Digging into Death / First of the Novel and Links

 Has the Love of her Life Beguiled Her Straight into Death?

Isabella, a damsel not in distress, arrives at an archaeological dig and discovers love and murder. 

Digging into Death

Chapter 1 :: Saturday, October 4

If ever a maiden needed a hero, Isabella did.

Crete was the famed birthplace of Zeus, the god who granted supplicants’ prayers. Standing on the steps of the Heraklion Hotel, Isabella hoped her hero appeared before a blood sacrifice was necessary.

She plunked down her suitcase on the hotel steps and fanned her wide-brimmed straw hat.  In ancient Crete the rulers had offered shelter and protection to strangers.  Yet in the closed faces of the passers-by, intent on their errands, she did not see any hospitality offered to a foreign woman alone.  She needed a recognizable and friendly face.  She didn’t see one.

Men talking, engines sputtering, horns blaring, dogs barking, donkeys braying:  after the hotel’s quiet, the cacophony assaulted her ears.  Men poured past the steps with scarcely a glance at her.  Most wore the dark Cretan jacket and loose breeches, although a few suits testified to modern Europe’s inroads on island culture.  A few women in unrelieved black walked along the dusty road, but they ignored the lone foreigner on the hotel steps.

Isabella saw no one familiar and definitely no one who looked like the reincarnation of a protective god and certainly no one who could rescue a stranded governess.

Then a demigod emerged from the hotel.  Like Apollo, god of light and knowledge, his golden hair glinted in the morning light.  And Isabella recognized him:  Nigel Arkwright, one of the English archaeologists.

Prof. Arkwright had dined with her erstwhile employer on Tuesday night.  Last night, in the bar, she’d seen him order one whiskey after another.  This morning, though, her panic when the hotel manager confronted her about her bill had cast him from her mind.  But he could give her help.  Although Isabella despised encroachers, she couldn’t let this god-given opportunity slip away.

As he reached the last step, she dropped her heavy suitcase in his path.  “Prof. Arkwright, hello.  I’m Isabella Newcombe.  We met when the Harcourt-Smythes visited your dig last weekend.”

His mouth compressed, which didn’t bode well for her start.  Last evening’s drinking might have been too deep for an appeal to his English gentleman’s code.  A hangover this morning wouldn’t help her.

He cleared his throat.  “I remember you.  You were the governess.”  He looked past her, scanning the road.  “American governess, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I was the governess.”  She stressed the past tense.  She hitched her satchel strap higher on her shoulder.  “They discharged me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Miss, but I’m in a—.”

“No, you’re not sorry.  You do not care.  You don’t know me well enough to care.  You don’t know me at all.  And that is the crux of my problem, Prof. Arkwright.  Besides my former employers, no one knows me here, and no one cares.  I am in a foreign country, surrounded by foreigners, and I do not have enough money for my passage home.”

“Your appeal should go to your employer, not to me.”

“No matter what circumstance, I will not return to him.”  She hoped the bright glare hid her flaming cheeks.  “Two weeks’ wages and a letter for his bank in Athens were all that Mr. Harcourt-Smythe gave me.  I can repay you once I reach Athens.  I do have the funds.  My problem is here and now.”

“Surely someone—.”

“I am completely alone, and I might as well be penniless.  Then I saw you.  I thought Providence had sent you to be my rescuer.”

“Miss Newcombe,” he settled a pith helmet on his gilded hair, “I don’t believe I qualify as a rescuer.”  The narrow brim shaded his eyes.

She hated this intruding role she’d been thrust into, but she played it with the desperate energy that stressed its truth.  “Here am I, stranded and virtually penniless.  Here are you, an English gentleman in the midst of an important dig.  You must have need of a helper.  Someone who can catalog items or type notes or—or do something.  Surely an extra pair of hands can be useful somewhere.”

A horn honked.  Prof. Arkwright looked around.  An army truck jolted along the street.  He glanced back at her as he stepped down to meet it.  “Miss Newcombe, I’m not in charge of this dig.  Gawen Tarrant is.  I have no power to hire anyone.  And he has no liking for tourists who need their hands held.”

“Professor, I am desperate.  I will do anything.  Please, say you’ll help me.  Please don’t abandon me.”

The truck jerked to a stop and bounced when the driver pulled the brake.  Leaving the motor running, he jumped out.  The professor started to the front of the truck.

“Prof. Arkwright?” Isabella pleaded.

He looked back at her as he dropped a baksheesh into the young man’s hand.  Then he dug into his pocket for another coin.  “Ari, shove Miss Newcombe’s case into the back.”

Isabella nearly sank with relief, but Prof. Arkwright had already reached the driver’s door.  Ari lifted her heavy suitcase and swung it into the back.  The professor revved the motor impatiently, and she clambered gracelessly into the passenger seat.  He released the parking brake.  The truck jolted off.  She looked back.

Ari stood waving on the bottom step.  Behind him, the Heraklion Hotel loomed, substantial but unwelcoming to a single, penniless woman.

She wasn’t sure which appeal to the gentleman’s chivalric code had changed Prof. Arkwright’s mind, and she wouldn’t ask.  As the truck jounced over furrows and eroded ruts, she worried about her unsecured suitcase bouncing in the back, but she didn’t ask about that either.  The roar of the engine hid the grumbles from her days-empty stomach.

Close to Heraklion they had smooth driving, yet a few miles outside the capitol the road had fallen into disrepair, a casualty of the recent war.  It became disreputable as they rolled the miles around the north of Mount Dikte.

As he drove, Nigel Arkwright’s jaw jutted pugnaciously.  When they left the main road, the way disintegrated into a cart track winding through the eastern foothills of the mountain that guides still claimed had been the birthplace of Zeus.  Snow already frosted its heights.

The professor ground the gears as they halted for herds of sheep and workers repairing an eroded irrigation ditch and children playing in the tiny hamlets.  The roosters and chickens scattered ahead of the truck.  Not once did he speak to her.

Isabella clamped her jaw to keep from biting her tongue.  She wanted to ask about the passing landscape or about the dig at Knossos and why Arkwright’s group wasn’t working the famous site.  A look at his undimmed frown daunted her.

From the visit last weekend, she knew that Arkwright and his colleagues worked two obscure sites far from the four better-known digs of Knossos, Phaestos, Mallia, and Gurnia.  Compared to those, this expedition could hardly carry an official name.  Only Zeus’ own mountain gave grace to the sites.

Isabella and the Harcourt-Smythes had arrived at the dig after a pouring rain had collapsed a wall.  Muck the flat color of cement had covered everything and everyone.  The artist lurking inside Isabella had taken the mud and exposed foundations and imagined a country palace, braced against the bleaching sun and African winds.  Her two charges had distracted her from that past.  The busy archaeologists had barely acknowledged their unexpected visitors.

As Prof. Arkwright man-handled the truck over the road, Isabella stared at the craggy rocks of Mt. Dikte, scarred with ravines and pocked with tumbled boulders.  These English archaeologists might not be the answer to her prayer.  Should she have looked for a different rescuer?  Should she have waited?  She remembered two married ladies at the dig but no single ones.  The dig would still be busy, and she was an imposition.  Would they welcome her at all?  Would they give her a chance to earn her passage to England?  Or had she only delayed the inevitable?

Last night she had wanted to scream with fear and frustration.  Instead, she paced through the early hours as she tried to work out a solution to her unexpected unemployment.

This late in the year, few archaeologists remained on Crete.  She had planned to search each group out;  if they had failed her, she would approach the English construction crew working on the roads or haunt the antiquities museum.  Yet a search took money, and she needed to hoard the pittance that was her only protection against the world until she reached Athens.  And that was before the hotel manager demanded she pay from Tuesday through Friday.

Nigel Arkwright had seemed a gift from the gods.  If he weren’t, she had still gained time to contrive a less desperate solution.

The god Apollo was steering his sun chariot to its westward descent when they arrived at the dig.  Arkwright jolted his mundane chariot to a stop.  The professor set the hand brake but left the motor running.  As she reached for the door handle, he said, “At least you can be silent.  After this morning’s deluge, I wasn’t certain.”

“I was desperate, Professor.  If I had not convinced you, I don’t know what I would have done.  The hotel manager had decided I was a disreputable nuisance once he learned that Mr. Harcourt-Smythe had discharged me.  I must thank you once again, Prof. Arkwright.”

“I haven’t helped yet.  That’s not in my power.  As I said, I’m not in charge here.”

“Yes, you mentioned Professor Tarrant.  He wasn’t here last weekend.”

“Gawen Tarrant was at Knossos on a shared week, our fourth this season.  You may have seen his brother, although he tried to avoid your party.  Tourists are a nuisance who interrupt our work.  Your arrival will interrupt us again.”

She sucked in a breath.  “Thank you for the warning.”

“Our work requires training and education, Miss Newcombe, so you will not waltz into a position.  My wife sorts and catalogs the daily finds at the palace site.  Prof. Standings is in charge of the temple site;  his wife assists him there.  Tarrant handles his own notes, as do I.  I don’t know what Standings does.  The students will not need a secretary.  Unless you can contrive a job before you meet Tarrant, you will soon return to Heraklion.  All the chatter in the world won’t change his mind.  Indeed, you will find it decides him more quickly.  That, too, is a warning.”

Speech delivered, he shoved open the truck door and strode away, shouting to a worker to drive it up to the house.

Isabella slid out as the worker slid behind the wheel.  He flashed a grin as she snatched her hat.  The truck jerked.  She grabbed her satchel and slammed the door, and the truck rattled off.  She watched it wind around the cedars on the curving climb to the village.  Only when it vanished behind the trees did she remember her suitcase.  Yet her possessions were a minor worry.  Clothes and a few trinkets would not give her a job on this dig.  With her lack of experience, any work she found would likely be at their leased house.  Her cooking could not rival the savory dinners a village woman had prepared on Saturday and Sunday.  Two other village women took care of cleaning and laundry.  Isabella’s prospects looked worse and worse.

Her spirits wilting, she trudged after Nigel Arkwright.  Then she reached the dig.

The lower site was the ancient palace.  From the earlier tour she remembered that the archaeologists had excavated a complex foundation, a well, and a refuse tip, buried for centuries by a mudslide.  Farther up the hillside was the second site, a temple tumbled into ruined blocks.

Her employers had not wanted to climb up to the temple and had loitered around the palace site.  When Mrs. Harcourt-Smythe complained that it did not look like a grand palace to her, let alone a country manor, Prof. Arkwright had launched into a description of primitive life.  Isabella’s charges, the two girls, had immediately lost interest.  The entire family had had glazed expressions when the lecture had concluded.

 Smiling in remembrance, Isabella meandered around the excavation.  This time, no whining twosome distracted her.  Each separate chore fascinated her.  Diggers cleared out the mud from the earlier wall collapse.  Pickmen used their tools to distinguish a wall from centuries of mud.  Two English students dropped a plumb line to measure the wall’s height.

Her fingers itched to record the scene.  She rummaged in her satchel for sketchbook and pencil.  For several breaths she merely watched, then she tried to transfer the energy to the page: the pickmen, the two students, Arkwright gesturing to a worker carrying a brace.

“Well done.”  The woman at her shoulder startled Isabella.  “In a few minutes you’ve reproduced our dig.”

A wide-brimmed hat preserved the woman’s creamy skin from the intense sun.  It also framed the angular bones that gave her a singular beauty.  Dust and sweat had not touched her starched blouse and trim tan skirt.  With a yellow scarf tied in an ascot, she looked like an advertisement for the chic sporting woman.

Isabella offered a brighter smile than she felt.  “Thank you, Mrs. Arkwright.  The dig is fascinating.  History brought into the present.”

“Say that to Gawen Tarrant, and he may let you stay.  Come into the shade, Miss Newcombe, before this sun melts you.”

Isabella stowed her sketchbook then followed Cecilia Arkwright beneath a long tarp.

The woman walked around rough tables covered with sorting trays and settled onto a campstool.  She idly fingered the potsherds in the nearest tray.  “My husband told me of your straits.  What will you do, Miss Newcombe?”

Isabella fanned her hat.  “Wilt even more until I collapse under this sun.  Mrs. Arkwright, when I saw your husband this morning, I thought I had a brilliant solution.  I fear the gods may have blinded me instead of granting my plea.”

“Did you pray for guidance?  Well, we shall see if your solution was divinely inspired or not.  Bring over a stool, and help me sort these.”

Isabella spilled the story of her dismissal as she sorted broken potsherds from a basket into trays.  By the time the sun sank toward the horizon, her gloves were soiled by centuries’ old clay and she’d learned that pottery revealed its age as distinctly as sculpture did.

