Poetic Justice (16 page)

"I suppose I shall have to do it myself then." Dismay spread through her, but he continued, "You can help me narrow down the search considerably though. Tell me, where might your mother have hidden the index? Had she any favorite authors, volumes?"

Jessica brushed angrily at her skirt, having just noticed its deplorable dusty state, and recalled her resolve to keep this maverick in line. Craftily she said, "I suppose if I put my mind to it, I could remember something like that."

He was annoyed, she could tell from the set of his jaw. But he said very politely, "Will you put your mind to it, then?"

"I might...if you wait till I return to do the burglary."

"It's not a burglary," he said crossly. "It's only an unauthorized visit."

"You will wait for me, then?"

"I will be wasting my time otherwise, I suppose. If I wait, then, you will tell me where your mother is likely to have secreted the index?"

She didn't let her exultation show on her face. "Well, I do have another condition."

He turned away from her, towards the door. But he didn't walk away. "What is this preoccupation you have with making conditions?"

"I don't like anyone having the advantage of me. Especially," she added, "if he is hiding something of import to me."

"What do you think I'm hiding?"

She paused to put her thoughts into a coherent sentence. "You are hiding your interest in the St. Germaine trunk."

"Not very well, apparently." Resignedly, he faced her. "What do you want to know?"

"What you think is in there. Why you are afraid that Wiley will get it."

He moved restlessly to the narrow window and looked out at Berkeley Square. Indecision played across that exotic face, replaced at last by resignation. He had, she thought with relief, decided to trust her. "I have a colleague, who many years ago, got his hands on a prize. Something we would all have searched for, were we ill-judged enough to believe in it. My colleague, once he saw it, believed. But he hadn't the funds to purchase it, and it went instead to a French collector. Recently, my colleague taunted me with a poor substitute for this prize, and told me the one he had held in his hands was destroyed in the French Revolution. That is what he presumed, anyway."

"But you don't. You believe the French collector was my grandfather."

"The collector of oddities."

"How odd was this prize?"

When he answered, his voice was hushed, almost a whisper, as if the words might echo off the high ceiling and alert the world to his suspicions. "It was an autograph copy. A handwritten playscript. Several actors would have been involved in its writing. The Lord Admiral's Men, I think."

Lord Admiral? "Shakespeare was in that company, wasn't he? But surely you're not thinking that—"

John said flatly, "I've never known this man to be wrong when he makes a judgment. And your grandfather must have seen it too."

"That's why you were so interested in the signature." She couldn't take it all in just yet, that her mother might have hidden a script of Shakespeare from the world, from her husband, from her daughter. "But what is this play?"

"I don't know. Not one of the ones we know. My colleague said only that it had something to do with a riot."

"A lost play. My father must have suspected it. And yet—"

"I know. It's astonishing that he didn't break open that trunk. I would have."

She caught a glimpse of the hard light in his eyes and knew it was so. She also knew, if she weren't very careful, this man might break into the vault as casually as he suggested breaking into the library. Could he be as dangerous as he looked just that moment? Yes, she answered silently. But, for the moment, at least, his dangerousness was in her service. To remind him of that, she asked, "Do you think Mr. Wiley knows about it also?"

"He must think something in that trunk will help his case."

"But it won't!" Jessica shook her head in confusion. "If it's in Shakespeare's hand, it will prove him wrong!"

"He must think it is in Bacon's hand."

"And when he finds out it isn't—"

Jessica couldn't go on, so John finished it for her. In a hard voice, he said, "He will very likely destroy it. The only literary work in Shakespeare's hand."

Her head was too dizzy to ask the questions she had—how long he had known, how much of their acquaintance he had planned, whether he would have told her if she hadn't forced him. She could only lean back against the wall, her tumbled hair brushing her father's picture, and whisper, "Maman concealed a lost play."

Sir John waited quietly, leaning against the window frame, the sunlight outlining his slim form. She stared down until his shadow crept across several planks of the bleached oak floor. Then she took a deep breath and gathered tattered reserves. "What do you think we should do?"

