The Devil to Pay (6 page)

It was a cool but bright morning in Mayfair; a little too bright, really, for the sunlight was making his pounding head worse. Fortunately, the walk was but a short one. Unfortunately, he had not even reached the steps of his club before the first round of applause broke out, sharp and clear in the crisp spring air. Devellyn looked up to see a trio of young bucks literally hanging out the bay window of White’s, clapping and hooting like a cell full of bedlamites.

Wondering whether he ought to simply call one of them out and shoot him for sport, Devellyn cut the three a look of warning, a malicious black snarl which had left many a man shaking in his shoes. The hooting stopped. Their color drained. The young men drew back through the window, their eyes averted, their voices lowered.

Devellyn soldiered on up the short flight of stairs, forced himself to push open the front door, then somehow managed a gracious smile for the porter who hastened to take his coat. Despite the hushed tones still ensuing from the morning room, the porter kept a straight face and bowed respectfully as Devellyn passed through to the drawing room.

Tales of the Black Angel’s exploits had been providing grist for the
ton
’s gossip mill for months now. So it had been too much to hope, of course, that Sir Alasdair MacLachlan, raconteur extraordinaire, could have kept his mouth shut about last night. But Devellyn really had hoped he wouldn’t draw quite so large a crowd. That hope was crushed the instant he stepped into the room. Alasdair already stood before the hearth, one boot set on the fender and one elbow propped on the mantelpiece, enthusiastically regaling what looked like half the membership.

“And by then, everyone in the taproom could hear Dev roaring!” Alasdair waved one hand theatrically. “Why, he was bellowing for the innkeeper, and demanding we break the blasted door down, and shouting some other wild nonsense about a red-haired doxy with a tattoo on her breast.”

Mortification swept over Devellyn again. Damn it, he should have sworn Alasdair to silence. Then and there, the marquess renewed tenfold his vow to find the Black Angel and make her life a living hell. Assuredly, he was living one.

Alasdair—who now had tears running down his face—was gesticulating wildly as he recounted the rest of the misadventure. “Finally, Quin Hewitt and I knocked the door off its hinges, and I swear on my life, gentleman, that the old boy was buck-arsed naked with one wrist still tied to the bed when we burst in,” he recounted as the crowd roared. “And bellowing like a bull with his horns hung in a hedgerow. I tell you, it was a frightful vision indeed.”

“Tell ’em about the window, MacLachlan!” shouted a young blade near the front.

Half-hidden behind a column, Devellyn watched Alasdair clutch his belly and laugh. “Well, he’d already ripped one wrist loose, and wh-when Quin f-f-finally got the other, he went—he went—oh, Lord!—he went straight for the bloody windowsill!” Alasdair was fighting off spurts of laughter now. “Crawled half out the window wearing nary a stitch. Took two of us to drag him out again! And Dev was kicking us, and throwing punches, and hollering that he meant to follow her out and throttle her! And I said to him, ‘Dev, Dev, old chap! That’s a fifteen-foot drop!’ ”

“And then
he
said—” interjected Devellyn loudly as he strode into the room, “ ‘—stand back, Alasdair, you fool, or I’ll throttle you, too.’ And I shall yet do it, old boy, if you don’t sit down and shut the hell up.”

Alasdair’s mouth fell open. His audience turned to gape. Then, like a flock of startled crows, the gentlemen burst into flight, most of them scurrying from the room. A few coughed, rattled their newspapers, and looked away. Alasdair and a couple of braver souls approached Devellyn to pound him heartily on the back and offer varying degrees of sympathy.

It was all Devellyn could do not to wince when Lord Francis Tenby tried to drape one arm over his shoulder. But Tenby was a full foot shorter, and Devellyn had no interest in empathy, camaraderie, or anything else from a spoilt, overbred fop, so he stepped away.

Tenby didn’t take the hint. “Dashed sorry, Dev, that you got rooked by that bitch,” he said. “That makes almost a dozen of us she’s humiliated, and for my part, I mean to make her pay.”

The crowd was falling away now. Devellyn stared down his crooked nose at Tenby. “Oh?” he said. “And just how do you mean to do that?”

Tenby’s mouth turned up into a sour smile. “Some of us have got together and set a Runner on our Black Angel,” he answered. “And when he catches her, he’s bringing her to
us.”

Devellyn grunted in disdain. “He’ll have to beat me to her.”

