On his first day as blockade commander, Tristan had ordered the burning of every single sailing vessel in Hackbury.
He’d stood there, cold-eyed and stone-faced, on a gray morning in Sussex, staring down the villagers through the flames as his men torched the boats, one by one. And there had been defiance in some of the villagers’ eyes, but not one of them dared say a word. They knew their days of lending horses for late-night smuggling runs in exchange for a cask of contraband rum, of ferrying contraband tea along secret cart tracks toward London, of rowing out to reel in casks of goods sunk near shore brought in by boats painted black, of piloting their own black boats, were over. Every last sailing vessel in Hackbury had been used in smuggling somehow. They were, in fact, getting off lightly.
Next time they would not.
Hardy is ruthless. Word spread quickly: he was a different sort of blockade commander. He taught his men to be relentless. Organized. Thorough. And tactically, skillfully violent. They slashed open coiled ropes on ships to find the tobacco hidden within. They found the false bottoms in barrels where illicit liquor was stored; they once even hacked apart the mast of a cutter to find it hollow and stuffed with silks. They were everywhere, day and night, haunting the country and coastal byways on horseback and watching it in towers. They could not be bribed, like blockade runners of yore. They were zealots and they were heroes. Because while some villagers were willing participants, more of them were terrorized into silence or participation by increasingly murderous gangs. Smuggling had held them captive, and Hardy’s men were setting them free.
He was born for the job. Tristan understood smugglers. How they thought, and how they survived. Like cockroaches, when dispersed, they ran for the baseboards, the cracks of England: the tunnels, the byroads, the tributaries, the caves. And recongregated.
But they were no match for a commander who’d survived his first ten years in St. Giles slums. He was fueled by a cold hatred for those who preyed on the defenseless. In St. Giles he’d known terror and ugliness; withstanding them was the foundation of his own courage. He’d learned to fight, to hide, to steal, to strategize. And while he’d never known his father and he’d been orphaned when he was eight, from one or both parents he’d inherited a conscience and a wily intelligence and perhaps, after a fashion, luck: he’d stumbled into a position as a naval captain’s assistant when he was ten years old. He rose ceaselessly in the ranks from that point on. The navy knew what they had in him.
Hardy had nearly broken the back of smuggling gangs in England.
All save one.
He stared out at the water now, black and oily smooth, at the ship he’d arranged to buy before Lord and Lady Millcoke’s house had burned to the ground, killing them and their young children. All because Millcoke had refused to allow the Blue Rock gang to conscript their horses to transport contraband cigars.
He’d sent Massey back to the Stevens Hotel to get some sleep and to await further orders from him.
“I’ll have a word with Derring’s solicitor. And we might as well try to track down his widow, too,” he’d told him.
Massey had told him he was going to stay up for a few more hours trying his hand at writing a poem about his sweetheart.
Tristan had furrowed his brow. “What is your sweetheart’s name?”
“Emily, sir,” Massey had told him tolerantly.
Tristan knew her name, of course. Emily Emily Emily Emily Emily Emily. For God’s sake. That was the whole of Massey’s conversation when they weren’t catching smugglers.
He did like to tease his very patient and literal lieutenant.
“Sometimes it’s too much, sir, the feelings, and you just have to try to write a poem,” Massey said earnestly.
Whatever on earth that meant. Sticky sentiment was a foreign language to Tristan. His own carnal education had taken place at the hands of generous whores and willing widows, and his one foray into actual courtship had been an illuminating lesson in how one’s heart, loins, and social status could conspire to hand him a rare and shocking defeat. He was, he understood now, much better off. And much wiser.
“Do not inflict that poem upon me if you do write it,” he warned Massey.
“Of course not, sir,” Massey soothed. He’d tried that once before. He’d learned his lesson.
Massey was a brutally talented soldier and a loyal right-hand man and, after a fashion, a friend.
But he, too, dreamed of the next part of his life.
Which is what Tristan was doing here at the East India docks, staring at the Zephyr, the ship he intended to purchase. Staring into the abyss—or rather, the Thames—helped him think.
