Chapter Eleven
BETWEEN THE SOUP and fish courses, Lavinia struck on a plan. It wasn’t a very good one, but it was a plan nonetheless, and she’d take inspiration as it came. The conversation at the table centered mostly around the rising price of coal and the difficulties the three mill owners present—Wark, Parris, and Rothesman—were having with a group of reformers who dared to suggest that their workers might be healthier if they had a shortened working day. Douglas joined in from time to time, but he spent most of the dinner making quiet asides to Mrs. Wark. No one seemed to expect Lavinia to contribute much. Normally this might’ve bothered her, but that left her to do what she suspected Andrew would’ve done if he was in her situation and play out various scenarios in her head, trying to predict the outcomes should they arise. Really, though, what she needed was decent timing and the reliability of human behavior to make this plan work.
After a pair of footmen cleared the mutton away, nearly crashing into one another as they worked, Mrs. Wark instructed that the next course, pheasant, be brought in. Lavinia drew in a deep breath. This was her best chance, while there were still enough courses to come that the dinner would continue on for some time. If she was going to act, it was going to have to be now.
She reached for her wineglass and took a sip. Then, making her hand tremble, she struggled to set it back on the table. Douglas noticed immediately.
“Mrs. Parkem, are you well?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said shakily. “I just— Forgive me.”
She made as though to stand, pushing her chair back from the table. The men all jumped to their feet as she collapsed, sweeping her remaining knives to the floor as she went.
She fell harder than she’d expected, hitting her head on the rounded edge of the table. It throbbed something fierce, but she kept her eyes screwed shut and forced her body to go limp. If this was going to work, she needed them to take her off to a quiet part of the house. She needed them to believe that she’d fainted dead away.
“Mrs. Parkem!” she heard Wark shout amid a great scraping of chairs and clattering of men’s shoes against the floor. In a rather dispassionate voice, Mrs. Wark told the butler to send a footman for a doctor while someone crouched next to her.
A hand—Wark’s, if she had to lay money on it—rested on her shoulder and she was shaken gently. The motion ground one of the steel bones of her corset into her hip and nearly made her gasp.
“Mrs. Parkem,” said Wark, trying to rouse her.
“Best to give her some space,” said a man she thought was probably Harrison.
“He’s right, my dear,” said Mrs. Wark, her tone still dry. “You don’t want to crowd the woman when she’s fainted.”
“We should get her up off the floor though,” said Douglas. “Is there a sofa she can rest on?”
“The yellow bedroom,” said Wark immediately. “Take her there.”
“Really, Harold, she’ll be just fine in the drawing room. The yellow bedroom hasn’t been aired for guests,” said Mrs. Wark.
But her son either didn’t hear her or didn’t care to pay her any heed. “Donaldson, tell the maids to bring water and cloths for the cut on Mrs. Parkem’s head.”
So that was why her head hurt so badly, she thought as she felt herself being lifted up into the air. She kept her body slack so that her head lolled away from the man’s chest and her arms fell away.
“Mother, perhaps you would like to assist me in attending to Mrs. Parkem,” said Wark.
There was a hesitation, but at last she heard the scrape of a chair against the parquet wood floor. “Of course. If you gentlemen will excuse me.”
Lavinia bumped along as she was carried through the house and up a flight of stairs. She heard a door open and a rush of cool air hit her.
“Why isn’t there a fire in this room?” Wark barked.
“Because I told you, it hasn’t been opened for guests. No one is supposed to be using it, Harold. Really,” said his mother.
“When I announced that we would use the yellow bedroom, I expected that someone would have gotten it into his bloody skull to jump to it and prepare it. What is the point of employing so many footmen if not a one is trained to do his job?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Footmen do not lay fires or air bedrooms.”
“The only thing ridiculous is that we keep four of them. Not even your Mr. Douglas’s Duke of Livingston has so many regularly employed. And not a one is any use right now when Mrs. Parkem has fallen ill.”
“She’s just fainted,” said Mrs. Wark. “She probably laced herself too tightly. Who knows when the last time she wore an evening gown was.”
If she hadn’t still been pretending to be unconscious, Lavinia might have arched a brow at that, true though it was.
