Chapter Eighteen
It was mildly depressing, Bernard could not help but think as he forced the door open—damn it, it always stuck—to see how little correspondence he had received since he had last been here.
“And I’ll send up a cup of tea, Mr. Kellan, and a few biscuits, and my newspaper from yesterday because I know you’ll want to—”
“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Emmerson!” Bernard called over his shoulder once he realized who on earth she was talking to. Right, he was Mr. Kellan in London. It was difficult to keep track. “But I’m quite all right, thank you!”
The rooms he rented from Mrs. Emmerson were not impressive, and they were not designed to be. He spent so little time here in London as Mr. Kellan, there had been no point in finding something refined. Besides, the wages of a spy for Her Majesty’s government rarely stretched to anything else.
Bernard shoved the door closed and turned to consider his surroundings.
Two rooms, that was all. His bedchamber was essentially large enough for a single mattress and that was it, but this room was larger. Two chairs by the fireplace, where a kettle sat over the empty grate. A small table pushed against the window, a chest of drawers beside it…and a lot of emptiness.
Bernard smiled ruefully. That was all he wanted. That was all he had thought he needed.
Still, it was a bit of a come down having spent the last six weeks living with an earl.
But this was home now; the damp patch in the corner, the peeling wallpaper by the door, the floorboards that creaked when one walked across them. This was home until he could find Hovell and get answers from the man.
He had to be here. If in doubt, go to London had always been Bernard’s approach to finding the damn man, and now he would have to hope he could do so again.
The man had a great number of questions to answer.
But in the meantime, Bernard considered as he leaned down to pick up the scarce correspondence that had arrived for him since he had been gone, the least he could do was review his letters.
There weren’t many. Four, after being away for three months. It was a little depressing, Bernard could not help but think as he dropped into the least-battered armchair by the empty fire. But then, living life as a spy did not exactly lead one to befriending many people on the way.
None whom he would want to own after he returned to his real life, anyway.
Bernard sighed. He knew that handwriting.
The note from Hovell was dated seven weeks ago, just before he had entered Brighton prison, and it was not particularly long.
Dixon—
This may not reach you in time, but I shall have to hope it does. Do not go to Brighton. Some complications. I can’t guarantee you won’t be transported as a real criminal.
Do not go to Brighton.
Hovell
Bernard blew out a long, slow, and ultimately startled exhale.
“Do not go to Brighton.”
Dear God, it all could have ended so differently. Instead of dining with an earl and his delightful daughter, he could have spent the last six weeks on a transportation ship, trying desperately to explain to anyone who would listen that he was no criminal, but a loyal subject and a spy.
He had to assume he would have received much the same response there as he had done from Lucy.
“How can I know you’re speaking the truth? How can I know that anything you’ve told me about yourself is true?”
Lucy.
Bernard had managed to prevent himself from thinking about her for at least an hour, which was a new record.
After bartering his way to London on the stagecoach—he’d accepted the borrowed shirt on his back but had felt bad about it, so he’d had to say goodbye to his relatively new boots, leaving him with these monstrosities with thin soles and only one bootlace—he had hoped that he would be able to leave Lucy precisely where she belonged.
In the past. In Brighton.
But she intruded on almost every hour of his life, waking or sleeping. Bernard rubbed his eyes, as though that could rid his mind of the memory of the woman. But no. She was intrinsic to him now, woven in the pattern of his life, the very fabric of his being a part of her.
And that meant he would never be whole again.
Bernard’s jaw tightened as he forced himself to look at the next letter. This handwriting he did not recognize, but the letter was almost as short as Hovell’s.
My lord,
I respectfully request that you return to your estate and meet with me and your steward to discuss the next five years’ management.
Yours respectfully,
Charles Vesner
Bernard muttered an oath. Yes, his man of business.
Or rather, the Viscount Moray’s man of business.
Mr. Vesner had to have been about seventy years old yet knew those hills and moors better than anyone.
This being his safest property and alias, he’d given his father’s man the address some years back.
He had to wonder if Mrs. Emmerson had questioned the “The Right Honble. the Viscount Moray” on the front of the envelope, though.
