“Harriet?” one of them said in a startled voice, breaking away from her competitors. “Harriet, is that you?”
Harriet put her finger to her lips. The girl shrugged, muttering, “Sorry, I thought I knew you,” and Harriet continued briskly down the street. By the time the hackney coach she hailed deposited her a few streets from her old home, she wished she’d had the foresight to buy a bunch of lavender to hold to her nose. She was more concerned about stepping in a puddle of slop than about her personal safety.
There were few enough people to worry about, anyway, at this time of day, even though the over-leaning dwellings shadowed the street in a perpetual twilight. She recognized the elderly surgeon standing outside the public house. He stared at her without a trace of acknowledgment.
A group of boys and girls in ragged clothing clustered around her. “Got ’alfpence to spare, milady?”
“You ought to be at school, you little beggars,” she scolded, slapping the grimy hands that tugged at her skirt.
Nicholas Rydell lived in the cellar of a back lane lodging house. The windows had been boarded up, but she knew the moment she opened the door that she had been followed. She hunched her shoulders to climb down the steps that led to his room. He was feigning sleep on the floor pallet beneath a pile of stolen fur-lined cloaks. Harriet detected the scent of cheap perfume in the air, the clatter of heels echoing from the room above.
She stood over his bed, a pistol gripped in her right hand. “I know you’ve got a knife under your pillow, Nick, and I truly do not trust you. But I’ve a favor to ask, and you owe me one for digging that bullet out of your leg when you were careless enough to get shot.”
He laughed, his dark eyes slowly opening. He had long black hair and a hard-angled face, both cheeks bisected with knife scars. Half the girls on the street imagined themselves in love with him and believed he could be redeemed. Harriet knew otherwise. She knew what had made him who he was. His soul was dead. “You never needed an invite to my bed, love,” he said amiably. He folded his arms under his head. “What’s the matter, then? The duke ain’t livin’ up to your dreams?”
“I could shoot you dead, and your own mother would probably cheer. Now I just want to know one thing-do you or my father have anything to do with that girl’s abduction?” “I wish I’d thought of it.”
Her nape tingled. A step creaked in the stairwell behind. Nick lowered his arms. “Your father’s dead,” he said, staring at the broken looking glass collecting dust in the corner. “What makes you think ’e’d be clever enough to pull off a kidnapping, anyway?”
“It isn’t cleverness. It’s spite. He never forgave me for leaving. He made no secret of the fact. And as you and I both know, he’s as alive as one of the rats scratching inside these walls at night.”
He frowned. “I dunno where ’e is. Maybe ’e’s really gone this time. You can move in ’ere if you’re lonesome.”
“Lonesome?”
He laughed. “Oh, I’m good company in the dark.”
She backed away from the pallet. He sat up, his hand sliding under the pillow. “There’s a reward for that girl’s return,” he said with a shrewd look.
“You don’t know her family like I do. If you’ve got even a finger in this, they’ll hunt you down. And I’ll do everything in my power to help.”
She was gone before he could stop her, climbing up toward the figure who blocked the stairwell. The duke’s eyes glowed in anger. “I have more than enough to worry about without losing you.”
“I’m not afraid to walk in this neighborhood.”
“But I am afraid for you. Give me your word that you will not come here again.”
She hesitated, pushing against his tall, unyielding form. He stood his ground. She realized in resignation that he meant to exact the promise from her before he’d allow her past. “We cannot stay here like this forever,” she whispered.
“Then give me your word,” he said coldly. “It is a simple thing.”
She looked up into his eyes. “I don’t know if I can. Could we make a compromise?”
He cursed softly. “Of what sort?”
“I’ll come only with your permission.”
He gave her a grim look. “Absolutely not.”
“Then…” She hesitated. She knew that Nick could hear everything being said. “Fine. Then what if I promise that I will not come here unless you escort me?”
His mouth thinned. “That I will consider, but not right now.”
The man who was watching them in the mirror gave a quiet laugh. “I never laid a hand on ’er, your grace. But if you need my ’elp with your other problem, I’d be more than glad to give it.”
It was still early enough when they returned to the town house to revisit the afternoon that Edlyn had spent in the park. By unspoken accord, Griffin, Harriet, and his aunt decided to exclude Lady Constance from this encore performance. She would most likely have refused to cooperate, anyway. Yesterday evening, before the news of Edlyn’s abduction became public knowledge, Lord Chatterton had announced her betrothal to an elderly earl who doted on her.
“Isn’t that a shocker?” Griffin murmured after he read the newspaper report aloud in the carriage. “I wonder if she will invite us to the wedding.”
They reached the park at precisely the same hour as they had on their previous outing. Griffin recalled watching Harriet tumble out of the carriage before she and his aunt had abandoned him to Constance. Edlyn had wandered off like a wisp of smoke. He had not kept her long in his view. Two governesses had been rescuing their charges from a cocker spaniel that had escaped its owner.
Or was he wrong? He frowned.
Perhaps only one of the bonneted, heavily cloaked women had been a governess. The other had been standing rather close to Edlyn. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that he had been paying too much attention to Harriet to notice anything else. And he could not even pretend to remember what Edlyn had been doing when Harriet’s half brother sprang out from behind the tree to cut Constance’s purse.
His aunt recalled little of what transpired that day. She became annoyed when Griffin pointed out that she was muddling the proper sequence of events. She blamed Constance’s prittle-prattle for impairing her memory and scoffed at his suggestion of old age.
Harriet thought to mention that there had been three phaetons sitting at the corner of the park. As to be expected, Sir Daniel had already questioned the drivers and a dozen or so pedestrians. None offered any pertinent information except to mention that the cutpurse had struck so fast, he could be described only by the color of his hair.
Evening arrived. Sir Daniel sent a brief message, reassuring the duke that a widespread search was under way.
“Edlyn’s disappearance could yet prove to be a prank,” Griffin reminded his aunt.
She rallied at the thought, then said, “I tell myself that every minute, but I’m not sure even she is that cruel.”
Harriet was fully aware that the duke said little else and that her own efforts to raise hope had not dispelled the mood of grim uncertainty that had settled upon his house.
“I think we might all feel better after a good dinner,” she said. “Something warm and savory, like roast beef with pudding. I’ll talk to Cook right this minute.”
But they only picked at their meal, dispirited, deprived of adequate sleep. Still, there was work to be done, and shortly after sherry and biscuits they set out again. The Marquess of Sedgecroft had invited them to his Park Lane mansion to review what had happened during the two soirées he had hosted in Griffin’s honor. Without the benefit of cheerful music and the glittering array of guests, the ballroom took on a disquieting emptiness that Harriet had not expected.
Their voices echoed eerily in the vast space. She felt as though she was tiptoeing through a cemetery and conjuring up ghosts, instead of remembering the few hours she had thought to treasure in her heart.