A Disappearance in Drury Lane (4 page)

I treasured it. The stick would be long gone by now, stolen by the denizens of Covent Garden.

“I left it there,” Felicity repeated, winking at me. “Where it might be found by a friend.”

“Where it might be picked up and sold at the nearest pawnbrokers.”

Felicity shrugged. “That’s a risk.”

“Blast you.”

“You’re sounding better. Want more gin?”

“No.” I did not feel better—my head pounded, my ribs ached, and my leg hurt like fire. “If you help me, Felicity, I’ll make sure you’re all right.”

She cocked her head and regarded me with intelligent eyes. “Gentlemen have made me such promises before. Men richer and stronger than you. They always lie. Or at least, they forget all about it when the time comes that I need their help.”

“Because those gentlemen aren’t me.” I reached for her again and gripped her hand. “I will keep you safe. I would whether you helped me now or not. I give you my word.”

Felicity paused, but I knew her hesitation did not mean she debated whether to trust me. Trust had been burned out of her long ago. She would decide, but not because of any pretty promises from me.

I drifted away on pain and the dregs of gin for a moment, and when the moment passed, I found Felicity’s soft body on top of mine, she busily kissing my lips.

I couldn’t struggle as she swept her tongue inside my mouth. I could not have tasted very good, and I didn’t respond, both from choice and because I could barely move. Felicity kissed me thoroughly, and she was quite good at it. If I were not anxious to wed another or lying in a wash of pain, I might take her offer. As it was, I rested my hand by my side and waited until she finished and sat up.

I did not ask for help again; I lay quietly and let her decide. Felicity studied me as she traced my lips with her fingertips.

“You’ll take me somewhere this Perry bloke won’t find me?”

“Is that his name? Perry?”

Felicity lifted her fingers away. “What’s your answer?”

“Yes.”

“You’re marrying a rich lady. You can give me plenty of money, can’t you?”

I could not answer to what Lady Breckenridge might agree to pay for my safe return, so I had to shrug—a movement that hurt. “I will do what I can.”

Felicity didn’t think much of my answer. “When you marry, her money goes to you. That’s English law. Then you can do with it what you want.”

“Not if the money is in trust. The estate and its wealth go to her son. My wife has only a jointure and whatever her parents put into trust for her. Money under English law can be complicated.”

“Then why are you marrying her?”

I tried a smile. “I like her.”

Felicity gave me a pitying look. “That’s no reason to marry a woman. You marry for money. If you like a woman, you take her as your lover.”

I knew I was a bit unfashionable in my desire to marry Donata simply because I esteemed her. I’d married for passion the first time as well. This time, I hoped I was a little older and wiser in my choice, but I admit, it was still passion that drove me.

“If you can’t give me money, what else can you offer?” Felicity asked. “A night with you?”

“Not that either. I am about to troth myself to another.”

“So, you can give me neither money nor your attentions. You ask me to help you, and in return, I receive only your promise that Perry won’t sell me off. That’s it? That’s your bargain?”

“I am afraid so.”

Felicity leaned down and kissed me again, her lips warm and soft. She must have dazzled her clientele, and she must dazzle poor Pomeroy.

“All right then,” she said.

Chapter Three

Felicity had to help me stand. As soon as I got to my feet, I fell to the floor, my head spinning. I lay there in a heap of pain, wanting to expire.

Felicity gave me no mercy. She put a digging hand on my shoulder and dragged me up again. “We have to hurry. If he comes back and catches us, we’re done for.”

I wanted to know more about this man who thought nothing of kidnapping a viscountess’ betrothed off the street and threatening slavery to a young woman if she didn’t help him. But breathing and moving took all my energy; nothing remained for more speech.

Felicity ducked under my arm, half carrying me to the door. The room turned out to be very small, the door not many steps from the bed. The door also appeared to be unlocked. Felicity opened it easily and led me out to a small landing at the top of a flight of stairs.

No lock or bolt? Either her fear had been strong enough to keep her in place, or Felicity had not been honest with me.

She helped me down the stairs and out a door at the bottom, which didn’t seem to be guarded. Again, too easy.

We emerged into a narrow passage that smelled strongly of slops. The night was still black and shrouded in fog. I had no way of knowing where we were or even what time or day it was. Was this the same night I’d been kidnapped? Or had more time passed?

