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Authors: Kate Moore

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The prince glanced slyly at Blackstone. “I thought all English lords had two things on their great estates, you see, magnificent horses and dogs. I could not bring my dogs. Horses always find a place, but dogs are never at home in another’s house.”

A pair of guardsmen bearing down on them at a fast clip forced the party to move aside. The galloping horses threw up clods and sprays of brown water. The prince sighed heavily, and his horse danced under him.

“You may go for a gallop, Prince. You must not put that beast away with the fidgets in his legs,” General Dubusari recommended.

The prince shrugged helplessly, and Violet glanced at Blackstone to see whether he, too, noted how easily the prince was led by his supposed underling.

“You see, Lord Blackstone,” the prince insisted, “you must join me. You may ride Cahul’s horse. We will have a friendly contest. Not a race. We do not need to put it in the betting book at your club.” He signaled his bodyguard to dismount.

Cahul muttered something in his own language.

“Cahul agrees with me Oberon needs to run.”

Violet saw how things were going. She glanced at the countess, who was arranging the veil on her riding hat. The count looked half-asleep on his mount. The prince would get his way. Sensing Blackstone’s discomfort in riding a poor horse, the prince would take delight in keeping the horse’s flaws at the front of the conversation. He was like a child, really.

The prince clapped his palm to his brow. “Ah, but I am being selfish. We must trade nags.” He dismounted and gave the reins of Oberon to Cahul. “You, Blackstone, must choose. The horses must have their run.”

There was a moment of confusion as the riders shifted, backing their mounts, rearranging the group. Oberon objected violently to the change. He reared, his front feet raking the air, his neigh near to a scream. All the horses stirred restlessly. Violet had to see to her uneasy mount. Only Blackstone’s nag placidly hung its head. Cahul pulled sharply on Oberon’s bridle to bring his head down.

The prince frowned. “I think Oberon does not like England. Yesterday an outburst on the docks, and now this. That is why we must have a run. Lord Blackstone, my horse.”

“Prince, you are too kind,” Violet said. “My fiancé will be happy to indulge you in the pleasure of a race. I will hold your mount for you, Blackstone.”

Blackstone’s gaze said he was anything but happy to indulge the prince, but he dismounted and led his bony animal to her. The poor beast immediately nosed the margin of the path for grass under the mud.

“I give you great honor, Lord Blackstone, and you wish to decline it?”

“Your horse feels less honored, Prince.” Oberon still stirred uneasily, and Blackstone swept the animal’s neck with soothing strokes. For a moment Blackstone simply acquainted himself with Oberon, letting the horse smell him and hear his voice. “Are you the only one who rides Oberon, Prince?”

“We were made for each other. Hah, he is just impatient to run. You will see. Give him his head, and he will outrun the wind. A quick down and back?”

“To the tenth plane tree,” countered Blackstone. When Oberon stood quietly under his touch, only a slight tremor agitating the stallion’s smooth flanks, Blackstone mounted. He shifted forward in the saddle to let Cahul adjust the stirrups.

The prince scanned the proposed distance. “Very well, but that is hardly enough for Oberon. Miss Hammersley, will you give us a signal?”

The men maneuvered their mounts into a line. Oberon immediately became agitated again, and Blackstone’s attention turned to his wheeling mount, his face grim. Violet regretted pushing him into the absurd position. The best thing to do was to get it over with. The track was clear. The men’s eyes swung to her. She lifted her arm and let her glove drop.

The prince’s mount leapt forward. Blackstone’s knees tightened around Oberon, and the horse bucked wildly. Blackstone lifted his seat but the horse continued its wild plunging, arching his back and spinning in the air, then rising up on his hind legs, his haunches lowered almost to the ground. If Blackstone hung on, they would go over backwards. Violet watched him release his hold and let the animal fling him off. For a brief instant he flew upward then landed in the path of the rearing horse. Violet held her breath. Blackstone rolled away as the horse’s legs came down with a jarring thud. The trembling horse snorted and blew, muscles rippling under the smooth black skin as Blackstone came to his feet.