“It’s like a puzzle, isn’t it?  Sorting by the color marks and the thickness and the slip.  Are the pieces ever re-assembled?  I think that would be incredibly frustrating.  A puzzle with no clues as to size or shape, and most of the pieces missing.”

“Hunting a job, Miss Newcombe?”

She stiffened at the unfamiliar voice.  Wilted she may have felt, but steel straightened her spine as she stood to confront her next challenge.  “Professor Tarrant, I presume?”

The oblique allusion to the great African adventurer earned his grin, a white flash in a face tanned by the fierce sun.  Beneath the wide brim of his hat, his startlingly green eyes were a brilliant shock.  A tall man, with arms obstinately folded, he loomed over her.  “Archaeology is not a treasure hunt but an exploration into our origins.”

“Gawen, Miss Newcombe has had a few difficult days.  You shouldn’t bombard her with your favorite lecture.”

“We have all had difficult days, Cecilia.  I’ve wasted a week at Knossos, and I return to days lost due to a mudslip and tourists, one of whom won’t leave.  Walk with me, Miss Newcombe.  Leave that,” he ordered when she lifted her satchel.

“I won’t, Professor.  I can’t.  My money’s in it.”

“Fool woman.  You should have the money on you, not in a bag for any street urchin to wrench away.  Hand it over.”  He unbuckled his belt.  When she stood disbelieving, he snapped, “I won’t steal your money.  I’ll keep it safely until you leave tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”  She had hoped for a week or more, not just one night.

“Tomorrow unless you convince me otherwise.  Now, your money.”

To refuse would further blacken her chances.  She handed over her purse.  He snapped it open and extracted the folded pound notes.  “How much?”

She named her woefully small sum as she returned her purse to the satchel.

His eyebrows lifted then dropped back to a scowl.  She was relieved his perpetual frown could break, albeit briefly.  “That’s all the Harcourt-Smythes paid for keeping their two screeching girls in line?”  He stuffed her folded bills into his money belt.

“You saw us?  When?”

“At Knossos on Monday.  How often did you want to strangle your charges?”

Isabella primmed her mouth.  “Not once, sir.  A governess inculcates good behavior as well as knowledge.  However much I deplored their shrill voices and reprehensible conduct, I could do no more than remonstrate with them to behave better.  My personal preferences as to strangulation remained but a dream.”

Cecilia Arkwright applauded.  “Well said.  I hear my own governess.”

Tarrant snorted.  “If you talked that way, no wonder they misbehaved.”  He finished buckling his belt then swept an arm to have her precede him.  “Is that a week’s wage?  Where are your other wages?”

“Two weeks’ wages.  I had other money with me, but I had to pay my hotel bill, an expense I did not expect.  Mr. Harcourt-Smythe banked the rest of my salary.  In with those bills is a letter from him to his Athens banker, explaining the transfer of my remaining wages.”

“Useless here, isn’t it?  Why didn’t you protest?  Throw a schoolgirl’s tantrum and let those brats taste their own behavior?”  Although he limped, Gawen Tarrant set a rapid pace.  “Or are you too much the pattern of propriety?  And if you are that proper, why were you dismissed?”

Isabella stumbled on the path he’d chosen away from the site.  He steadied her.  She forced herself to meet those hard green eyes, even as color flooded her cheeks.  “Perhaps I am too much a pattern of propriety, sir.  I have several times found it necessary to rebuff Mr. Harcourt-Smythe.  I found it necessary to refuse him more vigorously both before and after his wife discovered him in my bedchamber Tuesday night.”

The path angled up the hillside.  Spreading oaks gave partial shade.  “Before and after, Miss Newcombe?  Did his wife not dismiss you on the spot?”

“Mr. Harcourt-Smythe offered a different employment after she dismissed me.”

Gawen Tarrant stopped under an oak’s partial shade.  Her severe gray suit offered no armor against his scathing glare.  “I trust he offered you considerably more money.”

“I did not give him an opportunity to name a sum, sir.”

“You should ask much, much more.”

The blush burned her cheeks.  “I do not know what opinion you have of American women, Prof. Tarrant, but I do not seek that employment.  I have never—.”

“You did tell Arkwright that you were desperate enough to do anything.”

“I’m not that desperate,” she spat.

As if her vehemence confirmed a silent question, he nodded and resumed walking.  “You are not that desperate yet, Miss Newcombe.  You will be if you do not quickly find employment.  You are far from your passage back to England.”

“Yes, I know.  I hoped to find work here.  I can read ancient Greek and Latin.”

“We are digging earlier than the glorious Greeks.  We’ve excavated below the Minoan culture that Arthur Evans uncovered at Knossos.  Arkwright’s in his realm.  We will soon dig deeper.”  At her blank look, he shook his head.  “You do not even know what that means.”

“I can learn.”

“We operate on a lean budget, Miss Newcombe, unlike some archaeologists who spend their personal fortunes on a dig.  The treasure-hunters focus on Egypt, lusting for a find like Schliemann’s at Troy.  Standings and Arkwright won’t fund your salary.  Any money you would earn here must come from the Tarrant account, and that is not a rich one.  So in the morning you will return to Heraklion.  I will ensure your return to the mainland.  That expense I can shoulder for you.  Then you must seize on some other English gentleman for charity;  the British School at Athens is flush with them.  Or you may return to Harcourt-Smythe.”

“Never.”

“Never to him?  Or to that employment?  How many times did he come to your room?  How many times did he force himself on you?”

“My father was a fan of American football, Professor.  Perhaps you know the game?  That taught me all the protection I needed.  As for the rest, it is none of your business.”  She stalked ahead.

Even with the limp, he quickly caught up to her.  Those green eyes blazed, like Zeus preparing a thunderbolt to blast an impertinent mortal.  “It’s my business if I make it so.  I run a respectable dig, Miss Newcombe.”

“Yet you dare accuse me—.”

“Do I believe you or Harcourt-Smythe, a wealthy businessman?”

“A predator on defenseless women!”

“According to Arkwright, Harcourt-Smythe wants to discuss an antiquities deal with me.  He proposed it Tuesday evening, when Arkwright dined with him.  He will return soon.”  She gaped at him.  He prodded.  “And find you here.”

“Do you doubt me, Prof. Tarrant?  I do not lie.”

“You misread me, Miss Newcombe.  Through the business he wants to contract, I can have a leverage on him.  I can force him to re-hire you.”

“Only to have his advances foisted on me again?  No.  Besides, he would abandon me, perhaps in much more dire circumstances, as soon as he is beyond your sphere.  That service from you I will not request, Prof. Tarrant.  I and my propriety will find another way home.”  She whirled away.

He caught up at the last incline to the village.  “My apologies, Miss Newcombe.  I did not intend to offend you.”

“That is a lie.”  Even though her energy was flagging, she didn’t slow down.  “You designed every word to provoke me.”

“Guilty as charged.”

That stopped her.

He grinned, like a little boy who had tricked her.  His stern expression melted away, and he looked as young as the apprentice archaeologists.  “The house with the blue doors, Miss Newcombe.  Tell our housekeeper Dorcas that I sent you, and she will make you welcome.”  Then he headed back, skidding a little on the slope before it leveled off.

Isabella watched his hike back, a smooth gait even with a limp.  He had accused her twice, to satisfy an inner test she couldn’t divine.  He said that she would leave tomorrow and offered the means, then he hinted that she might stay longer.  She didn’t understand him.  As fickle as Zeus, he flashed punishment then seemed willing to protect a stranger seeking the dig’s hospitality—however briefly he extended the obligatory welcome.

She didn’t dare toss his assistance back, as much as she wanted to.  His “guilty as charged” had sapped her anger at his offensive questions.  She didn’t know what to do.

The wind picked up.  She held her hat in place and surveyed the dig.  Not a large excavation, like the one Arthur Evans had conducted at Knossos or Schliemann’s extensive digging at Troy.  The quartering ropes in carefully measured sections looked scientific, as had the sorting of potsherds:  dark glaze to this tray, earth-red in the other, unmarked bits in the third.  A logical method to uncover the site’s secrets.  As Gawen Tarrant’s well-chosen shafts had uncovered her secrets.

The professor had reached the dig.  He spoke to a dark-haired man she hadn’t met.  The other man turned, giving orders to the workmen.  They began to stack their tools.  Several unrolled a covering for the roped excavation.  Gawen Tarrant spoke next to Arkwright and the two younger men before ducking beneath the tarp.

Isabella remembered her money.  She would have to speak to Prof. Tarrant to retrieve her wages, but she would refuse to play “Miss Gratitude”.

She resumed her climb to the village.

The path plunged through a stand of cedars before it gained the hill, then it skirted an olive grove as it worked around a large house.  From the size and the terra cotta roof tiles, she guessed it was the one leased for the dig.  The blue doors confirmed it.  She smiled at those doors as she had last Saturday noon as she walked with the Harcourt-Smythes from their camp beyond the village.  Blue was an understatement;  the paint was a bright Egyptian lapis.  The blue was repeated in the tilework of a sparkling pool that centered the inner courtyard.  Like an ancient Roman villa, the house surrounded the courtyard.  She had wanted to explore, but their visit was confined to the entrance, the courtyard, and a long room that combined the sitting and dining areas.  Now she was to have her chance.

She rang the bell.  As she waited, she glanced at the village that straggled along the hillside.  A half-dozen families could have lived in this house.

The housekeeper Dorcas did not seem surprised at her re-appearance.  She left Isabella in the courtyard then bustled away along a covered hallway to the kitchen.

Sinking into a chair near the pool, Isabella trembled as much as the breeze-stirred leaves and water.  She had used her last energy of the day.  The spurt of anger and frustration that had buttressed her from the dig to the house evanesced.  The drone of bees increased.  The sun on the white-washed wall looked bright and brighter, then it blackened, and she melted like wax.

 

 

Chapter 2 :: Saturday, October 4

A cool cloth covered Isabella’s eyes.  Distant voices echoed but not clearly enough to distinguish the one she dreaded.  A bird trilled.  A gentle breeze cooled.  She wanted to lie quietly in this peace but dared not.  Holding the cloth, she sat up and swayed.

“Careful.  Don’t move too quickly.”  The man’s voice, deeper than Gawen Tarrant’s, yet with the same lilt of Welsh beneath the public school accent.  The mattress sank, and a strong arm bolstered her.  “Drink this.”

She removed the cloth to see an enameled cup advancing.  She barely caught her breath before the cup touched her lips, and she had to drink.  The whiskey burned its way down her throat.  When her coughing subsided, the man leaned her back onto the bed.  She blinked at this rougher version of a Tarrant and remembered that the professor’s brother was on this dig.

“What happened?” she whispered.

He set the cup on a side table.  In the time he gave himself before answering, she noted several differences to Gawen Tarrant.  This rugged version had a tanned face marred by a stubbly beard.  Dark hair curled over his opened collar.  And bright blue eyes framed by thick lashes every girl would envy.

She had to look away before he captured her heart.  Lamplight left much of the room in shadow, but she spotted her satchel on a low chest behind him.

“Better now?  Or is the room still spinning?”

She blinked, trying to marshal her scattered thoughts.  “No, no, it’s—.  I’m sorry to have caused more trouble.”  She liked his blue eyes.  The lamplight gave them a mesmerizing brilliance.  By contrast, his brother’s vivid green eyes had seemed cold, indifferent to her plight.

“You came the other day with the Harcourt-Smythes.  Don’t tell me they’re back.”

“No.  No, just me.”

“And have you abandoned the terrors?”

At the apt naming, she responded to his smile before her spirits sank again.  “I no longer work for them.  I was dismissed Tuesday night.  They left the hotel the next morning.”

“Have you eaten since then?  No?  Well, that explains your faint.”

“I fainted?”  Disgust at her weakness flattened her voice.

“Call it a swoon.  The heat and the climb uphill combined with three days without substantial food.  You were bound to swoon.  Why didn’t you eat at the hotel?”

“I need every pound to pay my passage home.”

“Yet you spent more days at the hotel.”

“Mr. Harcourt-Smythe said that he had paid my room through last night.  The hotel manager told me this morning that he had not paid it.  I thought myself blessed when I managed to coerce Prof. Arkwright into bringing me here.”

“I see.  You twisted his arm and marched him to the lorry.”

The sally won him another smile.  Isabella’s affinity for this Tarrant grew.  He was passing from stranger to friend, and she still didn’t know his name.

That thought woke her caution.  His touch to the damp curls around her face jangled an alarm bell.  He might scowl and inspect her like a specimen on a pin, but she knew her pulse fluttered in her throat and her cheeks burned at the hint of intimacy.

