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Louisa paused when he did and wondered why she’d impulsively stuffed her cap on her head and shrugged into Coste’s overlarge jacket, then ventured out in broad daylight to see where rude and disobliging Captain Darke was bound. She watched her own reflection in a shuttered window and tucked a giveaway strand of hair under the hatband of the silly hat she’d stolen last night. At least Charlton could live without his very odd suit of clothes, but she promised herself she’d replace Coste’s jacket if she damaged it, then all her senses suddenly sharpened as she considered a wiry young tough who seemed as intent on staying on Captain Darke’s tail as she was herself.
He was good, she grudgingly admitted that much to herself as she lurked in a doorway and eyed the innocuous-looking youth pretending to watch a street vendor chase off a starving little would-be pickpocket. Luckily she’d trained herself to be even better once upon a time and felt her old skills return as she fell into step behind both the Captain and his follower and neither of them even had a suspicion she was there. Spying a fancy footman, she was grateful Kit didn’t insist on Coste going about in some fanciful livery, though, for she’d certainly attract attention if she’d been forced to steal a chapeau-bras and gold-laced blue jacket. She slouched towards the unfortunate dressed so ostentatiously and he gave her a pained snarl and shuffled his feet self-consciously, obviously believing her another annoying idler, silently jeering his ridiculous uniform.
Grinning at this confirmation that she looked nothing like fashionable Miss Alstone, or even Miss Eloise La Rochelle, Louisa swaggered a little in her disreputable breeches and worn and ill-fitting coat and pretended to be absorbed in the noise and bustle of Cheap-side as follower and followed moved onwards. Hands in her pockets, she sauntered along at a distance from Captain Darke and his shadow, keeping enough space between herself and them to look as if she was aimlessly passing the time until more promising mischief offered.
She mused on the quality of the Captain’s enemies and decided the boy was very good, and at the next crossroads she cast a disguised gaze about her to see if she was being followed in her turn. All was clear and as innocent as London streets ever were, so Hugh Darke’s foes weren’t that canny. Suddenly she wished more fervently than usual that her big brother would come home. Kit would soon find out who was so interested in his infamous captain and she suddenly felt inadequate for this suddenly very serious task, as well as uncertain why it seemed so vitally important that Hugh Darke should not be hurt by his enemies.
She’d followed him on impulse, unable to think of another way to fill in her time until Kit came back without sitting tamely in his kitchen, waiting for Charlton or her uncle to come and march her up the aisle. Now her impulse had changed from a way of idling away the day into a quest to protect the ungallant Captain’s back. She wove a cautious track over to the other side of the street and blessed Hugh Darke for being tall enough to stand a little above the crowd and show her the way, even if he was several inches shy of her brother’s lofty height and Ben Shaw must tower over him like a giant, as he did over everyone else she had ever come across outside a fairground sideshow.
Now Hugh Darke was entering the quieter street where her brother and Ben had their offices and she had to walk past it and head down an ally to avoid being too noticeable to him or his pursuer. Anxious all of a sudden that the young tough would use the sparseness of the area to attack Hugh, she sped to the end of her alley and out into the opposite end of the street, only to skid to a halt and have to duck into a handy doorway to avoid the nondescript lad coming the other way, obviously off to report to someone that the target was safe in his office now and beyond following. Wondering even more at such an odd sequence of events, she leaned back against the heavily made door at her back and decided she must follow the young thug, rather than do as instinct demanded and stay to make sure Hugh Darke was safe if he ventured abroad again. Doubtless someone else would keep watch over Kit’s offices for the next few hours, but for now she might get a clue about who was behind all this if she could track the young bully to his lair or his current employer.
At the end of the chase she was very glad Kit and Ben weren’t in London after all, for they would surely have had fits if they knew where she’d been today. First of all to the cheapest of pie shops the City rejoiced in, where she managed to loiter and look hungry as well as penniless until chased off by the infuriated owner with a fearsome ladle. Then the boy sauntered through the noisome rookery she knew from her youth was the haunt of thieves and pimps of the worst sort; even high on the rooftops as she’d had to go to follow him there, she had to tread as if on pins to avoid discovery.
