Earl Crush (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #2)

Chapter 23

Dearest, find enclosed an early copy of the library’s newest pamphlet on condoms. If you do not find it personally useful, please assume I’ve sent it to you to assess the quality of the engravings. (They certainly are lifelike!)

—from Selina to Lydia

Lydia sat cross-legged in her dressing gown and surveyed the man in her bed.

He was still asleep, his curls mussed and one muscular arm flung across his face. After four nights on the mail coach, they had both slept long and deeply. If her mother had made up a separate chamber for Arthur, Lydia was not aware of it—no one had broken in upon them or knocked at the door.

She’d been awakened only by the dawn. In the soft light of the morning, she’d shrugged into her muslin wrap and pondered what she might find for Arthur to wear as well.

He certainly couldn’t wear the scarlet footman’s costume again. She intended to wreak some revenge upon Ned for that incident, once she stopped laughing whenever she thought of it.

Arthur’s gold-tipped lashes fluttered slightly. He had the beginnings of golden stubble on his cheeks and jaw as well, and she found she wanted to press her face there. Feel the rough scratch against her lips.

Perhaps she could, now. Perhaps that would be permissible.

It seemed possible, this morning, that he would welcome it. She felt a cautious and tentative hope unfurl itself, one petal at a time, in her chest. She might have many mornings like this, dawn-colored and sleep-warm beside him. She might have all of them.

But her dream of the morning was not to be. She heard a rustle at the door and then the quiet voice of Nora, her maid. “May I enter?”

Arthur’s eyes came open and went, instantly, to her face. “Lydia?” he murmured. He lifted an arm, rolled to his side, and caught her around the waist. He pulled her hard enough that her body half fell into his and pressed his face against her muslin-covered thigh.

Helplessly, she tangled her fingers in his hair. “Good morning.” He did not move, only murmured something inaudible into her lap. She breathed out a laugh. “Someone’s at the door.”

He turned his face just enough to blink reluctantly up at her.

Her lips curved as she looked at his face, almost boyish, all curling lashes and sulky mouth. “You probably ought to fasten your breeches.” It was with no little regret that she pulled away. “Hold on,” she said to Nora. “I’m coming.”

She crossed the room slowly, giving Arthur a moment to restore himself, and then tugged open the door.

Nora stood on the other side, looking fresh and crisp despite the early hour. She held a bundle of clothing in her hands. “Welcome home,” she said. “You look… rested.”

Lydia’s entire face went hot.

In retrospect, their behavior last night had been rather scandalous. She and Arthur had vanished halfway through supper and had not reappeared.

But—well—they were married.

After a fashion. If one did not put too fine a point on “were.”

“Ned said you were looking for Jasper and for an appropriate suit of clothes,” Nora announced. “I can’t help you with your scoundrel of a brother, but I’ve managed the rest.” She crossed the room to where Arthur had risen at her arrival and handed him the bundle of fabric. “Good morning, Lord Strathrannoch. This is the best I could do on short notice, but I’ve sent a request on to the tailor to have something ready for you by the afternoon.”

“Ah,” Arthur said. His voice was a trifle scratchy with sleep. “Thank you. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Lydia suspected she was as red as the footman’s waistcoat that Arthur had worn to dinner. She supposed she would have to get used to Nora finding them together in the bed in the morning, if they were to be married in truth.

Good heavens.

She cleared her throat and tried to ignore the heat radiating from her skin. “Nora,” she said, “I’d like to go over to the Stanhope residence this morning and speak to Selina. Can you—”

“To be sure.” Nora, efficient as ever, had already begun to set out the appropriate underpinnings and day dress. “I’ll go down and call for the carriage. Do you want breakfast?”

“No, thank you,” she said, and then hesitated, turning to Arthur. “Unless—that is, do you want to remain here whilst I go out?”

His jaw was set, his expression rather grim, but when he turned to look at her, his hazel eyes were soft. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t have you go alone.”

By late afternoon, their party had grown from two to five, and they found themselves not at the Stanhope residence, but at Belvoir’s Library itself.

They’d called on the duke and duchess early enough that the couple were still at breakfast, along with the duke’s adolescent brother and sister. Lydia had introduced Arthur—as her husband , dear God, would it ever stop feeling like a passing fancy?—and then ushered Selina into a sitting room for a whispered conference about Davis Baird, Jasper, and the stolen rifle scope.

Selina’s dark brows, at odds with her honey-blond hair, had risen higher and higher as Lydia related the events of the past weeks.

“Good Lord,” she said finally, when Lydia ran down. “You’re certain that Strathrannoch’s brother has this device—this rifle telescope? And you believe he means to sell it to… these French agents?”

“I’m not certain of anything,” Lydia said. “But the Thibodeaux knew Davis well. And they were searching for Jasper. I cannot believe it’s a coincidence. If there’s anything you know—anything you have learned from the Home Office via Belvoir’s—that might help us find them, we need your help.”

