Chapter Eighteen
Clive was gingerly climbing out of his tub when a knock came at the sitting room door. He had summoned enough strength to bathe quickly to meet his two friends, Langley and Halsey, downstairs at their prearranged time of ten o’clock. But he was late.
He glanced at his pocket watch upon the far table. Ten fifteen. Well, three men attacking a fellow wearing nothing but the suit he was born in, at five in the morning, definitely meant that at thirty-four years of age, a bloke was a poor wreck of a fighter.
Toweling off, he suppressed groans and grimaced at the pain—and at repeated knocks on his door. He grabbed smalls, fawn breeches, and a shirt, then shuffled barefoot for the door. “Coming! Coming!” he groused.
“Good God,” he exclaimed, his shoulders slumping as he stared at Halsey and Langley, “am I glad to see you.”
Both men strode in, their brows shooting high as they looked Clive over.
“What in hell happened to you?” Langley winced, closing the door with a quick hand. “The receptionist came into the dining room and told us you had an altercation here last night.”
“A polite way to phrase an abduction.”
“No! Giselle?” Langley was aghast at Clive’s scowl.
Halsey cursed. “Let’s sit down, for God’s sake.” Then he put two fingers to his own nose. “I hope the other man’s face is as colorful.”
Clive swallowed a wry laugh. “I am doubling up on my visits to Gentleman Jack’s very soon.” He led them to the settees and chairs, a hand out toward the tray. “If you’ve not yet had breakfast, please do so.”
“You’ve hardly touched it,” Halsey said. “Sit and eat. You look like you need it.”
“I’m afraid I’ve had my guts rearranged recently and I’d embarrass myself if I ate. But I will pour for us all. Coffee, yes?” Clive did as he’d said and passed around cups. He took two sips from his own. “I trust Annabelle and Terese are well?” he asked of Langley.
“Very well. Bella asks for you. We tell her you are traveling for your work but will arrive home soon. Terese is fine, anxious to hear about you and Giselle.”
“Have you married?” Clive asked, hoping the two of them had made themselves happy by doing so.
“Terese will not take vows until you are home, safe and sound. I agree with her. Weddings are for family.”
Clive tried to smile. “Thank you. You will not share my sorry state with her when you return. I will not have her worry.”
Langley grew furious. “Hell, man, I worry! I’m surprised you can walk!”
“There is that,” Clive said with sarcasm. “I’ll go put on a better face, if you’ll excuse me.”
In his bedroom, he paused to inhale. Calmed by his friends’ presence, he was nonetheless irritated with himself that he had to admit to them that he had failed to protect the woman he loved.
The one woman in this world whom he needed to save from whoever in damnation had attacked her and carried her away from him—and he had foundered.
He muttered about his need to find her. Buttoning his shirt, winding a simple knot in his plain cravat, he took off hangers a waistcoat and a frockcoat, then ran a comb through his hair.
Christ. Even his scalp hurt. In the warm, soothing waters of his bath, he had seen the damage done to him by the intruders. Not much of him was left untouched. Save his dangly bits. Kind of them, the buggers.
He grimaced, the errant reminder rising, as it had done a hundred times since this morning, that when the men stole into their rooms, Giselle was bare to her skin.
He ground his teeth that those hooligans would take advantage of that, abuse her, horrify her, hurt her in the worst way any man could injure a woman.
He cursed beneath his breath and strode back in to his friends.
“Tell us,” Langley urged him when Clive had taken a chair and picked up his coffee cup.
“Three men came before dawn,” he said with bitterness. “They had a key and stole in. I was awake, not it seems because I heard them, but perhaps because I perceived them or the danger they presented. In any case, when they barged in, I had that poker there in hand.”
His two friends eyed the long iron rod on the floor where Clive had left it.
“As you can see, my skills are not up to fighting off so many men at once. I passed out from their attack. When I began to come around, I saw them lead out Giselle.”
He would not add details of his state of undress, nor that he’d been restrained with hands and ankles tied.
The despair of his inability to save Giselle ate him to the bone.
He’d deal with that in days to come as he healed his physical wounds.
No need to emphasize to his friends his self-ridicule at his failures. He knew them all too well.
He drank from his cup. “There were three men, all ragtag ruffians. They spoke French. Not Parisian. But Norman. From Le Havre or Calais.”
“Why did they carry away Giselle?” Langley asked.
