Thief of Hearts (8 page)

O'Dunne made an impatient gesture. "Then you have a considerable amount of studying ahead of you. You'll never begin to be the expert Nick was, but that's not necessary. All you need is a grasp of the fundamentals, at least for the time being."

"What exactly was my brother an expert at?"

"Everything," Anna said before O'Dunne could open his mouth. "And if you lived to be two hundred years old, you couldn't come close to him in any way, Mr. Brodie.
In any way
." Silence while they glared at each other. She was thinking of their first meeting. So was he.

O'Dunne coughed. "Nick was Thomas Jourdaine's right hand after T.J. died."

"T.J.?"

"Mrs. Balfour's brother, Thomas Jourdaine, Jr."

To Anna's surprise, Brodie muttered something soft and sent her a look of genuine sympathy. His pale eyes went gentle and his hard mouth relaxed. She looked away in confusion. "When did it happen?" he asked quietly.

"A year ago. As I told you, Mrs. Balfour's father is ill, almost an invalid now, and most of the burden of running the company had fallen on Nick's shoulders."

"Didn't you tell me there was a cousin?"

"Stephen Meredith. He's second in command under Nick. He takes care of the administrative side of things, the internal housekeeping, so to speak. It was Nick who really ran the shipyard and dealt with the workers face to face."

"Did he design ships?"

"No, but he understood a marine architect's drawings and plans. He could read diagrams."

"He understood shipbuilding from beginning to end," Anna put in, her chin high with pride.

"There wasn't anything worth knowing about the building of ships that Nicholas didn't know."

"My, my," mused Brodie, "when do they canonize him?" He cocked a brow, watching her bristle. "Well, that's wonderful, it truly is, but I've got one question. If my brother knew everything there is to know about building ships, and if you're a lawyer, Mr. O'Dunne, and you're a… " he paused while Anna waited tensely, "a very lovely young lady," he finished, bowing fatuously, "how the hell am I supposed to find out what Nick knew about ships so I can fool people into thinking I'm him? Which one of you is going to teach me?"

"I am," said Anna flatly.

Brodie grinned. "You?"

"I."

He laughed out loud. The sound was so like Nicholas's laugh, her anger never surfaced and she stared, transfixed. "With all due respect, ma'am," he said when he was finished laughing, "I think our little plan is in deep trouble."

O'Dunne started to speak, but Anna's voice rose over his. "Do you, Mr. Brodie?"

"I do, ma'am. I humbly confess I do."

"If that's true," she said silkily, "then I suggest your immediate future is in deep trouble as well. I suggest that if 'our little plan' fails, you'll find yourself back: in prison sooner than you expected. Sooner than you deserve, perhaps, although that seems impossible. In the meantime, you might start trying to remember all you've ever heard about sheer drawings and longitudinal framing and intercostal keelsons, Mr. Brodie. Think about the optimum distance between transverse bulkhead frames in a middle-class merchantship. Consider the difference between a rivet with a countersunk head, chipped flush, and one with a snap head and a conical neck. Aiden, have you finished with your 'objectives'?"

"I… no, I—"

"Well, I'm not able to listen to them any longer. I want to speak with you alone. Occupy yourself with something useful, Mr. Brodie. Read a book." She scooped up the one on the bar and threw it at him. Taken unawares, he barely caught it. She strode to the door and opened it. "Mr. Flowers!" Billy came. "Watch Mr. Brodie."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Come, Aiden."

O'Dunne threw Brodie a look that almost but not quite communicated masculine sympathy. Catching himself, he changed it to one of stern warning. "Stay here until I come back," he ordered, then hurried to catch up with Anna in the hall.

The moon was half-full; by its white light Anna avoided the larger ruts and obstacles in the dirt courtyard and picked her way past brush and hedges to the same fence from which she'd earlier watched the sunset. She paced while she waited for Aiden. When he joined her, she blurted out without preamble, "What can you be thinking of? Do you seriously believe this?" she held her arms out helplessly, unable to think of a word derisive enough, "this
scheme
can work?"

"Yes. I do."

"But you've seen him, you know what he's like."

"He's a lot like Nick."

"He's nothing like him!" she denied hotly. "A resemblance, nothing more! He's uncouth, ill-bred, vulgar. Did you see him" she couldn't bring herself to say a word so indelicate as
spit
, "did you see what he did? He's impossible. A pagan!"

"I've spent some time with Mr. Brodie, and I say it can work. But not without your help."

She threw up her hands and resumed pacing. She was angry with Aiden, angry with Brodie, and angry with herself for agreeing to play any part at all in this absurd charade.

"I don't only mean teaching him the rudiments of shipbuilding or describing the
Morning Star
to him and that sort of thing," he went on mildly. "I mean the subtler details of impersonation. Things like… how Nick wore his hair or tied his cravat. Gestures he made, his walk, figures of speech he used. The sort of cologne he" He broke off when Anna made a soft sound of pure frustration.

"But I don't
want
to teach him those things, those personal habits." She faced him earnestly. "Have you thought about what this means? Have you considered what it will be like for me? Not just if something goes wrong and it becomes known, but how hard it will be, how painful?" She swallowed the lump in her throat and kept talking. "Aiden, I don't think you really understand. I can hardly bear to look at him," she admitted thickly. "He looks so much like him. Just now, when he laughed, I couldn't—" Her throat closed and she had to stop. She kept her face averted, not wanting him to see.

