Celeste Bradley - [Royal Four 03] Read online

  He shoved thoughts of the seductive Lady Barrowby to the back of his mind and regarded the house intently. He might be able to scale the wall by clinging to the seams between the stones with his hands and feet. He might be able to steal secretly into the house tomorrow and wait for nightfall. He might—

  He might grow old and die before he ever got into the house undetected. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, wrapped it twice about his knuckles, and punched out the nearest pane of glass.

  “Done.” It was crude but effective. He only hoped the Three never learned of it.

  He let himself in. The window led to a chill room containing a spinet and a few settees for the listeners. It was lovely and tasteful in a manner more befitting the last century than the current one. It looked as if it hadn’t been used in years. Marcus grunted softly to himself. “She doesn’t really seem to be the spinet sort, does she?”

  He listened carefully at the door before entering the hallway. He began to move silently down the hall, pinching out the candles with his fingertips without pausing as he passed them by. He left only a few burning in case he needed to run for it.

  Where to start? Obviously the lady’s bedchamber would hold the most secrets—some ladies more so than others—but since the lady in question was undoubtedly sleeping in that room—

  I wonder what she wears to bed? Would her hair be loose or braided? Did she bathe in rosewater before bed—

  Marcus stopped still long enough to banish such unruly thinking, then continued on his way. He would begin with the obvious, in the spirit of elimination—the study.

  It was a spacious and manly room, all gleaming wood panels and velvet drapery. The enormous mahogany desk caused Marcus a pang of acquisitive lust, for it was a lord’s delight of elegance and function. It was also entirely empty, containing not even a stump of pencil.

  There was nothing in the safe box but a note. “Amateur.”

  He found a promising hollow portion of the desk. He worked free the secret drawer. Another note. “Oh, go home. You lack imagination.”

  He had to laugh. Someone had a wicked sense of humor. Surely it could not be the ice carving, Lady Barrowby?

  He realized that the study was too obvious, and that she rarely seemed to frequent it anyway. Where did she spend most of her time?

  He worked his way back down the hall, taking each room into closer consideration. He knew it the moment he found it. There was a pleasing little withdrawing room off the music room with a view of the garden and a writing desk, a comfortable chair and hassock, topped by an embroidery basket.

  There was nothing in the desk but estate records, kept in a precise hand that surpassed his own. Lady Barrowby seemed to keep every detail herself, with no steward in her employ. She was doing a bang-up job of it, too, except that she kept far too many servants even for this vast a house.

  The embroidery basket drew his eye once more.

  He couldn’t explain why its presence struck him as so odd, except that, once again, Lady Barrowby didn’t seem the “embroidery sort.”

  The basket certainly had an air of neglect about it, although the desk saw hard use. He bent to brush dust from the handle of the basket. Curious, for he simply couldn’t picture the vital, energetic Julia settling down to a long evening of stitching, he lifted the lid to see what he assumed were the usual accoutrements of such a pastime. Colored floss, needles, tiny golden scissors … and in the bottom of the case, a false bottom.

  Most people would not have seen it as such, but it was obvious to him. The outer dimensions of the basket extended a good half-inch farther than the inner dimensions. He fiddled with the bottom of the basket for a long moment—he was beginning to feel a bit silly about it in fact—when he flipped up the bottom to reveal a shallow compartment that contained simply a key.

  Not a door key, not a safe-box key—it lacked the sturdy importance. It was a pretty key, the shank ending in a carving and a tiny jeweled eye. The key to some sort of luxury item … a box? Perhaps the sort that ladies used to keep dried bouquets and the left-behind handkerchiefs of solicitous gentlemen?

  Like the one he’d seen in the … where? Music room? First parlor? Surely not. Not left so negligently in plain sight, day after day, where any stranger could spot it?

  Unless … unless she was counting on just that sort of reaction. God, her thinking was twisted.

  He returned to the parlor where he’d borne that excruciating jousting session with her other suitors. There it was, on the side table with a pair of dainty spectacles carelessly laid on the top. He slipped the key into the lock and turned. With a click, the lid lifted slightly, released.

  Inside the box, things were much as he’d expected. There was a dried bouquet, a shell from the sea, a curling, faded ribbon … and another key.

  This one had the heft and authority the other key had lacked. It was definitely the key to a room. Nor was it the plain, unadorned key of a larder or a silver case. This ornately carved key was meant to be seen by more than mere servants.

  He could discount the master’s bedchamber and—much to the regret of his inner voice—the mistress’s bedchamber, for he was in the presence of a mind that would never be so obvious … so what did that leave him?

  Barrowby was huge, but it was also full of staff and was beautifully maintained—better than Ravencliff, in fact. What room in this house would see no traffic of guests or servants?

  He looked down at the key in his hand and smiled slightly. Only a woman …

  The journey up the stairs took too long, but he dared not allow a single squeak in such an overpopulated house. Two painstakingly silent floors later, he quickly searched the halls until he found what he was looking for.

  The nursery was every bit as neglected as the rest of the house was looked after. Dust coated the empty shelves that would have held toys and the sheet-covered cribs were positively saddening.

