Sabrina frowned. “A rather peculiar-looking man with a long neck and a small head?”
Hero glanced at her in surprise. “Yes, that’s he. So you did know him?”
“I met him once, when I was with Alexander.” She sucked in a quick breath, her eyes widening with sudden comprehension. “You said he ‘was’ a collector of old books. Why? What has happened to him?”
“He was killed yesterday.”
Sabrina shuddered and turned so alarmingly pale that for a moment Hero worried she might faint. “You mean, murdered?”
Hero eyed her warily. “Yes. I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to distress you. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
Sabrina swallowed hard and shook her head. “No. You were right to tell me.” She walked on in silence for a moment, her gaze on an old-fashioned closed carriage pulled by a pair of showy dapple grays that was drawing abreast of them at a sedate pace. The park was largely deserted at this hour; they could see only some children laughingly playing chase under the watchful gaze of a nursemaid, and a tall, broad-shouldered gentleman in fashionable trousers and a black coat walking briskly toward them.
“Hero,” said Sabrina, as if suddenly coming to a decision, “there’s something I need to tell you—”
She broke off with a frightened gasp as the tall gentleman reached out to seize her arm, spin her around, and slam her back against his chest. In his left hand he held a pistol, its muzzle pressed against Sabrina’s temple.
“Do anything stupid,” he said to Hero, his rough accent at decided variance with his natty clothes, “and yer cousin here gets popped. Understand?”
Hero held herself perfectly still, although she could feel her heart pounding wildly in her chest. “I understand.”
“Hero
,
”
wailed Sabrina, her legs buckling beneath her, her face slack with terror.
Hero’s maid, Marie, had come to an abrupt halt a few feet away, her eyes wide in a sickly pale face.
“It’s all right,” Hero told Sabrina calmly. “They won’t hurt you.” She cast a quick glance at her abigail. “Marie, stay where you are.”
She was aware of the showy grays coming to a stop beside them. The door of the ancient carriage flew open. Another man—his buff coat well tailored but ill fitting, his cravat clumsily tied—leapt out to seize Hero’s arm in an ungentle grip. “Yer comin’ wit’ us,” he hissed. He tried to drag her back toward the carriage, but he was a good head shorter than Hero, and slight.
“I will not,” she said.
The first man pulled back the hammer of his pistol. “Do what yer told.”
“Hero!” screamed Sabrina, lunging against his hold.
“I’ll go with you on two conditions,” said Hero.
“Oh, ye will, will ye?” jeered the buff-coated man, shoving his beard-roughened, tobacco-stained face unappetizingly close to hers. “And what are yer
conditions
, yer ladyship?”
“My cousin is allowed to leave safely.”
The black-coated man with the pistol laughed. “And?”
Hero glanced down at the broken, dirt-encrusted nails digging into the fine cloth of her walking dress. “You take your filthy hand off my arm.”
Chapter 42
S
ebastian arrived in Berkeley Square to find the Jarvis household in an uproar.
“What the devil is going on?” he demanded when the harried butler finally answered his peal.
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” said Grisham, his normally impassive face ashen, “but I am not at liberty to—”
“If that’s Devlin,” boomed Lord Jarvis’s gravelly voice from the back of the house, “send him in. Now.”
Sebastian followed the butler through a hall filled with milling servants, Bow Street Runners, and the steely-eyed, former-military-looking types Jarvis tended to favor for doing his dirty work. From somewhere abovestairs came the sound of hysterical weeping that inexplicably raised the hairs on the back of Sebastian’s neck.
Lord Jarvis stood before the great empty hearth of his library, surrounded by a throng similar to that in the hall. “Leave us,” he snapped. He waited until the others had filed from the room, then shut the door and said to Sebastian, “Hero has been taken. She was walking with her cousin in the park when they were set upon. It appears that at least two men were involved, plus a coachman.”
Sebastian knew a strange numbing sensation of disbelief. As if from a great distance, he heard himself say, “Both young women were seized?”
Jarvis shook his head. “Only Hero—and her abigail. Not Miss Cox.”
