Linda Needham (20 page)

“You’re going now?” She tried not to sound too hopeful, praying only for him to be away just long enough for her to finish reading the rest of the papers. “For how long?”

“That depends, madam.” He leveled a finger at her, a softer note in his voice, a lower thunder. “And you’ll behave. Tell none of your subjects about the incident yesterday.”

“I promise, my lord.” Caro nearly crossed her heart as a seal, but considering what she was hiding from him just under the counterpane, it seemed almost a blasphemy.

“Good luck, Tweeg.” He tipped the woman a salute and then strode out of the room without another word to Caro.

“Are you ready for your bath? Or your breakfast?”

“Oh, breakfast, please, Mrs. Tweeg.” Caro made room for the tray across her lap. “I didn’t have dinner last night.”

“Then eat up, Your Highness. The bath will keep warm for another half hour.”

Then Caro was alone again, the pages at her thigh seeming to burn a hole there.

She retrieved them all from under the covers and read the next on top as she munched on a piece of toast.

A letter dated two days before she was born.

“Precious cargo? What the devil is this?” And why would such a letter be included among papers in a file compiled to investigate a threat to her life?

Who is this Captain R?

And what about GR IV?

“King George the Fourth?” He hadn’t died until June 26 of that year, so he would have been king when her mother was spirited safely out of Boratania. Was this Captain R responsible for her mother’s safe arrival in London, just in time to give birth to Caro herself?

Sobering indeed. After all, what if her mother hadn’t made it here to England? If she’d been taken at sea with the unborn heir to Boratania.

A kingdom lost to the world.

And might soon be again if she didn’t uncover the source of the conspiracy against her.

But the last page of the lot was a true joy, and she laughed out loud.

“I told you so, Andrew Chase, first Earl of Wexford.”

Pleased as punch, Caro downed her breakfast as she soaked in her blissfully steaming bath, afterward suffering through Mrs. Tweeg’s tending to her stab wound, listening to the woman’s exclamations of outrage against her wicked attacker, as well as her pronouncement that the wound was healing quite nicely, thank you.

She dressed on her own in a lose-fitting skirt and button-front shirtwaist and then carried her folio downstairs.

As she approached the library, she heard Wilhelm and the rest of her subjects in a spirited discussion over the sale of a mule.

“All that trouble over a mule, gentlemen?”

“Your Highness! Good morning!” The men stumbled to their feet, greeting her randomly as she entered the room and dropped the folio into her chair at the desk.

“Avery good morning, everyone.” Very, very good!

But they were still bobbing and wavering, waiting for her to instruct them. She hadn’t had much practice at being a ruling monarch, especially in such distinguished company.

“Please, do make yourselves comfortable.” But they only stood looking at her, still poised at the ready. “I hope you’ve all settled in to your rooms.”

“Oh, we have, Your Highness,” Gunnar said, nodding, “and the children are very happy. Though we still cannot possibly thank you enough.”

“You already have, Gunnar.” And Drew’s suspicions had been so wrong. “Why, imagine my delight to discover that your family is one of Boratania’s most ancient.”

Gunnar’s eyes went wide. “The Hertenfels may be
nearly as old as the Grostovs, Your Highness, but they were scholars and scientists. We’ve no claim at all to nobility.”

Which seemed suddenly nonsensical as she slipped the paper out of the folio and unfolded it to Drew’s report on the indisputable pedigrees of her subjects. His diabolical Factory was good for investigating more than just mayhem and murder.

“I don’t know why I didn’t realize it sooner, gentlemen.” She’d always concentrated on the
things
of Boratania, not its people. The artifacts, not the artisans. “Your house, too, Wilhelm. The Belvederes have been Boratanian for at least six hundred years.”

“Proudly so, if you don’t mind my saying, Your Highness.” Wilhelm smiled and bowed grandly for her.

“You have every right to be proud, Wilhelm. All of you.” She had nearly memorized the Factory report. “Karl, your Brendels were all ambassadors, just as you were.”

“I’ve been more a gypsy these last twenty years, Princess Caroline.” He sighed, his shoulders sagging as he nodded toward his compatriots. “We’ve all been.”

And she was going to right that wrong as well. “Johannes comes from a long line of Halstedt generals, just as Marcus does through the Oderwald family.”

“Well, Princess Caroline,” Erasmus said as he folded his long limbs into a chair that was too low for him, “the Uechersbachs have always been just hound folk.”