  Then again, children had obviously never been Lady Barrowby’s goal.

  There was a small dusty trunk standing in one corner of the room. Careful to disturb the accumulated dust as little as possible, Marcus crossed the room to kneel by it. The keyhole was tiny. Marcus tried the same key he’d used to open the ornate box in the parlor and was rewarded by a click.

  Inside there were several leather-bound books with plain covers, the sort used for diaries or sketching. At last, her records. Marcus adjusted his candle for maximum lighting and opened one at random. The looping script was easy to read.

  “—his thickness drove into me with increasing fury as his hard hands lifted me above him again and again—”

  Marcus nearly dropped the book in his surprise. “What the hell?”

  The records were a diary—but what a diary! Page after page was filled with raw, sexual description and erotic darkness. Marcus read faster and faster, his own breath coming quick at the erotic daring on the pages.

  He forgot to look for code, he forgot to scan for secrets, he only wanted to live each fevered page of her exploits and then the next, and the next. By the time he neared the end of the final volume, he was dripping in perspiration and his cock was as hard as iron.

  It was going to take an hour of cold cloths on the back of his neck and a hundred press-ups before he was sure he would not have to take himself in hand to relieve the pressure!

  Absorbed, he lost all awareness of the passage of time. A sound came from outside the house. Dear God, it was nearly dawn! Marcus put aside the last, unfinished volume and concluded that the only thing revealed by the diaries was that Lady Barrowby was no lady, no matter how highborn she was.

  She was unchaste and unfaithful. He was repelled.

  Oh, really? Repelled? Is that what you were thinking when your trousers nearly lost their buttons?

  That wasn’t the point. The point was that he had gained nothing useful in his night raid of Barrowby. He could try again, but he’d been most thorough.

  He was going to have to start all over again.


  In the meantime, the morning brightened. It was past time to leave.

  5

  The garden is warm and the sunlight glows through the petals and leaves of the roses. The sweet, delicious scent turns my senses to fire, making my skin tingle for my lover’s touch. He walks beside me and I can tell that the perfume is affecting him as well, for his steps have slowed and his fingertips linger on the blooms as we pass. “They feel like you,” he tells me huskily. “Like the inside of you.”

  I turn and walk slowly backward before him. I dressed to tantalize him and his gaze falls victim to my décolletage. “Are you sure of that?” His eyes meet mine. “I mean to say, don’t you think you might need more experience to make such a comparison?”

  He laughs, a low, heated sound that matches the passion rising in his eyes. With one hand, he pulls the petals from a few blown roses, then tosses them to fall about my hair and shoulders like ruby-red snow. “Perhaps you are right. It would not do to compare them without further investigation—”

  He grabs my hand and we run for the ruined Roman temple at the back of the garden. He pulls me through one of the arched windows, lifting me easily. Then I see that he has covered the floor of the tiny temple with rose petals of all colors. He lays me down upon them. “My goddess,” he whispers. “My Artemis, my golden huntress.”

  “My Adonis,” I reply with a smile. “Now, enough with the pet names. You have important research to conduct.”

  He laughs and throws petals in my face. “Then shut up and let a man work.”

  I close my eyes and let him do just that …

  Julia opened her eyes to the dimness of early morning in her bedchamber, then sighed in frustration. She could not seem to break the habit of predawn rising.

  There wasn’t a sound from the house and only the palest of morning light crept past the draperies. She could sleep for hours yet, if her habits allowed it.

  Once these had been the hours she’d spent at Aldus’s side, reading the reports aloud to him and discussing her opinions on every one. After he’d first collapsed, that had been his best time of day, before the confusion and mind-wandering would steal his attention.

  He’d been unable to speak, but she’d seen the understanding in his eyes, and he’d been able to signal her with small hand motions … at least for a time.

  By the end, he’d been slipping away from her for so long that she knew he no longer heard her, but still she had sat there every morning, setting her own mind in order and feeling as though somewhere, somehow, he was listening.

  She drew a deep breath, feeling the void in her heart. There was no one to speak to now and for the first time she realized the true lot of the Fox. No one else could share the burden and the knowledge that a member of the Royal Four held close. No trusted servant, no companion, no family member could ever know.

  No wonder each member kept an apprentice! Otherwise one would go mad from the isolation of it!

  Julia felt twitchy with restlessness. For some reason, her thoughts kept returning to those diaries she’d kept years ago. Honestly, she’d thought she’d banished that portion of herself quite thoroughly!

  It was all Mr. Blythe-Goodman’s fault. He made a woman think of hard hands and urgent heat. And those eyes, darkening like night in the forest when he looked at her … perilous night in a dangerous forest.

  Aldus had touched her as if she were about to break from his handling. How could she have told him that she wanted more, that she longed to feel a man’s hands on her?

  She was not like the fragile ivory carvings from China that Aldus had compared her to. Pain was simply something she’d lived with all her life, from hard work if nothing else.

  This world, the luxurious realm of Lady Barrowby, was only part of the mask she’d donned upon her marriage.

  She’d spent her childhood in the rough-and-tumble world of the traveling fair folk. They were a loud, boisterous lot, prone to fits of arrogance and temper and just as prone to acts of astounding generosity and good humor.