He quirked the corner of his mouth humorlessly. And to think, he’d decided last year that by this time in his life he’d be a dull, respectable merchant, running respectable cargo—silks and spices—with his own ship. It hadn’t seemed unreasonable. After all, hadn’t he nearly ground the smuggling trade into dust?
Instead he was tracking cigars.
One. By. Bloody. One.
He would do it as long as it took. But it was making him, and all his men, restive. They were designed for a different sort of action.
It was a wonder the water below him didn’t begin a slow boil, such was his focus.
Of all the fatal mistakes the Blue Rock gang had finally made—the fire set in a barn meant to intimidate an aristocratic family into allowing them the use of their horses but which had gone horribly wrong; incurring the rage of the king, who had a soft spot for Lady Millcoke, an old lover; and igniting a cold, vengeful wrath in a certain Captain Tristan Hardy—the cigars were probably the biggest.
Because they were singular. Staggeringly expensive. A unique sop to the vanity and boredom of wealthy men, and wildly profitable for the smugglers. They arrived already rolled and needed to be transported quickly. Typical smuggled cargos—tea, tobacco, spirits—were so undistinguished as to be difficult to trace, if they got past the blockade men at all. And since Tristan had become commander, they simply didn’t get past the blockade.
But those cigars—created somewhere in France, by God knows who—were as distinctive as animal scat, and just as trackable.
And Tristan and his men knew the Blue Rock gang was smuggling those particular cigars.
But they didn’t know how the gang was getting them to London from the Sussex coast. Which maddened them, because they had all but choked off the flow of any contraband along that route.
And despite watching all the docks along the Thames, they’d been unable to discover how the cigars were being distributed in London, or how they wound up in the hands of the likes of Lord Kinbrook, in White’s.
Which probably meant someone considered untouchable, who could move outside the usual confines of a smuggler’s world, was funding or abetting them.
In short: some aristocratic bastard.
They’d located a few merchants who sold them in Piccadilly. Both claimed they hadn’t had any new ones in at least a fortnight.
At least three of the smug, entitled, aristocratic bastards he’d had the displeasure of charming, cajoling, threatening, or coercing revealed that Lord Kinbrook always had more than one on hand.
And they’d finally learned that Kinbrook had purchased his cigars from Derring.
Only to learn that Derring was dead.
Bloody.
Fecking.
Hell.
But it made sense, somehow: the flow of cigars seemed to have stopped right about when Derring died. Which could be coincidental. Except that he didn’t believe in coincidences.
He also wasn’t accustomed to grasping at such wispy, ephemeral evidence.
Then again, he’d learned to trust his instincts.
It was just that so many people were trusting his instincts at this very moment.
The king was on his neck. And the king behaving in a kingly way was unusual, but when his stomach and his penis were involved, he took matters quite seriously. In fact, he was, Tristan understood, a man of feeling and intelligence in the wrongest possible job for him.
But he represented a country Tristan loved and believed in.
And the king had offered Tristan a reward if he could bring those bastards in.
He didn’t really need the reward. He’d bring those bastards in, no matter what.
But in a future he could read as clearly as he could read the murky ocean below, money—earned honorably—of course couldn’t hurt.
For either him or his men, who would get their share—who were counting on him to lead them to this victory, too.
Tristan’s pride and his legacy were at stake. Not to mention the future in which he hoped to be . . . ordinary? Was that what he wanted? What would life be like without fighting, strategy, and maneuvering? Who would he be?
Alive, that’s what he’d be.
And a life like Massey’s, a house in the country, a doting wife, a brat or two who looked like him—not even using the reliable Thames for scrying could Tristan conjure a home or life like that. He’d never known one; likely he wasn’t cut out for that sort of thing, anyway, a man of action like him.
Then again, he’d probably never had a prayer of being ordinary, anyway.
And that, at least, was bad news for the Blue Rock gang.
It took all three of them to shoulder open the studded oak door of Number 11 Lovell Street once she got the key to turn, and its hinges screeched like a murder victim.
Which probably wouldn’t attract much attention in this area.
It thunked shut behind them in a permanent-sounding way. Delilah felt for an instant as if they’d pulled up a drawbridge against marauders. Or were perhaps trapped inside a castle keep.
