The Water Nymph (21 page)

What could his father possibly have seen in the bronze casting of a lass, naked but for a ridiculous bonnet, standing in the midst of three very unrealistic looking sheep? The whole menagerie was mounted on a hillock, at the base of which was a garland of flowers. Crispin could not imagine what his father was doing with such an item and was on the verge of removing it once and for all from the library when a voice behind him said, “Pull the daisy get the girl.”

Crispin turned slowly to look at the raven and could have sworn it winked at him. Then he turned slowly back, pulled the only flower that matched the description “daisy” on the base of the statue, and watched without surprise as a panel in the side of his father’s desk slid open.

“Hello?” he called into the darkness behind the panel. “Hello, is there someone down there?”

The sound of absolute silence greeted him. Followed by more silence. Followed by a distant flickering of light. Followed by the emergence of four fingertips from the hole. And then another four. And then two thumbs. And then, after a bit of grunting, the face he most wanted to see in the world.

“Are they gone?” Crispin only had time to nod before Sophie went on. “So nice of you to ask. No, nothing big, just a snack. Let’s see, perhaps two pheasants? Oh, and a whole cow. And a pig. And a lamb. And six sticky puddings.”

“Are you sure that will be enough?”

“For me. You should bring some for yourself, as well. And then come down here. I have a marvel to show you.”

Crispin was backing up to execute her orders when she called out to him, “Wait. There is something I forgot.”

“What?” He bent down to hear better.

Sophie stood on her toes to kiss him. “Oh, Crispin,” she breathed against his lips, “I missed you so much.”

“I missed you too,
tesoro.”

She brushed her mouth over his lightly. “I love you, Crispin,” she told him. And then, not waiting to hear the words she knew would not come, she rushed on. “Now go, hurry, get the food before I die of hunger and wanting you.”

Crispin ransacked the kitchen, taking every mobile piece of food he could find until the cook threatened to chase him out. It was a motley feast he assembled, but he had neither the time nor the inclination to wait while the whole pig, lamb, goat, goose, sheep, and whatever else Sophie had requested were prepared. He nearly ran into The Aunts, who seemed to be in search of him, but a well-timed duck into a service corridor he had not known was there before saved him. He peeped out to ensure that the way was clear, then emerged stealthily.

Before he had taken more than three steps, a discreet clearing of the throat echoed behind him.

“Good afternoon, my lord,” Thurston said, as if there were nothing in the least bit unusual about his master creeping around with all the food and half the plates in the house. “I know you were looking for me while I was walking Miss Helena back to Hen House, my lord, and I wanted to tell you that I am returned and that this arriv—”

“Not now, Thurston,” Crispin said urgently. “I have an appointment.”

“I can see that, my lord. But—”

“No,” Crispin said positively, continuing down the corridor. “I am busy.”

“I understand, my lord, however—”

Using his elbow, Crispin shut the door of his library in his steward’s face. He had never before been so rude to Thurston, and he would pay for not stopping to listen, pay for it dearly, later. But at the time no message could have been nearly as important, no missive as urgent, as his need to be with Sophie.

He set the tray on the floor under the desk and whispered her name. At first nothing happened, but soon a candle flickered into view and her smile floated above it. “Food?” she asked.

“Food,” Crispin confirmed. A decanter of wine was handed through the panel, followed by a braised leg of lamb, a plate of sautéed sorrel, half a steak pie, a tureen of something green, six pork chops topped with walnut sauce, two capons roasted until golden, rice with almonds and cinnamon, three oddly shaped melons, a plate of cold asparagus, cherries, trout in brine, six candles, two spoons, a knife made out of sugar left over from last Easter, a loaf of bread, a tray to carry it all on, and Crispin. His legs went first, guided by Sophie’s hands, which not accidentally strayed over his thighs when he was only halfway through. He wanted to protest as he felt her fingers unhooking the lacings of his breeches, but he could not find the breath. He should stop her, he thought to himself, he should not allow her to do this. He opened his mouth, but his cry of “halt” turned into something closer to “
Alaaahhhh
” when her lips touched his shaft. All thoughts of opposition, along with all thoughts of breathing, left him then, and he gave himself up to the sheer pleasure of her touch.