“Breeders of the three finest hunting hounds in all the world. And you still have them?”

“In direct line from your father’s favorites.”

“I am so grateful to you, Erasmus. To all of you.” A watery lump rose in Caro’s throat, years of not understanding the deeply personal connection she had to the kingdom she loved with all her heart.

And these men, their children and grandchildren, were the living symbols of Boratania’s past, as well as its future. The treasures and artifacts belonged to them as much as they did to her.

Their roles every bit as important as her own.

“I have a huge request to make of you, gentlemen.”

“Anything, Your Highness,” Wilhelm said, and to a man their chests rose. They exchanged wide smiles and then turned them all on her.

“I know it’s late notice”—she’d only just thought of it while in her bath—“with the coronation only a few days away; however, I would consider it a great honor if you would all take part in the ceremonies.”

Caro didn’t know what she had expected from her subjects, but it certainly wasn’t the stunned, staring silence they were giving her.

“I know it’s a surprise, gentlemen,” she said, seriously concerned at the tears gathering in Johannes’s gray eyes, “but I promise you that—”

“What is it you mean for us to do, Your Highness?” Gunnar asked, his voice quaking.

“Well, I’d like you to be my honor guard.”

“Your what?” Karl had been quiet till then.

“It’s simple, really. You’ll walk down the aisle ahead of me in two lines—”

“Oh, no,” he said, vigorously shaking his head, sharing his distress with the others.

Certain that she wasn’t explaining correctly, Caro continued, cajoling. “One of you will carry my scepter and one will carry my crown—”

Marcus was now waving his hands in front of his chest. “Oh, no, no, that won’t do, Your Highness.”

The lot of them looked terrified.

“I don’t understand, gentlemen.”

“Your Highness, you humble us all,” Johannes managed as he wiped his nose on his kerchief.

The other men stumbled to their feet again, Wilhelm wringing his hands. “No, but we really couldn’t, shouldn’t…” he stammered, shaking his head at the others.

“But why can’t you?” Gracious! She hadn’t insulted them, had she?

“Well, Your Highness, we…just…”

“I’d very much like all of you to be there with me when Boratania is reborn.”

Marcus clapped his hand across his heart. “What if we fail, Your Highness?”

“Fail?” Was that all? “Well, I don’t think you can fail, Marcus. You are all very good at walking in a straight line and holding things that are far more cumbersome than a scepter and a crown. Heavens, I’ve seen you with the children.”

“But, but, this is your coronation, Princess Caroline,” Johannes whispered as though someone would hear.

“And I can’t imagine accepting my crown without all of you at my side.”

They were staring at her again, still terrified of something. And then an idea came to her.

“I can show you what I mean, if that would help you feel better. We can practice right here in the library.”

“Well…but…” Erasmus said in a very wobbly voice.

“The coronation takes place in St. George’s Chapel
at Windsor Castle.” Caro pulled her chair out of the way of the desk, flinching at the stitch of pain in her side. She ought to be more careful, but this was so important. “So we’ll clear an aisle down the middle of the room, though the chapel is quite a bit longer.”

Their eyes wide with doubt, the men quickly moved chairs and tables out of the way, making a path between the library door and the tall windows.

“Ah, we can use these.” Caro grabbed the fireplace poker and a wreath of dried roses, then went to the door. “Now, form two lines on either side of the rug there.”

They turned in a tight knot, then separated into two rows, facing Caro.

She handed the wreath to a surprised Johannes. “The crown of Boratania,” she said with a smile. And the fire poker to Wilhelm. “The golden scepter.”

“But Your Highness,” Wilhelm said, looking up the shaft of the sooty poker.

Caro strode grandly between her subjects to the windows, grabbing a lap blanket off the back of a chair, stopped, and turned back to them as she tied the blanket around her neck with the fringe at the corners.

“Then you’ll merely have to walk the distance of a hundred feet or so down the aisle.”

They were standing stock still, silently looking back at her over their shoulders.

“You’ll stop at the base of the altar.” Afraid she was losing them entirely, Caro hurried on, the blanket trailing down her back to her hem. “I’ll walk forward and stop just ahead of Johannes and Wilhelm. The archbishop will talk a bit and I’ll pledge to serve Boratania and then the archbishop will take the crown from you, Johannes, and set it on my head.”