They all stood in silence for a moment, borrowed (from Frances the barmaid) lanterns held aloft. The hush was so thorough one could nearly grab handfuls of it. The building was solidly built, which was a fine thing.
Distantly they heard a thunk, as though a dragon was kept in the basement.
Doubtless it was one of the mysterious noises from outside.
“The floor is unnervingly rather soft,” Delilah finally said, carefully.
“Probably mouse pelts,” Angelique said.
Dot gave a guttural shriek and performed a sort of revolted high kick, which sent the beam from her lantern swinging in long, woozy arcs.
Delilah seized her elbow, her heart in her throat. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dot, it’s just dust. You need to be brave if . . .”
Dot’s swaying lamp beam had skipped across something dazzling.
Delilah looked up and her breath snagged.
The dust Dot had kicked skyward was sifting down, down, down in lazy, amber, lamplit spirals through the tiers of an improbably fine chandelier twinkling in the middle of the high foyer ceiling like a little constellation. The lamplight made the faceted crystals wink in rainbow colors—red, blue, green.
Dot might as well have flung fairy dust.
Their silence, for a moment, was wholly mesmerized.
It felt, somehow, like a sign, this hidden, shambly, fine beauty. And it’s mine, Delilah thought, with wondering exultation. That beautiful thing is mine. The filthy floor we stand upon, that staircase in front of us, all the rooms we have yet to see—mine.
Dot sneezed like a wolf trying to blow down a pig’s house of straw.
Angelique tugged her gently out from beneath the chandelier. “One sneeze too mighty and that thing might crash down.”
The spell was broken. “You’re quite right,” Delilah concurred. “And no more shrieking unless we see a murderer, Dot. No, do not faint,” she said, as Dot’s eyes seemed about to roll back in her head. “You’re sturdier than that and we both know it and seeing a murderer is unlikely.” She wished she was more confident of this. “Have you your hatpin?”
“Sorry, Lady Derring. Yes, Lady Derring.”
“She probably frightened the vermin good and proper with the shrieking,” Angelique said. “Well done, Dot.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Breedlove.” Dot beamed.
“But the vermin are very determined here by the East India docks,” Angelique added, wickedly.
“Brave,” Delilah growled, cutting Dot off mid-whimper. “Angelique, you’re not helping.”
“I feel braver when I can make light of something.”
Delilah cast her a baleful sidelong look. A sardonic Angelique was at least better than the one who wanted to wade into the Thames. “Let’s see what we have on this level.”
They aimed their lamps in various directions—east, west, up, down. They soon determined they were in a foyer, in front of a staircase, flanked by what appeared to be two sitting rooms.
Everything was so blurred with dust and laced with cobwebs it was like seeing everything through a haze of laudanum.
The banister and balustrade of the handsome staircase before them seemed to be carved in bulbous shapes and vines, but it was impossible to know quite what those shapes were. Delilah toed the floor to clear some dust; it felt like marble.
“Looks just like a townhouse like ours, Lady Derring, don’t it? Only bigger.” Poor Dot sounded infinitely relieved, as if she’d fully anticipated that the studded oak door opened onto the Gates of Hell. And yet she’d followed Delilah through anyway. What had Delilah done to deserve that kind of loyalty?
“I do believe that’s precisely what this is,” Delilah said brightly. “How very interesting. Let’s have a look, shall we?”
She led the way to the right, where they found a modest sitting room. The fireplace was blacked with soot, and its corniced mantel and carved pilasters had been in vogue around the time King George III was still sound of mind; likewise, the balding rug—it was Savonnerie, if she had to guess—the peeling wallpaper, and the two deteriorating settees on spindly legs—Chippendale, or copies. All seemed to be in various shades of red. They’d probably been home to generations of mice. Cobweb bunting swung from the windows and corners.
It was snug—the shuttered windows let in no drafts—and had once been gracious.
Who or what had occupied it? Why was it empty now?
Why on earth had Derring owned it?
They moved across the foyer and discovered the room opposite was twice the size, dominated by a fine fireplace of the same vintage. It was bald of rug and bare of furniture.
