C Harris: Where Shadows Dance

“Mmm. Something that had nothing to do with those pesky upstart former colonials. Ross knew about your indiscretions with Yasmina Ramadani.”

Foley paused in the act of shoving his papers into a case. Then he very deliberately fastened the buckles and lifted the case off his desk. “Again, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He turned toward the door. “Perhaps we could continue this conversation at another time?”

Sebastian stood in the shadowy doorway of the Cat and Bagpipe, his gaze on the bustling, crowded flagway across the street. Tom held the chestnuts nearby.

They had not long to wait. A moment later, Sir Hyde Foley exited the Foreign Office and turned toward Whitehall. At the top of the street he paused for a moment to take a nervous look around. Then he turned right, walking quickly toward the hackney stand on Parliament Street.

Driving his curricle, Sebastian trailed the Undersecretary’s hackney through a snarled throng of wagons, carriages, and carts. Drivers shouted; horses snorted and sidled restlessly; dogs barked. He was careful to keep well back from his quarry, lest Foley chance to glance around and see him. As a result, he nearly lost him first on the Haymarket, then again on Piccadilly.

“Where is he going?” muttered Tom from his perch at the rear of the curricle as they followed Foley onto Park Lane.

“Wherever it is,” said Sebastian, “I doubt we’re going to find either Castlereagh or Liverpool awaiting him.”

They were just swinging onto Oxford Street, headed toward the Tyburn Turnpike, when Sebastian reined in hard. A milling herd of sheep filled the rutted roadway, the angry voices of their drover and the gatekeeper drifting over the plaintive chorus of baas and bleats.

“Four pence? Four pence, you say? Can’t you count? There’s thirty sheep ’ere, not forty!”

“You’re the one who can’t count! It’s four pence, I say.”

“Bloody hell,” swore Sebastian as he watched Foley’s hackney bowl away up Uxbridge Road. He handed the reins to Tom, along with ten pence for the toll. “Here. Follow as soon as you can.”

“Aye, gov’nor!”

Slipping past the toll gate on foot, Sebastian pushed his way through the last of the bleating, crowding sheep. Then he began to run, his Hessians kicking up little eddies of dust in the unpaved road.

From here, the vast acres of Hyde Park and Kensington stretched away to the south; to the north, facing the parklands across Uxbridge Road, rose the new blocks of St. George’s Row. But beyond that lay only the burial grounds, a few more scattered houses, and then the open fields of Paddington.

Where in the bloody hell was Foley going?

Then he realized the hackney was pulling up before the cemetery’s plain, small chapel. Sebastian slowed to a walk. As he watched, Foley paid off the jarvey, pulled his hat low, and strode quickly through the gates to the burial ground.

Sebastian followed him.

He was aware of an aged landau with two footmen parked farther up the leafy lane that ran along the far side of the burial ground. There was something vaguely familiar about the liveried coachman on the box, but Sebastian couldn’t place him.

Pausing in the shadows cast by the chapel’s high walls, Sebastian watched Foley slip from one monument to the next, being careful to keep to the long, rank grass rather than the graveled path.

What the hell was he doing?

Then Sebastian realized there was someone else in the cemetery, near a massive weeping willow that shaded what looked like the oldest section of graves. A small, slim woman in a gray walking dress trimmed at the neck with a narrow band of simple lace, she clutched a bulky gray reticule in one hand; a black silk patch covered her right eye.

Angelina Champagne.

Pressing himself flat against the chapel wall, Sebastian watched Sir Hyde Foley crouch behind a massive classically columned monument.

The Frenchwoman had paused beside one of the low, lichen-covered vaults. Much of the tomb’s weathered concrete surface had crumbled and fallen away, exposing the brick structure beneath. She cast a quick glance around. But the burial ground was quiet, the only sounds the breeze rustling the leaves of the willow and the cheerful chirping of an unseen sparrow high above them.

Stooping low, she stripped off her fine kid gloves, then eased one of the bricks from the old tomb’s lower course. It was obviously loose, for it came out easily. Setting it aside, she reached her hand into the small dark opening now revealed. From where he stood, Sebastian could see her stiffen.

She withdrew her empty hand and cast another darting look around.

“It’s nice to know that Yasmina told me the truth,” said Sir Hyde Foley, stepping out from behind the monument to stroll toward her. “In the end.”

Angelina Champagne held herself very still. “You killed her.”

“I did, yes. But before she died, she provided me with some very useful information.” He nodded to the tomb beside them. “The location of your drop point, for instance. The clever signal she used to let you know she’d left information there.” He paused. “And of course your identity as an agent of Napoléon. I suspect she hoped if she told me what I wanted to know, I might allow her to live. ”

Angelina Champagne let her head fall back, her remaining eye narrowing as she watched Foley walk up to her. “How did you discover that Yasmina’s motives for seducing you had nothing to do with your beaux yeux and everything to do with your propensity for bragging about your knowledge of state secrets?”

A quiver of fury, quickly contained, flickered across the Undersecretary’s sharp-featured face. “As it happens, Ross told me. He confronted me with his suspicions the day before he died. I denied everything, of course. I’m not certain he believed me, but it gave him pause.”

“Alexander knew?” She frowned. “How could he have known?”

“De La Rocque.”

“Ah.” She pushed carefully to her feet, her reticule and gloves clutched in her hands. “He was cleverer than I thought.”

“Not so clever in the end. The fool attempted to blackmail me. I had every intention of quietly silencing him myself, only someone else—you, perhaps?—was kind enough to take care of it for me.”

A faint whisper of a sound—like cloth shifting against cloth, or perhaps a soft kid shoe brushing against stone—drew Sebastian’s attention to one of the newer tombs that lay in the dappled shade of the willow. It was obvious that neither Angelina Champagne nor Sir Hyde Foley had heard anything. But then, Sebastian’s senses were unusually acute.

Squinting against the glare of the sun, he studied the tall young woman who stood motionless in the shade of the giant old willow. The glorious teal and yellow walking dress he’d admired earlier had been replaced by a more subdued muslin gown worn with a lightweight, moss green spencer and a small chip hat devoid of feathers. But it was undoubtedly his betrothed. He remembered the landau with the familiar coachman he’d noticed waiting in the lane and wondered what she had done with her maid.

He also wondered what the bloody hell she was doing here.

He heard Angelina Champagne say, “So it was you who killed Ross.”

Foley drew up beside her. “No. I assumed it was you.”

“I liked Alexander. And I had no reason to kill him.”

“But you would have killed him, had it become necessary. After all, you killed Lindquist.”

“We did.” She gave a wry smile. “Although in a sense, one could say that you did. If you hadn’t bragged about the gold transfers to Yasmina, we never would have known where to look for him.”