Clive took another long drink of his coffee. It soothed his weary soul and fortified his aching body. “She has an enemy in Fouché, and his deputy, René Vaillancourt.”
Both men froze.
Clive hastened to add, “She also works against the French.”
“Not for us!” Halsey blurted, red in the face.
Clive understood his colleague’s shock. “No. For Kane, Lord Ashley, and through him—”
“Scarlett Hawthorne,” Halsey finished.
Halsey was a tall, dark, severe fellow who was a light of London Society.
He had a taste for horses, French wine, and exquisite women.
Scarlett Hawthorne—beautiful, educated, and ruthless cit that she was—ran her deceased father’s merchant marine business and used his contacts all over the world to run her own espionage network.
She did not admit such to anyone, but the successes she had tallied were innumerable.
Every day, every night, she was a light of Society despite her mercantile background.
Halsey, who advised the prime minister on all agents foreign and domestic, had courted her, as many men had, to little avail.
The only man who got close to her was her chief clerk, a giant of a man named Todd Carlton.
The other men whom she saw regularly were the ones who worked for her, like Ashley, Ramsey, and dozens more.
Halsey fumed. “How on God’s green earth did Madame Laurant get connected with Scarlett?”
“She was childhood friends with Augustine, Lady Ashley, and Amber, Lady Ramsey. They recruited her. For a few years now, she has worked for them.”
Halsey’s violet eyes shadowed with an urgent fear. “What does she do for them?”
Clive swiftly glanced at Langley. “Those sketches and paintings in the Hastings bookshop?”
Langley nodded. “Yes?”
Halsey knew of them, too. “What of them?”
“Giselle did them. She’s executed dozens of paintings and sketches since arriving here in England last autumn. She would visit the town, walk it, measure and define it, then render it in various mediums to place in locations where her contacts picked them up.”
“I’ve marveled at the exquisite nature of those drawings in the Hastings bookshop,” Halsey ruminated.
“At the inaccuracies in them, too. I thought it was the mistake of the artist. Wondering too why they would be left, other than the fact that whoever was to pick them up saw the mistakes and left them there to rot.” He sat forward.
“Unusual for a woman to draw landscapes so well…and so deceptively well. How did she learn to do any of that?”
“Ah.” That answer Clive had, and it brought a small smile of satisfaction. “When she was a child and her mother was in residence at Versailles, she met her mother’s friend.”
“Who is…?”
“Madame élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun.”
Halsey stared at Clive.
“That’s why,” said Langley at last with a shake of his head, “she was invited to Le Brun’s party here in Brighton a few weeks ago. They are friends!”
“What’s more, Giselle knows the Comte de Vaudreuil and studied with him as well.”
“That old roué?” Halsey crowed. The man was responsible for so many scandals at the French royal court that most marveled he yet survived the guillotine.
“He ran fast after the Bastille fell,” said Langley.
“Running away with the king’s young brother, Artois. Now he’s here to grace our shores with his simpering apologias for his sins,” Halsey added. “I’d pack him off on a convict ship if I could. He makes trouble for me every time he opens his mouth.”
“But he knows a fine artist when he sees one,” Clive said. “In Giselle, he spotted her ability to eye a landscape and create a realistic rendering.”
“Except,” Halsey said, “those Hastings drawings are not accurate.”
“No, they weren’t.” Langley fell back in his chair.
“Because… Dear God,” said Halsey, mesmerized, “she is drawing them incorrectly to delude the French! Astonishing. And what is her method?”
“How does she convey them to France?” asked Langley. “She has couriers here in England?”
“One she told me about,” Clive said. “Perhaps there are more, but I doubt she knows them all.”
“Who is the one?” Halsey pressed him.
Clive gave his first sad laugh of the morning.
“A smuggler. Evidently the best. Very successful at running the blockades. He brought Giselle across the Channel last autumn. He runs many a gauntlet through the lines and brings with him news of all types. Useful man. It was one of his whom Giselle was to meet one night in Brighton. But he never appeared. Arrested he was, by revenuers, and so she never heard from any of his men again.”
“Who is this smuggler?” Langley asked.
“A fellow by the name of Jacques Durand.”
Halsey shook a finger. “I’ve heard of him. French. An aristo. A prince of the blood. Bourbon, maybe? Hates the little emperor with a blind passion.”
Langley frowned. “Does Giselle know that you work for Mulgrave and the Foreign Office?”