“It appears we have arrived,” he said. Far too soon, he thought.
“Good heavens.” Amity straightened away from him as if scorched by his touch. “Whatever were we thinking? We are on very important business tonight. We should not have allowed ourselves to be distracted.”
He watched, bemused, as she attempted to put herself to rights. She looked adorable, he thought. Her clothing was delightfully tousled and a few tendrils of hair had slipped free of the pins. There was an enticing fullness about her just-kissed lips. He liked the look, he concluded. But most of all he liked knowing that he was the man who had put that expression on her face.
“How is my hair?” she asked. She raised one hand and found the stray locks. Hastily she attempted to re-anchor them. “Oh, dear, what will your uncle think?”
“Knowing Uncle Cornelius, he is unlikely to take any notice of the state of your hair. He is concerned only with the matter of finding the Russian spy.”
Benedict opened the door to reveal a street that was rapidly filling with fog. The lamps at the front door of Cornelius’s small town house glared in the mist, but they did little to illuminate the surroundings.
He got out of the cab and turned to assist Amity. She took his hand, collected her skirts, and allowed him to help her down from the carriage. She pulled up the hood of her cloak and surveyed the unlit windows. “It does not appear that there is anyone at home.”
“Cornelius lives alone except for his old butler, Palmer,” Benedict explained. “My uncle never married. As I said, he is completely dedicated to his work for the Crown.”
“You told me that he is elderly. Perhaps he fell asleep.”
“I doubt it. He sleeps very little and even less since this affair of the solar weapon began. In any event, he is expecting us. If he has nodded off, he will not mind if we awaken him. In fact, he will be annoyed if we leave without speaking to him.”
The fog muffled the quiet neighborhood that had long ago settled down for the night. An uneasy sensation feathered the back of Benedict’s neck. He looked around, searching the mist to make certain that there was no one else about. There were no mysterious footfalls in the shadows. An eerie silence gripped the scene. Nevertheless—or perhaps for that very reason—he reached inside his coat and took out the revolver.
He looked at the coachman.
“Wait for us, please.”
“Aye, sir.” The coachman hunkered down on his box and removed a flask from his coat pocket.
Amity glanced down at the gun in Benedict’s hand. “You did not have a weapon with you on St. Clare.”
“Let’s just say I learned my lesson on that damned island. I picked this up in California.”
He guided Amity up the front steps and raised the door knocker. He rapped twice.
But there were no footsteps in the hall. The lights did not come up in the transom window over the door.
He banged the knocker again, harder.
Amity looked at him. In the glary light her hooded face was etched with concern. “There is something amiss, isn’t there?”
“Things are not as usual, that is certain.”
Without a word she reached inside her cloak. When her hand reappeared Benedict saw that she gripped the tessen.
He tried the knob. It did not turn.
“Palmer is always very careful when it comes to locking up the house for the night,” Benedict said. “But Cornelius gave me a key a few years ago.”
He took the key ring out of the pocket of his coat.
“Perhaps you should summon a constable before you go inside,” Amity said.
“Believe me when I tell you that my uncle will not appreciate it if we draw that sort of attention to this house,” Benedict said.
He inserted the key into the lock and opened the door. The front hall was filled with shadows. Nothing and no one stirred in the darkness.
Gun at the ready, Benedict moved into the hall and turned up the lamps. There was no pounding drumbeat of fleeing footsteps. No one leaped out of the shadows. No one challenged them from the top of the stairs.
He led the way along the hall, turning up lamps as he moved toward the room at the far end.