“I want to sit up.”

“Not yet.  You may be dizzy.”

She wriggled.  “I don’t know you.  Not your name or who you are—.”

“And you have recovered enough to remember propriety.  I see I made no impression at our first introduction.  I’m Madoc Tarrant, Gawen’s brother.”  Spying her puzzled frown, he added, “I was covered with mud the first time.”

She remembered then, despite the two terrors’ distraction.  During their tour they had watched workers digging out a wall half-covered by the recent mudslip.  Arkwright had called a man’s name, and he had straightened to acknowledge them.  Taller than the other workers, the mud had given him anonymity.  His eyes had flashed white in his muddy face, then he’d bent back to work, giving them his broad shoulders.  Muscles had rippled under his mud-slick shirt.  Mud had plastered his trousers to his legs.  Artist she might pretend to be, but then and now embarrassment colored her face.  Isabella wriggled again.

“Lie still, Isabella.”

Her name on his well-shaped mouth did not help her composure.  “How did I get—?  Where am—?  I was on the terrace.  What happened?”

“Our housekeeper Dorcas found you, and I was first back, luckily for you.  I carried you here, to my room.  It’s the quietest in the house.  Dorcas did the rest, not me.  Your modesty remains untouched.”  His flashing grin reassured her.  “Dorcas would still be hovering if the others hadn’t returned, demanding dinner.”

“I must thank her.  And you.”

“No thanks are necessary, Miss Newcombe.”

“Please, I must sit up.”

He helped her, tucking a pillow behind her.  Then he walked around the bed to the window, open to the night air.  The bird trilled again.  A dog yapped unceasingly.  Madoc Tarrant’s profile was sharply defined against the darkness.  High brow and straight nose, square chin bristly with the day’s whiskers.  The only trait he didn’t share with his brother were those blue eyes, but no one would ever confuse the two men.  Tall, dark and handsome.  If Nigel Arkwright were Apollo, which god was he?  Hades?  Then which god was his brother?

“What brings you to the dig, Miss Newcombe?”

 

Read more in the novel Digging into Death by M.A. Lee, at these links.

Ebook and Paperback at Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LXPRKHM

Ebook only at Worldwide Distributors https://books2read.com/u/bzdM72

 

The Hazard for Spies / 1st Chapters and Links

 Read below for the opening chapters. Find LINKS at the End.

Book Description

A young constable tracks treacherous traitors. A spinster hopes to find a killer. Will murder destroy their chance for love?

Conrad Hoppock left his village and the girl he secretly loved for a chance at a better livelihood. He joined the London constabulary and began working with the Bow Street Runners. Now he hunts the master spy stealing information for Bonapartist France. His search sends him undercover in a lawyer’s office.

When Phinney Darracott’s sister and brother-in-law died, their children whispered “murder”. She dismissed that claim as unreasonable terrors caused by the tragic loss. Yet after repeated burglaries and an arson that destroyed their home, Phinney believed the whispers. Now she wants justice for their murders.

The clues lead her to London. There, she disguises herself as a cleaning maid for the very law office where Conrad is disguised as a clerk. Phinney’s young niece Elise and the street urchin Vic secretly pursue a different tangle of clues to the murders.

In the night hours, when all is still, Phinney prowls for the evidence. Then she encounters Conrad.

And the lawyer at the center of the tangle of clues is shot dead while they watch from their hiding place.

Can Conrad discover the identity of the French mastermind? Will Phinney’s single-minded pursuit lead her into the murderer’s snare? Will the children be caught and sold into London’s underworld?

Will they discover the connection between past and present murders?

Or will two bullets allow the murderer and the French master spy to continue their work against the British government?

Opening Chapters

Chapter 1

A hand dropped on Vic’s shoulder. He stopped scratching his picks through the lock’s resisting tumblers.

The round moon cast her silvery eye over the alley. Soon she would drift beyond the narrow walkway

between the buildings. The silvery light would travel with her, leaving the alley dark except for the golden gleams peeking through the cracks of Elise’s shuttered lantern.

Her light hand lifted from his shoulder, and he returned to his work, figuring out the tumblers on the heavy lock safeguarding the warehouse side door.

She bent close, her breath a warm wisp across his cheek. “How much longer? That’s the third pass by the watchman.”

“Nearly there,” he lied. He didn’t know if he could get past this lock, rusted after long months in rain and cold. He fumbled for a heavier pick.

She huffed, and Vic knew she hadn’t believed him.

Times like this, the job chancy and the watchman vigilant, Vic missed the known of Liverpool. The escape routes, the likeliest hiding places, refuges from stout fists, the constable who would turn eyes elsewhere. He didn’t like London’s crowded buildings and sooty streets, the seething markets, the constant noise even in the deeps of night. He’d stay, though, till they found the information that Elise and her aunt Phinney hunted.

The strong wire pick Bessy worked past Hook and Fine to reach the last tumbler, stiff with rust. Vic gave a jerky twist. The tumbler resisted then “creached”, the word Ollie had taught him for the soft screech of metal giving way to his picks. As the lock swung from its shackle, he caught it, cold in his hand, rough with rust.

Elise snatched up the shuttered lantern. Her sharp elbow moved him aside. The door opened into darkness with a glow of light off to their left. That was street-side, where the front office would be. The light lured the unwary, but Vic knew better than to head for it, for the light meant watchmen resting between their patrols.

High windows admitted the moonlight. The silvery radiance might illuminate the night sky, but they would need stronger light to find their way through the warehouse. Stacked crates formed haphazard walls, and piled on and around them were boxes, trunks, and barrels, too many to count.

Elise glided over the bricked floor, smoothed by years of use. She didn’t open the lantern shutters, but light streamed around the metal plates, joined badly, repaired worse, but still better than candlelight that would signal a watchman. Cautious skittering started off to his left. Rats, the big London ones that stared before running to hide, considering attack rather than flight. A good mouser would have a battle against London rats.

She reached back, grabbed his coat, and hauled him inside. He shut the door gently.

“Lock?” she hissed.

“Pocket.”

She dragged him a few steps before Vic planted his feet. “Come on,” she demanded.

“Where to?” he retorted, keeping his voice equally low. “Can’t see nothing.”

“We’ll use the lantern upstairs. The windows are shuttered there.”

“Steps or ladder?” He didn’t like ladders. Rickety things weren’t kept in repair until someone fell and died.

Elise snorted, “Stairs. In the middle,” but she didn’t sound sure.

“This the right warehouse?” he questioned, not for the first time.

“Come on,” she ordered, and he followed because she still had his coat bunched in her fist.

Elise had explained her plan on the day after they arrived in London, almost ten days ago. Her aunt Phinney was off talking to her friend, the matron who offered them rooms in her mission. Hank had hared off to the kitchens, pretending to focus on fresh scones. Emissary to the house, he brought back all snippets of unusual information. In less than a day he had formed an instant friendship with the cook, a lean African woman that Vic had trouble understanding but who turned out food better than he’d ever had in his short life.

Drawing Vic to the double entry for the residence quarter of the mission, Elise sat him on the floor beneath the coats to lay out her plan. She claimed her father had had a second office where he kept important documents. She sketched a plan to find the building on a Church Garden Street near the river. They would break in at night then go through the documents until she found her father’s murderer.

Vic listened. He saw problems with the girl’s plan, not least that they were little more than children and they would be running the London streets when the criminals were about. He didn’t anticipate that she had the street name wrong. That problem took a week of cautious questions to discover it was Kirkgardie rather than Church Garden. Then they discovered the street ran a long ways beside the river. More days were lost walking and searching. More days passed before Elise spotted the blocky building with its unpainted plank walls warping in London’s moist air. “That’s it!” she cried then clapped her hand over her mouth.

No one had heard her. That was luck. They scouted round, counting windows, locating doors. Vic liked the narrow side door with its thick rusting lock, proof that few people paid any attention to the door. He didn’t like the watchmen patrolling the exterior. More men would be inside, that he knew, but her elation infected him. He scouted for a couple of days and a couple of evenings on his own, learning the men’s routines, before he agreed to break into the warehouse.

Neither of them mentioned anything to Phinney. They didn’t want the young woman to worry. She would be frantic if Elise or Hank went missing. Vic came up with a good story in case she questioned him. But Phinney hadn’t noticed. She’d been gone herself. “A job,” she told them at breakfast, “cleaning offices. We should pay Mrs. Stowbridge something for taking us in, giving us rooms and food. I’ll be working in law offices near the Old Bailey.”

Vic thought nothing of it.

Elise stared at her boiled egg like it turned her stomach. “Which lawyers?”

“You wouldn’t know them, dear.”

“Papa was a lawyer here in London before he moved to Liverpool, only a few months before he and Mama—died.”

Phinney bit into her scone. It crumbled, and she caught the pieces in an open hand. “Yes, Rosie wrote me. Peter was in London more than at home. Did you wish to go to his old office?”

“No. He closed that office.” Her blue eyes met Vic’s.

“I remember,” her aunt said, still chasing crumbs. “Rosie said that he had opened the office in Liverpool where his primary client was based. Everything else was stored at the house in Merrybush.” She sipped her tea. Lifting the quilted cozy, she picked up the teapot and offered to warm the children’s cups before re-filling hers.

“Which lawyers are in the building, Aunt Phinney?”

“I suppose you might know them, especially after our stay at Parton March. The ground floor is all clerks, of course, and reception. A large firm of barristers has the entire first floor. Clements, Pickard, and Quincy. Do you know that firm?” After Elise shook her head, Phinney set aside her teacup. She named other firms housed on the second floor. Her eyes tracked an invisible line. “Third floor. Phipps and LaVesque. Titterstone and Montjoy. Fulbright.”

Vic’s mind stopped at Titterstone and Montjoy. Those two were at Parton March when the murders and attempted murders had occurred and been solved. Titterstone was the mustached man who had ordered another man to kill Joe and Button. Joe had hired Vic to break into a locked office in Liverpool. An office from which Elise had taken a file.

And now he was sliding over the worn bricks, following Elise deeper into the warehouse, to break into her father’s office and read more files.

She walked fearlessly along a side aisle, and he gradually made out a flight of stairs leading up. The warehouse was like a huge cave, with moonlight filtering through windows higher than a second floor. Riverside, though, was a balcony running the building’s length. One steep flight of steps climbed to the balcony, and the silvery light revealed doors opening off the elevated walkway. The rooms that opened off the walk overlooked the Thames. Vic remembered those windows with their weathered shutters. None opened to admit good daylight.

Beneath the balcony were deeper shadows, more scratching rats. He didn’t want to go there. He tried to gauge how far along they were. The warehouse had one massive door opening to the street and a long dock to load cargo into a boat.

Vic slowed as they neared the stairs. “You sure?” he asked as the steps creaked under them. Even in the darkness the floor looked a long way down. “Don’t seem like the place for an office.”

Moonlight shone on her pale face, glinted in her sun-yellow hair. “I remembered.”

He wouldn’t argue with memory.

Elise was ten, two years younger than him. He didn’t know how she remembered something from when she was only eight. Hank was eight and couldn’t remember nothing unless his sister drilled him on it. Sitting in the dark double entry, coats brushing their heads, the floor cold under his rump, he had listened to her plan to find the warehouse, creep into her father’s old office, and discover the reason her parents were killed.

Vic didn’t point out that this office could be closed, the documents removed, the furniture sold in the two years since her parents’ deaths. That’s what had happened to her father’s office in Liverpool. He just agreed to help.

Yet he worried about the watchmen and the documents Elise planned to read. He worried about Phinney cleaning the offices of Titterstone and Montjoy, on the same hunt as her niece to find who had killed Peter and Rosie DeChambeaux.

And Joe and Button were now dead, because they broke into an office in Liverpool.

Killed by a man hired by the lawyer Titterstone.

 . ~ . ~ . ~ .

 Phinney tucked a dark tress back under the ruffled mobcap that topped her disguise as a cleaning maid.

Light glowed down the hall in a side office. While no one was present, someone obviously worked late. A clerk from the ground floor, she had guessed as she picked up crumbled paper that had missed the dustbin. She smoothed out the documents that had a clerk working into the small hours then folded them and tucked them into a pocket for later perusal.

The other offices needed only a cursory cleaning. She used the master key given her by Mr. Gregory to re-lock each office as she finished. “Never can be too careful, not with lawyers and their documents,” the older man had said, his esses whistling through a missing tooth. “You keep everything locked good and tight, Mrs. Coates.”

Phinney had nodded and accepted the key with a solemn promise to keep it on her person.