She was just being laid out on a soft surface she could only assume was a bed when Donaldson’s voice came from a few feet away. “Here are the water and towels that you requested, sir. The doctor has been sent for.”
The sound of enamel clicking against wood and the slosh of water was followed by Mrs. Wark. “There. You’ve done more than enough. You can go back to your guests now.”
“No,” said Wark. “Her wound needs to be attended to. And build up that fire.”
“My apologies, sir. Evie is here with the taper,” said Donaldson.
“Give me that,” said Mrs. Wark fiercely. Suddenly there was a soft, damp cloth being pressed against her throbbing head. For all that she knew the woman hated her, Lavinia couldn’t fault Mrs. Wark for her nursing. Her hostess had a gentle touch, which was good, because Lavinia wasn’t sure she could’ve held back her reaction if Mrs. Wark had pressed down on the cut.
“There,” said Mrs. Wark. “The doctor won’t even need to apply stitches.”
“There was so much blood,” Wark muttered somewhat sheepishly.
“Head wounds always bleed far more than they should. Now, Harold, you’re making a fuss over nothing. Mrs. Parkem will be fine. She’s had too much to drink or she’s overexcited. It happens to ladies all the time.”
“I thought you said her corset was too tight,” he sneered.
“That too!” cried his mother. “You have guests to attend to, or are you forgetting the importance of tonight?”
There was a pause and then Wark said, “We can postpone the discussion of plans until another date.”
Yes, the plans! Talk more about the plans right here in this bedroom! she wanted to yell.
“No,” said his mother firmly. “There is too much at stake for you to put this off, and you’re running out of time. Everything must be perfect. We’ll go downstairs and you can come back up when the doctor arrives. If she awakens, she can ring the bell pull, assuming she’s ever used one before.”
Wark started to protest, but then his mother added, “The cause is far more important than any one of us, and certainly more important than her.”
“Fine,” he muttered at last. “But I will attend her when the doctor arrives.”
“Do you as you wish, but don’t squander this night,” said his mother.
Two sets of carpet-dampened footsteps receded from the room, and the door clicked shut behind them. Lavinia lay still on the bed for as long as she dared before slowly opening her eyes.
The dim room was crowded with overwrought, gilded furniture but empty of people. As quietly as she could, she swung her legs to the ground. Sitting up made her head swim, but when she touched her fingers to the wound they came away with hardly a trace of blood. In all likelihood, the bruise would be wicked but the cut would be hardly more than a scratch.
Her heart rattled against her chest as she tried to calm herself enough to think. She had only a short amount of time in which to find Wark’s study. The bedroom where she lay was silent save for the pop of the freshly lit fire that hadn’t yet begun to throw off any substantial heat, and she couldn’t hear any sounds in the corridor beyond the closed door. That was good. The bedroom, just like Wark’s study, would be set apart from the house’s public rooms, probably on a lower floor. Still, she had to avoid everyone in a house swarming with guests and servants. In fainting, she’d bought herself time, but now she was supposed to be an invalid and awaiting a doctor. There would be no excuse to explain away her wandering the halls if she was caught.
Lavinia lifted her chin with as much defiance as she could muster. She’d survived a miserable marriage and paid off her husband’s debt. She’d moved to a new city where she’d known no one except her brother and grown a business that had, over the years, slowly acquired a loyal set of patrons who kept her on the right side of profitable. She’d made a life for herself when once it had seemed as though her life would be no larger than the boundaries of Eyemouth. She could do anything.
Moving as quietly as she could, she crossed the room and opened the door, praying that it wouldn’t squeak. The hinges gave without a groan. A good start.
There was no one in the hallway when she stuck her head out the door. The hall was long and lined with doors. Panic tugged at her nerves, but she tried her best to push it away. Think. She had been in the drawing room and the library on the first floor, and there were at least four other doors farther along the corridors on that floor. One of them was likely to be Wark’s study.
Forcing herself to put one quiet foot in front of another, Lavinia crept along until she reached the stairs. With a rustle of silk, she descended and skipped past the first door to the drawing room. She opened the second and found herself in a darkened room with a large circular table in it. A morning room, most likely. She shut the door quickly and moved on.
The second door revealed what was undoubtedly a study, done up just as she’d imagined, in deep hunter green with a set of leather club chairs and a massive desk.
