To Seduce an Angel (15 page)

Wallop wagged a fat finger at her. “He's a cagey one. He sends nothing through the post. What did you find out about the package he received?”

“Was it a wrapped package?”

“Don't be smart with me, missy.”

“If it was wrapped, it must have been unwrapped. If it is a common object like a book or a . . .”

“Have you looked?”

She nodded.

“Where?”

“His library.”

“Not his bedroom?”

“On his desk he has a pile of papers full of the duke's name.”

“Are you trying to tell me 'e got a package of papers?”

Emma nodded.

“You read those papers?”

“As much as I could.”

“Well, what did you see?”

“A list of names of contributors to Reverend Bertram Bredsell's School for Boys. The Duke of Wenlocke was listed there.”

Wallop harrumphed. “Don't 'ave to tell me wot I know, missy. You watch yourself. I'm onto your game. You don't want me to have to tell 'Is Mighty Lordship Aubrey that you aren't doing your job. Josie Wallop does 'is job. Never had a customer from Newmarket to London dissatisfied with my work. When Josie Wallop plans a lay, it's a good 'un.”

He attacked the meat clinging to the chop bone with fork and knife. “Wot's in your basket?”

“Purchases from the village store to excuse my errand.”

“Show me.”

“It's nothing.”

“Show me.” Wallop dropped his cutlery and grabbed the edge of her basket with a greasy hand. Emma twisted away. He heaved up out of his chair and lunged for her. Emma staggered back, but he had hold of the basket and tipped her parcel onto the floor. Sinking back into his chair, he scooped up the package and ripped it open, spilling white linen onto the table. “What's this? Shirts! So you can cover up your dairies, eh.” Wallop took a delicate shirt in his fists and tore a sleeve off.

“Stop.” Emma hated to plead with him. Tatty would say it was always a mistake to plead with a bad guard. It brought out the worst in them. “I'll tell you something.”

He held the shirt.

“Daventry plans to enter a prizefight.”

“Oh ho, now that's good. That's a rich one. Could be better'n London. What do you know? When and where?”

“Give me my shirts.”

Wallop's face grew sly. “You need to bring me something from his closet, miss, to get these shirts back.”

“He trains every week when his brother comes.”

Wallop tossed the shirts behind him on the floor. “Well now, you can help yourself, girl. See that you find out which match he's aiming for. Open your legs if you have to, if you haven't already.”

Emma retrieved her basket. She was right. Wallop was the kind of guard who spit in the soup. At least he had not found the shoes in the bottom of her basket.

“Remember, you weren't picked for your wit, a dolly mop like you. Next time bring me a box from his closet, mind.”

“Any box?”

Wallop appeared to think. “A man's leather box for his fobs and gewgaws.”

EMMA went directly to the schoolroom. The boys would be at Daventry's training ground wherever that was. Perhaps they had hidden the pin in the schoolroom. She searched for half an hour and found nothing except a slate on which someone had written
NO MORE LESON
S—
MIS EPORLAN.

Emma tossed it aside. One of them at least knew more of reading and writing than he was letting on. She followed the hall to the three rooms they occupied at the end of the north wing of the house. Fate could not ask her to leave the last piece of Leo here. She found their rooms neat and spare, the beds carefully made, a row of hooks for their clothes, a long stand of pitchers and basins to wash in, and towels hanging neatly on racks. Someone had lined the windowsill with a collection stones. There was a bird's nest on an empty shelf.

Emma undid each small, firm bed. Nothing. She felt in all the pockets she could find. Nothing. She had to stop. Their bare, unfurnished new lives drew too much sympathy. If they had snatched the gold pin from her pocket and kept it, she should not blame them. They could not know its true value.

It was Daventry's room she should search, and she realized she'd been handed an opportunity to do it. The prizefighting practice was going on somewhere on the grounds. They would all be there, even the footmen and Mr. Creevey. She could find the box that Wallop wanted.

The knob of his door turned as hers did, and her practice with that mechanism made her perfect in silent opening. Inside she paused. His dressing room door stood open, but she heard no sound within. She studied the sober furnishings. The room was recognizably his, the colors muted browns and grays with strands of gold and wheat woven in. A grand bed stood against the far wall under a canopy of heavy chocolate velvet. A low upholstered chair in a golden hue sat by the corner hearth. She smiled at the table beside the bed stacked with books, a sign that he slept, or lay awake, on the left side of his bed. The brass candlestick he'd brought with him to her room had been returned. Emma looked away from the bed. It made her insides go odd to think of him lying there.

Under the window stood a handsome mahogany desk and an elegant carved-back armchair with a red leather seat. More open books lay stacked precariously in one corner. A tray held writing implements, and a pen lay across a page covered in his bold hand.

The leather box Wallop described was not visible on any table or surface of the room, but Emma could see that he had been writing at the desk. She read the words in his own hand, but they meant nothing to her, a list of names with whom he agreed about some bill in Parliament. Her gaze shifted to the open volume on the right, and her hand on the book began to shake as she read an account of the hanging of two sisters, aged eight and eleven, at a place called Lynn in 1808. Tatty would say it was a bad luck sign.

