The Devil May Care (Brotherhood of Sinners #1) (2 page)

Outrage pulsed through her. “Not that it’s any business of yours, sir, but by the time my great aunts died, I’d rendered myself unmarriageable.”

The gargoyle’s eyebrows arched.
Good
. She’d shocked him.

“And how,” inquired Helm, his thick white brows rising as well, “did you manage that?”

Her chin tipped up. “I beat the Reverend Mr. Cadwallader at chess.”

“Beg pardon?”

“He only condescended to play with me because his usual opponent was laid up with the gout. I was, quite charitably, allowing him to win. Until he launched into a disquisition on how the organs of mathematical reason in the feminine brain are of equivalent size to those of nine-year-old boys. At which point I abandoned charity and put his king in check in three moves.”

Helm’s eyebrows climbed even higher, twitching like caterpillars, and his barrel chest rumbled with a deep chuckle. “And how, exactly, did this render you unmarriageable?”

She held his gaze squarely, abandoning all pretense of being a meek country mouse. “The reverend’s sermon the next Sunday concerned the evils of educating women beyond their heaven-ordained domestic duties. I was held up as a model of iniquity, and the neighbors quickly deemed me unfit for any man within the parish.”

“On such a slight basis?”

“I believe my utter lack of a dowry helped confirm their opinions.”

“Poor child,” replied Helm, eyes sparkling. “You’ve suffered a grievous injustice.”

“Not really,” she said. “There wasn’t a man in that parish I’d have consented to marry anyway. Even with a pistol to my head.”

Now the scarecrow was chuckling, too.

“You see, Sebastian?” said Helm, his gaze sliding meaningfully to the younger man still skulking in the shadows. “She shows promise after all.”

“For a schoolmistress, maybe.” The gargoyle grimaced, his face a distorted mask in the firelight. “This is a farce, Helm. Give it up.” He turned and pushed at the wall behind him. A hidden panel swung backwards, revealing an even blacker space beyond, through which he vanished like a cat.

The scarecrow started forward as if to follow, but Helm took hold of his arm. “Let him go,” he said. “He’ll make his peace with it. He knows his duty.”

His duty
? Her gaze swung back to Helm’s beefy face, her heart drumming once more. What duty? And Helm had said
she
showed promise. But for what?

Enough with their games. “Lord Helm,” she said, and he startled. Her guess about his title had been a good one. “What precisely do you want with me?”

Helm’s fingers steepled, and he rested his chin upon them, his gaze fixing her as if sighting a gun. “What I want, my dear, is the good of England.”

“The good of England? And why should that be any concern of mine?”

He ignored her tartness. “You have a gift for languages, Miss Covington, do you not? Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, French. I hear tell you had an excellent tutor.”

Her skin chilled, prickling everywhere.
Who in blazes had told him that
? The curate Mr. Rapson, hired by her great aunts to provide moral edification, had dared instead to introduce her and Sarah to literature—mythology, pagan philosophy, love poetry. Wicked vice to the strict Dissenters of Rookshead. Only three people ever knew the truth of it: she and Mr. Rapson . . .
and Sarah
.

Hope and anxiety surged in equal measure, and a yearning so great it swelled painfully against her ribcage, threatening to suffocate her altogether.

Helm licked his lips. “May I offer a piece of advice?
Quid sit futurum cras,
” he intoned in Latin, “
fuge quaerere.
”

The room shifted around her, the floor unsteady beneath her feet. Those words. Those particular words.

“Did you not understand me, Miss Covington?”

“I—I understood.” It was a signal from Sarah. It had to be. Their most cherished passage from Horace, recited nightly in their frigid room, when sleep forced their great aunts to leave off monitoring them for evidence of mortal sin.
Cease asking what will happen tomorrow
.

Her head went perilously light. If this was a message from Sarah, why wasn’t Sarah here? “Do you mention this merely as a point of philosophy, sir?” she said. The air felt hot and thin, rasping against her lungs. “
Carpe diem
, and all that?”