Shutting the door silently behind her, she glanced at the huge grandfather clock in the corner. It was twenty-eight past nine. Knowing she likely had just minutes, she hurried to the desk.
It was surprisingly messy, but all the better for her. She doubted Wark would keep any truly sensitive papers out in the open, but there was a chance that he had been sloppy with something he deemed less important that could tip her off as to what his plans were.
She sorted through a stack of papers outlining various events that the Prince of Wales would attend or be honored at. A military tattoo, a school opening, the dedication of a ship in a Glasgow shipyard. The pages were marked up in the handwriting she recognized, from his mother’s dress bills, as Wark’s.
Next was a stack of articles cut out from the Lothian Herald-Times and the Edinburgh Record about all aspects of the prince’s visit, including a history of royal visits, an account of the food that would be served at the arrival luncheon, an etching of the royal coach, and a rather overwritten description of the royal household’s livery and the responsibilities of the servants who traveled with the family. Every bit of the visit had been scrutinized and written to death about in anticipation, and it appeared Wark was an avid reader of it all.
She lifted the heavy leather cover of Wark’s bankbook and saw nothing more than the usual withdrawals for cash and payments to two tailors—both considerably cheaper than she would’ve thought a showy man like Wark would patronize—and a bookmaker of no particular reputation. Perhaps he needed to economize. The thought gave her a petty but considerable amount of pleasure.
Chewing on her bottom lip, she began to open drawers. Her search of the right side came up with the Wark Woolens account books and paper for personal correspondence. There was a stack of letters too. Her pulse quickened when she realized that a few were about the prince’s visit and dated from the previous week. She scanned them, looking for anything that might be helpful, but most detailed the mundane details of a royal visit.
His Royal Highness will progress by carriage from the Duke of Livingston’s home, where the prince will dine before the ball, at 19:45. The carriage, attended by the four footmen of the prince’s household as well as the driver, shall be held at the ready for the prince’s departure.
Members of the committee and other dignitaries shall be received by the prince between 20:15 and 20:30. The prince should be greeted as “Your Royal Highness,” but subsequently can be addressed as “sir.” Guests are reminded to keep their compliments to His Royal Highness to a minimum.
His Royal Highness shall open the ball with a quadrille. His partner shall be the Duchess of Roxburghe.
A light refreshment shall be served at midnight.
While all of this was good information that she would relay to Andrew, none of it was anything he wouldn’t have been able to find out for himself when speaking to the committee or the prince’s household.
In the left side of the desk, Lavinia found a stack of handwritten receipts and a rolled-up tube of paper. Undoing the ribbon, she spread it out over the desk. They were an architect’s blueprints for one of the small mews houses built behind some of the bigger houses in the New Town. This one appeared to have been constructed some time ago, but a set of penciled-in notes about removing a wall to the connecting building showed that Wark appeared to be interested in making modifications. Perhaps he intended to purchase another carriage.
She opened the next drawer and a scrap of paper fluttered to the ground. Stooping, she picked it up and unfolded it. Written on the paper was a line of numbers. She squinted at them hard, trying to make out their meaning.
41 43 34 17 20
It could be a code, but what it was for she had no earthly idea. Maybe Andrew and Miss Gibson could figure out—
Bong!
The grandfather clock belched out a bone-rattling gong, marking the half hour and nearly scaring her out of her skin.
Her hand pressed hard against her heart as though that would keep it from beating straight out of her chest. There wasn’t time to figure out what the numbers meant, and while she could hold a string of measurements in her head, that was only because they meant something. She had no hope of memorizing these.
Taking a calculated risk, Lavinia ran her hand underneath the drawer, dislodging four more pieces of paper wedged into the seams of the wood. Gathering them up with the first strip, she folded them twice and stuffed them into the top of her bodice. Then she shoved the drawer back in, retied the blueprints, checked that the desk looked as it had when she’d entered, and hurried out of the room.
The soft-shoed sprint back to her room must only have taken thirty seconds, but it felt like ages. Every tiny shuffle and every creak threatened to betray her. She felt sick and shaky all over.
Her door was in sight when she heard Wark’s voice on the stairs to the first floor. “What’s taking that doctor so long?”
Lavinia froze when the more muffled voice of his mother drifted down the corridor to her. “Dr. Gilfoyle will come.”
