Valour and Vanity (28 page)

Letizia gave no sign of recognising her, but stepped back and told Jane to bring the groceries in. Jane lifted the basket of squash from the barrow and tucked it under her arm. With her other hand, she picked up the three ducks they had ordered and carried them in. The wings kept catching on her fake paunch, and Jane was hard-pressed not to complete her disguise by cursing. She followed Letizia down a narrow passage to the kitchen and set the supplies on the side table. One of the local girls stood at another table chopping garlic and filling the air with its pungent scent.

Leaving the cook, Jane went back to fetch the remaining items. As she walked down the hall, she marked the door that led to the main house. It was not in view of the kitchen. In less time than she would have thought, she had the rice, chard, and asparagus inside. That left only the basket of oysters. Jane carried it in and set it on the counter.

She nodded to Letizia and went back down the hall as though she were ready to depart. Glancing over her shoulder, Jane slipped through the door into the main palazzo. Her heart beat violently against her chest. From their observations, it seemed unlikely that anyone should have reason to go to the side yard where the barrow stood, but she still felt all the pressure of time that its possible discovery presented. She stood in the dining room, a graciously appointed room with a row of windows looking out into the courtyard. Jane crossed the polished marble floor to the closest window. Grabbing a fold of glamour, she ran it up and out of the window. The glamour had no form or substance, and was visible only to the second sight. Vincent would be watching for it to know that she had made it indoors.

A moment later, a corresponding flash lit the roof of the building opposite. He knew she was there. Good. She waited a moment, till Vincent’s signal flashed twice to indicate that, as far as he could ascertain, it was safe for her to leave the room. Jane dissolved her glamour in reply.

She went to the dining room door and eased it open, wincing as the catch clicked free. She peeked out and, not seeing anyone in the hall, crept across it to the room that their map indicated was a library. Turning the handle, Jane opened the door just wide enough to slide in, but forgot her fake paunch and was briefly stuck. Grimacing, she pushed the door wider and slipped into the room. She closed the door as gently as possible, but it still felt as though the catch clicking home was a gunshot. Jane waited by the door, breath held for the sounds of movement elsewhere in the house. She heard nothing.

Hurrying to the window, she sent up another flare of unformed glamour for Vincent’s eyes. His flashed in return, and Jane turned her attention to the room.

Books bound in delicately tooled calfskin lined the walls, with gilt letters announcing their contents. Large, comfortable chairs stood by the windows and the hearth, waiting for readers. A library table stood in the middle of the room with some papers scattered upon it. For a moment, Jane had hopes that they might be related to the spheres, but it proved to be the drawings for a billiards table. Against the wall opposite the hearth stood a tall inlaid secretary. Jane began her search there.

Working methodically, Jane opened the top drawer and went through the contents as carefully as she could. She needed to find the papers without disturbing the other items. That drawer yielded nothing but receipts for various purchases, a washing bill, a bill for a new hunting rifle, and a program for the opera.

She felt at the back and the sides of the drawer for any secret compartments, but it was of solid construction and had no mysterious thicknesses. She slid the drawer back into place and moved to the next. It, too, had little to hold her attention.

The next drawer had a stack of letters, which all seemed to be personal correspondence. Jane turned through them, hoping to spy a code or some other tell-tale.

One with familiar handwriting caught her eye and nearly stopped her breath.

Why did Spada have a letter from her mother?

The contents of it seemed innocent enough. Her mother had written to a Mrs. Harrison, commiserating about her health issues, but comparison of ailments was usual in most of her mother’s letters. Then Jane spotted a single sentence that had been underlined.

My eldest daughter and her husband—you may know them, I am certain, as Lady Vincent and Sir David, the Prince Regent’s glamourists—will be separating from our party and going to Venice to visit—you will not believe this—to visit Lord Byron, the celebrated poet!

She sighed. Well … that explained how Spada had known they were coming, but she could not understand how her mother had come to correspond with Mrs. Harrison in the first place. Tempting though it was to take the letter, she placed it back in the drawer.

Save for that one letter, none of the drawers held anything that could be used to charge Spada or to shed light on the whereabouts of their belongings. Jane slid the last of the drawers back into place and stood, arching her back to ease the ache from leaning over the desk. Where next?

She glanced at the window to see if any signal from Vincent hung outside, but saw nothing untoward. If the papers were not in the library, then where? In a bedroom upstairs? Or in the second floor parlour they frequented. She disliked going up, since it would make leaving harder, and it would increase the chances that she would run into the clerk. But … she was inside, and another opportunity was unlikely to present itself.

Again Jane went to the window. This time, she shaped her glamour in an arrow pointing up, followed by a question mark, but kept both too attenuated to be visible except to someone watching for them. A moment later, Vincent sent two flashes, for yes.

Part of Jane had hoped for three, meaning no, but if the way was clear, then she would take the risk. Jane crossed to the door. Moving with as much stealth as she could, she crept out of the library and up the stairs to the first floor. Her heart beat faster. On the ground floor she could claim to have lost her way, but here? A grocer’s errand boy had no reason to be up here. The parlour at the front of the palazzo was off a long gallery, and Jane dearly wished that she could see the view from Vincent’s window before opening the door. She had heard no footsteps or other sounds to indicate that anyone was moving about the building. Her palm slick with sweat, Jane opened the door and stepped into the parlour.

To her astonishment, Vincent’s writing slope sat on a side table in plain view. For a moment she almost forgot to close the door, but she recovered quickly. Though she wanted to go to the battered oak travel desk immediately, she first needed to let Vincent know that she was in the parlour. Jane let her flare of glamour flash and kept her vision expanded to her second sight to see his response.

Relieved when he gave her the signal that it was safe to proceed, Jane reverted her vision to the mundane and turned to the desk. As she did so, she stopped with a gasp and deepened her sight back into the ether. One end of the room was rendered with glamour.

