Much Ado About Rogues. Kasey Michaels
Читать онлайн книгу.
scowling more than usual, Jack. Is there a problem?”
Jack was still reading. “You could say that. It would seem the Marquis de Fontaine has gone missing.”
“Really? Haven’t heard that name in a while. Your mercenary mentor in the dark arts during the war, wasn’t he? And then there was that business with you and his daughter. Tess, correct? You never said, but I’m assuming that ended badly.”
“He doesn’t talk about it, no,” Dickie told Will quietly when Jack didn’t answer, but only replaced the page and closed the satchel.
“Still, the war’s over, more’s the pity, or else we’d still be hunting adversaries more worthy of our time than overly ambitious clerks, and de Fontaine has been pensioned off, or whatever we do with mercenaries we no longer need. So what does Liverpool care if the fellow’s taken a flit?”
Dickie carefully stepped over the late, overly ambitious Miles Duncan as Jack led the way out of the alley. “Old secrets or new, they’re probably all the same to Liverpool, yes, Jack?”
“Governments never want to give up their secrets,” Jack answered shortly. The mention of Tess, coming out of the blue along with seeing her father’s name, had set off a cascade of memories he’d rather stay dammed up behind the stone wall he’d built for them in his brain.
“So what are they going to do about the missing marquis, Jack?” Will asked as they climbed into the unmarked coach waiting at the end of the alley.
“Find him,” Jack said at last. “Liverpool’s memorandum to his secretary concerns my next small project for the Crown. It has been decided that, since I know him best, I’m to be asked to find Sinjon.”
“Liverpool wants to know what he might be up to since they set him out to pasture? That seems reasonable enough,” Will said, settling back against the squabs.
“Yes, reasonable enough. Find him. Question him,” Jack said, twisting the gold-and-onyx ring on his right index finger as the image of Tess’s sad, beautiful face seemed to float in front of him inside the dark coach. “And then, for the good of king and country, eliminate him.”
CHAPTER ONE
LADY THESSALY FONTENEAU sat perched on the window seat, her slim frame and riot of tumbling blond curls outlined by the sun shining through the windowpanes behind her.
Her long legs, encased in high, dark brown leather boots and tan buckskins, were bent at the knee, her heels pressed against a low stool shaped like a camel saddle. She was leaning slightly forward, her arms akimbo, her palms pressed against her thighs, her face in shadow. The white, full-sleeved lawn shirt she wore had been sewn for a larger frame, and rather billowed around her above the waistband, the deep V of the neck exposing the soft swell of breasts beneath the worn brown leather vest.
Just above her breasts hung the oval gold locket suspended from a thin golden chain. A pair of painted images were inside, one old, one newer, both painted by the marquis himself. The locket had hung from a black velvet ribbon until her father had pointed out that one should never wear a weapon in aid of the enemy: a thin chain will break, but a tightly knotted ribbon makes for a tolerable garrote.
She possessed the sort of classic beauty artists wept to paint. Aristocratic, finely boned. Gallic to the marrow. Yet with an air of sensuality about her, in those high cheekbones, that slim, straight nose, the wide, tempting mouth, those darkly lashed hazel eyes.
Those eyes, awash now with tears she refused to let fall.
“Where, Papa?” she breathed, surveying the shambles that was once the Marquis de Fontaine’s neat study, now searched to within an inch of destroying it completely. Her anger, her frustration, her growing fear, it was all there in the aftermath of her latest search, evidence as damning to her as would be a bloody knife in her hand as she stood over a body. “There has to be something. You would have left me something.”
Tess had instituted her search of the modest manor house a week ago, the day after her father’s disappearance. She’d been slow, neat, methodical, as she’d been taught to be.
She’d begun with the servants, who either knew nothing or said nothing. You never knew with servants, where their loyalty truly stood, if anywhere. Her papa had never employed any of the staff for long, as familiarity invited a relaxation of one’s guard; a paper carelessly left on the wrong side of a locked drawer, an unguarded word spoken at the table, with a servant still in the room. Always assume you are among enemies, he’d advised. It’s safer than relaxing with those you think friends.
It had been a trusted servant who had betrayed her father all those long years ago, he’d told her, and the marquis’s beloved Marie Louise who had paid the terrible price for her husband’s indiscretion.
No, the servants knew nothing, save for the one who had immediately reported the marquis’s absence to London. She’d known about that within days, having gone to the village to beg to be allowed more credit at the grocers until the end of the quarter, only to return home with a woefully inept government tail wagging behind her.
There had been no reason to dismiss the servants now, or to bother ferreting out the one who had tattled to Liverpool. Whomever she’d hire, one of them would be there expressly to spy on her. Save for Emilie, who had come with them when they’d escaped Paris all those years ago. Thank God for Emilie.
And no reason to hide the fact that she didn’t know where her father had gone, or why he’d left, or if he’d ever be coming back. Indeed, it was imperative that she let everyone see her lack of knowledge as to what her father might be planning or doing at this very moment. Her safety depended on her ignorance. That’s why she’d found no note, was given no warning. He’d been protecting her.
“But he would have left me something, something to assure me he’s all right,” Tess said aloud, pushing away the stool in a renewed burst of energy and getting to her feet. “I’m just not seeing it, that’s all.”
Pulling a key from her vest pocket, she approached the special cabinet the marquis had ordered built into the room, and inserted it in the lock. She pulled the glass doors open to reveal shelving holding various artifacts her father had bought or traded for over the past two decades. His treasures, he called them, some of them Roman, some Greek, most Egyptian. Bits of stone, chipped clay bowls, a small carved idol of some long-forgotten god, an ancient pipe with a broken stem. The prized possessions of a man who had traded in his love of things ancient and turned his mind, his talents, to revenge, a man at last left with nothing save these ancient, inferior relics of what had been. And a reminder of all this small family could afford, when the Marquis de Fontaine had once claimed one of the premier collections of ancient relics in all of France.
Tess hadn’t touched any of these prized possessions during her earlier searches, but they were all that was left. Her last chance.
One by one, she lifted the items from the shelves. She looked at them from every angle before depositing each piece on the desktop, her frustration building until it took everything within her not to throw the very last item, the broken pipe, into the fireplace.
Because there’d been nothing. Nothing. She put her palms on the bottom shelf and leaned her head against the edge of another, her position one of abject defeat.
“Second shelf, the left end of it. Lift it… there’s a button there. Push it, and then close the doors and step back.”
Tess couldn’t breathe. Every muscle in her body had turned to stone; heavy, immovable. Her mouth went dry, her heart stopped, then started again, each beat hurting. Hurting so bad. It was a voice she hadn’t heard in nearly four years but would never forget, could never forget. She heard it nightly, in her dreams. I love you, Tess. God help me, I love you. Let me love you…
“You?” she asked, not moving. “They sent you? That’s almost funny, Jack. The student, sent to find the master. And you came, you agreed, knowing what could be at the end of the day