Except for a pianoforte.
“Ohhhh,” Delilah breathed.
She moved toward it slowly, almost on her toes, like a hungry leopard stalking an antelope.
No sarcophagus creaking open had ever sounded quite so eerie as the dusty, closed lid when she lifted it.
Dot muttered something that sounded like a string of prayers.
Delilah touched a dirty key. A G note echoed, like a ghost of long-ago parties.
Behind her, Dot visibly shuddered.
“Do you play?” Delilah asked Angelique, her voice dreamy.
“Yes,” Angelique confirmed. Sounding as mesmerized as Delilah.
And maybe it was weariness, maybe it was the spell cast by the chandelier, maybe it was the sherry, but Delilah could have sworn she could hear very faint voices raised in song and laughter, as if from a parade approaching from miles and miles away.
Something stirred in her. She could not have put it into words if asked; it was more a feeling than an actual idea. But the feeling glinted like one of those chandelier crystals. An idea was forming.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said.
The fourth stair creaked, but no one vanished through any of the steps with a scream and cloud of dust. Their lanterns threw giant shadows of the three of them on the wall opposite, which made Delilah feel as though they were going up with reinforcements. Oddly, this made it just a little easier to go down strange hallways when they could light only a few feet ahead at a time.
Which she supposed was rather a metaphor for life.
Some of the fourteen doors on the two floors opened with a twist of the knob; most of the locks, however, needed oiling and required finesse and fussing, except for the one for the largest suite on the first floor, which seemed to have been recently oiled. The rugs and wallpaper in the rooms and halls were shredded ghosts of their original selves. The rooms were empty save for a few toppled pitchers, a washbasin, and several surprisingly decent wardrobes in the larger suites.
Each sealed-up room released a stale gust of air but no other untoward smells or entities. Until the last room, which released something sporting a long, skinny tail and tiny, shiny eyes.
It vanished with such startling speed no one had time to scream, but they all certainly wanted to.
“Well. That wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” Dot announced in a voice that wobbled up and down the scale.
“I’m very proud of you,” said Delilah. Her voice was none too steady.
Angelique shimmied her shoulders as though the creature had crawled right down the back of her dress.
Rat or no rat, by the time they reached the kitchen the feeling that had begun next to the pianoforte had crystallized into an idea, and Delilah’s heart picked up a beat.
The centerpiece of the kitchen was an enormous heavy work table, furred with dust. She stopped short, so vividly could she imagine Helga cheerfully shouting orders to the kitchen staff while they sat here and chopped and stirred. She could almost smell simmering onions and fresh bread and—had she just caught a whiff of one of Derring’s cigars? Perhaps she’d dredged it from her imagination? Or had he stood in this dusty kitchen, for some reason?
It was empty of everything apart from the table and dust, and it could easily become the bustling heart of a house again.
The light in here was gray now, squeezing in through the chinks in the shutters.
All at once Delilah’s heart was pounding. Hope was painful, but it was also like exposing a wound to the light it needed to heal. She hadn’t realized how little hope her comfortable, stultifying life had contained. She’d been sealed and locked up, in some ways the same as this house.
“I think this building has potential,” she began idly, offhandedly. She traced a D in the dust on the table.
“The potential to be a whorehouse, which I suspect it was some time ago. Or a truly fine and dangerous gaming hell, given its location,” Angelique agreed, on a yawn.
Delilah cleared her throat.
“Actually . . . I think it has the potential to be a very fine boardinghouse.”
She’d said it.
“Do you think you may still be a little drunk?” Angelique tipped her head, suggesting gently.
“On hope,” Delilah said, beatifically. Though she was, in fact, still a little drunk. “But think about it. The rooms could be made very comfortable and charming. The whole house can be made very comfortable and charming. It’s filthy, not decrepit. Look around you at this kitchen . . . imagine it filled with cheerful staff, making apple tarts . . .”
“Ohhhh, apple tarts,” Dot breathed, caught up in the vision. “I do like apple tarts!”
“And if the roof leaked, it would smell like mildew, and it doesn’t, does it?” Delilah demanded.