Emma steadied her shaking hand. He was not a hangman. Wallop and Aubrey and the old duke wished her to hang, not Daventry. And with her plan she would not hang. She entered his dressing room. Dark masculine furnishings lined the far wall, an imposing wardrobe, a boot rack of gleaming boots, a set of open shelves for hats, and a low closed cabinet. Under the high windows to her right stood a large porcelain-lined hipbath next to a long bench, a tall chest of drawers, and a commode with shaving implements. The room smelled of woods and citrus and polished leather as if Mr. Creevey had been at work there.

If Daventry kept his leather box here, he did not keep it openly. She turned to the wardrobe as the likely place for his secrets. She opened it and drew a breath of him. But the neat rows of coats and trousers hanging there, the white linen shirts, and the pewter gleam of a silken dressing gown were the clothes of his aloof gentlemanly guise. Some other scent buried in the folds of proper gentlemanly attire hinted at that other self she saw at times.

She brushed her hand along the hanging garments, stirring them and releasing more of the scent of him until her fingers caught on a long coat of black velvet. Different from the other clothes, it smelled of soot and stone. She pushed aside the coats around it and pulled it from its place. Threadbare cuffs and a frayed hem spoke of long use. Black as night and theatrical in cut with wide shoulders and a narrow waist, it had long skirts like a magician's cape, free to swirl around the wearer's calves as he moved. She pressed a tattered sleeve to her face and knew it was more completely his than anything else in his closet.

As she stood breathing him in, she saw under the lifted folds of the coat a tan leather box. She dropped the coat back in place and sat and pulled the box into her lap. A simple clasp held it closed. She turned the clasp and lifted the lid. A stack of letters filled the box. She did not have to touch them to read the first.

Emma closed the lid and returned the box to its hiding place. For a moment she saw nothing around her. They were two of a kind. She would not give Wallop even one letter from the box. She would deny its existence. She had begun the afternoon searching for Leo's pin and had found instead words that Daventry kept of the father who had been lost to him. She did not want to know that he kept his dead father's letters hidden away with the old coat that she knew must come from his life in London.

The past was a determined enemy. It dogged your footsteps and when it found you, it tugged you back like a receding tide that would drown you in memories and nightmares. You had to resist its pull with all your strength and put one step in front of the other into the bare, unfurnished future. He had put his past in a closet. She would be wise to learn from him and let hers go as well.

She got to her feet, restored his clothes to their neat, concealing order, and closed the wardrobe doors. Her past would consume her, eat her for breakfast with toast and jam like an ogre, if she didn't escape them all.

 

 

No one noticed her leave the house with her basket. The sky was filling with dark clouds, and the wind plastered her cloak to her. Still she made her way to a place in the thick hedge on the path to the bridge where she could hide a tin of bread and cheese.

It was on her way back that she heard the shouts and turned to follow them. On a stretch of dead grass between a great hedge and a stand of tall dark trees, a measured square had been marked off with ropes, like a pen for animals to be sold at a fair. The boys clung to the ropes around the square, bouncing on their toes and shouting.

“Trim 'im, Daventry.”

“Go fer 'is peepers.”

“Go fer 'is ivories.”

In the center of the ring, stripped of their shirts, torsos sleeked with sweat, two men danced and feinted and jabbed at each other with powerful quick flashes of strength. They appeared evenly matched in the weaving dance. She stopped, concealed by the shadow of a yew, to watch her first prizefight.

She had not been used to thinking living men handsome or to imagining that she might want to look at them in motion. Angels and saints, flesh of paint and marble, were handsome, not men.

The dark-haired man with the scarred ribs grinned and defended himself with careless grace. Daventry had narrowed his attention to his grinning opponent. He held his fists in padded gloves close to his face, moving in a light sideways dance of his feet. She flinched when his left fist shot straight from his shoulder, so fast she could hardly catch the movement.

The other man countered with a deft twist of his body, laughing. “Hey, I'm your brother, Dav. My wife won't like it if you rearrange my face.”

“Draw 'is claret, Dav,” Lark yelled.

With a sudden shift of intensity, the men exchanged a flurry of blows, bodies bending and shifting. The dull smack of fist against flesh and the harsh huff of expelled breath mingled with the boys' giddy shouts. Daventry seemed neither to hear nor to see anything beyond his adversary. He did little to defend himself from his brother's blows, but rather seemed to welcome them.

The men broke off the exchange, returning to their wary dance of seeking advantage. Daventry was fiercely beautiful and dangerous in the play of muscle under smooth skin. She recognized this other, elemental side of him, as she had seen it in him the first day when he rose from the stones of the chapel. Aubrey had said he was a hard man to kill. She understood that he would be a hard man to defeat in the fight because he was made for it, like a living weapon that finds its purpose in battle.

“Hey, Miss Portland.” Swallow called. They all turned to look at her, except the dark-haired man. Daventry merely glanced, his startled gaze meeting hers, a glad admission in his gray eyes, and the dark-haired man's fist connected with his jaw, and down he went. Emma had stepped toward him before he even hit the grass. The dark-haired man's knowing gaze caught her look before she had a chance to control it. She halted at the ring's edge, clutching her empty basket.

“A facer,” shouted Raven.

“Foul, Will Jones, ye shouldn't hit a man when 'e's distracted.” Lark complained with a fierce glare at Emma.