She didn’t grin at this unexpected luck until Mr. Gregory headed off to deal with a creaking shutter.

Her luck continued to hold. She had only the two top floors to clean while Mrs. Gregory took the bottom two. Mr. Gregory fixed problems, did the heavy work, and maintained the cellars with its large coal bin.

As she slipped into the offices of Titterstone & Montjoy, Solicitors, she gave a fleeting thought to the children, sleeping soundly at the mission. She had tucked up Hank then reminded Elise to put aside her reading before the downstairs clock struck the eighth hour. Bright blue eyes sparkling with mischief, her niece complained but acquiesced. Vic had a primer and pencil, working on the alphabet that Elise was trying to teach him.

Vic might not be family, but he formed part of their little family now, the three children and her, alone against the world.

Vic had warned them to flee from Liverpool. After trouble with press gangs, Phinney hadn’t hesitated to hustle them onto the first coach out of the city. The boy had then protected their journey to Parton March. Once they were settled, seemingly safe, Phinney had tried to leave the children at the estate. She hadn’t reached the neighboring village before she demanded the carter return her to the house. She couldn’t leave them with strangers, even if the strangers seemed trustworthy.

Now she stood in the offices of Titterstone & Montjoy, convinced the two upstanding attorneys were criminals.

She had lucked into the job as cleaner. Mr. Gregory accepted her disguise as a war widow desperate to support her three children.

At Parton March, she had avoided any interaction with the two lawyers, there to serve their wealthy client as he determined his heirs. Even with murder and attempted murder, she kept herself and the children closeted, well away from the family and guests. She knew of George Titterstone and Kennedy Montjoy from Rosie’s correspondence. Her sister poured out in a letter that Peter’s father had involved himself in another contretemps on a business venture. In resolving the issue, the son had fallen out with his father and severed the connection when they left London.

Phinney only vaguely remembered those months before her sister and brother-in-law were killed. Working as a governess of four children had consumed all her energies. She barely had a half-hour each day to herself. Her meals were taken with the children. Her employer required daily reports of the children’s progress and weekly proof of that progress. The older girl was a dreamer; the twin boys were pranksters who preferred fishing and roaming to Latin and ciphers, and the youngest girl would sneak to the kitchen for a sweet from the cook. She had tucked Rosie’s letter in her reticule and forgotten it—until she drew it out at the Lintons.

She shook herself mentally. Brown studies were an indulgence. She had offices to search.

A whisk over the surfaces with her duster, then she carried her lamp into Mr. Titterstone’s inner office. Last night she had searched Mr. Montjoy’s office. She wanted one document with Peter’s name or even his father’s, Pierre DeChambeaux. One document, to prove she was on the right track.

The kneehole desk had six drawers, three on each side. Mr. Titterstone had double-framed windows at his back. His partner had only one window and the smaller of the two offices. Mr. Montjoy’s window view, however, looked toward the park at the end of the block. On a fine day he would see treetops and catch glimpses of flowers. Mr. Titterstone overlooked the street and the red-bricked building across the way, yet he had an inner closet with a narrow bed, washbasin, and shelving for boxed documents.

George Titterstone also worked more cases than his partner. A dozen labelled boxes were stacked on shelves to one side of the room. Phinney eyed those case files and wondered how long a perusal of each would take. She might need several nights to work through all of the files.

Tucking her cleaning basket with rags and wax polish beside the shelves, she approached the desk, choosing Mr. Titterstone’s side. She quickly scanned the stacked ledgers and the documents inside folders, careful not to disarrange them. Her father hadn’t liked any of his papers moved, especially when he prepared a sermon. Phinney had picked up items, dusted underneath, then replaced them, all without the Rev. Darracott spotting the removals. Finding nothing, she tugged on the center drawer. It didn’t budge. Slipping fingers under her mobcap, she withdrew two hair picks and set to work on the simple lock, mentally thanking Vic for his lessons.

When the clock in the outer office chimed the half-hour, Phinney climbed from her aching knees and glared at the desk. Nothing. Not a single paper with the name DeChambeaux. Only a couple of files had dates preceding the carriage accident, but those were innocuous statements about an estate called Ridings in Little Houghton, inherited by Sir Charles Audley from his uncle. Mr. Titterstone had jotted a half-page of notes about the classics scholar who was decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone. Three words in a different hand appended the note: Poutaine, cipher, key.

She slipped the note back into the file box, telling herself the intervening years would have resolved any issue. Yet those three words niggled at her as she searched the other drawers. Hands on her hips, she considered retrieving it, yet even as she reached for the drawer, the door to the outer office opened. Hurriedly, she grabbed up a cleaning cloth.

When Titterstone’s office door opened, Phinney stayed crouched beside her basket and pretended to dust the bottom shelf.

“Here. Who are you?”

She straightened. Without looking in the man’s direction, she bobbed a curtsey. “The cleaner, sir.”

“I hadn’t—you are here alone.”

Phinney stiffened. “The Gregorys are below, sir,” she snipped. “This floor is my duty. And the one below.”

“It can’t be.”

At the confusing comment, Phinney chanced a look to see a tall, broad-shouldered man, black hair and pale skin, blue eyes so pale they looked like tinted glass. Her mouth dropped open.

Conrad Hoppock laughed. “It is you.”

 Chapter 2

Life kept surprising Conrad. Phinney Darracott in a maid’s mobcap that hid her dark curls was a welcome surprise, one of the few. Her piquant features had the same archness as nine years before. An engulfing apron hid her slender frame. While his star had been ascendant, though, hers had plummeted after her father’s death. Governess, he remembered. Now a maid cleaning offices?

Conrad wiped away his grin. “Josephine Elizabeth Darracott, I never expected to see you.”

“Again? I think I heard an again.”

His lips twitched, wanting to stretch wide. Phinney might be down, but she remained plucky. “Never I said. And meant it.”

“You expected I would remain in Brize Norton until I dried up like a wheat crop left unharvested, all brown and useless.”

“No, Phinney. No!” Rather than impress this girl who had once fascinated him, he had offended her. “I returned to Brize Norton a couple of years ago. My condolences on the deaths of your parents.”

Her mobile mouth twisted. “I was gone by then, working as a governess until my sister—.” She stopped. Her visible swallow hurt his own throat.

“I heard that, too. Your sister had a child, didn’t she?”

“Two. Elise and Henry. Hank, we call him.”

“They’re with you?”

“Of course!” Her gaze dropped to the rag in her hand then swept around the office. “You work for Messieurs Titterstone and Montjoy?”

He hesitated only a second then told the official lie. “I clerk for them. I’m working on a brief now.”

“That’s your lamp burning in the side room down the hall?”

“Yes.” He didn’t know what else to say. “Are you—?”

Voices came from the hallway, muffled by the outer door he’d had the sense to shut.

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

A key scraped in the lock.

He quickly pressed the inner door nearly shut then grabbed Phinney’s arm and her lamp. She squeaked as he hustled her to the closet. “Open it.”

She obeyed, as eager as he to hide.

He crowded behind her into the closet and yanked the door shut as the men’s voices came louder. They had entered the anteroom. Conrad blew out the lantern and set it away from the door.

At the plunge into darkness, Phinney squeaked again and grabbed his arm. He clapped a hand over her mouth as light gleamed along the cracked door. He shifted a little, hoping for a view of the room.

Phinney staggered and grabbed his forearm. She pushed at his smothering hand. “Sh-h,” he warned before he removed it. The gleam of light illuminated her pale face. Those large expressive eyes were closed. Her lips were parted. He wanted to kiss her—a stupid wish, really, with men coming into Titterstone’s office. Yet that old desire pushed him. Well aware of the distance between a plow boy and the vicar’s daughter, his fifteen-year-old self had controlled the yearning. He didn’t want the vicar’s cane planted across his back. The desire’s resurgence didn’t surprise him—but his job demanded he discover whom Titterstone met after-hours. That was as much a deterrent as the vicar’s macassar cane.

He looked away from temptation and peered through the thin crack between door and jamb. He could see Titterstone’s desk. The man must have brought in a candle, for the light jumped around as if a breeze wisped over the flame.

“You threw your lot in with the wrong people,” the lawyer said. A creak came, and Conrad saw him turn his chair and sit.

Grey superfine wool entered his line of sight. “I never expected Napoleon to lose.” A man’s sleeve. Not as tall as him, for the shoulder was well below Conrad’s eye-level.

“What do you want, sir? Do take that chair. How may I assist you? What are your needs?”

“This isn’t a need; it’s a necessity. I must return to my life here in England.”

The man moved. Conrad saw the desk with its stack of ledgers, the array of files, loose papers strewn over the blotter. The inkwell gleamed like champagne in the shifting candlelight.

“Sir, how is your return to England possible? Too many people know you. The Westover family, especially Lord Alex who once counted you a dear friend. Lord Costell, who has recently inherited. The Wilsons, the Armitage brothers. These men move throughout society.”

“They continue to drink the elixir of privilege while I inhabit drafty garrets and rat-infested apartments. I weary of being the foreigner that everyone can identify and of whom they attempt to take advantage. That life is no longer for me. I will return here to live.”

“I do not advise it.”

“Come, Titterstone, advice is not what I seek. Possibilities are. I appreciate your and Mr. Montjoy’s efforts to keep me from being tried in absentia. On my return I need not live in the cream of society. I can inhabit the shadows ... as my uncle does.”

Conrad sifted through the snippets of information, trying to divine the man’s identity. Alex Westover had a friend named James Costell. The brothers Michael and Lucas Armitage walked the fringes of society, accepted in the tonniest ballrooms but also familiar with the gaming dens and streets of blue ruin. They worked for London’s spycatcher, Sir Roger Nazenby. That name wasn’t widely known.

This man—who was he? When had he fled England? What crime had sent him to the Continent?

“My uncle does very well for himself,” the man said, and Conrad realized that he had missed Titterstone’s reply. Phinney stood statue-still against him, barely breathing, her fingers still clutching his arm.

The chair creaked. Titterstone’s arm rested on the blotter.

Phinney angled her head, trying to see more. Conrad tightened his hold, wanting to draw her away from the door.

“You would be content with that shadowy life?” The lawyer played with a letter knife, lifting it to turn and slide through his fingers only to turn it again and let the tip land in the blotter. “You should consult the Boss, not me.”

The Boss? Did he mean the Boss of London? The man who ruled the criminal underworld?

Talk of a shadowy life now made sense.

Another creak, a different sound than the lawyer’s chair. “The thing is, Titterstone, I owe my uncle a great debt. Not a monetary one. A debt that is much more difficult to repay. He will not support my plans until I repay him. He wants everything equaled out.”

“I am well acquainted with the Boss of London and his idea of equaling debts. I am not, however, in the business of intangible usury, Mr. Malbury. I will work with you on tangible debts.”

“Intangible usury? You sound like the lawyer you are, Titterstone. I do not expect you to advance me any funds. Neither does my uncle. He definitely does not need more money.”

“I do not think—.”

“My father is in ill health.” The younger man rode over the lawyer’s protest, calm words that still plowed ahead like an ox working up a muddy hill. “My uncle’s message to me, notifying me of his steady decline, prompted my return. At the appropriate time, this office can ensure the estate’s funds will be funneled to me. You and Montjoy do still retain my letter of intent to that effect.” He paused, and Titterstone must have nodded, for he continued, “At the appropriate time, I will provide this office with my new location and my new name. Neither is yet decided. I am not the imbecile you believe that I am.”

After he had turned the letter opener several times, Titterstone cleared his throat. “Your father may recover.”

“Not according to my uncle.”

“Have you seen him?”

“My father? Of course not. White Hall has agents watching their residence, as if they think I am foolish enough to walk brazenly to the front door. Three years since my departure, and they still watch the house.”

“I meant, have you seen your uncle? Have you spoken with him about your return?”

“Ah, therein lies the rub, doesn’t it? You and Montjoy have attempted to conceal your connection to Boss Malbury and other nefarious rulers, such as the master of Liverpool.”

Titterstone dropped the letter opener. “I have had no contact—.”

“My uncle knows that you were in Liverpool a few weeks ago. He knows the reason. He is curious about the contents of that file taken from a certain solicitor’s office near the waterfront. A file that he knows you were so intent on concealing that you required Stevens to kill the two men who broke into that office for you. Joe and Button. Or did you bother to learn their names?”

Phinney jerked and began trembling.

His arm still around her shoulders, Conrad braced her against his chest. He stared at the mobcap ruffle that blocked his view of her face. What does she know about Liverpool and two murdered men? Information about those murders would please Chief Constable Evans. Not only could Titterstone be connected to murders by the assassin Stevens, but the theft of this file offered another avenue of inquiry. Yet Phinney apparently knew something about the theft and those two murders. His chief would want her interrogated. Conrad didn’t want to.