Tenby’s smile tightened. “Nonetheless, old chap, send me a description of what was stolen,” he suggested. “Our man has connections—pawnbrokers, fences, and such. One never knows what he’ll turn up.”

Devellyn considered it. “Perhaps I shall,” he said.

Alasdair elbowed Tenby out of his way. “Brave of you, Dev, to turn up so soon,” he remarked, setting a hand on his shoulder. “Never knew you to crawl out of bed at such an hour.”

Devellyn glowered at him. “By God, I’ll not be called a coward, Alasdair,” he snapped. “And I’ve not yet seen my bed. I’m too bloody infuriated to sleep.”

Alasdair dragged him toward the coffee room. “Come along, Dev,” he said. “What you need now is a cup of bilgewater down the gullet. And after you’ve had it, you can call me out if you’re still of a mind to shoot me.”

“Believe it or not, Alasdair, you are the very least of my plagues just now,” Devellyn answered.

They sat down in the nearly empty coffee room, and Alasdair sent a waiter scurrying off. “All right, Dev,” he said, turning back to his friend. “What’s wrong?”

Devellyn looked at him in mute amazement. “Wrong?” he finally muttered. “You dare ask?”

Alasdair narrowed his eyes. “Well, you looked merely infuriated last night when we untied you,” he said. “But now you look…I don’t know.”

“Dyspeptic?” supplied Devellyn. “That’s because I am. But I’m sober, right enough.”

“And?”

Impatiently, Devellyn began to tap one finger on the table. “And now I realize what’s been lost,” he finally said. “Moreover, it is
not
a matter for public discussion, Alasdair, or I swear to God, I’ll gut you from neck to knackers with a rusty letter opener.”

Alasdair nodded effusively. “Wouldn’t dare mention it, old boy.”

Devellyn kept tapping his finger, faster now. “The Black Angel took my watch, my snuffbox, and every sou in my pocket,” he said grimly. “But she took something far more valuable than that, Alasdair. Something irreplaceable.”

Alasdair’s eyes widened. “Good Lord, what?”

Devellyn felt like a fool. “A miniature of Gregory,” he finally admitted. “And…well, and a lock of his hair. I carry it, you see, in my pocket sometimes.”

Sometimes!
he thought.
All the time. Every bloody second of my life. Just like I carry the guilt that goes with it.

Alasdair was looking at him strangely. “Why, Dev?”

Devellyn was immediately on the defensive. “Damn it, I don’t know why. I just do sometimes, that’s all.”

Alasdair shrugged. “Well,” he said pragmatically. “A chap doesn’t need a reason. Perfectly natural thing, your dead brother and all.”

“It was the only likeness I had of him,” growled Devellyn at the tablecloth. “And now that bitch the Black Angel has it. And for what, I ask you? For
what?
Why ever would she want such a thing? Of what use can it possibly be to her?”

Alasdair shrugged. The coffee came. “Dashed sorry, Dev,” he said again as he slid one cup in Devellyn’s direction. “But she’s been at it for months, and no one knows who or what she is. No one can catch her.”

The marquess eyed his friend over his steaming coffee cup. “Oh, you think not, eh?”

Two days after her rash encounter with the Marquess of Devellyn, Jean-Claude met with Sidonie. This was always done by prior arrangement, and they varied the time and the location. Often, Sidonie concealed her appearance, but today they were meeting at the British Museum, but a few blocks from her home. It was an innocent enough place for either of them to be seen, and not apt to be frequented by the sort of gentlemen the Black Angel targeted.

They had taken a table by a window in a little-used corner of the reading room and piled both sides with books they’d no intention of opening. While Sidonie kept one eye on the passageway between the shelves to ensure that no one approached, her brother’s assistant slipped a jeweler’s loupe into his right eye and began an assiduous study of Lord Francis’s sapphire pin.

“Ah, Madame Saint-Godard!” whispered Jean-Claude. “Thees eez a very fine piece, indeed. Better, even, than the diamond pin you bring last month! In Paris, thees will fetch a fat price on the—the—how you say
au marché noir?”

“On the black market.”

Jean-Claude smiled.
“Oui,
the black market,” he echoed. “The watch, I will also take. And the snuffbox! Eet eez very excellent indeed.”

Sidonie looked across the table at Lord Francis’s snuffbox. “I’m afraid, Jean-Claude, that it is only silver,” she answered.

He gave a Gallic shrug.
“Oui,
but chased inside with gold,” he said. “And the engraving!
Très élégant.”

