Terror gave her strength. With a grunt, she swung her foot over the eave and hauled herself back onto the roof. She scrambled upright and stood, panting and silent, regarding Seward across the eight-foot-wide gulf.
He gazed mutely back. Then, slowly, mockingly, he lifted two fingers to his dark, scar-traversed brow and saluted her. Even at this distance she could see the self-scorn blazing in his gray eyes, as if he had been retaught a lesson he should have learned long ago and appreciated her instruction.
“Until next time.” Though she barely heard him, she understood the words to be a vow.
Next time?
Why? Why had Whitehall’s Hound been set on her trail? It seemed too extreme a measure to protect some wealthy aristocrat’s baubles, no matter how expensive they might be.
She stared at him, a slow surge of triumph replacing her earlier fright. She’d been betrayed by her body, not only by her reaction to Seward’s single, hot-mouthed kiss but by her desire to yield to him for the promise of a passion so heated it would sear the damning memories from her mind. Yet she’d won.
Across the narrow chasm, Seward inclined his head in gracious acceptance of his defeat. She could not let his gesture go unremarked.
Her smile was rife with anticipation as she snapped sharply forward at the waist, a perfect parody of an officer and a gentleman. Then she ducked back behind the chimney pot. She would disappear now. The paths open from here were myriad and secret and high above the plodding footsteps of guards and Bow Street Runners . . . and Jack Seward.
By morning the Wraith would be gone. In her place would be Anne Wilder, a wealthy member of the ton, a once-celebrated beauty now acting as a debutante’s doyenne ... a much-aggrieved widow. No one would ever suspect her.
Yet, even though Anne knew she was safe, she did not feel safe at all.
And, God help her, she liked the sensation.
Sir Robert Knowles thumbed through the papers on his desk as Henry Jamison and the two other men in the room awaited his attention. He was being purposefully irksome, Jamison thought. But just whom was he trying to provoke?
An undistinguished and benign-looking man, Knowles’s baby-pink scalp and the soft, pleated lines on his round face belied his character. Jamison knew he looked the complete antithesis: angular, imperious, and proud. It amused Jamison, during those rare moments when he allowed himself introspection, that such diverse looks could contain such similar personalities.
For thirty years Knowles and he had striven to best each other’s equally powerful and equally nebulous positions on the Home Office’s Secret Committee. Neither of them had a title for the posts they occupied, posts wherein they gathered information, thwarted certain plots, aided others, and gathered, manipulated, and manufactured information essential to the secret workings of the government.
Though Knowles currently held the upper hand, it would not last. It
could
not last. Because Jamison was destined for greatness. Not near greatness. Greatness itself.
Lately Jamison’s political influence had faltered, the strength of his personality alone no longer sufficient to carry out his directives. He needed others to see that his interests were advanced, his power secure. He needed Henry John Sewardthe most successful secret agent ever utilized by the British government.
“Have you discovered the thief’s identity?” Knowles asked without looking up.
“No, sir,” Seward said. “I have not.”
Jamison pressed his liver-spotted fingertips to his lips. Wryly he noted how Knowles’s purposefully intimidating desk did nothing to diminish Colonel Seward. He stood at spine-punishing attention before it.
“And why the blazes not?” the young Lord Vedder demanded. A precious little popinjay playing a far deeper game than he imagined, Lord Vedder had been brought into this meeting as the prince regent’s representative and stayed at Jamison’s sufferance. Popinjays, Jamison had long since learned, served their purposes.
“Because I have been occupied with other matters.” Jack gazed passively at Knowles. “A fellow called Brandeth, a situation needing my attention in Manchester. And then there was the Cashman debacle.” For a second anger brushed Jack’s words with coldness.
Knowles had recalled Seward from sabotaging the plots of the increasing number of angry political dissidents especially for the task of apprehending this “Wrexhall’s Wraith.” But if Jamison resented Knowles commandeering Seward, whom Jamison considered his personal agent, Seward resented being commandeered twice as deeply. Seward’s words were a clear reminderas if any were necessarythat he considered his current job trivial.
Brandeth had raised a small army on the Derby border, which Seward had anticipated. The Manchester affair had involved a far more ambitious plot, the storming of banks and prisons. Seward had infiltrated its leaders’ coven, obstructing the plan before it could come to pass.
Seward had been violently opposed to Knowles’s and Jamison’s locating somewhat tainted evidence against Cashman, so violently that ultimately he’d refused to become involved.