Someone had had to have read it to her for her to deliver it.
Or maybe she just recognized the apartment number and had shoved it under the door with the others.
Guilt gripped his stomach as he thought of the estate he had not seen for years. He would have to go back, he supposed. At some point.
The trouble was, a part of him had started to hope, perhaps even plan, a return that was not alone.
He could take Lucy up there, show her the hills upon which he had roamed as a boy.
It was perhaps a landscape as far from the beaches of Brighton it was possible to get, but it was his, not just because he owned it, but because he had been raised there.
Spent years wandering those moors, desperate not to be in that house, with a man who’d said nothing but had glared at any small noise…
The knock at the door disrupted his thoughts and prevented him from moving onto the next letter. “I said I didn’t want a cup of tea, Mrs. Emmerson!”
Another knock, this one more insistent.
“No tea, thank you!”
The knocking returned, this time urgent.
Bernard rolled his eyes. That was the trouble with landladies who actually cared about their tenants. She did always want to make sure he was comfortable. It made lying to her all the more difficult.
“The door’s open, Mrs. Emmerson.”
He did not bother to look around as the door screeched open, Bernard putting all his attention to the third letter, which appeared to be a bill for something he had not bought. Now how had that happened? Ah well, perhaps it was delivered to the wrong address.
“You mustn’t get into the habit of feeding me, Mrs. Emmerson,” Bernard said vaguely as he turned to the fourth letter. “I’ll be gone soon anyway, for… Well, for my work.”
“Back to Brighton?” came the quiet words of most definitely not Mrs. Emmerson.
Bernard moved in an instant. There was always a knife secreted down the side of his armchairs and he pulled it out in an instant, darting about and lowering himself on his haunches, giving him the best chance of—
His eyes widened as he straightened up. “Damn it, man, you’ve taken your time.”
Hovell clamped his lips together a moment, barely suppressing a smirk as he shoved the door shut behind him. “I could say the same about you.”
“Well, I wasn’t the one abandoned in Brighton, was I?” shot back Bernard, pulse starting to calm now that he could see it was merely his handler, not another assassin. Or worse, a Frenchman. “Where the hell have you been?”
He gestured at the seat he had just vacated, confident in the knowledge that the knife had been removed so Hovell could not use it against him.
At least, not Bernard’s own knife.
It was not that he did not trust the man, Bernard observed as said man dropped into the opposite chair and raised an inquisitive eyebrow. It was more that there were few people in the world he could entirely trust, and a man who lied for a living, like himself, was probably not one of them.
Hovell eased himself onto the seat with an easy grace that was disarming.
The man isn’t usually this suave, is he?
Bernard cast his mind back to the last time he had seen Hovell. It had been just like normal. The man had been wearing workman’s clothes, a little oil on his hands that hadn’t quite been wiped off. Bernard had always wondered if the man used it as a cover or was perhaps actually an engineer.
Either way, it had not mattered. Hovell had always been a quiet, unassuming man, the sort one could see several times and still struggle to describe.
He had always hunched, always grinned inanely even when giving quite serious instructions, and had once let slip that his first name was Obadiah, which was probably why he went by Hovell.
Bernard smiled. Even the man’s name was a tad unpleasant.
But his smile faded as he took in the version of Hovell who was seated before him. This was a very different man.
Hovell tapped his index fingers together in front of his face. “You look disconcerted.”
“I am,” Bernard said honestly, not seeing much point in hiding the truth. Where had that gotten him? All it had done was lose him Lucy. “You look…different.”
“‘Different’?” The man before him shrugged, and there was a looseness and a cavalier attitude that made Bernard’s neck prickle. “I will admit, it was quite a wrench, deciding not to dress up for you. I’ve got so accustomed to borrowing oil from Frank, though she doesn’t know I take it. Or why.”
Now Bernard’s stomach dropped. “Frank… ‘She’?”
“My sister,” said Hovell lightly.
What the devil did the man think he was doing, revealing a personal fact about himself to Bernard? Didn’t Hovell remember how they had always agreed to keep as much about each other a secret as possible?