He straightened and turned to study her. Quietly he said, "Tuesday night, we will do the job. You might make a list of possible hiding places. I will send you a note with the other details."

She nodded and bent to pick up the reticule she had let drop to the floor. Then she started towards the door. John stopped her with a hand on her arm. "Will you be well enough alone?"

His gentle tone almost undid her. Alone. She supposed that was true; she was more alone than she had realized. "I will be well enough. It's just-—oh, it's just too much to contemplate. My mother, my father—always keeping things from me. And now they might keep the collection from me, and he might get it, and ruin it."

The steady pressure of his bare hand on her bare arm gave her the will to say what she had never let herself think. "It's all so unfair. Not just to me, to everyone who cares for books. And they were both so secretive, and my uncle—he could make it better, but instead he only makes it worse. Why didn't they just leave the collection to me, without all these complications?"

"I don't know."

Fiercely she said, "It's mine by right. It is. But I know everyone thinks that because I want the collection, I must be greedy and grasping."

"I don't."

"You don't?" She looked up at his face; the afternoon sunlight cast shadows across his eyes, but she saw kindness there.

"I think you are the only Seton in several generations who really knows what the Parham Collection should be, and the only one capable of making it reach that standard. Your father should have known you better, and trusted you more."

Then he released her hand and opened the door. "Tuesday night. We will make it come right again."

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Tell me where is fancy bred?

Or in the heart or in the head?

Merchant of Venice, III, ii

With time at a premium, it couldn't be helped. But John wished he hadn't picked one of the longest days of the year to resume his criminal career. At the very least, he thought, England might have moved to a more southerly latitude for the occasion. It was near ten o'clock, and even back here in the mews, far from the streetlamps, he could still see the numbers on his watch.

The stableyard was empty, and the lights in the carriage houses were winking off one by one as the stablemen went to bed. Still, John kept to the shadows as he approached the back wall of Parham House. He wore the loose black cotton trousers and black jersey of his free-trading days, when a moonless night and invisibility meant safe landings and high profits. The last time he had worn these had been another moonless night, in a fortress in Brittany, though his only profit had been the cautious joy of the Foreign Office agent when he realized he had been rescued.

The gate was locked. John pushed up his sleeves and leapt for the top of the wall, hands open, as if into the shrouds of the rigging. He felt his fingers scrape the rough granite then catch, and thought, I am myself again. And at that thought, he knew a moment's despair. A felon's heart, he had, and always would, no matter what clothes he wore.

He pulled himself up and paused balanced on the wall. The darkness was deeper here in the shadows of the house, and he could not see the ground. But he launched himself into the twilight, landing lightly in a crouch. He stayed still, holding his breath, but there was no sound from the dark house.

He crossed to the elm tree to wait for Jessica, who had been strictly directed to wait until full dark. He found himself wishing Devlyn would come to town and sit him down and talk him out of this. All their lives Devlyn had tried to dissuade John from one folly or another, succeeding so seldom that it was a credit to his hard head that he persevered. But this time, John thought, I might be more open to persuasion.

It was folly indeed, this felonious search, this absolute certainty about the lost play, this alliance with an heiress. He knew Devlyn well enough to anticipate his arguments: the risk an arrest would pose to his career, the hazard of Wiley—or worse, Alavieri—learning of his aim, the impropriety of involving a young lady in a felony, the danger of letting her too close. Unfortunately, John's memory couldn't reproduce the combined effect of Devlyn's reasoned tone, his eminently sensible approach, his half-concealed caring. And so, though he recited the points by rote, John remained unpersuaded. The felon's heart always won out over the rationalist's head.

And it always would after all, for now Jessica was stealing up to him, her bright hair stuffed into a cap, her eyes alight with laughter. They were allies, and he couldn't end that. If he did, she would be alone again, and that he couldn't allow.

