The Bastard's Iberian Bride (Sons of the Spy Lord Book 1) Page 23

  “You mean two ladies and two gentlemen,” Bink said.

  “Rowland is right. You’ll be quite noticeable, Gibson. Rowland knows how to play the servant, don’t you my dear? We can bring Paulette safely there and back.”

  “No.” He squeezed Paulette’s hand. “I’ve promised to keep her safe and I will do so. And I will not allow you to risk any more than what you’ve already done for us.”

  Betty tilted her head. “Well, I had to try.” She sighed. “There’s also the consideration the solicitor may insist on dealing only with your husband.”

  “What?” Paulette cried. “That is so unjust.”

  “The Rights of Man are only the rights of men,” Betty said. “No, I suppose Gibson must go with you. One of the ladies here has a very respectable dress that will suit. She’s your height, and we’ll take it in where it’s too large. And I have a bonnet and veil that will do nicely.”

  Paulette turned her hand in his and her grip tightened.

  “We’re grateful, Betty. And the loan of a dress would be marvelous. I shall return it, or replace it. And I should like seeing my husband with dark hair, but how shall we cover all those freckles?’

  Paulette donned the chemise, stays and puce gown Betty had brought her, barely able to make out the closures, barely daring to breathe lest she wake Bink.

  He’d slept a mere five hours out of the last thirty-six, yet she didn’t trust that a man who’d survived violent warfare could slumber through the escape of his bride.

  For escape, she would, for his sake. It was all for his sake. Rowland and Betty’s words had weighed heavily on her. Bink was impossible to not notice. She, on the other hand, would be garbed more finely than Agruen or Bakeley would ever expect, for indeed this dress was elegant, and the veil would do the rest.

  The solicitor would talk to her. He must talk to her. That was the other reason she must go alone. If Bink accompanied her, Tellingford might completely ignore her.

  She slid a pistol into her pocket, sheathed a blade on her arm, and another in her boot, and shoved the set of picks she’d lifted from Kincaid’s bag into her other boot.

  His breathing was the steady, loud snore she was growing accustomed to.

  A bit of light leaked through the muffled window and she crept to the door.

  They’d discussed the best time of arrival. They’d discussed hackney fare, and she’d tucked coins into her reticule. She was leaving far too early, but without Bink, she’d no idea how long it would take a hackney to reach the City. Solicitors had clerks who worked from dawn to dusk, she hoped. Surely they’d allow her to wait for Tellingford’s arrival.

  She tiptoed through the house. Below stairs, all was quiet, and she gave thanks Betty’s house kept late hours for even the servants. She eased into the back garden and out the garden gate. The corner they’d passed the night before had no hackneys, so she went the other way. Dawn was coming, and market men were out already, delivering goods. She made her way down the alley toward the busy street ahead.

  After many wrong turnings and obscure signs, the hackney paused at an elegant building with a black-lettered sign Tellingford, Lippscombe and Latrice.

  Her heart eased and then started up again. Her dither had turned into a panic about finding the solicitor’s office. Now she was here, she must worry about who else might be waiting.

  “This be it,” the driver said, none too kindly. He recited a fare that was more than they’d agreed to, but then she had led him astray.

  Perhaps she would walk back, if someone would but tell her the way.

  The building housing the solicitor’s office was not what Paulette would have expected, grander than the lone solicitor’s office in the market town near her home. A deep portico swallowed the entry door, its shadows lending an extra gloom to the overcast morning.

  The streets of Mayfair had been quieter. Here, laborers, tradesmen, clerks, even some early-rising gentlemen bustled about. Watchers, she did not see, but then she wouldn’t, would she?

  She gulped down the fear, paid the driver, and climbed out. A shadow moved in the portico and a dark figure loomed and terror slammed her.

  In a flash, he was down the steps reaching for her.

  Chapter 23

  “Breathe,” Bink whispered, all but carrying Paulette up the steps and through the door, where he plopped her against the wall, flipped back the veil, and ran his hands over her arms.