The houses might be rotten as a blown pear, but they were full of people forced into degradation and misery and every room and attic seemed to heave with human souls even at this time of day. That was what she’d conveniently forgotten from her childhood spent with one foot in the underworld and the other in an almost respectable street on the edge of Mayfair: the stench and misery and hopelessness of poverty. It seemed criminal to her that anyone should be expected to actually live in such cramped, dank and stinking conditions, so close to one of the richest capital cities the world had ever seen. She ghosted across closely packed rooftops, jumped at leaning chimneys and soot-grimed walkways even the inhabitants appeared to have forgotten about and wondered at herself for ever being discontent with the well-fed and secure-seeming life she’d lived since she left all this behind.
Reminding herself she wasn’t here to redeem her blemished soul, she followed the boy as he finally quit his native streets and again they were into quieter, wealthier areas and she wondered whether it might be better to come down from her unlikely perch and risk the broader streets with her now-sooty clothes and grimy hands and face making her remarkable in such a place. The apprentice tough ended the chase he didn’t know he was involved in at a quietly respectable church, of all unlikely places. Louisa paused and watched with bafflement as the rough youth from the slums removed his apology for a hat and bowed his head, as he entered the church by a side door as humbly as if he really had come to seek salvation. Could she be mistaken about him after all, then? Was he really a lost soul in search of redemption, who just happened to have been going in the same direction as herself and the Captain this morning? Her once-honed instincts argued he was nothing so simple and she stayed to see if anyone else would come to such a sacrilegious meeting place.
Nobody went in or out until the boy came out and sauntered down the street looking singularly unrepentant. Torn between wanting to follow him and staying to watch for his confederate, Louisa tried to decide which would gain her more, then the door opened again and a soberly dressed gentleman stepped out of the church.
Something about that clerical-seeming figure below seemed wrong and she didn’t know why the hairs on the back of her head rose in warning at the sight of him, but this was clearly a more important rogue than the one she now had to let go. Louisa eyed up her possible routes and hoped the man wasn’t about to cross the wide square the church was set in, as she would either have to scramble across a good many rooftops to follow him, or climb down and risk being seen in the open.
Luckily he headed towards her rather than away, so they were soon in the maze of service streets and wide roads that made up the most exclusive part of the capital. Louisa’s mind buzzed with possibilities as the sober figure finally entered one of the most prosperous squares through the mews behind it, then she scrambled to follow along the more generous roofs and was only just in time to see him disappear through French windows giving on to a town garden, as if he knew the house very well and could stroll in and out as he pleased. She pondered the man’s position in such a household and wondered what to do next. No scruffy idler would gain access to such a house and how would she find out anything about the owner and his connections from such a humble position even if she did?
Marking the house on her internal map for future reference, she waited until a genteel bustle of activity made her realise it was the fashionable hour for visiting and any trail the man had left was about to be wiped out. He could have left in any of those coaches in whatever guise he usually wore, he might be someone she’d met at a ball or some soirée he couldn’t manage to escape, she could even have danced with him in her other life. Horrified by the idea of being so close to a man who clearly wished Hugh Darke no good, she finally left very cautiously indeed and travelled a few streets at her lofty level before descending. She could find out nothing more just now, so she headed for a dealer in second-hand clothing that she knew from experience was the least likely to leave her scratching and cursing at someone else’s parasites when she wore their wares.
By mid-afternoon Hugh had ploughed through his mathematical duties and was secretly relieved to get an urgent summons to the enclosed dock his youthful employers were having built to cut down on the organised pilfering of their cargoes. Hugh frowned as he pondered that pilfering and told himself it was normal, all owners suffered from the problem, which was why the East India Company had already built a closed dock and were probably planning more. Like Kit, he thought there was something more than chance behind their own heavy losses. It was all of a piece with the loss of one of his ships and the murder of its crew not already corrupted by whoever organised the infamous scheme a couple of years ago.