  Her life had been colorful and mostly unkempt, except for when her more subdued mother had managed to pin her down long enough for a bath and combing.

  Now she was a lady, just as her mother had dreamed for her. Those dusty wild days were nothing but fading memory. Only Julia’s resilient nature remained the same.

  So there was nothing Aldus could have done to cause her more than the most momentary discomfort, yet he had insisted on treating her as if his intrusion were more than mortal woman should be forced to bear.

  The gentlemen who called on her now were much the same, treating her as if she might blow away if they spoke too forcefully, as if she might collapse beneath the pressure of their slightest touch.

  Gentlemen were bloomin’ annoying that way.

  Of course, Elliot might be open to a bit of rousing bed play. Unfortunately, Julia wasn’t so sure any longer that she would enjoy being with Elliot. His reaction when she’d outlined her proposal had been rather lukewarm. He’d begun to seem a bit … depleted, somehow. As if he were half a man—

  As if he were half the man that Marcus Blythe-Goodman is.

  She slapped away that annoying thought the way she would a gnat. Marcus was a boor and a lout and a great deal too distracting—

  Marcus, eh?

  Damn, she was doing it again.

  And who said the man was even pursuing her? He had called on her, just like all the others, yet he’d scarcely spoken until she had addressed him first, never joined in with the social chatter, done nothing but watch her with those eyes …

  She shivered. Sometimes she had felt as though he hated her, then she would catch a glimpse of heat shimmering like the green light in a jungle—

  Ridiculous. The man was simply not to be borne. She had much more important things to think about.

  Before Aldus’s death, she had been running her own investigation into the man the Liar’s Club called the Chimera. The Liars were very good, but she had sources in a world that they could not touch.

  No one could penetrate the tight, nomadic society of the fair folk unless one was one of them.

  There was no way to infiltrate, investigate, or otherwise gain access to the traveling fair folk. Not the finest of the Liars could pass in that world … but she could.

  From the center of her web at Barrowby, the strands of her intelligence-gathering spread out over England and all of Europe—for what did festival players care for wars and borders? Her information came fast and fresh, spread like lightning through the ranks of the showmen, the accuracy preserved in the long-standing oral tradition of the “Say.”

  As there was nothing to do now but wait for the final decision of the Three, she might as well take up the threads of her latest investigation once again.

  The Chimera had last been seen on Cheltenham lands in Durham County and she knew the Liars and the Three considered the man to have drowned beneath the wheel of a crumbling mill.

  Julia was not so sure.

  The Chimera had slipped through their defenses again and again. He’d assumed the guise of a young bag man of the streets and insinuated himself into the household of the previous spymaster, Sir Simon Raines. He’d then been passed from household to household among the more highborn Liars as a valet until Rose Tremayne, the first lady Liar—and Julia had been very interested in the career of the young housemaid Rose Lacey from the beginning—had become suspicious of him.

  Trust a woman to see through the man’s disguise.

  In addition, it had been the Falcon’s operative, his cousin Lady Jane Pennington, who had been the one to realize that the uneducated young valet, Denny, was in fact the French spymaster, the Chimera. The fellow was a brilliant master of disguise and seemed to have an eerie ability to sense and recruit England’s dissatisfied and aimless for Napoleon’s cause.

  Yet such a man had died beneath a mill wheel? Julia didn’t think so.

  The body had never floated to the surface—something the Lion had expl
ained away by the fact that the bottom was riddled with years of accumulated grasping sunken branches.

  The Liars were making inquiries, she knew, but the fact remained that the Liars were still undermanned from the Chimera’s attacks and only the first class of new trainees had graduated from the Liar’s Academy. With man—and woman!—power so short, Julia somehow doubted that the Liars were expending their energies searching for a dead man.

  Enter the traveling players.

  In every corner of England and Europe, a “Say” was being spread about an evil man who could change his face and manner at will, a man of small stature, who might even now be ill from a near-drowning. The showmen loved such a tale and even the tiniest child would soon be on the lookout for such a man as they played the last of the harvest fairs of the year.

  There was nothing to do now but wait to hear from them as well as from the Royal Three.

  She slipped from her bed and pulled her wrapper about her. Pickles was used to her doing for herself in the mornings and doubtless assumed that Julia would be having a bit of a lie-in now that there was no need to rise early.

  The heavy draperies still covered the window, keeping out the light and the chill. Julia tugged one aside to peek out at the day.

  It was gray and misty outside, which was no surprise. The hills were nearly revealed now that the trees stood naked in their carpet of fallen leaves. There was little doubt the winter would be—

  Something moved between the stables and the house. Not a deer, not a servant about his business. The motion had been furtive and quick. Someone did not want to be seen.

  Julia blew out an irritated breath. Her suitors were truly pressing her patience! She tugged the belt of her wrapper loose and moved quickly to her wardrobe. Someone evidently hadn’t taken Elliot’s claims seriously!

  It was a good thing that Sebastian was safely in bed.

  Marcus made his way back down the wall of the house without incident, until he was only ten feet from the ground.

  Then a great bestial roar shattered the dawn’s stillness.