Shameless (6 page)

Not without some satisfaction, Neil hit him again.

And that’s for pretty Lady Elizabeth,
he thought.

After that, it was short work to hoist the man to his feet, support him so that he looked drunk, with an arm draped limply around Neil’s shoulder and Neil’s hand hooked in the waistband of his breeches, and drag him away from the house. By putting himself to so much trouble he was, he reckoned, even more of a fool than he’d already proved himself to be by allowing the winsome Lady Elizabeth to live. An unwritten rule of his existence was that he never helped anyone but himself, but somehow or another she’d tapped into a vein of chivalry that he’d thought had bled out long since, and here he was: cleaning up a mess that was none of his making.

His mouth twisted ruefully at the thought even as he tightened his grip on Rosen, who, deadweight, was heavy as a man-sized chunk of lead.

The easiest thing to do would be to simply kill the man and have done
.

Even as the thought slid through his mind, it was followed by another.

The lady would undoubtedly object
.

Neil realized that it was the first time in a long, long while that he had considered someone else’s needs besides his own. And it was definitely the first time in his memory that the other person’s well-being actually won out. If he killed Rosen, Lady Elizabeth would very likely consider herself a close cousin of the murderous Lady Macbeth—ah, his Shakespeare was coming back to him in spades tonight—with blood on her hands. If he abandoned him, which was equally tempting, the inquiry when Rosen was found might well embroil Lady Elizabeth. And for whatever obscure reason, he was resolved to do his possible to get her safely out of the fix in which he had found her.

Damn the chit anyway
.

At thirty-one well-hardened years of age, he was far too old and far too experienced to be swayed by a damsel in distress, big blue eyes, soft, kissable lips, and a truly memorable pair of breasts.

Yet here he was, clearly not as impervious as he had thought.

Which was something he undoubtedly needed to rectify if he wished to live out his natural life span.

By passing through the back gardens of adjacent houses before emerging with his burden at the corner of Grosvenor Square and Brook Street, Neil was able to avoid the line of carriages with their nosy drivers and restive horses waiting in front of the elegant mansion where the ball was being held. He paused in the shadows, waiting unseen while a tired kitchen maid unexpectedly hurried out a close-at-hand door, obviously bent on some errand. A party of noisy toffs complete with top hats and canes piled into a carriage farther along, and he took good care they didn’t notice him either. Otherwise, the area was deserted. Oblongs of light from the windows of the houses he
skirted were the only other obstacles he encountered, and he avoided those. Rosen was breathing hard, reeked of cologne or some foul hair pomade, and drooled besides. Neil gave a grimace of disgust as he half carried, half dragged the man away from the sanctified air of one of London’s toniest blocks into the narrow backstreets and alleys with which the area was honeycombed. There, gaslights smoldered smokily on distant corners, lending an eerie yellow glow to the fog that was beginning to roll in to clog the streets, but everywhere else the gutters and streets were so dark as to make it impossible to discern the identity of anyone. Only a few women were out at that hour. The decent ones hurried along, their heads bowed and concealed by the hoods of their cloaks, the others loitering in hopes of picking up a protector for the night. The men were a mixed bag, gentlemen, drunken and otherwise, mingling with a more sinister sort. Despite the hour, traffic as he neared Piccadilly was heavy. A bath chair carrying an overweight man in an advanced state of inebriation, evidenced by the fact that he was singing immoral ditties at the top of his lungs, trotted past. Crested carriages trundled noisily over the cobblestones on their way to or from the Opera House, or perhaps a private party or a gentleman’s club. Finally Neil judged that he had gone far enough, spotted a cab, and hailed it.

Bundling Rosen inside, he gave the man’s address, reluctantly handed over a pony for the fare, and stepped back.

The carriage took off with a jerk, and his unwanted problem was thus removed from his life. He was once again free to get on with the business that had brought him hotfoot to London.

He only hoped things worked out as well for Lady Elizabeth.

Perhaps, one day, he thought as he faded back into the shadows of the alley from which he had emerged, sparing her would count for something when the ledger of his sins was being tallied. But then again, against so much sin, probably not.