It had taken a deal of hard work and scrupulously fair accounting to repair the damage to their reputation and persuade Lloyds that Stone & Shaw were not behind the fraud. Rumours that the Mirabelle had not gone down after all, but was sailing under another name with an entirely different crew, had horrified her young owners and sent Kit on a quest to discover the truth and Hugh knew his friend wouldn’t give up until he had every detail of the infamous scheme at his fingertips. Having an implacable yet invisible enemy of his own, Hugh knew how that constant but intangible malice ate away at a man’s soul. At least he knew his foe was probably one of his late wife’s legion of lovers, determined to make him pay for the unresolved crime that ended her life, but Hugh couldn’t solve it and prove he wasn’t a wife killer, so it had seemed better to take a captaincy from Stone & Shaw and stay out of the idiot’s way rather than fight for his good name—a lost cause if ever there was one.
Chapter Five
Hugh frowned blackly out of the window of the hackney he’d summoned to get to Stone & Shaw’s dock as fast as he could and wondered at the elaborate route the jarvey was taking. About to tap on the roof and inform the driver he wasn’t the flat he probably looked today, he jolted in his seat as the hackney veered abruptly and threw him forwards with a jarring thud. Hugh was still rubbing his bruised temple and trying to reassemble his dignity when the door was thrust open and a familiar voice demanded he get down immediately and follow her.
‘Why the devil should I?’ he snapped back crossly.
‘Because it’s all a sham and you’re being kidnapped,’ Eloise informed him shortly, tugging ineffectually at his sleeve. ‘Please, believe me. I’m not sure how much longer my diversion will hold up,’ she added desperately and he believed her, despite all her secrets and lies.
‘I’ll come, but only because this is the most unlikely route to my destination.’
‘Good of you, now hurry up,’ she urged impatiently.
Hugh took a swift glance about him and suppressed a grin as he took in the quality of her helpers. A one-legged sailor was sitting in the road, scrabbling for his wooden leg and loudly bemoaning the losses from his spilled apple cart in terms that must make even the assembled urchins blush, while an old woman berated him for a drunken and careless old fool. The urchins were wriggling about under the cab for the fallen and bruised apples and tangling up the traces as they darted nimbly out of the way of the jarvey’s whiplash whenever he tried to fend off the sea of bodies suddenly surrounding his battered vehicle.
‘Hurry,’ Eloise urged and he gave her a long, distrustful look before deciding she’d gone to such a deal of trouble to get him out of that cab, he might as well humour her, if only to find out exactly what she was up to.
This time she was dressed in layer upon layer of disreputable clothes like a rag-picker’s daughter, carrying as many of his wares as she could on her own back. It certainly hid her fine figure a lot better than her last disguise, he thought as he followed her into a maze of courts and alleys and had to concentrate hard to recall the way back should he need a hasty escape from her toils. Sensing his resistance, she tugged on his hand impatiently and drew him on as swiftly as she could. He could sense her apprehension through their locked hands as he felt a prickle of awareness shiver over his own skin and knew they were being watched from dark doorways and darker rooms. Unwillingly caught up in her drama, he made himself as silent and wary as he could and hoped he managed to seem the over-eager client to Eloise’s part-time whore, although he wondered how such a client would know what delights lay under her false bulk.
He knew, even under all that ridiculous cover that must be making her sweat like a racehorse under her burden. Just the thought of her long, elegant legs under so many layers of hampering fabric—her dangerous allure threatened to slide under his guard once more and draw him into her net. He sweated himself now as she reached more commercial areas, full of workshops and small factories, and upped their pace as fast as she could without everyone coming out to watch them pass. It wasn’t their speed that made his breath come short, it was the incendiary thought of finding a space where he could be alone with her to finally slake this feral passion for her, once and for all, that had him almost unmanned with longing. Stupid, he railed at himself—undisciplined, ill-starred and just plain stupid. She’d turned him into a lust-led fool in less than a day after haunting him waking and sleeping for three weeks before that. She always seemed to affect him as fiercely as water did baked lime and he wished he’d never laid eyes on the devious jade.