Dripping mud, he caught up Oberon’s dragging reins and began soothing the distressed animal with his hands. As the prince cantered back along the Row, Violet urged the rest of the party to catch up to them.

The prince was splattered with mud from his toes to his thighs. His grin stretched his moustache even further. He dismounted and took over with Oberon, consoling the horse, saying, “You cannot win without me, can you, Oberon? Miss Hammersley, such a frown. Did you fear for us?”

She hardly knew what she answered. For a moment her whirling thoughts were consumed by Blackstone. He had let himself be thrown, and she had feared to see him crushed by Oberon’s hooves. And now she was unreasonably happy to see him mud-caked and frowning. He stripped the ruined coat from his back. His hat had tumbled away. One cheek bore a dirt smudge. He looked absurdly young and utterly alive.

The prince supplied his own answer for the question she’d forgotten. “Ah, no, you are worried about your brother. But he is a trickster, you know, always disappearing on us and showing up to laugh at us when we do not expect him. He got away from us three times, you know. There is a lady, perhaps. In Spain, he went to see a lady.”

Violet almost missed the remark with her gaze still on Blackstone.
Got away from us
. It was what the prince had said earlier, except for the one odd phrase.

“You gave us all a fright,” she said to him as Blackstone came up to her. “What caused Oberon to spook that way?”

“Worried, my love?”

“I would hate to see that magnificent animal suffer a fall.”

He took her gloved hand in his and opened it, dropping a kiss on her wrist. As he lifted his mouth from her hand, he closed her fist around a short sharp object. It pricked her palm through the leather. A thorn.

“From Oberon’s saddlecloth.”

She did not have to wonder any longer that Oberon had tried so desperately to throw his rider. As soon as Blackstone’s weight had settled in the saddle, the thorn must have dug painfully into the horse’s sensitive back.

Violet rode beside the prince on their return from the park. She could not say what the topic of conversation was. She had stopped thinking about Frank, her mind returning to the moment when it looked as if Blackstone would be crushed. When they reached the house, Blackstone excused himself and sought her father. That was when Violet first missed her glove. She thought Cahul had picked it up from the track. She still had the thorn, dark brown, thin, an inch long, round and straight as a needle. She did not recognize it as an English thorn.

Chapter Nine

“She is a handsome girl, about fifteen or sixteen, and, I understand, highly accomplished.��

—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

Miranda Kirby smiled at the gentleman examining the jars of ointments and salves. He was as fashionable as she could wish. From the excellent cut and fine wool of his dove gray coat, she could guess his tailor’s name and the guineas he’d spent. By her calculation the man was likely worth four thousand a year. His lavender waistcoat had subtle gold threads in the weave. Only the poorly tied neckcloth suggested a man in some distress. Well, that and the carefulness with which he considered certain salves.

Miranda recognized the embarrassed scrutiny of a man who had acquired an uncomfortable condition, which he did not wish to disclose to anyone, but which needed immediate relief. She drew a resigned breath. She much preferred to help gentlemen select soaps and scents for their shaving needs. She could stretch out her arm to offer a gentleman a whiff of fragrant sandalwood soap in its porcelain bowl or whip up a bit of foam with a badger-bristle brush and spread it on her palm to show how thick and rich it was.

Directing a gentleman to a remedy for his indiscretion would end the transaction quickly. The man would not be inclined to look twice at her and notice and admire. He wouldn’t linger to exchange any banter. She wouldn’t hear much of his toffy accent. She could listen all day to West End gentlemen talk. Sometimes when they asked about her, she told them about her mother, the young French lady who had fled the Terror in Paris, when to have a shoe buckle meant death, and come to London with nothing.

The shop bell tinkled again, and a low ruffian slouched in with a soiled jacket and a coarse cap over his face, the sort who had no business in a respectable shop. Miranda’s fine gentleman shifted aside, immediately wary.