Selina drummed her fingers along the arm of her chair. “I am not as involved with the Home Office as you seem to think. But—” She hesitated, straightening the seam of her glove before she spoke. “But you are right about your brother. He works for the Home Office. And I permit him to pass correspondence through the library. I could try to contact him.”

“Yes,” Lydia said. “Yes, please. If there’s any way to find him—”

“There might be,” Selina said slowly. “And I think…”

She trailed off. Her amber eyes had sharpened into an expression that Lydia recognized—an expression that occasionally terrified her, but in this particular instance sent a bloom of optimism through her instead.

Selina had a plan.

“You said you have Davis’s notes?” Selina asked. “His papers?”

“I had some of them on my person when we were separated, yes. Georgiana has the rest in my trunk. They’re not terribly clear though.”

Selina made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “It doesn’t matter. Meet me at Belvoir’s this afternoon. I’ll get Georgiana. Bring the papers, and we’ll sort this out.”

Lydia trusted Selina’s cleverness enough to do exactly as she said.

And so, roughly six hours later, Arthur and Lydia were ushered by a Belvoir’s staff member into Selina’s top-floor office at the library.

Inside the office sat Selina, flanked by Georgiana and another one of their mutual friends, a dark-haired, curvaceous, perpetually abstracted antiquities scholar named Iris Duggleby.

“Er,” Lydia said, “good afternoon.”

“I know this may seem untoward,” Selina said, “but I would like to bring Iris into our confidence. The five of us together have a far better chance of uncovering Davis Baird’s intentions or whereabouts from his papers.” She turned her gaze to Arthur. “I assure you, Lord Strathrannoch, you can rely upon the sanctity of what is discussed in this room. Lydia, Georgiana, and Iris have trusted me with their secrets for years now. Their cooperation in this endeavor will provide—”

“No,” Arthur said flatly.

There was a brief, shocked silence.

“No,” he said again. “I will not have my family’s transgressions spread around more widely. I should like to avoid placing more innocent people in peril, for God’s sake. ’Tis bad enough that you’re involved already, Lydia.”

Georgiana, seated behind the desk, arched one delicate eyebrow. “I am also involved, for what it’s worth.”

Lydia twisted her fingers together in front of her. “Arthur, I think Selina is right. Finding Davis and Jasper must take precedence over the vague possibility that someone might be endangered.”

“The vague possibility —have you forgotten your room was ransacked? By people we now believe to be French agents?” Arthur’s throat had gone pink.

“Her Grace is also involved,” Georgiana put in. “One might observe that the majority of the women in this room are in fact already involved.”

Lydia paid no mind to Georgiana’s remarks. She untangled her fingers, gathered her courage, and touched Arthur’s hand. “I know. I know you are concerned—”

“Christ, Lydia, concerned is not the word—”

“But the Thibodeaux could be hunting for Jasper as we speak, and he does not know it. We have to find him. And we have to find Davis. If Selina believes that this is our best hope of doing so, then I trust her judgment.”

Arthur stared down at her. His thumb brushed across the back of her hand. “I don’t like the idea of bringing more people along to help right my family’s wrongs. I… very much misliked asking it of you.”

“For what it’s worth,” put in Iris, “no one has asked us to do anything beyond appear at the appointed hour. I begin to wonder what I am doing here.”

“Don’t worry,” Georgiana said. “Everyone else is invisible to Strathrannoch when Lydia is in the room. One becomes accustomed to it.”

Lydia felt a flutter in her belly at Georgiana’s words and chose to ignore it. Instead, she looked up and met Arthur’s gaze.

“Please,” she said. “I believe this is the right thing to do.”

Arthur passed his free hand along the back of his neck as he stared down at her, his eyes a thousand shades of worried gold and green. “All right,” he said finally. “So be it. You trust them. And I trust you, Lydia.”

She squeezed his fingers, and he squeezed back.

And for the next several minutes, as she explained the situation to Iris while Georgiana produced Davis’s letters and papers, neither of them let go.

“Well,” Selina said when the recital was finished and the notes brought forward, “when you said that the papers were unclear, I did not think you meant that Davis’s writing was invisible .”

“It’s not invisible,” Lydia protested. “It’s only… hard to read.” She held one of the papers up to the light and tipped it, angling it so that the shadows fell into the impressions left by Davis’s pen. “You can make it out, if you try.”

“Actually,” said Iris, “this is very exciting. I’ve been wanting to try out the Niebuhr-Savigny method of palimpsestic excavation! But I suppose on paper, not vellum, gallic acid may result in destruction, rather than excavation.” She brushed her thumb across her lips. “Perhaps a wash of iron gall ink.”

There was a small silence.

“Do you—” Arthur began.

Lydia shook her head. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

Iris seemed not to hear them. The antiquities scholar shook her dark hair back from her face, twisted the heavy mass up abstractedly with an ink-drenched pen from Selina’s desk, and began to spread out the papers. She made quick work of the inkwell and a small pitcher from a sideboard. She called for tea, and when it arrived, she chewed on her lower lip and appeared to perform some kind of chemical experiment within the pitcher.

