Swept Away (36 page)

A low rumble in his throat was the only answer as he pointed toward the octagonal vestibule and the magnificent Baroque staircase, where guests were being served iced champagne off silver trays by polite harlequins with ribboned staffs. Anna and Emory did their best to blend in with the crowd of wizards, Romans and Vikings as they followed the glittering bower down to the lower level. There were frequent pauses while the other guests greeted acquaintances and women squealed over costumes, and, not wanting to appear like they were in any extraordinary hurry, Emory joined some of the men in leaning over the gilded balustrade to comment on the painted glass dome two storeys up.

In doing so he gave more than a few keen-eyed ladies the opportunity to regard the tautness of his buttocks, several of whom squealed again and had to snap open their fans to cool the blush that came to their cheeks.

One young lady, wearing the wide panniers and towering rolled wig similar to the dozen other Marie Antoinettes present, was distracted enough to stare openly at the handsome sight. She neither blushed nor squealed, but she did abandon the small group she was with to ease her way through the crush and join the shapely Puck in admiring the gilded patterns in the rail.

Before she could fully raise her vizard and dazzle him with her smile, he excused himself and went back to where Anna was waiting by a plaster portrait bust of Charles James Fox.

Emory glanced back and had to scan several guests before he found the right one, her face powdered white, her lips bright red, and a heart shaped patch stuck to her cheek. “I pray she does not lose her head over--”

Anna looked up at his sharp intake of breath. “What is it?”

“Move,” he said, taking up her arm again. “Just keep walking and do not look back.”

The command came a split second too late, for she had already tipped her head to see past his shoulder. She straightened again quickly enough, but she could sense the woman was staring after them, her gaze narrowed as she followed their progress down the rest of the curving stairs.

“Did you recognize her? Who was she?”

“My esteemed sister in law, Lucille Althorpe.”

“
What
?” Anna stumbled, missing the bottom step and hanging precariously off Emory’s arm for the few seconds it took for her to regain her balance. “Are you certain?”

“More than I care to be.”

“But how--?”

“She stripped me naked once before, in your aunt’s parlor. She did it again, just now, and it is not a sensation one is likely to forget.”

Anna was about to ask what he meant, but then she remembered a comment Florence had made that evening. Something about Lucille staring hard enough to leave scorch marks in his breeches.

“What on earth is she doing here?”

“Stanley said he was sending her to London for a short holiday. Plague take his timing.”

Anna thought back to the close call they had had at the posting house in Bath. She had seen Lord Barrimore alight from the berline, then her brother Anthony, then...

“Colonel Ramsey,” she whispered. “He must have had an invitation to the ball and extended it to Lucille.”

“A merry muddle indeed,” Emory said, guiding her across the marble rotunda. He paused at the archway to look left first, then right along the crowded corridor. “It would behove us to find Lord Wessex with all due haste, but curse it--” he lifted the green elfin mask and propped it atop his curls while he searched the sea of painted and masked faces-- “where do we begin?”

“We could each take a wing,” she suggested half heartedly. “The small dining room, the golden drawing room and library lie one way; the bow room, formal dining room, and conservatory lie the other.”

Emory shook his head. “The music guides us toward the conservatory, but my guess is Wessex will not be in too frivolous a mood. The ghostly words of dead philosophers would suit him better.”

He dropped the mask back into place and took up her arm again, a sparkling silver princess and her woodsprite escort strolling leisurely through the draped Gothic archway that led toward the library.

CHAPTER 21

Emory had guessed right. Geoffrey Peterson, Lord Wessex was in the library, well away from the noise and revelry. He was not in costume, but judging by the haggard caste to his face, he was not overly concerned by the faux pas. A man of medium height and middle age, he carried no extra weight around his girth. He had a plain face that was not much improved by bushy muttonchops whiskers. His hair was gray, thin enough to see the shine of his scalp on top.

He was standing by the black marble fireplace, his face glowing red in the bright flames, as much from the heat as the company of the half dozen pirates, clowns, and court knaves who were engaged in a vitriolic debate over the wisdom of exiling Napoleon Bonaparte for a second time.

“What is to say he will stay put this time? We thought Elba a hellish safe place to confine him and look what has come from that. Three, nay, nearly four months of bloodshed, and the deaths of tens of thousands of fine young men. France is in chaos and we show a complete lack of faith in the ability of English justice to punish the man responsible.”

“Mercy and honor have their limitations,” another man agreed. He was seated in a tall wing chair before the fire and not much could be seen of him other than a sleeve, a cuff, and a snifter of brandy.

“Have you heard what awaits him on St. Helena? It is a bare rock in the middle of the South Atlantic, a thousand miles from the nearest landfall. ‘Tis said the devil shit the island out as he flew from one world to the other.”

After a short gust of laughter, another voice emerged. “I heard Napoleon himself had once considered sending a force of fifteen men to capture it, but decided it was not worth the waste of gunpowder. We are sending three thousand, at God knows what cost, just to guard him.”

“It would only take one man to wield an axe,” said a gruff voice of reason. “And cost us naught but the price of honing a keen edge on the blade.”

Wessex turned from the fireplace. “Perhaps we should build a guillotine in Piccadilly? Then we could invite the old hags to come and knit souvenirs to sell while we showed the rest of the world how civilized we have become after two decades of war.”

In the discomfiting silence that met his remark, Wessex glanced around the room. There were few party guests who, upon entering the gloom of the library and hearing the topic of discussion, elected to remain overlong. He saw a tall, broad shouldered man in a ridiculous elf costume and a quite lovely woman wearing little more than an airy silk veil standing off to one side, and was about to dismiss them and turn back to the fire when the man lifted his mask.