Caro took the wreath from the man and crammed it onto her head. “Then he’ll take the scepter from you, Wilhelm and hand it to me…”

Caro took the poker out of the stunned Wilhelm’s hand and turned too quickly toward the open library door, dislodging the wreath and making it slip down over her eyes.

“See, gentlemen, it couldn’t be simpler.”

“But I must say, Princess,” came a dear and familiar bass rumble, “I’ve seen more opulent.”

“Drew!” Her heart stopped, then her pulse lifted and went sailing through her veins as she pushed the wreath up off her eyes.

Great heavens, could a man grow more handsome in the course of just a few hours? Taller, more devilish?

Because Drew certainly had.

“You’re home early, my lord!”

D
rew found himself wanting to grin like a wild man at the bewitching sight before him. His exotically rustic princess surrounded by her wide-eyed tribe of loyal, benighted warriors.

She was homespun and otherworldly in that soft, loose-fitting shirtwaist, her hair hanging down her back, crowned in a spray of dried pink roses.

Charmed to the marrow and deeply roused by the crimson of her cheek, by the sinuous, sensual memory of last night’s intimacies, Drew chewed on the end of his tongue to keep from laughing right out loud.

Because the blasted woman had stolen papers from her secret file right out from under his nose, from the impregnable, highly secure Factory.

“We were practicing, my lord,” Johannes said, looking thoroughly scandalized.

Caro’s grin was slanted and haughty as she dragged the wreath off her head. “For my coronation.”

“I see.” Though the spectacle of the real ceremony couldn’t possibly hold a candle to the pomp playing out before him here in the library.

Caro turned back to her shell-shocked loyalists. “Please stand with me, gentlemen. I can’t think of a more worthy group to share in my joy.”

Whatever it was she wanted from them, now the men went sheepish and shy. Shuffling their feet, swaying from side to side.

“For Boratania?” Caro looked from face to face, her hands clasped together.

Drew was sure they would agree to her request, whatever she was asking; his agents had found nothing more threatening to Caro than old family loyalties and a quiet, admirable devotion to their princess and to their lost dreams.

Their hopes and love for Caro were plain in their faces, shown brightly through their eyes—as brightly as her love for them.

“You’d best give in to the princess, gentlemen, else she’ll haunt you all your days.”

As she’d begun to haunt his nights, his afternoons and his mornings.

The air he breathed and the rooms he entered.

“I
will
haunt you, gentlemen.”

Wilhelm’s worried frown lightened to a hopeful grin. “If you don’t think we’ll embarrass you…”

“You couldn’t possibly, Wilhelm!” The woman paused then, suspended in her expectations as the men looked to each other for agreement.

And then in concert, they nodded at her, wanly and then eagerly.

“Oh, thank you all!” Caro clapped her hands.
“You’re wonderful!” She fell on each man with a noisy kiss on the cheek, causing Erasmus to stagger backward into his chair in a happy daze. “And don’t worry a moment about the ceremony. You’re already perfect, but we’ll practice again and again, if you’d like.”

Drew watched the woman as she continued courting their resolution, riding out their courage until Gunnar was volunteering to play a traditional Boratanian folk tune on his concertina and Marcus was dancing hooked armed circles with Johannes.

“May I see you in the parlor, Princess? Alone.”

“Oh…” She smiled at Drew, her cheeks pink and blooming with health. “Oh, yes, of course, my lord!”

“And bring your folio.”

She stopped still for a moment, looked at him from under the dip of her eyebrows. Then she exhaled sharply, thanked her delighted subjects, grabbed her folio from the chair and beat him to the investigation room.

Drew shut the door behind them. “You stole papers out of my file.”

“
My
file.” She hefted the folio onto a table. “It had my name all over it.”

“Did you hope I wouldn’t notice a few missing documents? Or did you think I wouldn’t care?”

“I wanted to see what was inside.”

“So instead of asking my permission, you merely took it upon yourself to steal what you want?”

She gave an unconvincing shrug and then a long sigh which made her sound nearly contrite. “Sorry, Drew. It’s become a habit with me. It was so easy. I just slipped them into my cloak pocket.”

“How comforting.” He’d been utterly bewitched by her at the time, still terrified for her safety, and angry, his confounded senses tied in knots.

“If I had asked to read through my own file, would you have allowed it?”