Poor little rich girl, he thought, holding out his hand to take the bag she'd looped around her shoulder. Bright and brave, just like Tatiana—

It was an errant thought, but true enough. When he first met the princess, she had been alone in a world of privilege, her enemies wearing the masks of family and friends. Oh, hers was a more dangerous world, the Romanov court, where a small misstep could be punished by a quiet execution. Jessica had less at risk, not her life, only her life's work. That was enough, though, to win her an out-of-practice knight errant, one far more errant than Tatiana's own.

And it was worth it after all, for Jessica's laughter bubbled over as she whispered that surely it was dark enough, and she couldn't wait any longer, and did John like the burglary attire she had stolen from the laundry of the stableboys.

"The breeches are too big," she whispered, tugging at her thigh to demonstrate.

"Good," he replied with feeling, and she laughed. This was no green girl. She knew what he was thinking, and must have found it amusing that the sight of her slender form even in too-big breeches and a boy's shirt tight across the breasts might make him think that. To distract himself, he stared up into the branches of the elm tree and calculated their route to the window. "Let's go," he said, and compliantly she edged over to him, so he could put his hands on her waist and help her up to the first branch.

He'd done something like this before, guiding the climb of other bright-eyed ladies in the rigging on his ship, to show them the view that couldn't be had anywhere but the crow's nest. But his senses were especially heightened now, as if the light breeze scraped up every nerve ending. Her calf was slender but surprisingly firm under the rough breeches, her skin warm where his fingers accidentally caught in her wool stocking. The excitement she couldn't quite contain radiated like heat from her body as she scrambled for the next branch.

"Let me go," she murmured, but he didn't. He guided her foot to the fork in the tree, then slid his hand up her calf to the back of her thigh and gave her a gentle shove. Once she slipped, and he found himself with his arms around her waist and his face against her silky fragrant neck. If he hadn't spent his youth climbing masts in hurricanes, he might have fallen right out of the tree.

Once he'd managed to untangle himself, he got her settled on a sturdy limb and started on the window. He edged out on the branch, and when it swayed ominously he braced his knees against the window frame. It was dark enough now that he had to feel with his fingers to find the slight gap between the two casements. He slipped his knife into the gap and ran it up to the latch. With a twist of his wrist, he dug the knifepoint into the latch and flipped it up. Jessica exclaimed admiringly, but he shook his head as he pushed the casement open. "Easy as it was for me, Alavieri could do it too if he could get up this tree. Then your prizes would be gone. Not that anyone would notice, since your family hasn't bothered to catalogue."

"Monsignor Alavieri?" she inquired, completely missing his point. "The consultant to the Vatican? He wrote that lovely essay on the ethical values of book collecting."

"Precisely." He stood up on the branch, balancing for an instant on the balls of his feet, and, grabbing the window frame, swung into the library. When he had his feet planted, he turned and held his hand out to her. She took it and stepped onto the window, as daintily as if she were descending from a carriage. But then, as if she'd put on a boy's nimbleness when she put on a boy's clothes, she let go of his hand and jumped lightly to the floor.

Then she peered around the dark room. "We're in the work area."

He pulled the drapes shut on the window and started for the next. "Yes. Careful, the table's right in front of you. Can you find the lamp there? I brought a flint."

So had she, and he let her win the argument of who got to light the lamp, just so he could see her face in the glow as she turned the flame up and set the lamp on the table. Her cap had come askew. He pulled it off and her hair tumbled down, pins falling to the floor. With a corner of his mind he counted the clinks, reminding himself that they must pick up every one, so as not to leave evidence of their entry.

But for the moment he just caught another pin when it loosed as she shook her hair free.

He had never seen her with her hair down. It fell around her face in tangles, golden as the lamplight. He reached out to pull off the last clinging pin, letting his fingers rest just for a moment on the lock of hair. It was a moment of synesthesia, of sensual confusion, when he felt a warmth that was but a reflection of flame on gold, when his desire was stirred by the aesthetics of sweet femininity in rough masculine attire.