  The prickling in his hands was easing, the blood flowing back. Dear God, he’d wanted to throttle her, but her trembling was shaking his anger away.

  He pulled her close, their chests heaving together. That was terror there. She was good and afraid, and rightly so. When Trish had pounded into his room to tell him Paulette left, all he could see was visions of a defenseless woman—his woman—walking the streets of London.

  Who knew she could find the hackney stand so quickly, or be so foolish as to go there by herself, without him? Even without Agruen’s or Bakeley’s interference, there was the usual danger. London was no place for a woman alone.

  The porter entered, and Bink set Paulette back from him.

  “Mr. Tellingford’s clerk will see you now, Mr. Gibson.” The lean fellow eyed Paulette’s heaving bosom with far too much curiosity. Bink sent him a withering look that quickly detached the gaze.

  “Come along, my dear.” He latched her to his side. The scolding would keep until later, to a more private setting.

  “You came without me,” she whispered.

  Well, perhaps they could have a word or two now. “Only after I discovered you gone. What bloody nonsense was that?” he whispered as they moved down a corridor.

  Their greeter ushered them into an office, introduced them to a clerk, and left.

  “Mr. Tellingford is with another client.”

  “He’s in?” Paulette asked. “So early? I didn’t expect it.”

  “Would you like to take a seat?”

  The man addressed his words to Bink, ignoring her. Irritating that. Worse, though was the thread of suspicion racing through him. He had a knife and a pistol, and—he patted her arm—Paulette was wearing her sheathed knife.

  “Perhaps we should have expected another client to be here, my dear.” He kept his voice steady. “And I believe we will stand.”

  The inner door opened, and he shoved Paulette behind him.

  “Brother.” Bakeley filled the doorway, his face breaking into a smile that looked like relief. Behind him Kincaid’s head bobbed.

  Kincaid nudged past Bakeley and advanced on them. “You didn’t trust us.”

  There was no accusation in his tone, only a bland matter-of-factness, but the older man picked up Paulette’s hand and chafed it. “You’ve made it this far, so you’ve been careful. Where did you stay the night?—no, no I won’t ask.” His sigh displayed an uncharacteristic fatigue. The man rarely slept, yet this was the first time he’d seemed tired. Bink imagined him scouring all the townhouses of Hackwell’s acquaintances, and all the hotels and inns. “We’re going to help you the rest of the way. You must trust us, Gibson. Paulette’s safety is paramount to us, as is yours.”

  “Where’s your man, Stewart?” Bink asked.

  “Did including him make you lose trust?” Bakeley asked. “He’s off arranging your rooms. Good God, when we saw that body upon the road—”

  “Body?” Bink asked.

  Kincaid sent Bakeley a glare. “Never mind that. You’ve arrived safely.” He squeezed Paulette’s hand. “It was excluding Paulette made you both lose trust, wasn’t it, lass?”

  Paulette’s head swam with the up and down of fear and emotion. Kincaid’s touch was comforting, almost paternal, very trust-inducing, except…after all she’d been through that morning she had no certainty in her own judgment.

  A body? There’d been a body? She must pull her head out of the water and start swimming.

  “What of my servants?” Paulette said.

  The chafing turned to patting.

 
; “They’re safe. Don’t worry. They have the grooms and my men to assist them. They’re on their way to London.”

  “I don’t know Stewart. I don’t wish to stay in some secret rooms he’s arranging.”

  “Then we won’t,” Bink said. “We’ll stay at Hackwell House.”

  Kincaid’s eyes narrowed. “’T’will only be for a short while.”

  “What of this body?” she asked.

  Kincaid’s mouth firmed before he spoke. “Upon the road. We found a laborer with his throat spiked besides a broken, abandoned cart.”

  “No horse?” Bink slid his gaze to her.

  He was remembering also the woman they’d seen from their place in the bushes, the woman driving the cart, a man lounging in the back.

  A shiver went up her back. “That woman driving…”

  “What woman?” Kincaid cut in.

  “We saw a cart upon the road, a woman driving it,” Bink said.