“Tell me, my dear,” he countered, his tone that of a pleasant-tempered schoolmaster. “Do you know the next line?”

Her limbs began to tremble, but she wouldn’t let her spine soften. “Of course,” she bit out. “I have most of the Odes by heart. But you knew that when I walked in here, didn’t you?”

“Recite the lines for me, then, if you will.”

“
Enough
! Where
is my
sister
?”

There was something terrible in Helm’s expression—gentle and pained, but terrible.

Oh, God
. The answer to her question was written there, with no need for words. Everything she’d feared, made suddenly, unbearably real.
Sarah.

Mercifully, tears burst forth, blurring away the sight of the men. She had nothing now, and no one. No hope at all. Only a bare phrase that echoed dully in her skull:
Nec dulcis amores sperne puer,
neque tu choreas.
“You who are young,” she whispered in English, her voice cracking, “don’t scorn sweet love, don’t refuse to dance.” Sarah’s very favorite lines from the Ode, the most sweetly cherished dreams of her girlhood.

“And do you adhere to Horace’s philosophy?” Helm’s voice seemed to be coming from very far away. “Despite your upbringing, Miss Covington, can you approve of those who put it into practice, who dare break every rule? Who seize the moment, take risks if they must? Even if that means their lives are forfeit?”

Dear God
. Her knees wobbled. Sarah.
Sarah is dead.

“I’m afraid, my dear, we must ask you to take a great risk. A risk your twin sister took gladly.”

The walls of the little room swayed and buckled, the lamp winked out, and the air went roaring past her ears.

“Catch her!” someone said, but she was spinning much too fast, and the black shadows rushed out from behind the bookcase and swallowed her up.

* * *

Sebastian was shaking. Hard.

It took three blasted tries to pick the lock on Mawbry’s Whitehall office door. When he stumbled inside, he had to brace himself on the desk to steady his hands before he could rifle through the stacks of diplomatic packets crammed into the largest drawer.

He was never so glad in his life that he’d learned to pick locks. And never so glad he knew where a friend stashed his secret store of liquor. A glass of Mawbry’s ridiculously expensive smuggled brandy was essential right now.

A glass? No, bugger that. He’d be going through a bottle. Or two.

The first bolt went down in a hard gulp.

He thought he’d been prepared to see the girl. Had done perfectly well, in fact, for the first minute or so. He’d been so relieved by the gray dress, the virginal stiffness of her posture.

Of course, there was the all-too-familiar slant of her lovely cheekbones. The full curve of her lips in that rich coral shade he knew so well. Those sent a jolt of alarm through him.

Sal’s face.
Sal’s
.

For a moment, he’d felt the edge of the horror that slammed through his brain each night like a spike. A haunting made flesh.

But there’d been no flirtation in this girl’s manner, no sensuality. Coiled tight in that topknot, her hair looked flat and dark, with no sign of auburn fire. Her voice was mild, submissive. Her eyes cool. Her hands still as gravestones.

A nun. She’d looked like a
nun
.

Silks and ruffles and saucy curls would surely make no difference. Dress the twin up as they might, no one would ever mistake the little governess for Salomé Mirabeau. Or think she could succeed where Sal had failed.

Seeing that, he’d thought it over and done with; he’d thought Helm’s plan could never work. Though the abandonment of that plan meant grave danger for England, intolerable loss against the French in Iberia, and probable death for himself, gratitude washed through him. He’d been relieved, so bloody, bloody relieved.

Now he poured and drank.

And poured and drank again. Though the brandy burned at his throat and soured his stomach. If only there were enough of it to bring oblivion.

Because when Helm asked the girl why she hadn’t married, something came alive in the little nun’s eyes. Her voice changed, and even her posture. Beneath that meek exterior lay steel. And fire. He’d known, with instincts honed in a decade of spying for Helm, that she had the potential she needed.