“No. I can’t, Caro. I’ve got sources and methods to protect. Agents in the field, with covers to safeguard.”

Your own identity to protect, Princess. From you and from those who would use the truth against you.
Though he was certain she hadn’t taken anything that would singularly give her away.

“Then here’s everything back, Drew.” She frowned at the papers that sprung out of the folio when she unlatched it. “I certainly don’t want to cause any more bloodshed.”

“Nor do I.”

“But I do want to know why you’ve got such commonplace letters in here.” She eyed him as she thumbed through the stack of purloined pages. “From each of my parents, a cook, my long-dead nanny—”

“Handwriting samples,” he said, hoping that would be enough explanation for her. But she was looking at him askance.

“Why?”

“Because in the course of my investigation, I might need to verify the source of a document. Having signature samples on file makes my job simpler and the process faster.”

She nodded. “That’s very clever, Drew.”

“A standard investigating technique,” he said as he reached out to collect the stray pages of the file. But she plucked back one of them.

“What about this very cryptic letter to a sea cap
tain. It’s dated two days before I was born and signed by King George the IV, just weeks before he died. I can only imagine that he’s talking about seeing to the safety of my mother.”

The safe transport of her body in this grand ruse, my love.
The last measure of her devotion to her husband and her lost kingdom.

And you hadn’t yet been chosen from the orphanage, Princess.

“That’s…um, yes, Caro,” Drew said, putting the page back into the stack as he tried to form an answer that wouldn’t feel so much like a lie, “you’re probably right.”

“Where did you get the letter?”

“Like the others, they came from Palmerston, from the Foreign Office files when I took on your case.”

She snorted and eased back into a chair, narrowing her eyes at him as the sunlight streamed into the room and caught up like bits of gold in her hair.

“Ah, yes: the Case of the Foul-hearted, Spoiled, Despicable Royal.”

He caught the smile crinkling up the corners of her mouth, his own words, his hasty judgment come back to chide him. “The very case.”

She lowered her lashes and then raised her gaze to him with her blue, blue eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Bloody hell,
he
wasn’t. “No, you’re not sorry at all, Caro. I know you too well.”

“I am sorry for making you work that much harder for me. Sometimes I don’t think before I act.” She caught at the edge of her full, sultry lips with her teeth. “You’ve been my champion all this time—my hero—and I’ve been a lunatic princess.”

A lunatic that he wanted to kiss again.

A princess he’d claim for his own if he could.

“But my favorite lunatic princess, Caro.”

“Your favorite? Truly?”

“My favorite in all the world.”

With whom I’ve fallen desperately, foolishly, in love.

Her smile fell with the tip of her chin. “Just a few more days, Drew.”

“Until what?”

She sat forward on the edge of the chair as though to fling herself from it. “Until my life is safely out of your hands and I am crowned empress.”

His stomach tightened, lurched at the thought of losing her, of not being able to look into those soft blue eyes every morning and every night.

Or hear her laughter.

Not that he could ever have taken a step in that direction. Their lives were as impossibly divergent as the sun and the moon. And he had a job to complete.

“I think we’ve got company, Drew!” She stood and hurried toward the front window.

“Two horses.” He’d heard the hooves on the gravel at the same time she had. “It’s probably Jared and Ross.”

He had left word at the Factory that he’d be at Grandauer Hall, hoping they would have uncovered a bit of good news and come find him.

Drew reached the foyer in time to see Jared and Ross nearly knock Runson over as they came bursting through the door. Ross stopped and clapped the man on the shoulder. “That butler suit fits you fine, Runson.”

Runson only grunted and went out the door to stable the horses.

“Tell me you found the bastard,” Drew said in a
whisper, wanting to learn whatever they had to report without Caro overhearing anything that would cause her to start up another investigation of her own.

“Your man was a mason, all right,” Jared said, leaning back against the paneled wall, folding his arms across his chest.

“Excellent!” Drew caught back the bellow of joy.

Ross handed Drew a notepad. “And he was employed by the Flannery Brothers, one of the contractors who were installing the fountains at the Crystal Palace.”

“Then you must have gotten his bloody name.”

“It was Cowling,” Jared said, as though Drew would understand the significance. “John Cowling.”

“Was?” Drew finally heard their deliberate reference to the past tense.

“Cowling’s dead.”

“What? How, dammit?”

“Stabbed.”

“You’re joking, Ross.”

