Chapter Eighteen #2
“No.” Clive had kept that from her. It was prudent.
What she did not know, she could not reveal under torture.
“The fewer people who know a secret, the safer it is from harm. But to the moment here, we have work to do. Three men to track.” He shot up from his chair, groaning as the pain in his ribs doubled him over.
“Hell,” Langley cursed. “Are you sure you are able?”
“I’ve already searched a few clues. After the attack, I went downstairs.”
“What? How? You look ragged, old man.” Halsey looked skeptical as to Clive’s health. “Do sit down.”
Clive could not. “I know, I know. But time is fleeting for Giselle. So I caught my breath this morning, and I hurried to dress. I went downstairs to summon the manager and I demanded he call his staff together. As I suspected, one was missing. A footman whom he’d recently hired had appeared at his regular time last night at eleven.
But then this morning at five forty, he was nowhere to be found.
The key to my rooms was missing from the front desk, too. ”
“Does the manager know where this fellow lodges?” Langley asked.
“He does. I had him hire a hack for me straight away, and he and I both went north to the outskirts, to an old inn where the man told him he lived. The owner of the pub told us his lodger had paid his bills and left with his belongings last night. He also had three friends. French, they were. Not a word of English among them.”
Halsey frowned. “Did the innkeeper have any idea where they were headed or what they planned next?”
“They spoke of taking a packet out of Hastings,” Clive said.
“Bah! Must be a smuggler’s boat. But why Hastings?” asked Langley. “Wouldn’t you want to bypass the thickest part of the blockade? Why not go to the North Sea, where fewer ships of the line patrol the waters?”
“Hastings,” Halsey mused. “We need more than this mention of a trip out of Hastings. But what? What? Wait… Let us consider if this is anything to do with that bookshop business.”
“I see no relationship of this to the Hastings drawings remaining in the bookshop. Unless the agent who was to take them has been deterred…” Langley speculated, his eyes widening.
Halsey nodded. “Or knows the drawings or the site have been discovered or compromised.”
“And who would know that?” Clive asked himself, and stared at the others.
“Only a French agent? Of course! A coordinator. One who has been living here, working here, learning the coastal geography. One who has enough agents in their employ to monitor the bookshop and trace who put them there or who designed them. Dear God. Could that be true? A master French agent in Hastings works among us?”
Halsey grumbled. “It’s what I have feared for so long. I’ve my agents following so many of them, but any in Hastings escape me.”
“Who might know?” Clive asked, frustrated, as he paced to the window and back. But he halted. The forces set against his darling Giselle set his mind reeling. “Lord Ashley?”
“Let’s go to him. If we must, we’ll go over him to Scarlett Hawthorne,” Halsey muttered. “We must ask them. Even if they have no idea of a French agent in Hastings, both will want to know what has happened to Giselle.”
Langley grimaced. “All the more reason to consult them.”
Halsey sniffed. “God knows, I’ve tried to negotiate with Miss Hawthorne. Stunning, but prickly woman.”
“To save her own agent,” Clive declared, “she’ll want to help us.”
*
Clive and Langley climbed down from their hired traveling coach that evening at seven twenty.
They’d left Brighton that morning at noon and stopped once to change horses in Crawley. Offering their two different coachmen double their fee to get them to London before dinnertime, they had endured the jostling carriages with a hamper of good food and fine brandy.
As they stepped up to the Ashleys’ townhouse at No. 20 Grosvenor Square, they agreed they would not be deterred if the butler were reticent or if Kane and his wife, Gus, were out for the evening. They would remain until they returned and speak of these matters.
The butler was accommodating. After all, Clive knew the man and all the Ashley staff because his own townhouse was at No. 16. The butler greeted Clive warmly, sensing the urgency of their matter. The Ashleys were at home, he told them. Then he showed the two to the grand salon.
Langley took a chair facing the back garden.
Clive paced before the fireplace. He had figured that whoever had taken Giselle was funded well, to hire three men to abduct her.
Money enough to hire a fast coach, most likely two.
They had means enough to spirit her away quickly and to obscure points of rendezvous with the organizers.
The motive could be many things. Clive did not care what it was.