Now that they were closer to the river and among the warehouses where he was probably far more familiar with their surroundings than she was, he pulled away from her. Letting her take the lead only so he, too, could be sure they hadn’t been followed, he sharpened his senses, made himself forget her as a woman as far as it was in him to do. Knowing suddenly that she was leading him to the small warehouse Kit and Ben had hired, then bought when they first set up a small business hauling coastal cargoes, he let her dart into the cover of its ancient shadow and fumble for the keys under her many layers of clothing. He opened his mouth to demand them of her, then closed it again when she hushed him and slipped the key furtively into the lock and turned it as silently as she could with both hands on the doughty iron.
Shrugging impatiently at her silent pantomime, he followed her inside and turned to help her close and relock the stout side door and inspect the gloom inside. He summoned up his captain’s senses and sent them to explore that semi-darkness and came up with nothing but a cargo of finest coffee beans destined for the breakfast tables of discerning northern households, not very fresh air still haunted by sugar and spices and other exotics, a hint of mouse and worse. Even his sixth sense could find no trace of another human being, although there seemed an unacceptable quantity of non-human ones, which reinforced his opinion that Kit and Ben should demolish the venerable old building and replace it with something a lot more vermin-proof and never mind sentiment.
‘Right, there’s obviously nobody here, so I’ll go no further into this business of yours without an explanation, madam,’ he informed her grimly.
‘Very well then, this morning I followed you to work.’
‘You followed me?’ he demanded, suddenly distrusting those finely honed senses he’d always prided himself on after all.
‘I’m very good,’ she boasted unrepentantly and how could he argue when he’d sensed not a single hint of her behind him? ‘But so was the other person tailing you through the City this morning,’ she added; this time he wondered if he had any senses left to him to have missed two of them trailing after him like a procession.
‘The other person?’
‘I used to know a parrot just like you, Captain,’ she mocked him, but must have seen the warning glint in his eyes, because she suddenly looked as serious as anyone could wish, especially a beleaguered and apparently rather simple sea captain. ‘He was a well-trained follower and belongs to a villainous crew.’
‘And how can I trust you to recognise such a man?’
‘You just can,’ she assured him and met his eyes unflinchingly, despite the dusty gloom thickening as daylight began to seep away from such dark places early.
‘But can I also be sure of your motives, Miss La Rochelle, since you seem a little over-familiar with the workings of the London underworld?’
‘You can,’ she insisted steadily.
‘For some extraordinary reason, I believe you.’
‘Why, thank you, I’m suitably flattered, of course.’
‘So you should be,’ he told her dourly.
‘Never mind all that now, we’re in the devil of a jam and have to find the best way out of it.’
‘I only have your word for that, so how do you conclude I’m in a pickle just because a man followed me to Stone & Shaw’s offices in the City?’
‘I followed him afterwards to a fashionable church where he met a supposedly clerical gentleman.’
‘Which is odd, I admit, but perhaps the man is struggling for his lost soul.’
‘And perhaps he’s also raising flying pigs, because when they parted I followed the respectable cleric to a mansion in Mayfair and waited for over an hour before I got down off my perch to try to find out why he went into that house and departed arrayed in the height of fashion among his own kind.’
‘Not a son of the church after all, then?’ he asked whimsically, but his brain was whirling with ideas as he went over all the possibilities her story presented.
‘Very far from it,’ she said disapprovingly.
‘You knew him, didn’t you?’ he suddenly realised, marvelling at her acquaintance with such fine gentlemen and instantly rigidly jealous of a man who could be a former protector of hers.
‘Only later, when I realised whose house it actually was. I can’t believe how convincing his disguise was, especially when he always seemed such an empty-headed fool when I met him at—’
She stopped, blank-faced and wary, as she bit back whatever it was she was going to say next. What a damned fool he was, he decided dazedly as he forced himself to assess Eloise La Rochelle anew. Her faultlessly unaccented accent, her unconscious elegance and that air she had of being a princess let out of her castle for a holiday and only pretending to be a female buccaneer, or even Eloise La Rochelle herself. An appalling suspicion crept into his obviously rather slow mind and he eyed her annoyingly calm countenance through the thickening darkness with hot fury clawing at his gut.
