Chapter 26
The walk from Berkeley Square to Grosvenor Square began as a quiet one. Beau’s heart raced, and there was a subtle quake in his limbs, reminiscent of his early days on assignment, but he found the uncertainty of knowing what thoughts were whooshing through Miss Doubleday’s brain more disconcerting than anything he’d faced in his line of work.
She was doing her best to keep her face forward, placid, untouched by his revelations and who could say what else, but several times her eyes slipped his way, by turns curious and scrutinising. Once he thought she looked inexplicably dissatisfied.
As they left Berkeley Square behind, she ventured to say, her voice tinged with unusual shyness, ‘I thought perhaps you were avoiding me, when you didn’t return with us from Almack’s.’
‘Never,’ he said, and, keeping his tone light, added, ‘except when I hid outside the study for more than an hour and the one time I threw myself behind the couch in the library when I heard you coming. After that night.’
She whirled on him with a sharp gasp. ‘I knew it!’
‘While we’re speaking of hiding, did you really wake up under my bed and think your presence there had gone undetected?’
Miss Doubleday began her answer with an imperious lift of her chin. ‘Mayhap I did. It seemed just as plausible, more so, some might argue, than the alternative: you finding me and leaving me there.’ There was amusement sparking in her eyes when she brought them to meet his own.
Beau was enchanted and let his laughter kindle in the air between them. ‘The alternative, my dear ward, was my sitting in a chair and biding my time till you crawled out. I think, given the choices, the one allowing you to preserve some dignity was the correct one, no?’
Her dark eyes slipped his direction, a dangerous gleam sending a shiver of warning down his spine. ‘You undressed knowing I was there.’
He adored her firm, purposeful way of speaking, and her willingness to challenge him, spar with him.
‘Perhaps I mistook your intentions in entering my room,’ he drawled.
‘You never.’ She met him with a stern-faced expression, but he knew she was fighting off a smile by the twitch at the corner of her lips.
As they turned onto Grosvenor Street from Davies Street, a cry of ‘Thief!’ disturbed the quiet, warm accord brewing between them. An urchin rushed around the corner, his small body knocking into Miss Doubleday’s legs as he ran like the devil himself was at his back. She would have fallen backward had Beau not been there to catch her, and she toppled into his arms with a stunned little cry as the pair watched a well-dressed merchant give chase, although the young boy was already gone from sight.
Beau righted her, inquired if she was all right, and cast a quick look over their surroundings.
‘Fine. A little shaken. And I feel terribly for that poor boy, although there are not so many of them as I expected to see in London.’
It was a na?ve statement, and one Beau wasn’t sure he was willing to correct yet, but her assessment held some truth. It was unusual to see a street urchin in this part of town. The crimes they got away with in the seedier parts of London could see them hanged if committed and caught in Mayfair. The boy, the given hour, and Beau’s general wariness made him suspicious, but if the charge had been deliberate, it made no sense why the urchin would run into her and not him. He said none of this to Miss Doubleday, but picked up her hand and placed it snug in the crook of his arm, keeping her close to his side for what remained of their walk.
He felt a silly rush of pleasure when she didn’t immediately disentangle herself from him when the door to Avon House opened. Even as she turned to face him, she let her hand rest till the very last moment.
‘Thank you, for today.’
They stared at one another, and Beau hoped it wasn’t only he who heard the subtle song of change flickering between them. Any reply he might have made was prevented by the arrival of a courier with a letter. He took it, and by the time he looked back to Miss Doubleday, it was only to see her retreating up the stairs.
The sender was written out as J.B. Brown, Esq, a cover for the Home Office. Waiting till he was in his room to break the seal, he cast a quick look around and considered finding new hiding spots for missives he could not immediately destroy.
The letter was as expected as it was short. Two sentences. The first requested his immediate presence at the Home Office; the second instructed him to burn after reading. Despite the clear orders to avoid work while he recovered at home, Beau had dashed off a letter to his boss as soon as he had heard Babin compared to Guy Fawkes and many more missives since.
He retrieved his greatcoat from the chair upon which he’d just placed it, walked back downstairs, and began the mile or so walk to the Palace of Whitehall, where the government’s offices were housed. Upon arrival, he turned down a smaller street, home to several law offices and other sundry business fronts, and entered the door framed under the letters J.B. Brown Co. He proceeded through one long corridor, two short ones, and three separate doors, the last bringing him into the back of the Foreign Office within the Treasury building.
His boss, the esteemed Lord Duffy, and the gentleman’s fresh equerry were waiting, a grave air hanging about the pair.
‘By all means, take your time,’ Lord Duffy huffed.
‘I walked.’
‘You and your walking,’ grunted Duffy. ‘You could have a carriage for every day of the week and yet you choose to walk. Never mind. No time to explicate your odd habits. Where is Babin now?’