He only wanted her back in his care, his embrace.
Halsey ran his own agents in Dover and Ramsgate, but Hastings was the port town he knew most. He’d spent his childhood there under the watchful eyes of his mother and five doting younger sisters.
That Halsey knew the area was one boon, but he also knew—courtesy of the women in his family and those who had graced his bed off and on for decades—the society and the military who ran the town.
Scarcely had Clive had time to calculate where the three Frenchmen now held Giselle when the double doors opened and Kane, Lord Ashley, appeared. Surprised and curious, he also had a worried brow.
As well he should.
“Good evening, gentlemen.” Ashley strode in as his butler shut the doors behind him. “An honor to have you. However, I note by the hour, you do not call with any good news.”
Clive took a step toward Ashley. “We’ve run up from Brighton. Madame Giselle Laurant was abducted from my presence from the Old Ship Hotel this morning before dawn. Three men accessed the hotel through the servants’ staircase and entered my rooms with a key to the lock.”
Ashley’s face fell as he took in Clive’s black eyes and bruises on his throat.
“Fortunately,” Clive continued, “Lord Langley and Lord Halsey had scheduled meetings with me previously and arrived in town the day before. Both men called upon me in early morning. Lord Halsey, who parted from Langley and me at ten this morning, has gone to Hastings to investigate as a result of this catastrophe. He knows that town well and thought it best to go ahead of us to find his own agents there. We three probed as best we could early today the facts of the matter in the hotel, and with a local publican who had lodged one of the culprits in his inn.”
Ashley paled. “Hideous news. Please do sit, Lord Carlisle. You both appear to need it, and sustenance as well. I will have my man bring in what we have as a cold dinner for you. Now,” he said as he went for the bellpull and indicated a chair for Clive, “tell me the rest and we will make haste to get Giselle safely back.”
Langley spoke up. “Those of us who work for the prime minister have long suspected that you head a network for Scarlett Hawthorne. We have had clues to that for many years, but of course, none of you has admitted to it.”
“As you have not revealed anything to me, sir.”
“Quite so,” Clive said. “Now, with Giselle gone, that must change. We must learn what you do—not in total, obviously, but at the very least, what you do that hinges on Giselle’s work and her disappearance.
Whatever you do complements our own work in the Home Office and Foreign Office.
We cannot be at cross-purposes here. Now we must learn what you know to help us find her. If she is yours—”
“She is.”
Clive rejoiced at the man’s admission. “We need not know more from you to help us, but I am very afraid for Giselle’s life.”
“As am I, Carlisle.” Carefully, Ashley had not elaborated on whether he ran agents for the renowned merchant lady in the City.
“I think, sir, we are at first names, don’t you?” Clive said.
“Kane, it will be, from now on.”
Clive and Edward Langley gave up their own names.
Kane gave a nod. “Please note that Giselle is my wife’s dear friend, Clive. We will ask her to tell us what she can, but she will take this news poorly. I ask you to help me break this to her. She is with child once more, and I am devoted to her welfare.”
“I understand,” Clive said with understanding for a man’s desire to protect a woman in any matter, especially one in a delicate condition.
A shot of concern zipped through him. His old fear reared its head, that he may not have been so careful of Giselle whenever they made love.
Though he had been diligent about withdrawing from her before his own climaxes, he had feared any failure, especially the first night they had enjoyed each other.
Since then, he’d been zealous about it. Still he worried. Now more than ever.
“Can you share with me why Lord Halsey has gone to Hastings?” Kane fretted, sitting forward, elbows on his knees. “I mean, does he have another reason besides the fact that he knows the town well?”
Clive quickly ran through the reasons. “Most important is that the three who abducted Giselle mentioned the town often as one from which they would take a packet to France. But Hastings,” he murmured, wishing he did not have to speak this next thought, “has another aspect. It is directly across from Boulogne-Sur-Mer.”
“You think they’re taking her to Bonaparte?” Kane ran a hand over his mouth in horror.
“It makes sense,” Clive admitted, his blood boiling with alarm. “Hell if I want to think it.”
“In the midst of the blockade?” Kane argued. “Foolish, deadly to try it.”