‘You met him in polite society, did you not?’ he asked coldly.
‘How can you even think such a thing?’ Louisa blustered, but ground to a halt as she met his steady, condemning gaze and decided the game was up. ‘Yes,’ she agreed stoically, trying hard to pretend having her clever disguise penetrated at exactly the wrong moment didn’t matter in the least.
‘Then you really are slumming it?’ he asked stiffly.
‘No, I’m looking for something real,’ she told him in a raw voice that threatened to tug at his heartstrings, so Hugh hardened his heart against her and made himself re-examine the information he had about her and reach another startling conclusion.
‘Say something unreal rather, Miss Alstone,’ he said stiffly, trying to be cool and logical, yet struggling with hot humiliation, and a disappointment he refused to examine at the thought of her laughing up her sleeve at him. She’d deceived him every step of her way last night and again this morning. ‘As far as I cared for anything or anyone in polite society, I gave Christopher Alstone’s little sister the benefit of the doubt when I heard that you’d been named the Ice Diamond by the wags, my dear, but at least now I know how richly you must have deserved that nickname and can learn to pity your victims instead.’
‘You never gave any fashionable female a second chance in your life,’ she scoffed. How could he have not seen the haughty minx for what she was the instant she eyed him like an offended queen across Kit’s office that first day?
‘Now there you’re more wrong than you’ll ever know,’ he said grimly, thinking of all the times he’d believed Ariadne, when only an idiot would take his wife’s interpretation over the plain facts. ‘I’m cured of it though, Miss Alstone, and if you made up this shameful tarradiddle for your own perverse amusement then I’ll see you publically exposed and pilloried for it as you deserve to be.’
‘I should have left you to your enemies, but oddly enough my sense of fairness wouldn’t let me leave you to take your chance against such overwhelming odds. I’m rapidly changing my mind, needless to say,’ she said, her face such a mask of polite indifference he couldn’t read what lay behind it, and how he hated the mass of contradictions gnawing away at his supposedly stern composure.
‘Good, I certainly need no help from the likes of you,’ he snapped.
‘You don’t even know me.’
‘I know enough.’
Hugh watched her lining up glib arguments to defend herself with and held up his hand to stop her. With his foul luck, and worse judgement, she’d be as convincing at it as his late wife had been. Ariadne had believed her own lies so steadfastly by the time she told them that she’d cheerfully swear to them, even when all the facts proved her wrong. Yet now she was dead and he was branded a murderer in all but proof. Dark grief, fury and shame threatened to swallow him up in the horror of that terrible crime once more, but he fought it back to hell where it belonged and hated this lying female all the more for showing him Hugo the Fool, the cuckolded husband, was still alive behind Hugh Darke’s cynical disguise.
‘I know you are the despair of your brother and sister, Miss Alstone,’ he said coolly enough, for all that hot fury raged under his surface calm. ‘Even I have heard that you lead half the otherwise sane men in polite society around by the nose with your beauty and various other perfections that elude me. It’s just as well known that you don’t care a snap of your fingers for a single one of them. You’re a cold-hearted vixen who dismisses her suitors as if she’s waiting for a prince or a king at the very least to decorate her cold brow with a crown, instead of the coronets you are apparently offered by the cartload every Season. And rather than make your long-suffering brother happy by graciously accepting one of those lords or their foolishly besotted heirs, you dance and flirt and charm them for your own idle satisfaction the one day, then give them a very cold shoulder the next.’
‘My, I am a bad woman,’ she said with deceptive mildness and Hugh realised he’d let some of his fury with Ariadne for being a liar and cheat and a lovely, dead, fool creep into his verbal attack on Kit’s little sister.
‘I don’t care what sort of a woman you are,’ he lied, ‘but I’ll certainly manage without your help from now on. Something tells me you’ll lead me further into the maze just because you can, rather than show me the way out of it.’