Miranda knew she must act quickly. “What are you doing here, boy? There’s nothing here for the likes of you.”

The rough youth thrust a grimy hand in front of the startled gentleman, and offered him a jar. “Here’s the one you want, governor. Sloan’s salve will clear up what ails you in a fortnight. She recommends it to all the gentlemen. Isn’t that right, Miss Kirby?” The youth grinned at her with a full set of white teeth.

Miranda grabbed her broom and came round the counter in a move that set her skirts to rustling. “Oooh, it’s you, Nate Wilde.”

The gentleman backed away from the youth with the jar. “I say, miss, it’s not the thing to let riffraff assault your customers.” He eyed the door. “Be off, you.”

The youth stood his ground. He even leaned towards the gentleman. “Don’t forget, governor, Sloan’s salve.”

The bell jangled again with the man’s hasty exit. Miranda turned on the intruder. She would dearly love to whack him with her broom. His laughing eyes dared her to do it. But if she gave in to the unladylike impulse, he’d win. No lady would hit a man with a broom no matter how he provoked her, and Miranda was a lady. She knew it. She composed herself and returned to her place behind the counter, putting the broom away.

“Did you tell him about your mother and her shoe buckles?” he taunted.

“You delight in vexing me.” She kept her back to him as she rearranged the display of shaving brushes and bowls.

“Vexing you? And here I think of myself as your champion, your knight.” He put the jar of Sloan’s on the shelf.

“My knight? That’s rich. A cheeky devil, more like, sent to make misery for me, that’s what you are.” She sat on her work stool and took up the straw bonnet she had been trimming before her gentleman customer interrupted. She bent over the work again, applying a lavender ribbon to the brim. Nate Wilde didn’t take the hint. He lingered as if he had not a care in the world. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“I had to go to Wapping about a case.”

“A case? Not likely. As if you were a real copper.”

“Close enough, but better paid, and usually, better dressed.”

“Thanks to my father.”

“Face it, Miranda, I’m as close to a gentleman as you are like to get.” He hoisted himself up onto the mahogany counter. It was the sort of thing he did that she tried not to notice, but she’d seen his arms when he stood in his smalls for her father’s measurements. He was not much above her in height, but his shoulders were broad and his arms had a lean iron strength.

She shuddered. “Spare me. I would throw myself in the Serpentine with rocks in my pockets first.”

“The Thames would be better,” he advised cordially. “As ladylike as it would be to drown yourself in the park, it takes a real river to be certain you’ll get the job done.”

“My mother did not bring me into this world for the likes of you.”

“Shall I tell you your mother’s true story? She was a beautiful Irish lass who came to London to work in a factory and listened to a honey-tongued rogue who got her in trouble and your father took her in.” He did not say that her father had not married her mother. No need to rub salt in the wound.

“Hah! What do you know! Who was your mother? Who was your father?”

“You don’t know anything about your mum, either. So we’re even.”

“I know I could have been a Nan or a Susan or a Molly, but I’m none of those. My mother knew things, and she named me to be someone. Miranda, a duke’s daughter.”

“A character in a play that anyone can see for a fistful of shillings.”

“Well this Miranda will meet a prince’s son, too. Not some flash cove that’s gotten above himself.”

“Not in London, you won’t. Unless you meet a royal by-blow or plan to marry an infant. No prince’s sons for that lot of brothers to King George.”

Miranda stuck a pin through her bonnet with a savage jab. “Nate Wilde, you spoil everything.”

* * *

“Where’s Wilde?” Blackstone found his fellow members of Goldsworthy’s exclusive club in their usual places. Hazelwood lay on his back on one of the long sofas tossing a tennis ball in the air. Captain Clare faced the carpet, his arms pumping his rigid body up and down, like a plank bobbing in a choppy sea. Neither man answered at once. Blackstone reached out and caught Hazelwood’s tennis ball midair.