Felicity ducked out from under my arm and pinned me back against a cold wall. My weakness alarmed me. A slim woman, even one as fit and strong as Felicity, should not have been able to shove me about.

“All right, Captain. You make good on your promise. Get me away from here. Somewhere safe.”

I tried to nod, but my head hurt too much. “I’ll need a hackney.”

“I’ll get one. But we need to hurry. No telling when Perry will be back.”

I gave up on the next nod as well. Felicity left me leaning against the wall, the only thing holding me upright. My legs kept trying to bend, and in fact, did so without my awareness. When Felicity returned, she found me sitting on the noisome cobbles, my knees around my head.

“Captain, we have to
go
.”

She pulled me up too fast, and I nearly fell again. Felicity managed to hold me upright, my arm slung around her shoulders, and we stumbled from the passage to the street. I thought we were in the environs of Drury Lane, somewhat north of the theatre, closer to High Holborn, but I couldn’t be certain.

A hackney waited not far away, the driver looking about him uneasily in the thick darkness. He jumped down from his perch when we approached and helped Felicity lift me inside.

I groaned as the coachman’s touch pressed my hurt ribs, but his look held no compassion. Likely he thought me drunk, and I could not blame him his assessment. I reeked of the passage I’d collapsed in and the gin Felicity had poured down my throat.

“Where to?” the coachman asked.

“Curzon Street,” I managed to say as Felicity crammed herself against me in the small seat. “Number 45.”

“Right you are.”

The hackney listed sickeningly as the coachman climbed back to his box, and I nearly brought up all the gin.

When I dared open my eyes again, the coach was moving and Felicity glared at me. “We can’t go
there
.”

“Can you name a safer place?” I asked, my voice weak. “My lodgings are unguarded. If Mr. Perry finds us gone, he will go first to Grimpen Lane to look for me. The friends I’d turn to for help are not in London.” All my London friends were gone, in fact—either at country homes celebrating Christmas or in Oxfordshire waiting for my wedding.

“We might be safe from Perry, maybe,” Felicity said. “But are we safe from
him
?”

“Jump out if you don’t like it. Run back to your lodgings and bolt the door.”

“Those
were
my lodgings. Perry will be back any moment.”

“Then go to Pomeroy.”

Felicity let out a snort. “He’s a dear one, inn’t he? If he knew what I’d done tonight, he’d slap me in a cell, never mind I’ve shared his bed.”

I could not disagree with her. Pomeroy was unforgiving when it came to crime. He’d attempted to arrest me more than once, and I could easily imagine him arresting Felicity without a twinge of remorse.

“Then it seems you have no choice,” I said.

Felicity gave me an unhappy look but collapsed against the seats in silence.

I drifted in and out of consciousness as we moved through the shrouded city. I hoped Marianne had not met with misfortune on her way home. Perry had asked me about Drury Lane, knowing I’d been there. Because I’d given him no answers, he might turn to Marianne for them—it had been his ruffians and Felicity who’d followed us in the dark, so Perry would know Marianne had accompanied me. At least she’d gotten into Grenville’s coach and had been taken to the safety of the house he kept for her.

Then again, Perry might decide to walk to the theatre itself and find the blind Hannah vulnerable there. I thought of Coleman, huge and strong, and felt a little better. Coleman seemed to care about Mrs. Wolff and would look after her.

It could not be coincidence that Perry had abducted me just after Marianne asked me to make inquiries about Mrs. Collins. After I married—if Donata would accept a beaten up, tardy groom as a husband—I would return to London, find Mr. Perry, and shake some answers out of him.

Number 45 Curzon Street was a plain Georgian house with less pretension than most of its neighbors. The house had a black painted door, a thick brass doorknocker, sash windows with black shutters, and solid brick walls.

The coachman descended, and the horse cocked one back foot to rest its leg. Before the coachman could lift the doorknocker, a large, beefy man yanked open the door and peered out into the fog in suspicion, much as Coleman had at the theatre.

I clutched the hackney’s windowsill and pulled myself forward, so the man would see who I was. His look turned to faint surprise, but the suspicion remained. He called to someone behind him and stepped out of the house.