Lord Vedder knew none of this. Jamison wondered if he would treat Seward quite so negligently if he realized that, if Seward so desired, he could engineer Vedder’s death thrice times overwith little effort and less chance of being inconvenienced for it. Vedder adjusted his ridiculous chickenskin gloves, sniffed imperiously, and embarked on a tiresome tirade about Seward’s duty to his future king.
Jamison studied the agent’s reaction to Vedder’s harangue. Much as he expected, Seward didn’t appear to have one. For nearly a quarter of a century Jamison had observed Jack, watched him develop from sinewy youth to densely muscled manhood, observed his violent passion become iron-controlled civility.
Perfect manners coupled with absolute remorselessness. It was a disturbing combination. Seward might stand with the military exactitude that attested to the success of a strict disciplinarian, but his face reflected only a polite interest in Lord Vedder’s vitriol. An interesting creature, Colonel Seward.
Jamison, who’d a long history of manipulating others, had never known so enigmatic a man. It troubled him that he did not understand why Sewardthe most effective agent he’d ever harnessed to his willallowed himself to be used.
What would happen when Seward’s interest did not run in tandem with the Home Office’s Secret Committee? Or worse, Jamison wondered, his own?
“This is unlike you, Seward,” Jamison muttered, cutting off Vedder’s harangue.
The colonel’s gaze swung smoothly about. He’d known all along that Jamison had been studying him.
“Is it, sir?” Perfect sangfroid. Exceptional address. Etiquette, Seward had once told Jamison, was all that mattered. Ideologies waxed and waned, religions developed and eroded, political parties rose and fell from power. Only courtesy remained one of the few things valued by all civilized men.
Seward had gone so far as to suggest that the reason so few of the men he commanded died was because it was the least wasteful way to arrange things, the least repugnant to the sensibilities, the best
manners,
in fact. A man like that was frightening.
“It is unlike you to be so incompetent,” Jamison snapped, disliking this uncharacteristic alarm. “How do you propose to catch this thief if you cannot bring him in even after he steps into your own trap?”
Vedder slapped his gloves in his hand, demonstrating his ire. “He’ll want more men assigned to him, I suppose.”
“No, sir. Not a bit of it, sir.”
Damn Seward. In spite of all Jamison’s attempts to eradicate the last vestiges of his Scottish accent, he still clung to it.
“What then?” Lord Vedder asked.
“I would like entree into the prince regent’s social circle.”
“What?” Lord Vedder’s mouth dropped open.
“Be damned, one must admire your audacity,” Jamison said.
“I have been pursuing this thief for six months, sir. By anticipating his choice of victim, I gave myself a chance to catch him. It was an easy enough deduction. The Marchioness of Cotton is well known for carting her gems about to house parties.” His voice grew hoarser with each word. As a souvenir of having been hanged for two minutes by Napoleon’s “patriots,” Seward’s voice carried a slight raspiness. Today the effect was pronounced. “But as you say, I failed to apprehend the thief.”
Jamison noted the knuckles of Seward’s crippled hand gleamed like marble beneath the skin. Interesting. His failure to apprehend the thief bothered him. More than interesting, useful.
An emotionany emotionmight be honed, worked, used like a whip to drive him. And there were few enough scourges one found to drive the likes of Seward.
“I cannot predict the thief’s next victim other than that he will most probably be, like his predecessors, an intimate of His Royal Highness,” Seward went on. “If I am to catch this thief, I must be able to determine his victims. I will be better able to do so if I can observe who among the prince’s friends attracts notice, appears vulnerable to a thief.”
“Of all the gall!” sputtered Lord Vedder.
“What do you mean by entree?” Knowles asked, entering the discussion for the first time.
“The crimes are aimed at the ton who are in London for the opening of Parliament, not the innermost circle of the prince’s intimates,” Seward said.
“You would need only attend the larger parties and entertainments?” Knowles asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I believe”
“I cannot countenance such an imposition on His Royal Highness’s friends!” Lord Vedder shouted. “This man is a bastard.”
Knowles looked at him with distaste. “If the prince’s ‘friends’ continue to be robbed whenever they attend one of his parties, His Royal Highness may soon find himself dining alone.”
“You overstep yourself, sir,” Vedder declared indignantly.
Knowles raked back his scant white hair. “His Majesty’s demand that his friends no longer be targeted by this criminal was quite clear. Do you wish me to tell him you undermined our efforts to see this thief brought to justice because you objected to the circumstances of Colonel Seward’s birth?”