I’ve just found her. I’ll lose her again.

“What does Boss Malbury want?” the lawyer demanded. Rather than be quelled by Malbury’s information, he had stubbed up like an ox that refused to plow another furrow. “What is this intangible usury he demands?"

LINKS

Worldwide Distribution through Books to Read, ebook only

Paperback and ebook from Amazon

View the Trailer:  https://youtu.be/YrnFtNhzwQs

Interested in the whole Subseries about Tracking French Spies?

1. A Game of Secrets > the book description, links to purchase, and the opening of the novel at this blogpost
2. A Game of Spies > 1st chapters with our heroine and hero, the book description, and links to purchase in a blogpost
3. The Dangers for Spies > 1st chapters, links to purchase, and the book description, all in a blogpost
4. The Key for Spies > a loosely-connected novel, for this one is based in northern Spain rather than Regency England. More of a stand-alone, this story of a British officer and a lady leading Spanish guerrillas against French occupation is more about warfare than the ballrooms of high society London. The opening, a book description, and links to purchase at this blogpost
5. The Hazard for Spies (this blogpost) ~ the conclusion to the subseries.

Want to Read More with Vic and his Friends?

• The Hazard of Secrets, which introduces Vic, Elise, and Hank and a bit with Phinney: Our main characters Clarey and Jem feature in this blogpost from earlier this year. (Links included!) 

The Dangers for Spies / Prologue and first 2 Chapters

 

A Spy who Abandoned the Game
A Double-Agent who barely Escaped Capture
A Cryptographer better with Puzzles than with People
The Spy-Hunter who wants Revenge

The Dangers for Spies

Prologue ~ 1810 July ~ London

The door opened. Eugenie remained as she was, staring through the rain-drenched window at the garden. If she were to die here, the only place in the world where she had expected safety after six years of hiding, then so be it. She had wearied of running.

A footstep, then the door closed. More footsteps, quickly muffled by the flat-weave carpet covering the wax-sheened floor.

Had she been in Paris, pretending to be Madame de la Croix, she would have greeted the incomer with a glittering smile and effusive chatter. Had she been in Brussels or Dusseldorf or Groningen, she would have surreptitiously drawn her little pistol then waited to see if the intruder were a thief or a murderer. Yet she was in London, at Sir Roger Nazenby’s residence in exclusive Mayfair, and she took neither of those actions.

He stopped several steps away. Was he innately wary? Or had caution come after years as England’s great spycatcher? Eugenie had given the barest name to the servant. She had almost expected to be refused entrance. Yet the bruiser serving as doorman had admitted her without question. Apparently, mysterious visitors often came to Sir Roger’s door. And the mantilla and voluminous cloak that shielded her identity had not twitched a single of his whiskers.

The silence grew heavy before Nazenby spoke. “Madam, you wished to speak with me?”

Either the servant hadn’t conveyed her name or the great English spycatcher would not use it until he confirmed her identity himself.

“I do.” Turning from the window, Eugenie lifted the black mantilla from her hair. As it dropped, she felt naked, but his gasp of recognition eased the first of her many worries. The black lace had disguised her from Groningen to here. “Good afternoon, Sir Roger.”

“Madame de la Croix. We thought you lost to us.”

“I nearly was. And I am she no longer. Please to remember that.”

Nazenby was much as she remembered him: a slim man, well-dressed in the height of English fashion. His striped waistcoat and bright yellow ascot drew attention from his features. His legendary sartorial elegance disguised his lethality better than her lacy veil and heavy cloak disguised her identity. Hiding her appearance, though, kept her alive.

“Come, sit down.” He gestured with a pale-skinned hand. “Would you care for wine?”

“Cognac, if you have it.”

That request startled the great man. After a hesitation, he did not deny her the stronger liquor usually reserved for men. She crossed to the marble-wrapped hearth, empty of fuel in London’s summer. Throwing open her cloak, she took the closer seat and eyed the great spycatcher.

He had not greatly changed in nine years: more grey hairs peppered his hair, but his back remained stiff and straight. A few more lines on his face, but nothing that marred his elegance. Eugenie had timed her arrival to intercept him before preparation for any evening’s entertainment. He looked almost the same as he had upon their first meeting in Paris, only a few months after she’d ventured to the capitol to locate her missing brother. Her masquerade as the wife of Louis Langlais de la Croix had temporarily fooled even the keen-witted Nazenby.

Her own mirror revealed how much she herself had changed. Six years of deprivation had sucked the fat silkiness from her flesh. She had no silver yet, but weary hollows darkened her skin. In Paris, she had attired beautifully, as befitted the rich widow of M’sieur de la Croix. When she fled, she had dressed to hide. Everything that remained to her, including her dull green traveling gown, was travel-worn and out of fashion.

Nazenby handed her a snifter. She glanced up as she accepted it and caught his narrowed eyes. “Counting the changes, Sir Roger?”

“I do apologize.”

She shrugged. “Do not. I myself have counted each one. As I count your changes.”

A smile flickered out at her honesty, then he gave her an unexpected compliment. “You speak English with only a slight accent now.”

She watched the cognac swirl in the glass. “That is not the greatest change.”

“No, it is not. I must say, your name was not one that I ever expected to hear.” He leaned back on his upholstered chair, but remained stiff. “You were reported arrested. Executed within the week. How did you escape?”

“And you wonder who died in my place?” she added softly. Her lashes lifted. Yes, she watched him closely, that was his chief question. Not how I escaped, but who was sacrificed to enable my escape? “Here is a name for your dossier: Annette DesChamps. My cousin from Saumer died. The authorities did not realize their mistake. She must have screamed of their mistake, but why would they believe any prisoner who matched the description of the woman they needed to arrest? Annette and I did look much alike.”

“How did she fall into their trap?”

“Whoever in my household betrayed me did not know that she had arrived late the night before.”

“You were ... fortunate.”

Eugenie’s eyelids flared. “I still am. I still bear the guilt of her death. Do not think, Sir Roger, that I am blithe and carefree. Her death by the greatest of misfortunes aided my escape. She remains on my conscience.”

He did not pursue a dialogue about Annette. He sipped his cognac then asked again, “How did you escape?”

Eugenie had known she must reveal much to the Englishman before he would help her. “Madame de la Croix would have fled west or north. I went to Metz, to an old friend of Louis, a man unknown to his associates in Paris.”

He followed what she had buried in the list of places. “Louis told you of Abbé Villiers?”

“The abbé helped me travel to Brussels.”

“You risked his life. He is a great contact for us.”

“Never fear that I was in a foolish headlong flight.”

“You should not have risked him. Louis Langley would have taught you that.”

“I took great care, Sir Roger. I approached him in the church confessional. I took only information from him. We were never seen together. This is the training of Louis, to protect this back door from France. Was the abbé taken up?”

“He was not.”

“Alors,” the word escaped with her relief. “I am reassured, as you doubtless are. Poulaine would have been a dog after his bone, snatching anyone up since his two objects escaped him, myself and Delaney.”

“How do you know Delaney escaped?”

“I encountered an associate of his in Dusseldorf. Only he used Delaney’s other alias, Jean Louis Jettere.”

“So, Paris to Metz, and Metz to Brussels.” He sipped his cognac again. His crossed leg swung, the buckle on his polished shoe flashing in the dreary daylight. “From Brussels to Dusseldorf, I must presume, since you encountered one of Delaney’s contacts there. And then to where, Madam?”

“Groningen.”

“An unusual choice.”

“The very reason I chose it. But it is not easy to sell jewels for their worth in that city.” Remembering the dark streets where she had hidden while she slaved at work, she shivered. She sipped the cognac in her turn, and it warmed her core. “Earning the money for my passage from Groningen to Dover took much time. You English have many smugglers plying the waters of the Channel. They care not at all whom they ferry to their home shores as long as one pays the exorbitant price.”

“You are recently arrived in England?”

“Very recently. I come to you first.”

“You wish me to give you Delaney’s identity?”

“Delaney? No. I do not wish to know it. Such knowledge is dangerous, for me, for him. Poulaine will still be on the hunt. Six years will not have slackened his pursuit. He is a man who does not forget.”

“He thinks you dead.”

“Do not make the mistake that others have with Didier Poulaine, Sir Roger. He never, never forgets an enemy. He will end his hunt only when he has found his prey or when he dies.”

“He thinks you are dead.”

Eugenie continued to shake her head. “Poulaine would have known the mistake of Annette’s arrest as soon as he returned to Paris. He is a man who would not care that he sacrificed her. For this reason alone I have never returned to France.”

“You must miss your home,” he said blandly.

She narrowed her eyes then quickly smoothed away the revealing expression. “France has not been my home for many years. I am no Bonapartiste. Louis told you that.”

“He never explained the reason you married him. I know before his death that you ran his messages and ferreted out information. That was the only reason I consented to Ken—Keiran Delaney’s association with you.”

He thought her a traitor to Louis’ ideals and work in Paris. After six years and her life in jeopardy, he still thought she had sold Delaney out to the French spymaster Poulaine. “I am no traitor to Louis. I was not the reason that Poulaine identified us as spies.”

“Perhaps,” he allowed, and her frustration increased. “I will want to talk with you more on that matter.”

“I do not support the current French regime. Louis told you this.”

“I admit that Louis never fully explained the reason you hated Boney.”

Eugenie’s hand shook. She set the snifter on a side table, but she knew Nazenby had spotted that betraying tremor. “Napoleon killed all the men of my family, Sir Roger. My older brother was one of the sick at Acre that Napoleon poisoned before his retreat. His consul exiled my father to French Guiana. Papa did not survive the voyage. My younger brother was abandoned, alone in Paris, when my father was arrested. He must have been murdered or left to die. That is a better ending than others that I have imagined. Rainier was only eight, Sir Roger, and recovering from an illness when my father was arrested.” After ten years, her anger still burned like acid. “When I reached Paris, the concierge of Papa’s hotel could only tell me that Rainier had disappeared the night Papa was arrested. He had only eight years. Eight.” She dashed away angry tears.

“You were not much older, were you? Louis told me you were twenty when he married you. That was a lie, wasn’t it?”

“He believed the age I told him.”

“How old?”

“What does it matter?” Sudden weariness slumped her shoulders. The sips of cognac had lost their bracing effect, and she shivered with a soul-deep chill. “I had five and ten years. But Louis, he did not consummate the marriage. He told you this. I heard him.”

“He did. Do you think your vehement hatred of Napoleon is born of your youth? Many countries make mistakes.”

“Oui, c’est vrai. But Napoleon is power-mad and manipulative. I warned Louis of this. I warned him that Napoleon wanted all of Europe. Has that not come true? England remains the only hope to stop him, so I throw my lot in with you.”

Her tirade affected him not at all. “Throw your lot in with us? You picked up some gambling cant in your travels, didn’t you?”

“I learned the most of it from your Keiran Delaney. He was as reckless as a gambler at the tables, with his jeu parti.”

Nazenby set aside his snifter. “What do you want, Mdm. de la Croix?”

“I have said: I am no longer she. She was a mask for a time and a place. I have been many names in the past six years. I would return to being myself.”

Resting his elbows on the chair arms, he templed his fingers. “And who is that?”

“Ah no, Sir Roger. To return to myself, I must be assured of safety. Louis warned me about you. Once you have a spy, you never release him. But I will not spy for you. I cannot any longer. Not in Paris. Not anywhere that Bonaparte controls. The world has narrowed for me.”

“I repeat: what do you want?”

“Louis left me money in your English bank—unless you consider his coin belongs to your government.”

“Louis funded his own mission, Madame. That enabled him to ignore my advice.”

Eugenie lifted one eyebrow, for Sir Roger had advised Louis to distance himself from the young Française who pretended to be his wife. She did not task him with that, though. “And the Langley family?” she asked, revealing that she knew de la Croix was an assumed name.

Sir Roger dropped his hands. He continued to swing one elegantly hosed leg. “He had no heirs. His money was his own. If he bequeathed it to you, it remains yours, even after nine years.”

His words tallied with what Louis had told her in the days before his body failed. “You ask what I want? I wish a place, a place to live much retired.”

“You are still young. You are as beautiful and elegant as ever, Madame. Finding another protector would not be difficult. I can introduce you—.”

“Non. Sacre bleu, you misunderstand. I will not live in London. I wish a petite maison in the country. Mon famille, we had a farm before my father involved himself in the politics of the Republic. I wish such a place to find.”

“My home is in London, not the country.”