For all of ten seconds the significance of the gesture did not register. But then the skin across the back of Wessex’s neck began to shrink and an arctic chill seemed to settle over the room, freezing out the voices of the men behind him. His every sense, his every instinct was tuned to the dark, bottomless eyes staring back at him; a gust of disbelief parted his lips, nearly staggered him back against the marble caryatid.

“I say, Wessex,” one of the men raised his empty glass. “Will you take another brandy?”

“What? Oh. No, not just yet thank you. As it happens I, uh, feel the need to, uh, seek out the nearest water closet. If you will excuse me, gentleman.”

He moved clumsily away from the hearth, bumping his hip on a table as he passed. The elf’s mask was back in place but the glitter of dark eyes followed Wessex across the library and through the arch to the adjoining drawing room. He hesitated there, only long enough to glance back over his shoulder, then continued out of sight.

“Wait here,” Emory said, touching Anna’s arm.

“Absolutely not,” she hissed back, conscious of the men peering around now to have a better look at the wisp of her costume.

She sensed rather than saw his grimace as he took her arm again. “We really must compare our definitions of docile and obedient one day," he growled. "I suspect our meanings differ drastically.”

Anna kept pace with his long strides as he followed Wessex through the adjoining drawing room and up a small staircase concealed by an elegant swath of gold drapery. At the top, they hastened wordlessly along a narrow servant’s corridor into the regent’s private audience room.

Named appropriately the Blue Velvet Room, the walls were hung with dark blue panels framed in ornate gold moldings. Each panel in turn framed a masterpiece by either Rembrandt, Cuyps, or Both, as well as paintings of British military triumphs. The carpet was blue, woven in a patter of gold fleur de lis to reflect his sympathy for the ill fated monarchy; the furnishings were upholstered in pale blue with heavily gilded arms and legs. Anna, for one, had never been in such a grand state room before and was unabashedly awestruck. She stared up at the multi-tiered chandeliers, at the priceless collection of Chinese vases, at the elaborate candelabra featuring female figures holding palm branches, and she again envisioned scarlet-clad Beefeaters bursting through the gilt doors to drag them away in shackles.

Wessex merely crossed to the regent’s ornate escritoire and lit a pair of candles to supplement the scant light coming from the wall scones.

“Perhaps she would prefer to wait right here,” Emory said. “I am alive thanks to Miss Fairchilde, not to mention here speaking to you now.”

“Yes,” Wessex drawled. “I will not even ask where you come by your audacity in showing up here tonight, Althorpe. Nor why you, Miss Annaleah Fairchilde--” he turned again to address Anna where she stood in the shadows, the folds of her gown shifting ghost-like in the drafts-- “would risk bringing total ruin down upon your family’s good name to help him.”

“That you lost your senses? Or is it that you have lost something even more valuable to this blackheart and feel you have no choice but to remain in his company?”

“I remain with him because I choose to, my lord,” she said coldly. “And because I believe him to be innocent of the charges laid against him.”

“You do realize what will happen to you if you are caught?” Wessex did not wait for an answer before he glared at Emory. “To both of us if we are caught in your company?”

“I was hoping you could call off the hounds so to speak, clear up the misconception that I am a traitor and a Bonapartist, and that I have, in fact, been in your employ as a spy for the past
three years.”

Wessex looked hard into the dark, probing eyes. “That would be a difficult thing to attest to, sir, since I have not had a single missive from you for several months. Not since you took it upon yourself to sail to Elba and unleash that Corsican plague upon the world again.”

“I sent you dispatches,” Emory said quietly. “Fully a score or more. I told you there was a plan afoot to mount a rescue and that I had been approached by Bonaparte’s associates to sail the
Intrepid
to Elba.”

“I received no such dispatches.”

Emory looked startled. “You must have. I sent them through the normal channels, taking all the usual precautions.”

“I assure you, I received nothing. Not then, not at any time before or after Napoleon landed at Antibes and began his march to Paris.”

“Are you saying none of my subsequent dispatches got through either? None of the messages detailing Bonaparte’s movements? The movements of his army?”

“I have received nothing from you, sir. Not for five months or more. Thank god you were not the only coal in the fire or we should have had no prior warning about the positioning or strength of his troops at Waterloo.”

Emory, clearly stunned, paced to the far side of the room. “If none of my messages came through,” he said hoarsely, “ how do you explain the coded replies I received back ordering me to go along with the ruse at Elba? Ordering me to remain in Bonaparte’s camp?”

“They did not come from me, sir! I sent no such orders coded or otherwise! And if you think you can lay any of the blame for your traitorous actions on my shoulders you have a sadly misguided notion, indeed! In the first place, I would never have sanctioned the escape of such a dangerous fugitive--what would be the point? Why in God’s name would I unleash that plague upon the earth again?”

Emory blinked. Then blinked again. His right hand went to his temple, his left he held up to Annaleah as she started toward him.

“Cipriani. He said ‘the messages were intercepted.’ He also said, ‘we knew all about you from the beginning’ and implied there was a spy in Lord Casterleagh’s offices.”

“You are grasping at straws, Althorpe. Is that why you have come here?” the minister demanded. “Because you expected me to corroborate this outlandish story?”

“I expect you to uphold your word to reveal our relationship should the need arise. You gave it freely enough the day you presented me with the arrest warrant for Seamus Turnbull and used his freedom to blackmail me into signing on as one of your spies.”

“You voided that agreement, Althorpe, the day you sailed the
Intrepid
to Elba. And if you think you can barge in here accusing me of collusion and expect me to bow to
your
threat of blackmail, you can damned well think again! Any outlandish accusations you make would amount to your word against mine--and yours, I fear, is not the worth the spit required to form the words.”