With a sound of choked fury, Lord Vedder snatched up his cane from the table and stormed from the room.
Knowles released a small sigh. “A pity we must tolerate him, but tolerate him we must. He serves to mask our real purpose in finding this thief.” He indicated a chair. “Won’t you sit, Jack?”
“No, thank you, sir.”
“Now, may I surmise that in addition to your failure to apprehend this thief, you have also failed to retrieve the letter?”
“Yes, sir,” Seward replied.
“Dammit, we can’t afford failure,” Knowles said. “Most disappointing, Jack. You had the thief right in the room with you, is this not true? What happened? Did he overwhelm you?”
“Yes.” The admission slipped out in a hushed, intense voice.
Jamison’s attention sharpened.
“Are you getting feeble then, Jack?” Knowles asked in concerned tones. “Should I send some youngster with you to act as your strength?”
“For the ‘youngster’s’ sake, I suggest not.” Though the words were delivered quietly and an apologetic smile curved Seward’s lips, the warning was clear.
Pride?
Jamison thought in amazement. No, this was a baser emotion. Jamison leaned forward, every faculty focused on Seward. He considered himself a master of discerning another’s heart, a skill he attributed to having no sentiment of his own clouding his judgment. Seward sounded . . . possessive.
“You
are
a bastard, Jack.” Knowles relaxed, satisfied with Seward’s response.
“Yes, sir. A fact Lord Vedder shall doubtless be tiresome in remarking.”
“What do you think, Jamison?” Knowles asked. They might not like each other, but their respect for each other’s acumen was extreme. Together they’d clandestinely orchestrated some of the Secret Committee’s greatest coups and barely avoided as many catastrophes.
“I think,” Jamison said, “it should have been done weeks ago.”
“I might find it beneficial were I to know more of this letter,” Seward said.
Knowles considered a moment before beginning. “This whole affair is most disconcerting, Jack. A while back I received a letter from Lord Atwood. In it he described how he’d come into the possession of a dangerous document. It had taken him quite some time to determine exactly what should be done with it and who had the proper authority to deal with such a sensitive issue.
“Apparently he’d already been in contact with Jamison here”Knowles glanced at Jamison, who nodded once“but wanted to reiterate to me the importance of this document he held.”
“Yes,” Jamison agreed. “He contacted me just before Knowles. An unnecessary redundancy. I’d already arranged to have the document delivered into our hands.”
Knowles shot him a thoughtful look. “Yes. But it never was. The day before it was to have been delivered, it was stolenalong with the jeweled case that Atwood told Jamison he kept it in.”
“And he informed Jamison of this theft?” Seward asked.
“Not Jamison, but an entire dinner party. The evening after the theft, he made a very public announcement that he was this Wrexhall Wraith’s latest victim.”
“Odd that he would have made so public a disclosure.”
“Not so odd,” Jamison disagreed. “He may have been telling the thief he knew his identity and giving him a chance to return the stolen property. This is one of the reasons we think the thief may be a member of society.”
“Why didn’t you ask Atwood who he suspected?”
“We never got the chance,” Jamison said. “The next morning Atwood was killed. In a coaching accident.”
“Accident,” Seward repeated.
Knowles nodded wearily. “Just so.”
Jamison waved his hand as if clearing a mist that threatened to obscure their real purpose. “The only questions that need concern you are these: Who was able to anticipate our last-minute arrangements for that letter’s recovery? Who knew Atwood was our courier? Who was at that dinner party?
Who has that damn letter?”
“Perhaps no one, sir,” Seward said.
“Explain yourself,” Knowles said.
“If this letter is as important as you say, it would have shown up by now. We may not have heard of it simply because the original theft was an accident and the thief only meant to steal jewels.”
It was a plausible explanation, Jamison thought. “I agree,” he said slowly. “If someone hired this thief to steal the letter, by now they would have either made its contents public or made some ransom demand.”
“We can’t be sure,” Knowles said. “And we
must
be sure. That is why it is imperative you catch this thief and discover what he has done with that letter.
“Let me make myself clear, Jack.” Knowles’s grandfatherly mien slipped, allowing a glimpse of the calculating and ruthless intelligence behind his mild features. “I do not care what you do, or how you do it, but you will find that thief and you will ascertain from him what happened to that letter.”
“And then?”
“And then,” Jamison said, “you will act accordingly.”