“Not soon enough,” he boomed, his steps coming closer. “We should’ve sent the carriage. Douglas could’ve gone and put the driving skills he’s always boasting of to use, since our current driver goes like a granny.”
She was still ten feet away from the door, and she had no idea how quickly Wark would get there but she couldn’t risk being seen going into her room. It would arouse too much suspicion. But there was another way.
Lavinia slumped against the wall of the corridor and touched her fingers to her temple right below the cut. She moaned low, just as Wark rounded the corner.
“Mrs. Parkem!” he shouted, sprinting the last few steps to her and grabbing her by the waist as she made as though to collapse on the floor. “You shouldn’t be up on your feet.”
“Where am I?” she half groaned.
“Don’t you remember?” he asked.
“What’s happened here?” Mrs. Wark had come into the corridor and was striding up with the pinched face of a woman who’d just sucked on a freshly cut lemon.
“I woke up in a strange room and didn’t know where I was,” said Lavinia, her voice a croak. “Why does my head hurt?”
“You fainted at the dinner table,” said Mrs. Wark matter-of-factly.
She looked up at Wark in horror. “Oh, how embarrassing. What you must think of me!”
“Only that I’m glad I’m the one who has the privilege of attending to you,” said Wark.
At least he was playing the gallant rather than going for the usual lecherous suggestions he made when he was standing in her shop.
“A doctor is coming,” said Mrs. Wark. “Until then, I suggest you lie down.”
Lavinia nodded and tried to straighten but sagged heavily against Wark for effect. The man shifted his arm so that it wrapped tighter around her, his fingers brushing the underside of her breast.
Later, when she was free of this awful house owned by this awful man, she was going to have to have another discussion with Andrew about his policy on pistols.
Andrew knew every square inch of the long strip of space that ran the length of his office directly in front of his desk, because he’d paced it at least a thousand times in the past three hours. It was well past two in the morning and there hadn’t been any sign of Lavinia. Gillie, who’d offered to wait up with him until she checked in as he’d instructed her to, was the picture of calm, cool, and collected—so much so that she was snoozing in a chair in the corner, wrapped up in a particularly loud magenta shawl.
He glared at the young woman, jealous of the fact that she could sleep at a time like this.
“I haven’t done anything wrong, so you can stop making sour faces at me,” Gillie mumbled, making him start.
He stooped down to check that her eyes were, as he’d thought, closed. “How do you know I’m staring at you?”
“Because I can feel the resentment radiating off you.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“And yet I was right, wasn’t I?” she asked.
He huffed and went back to pacing.
“They say it takes rivers thousands of years to carve their way through rock, but you’ve walked over that spot on the floor so many times you might wear a hole in it by the end of the evening,” said Gillie, eyes still closed.
“Lavinia should be back by now.” He’d stopped trying to pretend he wasn’t worried hours ago. Hell, he’d been worried since the moment she had told him her plan to attend a dinner at Wark’s house. It was dangerous and—he could admit now—the best bet they had to find out information about Wark’s associates.
But that didn’t mean he had to like it.
“She’ll be fine,” said Gillie with a yawn. “She’s an intelligent lady.”
Lavinia’s intelligence had never been in question. It was her safety he was worried about.
“What are you doing while we wait?” he asked.
Gillie sighed, opened her eyes, and pointed to a stack of papers she’d set aside ten minutes before. “I asked several of my contacts for more information about this Mr. Douglas, who’s been spending time around Wark’s mother.”
“Not the sort of thing we’re looking for. Even Mrs. Sullivan doesn’t know a great deal about him except that he was widowed about five years ago, and he seems to have gone on a spree snatching up metalworks factories in the last two years. Most of his businesses are in Glasgow. He’s also a crack shot with grouse and can drive four-in-hand.”
“While fascinating, I’m not sure that’s helpful,” he said.
“I’m simply being thorough.” Gillie shifted in her chair to find a more comfortable position and closed her eyes again. “Now, why don’t you make us a cup?”
He grunted. Tea was a good idea. It gave him something to do with his hands. He pulled the heavy cast-iron kettle off its shelf and poured water from a jug into it before lugging it to the iron hook that was mounted above the wood fire. He’d been happy to see that in his office rather than a coal burner. The scent of a proper wood fire was one of the things he’d missed while he was at sea.
