He knew. He knew who Bess was.
He must have overheard Lord Phillip at the masquerade.
And there was no time to deal with any of that because Lucy. Was. Missing.
“What do you mean, missing?” she demanded sharply. “Close the door so I can get dressed, if you please.”
Nathaniel conferred quietly with Rufus for a moment and handed him a small pouch before complying. When he turned back to her, his face was very grave. “This is a note from someone named Charlie. It says he and Lucy’s maid have been searching for us all evening. Apparently, Charlie had some reason to believe you might be here.”
“He was the one who first told me about The Nemesis,” Bess said, yanking on her petticoat and doing up the tapes with fingers that trembled. “Charles Truitt, Lucy’s friend. The young man she saved by the Thames that day.”
“The young man you saved,” he corrected, shrugging into his shirt and tucking it into his breeches. It was such a domestic thing to witness, Bess felt her throat clench. “I seem to recall you were the one with your hands in his wound, stopping him from bleeding out on the riverbank.”
Bess waved that away as she struggled to lace up the corset she’d needed with the beautiful pink damask dress. “But what does Charlie say?”
God, what she wouldn’t give for one of her old gowns right now, simple and plain and designed for a simple, plain woman with no fancy lady’s maid or anyone to help her with stays and fastenings.
Already dressed, Nathaniel came over to help lace her back into her corset and gown.
“Apparently it was the maid’s half day. She came home rather late to find Lucy gone. My terribly clever sister had stuffed pillows under the bedcovers to make it look as if she was sleeping, but evidently the maid was suspicious when she found several of Lucy’s gowns and things missing while tidying her dressing room.”
“Pillows!” Bess whirled. “She took to her bed yesterday afternoon with a headache! I checked on her before I left to meet you, but all I could see in her darkened bedchamber was…a still, unmoving form under the covers. Oh God. It wasn’t her. It was the pillows. Lucy was already gone by then, wasn’t she? That was nine o’clock last night! Has she been missing that long? Does the note say if she left anything behind, like a message or, or, some indication of where she’s gone? Perhaps she’s only slipped out to see a bit of London night life on her own!”
A grim expression had set Nathaniel’s jaw while Bess spoke. “No message. But the fact that she seems to have packed a bag argues for a much more serious intent to run away than to merely gallivant about town without her chaperone.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.” Bess wrung her hands together, hysteria bubbling unpleasantly in her belly. “But how are we to track her?”
Another knock at the door jolted her out of her rising anxiety.
“Carriage is here,” came the clipped announcement from the hallway, and then everything was in motion.
They rushed down the stairs and out through the front door of The Nemesis to find the Ashbourn coach waiting for them. Someone must have paid a boy to run straight to Ashbourn House for it. Nathaniel bundled Bess into it and sat on the bench facing her, calling out, “Take us to The Swan With Two Necks, Lad Lane. Near Milk Street. Make haste, man!”
Taking him at his word, the coachman whipped up the horses and pulled away with a jerk that threw Bess back against the squabs. Her hair, already far beyond disheveled and well into disaster territory, tumbled from its last remaining pins to fall about her shoulders.
The knock had also loosened the ribbons that tied her mask, and she reflexively darted a hand up to secure it—but then she stilled.
She could take the mask off.
There was no earthly reason to keep wearing it. She had no secret to protect any longer.
Hands shaking, Bess untied the mask’s ribbon and let it drop.
Nathaniel’s gaze fell on her so heavily, it was almost a blow.
She sat there across from him and tried not to flinch. Fully dressed and feeling more vulnerable than she ever had when naked in his arms.
His eyes were dark as he took her in, the bleak, colorless gray of a winter storm. Bess bit her lip, and all at once, he pulled off his own mask, revealing his handsome face.
They sat in the carriage, two people who had bared so much of themselves to each other, fully bared at last.
Somehow, though, it didn’t feel like a new beginning to Bess. It felt like an ending.
Aching, she asked, “What’s at the…Swan With Two Heads?”
“The Swan With Two Necks.” He looked carved from stone, his face the cold, implacable Roman marble of the Duke of Ashbourn. But his eyes were still the eyes of the man who had kissed her and held her and whispered anything you want in the dark. “It’s a pub near the General Post Office where the mail coaches go to pick up passengers for several of the largest routes out of London.”
Bess’s heart sank like a stone. Dismay pitched her voice high. “You think she’s caught a mail coach?”