While the parlour appeared to end with a wall of green baize, a portion of it was actually a carefully rendered illusion. With her vision pushed fully into the ether, the illusion dropped away, leaving only the glowing strands of glamour that produced it. The folds and threads made a formidable tapestry composed of light, with trailing ends that remained attached to the ether. Woven through it were additional strings of glamour visible only in the second sight. Some she recognised as waves of sound tied into knots awaiting release. Others seemed to have no purpose except to confound the senses.

Now that she knew what to look for, it was obvious that a door in the far end of the room had been masked. It answered the question of why the measurements for this floor had seemed off. It was not due to the relative illiteracy of the person providing the map but evidence of a strong room. It seemed almost certain that the
Verres Obscurcis
lay beyond the glamour.

Equally certain: the glamural had alarms woven through it.

Jane surprised herself by cursing. There was little she could do now, but it would make their task much harder later. She took a moment to make certain that the rest of the room had no hidden surprises in it. A sofa stood in front of the hearth, which had a low fire. Raked as it was, it seemed likely that someone had been in the room earlier in the day and would return, but not soon. The chairs stood in comfortable groups, and a table held crystal decanters and the other accoutrements that a gentleman of fashion might require to be comfortable. Other than the wall of glamour, nothing seemed out of place in the room.

Which meant that, for the moment, Jane could concentrate on the contents of Vincent’s desk. She had not seen it since it had been taken from him before the Battle of Quatre Bras. The lock had been broken at some point and not replaced. Jane opened the desk to the carmine leather slope. Lifting the lower lid, she found bundles of papers that appeared to have been neatly sorted. Labels in a quick, masculine hand marked them
non pertinente
and
riesaminare—
“Irrelevant” and “Re-examine.” The “
riesaminare
” stack had letters from M. Chastain in Binché and Herr Scholes in Germany. Neither of them had any information about the
Verres,
though both men discussed glamour at length. The “
non pertinente
” stack contained lists of lambs and sheep, products of the code Vincent had used to deliver messages during the days leading up to the Battle of Quatre Bras. Jane’s own notes were tucked into the stack, apparently unread, as though the mere fact that she was a woman rendered them worthless.

She turned through the pages and found only one where she mentioned sunlight. Tempting though it was to simply take the page, Jane carried it to the side table and drizzled some water from a carafe on the page, smearing the ink on the sentence in question. She blotted it with the inside of her jacket, then slid it back into the stack she had pulled it from and continued turning the papers to see if there was anything else that had been discarded as irrelevant and should be dealt with. Her name caught her eye.

A half-sheet of paper began:

My dearest Jane,

Muse. I am writing this because I want to talk to you and cannot. I love you and

He had been writing that in Binché, he must have been. On the paper below that, the ink was blotted and smeared as if Vincent had put the sheet away hastily. Jane very much wanted to take it out of the box and carry it with her, but she left it in its place and continued leafing through the pages. Finding nothing else appertaining to the spheres, she closed the lower lid and opened the upper.

Here was Vincent’s journal. Letting out her breath in relief, Jane marked its position and lifted it out of the box. The leather was smooth and well worn. She carried it to the window and set it on the sill in front of her. Jane spread her legs in her operating stance and took several deep breaths to prepare herself. She pulled a thin strand of glamour out of the ether and began to push it out of the window and across the street to serve as a scaffold for the modified
bouclé torsadée
they had planned.

There was no way she could hope to span that distance on her own. She merely needed to get the loop as far out as she could. The thread Vincent was spinning out from the other side would catch hers. It was not precisely a yoke, but it would serve a similar purpose. The yoke and splice had not carried the images with sufficient distinctness, so instead Vincent was going to reel her thread to his side of the street. In theory, at least. This had seemed to work most effectually during their trials, but the technique was new to both of them.

Jane’s heart was racing faster than it should, and she barely had the thread six feet from her. It did not seem possible that she would get it over the wall at this rate. As she worked, she was trying to listen to the sounds of the house, but that split in concentration made it difficult to hold the thread steady and give it the twist it would need.

From the other side of the street, she could just make out Vincent’s strand of glamour. They were keeping their work as close to gossamer as possible, so that only someone with their sight very deep in the ether would see it. But doing this meant that Jane was less aware of the house than she would like. Had she heard a sound, or was it only the thumping of her own heart?

Beneath the padding of her suit, sweat dripped down Jane’s back. She had not calculated how much more quickly she would overheat in the disguise. Jane’s hands trembled with the effort of spooling out the glamour till she was afraid she would drop it. She stopped, panting, and held the glamour as steady as she could. But if she stopped here, Vincent would have to span the gap farther than they had practised, which would not suit. She ground her teeth together and pushed the glamour out farther by another foot.

She should have drawn up a chair. It would do no good if she fainted while doing this. Jane stopped again, trying to slow her beating heart and calm her breathing. The whiskers on her cheeks itched with sweat. Jane closed her eyes and concentrated on staying upright. Only a little farther, and she would have it.

The line twitched in her hand. Jane opened her eyes to the welcome sight of Vincent’s line hooked into hers. It was supported by a yoke wielded by two of the choir members, under the supervision of Sister Maria Agnes. She let Vincent draw her line back at his own pace as she fed it out to him. Even with his support, she still felt the strain of spanning that distance in her shoulders and back. The assistance made it possible, but not any more pleasant.

Through the line, she could feel the minute vibrations of her husband’s touch as identifiably as if he were handling something fully tangible. Jane would know his work in whatever form it presented itself. He took the far end of the thread she had woven and tied it to his side of the street. With a sigh of relief, Jane did the same, anchoring it behind the window’s heavy curtains. She ached, and sweat covered her brow, but it was done.