The first bottle was somehow empty already. He wrested the stopper from a second.

It would take work, no doubt, to make her ready. But the spark he’d seen in her eyes told him she would surely agree to try.

And he was going to have to help.

One thought kept pounding through his head, too loud and vicious for alcohol to have any hope of drowning it: no matter what he chose to do, he was about to watch Sal die all over again.

Chapter Two

Despite the heavy velvet cloak around her, Rachel was cold to the bone.

Even the glaring sunshine in this place they’d moved her to couldn’t warm her. The light was an irritant. The whole room—the gilt-edge furniture, the bright Turkey carpet, the pretty oil landscape hanging over the fire—was entirely too cheerful to bear. The men kept talking to her in kindly voices, which made her want to scream.

How long had she been here? An hour? Two? She drew up her legs under her on the cushioned chair they’d sat her upon and wrapped her arms around herself, wishing she could simply lose consciousness again.

Her brain was too stubborn to let her.

Grief swept over her, thick and cold and dark.
Sarah
. When she and Sarah were girls, if one of them skinned her knee, the other shared the grating pain. After Sarah ran away, Rachel would be kneeling at prayers on the cold slate of her great aunts’ kitchen floor, and feel light burst inside her, and know her twin was laughing. Or wake in a frozen sweat, and know her twin was afraid.

Then, three months ago, she’d been alone in her room at the Greeley’s, late at night after the children were in bed, when a pulse of blind terror struck. Panic sent her leaping from her chair, a scream tearing at her throat. An awful blazing-hot pain ripped through her belly. She fell, clutching her abdomen, fighting to breathe. Looking across the room, frantically, hopelessly, towards . . .
someone
.

Then it was over. The connection snapped, like a frayed rope.

She lay sprawled on the Greeley’s musty carpet, her copy of Cicero where it had tumbled beside her. In silence. In safety. Utterly alone.

Alone
.

Now, a terrible heaviness filled her limbs. Dragging air in and out of her lungs hurt.

Oh, God, she’d known the truth then. She’d known, but hadn’t wanted to believe it. She couldn't bear to.

Now she had to accept it as fact.

“Miss Covington?” Lord Helm laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. As if gentleness could ease the unbearable news.

At least the gargoyle-man hadn’t reappeared since he’d vanished through the wall in Helm’s office. Weak as she felt, one glance from those blazing eyes would reduce her to ash.

“Forgive me, my dear,” said Helm, more insistently, “but we’ve already lost weeks looking for you. Your sister wanted nothing more than to protect England, and I’m sure she—”

“Leave her be awhile,” came another voice, a rich baritone, with a hint of Northern burr. The man had arrived a short while ago. Helm called him Mawbry. Tall, russet-haired, good-looking, smelled of cologne. And he kept trying to show her pity, which made her want to kick him.

“Don’t be soft-headed, Mawbry.” A deeper voice, a true bass, from Mawbry’s companion, a towering hulk in a black cloak, with overlong raven hair curtaining his face. No one had yet referred to him by name, so she’d privately christened him the Black Giant. “We can’t coddle her,” he said. “If she’s fragile, she’s no use to us.”

“Devil take it,” retorted Mawbry. “She’s practically a child.”

“She’s nearly five and twenty,” said the Black Giant. “Sal took down Le Conte when she was eighteen.
Le Conte
. And DuBlieck and Carteret just two years after that.”

Rachel squeezed shut her eyes.
Sal
? Awful, ugly, vulgar name. Why did they keep saying
Sal
? Sarah would never have used it. But, then again, nothing these men were saying made sense. “Le Conte?” she asked, her voice an unfamiliar hoarse whisper. “Who is Le Conte?”

A long silence thrummed in the room. Mawbry was suddenly busy pouring himself a drink from a crystal decanter. Helm became fascinated with an ornately painted globe, and the Giant retreated stonily behind his veil of hair.