  Anger rose in her. “Agruen will have taken her.”

  Bink frowned. “Unless she was employed by him.”

  She shook her head. “He hates women.”

  Kincaid’s frown had faded back to his usual inscrutability, and she studied him.

  “Did you track the horse?” Bink asked.

  “Into the woods,” Bakeley said, “where we lost the tracks. But we found no woman, nor any trace of one.”

  Bink caught her eye, and glanced back at Kincaid. Like her, he thought the wily man was concealing something. But what?

  Never mind. Questioning him would be useless. She pulled out of the older man’s grasp and looked up at Bink. “Thank you, my love.” It was time to face up to whatever her father had left for her, and wait for Agruen to show his next hand. “Is this solicitor ready for us, Bakeley?”

  “I am, Mrs. Gibson.” A man of middling years stood in the doorway, a tall handsome man who yanked a thread of memory in her brain so violently she felt her breath leave her. She stood very still, pushing away the urge to swoon and beating her stomach into settling. Bink’s hand touched her waist again, gentle and warm and as reliable as the back of a sturdy chair.

  This man, this solicitor, had visited her mother. She’d seen him touch her mother, the way Bink was touching her now.

  She eased in a breath. They’d been lovers, surely.

  She blinked, shutting out the picture of her beautiful, aloof mother and this man, tucking away the knowledge. “I know you.”

  He approached and reached for her hand. Another man wanting her hand. She gave it to him, allowed him to bow over it. “Yes. I was a friend of your mother’s. You were a spirited child, and I see that hasn’t changed. Mr. Gibson.” Bink freed up a hand to shake. “I’m glad you’ve kept Paulette safe. Let us get her seated before she faints.”

  “I do not faint.”

  “She doesn’t,” Bink said. “But let’s take a seat anyway, Paulette.”

  Bink had done much to help fill the empty chasm in her heart, but it hadn’t closed over. Not yet, and the news the solicitor provided tugged at the frayed opening, made the wound stretch a bit wider. Outside of the details of a pension—a very small, very precarious-upon-the-whims-of-government-and-lost-upon-her-marriage pension—her trust was indeed as small as she’d learned from Bakeley.

  Actually, it was even less than that. Had she not married Bink, she’d be living in the tiniest rooms, in the smallest village, in the remotest part of the kingdom. London or a grand estate would be out of the question, unless she could reconcile herself to the unsavory part of this town, or to living the life of a genteel servant.

  There’d been nothing personal, not even a letter from either of her parents.

  Her chest swelled with aching and pushed the pain into her throat, freezing around everything she wanted to say, obstructing her hearing. They were talking, signing, going over details, settling her back into her fathomless hole. She gripped the arms of her chair and squeezed them until she could clear her throat.

  Bakeley—or Shaldon, she must think of him as Shaldon—had been present for this affair, still clinging to the old lord’s sense of his rights over them. If she could speak, she would order him out. Why Bink didn’t do it…

  Her breath caught. Bink had rested the quill, leaning forward, ready to propel himself out of his chair.

  She’d missed something—no everything. They’d finished this business.

  She forced in a breath. “Wait just a moment.”

  Mr. Tellingford loomed over his grand desk, his face a blank. Kincaid’s eyes were dark and grave, and not without compassion. He’d also stayed, another man who thought he had a say in her life.

  She didn’t need his compassion or his pity. She eased in a breath around the constriction in her chest. “You knew my mother, Mr. Tellingford.”

  “Yes of course.”

  “Were you her lover?”

  He blinked, the only alteration to his demeanor. No color rose to his cheeks, nor did he appear to tense.

  Oh. Of course. He was another one who worked for Shaldon.

  Memories snaked in through the fog in her head. Jock had limped into the cottage, his head in a bloody bandage, ranting in Spanish and delivering the two letters. Mama had put Jock in the spare room, changed his dressings, and fed him. Days later, this man arrived and took Jock away. And then brought him back.

