Brimstone and Beelzebub.
He wascryinglike a babe. The liquid in his eyes wastears.
What in the bloody hell?Such a revolting show of weakness had not emerged from him since the day he had killed his first soldier on the field of battle, and even then, the liquid in his eyes had been more a product of his violent retching of bile than anything else.
He scrubbed at his eyes with more force than necessary before hastily stuffing the scrap of fabric back into his coat. “Miss Turnbow trounced on my toe,” he announced, daring anyone to contradict him.
Bad enough he had been assailed by such a lowering, unacceptable emotion as melancholy. But to have been witnessed turning into a watering pot by three females, two of whom were his minx sisters and one of whom was the woman he wanted to tup until his cock went raw… it was the outside of enough.
“You are weeping,” Nora said in the same tones she might use to announce he had sprouted cloven hooves.
“That was a lovely rendition of ‘Mrs. McCleod’,” came the firm, dulcet voice of Miss Governess as she swished past him. “Thank you for playing, Lady Honora and Lady Constance, but I do fear the hour grows late, and it is already half past eight.”
The heady fragrance of jasmine trailed in her wake, and for the first time it occurred to him it was rather odd for a woman of her reduced circumstances to wear a scent. Then again, the only females he dallied with these days were strumpets, and even they perfumed themselves equally above and below.
He cleared his throat, pretending he had not just made a fool of himself, for what else was he to do? “If you will excuse me, sisters and Miss Turnbow, I have some urgent correspondence to which I must attend. Thank you again for the evening’s entertainment.”
“Pray forgive me for my misstep,” Miss Governess could not resist calling after him as he gave them his back and made a hasty retreat like the coward he was.
“You are forgiven, Miss Governess,” he clipped, not bothering to turn about. Not wishing to face her knowing gaze or the wonderment of his sisters. Not even certain how such a thing as his unrefined, unfettered feelings had come to be. He had thought himself impervious to that rot.
Tears. Crying like a bloody maudlin female.
He slammed the door at his back. It was not to be borne. There was only one swift solution he could countenance. One reliable means of dulling the unwanted intrusion of old ghosts and grief.
The time was half past eight, Miss Governess had said, and he had not had a drop of whisky since yesterday at The Duke’s Bastard. That injustice was about to be rectified, posthaste.
Chapter Ten
Someone had beenin his study.
Crispin made the realization the moment he sat down at his desk, glass of whisky in hand. His correspondence was not stacked in the neat order in which he had left it, bound by a ribbon and ordered according to the date of receipt. Several envelopes were scattered in a paper waterfall, and the ribbon was nowhere to be seen. His quill and ink had been moved. The letter he had been in the process of writing to the dowager Marchioness of Searle had been smudged.
Suspecting Con and Nora of yet another prank involving a creature or a carcass, he lowered his glass to the polished surface of his desk and began a cursory inventory. Aside from the misplacement of his papers and the missing ribbon, everything appeared to be in order.
He opened each drawer, taking care to rummage about lest the minxes had hidden something prone to rot and stink. About a month ago, they had left a decaying potato beneath his bed, and his chamber had been befouled and uninhabitable for an entire evening before a chamber maid discovered the source of the stench and removed the malodorous thing. The carpet had required a thorough scouring, and he had been ready to tan their hides.
When he reached the drawer where he kept the journals he had written during his years at war, a scratch upon the lock gave him pause. He had not known his sisters to attempt to pick locks, but the effort had clearly been made. Anger unfurled in his gut. His journals were private, damn it. Did the hoydens know no bounds?
Retrieving the key from his pocket, he unlocked the drawer. What he found within was more troubling than a rotting potato or a dead mouse, however. His journals seemed to be in their proper order, the small leather-bound volume he’d kept during his first year of war atop the tidy pile.
Just to be certain, he extracted it, flipping through the pages of his familiar scrawl. Tucked almost imperceptibly between the pages of battle observations, he discovered not one but two folded notes.
Frowning, he removed them, unfolding the first and scanning the contents. Not only did he not recognize the handwriting, but he could not make sense of the gibberish scribbled upon the page. A series of letters that failed to make words, the note rather called to mind the enciphered dispatches of French soldiers that had repeatedly fallen into the hands of the Spanish guerilla fighters.
This did not seem like the work of his sisters. Con and Nora had yet to learn the finer art of subtlety. When they made mischief, the results were obvious, whether it be a shrieking governess or an unpardonable stench.
The second note contained more of the same nonsensical alphabetic lines. Retrieving the other two journals from his drawer, he searched them as well, until he had unearthed a total of seven letters altogether, all penned in the same neat hand, all a sequence of letters that appeared to bear no obvious pattern. An icy chill he could not shake settled deep in his bones. These were no ordinary letters, and though he had not an inkling as to their contents, he was willing to wager everything he owned that they were not the product of hoydenish tomfoolery.
But why would someone pick the lock on his drawer and hide ciphered letters within it? More to the point, who would do such a thing? Whoever it was, he had done an abysmal job at covering his tracks, for he had left quite an easy trail for Crispin to follow. Indeed, the fellow was likely a novice to make so many errors.
Briefly, his mind flitted to his run-in with Miss Turnbow on her first night as governess. She had been in his study, trespassing where she did not belong, had she not? But a governess who went about stashing ciphered letters in his desk drawer seemed as farfetched as a Gothic novel.
The person responsible had placed the letters where he had for a reason, and if Crispin wished to catch the villain at his game, there was only one manner in which he could conceive of doing it. Allowing his whisky to go untouched, he painstakingly copied each letter before placing the originals back in his journals, stacking them in their place within the drawer, and locking it once more.
There was only one man in all London he trusted. One man upon whom he knew he could rely for anything he required. Crispin hastily scrawled a note to accompany the copies, tucked the lot into an envelope, and sent the missive on its way before going in search of the one quarry he longed to corner more than the scoundrel who had planted the worrying letters in his desk.
Miss Jacinda Turnbow.