Sebastian took a deep breath, and when that didn’t help the sudden, crushing ache in his chest, he took another. “Their object is obviously not ransom,” he said, walking over to pour himself a brandy. His voice came out calm, even cold, but the hand that reached for the carafe was not quite steady.
“Obviously,” snapped Jarvis. The Jarvises might be an ancient and powerful family, but most of their wealth was tied up in land. For anyone interested in extorting a fortune, Miss Cox would have been the more logical target.
Sebastian sloshed a generous measure of amber liquid into a glass. “Is it an attempt to influence you on some looming policy decision, do you think?”
“I’ve received no demands.”
Sebastian threw him a long, cold look. “I’ll take you at your word.”
A flare of rage, primitive and uncharacteristically out of control, flared in the big man’s eyes. “Damn you, you impudent bastard. This is my daughter we’re talking about. My
daughter
.”
Sebastian stared across the room at his prospective father-in-law. Once, he would have said that Charles, Lord Jarvis cared about nothing beyond his own power and the security of England and the House of Hanover. In that, Sebastian now realized, he’d been mistaken.
“I will remind you,” he said quietly, “that she is also my affianced wife.”
And the mother of my unborn child.
“This is because of you.” Jarvis punched the air between them with an accusatory finger. “You and this mad, quixotic quest of yours for ‘justice.’ You have no idea what you’ve mixed yourself up in this time. No idea whatsoever.”
Sebastian set aside his brandy untasted. “What the devil are you saying? That Ross was involved in something
else
? Something more than the transfer of gold to the Swedish government?”
Jarvis clenched his jaw so hard, the muscles along his cheek line bulged.
Sebastian took a step toward him, then forced himself to draw up short. “
Goddamn you.
Tell me. Hero’s very life may well depend upon it!”
Jarvis’s nostrils flared on a deep, angry breath. “The first and fifteenth of every month, the French Minister of War provides Napoléon with what is called the Survey of the Situation of the French Army.”
“Which contains what?” snapped Sebastian.
“Numerical changes in the French divisions. Billeting changes. A list of appointments to command posts. That sort of thing.”
“And?”
“For some time now, a certain individual serving on the General Staff has been making copies of these briefings, which he passes to a Parisian bookseller with a stall near the Pont Neuf. From there they progress to the coast, where smugglers carry them across the channel. Until yesterday, they then passed into the hands of a defrocked émigré priest.”
“Antoine de La Rocque.”
“Yes.”
Sebastian studied the big man’s closed, angry face. “That’s why de La Rocque visited Ross the Wednesday before he died? He was delivering the latest dispatch?”
“Yes.”
“And then what? What typically happened to the briefings after that?”
“Generally, such documents are turned over to a dedicated section of the Foreign Office, where they are copied and studied. It’s a two- or three-day process. After that, copies are distributed to the representatives of a few select allies ... and certain friendly governments.”
It was all, finally, beginning to make sense. Sebastian said, “You mean, friendly governments such as that of the Czar.”
“Amongst others, yes.”
“Let me guess,” said Sebastian. “The Russian who typically collected the copies of the dispatches from Ross was Colonel Dimitri Chernishav.”
Jarvis gave a brief, curt nod. “Their meetings excited little attention, given the long-standing friendship between them. Chernishav was scheduled to receive the dispatches Saturday night. But the transfer was never made.”
“So what happened to the copies of the briefing Ross had in his possession when he died?”
“They disappeared.”
Sebastian went to stare out the window overlooking the garden, one hand resting on the long library table. He was aware of a white-hot rage coursing through him, stoked by fear and guilt and a confused tumult of emotions he had no time now to analyze. “What have you discovered about the men who took her?”
“Precious little. That fool girl, Sabrina, was hysterical by the time she reached the house. A nursemaid tending some children nearby saw the entire thing but wasn’t much better. All we have at the moment is a hazy description of an antiquated carriage pulled by a pair of showy dapple grays and driven by an aged, liveried coachman. That, and contradictory descriptions of two men who were not gentlemen but were dressed as if they were.”