  Months after that, the lap desk arrived from a merchant in Cornwall, misdirected there by the smuggler who’d rescued it and who, Jock said, feared the wrath of Paul Heardwyn’s masters more than he coveted the profit of selling the finely crafted item.

  Mr. Tellingford expelled an expansive sigh, designed to push all the air from the room. “My dear—”

  “So that is a yes. I was but a child, but I saw things, sir. And I don’t, I don’t criticize. She was tossed away to rot in the country while my father ran off to the Continent or the Peninsula, or wherever. She was lonely. She didn’t fit in. After living the life of a spy it must have seemed like an early d-death.”

  Oh drat. Her eyes were threatening to water. She took a deep breath and thought of something distracting. Money. That would do. She should be angry about how little they’d left her. The treasure Jock whispered about was probably not even real. She must ask about that.

  She lifted her chin. They were all watching her, including Bink.

  Who didn’t know what she knew about her father’s supposed treasure, because she hadn’t told him.

  She dropped her gaze to her hands and blinked hard.

  “Paulette is right.” Bink’s hand engulfed hers and squeezed. “You must tell us everything you know about her parents, and you must tell us why Agruen is after her. It most certainly is not for these pieces of paper here. Her inheritance won’t cover his brandy bill for the year.”

  “She wasn’t a spy.” Kincaid said.

  Her head shot up, and she looked at the dark eyes, kind, perhaps even truthful. “Jock said she was.”

  “Jock was wrong,” Tellingford said.

  “He wasn’t. He couldn’t have been. He told me stories, very detailed ones about Mama’s b-bravery spying during the terror, before I was born.” She struggled to swallow the bile rising. If Mama wasn’t a spy, what was she? Who was she? And why had Jock lied?

  “He shouldn’t have,” Kincaid said.

  “He was trying to comfort you.” The solicitor came round the desk, swallowing up the air in front of her again.

  So devious were these men. Perhaps Bink was right and they were all liars.

  “There now,” Tellingford said. “Your mother was a Spanish émigré’s daughter from Cornwall. Not a spy. She fell in love with your father when he worked in the Home Office and had occasion to visit your mother’s family.”

  By the time Paulette was old enough to understand, her mother had been estranged from her own people.

  “Why would the Home Office visit my mother’s family?”

  Tellingford looked to Kincaid, who wouldn’t meet the other man’s eyes. B
akeley hadn’t moved either, and tension radiated from her husband next to her. They all looked to Kincaid. He was the man with the answers.

  Kincaid’s long pause told her she was about to hear a lie.

  She bit her lip, waiting, remembering. Jock had told her no stories of Cornwall, but she remembered her geography lessons. In Cornwall, there were inlets and hidden coves for the smugglers who owned that wild place.

  She freed a hand and smacked her forehead. “They were smugglers.” The gift had been misdirected to Cornwall, one smuggler to another, before finding its way to her. “Why could she not tell me that?” She took in a deep breath. “I want to meet them.”

  “Your grandparents are gone,” Kincaid said.

  “I see. How?”

  “Your grandmother died when your mother was young. Your grandfather died when he returned to the Peninsula.”

  “Well, that was suitably vague.” Bink’s voice rumbled up deep and angry. “We’re getting but lies and half-truths, Paulette.”

  Her stomach tensed. She’d hidden a secret from him also, hadn’t she?

  Kincaid’s gaze drilled hard into her husband, sparking darkly. “Ye’ve not asked about your father, Paulette. How he died. It was in Spain, outside Talavera. He was beaten to death.”

  She nodded numbly. “By a big Englishman. Jock told me that.” He’d watched from the bushes as her father entered the parley, before heading out with her father’s messages for Paulette and her mother. Only later had he learned Paul Heardwyn had been killed.

  Her husband twitched in his chair, his hand growing tight around hers.

  “You’re…you’re hurting me,” she whispered.

  His face paled and he yanked his hand away. She reached for him, holding both his hands in hers, and turning back to Kincaid.

  “A big Englishman,” she said.

  Of course. Papa had something that Agruen wanted. Agruen was a big man compared to Jock. “Was it Agruen who killed my father?”