“Yes, well, get what you can for it,” Sidonie instructed. “Lord Francis’s parlor maid needs money desperately.”

“I will do my best for
madame,”
he assured her. “There eez a shipment en route through Calais in two days’ time.”

Sidonie felt panic surge. “Jean-Claude, remember you mustn’t involve George,” she insisted, not for the first time. “If we get caught fencing this, his name cannot be mentioned.”

Jean-Claude lost a little of his color.
“Mais non, madame!”
he said, slipping the glass from his eye. “Monsieur Kemble, he would cut off my—my
testicules,
no? Then choke me on them.”

Sidonie winced at the vivid, but not inaccurate, suggestion.

“Now, what else have you there, eh?” He looked across the table a little greedily.

Sidonie thought of the solid gold snuffbox in her reticule and decided against it. She looked at Jean-Claude and shook her head. “No, the rest of it I shan’t give you,” she answered. “It is too risky.”

The young man’s expression was wounded. “What eez thees?” he asked.
“Madame
does not trust Jean-Claude? We have done beezness together for all of one year, and now you say—”

She cut him off by laying her hand over his. “I trust you, Jean-Claude,” she said. “But I’ve also grown fond of you. These other things, they are simply too dangerous to sell, even in Paris. They are very fine, yes. But too easily identified. And they belong to a dangerous man. Should you be caught, you would almost certainly be hanged, and for that I would never forgive myself.”

He wrestled with himself for a moment.
“Très bien,”
he finally said. “But just give Jean-Claude a leetle peek,
oui?
I wish to see theez so very fine things I cannot have.”

Sidonie cast a judicious gaze about the empty room, then pulled the first from her reticule, enfolded in a plain white handkerchief. Jean-Claude unwrapped the snuffbox first, glanced at the lid, and blanched.
“Oui, madame,
thees one I think you may keep,” he murmured, swiftly rewrapping it. “I recognize too well the leetle alphabeets—not to mention the crest.”

The “alphabeets” were the letters
A—E—C—H
etched deep into the gold in a small, old-fashioned script. Sidonie wondered what they stood for, and opened her mouth to ask Jean-Claude. Then on her next breath, she chastised herself for caring and shoved the box back into her reticule.
Devellyn
was all she needed to know. His Christian name needn’t concern her.

“What else have you there?” asked Jean-Claude.

Sidonie shrugged. “Another gold watch,” she said, then hesitated. But curiosity got the best of her and she dug into her bag again, instead pulling out a smaller bundle. “And this,” she said, passing it across the table.

Jean-Claude lifted one brow.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

“I haven’t a clue,” she admitted. “It is like a very thin pillbox, or some sort of square locket. I see a tiny hinge, but I cannot open it.”

“Very interesting,” said Jean-Claude, unfolding the fabric. “Ah! Thees eez a very rare thing,
madame.”

“Is it?” Sidonie asked.

“Watch, and I show.” Jean-Claude pulled a tiny tool from his coat pocket and worked it very gently between the lips of the mysterious trinket. It popped apart like a little gold book. “The latch, eet was stuck,” he murmured, turning it so that she might look at it. “A petite treasure,
n’est-ce pas?”

Stunned, Sidonie nodded. The thing really was something like a large locket. On one side was a gilt-framed miniature of a young man in the high collar and elaborate cravat of the Regency period. On the opposite side, under a tiny pane of glass, was a curl of dark hair.

Ma foi!”
whispered Jean-Claude, obviously intrigued. “Exquisite! This comes from the Devil of Duke Street?”

Sidonie was still trying to make sense of it all. “Yes,” she finally said. “From Devellyn.” She peered more closely at the handsome young man. “What do you make of this fellow?”

Jean-Claude made a very French face and opened his empty hand expressively. “Eet eez his lover,” he said. “What else?”

Given her recent experience with Devellyn, Sidonie had trouble believing that. “Or his father, perhaps?” she ventured.

But she knew at once she was wrong. The portrait was too recent. Jean-Claude gave a dismissive toss of his hand. “The Devil, he eez estrange from all his family,” he said airily. “Everyone says that eez true. So the pretty boy, he must be a lover, no?”

“No.” Sidonie frowned. “No, I don’t think so.”

Jean-Claude shrugged and snapped the miniature shut. “I can melt it down,” he suggested, carefully rewrapping it in the cloth. “Only the gold has value, for the leetle portrait, it is too easily identified and cannot come out without making ruin.”