“Tiens, again you misunderstand. Is this with deliberation? I do not involve you, Sir Roger. I tell you. I will find my little house. You need not lift a finger.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Me, I know you, the great spycatcher of England. It is a hunt for you. I come here this day, for very soon you will hear of a French widow residing in England. You will suspect her. You keep a finger tracking all the émigrés, this you must do. If you hear of such a Française, with such-and-such a name, you would send one of your people to investigate. And you would speculate on my intentions. So I tell you now, whether you believe me or not.

“I do not return to the spy game and work against you, Sir Roger. I am no Bonapartiste. You never trusted me, not as Louis and Delaney did. I come here and tell you all this. You will continue to doubt me; it is your way. Louis told me this. Mais si, you will know where I live, for I will write to you a letter for that purpose.” Eugenie leaned back and took a deep breath. She gave him her wide guileless eyes and knew he would still doubt. “I will do all this with your consent.”

Nazenby leaned forward. “Why do you need my consent? You have no connection to me. You never worked for the British government. Your plan is in motion.”

“It is not a plan, not as Louis and Delaney would make the plans to get the information you wanted. I wish only to live a quiet life in your English countryside. Me, I am practical, for the great Sir Roger Nazenby would be very suspicious if I did not apprise you of this beforehand. Would you not?”

“I find myself suspicious because you inform me of your plans.”

Eugenie dipped her head and picked up the brandy snifter. “This is as it should be. I played a double game in Paris, did I not? You would be a fool to trust me now. You will keep a watch upon me. I wish you to do so.”

His mouth twitched. “A useless watch when you know my man is there.”

“Whether I know or not, I will always anticipate that he is. Always.”

“You are as suspicious as I am.”

She sipped the cognac. “It is how I stayed alive, Sir Roger. Not all in my household did. My innocent cousin suffered and died. And I never could discover if Delaney knew I had escaped.”

“You wish to be re-united with him?”

“Non!”

“He reported you dead. He saw you executed.”

“The fool! He should not have returned to Paris.”

“Should I inform Ken-Keiran Delaney that you survived and are in England?”

“To what purpose? To weigh him down with guilt? No. He could not save Annette. He should not have tried to save me.”

“Will you seek him out?”

She laughed, brief and humorless. “We were not lovers. Poulaine thought we were. Did you think that as well, Sir Roger?”

“He gave the impression of a man enamored of you. If you expect to find him, he’s not the man you will remember. He’s hardened. He’s earned a reputation as a rake and a gamester, and he deserves it.”

“I do not wish to find him. I do not seek that old life. It is gone, as cold as my mother and my father, my brothers and my cousin Annette, all in the grave. That life is over. Not to be forgotten, but also not to be re-lived.” She set aside the scarcely sipped cognac and lifted the mantilla over her head as she rose.

Ever the gentleman, Nazenby rose as well. “You have a direction for me?”

“No.” She smiled. A little of her natural humor, repressed throughout this interview, peeked through. “For I did not know if my plan could continue. I do live on your graces, Sir Roger.”

“A quiet country life.” He shook his head. “You will find that dull after your adventures.”

Eugenie laughed. “I will find it very far from dull.”

 

Chapter 1 ~ Monday, 24 February 1812

Little Houghton, Yorkshire

Eugenie caught the hands of the little boy and spun him round and round until she staggered. Laughing, they both fell onto the rain-damp ground.

An older boy plopped down beside her. “I like it here best, Mrs. DesChamps.”

“Because I do not give you the chores and make you study your lessons, yes? Escape, it is necessary, Matthew. It does not always last as long as we want, though.” Two years, not nearly long enough, and Eugenie prayed that her little sanctuary would continue to last.

A shadow fell over them. A frisson of alarm running over her, Eugenie blinked, but the person blocking the sunlight was only Matthew’s sister Melly Ratcliffe.

“You’ll get damp on the ground. It was hard frost this morning and frost on the morrow. Up with you three.”

“See?” she said to the boys. “Responsibilities crowd at us.” But she stood and brushed over her backside. Her skirt was damp. “Hot tea, Melly?”

“Piping hot.” The young woman smiled. “With scones,” she directed at the boys. They yelped and ran for the house. “Scones are only for boys who wash their hands and faces,” she called after them.

Without turning around, Matthew waved at his sister. He said something to the smaller boy, and their speed to the house picked up.

Melly laughed and linked her arm with Eugenie. “Mention food, and boys lose all manners. You have charmed another one, Eugenie.”

“What? Little Robert? How is this? Does no one else spin him in the air? I do not believe it. And he likes scones more than he likes me. Both of them do. Men will always want food over women.”

“You are no romantic.”

She chuckled. “Me, I am practical.”

They reached the garden gate that the boys had left open. Eugenie tsked and let Melly precede her. She shut it firmly then turned and realized that the younger woman was not only waiting, but she looked determined about something.

“You have news, I think.”

“How do you do that, Jenny? Sometimes I think you are a witch. I know you are. Yes, I have news. He’s coming.”

“He is? Your Mr. Kennit? Has he written? Melly, my sweet friend, you will be married before Pentecost, if not before.”

“My father will not want us to marry so soon. He will think it ill-advised.”

“Then you and your Mr. Kennit must convince him otherwise. You must enlist your mother and your great-aunt. When does he arrive? What will you wear? Come, we have plans to make. I do not like this fashion of damp petticoats. I will succumb to a catarrh and miss Mr. Kennit’s arrival.”

Melly glanced at her back. “It’s not just your petticoats that are damp.” Giggling, they entered the house.

Watching her friend and the two boys consume hot tea and scones and the little savory tarts, Eugenie realized that she would soon lose her friend to this Mr. Kennit with his farm in Wales and a house in London. She did not want her to marry, but she knew Melly considered herself in love with Tobias Kennit. If the Rev. Ratcliffe approved of his daughter’s choice, what right did she, an outsider hiding in Little Houghton, have to interfere in the marriage? And her interference would be for selfish reasons. No, she would say nothing.

She would miss Melly. The young woman and her brother brought laughter to Eugenie’s petite maison nearly on a daily basis. Such brightness kept the shadows of the past at bay.

She did not know that soon those shadows would step once more into the light.

 

. ~ . ~ . ~ .

 

Monday, 24 February 1812 ~ London

Tobias Kennit saw Sir Roger Nazenby enter the Straights’ main gaming room. The man looked neither left nor right but headed immediately for the card tables where Toby sat.

He ground his teeth. The old spycatcher obviously had tracked him here. What game does Sir Roger hope to lure me into?

Nazenby had the grace to move among the tables. Only those who watched closely would realize his focus was Kennit. He waited to approach the table until the last trick was tallied. As his partner congratulated Toby and they gathered up their winnings, Nazenby separated from the onlookers and closed the distance.

“A well-played game,” he offered.

Toby didn’t look up. His partner grinned. “We did trounce them.” Distracted by a friend waving from across the room, he excused himself and moved off.

Nazenby took another step closer. “I am gratified to find you returned to London.”

He looked up then, his eyes narrowed. “A flying visit. I’m on my way north.”

“To propose to your vicar’s daughter?”

Toby knew that the old spycatcher still kept a map pin to mark all his spies, active or not, but he hadn’t realized his personal map pin had remained so up-to-date. He’d been out of the spy game for eight years, since the debacle that ended in the execution of his remaining ally in Paris. “When will you release me, Sir Roger? When will you burn that file on me?”

The man smiled. He nodded to a gentleman nearby, surveyed the gaming room, then began moving with Toby. “I thought I had let one person go, but I find two strings still attached. Your vicar’s daughter lives in Little Houghton, doesn’t she?”

“Not once I convince her father that I am worthy of her.”

“Hence the weeks at your home in Wales, determining your assets and restoring your manor to a glory that your bride will find acceptable.”

Toby scowled. He didn’t care who saw his displeasure with Nazenby. “What bush are you beating around? I won’t delay my journey for you. I quit working for you in `04.”

“Yes. I remember that tirade very well. I have my carriage. I can return you to your pied à terre or take you on to your next evening’s entertainment.”

He wanted to glare and protest that he wasn’t ready to leave Straights, but he’d decided a half-hour ago that he was bored with the level of competition. He missed Gordon Musgrove. He missed pitting his wits against Josette Sourantine. He missed Melly outwitting him at a simple game of Speculation. All three of them were better opponents than the men he’d played against tonight.

“Home for me,” he said. Since he knew Nazenby wouldn’t talk in a public place, he added, “I’m grateful for the offer of the carriage ride. It may be late February, but it’s blasted cold.”

The porter held their coats. Toby shrugged into his greatcoat while a footman assisted the older man with his. Then they entered the frigid night and strode down the street to the waiting carriage. The restless horses jingled their harness. Their breaths fogged in the cold air. The two men settled in the carriage. Nazenby knocked on the roof with his cane, and it rolled forward smoothly.

A streetlamp flashed its light into the carriage, illuminating a frown on the older man’s face. Toby didn’t like that look. The old spycatcher would try to manipulate him into a simple little assignment then the next one and then a third, and before he knew how, he would find himself back on the continent.

He crossed his arms over his chest and braced against the sway of the carriage. “It’s been eight years, Nazenby, yet here you come. Again. My answer is the same. I won’t work for you.”

“I do not ask you to throw your lot back into the spy game, Kennit. As someone once told me, the spying world narrowed for you when you were nearly arrested in Paris.” He paused, and another streetlamp revealed his frown. “I want—I need two things. Rumors are circulating that more French agents have entered England, looking for particular agents of ours who were once active in France. I wish to warn you of that.”

“Is this related to that Sourantine woman?”

“No, we arrested her puppetmaster, Robert LeBrun. He’s traveled on to a hotter place. Claude Thierry remains imprisoned. I wished to have him shipped to Calais in the middle of the night. And for him to have a very rough crossing. That is not yet to be.”

“Could another spymaster have taken control here in London? Josette—Lady Hargreaves will be in danger if he did.”

“I warned Hargreaves to have a special care for his wife. A new spymaster is always a danger. Most of Thierry’s agents are known to us now, and we can keep a constant watch. That makes them useless to the French.”

“Useless in London, not in York or Scotland or Ireland.”

Nazenby lifted his upper lip. “No known agent has entered those places. Not yet.”

Toby supposed the spycatcher didn’t need his advice. The carriage started around a turn, and he braced against it. He thought of that spidery web that LeBrun and Thierry had controlled. The removal of those two and the death in a carriage accident of one of their chief agents had crippled the web of French spies in London and south England. Toby knew, from his own experience, that a crippled web could be revived. He’d helped Louis Langley revive the English web in Paris. He had never learned who remained after he fled and Louis’ French wife was executed. Asking about active agents put them in danger. Toby had barely escaped arrest and execution. He wouldn’t jeopardize anyone who remained in the spying game, a dangerous game, like Roulette, which he refused to play.

“And the rest of the French agents? How many of those did LeBrun sacrifice?”

“Not as many as I had hoped for. Whoever replaced him, however, came into a crippled operation.”

“Or has crawled so deeply under rocks that you didn’t even to think to look for them. But that doesn’t concern me.”

“It could concern you.”

He shook his head before realizing that Nazenby wouldn’t see it. The carriage had turned down a dark street, and the clouds blocked any moonshine. “No,” he said sturdily. “It will not concern me. I’ll keep an eye out for a murderous agent. You said two things. What is the second?”

“We have a cryptographer. His ciphers secure our communications to and from our various entities around the world. He lives in Little Houghton.”

Toby grimaced. “Convenient for you.”

“Very convenient. A few of the rumors have touched upon locating this man.”

“Murder?”

“Kidnapping.”

“Are they fools? A forced decryption of a cipher can be no more accurate than forced information.”

“They seek more than decryption. Without his creation of new ciphers, the French would soon break all of our codes. Last Spring they tried a trap sweetened with a lovely lady. He enjoyed her attentions, but he kept careful guard on his work and his methods.”

“Wise man.”

“A very wise man. He clued me in to what was happening and mentioned it had happened the year before. Only then did we realize that a couple of men in the cipher department had fallen into the sticky trap. He also opened up several lines of enquiry that bore fruit. We are fortunate that the French did not identify him as the master that he is. He kept his true level of work hidden, and LeBrun never stumbled onto the truth.”

“So they caught him, but he slipped off their hook long before they knew what a monster salmon they’d caught.”

“Exactly. We have other cryptographers, but none with his talent. Taking this man away from us would cripple our efforts against Bonaparte.”

“Murder is still their best alternative.”

