Rook (29 page)

Sophia stood on the small gallery, looking down at her engagement party, if not with disgust this time, certainly with apprehension. The flat was sparkling with soft light and the dusk skyline of the Sunken City, the violins playing, the room below her more full of people than they had dared hope, though it was nothing like the boisterous celebration of her Banns. The newspapers must have done the trick, or people were too afraid to stay in their own homes. The gendarmes surrounding the building might actually be a draw, once the Seine Gate opened.

She stepped back, restless and unsure why. Spear had not been himself ever since they left the Commonwealth. He was distracted, and when she’d asked him where he’d been the night before, he’d said Aunt Francesca’s, reminding her that it was good to have more than one plan B, and would say no more. She thought perhaps he was angry with her, after the ferry and the landover ride. If he was angry with her now, he would be furious with her later. He was never going to understand why she would take René Hasard with no marriage fee, when she could have had Spear Hammond for the same. But she could not think of that now. It was time to go down, to get Tom, to do what she’d come to. But for just a few more moments, the shadows of the unlit gallery held their own charm.

She started at a hand on her shoulder, and found René behind her. He was in full ballroom René regalia, though a bit more understated, as favored by the city at the moment. He didn’t speak, just pulled her through the doorway to the corridor, where he turned and put a hand on her neck and his forehead on hers. Sophia closed her eyes, lifting his other hand and holding it to her cheek. The door to the flat opened and shut below them, a distance that for a little while seemed very far away.

“Are you ready now, my love?” René whispered. She nodded. He tilted up her chin and kissed her once. “Then I will see you downstairs. Give me time to come through the back hall.”

She straightened, nodding again as she stepped away, watching as René disappeared into the dark hall. Her uncertainty was gone, doubt trickled away into nothing. She snapped out her fan, went onto the gallery, and waited in the shadows. When she saw René’s white head in the crowd below she lifted her chin, and began taking slow steps down the stairs to her engagement party.

Spear wove his way through the crowd, glass in hand, ignoring the women who smiled, moving to a corner where he could watch Sophia’s gray gown glimmering in the shadows of the gallery. She’d been just as easy to see at the end of the corridor, standing still with Hasard’s white head against hers when he’d opened his bedroom door. So easy to see when she’d let him kiss her. And now she was coming down the stairs, head held high under the fancy, black curls, eyes painted dark, skin the color of honey. She was so, so naive.

He’d thought it all through, made his preparations, but still he’d been undecided, dithering like a schoolboy. But now he knew what was right, and he knew what to do about it. Would not be dissuaded from it. He could have forgiven her infatuation; such things went away. What he could not forgive was what he had just seen in the upper corridor of the Hasard flat.

Just like at her Banns, conversations paused as she came down the stairs, and ballroom René, or a version of him, was waiting for her at the bottom. He kissed her hand.

“Miss Bellamy,” he said, so that only she could hear. “You are the brightest of stars fallen to the earth.”

Sophia looked at him from beneath darkened lashes. “Isn’t that what the Ancients said about Lucifer, Monsieur?” The familiar words caused a quirk at the corner of his mouth as she took his arm. “I am surprised you remember that,” she whispered.

“I never forget your insults. They are so instructive. And it is good to be right.” His eyes were mesmerizingly blue in the soft light. “Sometimes I do think you are the very devil.”

She hid her smile behind her fan before putting on a more formal expression. Unlike at her Banns, these guests were queuing up in a line several feet away, ready to walk up one at a time and greet her. The violins began to play McCartney as the first in line, a woman with a turban on her head, approached.

“Madame Gagniani, stop! Please!” René said loudly. “You turn my thoughts from my fiancée!” Sophia returned the woman’s amused curtsy.

“Smuggler,” René whispered near Sophia’s ear, as Madame moved away, “though she never uses the turban, which is strange to me. And this one coming is a collector, and a supporter of Allemande. We watch him carefully.” Sophia gave her hand to an older, very proper gentleman, and then to another man, large around the middle.

“My love, let me introduce you to the Sunken City’s new Ministre of Trade.” She smiled pleasantly at the man who had taken Ministre Bonnard’s post. If this was the man who had condemned them, she wished him a slow death.

“And Louis!” René said. “Where is your
maman
? You know how she always longs to dance with me!”

There must have been some inside joke here, because Louis, a boy who could not have been much older than Cartier, dimpled a little when she held out her hand. To her surprise, she felt that he’d left something behind when he let go. “Smuggler?” she asked René beneath her breath, hiding her hand behind her fan.

“Fence.”

“Is there anyone here who is not a criminal?”

His gaze roved the room. “Are you including us?”

Sophia smiled. Mostly criminals, then, and almost all of them armed, she’d noticed. She glanced down to see what was in her hand, and froze. It was a tiny black feather with a tip of red. This was for Tom, she thought. From the young fence. And for her, if he’d known it. She exchanged pleasantries with a sand supplier, and before their conversation was over, the tiny feather was down the front of her dress.