"Anna, my dear. It hurts me to see you this way. I don't know what to say." He patted her shoulder clumsily.

She had a sudden idea. "Why can't we say he's sick? Cancel the trip to Rome entirely and say he's too ill to travel. That way we wouldn't have to meet anyone at all. We could wait in Florence until it's time to go to Naples for your rendezvous with the nonexistent Mr. Greeley. Even if there is such a person, we don't know he and Nicholas ever met. In fact, for all we know, Brodie's not necessary at all
, you
could impersonate Nicholas."

"You're right, as far as that goes. We don't know for certain that Greeley and Nick ever met. But as for me pretending to be Nick—I'm sorry, I'm not willing to take that chance."

She looked away, privately admitting that the risk was too great but unwilling to acknowledge it.

"Besides, Anna, you're forgetting one fact. Somewhere there's a man who believes Nick is dead because he thinks he killed him. We can't hope to draw him out if Brodie stays in Florence and Rome incognito."

"Draw him out?" she repeated stupidly.

"Of course. Brodie's a target. If he stays out of sight, the killer will make the natural assumption that we're only pretending he's alive, and won't bother to show his face. But if Brodie's out and about, looking, talking, and behaving exactly like Nick, the murderer will believe because no other explanation will occur to him that somehow Nick survived. Then, with any luck, he'll try again."

"With any luck?" She blinked in disbelief. "Are you out of your mind? He could be killed. What are you thinking of? Does he know?"

"Does who know what?"

"Does Mr. Brodie know he's a 'target'?"

"Yes, of course."

She tried to absorb it. It made sense in a horrible way. Nicholas's brother was trading certain death by hanging for the possibility of it by assassination. But it seemed so ghastly, so cold-blooded, it made her shiver.

"Our dilemma," O'Dunne pursued, oblivious to her distress, "is that we don't know for certain that it was Union agents who killed Nick. But since no other possibility comes to mind, he had no enemies that we know of, at least none that hated him enough to kill him, there's no alternative."

"It couldn't have been. I will not believe it."

"Who, then?"

Her mouth opened, then closed. She scowled.

O'Dunne smiled tolerantly. "I understand your feelings about Mr. Lincoln, my dear, and your views on slavery and the war, but don't let your idealism blind you to the facts. War and idealism rarely exist simultaneously. That's hard for you to understand, I know, because you're a woman. Your temperament is too gentle to comprehend it."

Anna was so used to the condescension in his tone and his sentiments from the men of her acquaintance, her father, her cousin Stephen, even dear Nicholas, that it never occurred to her to take offense. She was still grappling with the enormity of the idea that Brodie was meant to decoy Nicholas's killer back out into the open. "What if he's killed?"

"What's that?"

She'd spoken so softly, he hadn't heard. "Nothing." She set the thought aside. It was too unwieldy.

"Listen to me, Anna. If you really can't go through with it, we'll end this business with Brodie tonight and you can start for home tomorrow. None of this was my idea, I promise you. Dietz will just have to think of something else."

She stared up at the black sky, remembering what Mr. Dietz's alternatives were to shut Jourdaine Shipbuilding down and send Mr. Brodie to his death. "And if I agree to it, what will happen when it's over?"

"When it's over, when Brodie's usefulness is at an end, we'll simply kill him off. You'll say that he, that Nicholas, died of a fever or in an accident, and you buried him in Italy. Brodie will go back to prison, and you'll resume your life in England as the widow you are. And no one will ever know the truth."

Anna shivered again, gripped by a cold, inscrutable emotion.

"I've spent the last two weeks with him, don't forget," Aiden continued gently. "I understand your reluctance to have anything to do with him, but honestly, he's not quite as bad as you think. I'm confident you're in no physical danger from him." Anna colored and looked away, remembering. "And I don't think he's a violent man."

"Not violent! But he murdered that woman, he—"

"He denies it."

She gaped, then shook her head in wonder. "I think you believe him. Aiden, I think you like him!"

"I don't like him! If it were up to me, he'd be dead and Nick would be alive!" He moved away from her to hide his emotion.

She followed, and touched his arm softly. Sometimes she forgot she Wasn't the only one grieving for Nicholas. She thought of all she had lost, and of what it would be like if she went back to England now. The curious thought struck that she was less lonely here than at home. That was something else she would have to think about. In a little while. "Very well, Aiden, I will try. I'll try to get through the next few days with that man. But stay with me, will you? Mr. Flowers doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence as a bodyguard, does he?"

He turned back, smiling, and took her hands. "Everything will be all right, Anna, I promise." They started to walk back toward the inn. "But… "

"What?"

"Tomorrow I think we should all begin riding together. There's plenty of room in our carriage for four, and it's time Mr. Brodie got started with his lessons. After all, he's got a lot to learn about what was it? Transverse bulkhead frames?"

She returned a wan smile for his benefit. "Oh, very well," she said on a tired sigh, resigning herself to it.

"Good girl. I admire you a great deal, you know. I think you're a very brave young lady."

"I'm not brave at all," she scoffed, putting her arm through his. "I think I must be mad."