With that, he dismissed her from his mind.

Only to find that his brief inattention to his surroundings had already cost him dear.

“Top o’ the evenin’, Angel,” Fitz Clapham said as he emerged from a recessed doorway, his hoarse cockney voice making him instantly identifiable despite the darkness, or the curly-brimmed hat that was pulled low over his face and the muffler he’d wound around the collar of his coat for further concealment of his features. Clapham was a good deal shorter than Neil and a good deal older, but strong and muscular as a Brahma bull and deadly as a thrown knife. In the small, insular world of assassins for hire, he was known as one of the best. “Keep your ’ands where I can see ’em, now. Tsk, tsk. Did you really think you’d seen the last of me?”

Considering that the last time he’d seen Clapham the man had been gutshot and lying in a pool of his own blood as hired bodyguards converged on him in the courtyard of a French château, Neil thought he could be pardoned for assuming exactly that.

“What do you want?” he asked, although he knew. On the very edge of his peripheral vision, he watched as the other denizens of the alley, the ones who were there for purposes of their own and wanted no part of this, slunk away like cats in the night. He was already calculating the time it would take to reach for his pistol, which still resided in the pocket of his greatcoat. His conclusion was, too much. If his hand made so much as a move in that direction, he’d be dead before he touched it.

“Ah.” Clapham smiled and pushed his coat aside so that Neil could see the gleaming barrel of his pistol, which, as Neil had known it would be, was aimed at his heart. “You made me look bad, you know. I didn’t appreciate that.”

That would have been two years previously, when they had both, with neither knowing of the other’s assignment to the same job until they’d spotted each other on the premises, been dispatched to remove the former head of French intelligence from the world of the living. Clapham had failed, felled by an alert bodyguard’s fusillade of bullets. Neil had succeeded.

As he always succeeded. Not one failed mission in more than a decade’s worth of state-sanctioned murders.

In some small way, he was proud of that.

“It wasn’t my intention,” Neil said.

Clapham nodded. “Still.” Then, to someone behind Neil, he added, “Check ’im for weapons. ’E’ll ’ave a pistol, for sure, and ’e carries a toothpick in ’is boot.”

Clearly, Neil realized, Clapham had seen him make use of the slender, silver-handled knife he always kept concealed in his right boot to dispatch the sentry who had, as he had thought at the time, done for Clapham. Even as he had the thought, Neil became aware of two more figures behind him, slowly closing in on him from either side. Although they, too, were cloaked in fog and shadows, Neil didn’t have to see their features to know who they were. Unlike himself, who always worked alone, Clapham frequently employed two associates, Moss Parks and Toby Richards, especially when the assignment promised to be more difficult or dangerous than usual. Unlike Clapham, they were stupid. But they were equally deadly.

And he harbored no illusions: tonight the trio’s mission was to kill him.

Unfortunately for them, Neil was not yet ready to die.

At the same moment that Clapham aimed his pistol and Parks and Richards, pistols at the ready, converged on him, Neil threw himself at Clapham’s knees in a low, fast dive.

“Blimey!” Clapham bellowed, trying without success to leap clear and shoot at the same time. The bullet passed close enough to Neil’s right ear so that he felt the wind of its passing, smacking into the cobblestones, then ricocheting with a whine. Neil made contact before Clapham could snap off another shot, the full force of his flying body slamming into Clapham’s legs, causing his gun to catapult out of his grip. Clapham went sailing over Neil’s back, tumbling forward, providing for the next crucial seconds just enough cover to protect him from Parks’s and Richards’s guns, which spat fire into the darkness. Screams echoed off the walls around them. The few remaining onlookers scattered.

“Don’t shoot!” Clapham yelled, covering his head as he hit the cobblestones.

“Get ’im!”

“Over there!”