After stoking the embers and adding a log, he sat back on his heels, watching the fire glow back to life. When he’d let himself think about his retirement, his image of his days had varied, but the nights were always the same. A comfortable room with well-worn chairs set in front of a fire, a stack of books at his hand. Never again would he feel the interminable, bone-chilling wetness that came from frigid voyages crossing to Newfoundland, and neither would he stew in his own sweat the way he had sailing in the Indian Ocean. He’d have a nice, normal life, spent exactly how he wanted it.
As he stared into the fire, however, he grew increasingly aware that during all of the years he’d fantasized about his retirement, there was one glaring gap. There might be two armchairs in his ideal room, but the other chair was always empty. He’d told himself that it was because, after years spent on ships full of men with little privacy, he wanted to finally be able to move about without being watched, but it was more than that. He’d long ago found the woman he wanted to fill that other chair, but he’d lost her, and in all the years after, he’d never found anyone to take her place. Now she was back, crashing through his life, and he couldn’t get enough.
He scrubbed his hands over his weary eyes and grabbed the steaming teakettle to pour water over the leaves in the chipped but serviceable stoneware pot he’d prepped earlier that evening. He must be mad to want Lavinia again, but he did. It was as though holding on to the idea of his anger for so long had somehow diminished it when he was least looking. It had flared up again when Home sent him on this mission and when he’d laid eyes on her for the first time in more than a decade, but it had never burned as bright as in those first months after his doomed homecoming to Eyemouth.
He wanted her. That was the problem. He wanted her and she’d come to him willingly. If she’d said no, it might’ve been possible to untangle her from the threads of his thoughts, but knowing that they shared this attraction made it impossible. In a few short days, she’d wrapped him around her little finger just as she had when they’d first met as children, far too young to understand what love was.
It would never be the same. He didn’t want it to be the same. But he knew that no matter how hard he tried, if she showed up that evening and told him to strip, he’d bare more than just his body to her. She rendered him vulnerable no matter how he armored himself, and he could feel himself almost on the brink of giving up on trying to fight her.
The doorbell jangled through the office, shattering his nerves. He shot up and nearly growled when Gillie began to stir. “I’ll go.”
Taking the stairs two at a time, he bolted to the back door, ripping it open. There, in a cloak with its hood up, was Lavinia.
“Where have you been?” he bit out, not caring that he sounded like a snippy chaperone.
“The evening was considerably longer than I expected,” she said, her breath clouding in the cold night air. “Before you interrogate me, may I come in please? The wind is bitter.”
He stepped back and she walked under the bridge of his arm. He shut the door quickly and drew the curtain over the window set into it. He was about to rip into her when she pushed her hood back and he saw a bruise blooming over her forehead, topped with an angry red cut.
“What happened?” he demanded, his fingers framing the bruise before he could think whether that was wise. All he knew was that he was going to tear Wark to pieces for touching her.
“I fell.”
“You fell?”
“Intentionally.”
A sweet relief pumped through his veins. “Then Wark didn’t hurt you?”
She blinked up at him. “No. Why would he hurt me?”
He rubbed his forehead. “Why would I ever be worried that a man the War Office suspects might be a danger to the British people might harm you, a spy who went into his home under false pretenses? Why, indeed?”
Her expression softened, and a maddening urge to stand there and bask in her soft glow gripped him by the throat.
“You called me a spy,” she said.
“You were worried about me,” she said, ignoring his warning tone.
“Since it’s past two o’clock, yes. I don’t know what kind of hours you keep, but normal people do not spent seven hours at a dinner party.”
“You were worried about me, and now you’re angry at yourself for worrying because—well, I’m not entirely certain why, but you are,” she said.
He leaned a shoulder against a wall and shook his head. There was no arguing with her. Not when she was right.
“Was it her?” Gillie called down from the top of the stairs.
“I’m coming up right now, Miss Gibson,” Lavinia called up the stairs. “I think I might have something of interest to you.”
She hesitated before beginning her ascent, reached for his hand, and squeezed it. “I’m fine, Andrew.”
She made her way up with hardly another look, leaving him at the bottom, struggling to catch his breath.