“It doesn’t,” Dot agreed.
Angelique was staring at her oddly.
“And we’ll get a cat or two for rats and mice,” Delilah said firmly.
“Oh, I do like cats!” Dot enthused.
There was a little silence as her words, her idea, her vision, hung and sparkled in the air like that listing chandelier.
“We’ll get a cat?” Angelique said quietly.
It was a fair question. Delilah hardly knew this woman. Their only bond was that a certain feckless earl had kept both of them alive, bored them silly, rolled on top of them and rolled off, and then left them terrified and flailing and penniless. At this moment they might be cleaving to each other the way shipwreck victims will cleave to the first available flotsam. Her judgment might be colored by terror, sherry, hope, hunger, and fury. But her instincts about people—save, perhaps, Derring—had always been good.
“Why not?” she said on a sort of bemused, gleeful hush. She hiked and dropped her shoulders.
Something like hope flickered in Angelique’s expression, as fleeting as one of those rainbow colors winking in the chandelier. Her mouth twitched, and she almost smiled.
She visibly, ruthlessly tamped it down again.
“But Delilah . . . here near the docks . . . the people who want to stay in an inn might be a little . . . well, they might not be the sort a countess is accustomed—”
Delilah waved a breezy hand. “Oh, we’ll have mixed company, of a certainty. But it could be so lively! I would love it. Just imagine! You might be able to use all of your languages.”
Angelique began to laugh, then she bit her lip to stop it.
But now Delilah was slowly rotating, as if filling all the shelves with food and imagining a cook before the stove.
She pressed on, her words rushing together now. “At first I thought I might be mad, too. But the more I think about it, the less outlandish it seems. Between us we’ve enough experience to run a large home. We need only allow people we like to stay, and we’ll charge them handsomely for excellent service. And—” She allowed the fantasy to bloom fully, drumming her fingers on her chin. “And we’ll require guests to eat dinner together at least four nights per week and sit in the drawing room with other guests most nights out of the week. So we’ll all come to know one another and feel like family. Oh, we can even have musicales.”
It was very nearly everything she’d ever wanted.
She clasped her hands beneath her chin in something like entreaty.
Dot was lit up with reflected zeal and hope.
Angelique had gone very still. Her hazel eyes were abstracted as if she were calculating something on an internal abacus.
And hope was a bit like that pallid light forcing its way through the chinks in the shutters. It would find a way, given the slightest bit of an opening.
“But you own the building, Delilah. Which puts me in a position I never want to be in again—beholden to someone. How would we make my participation official?”
It was the perfect sort of shrewd question that convinced Delilah she was absolutely right to put this proposition to her.
“Presumably you know where to sell the jewels we own outright. We’ll pool our funds and draw up papers.”
And after a moment, during which Delilah held her breath, Angelique gave a slow nod, as if Delilah the pupil had just given a correct answer.
“I do know where to sell them, as it so happens. And to find people willing to do the dirtiest of the heavy work for reasonable pay.”
“Splendid! And as for the location, well, we will make this place so appealing that people will go well out of their way to stay here, and won’t want to leave. And we’ll call it something very enigmatic and exclusive, like . . . like . . .” Delilah waved one hand like a sorceress with a wand. “The Grand Palace on the Thames!”
“Ohhhhhhhhh, Lady Derring . . .” Dot breathed. “That’s tray magnefeek.”
Angelique gave a little snort. But her posture suggested that some sort of internal knot had finally loosened.
“Can you picture it?” Delilah demanded on nearly a whisper.
“I can picture it,” Angelique conceded. “And it’s not only not mad, we might never have to be at the mercy of another man again.”
“Precisely my thought.” Delilah took a breath. “Shall we shake hands on it?” Her voice was shaking.
Angelique drew in a long, long breath.
And then with a certain ironic flair, extended the hand Delilah had lately stopped from taking that last sip of sherry.
They shook briskly.
“To The Grand Palace on the Thames!”
“To The Grand Palace on the Thames!” Dot and Angelique echoed.
And they all raised their lanterns and toasted each other with light.