“Their second choice. What we have says, Find him. Take him. And we don’t want to lose him.” The carriage swayed as it turned. A streetlamp flashed its light into the carriage. Nazenby looked grim.

“You can put him into protective custody,” Toby offered.

The old spycatcher grunted. “We tried that after the sweet spider’s attempt. He refused to work at all until we released him. Our compromise was that he complete his work outside London with the knowledge that he would be under constant watch.”

“How many on him?”

“Two of our best in his house, another in the village. And your contact—who will reveal himself at the appropriate time. You must connect with our cryptographer. I warn you: he may be obsteperous at first.”

Toby had to grin. “This man and I could be friends. So, when I arrive in Little Houghton, what do you want me to do? Warn him?”

“I do not know if a warning will do any good. I have little personal acquaintance with him. He’s in the military secrets branch. If a warning would alert him to defend himself, then that might be sufficient. If he is like the rest of that department, he won’t know how to defend himself.”

“Warn and protect.”

“Watch and protect,” Sir Roger clarified. The carriage halted. “Warn him only when you think it necessary.”

“How will I determine when it is necessary?”

“You were in the game. You know.” He rapped on the roof. The carriage swayed as a page jumped down to open the door and drop the step.

Toby gripped the door, holding it shut until he was ready to end this conversation. “You realize that I’ll be distracted with my concerns. Please tell me you have someone else watching for French spies.”

“Someone else—yes. You may recognize them, but that person may not offer any help.”

“Look, Nazenby—.”

“I will have another agent available in a fortnight. And the man has his own guards.”

That sounded better. He released the door. As it opened, he asked, “Who is this great cryptographer?”

“Colonel Sir Charles Audley. Enjoy your visit to Little Houghton, Kennit.”

Toby gave a derisive laugh.

 

. ~ . ~ . ~ .

 

Friday, 28 February 1812, Yorkshire

Charles Audley perched the pence-nez he didn’t need on the end of his long nose.

He wished he’d never started this disguise as a bookish scholar who occasionally availed himself of the country pursuits of riding and shooting. He especially wished it when Eugenie DesChamps brought her joie de vivre into a room and yet seemed to ignore him out of all the others there.

He was the only bachelor; she, a young widow. The matchmakers had eyed them wistfully when he arrived in Little Houghton last fall. Intent on decrypting the newest French cipher, he had made the mistake of being too distracted the first three times they met. By the fourth, he had solved the problem, but her luminous eyes no longer settled on him.

She was a dark French beauty. If she hadn’t already been settled in Little Houghton, he might have deemed her another sweet spider sent to steal his secrets and methods. The two men stationed in his manor had asked discreetly about her: a widow of an English gentleman, she had settled in the village two years before. He didn’t think the French would have such a long view, especially as they had learned of his work last winter, a full year after Eugenie DesChamps moved into his home village.

Since he had lifted his head out of that tricksy cipher, he had had opportunity to study his neighbors. None received as much of his attention as she did. Living in a small cottage, she employed only a maid and a man of all work. He heard she painted. Soft feminine watercolors, he’d guessed. After that fourth meeting, he twice tried to engage her in conversation. She hadn’t snubbed him, but her short answers revealed she wanted to be elsewhere.

While he rapidly concluded that he wanted to be nowhere else except by her side.

He sighed and swirled the wine in his goblet and watched the Frenchwoman laugh with her friend Miss Ratcliffe. They spoke of the younger woman’s return from London. Rumors of impending nuptials had surrounded the vicar’s daughter. He hoped she would look for additional love matches to promote. She had caught him watching Madame DesChamps several times. Thus far, she had done nothing. He should use the plaguey matchmakers from his wild oats days.

What was the matter with young women these days? Didn’t they want their friends as happy as they were?

He would have to make the move soon before other bachelors and widowers decided Madame DesChamps would make a cozy addition to their nests. How did no one scoop her up before I came to Little Houghton?

Ryland Cable, host of this evening, walked over to him. “You’ve been looking at her since October. You need wings on those feet, Audley.”

He groaned. “Am I so obvious that even you have noticed?

“Even me. I’m not blind. Although I didn’t see it until my wife pointed it out at last Sunday’s service. She said you needed a push. I came to give it.”

“Tonight? No. She’s talking to Miss Ratcliffe.”

“She always talks to Melly Ratcliffe. If you go over there and Melly doesn’t back off, I’ll fetch her off myself. Now go, man.”

Charles drained his wine and set the glass on the table. He lifted his chin over the stiffly starched points of his collar. He rolled his shoulders.

Cable clapped a hand on his back. “Go on now.”

He felt the eyes on him as he crossed the room. Miss Ratcliffe saw him coming and murmured to Mdm. DesChamps. The widow’s back stiffened. Then she said something that elicited a giggle from her friend. By then, Charles had reached them. He thought about going on past the two women—but he had wasted his opportunities last October and November because he’d been too abstracted with his work to notice anything not under his nose. Even the cook had learned to place a plate in front of him to get him to eat.

He took the necessary sidestep and stopped at her right elbow, so close that she could jab him if he insulted her. As he likely would. His foot had been known to insert itself into his mouth.

Miss Ratcliffe dipped an abbreviated curtsey. With a murmur she faded away.

And he stood side by side with Mdm. DesChamps, both of them with their backs to the watching room.

“Madame DesChamps, how are you this evening?”

“I find it cold. And you, Colonel Audley?”

She had trouble with the military rank, pronouncing all the vowels, but he didn’t feel sure enough of himself to correct her. “I am fine.” More words failed him. He knew he should ask something. What? Maybe a compliment. Her golden gown did wonders for her. Not many women could carry off such a color. He liked the way the gown fit her body, especially her ... chest. He probably shouldn’t mention that. No, Charles old chap, stay away from all talk about her gown.

The shoulder nearest him gave a tiny hitch. “Fine. This is one English word that I find fascinating. You English say it whether you are in good spirits or have the megrims. That is the word, n’est ce-pas, megrims? And fine? The weather, it is fine. The road from London, it is fine. The vicar’s sermon—.”

“Not fine,” he leaped in. “Perhaps this week’s text should have been a New Testament verse on Love thy Neighbor.”

She half-turned, and Charles matched her, careful not to overstep that slight turn. “Or a parable,” she countered. “The Parable of the Prodigal Son, a man who wasted his opportunities. That would have been my choice.”

This woman had a sharp dagger to point at him. He started to enjoy this conversation. “Perhaps not the profligate prodigal. Something from the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the Peacemakers or Faith as Strong as a Mustard Seed. Faith that Moves Mountains,” he added, his brain tossing up sermon titles.

“Faith that Moves Mountains?” She turned fully toward him and lifted her gaze. “I am accounted tall for a woman, but vraiment, I am not so big as a mountain.” She looked down her form, luscious in the golden silk with its white lace squaring the neckline.

“No, not you, personally. Your stubbornness—.”

“And now I am stubborn.”

He removed the pence-nez. “I have stuck my foot in my mouth.”

She gave a ripple of laughter. “I find that a delightful image, Col. Audley. Your idioms are sometimes incomprehensible, but I understand that one very well.”

Honesty appeared to work quite well. As long as he stayed away from her gown. “I have stuck my foot in my mouth since our first meeting, Mdm. DesChamps. I had a tricksome problem that consumed me, and when I looked up from it, you had flitted away.”

“Non, non, Colonel. You cannot call me a mountain and then say that I flitted away. No mountain can flit.”

“Both feet,” he said morosely.

She laughed. She must have taken pity on him, for she patted his arm then left her hand resting on the black superfine of his coat. “Come, we must find a subject that does not leave you with both feet in the mouth. For example, I must always wonder the reason you say Mdm. DesChamps when others merely say Mrs. Deschamps.” She gave the different pronunciations without hesitation. “Have you a reason to remind yourself that I am French?”

She hid her cleverness with charm. Two displays of intelligence in less than a minute. That snared him as completely as her beauty did. Now, how to keep her by his side? In with both feet, he reminded himself. “I thought—I hoped using the French pronunciation would bring home back to you. You must miss France. When did you come over?”

She withdrew a little, slipping her hand from his arm. “I became no longer a Frenchwoman with the Revolution, Colonel. England is my home now. I would ask that you no longer remind me of the lost past, as far from me as the ancien regime is from the rule of France.”

“Forgive me. I do keep blundering about. Perhaps we should talk of things not personal. This landscape, for example. It is a new addition to Mr. Cable’s collection. I like it.”

Her chuckle was muted but real, and his heart leapt at the sound. “You like it? As do I. Tell me what you like most about it.”

Eager to remove a foot from his mouth, Charles scrambled for an answer. “The smooth undulation of the land while turbulent clouds cover the sky. The colors of the heather juxtaposed against the range of stormy greys. That single opening of the clouds, sending a shaft of light onto that tree. I’ve seen that happen on the moors. And I know this place, just not that lone tree. I’ve walked across that upland many times. There’s no trees, not a stand, not even one.”

“The artist’s insertion. Do you think the tree is a needless addition?”

He wondered at that question, then he began to suspect the artist’s identity. “Not needless. Gives us a focus, doesn’t it? With the light shining on it.”

“Then you think it necessary?”

“I like how the tree limbs are bending to the wind. Not giving up, taking another way. We have to do that in life. Not give up, not give in. Find another way.”

Over the top of her wine glass she gave him an approving smile. “Has Col. Charles Audley had to find another way? I thought him one of the privileged.”

He could drown in those dark eyes. He forced himself to look at the landscape. “I’ve had to find another way more times than I can count on both hands. I’m not so privileged, Madame. I’ve been that tree, storms over me, alone in the world.” He glanced at her. Her gaze was lifted to the painting, but she seemed to look far beyond this room, perhaps even this England. How many times had she had to find another way? “Do you know the artist? I would pay well for a landscape of this quality.”

Her attention came back to him. “Truly? I might be able to arrange a meeting between you and the painter.”

He wanted to draw her out, so he tempted her to reveal her secret with “Give the fellow his due. Call him the artist he is.”

“And if he is a she?”

“I’ll still call her an artist. That scrawl in the bottom right, that’s you?” He stepped up to the mantel and lifted his pence-nez to read. “E. DesChamps. Definitely you.” As he came back, he noticed the many gazes turned to watch them. He tucked the spectacles in his vest pocket and hoped she did not think him old because he’d used them.

Eugenie did not remark on the pence-nez, and she seemed unconcerned with the room behind them. “You are not shocked that I mess with the oils when I should be managing a household. Many men would be.”

“I’ve seen your household. I’d be surprised if you ever need more than a girl and a handyman. You’re too talented with the oils to give up painting.”

“I am gratified that you are not shocked. And I bask in your praise.”

“That painting deserves praise. You deserve praise for coming out with it.”

Eugenie shook her head. “It is hard to judge one’s own work. I have a certain satisfaction when I complete a piece, you understand, but how will others judge my work? They offer compliments, but are they truthful?”

“You have other canvasses?”

“Very few here. I have sent a few small canvasses to a gallery in London. The owner does not wish the patrons to know the artist is a mere female.”

“Thus, the signature E. DesChamps. Does your gallery owner know you’re female?”

“He does. It was his decision to keep my gender unknown.”

“I hope you’re making a pretty pile of guineas with him.”

“Not quite a pile, but enough to supplement my wants as well as my needs. Mr. Faulkner, he wishes me to give him a large landscape such as this one, but Mr. Cable demanded this one as soon as he saw it.”

Jealousy raised its ugly head. “When did Cable see it?”

“When his wife and he came to pick up the small oils of their children. Those hang in the entrance hall. Did you see them?”

He remembered the light-gilded oval portraits hanging at the foot of the staircase. They had attracted his eye, but he had given them only a passing glance. “A different style.”

“Children should be soft and fresh. Were I skilled at watercolors I would have attempted that medium. Instead, I contended with a light palette and a lighter hand. I must confess, I do enjoy the starker, heavier landscapes. Children’s portraits are my bread and butter, though.”

He had lifted his gaze back to the painting. “What did you call it? Don’t artists name their works?”

“Un Reve de Paix.”

“Dream of Peace,” he translated softly. He could not remember what painting had previously hung above the mantel. Maybe a stuffy ancestor. “Yes. All the storminess of the clouds, but there, a shaft of sunlight on that patch of green tree. A bit of blue in the swirls of heavy greys. I like that title.” He looked at her as he gave the compliment and saw a pleased smile curving her mouth.

“M’sieur Cable did not like it. Nor did his wife. They call it Storm over the Moor.”

“Your title is better.”

That pleased her, for her hand returned to his arm. “You are not just being polite, Col. Audley?”

“Have you not seen multiple evidences of my lack of diplomacy, Mdm. DesChamps?”