Hazelwood snatched at the ball, his reflexes quicker than Blackstone expected, but not quick enough. “We’re having a contest, old boy. Unsporting of you to interrupt.” There was no heat in the complaint. “One hundred, Clare!”

The captain lowered himself to the floor. “Wilde’s around the corner at Kirby’s shop.”

“He’s in love. It’s the youth’s one weakness,” Hazelwood added.

Blackstone looked to Captain Clare for confirmation.

“Ah, you can’t trust the sot, but you can trust the man in uniform.” Hazelwood swung himself upright. He still wore his soiled eveningwear. “It’s true, whether you believe me or not. The lad’s deeply smitten. Clare and I have a wager on whether young Wilde can ever prevail with the fair Miranda. I say it’s hopeless. The captain is not so certain.”

Blackstone tossed the tennis ball back. He was familiar with the chemist’s shop and the pretty young woman who handled the counter. Gold letters on the black paint at the brick front of the shop proclaimed that Kirby and Sons were “Purveyors to their Majesties the Kings of Hanover & Belgium & His Royal Highness & The Duke of Cambridge.” There were no sons, only a daughter, and whatever the legitimate trade of the shop, its main business lay hidden from the public eye in the back rooms where Kirby himself labored to produce gentlemanly apparel for Goldworthy’s lads. The shop’s position directly behind the club, facing the next street, allowed for surreptitious coming and going as the club members were fitted for their new roles.

When Blackstone entered, he found Wilde transformed into a street rat, sitting on the long mahogany counter, behind which Miranda Kirby bent her shining head over a chip straw bonnet, to which she was applying grosgrain ribbon in a lavender hue with sharp jabs of a needle. Wilde’s fingers toyed with the end of the ribbon, and the girl jerked it out of his reach. Blackstone cleared his throat, and the youth looked up, disengaging himself from his rapt contemplation of the girl’s beauty.

She was a beauty. Built on a bountiful scale, Miranda Kirby’s pale skin was silky smooth and tinted dawn pink. Her blue eyes were fringed with dark red lashes, and her bow of a mouth drawn into a sweet pout. The boy looked like a starving man contemplating a dish of strawberry jam and cream.

“May I help you, Lord Blackstone?” Miranda liked to use the members’ titles. She put aside her hat trimming and straightened so that her bosom had its full effect.

Wilde looked briefly dazed before he managed to tear his gaze from the girl’s bounty. “I was just on my way to report, sir.”

Miranda’s glance took in Blackstone’s coatless person and his muddied riding boots and breeches, and her mouth dropped open. “Oh, you’ve ruined your beautiful riding clothes.”

“Did you get to the docks again, Wilde?”

“I did, sir, and found something of interest.” Wilde dug into a pocket of his jacket and drew out six horn buttons from a man’s jacket, each attached to a bit of fine blue wool cloth. “There’s a pawnshop up Cat’s Hole Lane where the proprietor is none too careful about the source of goods he accepts. For a couple of bob I purchased these from him. He only got them this morning.”

Blackstone took one of the buttons. He could see what had happened. Someone had pulled on the button and cut it free of the garment. “Wilde, you’re a genius.”

“You think it’s Frank Hammersley’s coat?”

Blackstone nodded. “What led you to the pawnshop?”

“Whoever took him has got to have someone local in on it. Someone who’s not paid enough to do a dirty job. Only a local knows which fence to trust.”

“If a man wants to profit, why not sell the whole coat?”

Wilde appeared to consider the question. “I’d say they’re not so greedy yet. There’s still money to be made out of the deal. If the detained gentleman were to die, then our man would strip the body, dump it in the river, and head somewhere to lie low. He’d sell the clothes later on Monmouth Street.”

Blackstone turned over the button in his hand. “So our local jailer may not want to be a party to murder, but he still wants to make a profit? Where is that pawnshop? Can you show me on Goldsworthy’s map? The prince said something this morning that fits your theory.”