When she’d finished, she tugged the quill out of her hair, grimaced as the shiny black weight flopped back down around her shoulders, and then dipped the feather end of the quill into the potion she’d hastily concocted.

With a steady hand, she swept the feather over the first sheet of foolscap, producing a thin wash of brownish liquid. As they watched, the pigment settled in the grooves left behind by Davis’s pen. Iris blew carefully on the paper, but there was no need to wait for it to dry.

Every line set down by Davis’s pen was now perfectly visible.

Selina made a smothered sound behind her hand.

“Go on,” Lydia said. “Say it.”

“I can’t.”

“You said we needed Iris. You told us so.”

“It would be smug of me to remind you.”

“You’ve the look of a cat who’s eaten the entire Christmas goose. You are already smug.”

Selina laughed.

The rest of the group perused the letters Georgiana had retained as well as each of Davis’s papers as Iris revealed the writing therein with careful tea-colored strokes. Their companions’ speculations were similar to Lydia’s and Arthur’s—the figures were depictions of the rifle scope; the numbers might perhaps reflect the weapon’s range.

Lydia ground her teeth as she angled her head over the letters that Selina had recently scrutinized. “Do you notice anything that I’ve missed? Here he asks about Piccadilly. I know there were more letters in which he mentioned London sites, but I fear I cannot recall them exactly.”

Selina shook her head, frustration evident in the set of her jaw. She straightened the papers with quick, efficient movements. “I don’t know. Based on his diagrams, it seems likely he meant to put the weapon to use, but we do not know where or when. He might not even be in London at all.”

Georgiana, seated at the desk near where Iris worked with her quill, made a tiny, quickly stifled sound. Almost a gasp.

Lydia looked up. Her heart had clutched at the sound—fear and hope together. “What is it?”

Georgiana was staring down at one of the papers that Iris’s ink wash had excavated. “I know this place,” she said evenly. “I’ve been here.”

Arthur made for the desk to look down at the papers.

Lydia felt herself frozen to her chair. “What is it? Where?”

“It’s St. Saviour’s Church,” Georgiana said, still looking at the paper. “I set one of my novels there. It’s fallen into disrepair inside—everything covered in cobwebs, most of the medieval furnishings rotted away. I went there last year for research purposes and had to sneak in past two separate padlocked doors.”

Selina had risen as well. “They’ve started a renovation project there,” she said. “They asked us to donate.”

“Yes,” Georgiana said. “I went back this year and could not enter. The tower is in the process of being rebuilt from the ground up, and the chapel is to be demolished.”

“Why would Davis have a drawing of a church?” Lydia asked.

Arthur had stopped behind Georgiana and was looking down at the papers. “This tower,” he said slowly. “It looks out over the city?”

Selina pressed a hand to the base of her throat. “Somewhat. The tower overlooks the Thames and London Bridge.”

“He would have excellent range to shoot from that tower,” Arthur said. “Almost as far as from the ramparts at Strathrannoch Castle.”

Lydia felt her blood run cold.

The rifle scope—the ramparts—the pine tree so distant she could scarcely make it out.

And now this drawing of St. Saviour’s.

Somehow, she had never quite believed that Davis meant to do violence with the rifle scope. Part of her still did not believe it. It seemed impossible that the charming, irrepressible man who had corresponded with her for nearly three years could also be plotting some kind of attack.

But the church—the notes on the rifle’s range—

The evidence, though circumstantial, was unnerving. She could not make it square with the person she’d thought she’d known.

“We have to tell Jasper,” she said. “We must get in touch with him.”

“Yes,” Selina said, “we do. I have a signal that I use to alert him when he has correspondence here. A red leatherbound book I set in my office window, which can just barely be seen from the street. Within a day or two of placing the book there, I’ll receive a note from him with a time to meet.”

Relief washed through Lydia. “Meanwhile, I can wait for him at home. He may come there first, and if he does, I can alert him immediately.”

Selina nodded briskly and turned to Arthur. “Strathrannoch, if you do not mind, I should like to take this information about the rifle scope and St. Saviour’s directly to the Home Office in the meantime.”

“Of course.” He hesitated. His eyes, all the colors shadowed, flicked from Lydia to Selina and back again. “If you’ll permit me to remain here in your library.”

“In Belvoir’s? Why?”

“If Jasper comes with a note, I might be able to intercept him. I should”—his voice hitched ever so slightly—“like to speak to him about my brother. Find out what he knows.”

“Ah.” Selina’s face softened slightly. “I take your meaning. I assure you, Strathrannoch, I will do my very best to help you find your brother before he is able to make use of this weapon.”

Arthur’s jaw was as hard and ruthless as a blow. He looked down at the papers on the desk, nodded once, and did not speak.