“I wish I were. I’d like to have led that particular interrogation myself. But his body was found around midnight, in an alley near the Dove pub in Hammersmith.”

“Selfish bastard! Is that all Cowling left of himself? Did you talk to his—”

“Good afternoon, my lords.” Caro came gliding toward them in her silent-heeled slippers and now offered a hand to Ross and Jared. “Welcome to Grandauer Hall.”

Jared stood away and gave Caro a clinical scrutiny. “It’s good to see you looking so well, Your Highness, after yesterday’s close call.”

She pivoted, obviously showing off her apparent
recovery. “If I were a cat, my lord, I’d still have seven lives left. And as long as I have Lord Wexford watching over me—”

“I told you she was mad,” Drew shot to his friends as he headed back toward the investigation room.

“Who is John Cowling?” she asked brightly as they arrived in the room, casually glancing from one man to another.

Drew took her question, not sure how far he was going to go with his answers. “He’s the man who stabbed you, Princess.”

She said nothing as she went to the table where her folio was opened wide and now lacking the “borrowed” papers. Her eyes were darkly serious when she turned back to him. “And where is he now? In jail?”

Drew felt Ross and Jared shift their gazes toward him, felt Caro’s settle on his.

“He’s…he was killed last night, Princess,” Drew said. “Stabbed. His body left lying in an alley.”

“Dear God!” Her eyes grew wide and deeply blue. “Murdered, because he missed me by an inch.”

“He wouldn’t have lived long, Your Highness,” Ross said, obviously surprised at Caro’s plainspoken observation. “Whoever hired him would have made sure he wasn’t around today to talk about it.”

“What a very bad business,” she said, scrubbing at her forehead with her fingers.

“But you were right about Cowling, Princess.” Drew paged through Ross’s notepad, plagued by the feeling that he was missing something vital. “He was a mason, a bricklayer, contracted to work on the fountains.”

“And the man in the tintype? Have you heard back from Wyatt and Halladay?”

“
That
assassin’s name was Paul Lauder,” Drew said, pleased that the conversation had shifted to more solid ground. He pulled the daguerreotype from a pocket in his own folio. “This is his younger brother. A law-abiding tanner named Arnold Lauder.”

“His brother?” She took the photo from him and studied it while Drew looked on.

“Paul Lauder emigrated from Bruges seven years ago, to settle in England. He’s been living in London since then, and was a waiter at Tavistock’s, the gentleman’s club.”

“Before he decided to become an assassin?” She lifted her eyes to him.

“So it seems.”

“A Belgian waiter and a bricklayer?” She shook her head and peered out the window toward the orangery. “But that doesn’t quite ring true.”

Jared sat on the edge of the window seat. “Surely not the typical assassin.”

She looked at Jared. “Then neither is the person who’s hiring them to kill me.”

“What do you mean, Princess?” Ross was studying her intently from across the room.

“I may be wrong, but wouldn’t a typical conspirator hire an expert assassin, instead of sending someone to Gdansk to ask a taverner to ask someone to ask someone else if he knows any assassins who need a little work?”

“I see,” Jared stood, his jaw squared as he worked through Caro’s insight. “An amateur.”

“An excellent observation, Princess.” Drew had come to the same conclusion. “Because when that doesn’t work, when the amateur assassin fails, the conspirator then hires the nearest waiter. And when that fails, the nearest bricklayer…”

A flash of wisdom went off inside Drew’s head.

The nearest.

There was a commonality here between the assassins that he didn’t want to share with Caro just now. Not before he and Jared and Ross could check it out without her.

And if he was right, he had no time to lose.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Drew bellowed, making a show of yanking his watch from his waistcoat pocket and groaning at it. “It’s nearly one o’clock! I’ve a meeting with Palmerston.”

“Right now?” she asked.

“Sorry, Princess.” He grabbed Caro’s pile of stolen papers and stuck them into his own folio. “Can’t be helped. You know how flighty he can be.”

“Do give him my best,” Caro said, with a raised eyebrow, “and my compliments on the fascinating operations in his basement at Whitehall.”

Drew gave Jared and Ross a don’t-ask look and started for the door. “You’ll share my carriage, gentlemen?”

Drew gave them a look that insisted. He needed to talk in private with them.

He’d trusted these two men with his life for as long as he could remember, trusting them with the life of his princess had just become imperative.

Palmerston’s warning notwithstanding.