He and another equally large man—I knew both had once been prizefighters—carried me between them into the warm, lighted house. I had no chance to see whether Felicity followed, because the two men carried me all the way up three flights of stairs and into a bedchamber before I could look for her. The bed here was made up, as though the owner of the house had been expecting a guest, although no fire burned in the grate.

While I sank onto the soft bed, one of the lackeys laid a fire and the other lit candles. Real wax candles, the scent of them soothing. No rush lights for Mr. Denis.

I hoped to drift to sleep, but a third man, this one spare and small with gray hair, joined the first two. Denis’s former pugilists quickly and competently stripped off my clothes, and the third man, apparently a surgeon, wrapped up my ribs and tended to my other wounds. A sip of laudanum went past my lips, and I slept.

I woke, blinking, to daylight, in an elegant room decorated in hues of ivory and Wedgwood green. Plaster medallions depicting women in classical Greek dress adorned the walls, and above the fireplace hung the painting of a young lad bending forward to blow a spark to life on a spill. Blackness surrounded the boy, but the spark threw a bright light upward, illuminating him in brilliance. The painting was a masterwork, no doubt old, no doubt pilfered, and no doubt priceless.

A man I hadn’t met before entered the room. He was younger and more slender than the other lackeys, and he started laying out shaving gear with expressionless competence.

He helped me out of bed, bathed me, shaved me, and dressed me in clean clothes—my own. The lackeys must have gone back to my flat for my things.

My ribs still hurt but were bearable now that they’d been wrapped. Touching them gingerly, I surmised they had not been broken but perhaps severely wrenched. I’d live.

I missed my walking stick, but I made my way downstairs the best I could without one to a private dining room in which I’d breakfasted before. A place had been set for me at one end of the table.

At the other end sat James Denis, a man who thought nothing of hanging priceless stolen paintings in his guest rooms. My life had become tangled with his in a complex mesh, and here I was again, at his mercy.

I’d always supposed a criminal mastermind would be aged and bent with a lifetime of dissipation, as novelists and playwrights would have us believe. Mr. Denis, in contrast, was a little past thirty, had dark hair cut short, a clean-shaven face, a slender build, and dark blue eyes that missed nothing.

His eyes also held a cold cruelty, an intelligence that weighed everything and assessed it in terms of how it might be of use to him. I’d only once seen Denis grow emotional about anything—a few months ago, in fact—and that emotion had led to disaster.

Denis looked up as I seated myself, but he didn’t greet me, going back to eating his meal in silence. Another lackey went to the sideboard, spooned out a complicated dish involving eggs, sausage, and fish from a silver covered tray, and set the plate in front of me.

I didn’t speak. There wasn’t much point. Any conventional politeness would be lost on Denis. He’d know what I truly thought, and I knew what he thought. So we ate in silence.

Not until the meal was complete and the footmen cleared the plates, did Denis turn his attention to me. His butler set down a cup of coffee, exactly centered in front of Denis, then brought a cup to me and slid out of the room.

I drank gratefully. I did not know where Denis obtained his coffee, but it was rich and good, better than any I could buy for myself.

Denis began as I sipped. “I do not like street girls,” he said. “They are like mongrel dogs, too apt to attack the hand stretched out to them, even if it contains their bread for the day. I have no dealings with them. You installed one in my house.” His cold eyes met mine, as he waited for me to explain my audacity.

“I promised her protection,” I said. “I could think of nowhere else to take her.”

“Mr. Grenville has several large houses at his disposal, as does your wife-to-be. You also are acquainted with gentlemen in this city who enjoy reforming prostitutes. And yet, you bring her to my doorstep.”

He was angry with me. Denis’s expression was cool, but I saw the deep irritation behind it. The anger surprised me. Was he put out because I’d brought a street girl here or at my audacity in thinking of his home as a refuge?

“My friends are in Oxfordshire,” I said. “Awaiting me, in fact. My reforming friends, the Derwents, are at their seat in Derbyshire for Christmas and New Year’s. Mrs. Brandon is likewise spending the winter out of London. I cannot be certain the skeleton staff left behind in either household would admit Felicity or protect her from this man she fears. I can’t risk that they won’t toss her out as soon as I depart. I know she can be wearying.”