C Harris - Where Shadows Dance

“Hero , ” wailed Sabrina, her legs buckling beneath her, her face slack with terror.

Hero’s maid, Marie, had come to an abrupt halt a few feet away, her eyes wide in a sickly pale face.

“It’s all right,” Hero told Sabrina calmly. “They won’t hurt you.” She cast a quick glance at her abigail. “Marie, stay where you are.”

She was aware of the showy grays coming to a stop beside them. The door of the ancient carriage flew open. Another man—his buff coat well tailored but ill fitting, his cravat clumsily tied—leapt out to seize Hero’s arm in an ungentle grip. “Yer comin’ wit’ us,” he hissed. He tried to drag her back toward the carriage, but he was a good head shorter than Hero, and slight.

“I will not,” she said.

The first man pulled back the hammer of his pistol. “Do what yer told.”

“Hero!” screamed Sabrina, lunging against his hold.

“I’ll go with you on two conditions,” said Hero.

“Oh, ye will, will ye?” jeered the buff-coated man, shoving his beard-roughened, tobacco-stained face unappetizingly close to hers. “And what are yer conditions , yer ladyship?”

“My cousin is allowed to leave safely.”

The black-coated man with the pistol laughed. “And?”

Hero glanced down at the broken, dirt-encrusted nails digging into the fine cloth of her walking dress. “You take your filthy hand off my arm.”

S ebastian arrived in Berkeley Square to find the Jarvis household in an uproar.

“What the devil is going on?” he demanded when the harried butler finally answered his peal.

“I beg your pardon, my lord,” said Grisham, his normally impassive face ashen, “but I am not at liberty to—”

“If that’s Devlin,” boomed Lord Jarvis’s gravelly voice from the back of the house, “send him in. Now.”

Sebastian followed the butler through a hall filled with milling servants, Bow Street Runners, and the steely-eyed, former-military-looking types Jarvis tended to favor for doing his dirty work. From somewhere abovestairs came the sound of hysterical weeping that inexplicably raised the hairs on the back of Sebastian’s neck.

Lord Jarvis stood before the great empty hearth of his library, surrounded by a throng similar to that in the hall. “Leave us,” he snapped. He waited until the others had filed from the room, then shut the door and said to Sebastian, “Hero has been taken. She was walking with her cousin in the park when they were set upon. It appears that at least two men were involved, plus a coachman.”

Sebastian knew a strange numbing sensation of disbelief. As if from a great distance, he heard himself say, “Both young women were seized?”

Jarvis shook his head. “Only Hero—and her abigail. Not Miss Cox.”

Sebastian took a deep breath, and when that didn’t help the sudden, crushing ache in his chest, he took another. “Their object is obviously not ransom,” he said, walking over to pour himself a brandy. His voice came out calm, even cold, but the hand that reached for the carafe was not quite steady.

“Obviously,” snapped Jarvis. The Jarvises might be an ancient and powerful family, but most of their wealth was tied up in land. For anyone interested in extorting a fortune, Miss Cox would have been the more logical target.

Sebastian sloshed a generous measure of amber liquid into a glass. “Is it an attempt to influence you on some looming policy decision, do you think?”

“I’ve received no demands.”

Sebastian threw him a long, cold look. “I’ll take you at your word.”

A flare of rage, primitive and uncharacteristically out of control, flared in the big man’s eyes. “Damn you, you impudent bastard. This is my daughter we’re talking about. My daughter .”

Sebastian stared across the room at his prospective father-in-law. Once, he would have said that Charles, Lord Jarvis cared about nothing beyond his own power and the security of England and the House of Hanover. In that, Sebastian now realized, he’d been mistaken.

“I will remind you,” he said quietly, “that she is also my affianced wife.” And the mother of my unborn child.

“This is because of you.” Jarvis punched the air between them with an accusatory finger. “You and this mad, quixotic quest of yours for ‘justice.’ You have no idea what you’ve mixed yourself up in this time. No idea whatsoever.”

Sebastian set aside his brandy untasted. “What the devil are you saying? That Ross was involved in something else ? Something more than the transfer of gold to the Swedish government?”

Jarvis clenched his jaw so hard, the muscles along his cheek line bulged.

Sebastian took a step toward him, then forced himself to draw up short. “ Goddamn you. Tell me. Hero’s very life may well depend upon it!”

Jarvis’s nostrils flared on a deep, angry breath. “The first and fifteenth of every month, the French Minister of War provides Napoléon with what is called the Survey of the Situation of the French Army.”

“Which contains what?” snapped Sebastian.

“Numerical changes in the French divisions. Billeting changes. A list of appointments to command posts. That sort of thing.”

“And?”

“For some time now, a certain individual serving on the General Staff has been making copies of these briefings, which he passes to a Parisian bookseller with a stall near the Pont Neuf. From there they progress to the coast, where smugglers carry them across the channel. Until yesterday, they then passed into the hands of a defrocked émigré priest.”

“Antoine de La Rocque.”

“Yes.”

Sebastian studied the big man’s closed, angry face. “That’s why de La Rocque visited Ross the Wednesday before he died? He was delivering the latest dispatch?”

“Yes.”

“And then what? What typically happened to the briefings after that?”

“Generally, such documents are turned over to a dedicated section of the Foreign Office, where they are copied and studied. It’s a two- or three-day process. After that, copies are distributed to the representatives of a few select allies ... and certain friendly governments.”

It was all, finally, beginning to make sense. Sebastian said, “You mean, friendly governments such as that of the Czar.”

“Amongst others, yes.”

“Let me guess,” said Sebastian. “The Russian who typically collected the copies of the dispatches from Ross was Colonel Dimitri Chernishav.”

Jarvis gave a brief, curt nod. “Their meetings excited little attention, given the long-standing friendship between them. Chernishav was scheduled to receive the dispatches Saturday night. But the transfer was never made.”

“So what happened to the copies of the briefing Ross had in his possession when he died?”

“They disappeared.”

Sebastian went to stare out the window overlooking the garden, one hand resting on the long library table. He was aware of a white-hot rage coursing through him, stoked by fear and guilt and a confused tumult of emotions he had no time now to analyze. “What have you discovered about the men who took her?”

“Precious little. That fool girl, Sabrina, was hysterical by the time she reached the house. A nursemaid tending some children nearby saw the entire thing but wasn’t much better. All we have at the moment is a hazy description of an antiquated carriage pulled by a pair of showy dapple grays and driven by an aged, liveried coachman. That, and contradictory descriptions of two men who were not gentlemen but were dressed as if they were.”

Sebastian swung to face him. “If there’s anything you’re not telling me— anything!— I swear to God, I’ll—”