Stephanie Laurens - A Lady of His Own

Someone had wanted information from Gimby, information Gimby either had refused to give or hadn’t known to give. He’d been beaten until his interrogator had been sure there was no more to learn, then Gimby had been dispatched, his throat cut with, it seemed, a single stroke.

Charles rose, his gaze going to Penny. “There’s nothing we can do, other than inform the authorities.”

Waving her back, he joined her, pulling the door closed on the dead youth, careful to keep buried all signs of the deep unease flooding him.

“He was murdered, wasn’t he?” Penny said. “How long ago?”

A good question. “At least yesterday, possibly the day before.”

She swallowed; her voice was thready. “After we started asking questions.”

He reached for her hand, gripped hard. “That may have nothing to do with it.”

She glanced at him; he saw in her eyes that she believed that no more than he. At least she didn’t look to be heading for hysterics.

“What now? Who should we tell?”

He paused, considering. “Culver’s the local magistrate—I’ll ride over and inform him first thing in the morning. There’s no sense in rousing him and his staff at this hour—there’s nothing anyone can do now that won’t be better done in daylight.” He looked at Penny, caught her eye. “Incidentally, you aren’t here.”

Her lips tightened, but she nodded. She glanced back at the cottage. “So we just leave him?”

He squeezed her hand again. “He’s not really there.” He drew in a breath, filling his lungs with cleaner air, noting the faint breeze rising off the estuary. “Before we go, I want to look at his boats.”

Leaving that to the morning was a risk he was no longer prepared to take. Someone else was there, someone with training similar to his own.

Someone with a background similar to his own.

He didn’t let go of Penny’s hand. Towing her with him, he checked she’d tied the horses securely, then crossed the track to the river. They were both local-born; they knew what they were searching for—a tiny inlet, a miniature cove, a narrow gorge cut by a minor stream—some such would be the Smollets’ mooring place.

They found it a hundred yards upriver, an inlet carved by a minor stream just wide enough for a boat and heavily overhung by the arching branches of the trees that at that spot marched down almost to the river’s edge.

The rowboat, moored to a heavy ring set in a tree trunk, bobbed on the rising tide. A quick glance inside revealed nothing more than the usual fisherman’s clutter—ropes, tackle, two rods, assorted nets, and two lobster pots.

Charles turned his attention to the second boat, hauled up out of the water and lashed to trees fore and aft. One glance and his eyes widened; the old sailor hadn’t been embellishing—the craft was a superb piece of work, sleek and trim. Under sail, it would fly.

Penny had already gone to it. When he came up, she was sitting on a log beside the prow; with one hand she was tracing, it seemed wonderingly, the name painted there.

Charles hunkered down beside her. Julie Lea . The name meant nothing to him.

“It’s my mother’s name.”

He glanced at Penny; he couldn’t see well enough to read her eyes. He reached for her hand, simply held it.

“Her name was Julie—everyone knew her as that, just Julie. Only my father ever called her by both her names—Julie Lea.”

He stayed beside her, let a few minutes tick by, then rose. “Stay there. I need to search inside.”

Not as easy as with the rowboat; the yacht, for it was that, just a very small one, had a canvas cover lashed over it. The knots were sailors’ knots; he unraveled those at the stern, then peeled the cover back.

Mast, rigging, sails, oars—all the necessary paraphernalia. But he suspected there would be more. Eventually, he found what he was looking for; leaning into the yacht, reaching beneath the forward bench, he pulled out a crumpled bundle of line and material, a set of signals.

Penny saw; she stood, dusting off her breeches as he strung out the line. She came around the boat to peer at the flags, colored squares carrying various designs. “What are they? I don’t recognize them.”

He hesitated, then said, “French naval signals.” He recognized enough to be sure. “Flying these, the yacht wouldn’t need to make actual contact with any French ship, just come within spyglass sight of them.”

Penny reached out and tapped one flag. “And this?”

Charles paused, then said, “You know what that is.”

She nodded. “The Selborne crest.” Drawing breath was suddenly difficult. “How could they?”

He regathered the flags, bundling them up. Evenly said, “We don’t yet know exactly what they did.”

She felt her face harden. “Yes, we do. Whenever Amberly gave Papa a secret worth selling, he sent Smollet out to sail close to the Isles, running these signals in sight of some French ship. The flags told the French when and where to send the lugger, and then Papa went out with one of the smuggling gangs and spoke with some Frenchman and gave our enemies English government secrets in exchange for pillboxes. Later, when it was Granville, he sent Gimby to fetch the French—and now Gimby’s been murdered.”

Disgust and revulsion colored her words, the emotions so strong she could almost taste them.

“Actually”—Charles’s voice, in contrast, was cool, his tones incisive—“while your mechanism is almost certainly correct, we don’t yet know what they were passing.”

“Something the French were willing to pay for with jeweled antiquities—you’ve seen the pillboxes.” She looked away.

“True, but—” He thrust the bundled flags into her hands, then caught her arms, forcing her to look at him. “Penny, I know this type of game—I’ve been playing it for the last thirteen years. Things are often not what they seem.”

She couldn’t read his eyes, but could feel his gaze on her face.

His grip gentled. “I need to send a messenger to London—there’s a possibility Dalziel might not have checked. You heard Dennis Gibbs. Your father might have been involved in something deeper than the obvious.”

He was trying to find excuses so she wouldn’t feel so devastated, so totally betrayed by her father and brother. It was an actual pain in her chest, quite acute. Charles was trying his best to ease it, but…numbly, she nodded.

She watched while he covered the yacht and lashed the canvas down. Grateful for the dark; grateful for the quiet. She felt dreadful. She’d had her suspicions, not just recently but for years; over the last months, it seemed every few weeks she’d discover something more, uncover something worse that painted her father and brother in ever-more-dastardly shades.

In some distant recess of her mind, she was aware that her deep-seated reaction to the whole notion of treason was tied up with what she’d felt—if she was truthful still felt—for Charles. The idea that her father and brother could, purely for their own gain, have done things that would have put Charles and those like him in danger—even more danger than they’d already faced—rocked her to her core, filled her with something far more violent than mere fury, something far more powerful and corrosive than disdain.

Charles straightened, checked his knots, then tested the ropes holding the yacht. She wondered vaguely at the fate that had landed her there, a hundred yards from her brother’s fishing friend who’d almost certainly been murdered for his part in their scheme, with the evidence of their perfidy in her hands—and it was Charles beside her in the night.

“Come on.” He lifted the signals from her, took her arm. “Let’s go home.”