As the line thinned René said quietly, “I should warn you, my love, that you will meet all of my uncles before the night is over. But do you see the tall man with the lace on his collar, drinking wine with that foul melter, the one who is looking at us now? That is Uncle Enzo, and you must be particularly cautious around him.”

“Will he garrote me in my sleep?”

“Not unless Benoit tells him to. But he is a lip-reader, and if he can see you, he will know everything you are saying. And if he doesn’t stop listening to our conversation now, I will be the one to garrote him in his sleep.”

The level of René’s voice had not changed, but when Sophia looked over at Enzo, he made a quick strangling motion before he winked.

“But I am also noticing we are a smuggler short,” René said. “We seem to be missing Maman.”

And Spear, Sophia thought. They were also missing LeBlanc.

Sophia danced her requisite two with René, who then left to go do his requisite flirting. It had been hard not to look at him this time, rather than the reverse. She received five more token feathers, slipped surreptitiously into her hands as she moved through the dance, all of which went down the front of her dress. Then, finally, through the milling crowd of somber grays and city blues, she spotted LeBlanc coming through the front door of the flat. He was impossible to miss with long billowing robes like a holy man, the white streak in his hair, and a huge pendant with the sign of the Goddess dangling from his neck. And he was positively strutting, confidence surrounding him like a stench as he greeted the proper gentleman, the ally of Allemande from the receiving line. The noise in the flat died down just a little as the crowd noted who had arrived. LeBlanc had a young woman on his arm, a girl much too young for him, curls hanging limp on either side of her face. She appeared to be petrified.

“Hello, Sophia Bellamy,” said a voice near her ear. “Welcome to the family.”

She found herself looking up into a face that was René’s, but not. This face was much more weathered, red hair that was not quite as rich, a pair of keen blue eyes regarding her beneath fine brows. It was René’s face, she thought, but in thirty years’ time. “Uncle Émile,” she said. “Am I right?”

“My nephew has been talking of me?”

Émile was handsome, though not conventionally so. But he was most definitely dangerous, like his nephew. Though perhaps he’d be more likely to nick the mother rather than her daughter. She smiled. “He has talked of you, Monsieur, but only with the greatest respect.”

Émile tsked quietly. “How sad that you should be a liar, and that I should come to know it so quickly. Now if you had said he praised my looks, then …”

He shrugged once and grinned. Actually, Sophia thought suddenly, Uncle Émile might not have any need for stealing any woman’s anything of any sort; he might only have to ask.

“René seems to be besotted with you, Mademoiselle, but it is Benoit who has taken us by surprise. He has defended you to the skies. How did you bring him to your table, may I ask?”

“I did not know I particularly had, Monsieur.” She looked at Émile curiously. Just who was Benoit? The respect he commanded in the Hasard family seemed unlimited. “Though I am glad to hear it. And why, exactly, did I need defending?”

“My sister, René’s mother, she had certain questions.”

Sophia flicked open her fan. “Well, she signed the contract, didn’t she?”

Émile’s mouth quirked. “Only too true. But let me say for all the family how sorry we are for the arrest of your brother. He will die a hero, Mademoiselle. May I kiss your hand?”

Sophia smiled and lifted her hand. Uncle Émile’s mouth remained a trifle too long, but at the same time she felt something slip beneath her fingers and into her palm. Not soft like a feather but hard and metallic. She slid her hand away and switched her fan to it, so she would not be seen clutching what she now realized was a ring.

“What has René told you?” she asked, still smiling as she leaned forward to listen.

“Only that you were in need, and through you, him. But time, Miss Bellamy, will be precious to us.”

“Did you get it off his finger?” she asked, darting a glance at LeBlanc and his wilted companion across the room.

“No. I did not wish to be dead. But it was not on his finger, nor was it in his pockets, which René has now picked twice. Would you have guessed robes have pockets, Mademoiselle?”

“What I don’t wish to guess is how you got it,” she said, looking at him through her lashes.

His mouth quirked again. “My brother Andre says the top left drawer of his desk. It should be returned there as soon as possible. Andre is here, and waiting to do so.”

Sophia gazed at the man beside her. They must think much of their nephew if they took this kind of risk on René’s word alone. “I need to go to my room,” she said.

“You are next to my sister, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“I am sorry for you. I will be there as soon as I can. Hurry, Miss Bellamy.”

He bowed and walked away through the dancers, hailing a friend or some relative as Sophia turned in the opposite direction, clutching her fan and moving as quickly as possible. But progress through a crowd of René’s business associates of collectors and criminals, all of whom wished to speak to her, was an impossible task, and time was slipping before she was able to plead the loo and escape into the corridor.

When the door was shut she ran the curving hall, grabbed a candle from the wall on her way—startling a young woman carrying a tray of cheese—found the back stairs, and then she was shutting the door of her room behind her and turning the lock. She slid a chair in front of the connecting door to Madame Hasard’s, tossed an unlit taper from its holder, and put in her lit candle instead. Then she went to her suitcase, tripped a switch, and pulled out the false lining of the top.