‘At this very moment?’ Beau lifted a shoulder. ‘His lodgings, his club, on his way to Westminster to blow up the House of Lords?’
Lord Duffy scowled, but the equerry’s face went grim and dreadfully pale.
‘Rest easy, boy, Duffy here knew it to be a jest. Babin doesn’t yet have the explosives needed, and Parliament won’t reconvene from their Easter break for nearly three weeks. Before we move too far beyond the subject, I was enjoying a walk through Mayfair this morning with my ward when an urchin barrelled into us. She would have crumpled to the ground had I not caught her. Curious, no?’
Duffy’s brows spiked towards his hairline. ‘Well, if you’re intimating the man had something to do with the scuffle, I daresay you may be right, given what happened to his father.’
Surprise registered on Beau’s face. He stamped it out, but his voice still pitched up when he said, a little stupidly, ‘Mr Babin?’
The older man was too stoic to tug at his cravat, but his hand touched it briefly before returning to the desk where he was sitting. ‘Are not your estates in the same county?’
Beau acknowledged they were. The peculiar tendrils of uncertainty snaked through him, and his limbs tingled with dreadful anticipation.
‘I suppose we’ve kept you from home quite a bit.’ Lord Duffy paused, looking as uncomfortable as Beau had ever seen him. Beau glanced to the equerry, who wore a terrified if confused expression but bore nobly the sheen of sweat gathering at his brow.
‘Let me clarify. I understand his father was also a smuggler, but I fail to comprehend what that man has to do with anything presently,’ said Beau, a touch of exasperation in his reply.
‘Babin the elder was indeed a smuggler—a mighty good one and prolific in the quantities of tea, tobacco, and brandy he was able to move. It took more than a year for us to build a case against him—you were in Brussels at the time—and even with a solid case built, given the challenge of trials and unreliable witnesses, all might have fallen apart had he not used one of the inlets on your family’s estate.’
Someone less familiar with Beau might think he hadn’t heard what had just been said to him, the way he sat so still it was impossible to tell if he was even breathing. There was a sound in his ears—he’d heard it before, like the high winds of a storm whipping past.
The last letter he received from his father came to mind, the contents of it turning the plum ice in his stomach to stone. Before this moment, Beau had often considered whether his father had only been saying there’d been something of great import he’d needed to discuss just to bring Beau home. But it had been this; he was more than certain. And he needed to know the rest.
‘My father and I did not have the benefit of open communication before he passed.’
Lord Duffy nodded in understanding. ‘There had been some poaching concerns at the same time.’ Beau remembered his father mentioning as much in his letters. ‘Your father was out riding with the gamekeeper when they spotted Mr Babin. According to your father, little more resulted than a staring contest. He suggested Babin got turned around looking for coastline closer to his own estate, cautioned them to watch out for poachers, and bid them a good evening.’
‘There was never any mention of a trial, and I saw Babin’s death announcement—’ The only reason his attention had drifted to the notice to begin with was the familiar name from Kent. Even now, Beau couldn’t recall a single detail from it, as uninteresting as it had been.
The equerry was fiddling with a pen, trying to mend the tip, and sent it clattering to the ground, earning him an unimpressed glare from Lord Duffy.
‘If you weren’t my only sister’s son,’ Duffy mumbled before turning his attention once more to Beau, who, for his part, was glad to know how the young man remained employed. ‘Pour me a drink,’ Duffy barked to the equerry, who startled at being spoken to and once more dropped the pen. ‘No, make it two.’
Duffy waited until Beau was holding the glass before he continued.
‘The problem with men like Babin is all their power is derived from fear. But your father was a man impossible to ignore or intimidate. A man whose power derived not just from his title or wealth, but from his integrity, his willingness to act, the relationships he built with others. When the older Babin learned your father was willing to be a witness and speak against him, he hanged himself before a trial could be scheduled, and the family put in the papers that he’d passed peacefully at home after a short illness.’
Beau, who had done nothing with the glass in his hand besides hold it, threw back its contents in one gulp, enjoying the burn and momentary distraction from the deluge of information he’d just received.
‘That’s—’ The sentence broke off in Beau’s mouth.
‘A lot? I thought it might be,’ Lord Duffy said, nodding to his nephew to bring the decanter over again.
But Beau shook his head and held up a staying hand. ‘No, thank you. I prefer to keep my head about me.’
He doubted this was the way the meeting was meant to unfold, and there was still more to discuss as it related to Mr Babin’s plans, but there was no room in Beau’s mind for anything else. He excused himself, and Duffy let him go, steepling his fingers under his chin as he bid farewell.
Beau thought to take the long way home, not that there were enough miles in all of London to walk his thoughts into some kind of order.