other women. Because I had."

"You can't be serious." His ears were still ringing with the impossibility of what he was hearing, with the morning traffic rattling past them in the street.

"That's why I'm suggesting that we mount a similar fiction to rescue the princess. Because I've done it three times already, Ross. More, really."

"I still don't understand, wife." His brain felt mushy and slow. "You kidnapped Lady Wallace? How? Then who left all those clues behind?"

"Me. I merely arranged for temporary lodging and a steamship ticket to New York for her, then executed a broad-daylight abduction, on Regent Street in front of as many reliable witnesses as we could manage. And then we slipped her safely out of town in a disguise."

Elizabeth had expected Ross to be angry or shocked or stunned or raving when she finished confessing her role in the so-called abductions. Outright bellowing would have been good.

But she hadn't expecte
d
him to be so completely silent.

Dumbstruck.

Though his dark eyes with their fathoms-deep fires were shifting across her face, watching her every breath, her every blink.

"Don't you see, Ross? You can't use any of the evidence from the first three abductions in your investigation of the abducted princess. The hat, the glove, the handkerchief with the chloroform. Because there were no abductions. And none of your information applies."

The only muscle that moved was his jaw; it squared and flexed and squared again.

"That's why I had to come to tell you the truth in person after I read your note at the cottage. The princess must be frightened to death. And I'm frightened for her. She's truly been abducted by some fiend who has copied my clues from reading about the details in the newspaper. Her life is probably in danger! We have to rescue her as soon as possible."