A large body—Richards—tackled Neil as he scrambled to his feet, almost bringing him down again. Chaos reigned as Clapham’s henchmen temporarily abandoned the idea of shooting him in favor of hand-to-hand combat. In the foggy darkness it was impossible to be certain of exactly what was happening, or who was who. Amidst the thuds and grunts of bodies hitting the cobblestones and blows being landed, shapeless figures of bystanders flitted through the fog like wraiths to watch from a safe distance while the three principals in the attack fell on Neil in a blur of lightning-fast movement. Neil blinked in pain as a fist landed a glancing blow that ripped the corner of his mouth. The silver gleam of a knife plunging at him through the darkness gave him just enough warning to dodge it. A man—Parks?—screamed in pain, Clapham cursed, and the sound of an upstairs window being thrown open was followed by a woman shrieking, “Timmy, go fetch the watch!”

The foul stench of the sewage-filled gutter almost under his feet filled Neil’s nostrils as he sucked in air, courtesy of a fist the size of an anvil slamming into his midsection. Wheezing, he returned the favor with a punch that sent that particular assailant flying.

As soon as he realized that he was grappling only with Clapham now, another pistol spat, the bullet glancing off the wall nearest Neil’s head.

“Bloody fool, don’t be shootin’ toward me!” Clapham yelled, his meaty arms trying to latch onto Neil even as Neil managed to tear himself free. Clapham was quick despite his bulk, and snagged a fist in Neil’s coat as he turned to run, jerking him to a halt. Neil whirled, slammed his fist into the man’s thick belly, and yanked his coat free. Then he bolted into the darkness, darting toward the mouth of another of the small alleys that honeycombed the area.

“’E’s gettin’ away!”

Snapping off a quick shot behind him as he ran down the first of the rabbit warren of streets he knew like the back of his hand and that
he hoped would be his salvation now, Neil tried to come up with a plan.
Run
was the best he could do for the moment, he decided as his immediate vicinity was peppered by answering gunfire and he ducked down another alley.

So that’s what he did, with his would-be assassins in determined pursuit.

Despite his years of loyal service to Crown and country, those who decided such things were determined to see him dead.

B
ETH FOUND THAT
she was shivering a little as she stole up the back stairs and flitted as silently as possible along the long corridor that led to her bedchamber. The shivering, she thought, was not due to cold, but rather to the shock of William’s attack, and had set in only now that she deemed herself really, truly safe. Even after she had dealt with William, the thought of exposure had terrified her. Had it not been for the fortuitous presence of that impossibly handsome housebreaker . . .

Her lips burned as she thought of him. He had, of course, been frightening at first, but at the moment when he’d appeared she’d had far too much disaster on her plate already to worry about any danger she might have been in from him, and in the end he had proved to be a God-send. Without his help, she would never have been able to get herself and William out of the library with no one the wiser. She’d even begun to trust him a little—until he’d proven himself to be as untrustworthy as most men with his unwanted kiss. Still, she hoped, no, prayed, he had kept to his part of the bargain. Her knowledge of him
was of the slightest, but still he had struck her as a man who kept his word, so she rather thought he would. If asked, she meant to say only that she had given William his congé and then he had left the premises (which had the virtue of being absolutely true). If an accident had befallen him after that—say, he’d fallen and hit his head—well, she was very sorry for it, of course, but it had nothing to do with her.

With any luck, that story might just see her through.

As luck—bad luck—would have it, Twindle was in Beth’s bedchamber as Beth slipped inside the door and quietly closed it behind her. The light from the fire in the hearth and the flickering candles in the sconces on the wall revealed her clearly just as soon as Beth turned around. Tall and spare, clad in austere black bombazine, with a narrow, deeply lined face and silver hair brushed up into a severe bun, Twindle had been first nursemaid, then governess, and finally, as they grew up, companion to her and Claire, and the elderly woman was fiercely devoted to the pair of them, and their eldest sister, Gabby, too. But she was also straitlaced and rather lacking in humor, and completely rigid in her notions of what was and was not proper behavior for an unmarried young lady. Beth was quite certain that if the complete tale of her evening’s misadventures should ever come to Twindle’s ears, Twindle’s scandalized lecturing would continue nonstop until the day one of them died.