The girl looked up. “Lord Blackstone, would you like me to send over some fresh clothes?”

“Thank you, Miss Kirby.”

* * *

In Goldsworthy’s office they looked over the map of London. Wilde traced the route of the tea cargo, from ship to the derelict warehouse, and explained its ruined condition. Together they studied a rough sketch that Wilde had made of the building.

Blackstone shared the prince’s remark that Oberon had caused a commotion while men were unloading the cargo. The morning’s incident with the thorn showed how easy it was to deliberately provoke the high-strung horse. The drama of a squealing, air-pawing stallion probably created enough distraction to permit accomplices or hirelings to remove Frank Hammersley from the boat before the customs officers came on board, or for Frank himself to slip away if one accepted Goldsworthy’s theory.

Blackstone considered the map again. Wilde pinpointed the fence’s shop. The river, the tea warehouse, the dock, and the shop formed a rough rectangle crisscrossed by narrow lanes and alleys with hundreds of places in which a man could be kept out of the way. Frank Hammersely had known his report would cause trouble for someone. Twice he had been stopped from passing that report along to British agents. If he was alive, it would only be because his captors knew he had not reported his findings. Anyone suspected of receiving that report would be in danger. It was likely that the main role of the members of Prince Andre’s gold-braided escort was to watch Violet and her father.

And there was the matter of the hundred thousand pounds. Where had Frank seen fit to stash that little inducement to villainy? Whatever the government suspected, Blackstone did not believe Frank guilty of theft or murder or treason. It was more likely that Frank, like his sister, had chosen to act independently.

“I’ll take one of these buttons to his sister. She can confirm whether it’s his.”

Miranda Kirby knocked on the open office door with a brown paper package in her arms. “Oh, Lord Blackstone, they told me I’d find you here. I’ve a new batch of shirts and neckcloths.” She tried ignoring Wilde without success. Her gaze took in the rough clothes that gave his appearance a dangerous edge.

Blackstone glanced from the girl to the youth. Wilde didn’t try to hide the man he was—brash, competent, sure of himself. He seemed to be saying to the girl that he was not his clothes, not his appearance. He was who he was.

The girl turned up her nose.

* * *

Violet spent the afternoon confined to her rooms, which was history repeating itself. After the episode in the park, Blackstone had said something to alarm her father, and Papa insisted that Violet remain at home while he took the prince and his party to see Sir Alexander Jones’s gasworks.

No one said anything about her own alarm, seeing Oberon rear and threaten to crush the man who was supposed to help them find Frank. She had since figured out the nature of the alarm she’d felt in that moment. It was concern for Frank. If Blackstone were killed, no one would help them find Frank. Chartwell and the government had no real concern for Frank, but Blackstone had once been Frank’s friend. That must count for something. She did not believe Blackstone indifferent to Frank’s well-being.

When Blackstone had first visited Hammersley House with Frank, Violet, thirteen, had been confined to her room for going alone to a lecture on economics in the city. In some odd way Blackstone’s reappearance had set their old history in motion again. For three years she had been telling herself Blackstone was only a painful memory from her youth, like a broken limb that ached once in awhile. His return was like a cold frost that set the healed limb to aching once again. She simply had to ignore the ache and concentrate on finding Frank.

She had another problem to solve, as well, Penelope Frayne. Though she had asked Blackstone not to put an announcement in the paper, Violet could be sure that Arabella Young had spoken to Penelope. With their subscription ball only days away, a note to Penelope was imperative. Violet must thank her for her kindness and decline any further part in the ball. Only finding Frank mattered at the moment. In the long afternoon, she consulted her
Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility
. Her former governess, Augusta Lowndes, had given her the little handbook as a parting gift. The book offered several models of polite notes declining various invitations, but Violet could find no sample letter offering another woman a crack at one’s former lover.

BOOK: Blackstone's Bride
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