He could feel her, her hands moving up and down his length, her mouth encasing him with its warmth and then pulling away, but with his head still outside the desk he could not see her. He had never had an experience like this, never had half his body suspended in a sensual dream, and it sharpened his senses. He closed his eyes and let his form fill with the feeling of her caresses, not separating them into mouths and tongues and teeth and fingers and hands, just letting them wash into him and around him. He felt himself sliding between her lips, into the marvelously smooth and tight passage of her mouth, her cheeks sucked in around him as she pulled him into her. She swallowed, pressing him against the roof of her mouth with her tongue, then let him slide in and out as her hands caressed the length of his shaft.

The tension of the day turned to a different sort of tension within Crispin as her hands, both hands, moved over his slick, wet member. She sucked hard at his tip as she pushed her mouth over him, and then let her fingers reach out and stroke the base of his shaft. That touch tingled over him, sending all his emotion, all his tension, exploding and shimmering into her. Not knowing what she was doing, what he was doing, he panted and moaned and trembled and tightened his muscles and poured himself into her mouth. She pressed her lips against him and savored his climax, imbibing every glorious drop, every sweet shudder of his release, every sign of his response to her.

When she moved her mouth away, the remainder of Crispin’s limp body slid through the opening under the desk. He staggered as his feet hit the floor, and would have fallen if Sophie’s smile had not helped him stand. She was wearing nothing but the red-and-gold silk dressing gown he had given her the first night he made her strip, and was standing in a small puddle of light being given off by a lantern.

“I am sorry, my lord,” she said, with even less contrition than Basil had shown that morning when issuing the warrant. “I could not stop myself.”

“And I certainly could not stop you.” Crispin move toward her and bent to kiss her red lips, then her eyelids. “I had no idea my father’s old desk could be so exciting.”

“You have not yet seen the half of it.” Sophie pulled away to show him but was distracted by the sight of Crispin’s lower torso in the half-light. She sighed, then dragged her mind back to the exciting news she had for him. “If you put your bottoms back on so I can think straight, I will show you something amazing.” When he hesitated, her voice became plaintive. “Please, Crispin, it is a wonderful surprise.”

“If you are sure.” Following her orders, Crispin pulled his breeches up. When he had securely retied each lace and retrieved the tray of food, Sophie reached for his arm. She lifted the lantern from the table next to her and held it above her head.

They and the table were standing on a small wooden platform, Crispin saw, with wooden stairs leading off one side and down into the darkness.

“I found the opening under the desk the other morning and told Thurston how to open it by pulling the daisy,” Sophie explained to Crispin as she led him down the stairs. “It seemed the perfect place to hide because the desk did not look big enough to conceal a person and the panels underneath would be expected to sound hollow if they were tried.”

“Do you think this hiding place was made on purpose?” Crispin felt a strange sense of foreboding as he descended and thought he heard his father’s voice telling him to go back.

“Oh, yes,” Sophie assured him, stopping their descent. “Just wait.”

Sophie had used the secret door under the desk the day she undertook her escape and return to Sandal Hall, and had that day noticed the door cut into the wall of the passage, but she had been too preoccupied with trying to come up with reasons not to leave that did not involve wanting to see the Earl of Sandal again to bother exploring it. Today, however, in the long hours that followed Thurston’s closing the secret panel in the desk, she had returned to the mysterious door and been well rewarded for her curiosity.

She now knew every horizontal, every diagonal, every dimension of the secret chamber, having traversed them all a hundred times as she waited for the search to be over. Her feet had barely kept pace with her thoughts, but they both seemed to come across immobile obstacles with some regularity. The most insurmountable of these, besides the walls of the chamber, was Sophie’s inability to believe that her godfather had been a counterfeiter. And yet, she had to admit that it made so many things—the blackmail, Lord Grosgrain’s recent battery of huge expenditures, his fear of the Phoenix—clear. But if he were being blackmailed because of the counterfeiting, why was he killed? Did it not make more sense to kill the blackmailer?