She chuckled. “True. Very true.”

He was winning this battle, even after insertion of both feet. Honesty served him well with this woman. How can I find a way to increase our time together? “Have you always painted?”

“Circumstances forced me to abandon it for a few years. Never the sketching. That was sometimes a little money-maker. I have made a tidy little sum with the portraits, especially General Reinholt’s wife, but I do not like the portraits.”

Her accent thickened a little when she talked rapidly, as she did recounting the first oils she attempted after moving here.

When she slowed down, he had his next question ready. “Where do you paint? This,” he motioned to Un Reve de Paix, “was not done in the plein aire.”

“No. The sketch was. Several sketches actually, before it all came together. I do paint where I have a view of the moor. I converted the sitting room into my studio. When you visit me, Col. Audley, do not raise your English nose at taking tea in the little room that should be the dining room.”

“Am I invited for tea?”

“But, of course. We will have little tarts both savory and sweet. I am also good with pastry, but my cook, she is a genius with the fillings.”

Charles began to breathe a little easier. He had not wanted to push too fast, too hard, especially since he had barely recovered the ground he had lost. Yet he wanted a relationship not dependent on Sunday sermons and dinner parties hosted by their neighbors. A visit over tea sounded a good start.

“And after we have tea and you have shown me your studio, I would commission a landscape from you, Mdm. DesChamps. A painting of the moors behind Ridings, with the spring sun greening the fields and the high moors untamed behind cultivated fields. Or better yet, the moors from my study window.” If she sketched while he worked in his study—or if he could convince her to work at Ridings, he would have the uninterrupted time to court her.

Eugenie gave him quite a different look. He might call that gleam in her eye mercenary. “You may not want a landscape when you hear what I will charge.”

With a recklessness not like him, he said, “I want that painting by you, no matter the expense.”

Her long lashes flickered. “Non, you must not say that. You make me wish to be greedy. The autumn and Noël cost more than I had anticipated. When will you come to tea? Tuesday? Thursday?”

He wanted to say tomorrow, but he took the hint that she might not be ready for visitors on Monday. Nor did he want to seem over-eager, just eager enough. “Will Wednesday suit you? I have a prior commitment on Tuesday.”

“Wednesday it is.” She presented her silk-gloved hand, as if they were striking a business deal.

He took it, wishing he palmed her flesh rather than white silk that matched her gown’s trimmings. And he held her hand longer than necessary for a business deal. “Am I now invited into the realm of friendship?”

An eyebrow lifted. “Are we not all friends in Little Houghton?”

“Then I may call you Eugenie when we need not be formal? As we must be here.”

“Many here call me Jenny.”

“Eugenie is too pretty to be reduced to that.”

She blushed, surprising him. She had faced off with him, accepted his blunders, heard his compliments of her art, but a compliment to her name brought pleased color to her cheeks. “I like that you give it the French pronunciation. Yes, you have leave to call me by my true name, if I may call you—.” She paused, letting him give her his name.

“Charles,” he quickly supplied. When she repeated it, softening the ch, every part of him tightened.

 

Chapter 2 ~ Friday, 28 February 1812

London

Didier Poulaine waited although he did not like to wait. He hid his impatience with the skill of many years. He knew when to tighten the strangling knot and when to release it. He knew when to slip the dagger in. He knew when to sit back and let the world stream by. After years in the business, he knew the world would offer up the proper opportunity.

This opportunity, for example. An opportunity that he had thought missed. On a mission to capture the master cryptographer for the English, he heard a name that he had not heard for eight years. Keiran Delaney. A pretend Irishman who had masqueraded as the French officer Jean Louis Jettere. The Anglais Delaney had slipped the noose in `04 along with another double agent. Two operatives who escaped him. Over the years, Poulaine made doubly sure no others escaped.

Delaney’s name had dropped in connection with finding another Military Secrets informant.

The information had slipped through the stream and found him. Here, in London, he would finally have his chance. To hold a slender dagger to the man’s neck, to feel and smell the terror engendered by the prick of that steel blade—that would appease his long unslaked anger.

It could be a trick. Poulaine knew that. A ruse to draw out more French agents for capture. Jacques Saultsein had warned him before Poulaine shipped across the Channel. The English spycatcher was on an active hunt for French agents. They had lost several well-placed spies and their best informant. Finding a replacement who had direct White Hall access would be difficult—which was one reason this Anglais could be a trap.

Poulaine hadn’t acted on the information. He waited. Confirmation was needed. Who better to find it for him than Saultsein, the new French spymaster in London? He had ventured to the address given to him. Then he set up a watch, to see who entered the new spymaster’s house. Caution meant life.

When the soft rain started, he’d left his post watching the house and entered this gallery. He did not think he’d been spotted. He wasn’t certain who waited for him there. His informant offered no particulars, only that contact was possible. The suave courier had known nothing of his replacement except this address. Poulaine would wait and watch before he contacted the man. Two days were not so long when measured against eight years.

And in waiting he’d again heard Delaney’s name, spoken by two men swilling beer in a pub. Foolish men. He had tracked one of them back to his lodgings. If nothing came of his meeting with the new spymaster, he would visit that man. In the deeps of the night, no one would hear muffled screams.

He smiled to himself.

A carriage rumbled past. He looked out the window, but the carriage did not halt at the house he watched.

“Sir.” An effete young man, willowy rather than sturdy English oak, approached him. “May I help you, sir? Has that painting attracted your attention?”

Poulaine stared down his long nose at the assistant then looked at the painting before him.

“One of our exclusive artists. This is Wild Moor,” the assistant said.

“This is typically English.”

“Yes, sir. The Yorkshire moors. I myself have never ventured to those hinterlands. Do I detect a French accent, sir?”

“I was born in France,” he allowed.

“You fled the Revolution, Monsieur?” He butchered the appellation although he seemed proud to know the French word. “We do have a few paintings of French scenes. One might strike your eye.”

The gallery’s assistant pointed out a light-capturing oil of the Pantheon atop Sainte-Genevieve hill. A heavy oil drew the lines of Notre Dame’s two towers rising above the cathedral’s roof. A sketch of the Louvre’s colonnade. A few street scenes. Poulaine liked none of them, but he followed the assistant to create the illusion of interest in art.

Then they came to a larger canvas of the French countryside.

Poulaine stopped. The sky above the farm had the brilliant blue it achieved only in October. Two figures had met in the golden wheat field. Bent stalks of grain revealed the path each had taken to meet. A meandering line of cedars marked the river. On the horizon were the clustered houses of a village, dominated by the Romanesque tower of a church.

“Ah, monsieur, you have a good eye. This is the same artist who painted Wild Moor, the canvas by the window that had your attention. This is definitely France.”

Poulaine remembered that day. He remembered the blood on him after that meeting. And he remembered who had stood behind him on the hill.

For eight years he had looked for her. She had to be punished. She had turned against him after that day. She had not had the horror of staring at his bloody hands, but she must have watched. By no sign had she revealed that she saw him murder Etienne Foucault. She had chattered with ease all the way back to Paris. But she turned cool then icy.

He leaned closer to the painting but could not decipher the scrawled artist’s name. “Who is the painter?”

The assistant did not have to look. “E. DesChamps.”

DesChamps. Not de la Croix. But it had to be her. Or she had to have some connection to the artist.

The frail young man rattled on. “You will see the date is 1811. We received this canvas only a month ago. The artist was reluctant to part with it, but Mr. Rainsford was quite determined. He informed me that he demanded this canvas for the gallery. I see it has quite captured your interest.”

“I like the style. And the light, that is very reminiscent of my childhood visits to the country. Peut-etre, is it that you have another canvas by this E. Deschamps?”

“No, only Wild Moor. DesChamps is brilliant with these small canvases. The interesting perspective! The quality of detail! I admit to you that we have difficulty keeping them in the gallery. I suspect Wild Moor will not last the month.”

“But this one lingers. You said it arrived a month ago.”

“That is correct. It is a larger canvas for this artist, which triples the price.”

“I want it. And any other scene of France by E. DesChamps.”

“Of course, monsieur. We currently have no such other canvas by DesChamps, but we have a fine watercolor of Avignon—.”

“No. It is this DesChamps I am interested in. What information can you give me?” He almost added about her, but he didn’t want the assistant to think he knew anything. Is it Eugenie de la Croix, styling herself as E. DesChamps?

“I know very little personally, monsieur.”

“Your Mr. Rainsford. May I speak with him?”

“He is in the Lake District. I expect him to return by the end of next week. If you have a card—.”

“No card. I will return next Friday.”

“And will you wish this canvas, monsieur?”

“I will take it with me. Wrap it well.” He produced his wallet and paid the amount the assistant named. Then he glanced back toward the window. “The Wild Moor. I am not certain that I will purchase that canvas, but it intrigues me. Would you place a retainder on it for me. That is perhaps not the word.”

“I think you may mean a retainer, a note that will hold the painting for you. Mr. Rainsford frowns upon that practice, monsieur.”

“I do understand. Should another person wish to purchase the painting, you would be able to dissuade them, is it not so? For a small remuneration.”

The young man’s eyes gleamed. “Exactly so, monsieur. You name? And your residence? I will have the canvas sent—.”

Poulaine dropped several guineas into the assistant’s hand. “I will take it with me. My name is Chevalier. Honoré de Chevalier.” He lied easily, from long practice, and the assistant never doubted him. He returned to the window to wait on the canvas.

Eugenie de la Croix, once his fascination, had become his enemy from the day of the wheat field scene she had painted. He had needed months to gather the evidence to convict her of spying for England and against her homeland. And when he moved to arrest the little spy-ring that circled around her, she had somehow evaded arrest.

DesChamps. E. DesChamps. Why did that name seem familiar?

His men had arrested the wrong woman. Poulaine had wasted days on the heels of his other quarry, the pretend Delaney. When he returned to Paris, his men reported their successful arrest. The error had not been discovered until he visited the Bastille.

His men had proudly displayed their captive. Swollen and mottled contusions had covered the woman’s face and body. When he’d entered the cell, she remained collapsed on the filthy stones of her cell. He had snatched her hair and prepared to gloat over Madame Eugenie de la Croix. But something told him the captive was not the woman he needed to destroy. The coloring was right, hair and skin and eyes, what could be seen of them. She did not respond to his questions, to his shouts. She merely flinched when he slapped her. His men claimed that she had to be Mdm. de la Croix. He’d had his doubts.

Poulaine let the execution go forward then sought out the de la Croix house servants. Only from the upstairs maid did he learn that the cousin of Mdm. de la Croix had arrived late on the evening before the arrest. Another round of interviews with the servants uncovered little more. They knew only that she was called Annette and had arrived from Saumer.

To Saumer he had gone, but he could find no information about a Mdm. de la Croix.

“Monsieur.” The gallery assistant irritated with his interruptions. “Your canvas. I wrapped it in paper and then oilcloth to protect it from the rain.”

“Merci. You say the gallery owner—zut alors! I have forgotten his name,” he lied.

“Rainsford. Geoffrey Rainsford. He returns on the sixth.”

“Bon, tres bon. I will return the next day to discuss this artist with him.”

He lifted the canvas and left the shop. Excitement raced in his veins, trembled in his muscles. Perhaps it was that Eugenie had shared her most vivid memory with an artist, someone from France, and he had painted it for her—only to have it refused. She would not want a scene of murder hanging in her home. Poulaine would track the artist, and the artist would give him Eugenie.

He needed to read the dossier he kept on the de la Croix woman and her associates, that Jean Louis Jettere who was the Irishman Delaney. He had regretted not going with the soldiers to her residence, but he’d been after a bigger fish: the English agent.

Annette of Saumer. And now this artist E. DesChamps, who replicated on canvas that red day in October, the sun bright while the wind chilled. Somewhere he would find a connection to Eugenie de la Croix, and then he would have her. He would find her, and then he would kill her.

He would draw the knife across her throat himself.

But first he had a master cryptographer and a pretend Irishman to find.

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The Predator Thirsts for his Prey

Once the toast of Paris, Eugenie DesChamps lives in a bucolic English village, paints landscapes, and flirts with Charles Audley, a secretive cryptographer for the British government.

 Eight years ago Eugenie courted danger by stealing Napoleon’s battle plans for English spies. When a French spymaster discovered her double game, she barely escaped with her life.

 Now that same French spymaster has stolen into England. His mission is to capture the cryptographer Charles Audley. Discovering the double agent who eluded him sweetens his assignment.

 A thirst for revenge drives the twisty romantic suspense of The Dangers for Spies, book 5 in the Hearts in Hazard series.