Chapter Six
Everything was more difficult than Diana had planned.
From the time the White Stags had recruited her, she’d expected orders about her betrothal to Jared. When the signal finally arrived, she spent months preparing her crew for the operation.
In her well-plotted scheme, Jared would have drunk himself into a stupor the night before the wedding.
Someone would have found him the next morning at Polly’s flat, providing a ton-approved reason to call off their engagement.
Diana would have escaped London for seclusion in Bristol and met up with the ship and cargo departing as scheduled, two days hence.
But plans were only perfect on paper. In execution, they were vulnerable to a traitor’s sabotage.
They also couldn’t account for the onslaught of emotions Diana had encountered in the space of a day. They couldn’t specify how her heart would twist when she met Jared’s son. Or the way it had fluttered when she’d grazed Ian’s cheek as she’d stolen his umbrella.
He was going to be livid when he found her.
That was, after all, her intent. She needed to determine how far he’d chase her.
The thrill of their future confrontation gave her a renewed strength as she stepped through the door of the Swan’s Nest.
It was larger than Diana’s sources had described. And more crowded. The dockworkers had ended their shift, and many were cashing in their coin for pints at the wood-topped bar that ran the length of the room.
The scent of hops and tobacco clung to the warm air, along with a salty aroma she associated with the water and ships, and men working. They were impossible to separate from her memories of her father.
In the years before his death, Harry Rives relentlessly indoctrinated her in the running of Rives Shipping.
The days in their dockside offices in Bristol and London were often grueling.
Many of the men overtly resented her presence in meetings.
They called her a distraction. One fool had possessed the gall to suggest she was a pretty little lapdog.
Diana had planned to make his life misery, but her father had repeated the comment in passing to Ian, and within a week, the pig was indentured on a long and unforgiving passage to Hong Kong, without a return ticket, courtesy of Holt there was no time to bicker with him. She nodded to the table at the center of the room. “The man with the silver hair. Tell me about him.”
“He’s a new face.” Ian slid a glance at the group. “The men at that table run with the Skinner’s Lane Lads.”
The South London street gang had fingers in many pockets. They held a prominent place on the Stags’s watch list.
“That lot handles commissions for hard-to-find items. Antiquities, artifacts. Gems,” Ian added.
His eyes flicked to the lace that hid the necklace.
“There’s a rumor they are working for peers who are advocating for Parliament to repeal the Pharmacy Act.
Many sitting members of the House of Lords have significant investments in Indian opium.
They stand to gain millions if there were fewer regulations on where people can get the stuff. ”
If the repeal succeeded, it would make the Stags’s mission more difficult. And treacherous. “Suppliers who deal in opium often traffic in other things,” Diana ventured.
Neither of them said people, but the word hung between them.
“It’s probable then,” she went on, “that Jared could have met one of those men here last night, and they slipped him the drug. By compromising his judgment, they could gain the upper hand in their dealings.”
This explanation was preferable to the possibility that one of Diana’s own crew was acting off script, for reasons she didn’t want to contemplate.
“Now, ’ere ya go, luvies.” The barmaid finally returned with their drinks and made a special show of reaching over the bar to wipe off Ian’s glass before handing it to him.
When he paid her, he placed an extra shilling in her palm. “My lady friend here lost one of her earbobs here last night. We’re trying to track it down. Were you working?”