As indeed, she reminded herself, someone had or at least had killed the blackmailer’s agent in the person of Richard Tottle. And if the evidence of the bill of credit and the pistol planted on the dead man’s body was to be believed, the same person committed both murders. Sophie had bashed her toe into a wall then, hard, and her thoughts had come crashing to a halt. When they resumed, she had the glimmer of an idea, the idea that perhaps it was not Lord Grosgrain who was being blackmailed but someone close to him, someone for whom he would pay the blackmail willingly, someone who wanted to stop the blackmail by killing Richard Tottle and was forced to kill Lord Grosgrain as well or risk raising his suspicions. Sophie recalled the morning she had gone to deliver the bill of credit to Lord Grosgrain, remembered the raised voices she had heard from his study, and the red face of Basil as he stomped by her out of the house, clearly unhappy after a meeting with his father. Could it have been Basil who was being blackmailed, Basil who—?

Sophie hit another wall then, both literally with her toe and figuratively with the idea of Basil as a killer. She just could not see it—neither Basil as a murderer nor the wall. She realized then, with some shock, that her candle had burned out long before and she had spent the better part of two hours alone, in the dark. Without being afraid.

Crispin. Crispin had done this. Crispin had freed her from the fears of her past. Crispin had given her back herself. She realized with a start that she was no longer scared at all. Not of the dark. Or of the voice.

She felt liberated and strong. And very, very grateful. Try as she might to redirect her thoughts toward Lord Grosgrain’s murder, they kept spinning back to Crispin and the magic he worked on her. Mercifully, Crispin’s voice calling to her had penetrated the darkness of the chamber then, because her longing to see him and tell him and thank him was hard to contain. She was filled with miraculous feelings that warmed even her much battered toes, and with a wonderful sense of expectation. She, too, could teach him something about himself he did not know.

Her excited anticipation of the surprise she had for him had been building and came to a peak now as, hand in hand, she and Crispin arrived at the bottom of the stairs. Sophie led the way across the narrow corridor and through a door, holding her lantern low, so that Crispin could at first see nothing of the chamber around them.

He had never been here, never even suspected the existence of a secret room under his father’s desk. But his surprise at finding it was nothing compared to the surprise he received when Sophie raised the lantern above her head.

“Blasted Aunts!” he said, his eyes agog. It was a small, square room with its walls completely covered in mirrors. Each mirrored surface was lined with six velvet-covered shelves. And each shelf was empty but for the eight or ten enormous pieces of jewelry arrayed on them. The jewels were arranged by color, rubies with rubies, emeralds with emeralds, sapphires together with sapphires, pearls with pearls, all carefully displayed. There were earrings and rings, scepters and sword hilts, bracelets and belts and buckles and broaches, crowns and chokers, clasps and collars—every conceivable shape and size and kind of ornament so long as it was encrusted with gems.

“You are rich,” Sophie trilled relieving him of the tray of food. “You are also the son of a jewel thief.”

Crispin’s eyes became more agog. “No.” He was shaking his head in disbelief. “It is not possible.”

“Look.” Sophie held up a sheaf of manuscript pages. “I found these down here. A meticulous catalog of the ‘collection’ of Hugo, Earl of Sandal, stating the date and manner of each acquisition, though keeping its provenance vague. Many of them are quite ingenious. My favorite is June thirteenth, fifteen hundred and sixty seven, when he made love to Countess V while prying her rings out from under the floorboards.”

Crispin took the pages from her and moved into the light of the lamp. He passed his eyes over them quickly, skimming the outlandish exploits, matching the objects described there to those along the walls, noting in passing that it was not organized alphabetically.

“There are some missing,” Sophie informed him as he got near the end. “Some that he describes are not here. I think you should demand their recovery. I for one would love to see the ruby bracelet he removed from the arm of Queen E herself while pleasuring her under the table at a state dinner.”

“I’ll show it to you when we go back out,” Crispin said nonchalantly.

“You mean you knew about this?”

“No.” Crispin shook his head. “And I can still hardly believe it. But among the dozen or so secrets that my house has been keeping from me which were revealed today, were four caches of jewels. Nothing like this”—Crispin gestured around—“but each containing a few, worthy pieces, including that bracelet.”