Sebastian swung to face him. “If there’s anything you’re not telling me—
anything!—
I swear to God, I’ll—”
“Don’t be a fool,” snapped Jarvis. “No one is more aware than I of the gravity of the situation. I have put every available man on this, and so far they have turned up nothing. Nothing.” He held Sebastian’s gaze in a long, steady stare. “I can’t begin to understand precisely what has developed between you and my daughter these past two months. But right now, that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except Hero. You fancy yourself adept at solving mysteries? Then solve this one. Find her.
“Before it’s too late.”
It didn’t take Hero long to discern that the taller of the two men who’d grabbed her was the leader.
He sat beside her on the forward-facing seat, his body swaying easily with the lurching movement of the antiquated carriage, his head tipped back against the worn velvet swabs, his watchful gaze never straying far from her face. He kept his finger curled around the trigger of the pistol held resting in an easy but purposeful grip on his thigh.
He was a well-made man, handsome even, with dark curling hair and a strongly boned face. But the slant of his full lips struck her as cruel, his pale gray eyes cold and hard as he nodded toward the sobbing abigail who sat bolt upright beside his confederate on the rear-facing seat. “Make her shut up.”
Hero leaned forward cautiously, one hand reaching out to touch the abigail’s knee. “Marie, hush. You must hush.”
The abigail stared at her with wild, unseeing eyes and wailed louder.
“That did a lot o’ good,” observed the buff-coated tough slouched in the corner beside the maid.
“I don’t know why you brought her,” said Hero.
“Don’t ye?” said the dark-haired man. Sullivan, she’d heard his companion call him. “She’s our insurance. Ye do what you’re told, she lives, and ye live. Ye don’t...”He shrugged. “She dies. First. Unpleasantly. It’s that simple.”
Fortunately, Marie was wailing so loud that the sense of most of that speech was lost on her.
Deliberately, Hero turned her head to stare out the window at the passing rows of unfamiliar shops and tradesmen’s ateliers. She felt the sting of threatening tears and blinked them away angrily.
She had no idea where they were taking her, or why. She knew only that the man beside her had lied. Neither she nor Marie would be allowed to live. Otherwise, he never would have let them see his face.
Chapter 43
N
o one knew better than Sebastian just how ruthlessly thorough Jarvis’s minions could be. But on the off chance they’d missed something, he set Tom to scouring the neighborhood of the park and asked Calhoun to make inquiries amongst some of his more unsavory contacts.
Yet barring any unexpected discoveries or a demand from the kidnappers, it seemed to Sebastian that his only hope of ever seeing Hero alive again lay in finding Alexander Ross’s murderer. Quickly.
And so he went in search of the Russian, Dimitri Chernishav.
The Colonel was coming out of his lodgings in Westminster’s Adington Buildings when Sebastian caught him by one arm and the back of his coat to spin him around and slam his face against a nearby brick wall.
“What the devil?” growled the Russian, heaving against Sebastian’s hold. But Sebastian had the man’s arm held in an iron grip and bent behind his back at a painful angle.
“Miss Jarvis,” said Sebastian quietly, bringing his lips close to the other man’s ear as he increased the leverage on his arm. “Where is she?”
“You are making a mistake,” said Chernishav, panting.
“Diplomatically, or tactically?”
“Both. I heard Lord Jarvis’s daughter has been taken. But I am not responsible. Why would I do such a thing?”
“As a distraction, perhaps?”
“From what?”
“My attempts to discover the truth about what happened a week ago last Saturday.”
The Russian was silent a moment. Then he said, “I did not kill Alexander. Why would I?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that your plans for that evening had nothing to do with a pint at Cribb’s Parlour. You went to Ross’s rooms to take delivery of Napoléon’s latest war briefing.”
The Russian’s face twisted into a disdainful sneer. “And you are aggrieved because I failed to disclose this fact to you? I told you before, Devlin; there is much involved here of which you are ignorant.”
Sebastian increased the torque on the man’s arm. “So, educate me.”
Chernishav gave a ragged laugh. “Break my arm if you feel you must. But it will serve no purpose. I still won’t tell you anything.”