“Tell me where the duke has taken him! I beg of you.”
For a moment he said nothing, the raucous sounds of the street all about them in the torch-lit dark. Finally, he nodded. “A’ll go and see what can be done, then send ye word.”
“No.” She gripped his arm. “You must take me.”
“No, lass.”
“There’s no ‘no’ about it. I will not leave your side.”
He looked about the street. “What’re ye doing here all alone?”
“Seeking the truth. Again. Now, you must take me to him. I want to help him. I need to help him. If I were one of your sisters, you would understand, wouldn’t you?”
The Highlander stared down at her from his vast height. For the second time in years, Diantha prayed.
Despite his long work for the government, and briefly for the underlord Myles, Wyn found himself surprised to discover that a great lord possessed a dungeon—in town—a dark basement of some medieval house in which he was now bound to a wall with shackles about his wrists. Given his present state, it was also somewhat difficult to convince himself that he had made the right decision to mount the duke’s carriage voluntarily. They had taken his knife. Indeed, he had surrendered it without fuss; mind numbed and heart thrashed from that little charade with Diantha, he hadn’t been thinking entirely straight when the carriage door opened and the duke’s minion uttered, “Get in or I’ll shoot you in the heart.” Since he hadn’t wished to die in a bloody mess on the sidewalk before her house, he had acquiesced. A man must have some pride, after all, and the tenderhearted minx deserved better.
A guard dozed in the corner, his lips jiggling with snores, keys to the irons dangling from his belt. Wyn had tried cajoling, even bribery, to win those keys, including an abrupt contortion of his arms when the big fellow came close that had gained him bruises on his wrists and a gash the length of Piccadilly along the side of his face. Perhaps not quite such a long gash, but it bled heartily enough. He felt a bit dizzy and his mouth was a desert. But it seemed clear now that if he’d gone to Yarmouth he would be likewise chained up. At least he’d spared Galahad the journey.
He cleared his throat. “Had you been following me long before you picked me up?”
The guard started awake and rubbed his eyes. “Yester’eve.”
“Since yesterday evening only?”
Grunt.
“Ah. The duke must trust you only with brute tasks. How lowering for you.”
Disgruntled mumble.
“What was that?”
“Rufus was chasing shadows,” the big fellow grumbled. “Told Chopper she weren’t nothing. Not to a flash cove like you.”
Wyn’s heartbeat spiked. “I’ll admit I am not entirely following you. Your colleague Rufus failed you, Chopper, and perhaps the duke in some task having to do with apprehending me?”
Nod of righteous indignation. “But now who’s already gone off bottle-knocked on a tuppence and left me here?” Scowl.
“Rufus, I suppose?”
Head jerk. Relapse into silence.
From which Wyn deduced with no little satisfaction that Rufus, the duke’s employee who had been watching Savege’s household from within, had been paid and furloughed by the duke hours ago. Rufus had believed Wyn’s ruse and Yarmouth had no more use for him. Diantha was safe.
Footsteps came on the step and another man entered.
“Ah, back so soon,” Wyn said. “Since you disappeared swiftly after that lovely carriage ride, I had begun to miss you.”
This fellow was not as large as the other guard, though plenty scarred; he’d been the winner in some nasty bouts. But if Wyn had the free use of his arms, he might be able to best him alone. Both, if he had his knife.
“He wants to see you.”
They took him up the stair, passing a single landing before the smaller guard opened the door at the top. The odor of decay ushered forth. Lit dimly, the chamber was a fortress, all bricked windows, Flemish tapestries, and a massive bed hung with curtains scrolled with gold cord and tassels. Upon a table by the bed a silver tray laden with porcelain bore testimony to an uneaten meal. In a chair beside the table huddled a narrow woman of indeterminate age tucked into a black cloak and dust veil. She did not lift her eyes as the guards brought Wyn toward the foot of the bed, but she stood and drew the curtain open.
The stench of death rocked him. From the shadows a wraith of a man with long, incongruously thick white hair stared back at him, his eyes cavernous in the darkness. His face was pocked with wet red sores the size of sixpence, and moisture stained the nightshirt pink beneath his velvet dressing gown.
At Yarmouth’s castle Wyn had seen a portrait of the duke—a picture of a man in the middle of his life, tall, aristocratically slender and weak-chinned, with round eyes and tapered shoulders exaggerated by an indolent pose, his elbow propped upon a bust of a long-deceased emperor. Caligula, probably.
The monstrosity before Wyn bore little resemblance to the nobleman in that portrait.
“Your Grace, I would bow but these fellows have me trussed too tightly. Or— Wait . . .” He tilted his head thoughtfully. “No, I wouldn’t bow anyway.” He shrugged, the shackles digging into his wrists.
The duke nodded and the gray woman pulled the curtain back farther. A pair of dueling pistols rested upon the foot of the bed, perfectly presented atop the satin coverlet as though still in their case.
Wyn’s throat constricted. “Ah,” he said conversationally, “you aim to finish this in a gentlemanly manner.” Curious. Yarmouth looked barely capable of lifting his hand, let alone of gripping a weapon.
“The s-second . . .” The old man’s voice rasped, unused, but diseased too. Syphilis, perhaps, by the look of the sores. If so, this creature sunk upon the mattress had been suffering for some time.
Wyn lifted his brow. “The second?”
“The second . . . is . . .” Yarmouth’s cravat pulsed. “ . . . if you miss the first.”
This, Wyn had not anticipated. In the duke’s eyes now he saw the madness. Madness, yes, that may have been there when he had raped and tortured his young ward, Chloe Martin, a girl of no more than sixteen when Wyn found her, fleeing her guardian after finally escaping him. Madness caused by the disease, or merely exacerbated by it.
“Given the hospitality I have been offered today, I don’t suppose you intend to pay me for this assassination, as you did for the last,” he said laconically. “Do apprise me, then, Your Grace, of your purpose. If you are able.”
“Kill . . . me.”
“If I am given one of those pistols, I will shoot the large man to my left in the kneecap. If I am then given the other, I will shoot this scarred chap likewise. It would be foolish of me to do otherwise, of course.”
A wild gleam lit Yarmouth’s eyes. “I hired you . . . to assassinate . . . a French—”
“Spy. That you did. And, imagining myself immensely clever, I gladly accepted your offer, before, that is, I learned that the so-called spy was no more French than you or I, merely a girl upon whom you had practiced your depraved fantasies until she was so scarred she could barely run. Yet still she found the courage to escape you. Remarkable, the human will, isn’t it?”
Fingers thick with lesions scrabbled the bed linens. “Kill me.”
“And satisfy you? Two birds with one stone? End the wretched misery of your existence while damning me to execution for defying you five years ago? Attempting to defy you, that is.”
“Your letter . . . You-ou vowed . . .” His head shook, uncontrolled tremors.
“I vowed to kill you the next time I saw you,” Wyn agreed. “For setting me up to kill her. For lying to me. For—” He could no longer withhold the anger. “She was under your protection. A girl. Given to you to protect after her parents died. Instead you hurt her.” His hands were fists, the shackles cutting his flesh.