“Come, we’ve no time to lose.”
Harlowe stiffened.
“Again, you’ll have to trust me.” Dorset halted, pulled Harlowe back into the cover of the trees, and angled his head to the front door of the salon. “Look.”
Harlowe’s eyes went to the two men strolling up the portico. Shufflebottom and his old friend, George Welton. “They’re regulars.”
“Yes. They are.” Dorset brushed off his trousers. “If Lady Harlowe was taken inside, it is almost a certainty she won’t be escorted into the actual salon. There must be a basement of some sort, which begs the notion of the widow’s involvement.”
“Involvement.” Harlowe wished to know exactly how much Dorset knew. Perhaps it was time to trust the man. “The Althenaeum Order?”
“Yes. The members have been very good at keeping their identities secreted.”
Having Dorset confirm what Harlowe had suspected was a relief.
“They smuggle children. Most are stolen off the streets when the opportunities present themselves. But there is an even darker side. Some of the upper class children are targeted and transported to other countries. You may recall Irene Ennis’s abduction. She was not the actual target at the time. There was a man by the name of Vlasik Markov. He specialized in selling very young girls to other countries who desired wives for noblemen. The younger the child, you see, the more malleable and the probability of not remembering details.”
Harlowe swallowed a bite of bile. “I was assigned to this Order,” he said slowly. “One of the street urchins said Jervis had friends in high places.”
Dorset nodded. “We just haven’t been able to determine who.”
Harlowe heaved in a deep breath, squeezed his shaking hands into fists. “The fact that Jervis took Penny and Maeve—”
“Tells me the situation is precarious, and we need to act with a clear head.”
Thirty-Eight
M
aeve held Penny tightly to her side, doing her best not to succumb to the suffocation threatening to overwhelm her by taking slow, shallow breaths. The room they were in didn’t have a single window, and black was edging her vision. Penny’s life was worth nothing if she fainted.
Mr. Jervis paced the sparse room. There was no grate for a fire, and the air was chilled. A faded settee and a wood table with three chairs and a couple of aged trunks stacked in a corner were all that graced the tiny chamber. No artwork on the drab bricked walls. All in all, the situation did not bode well for her or Penny.
It was kill or be killed. They would have to pry Penny from her dead hands. Sadly, that possibility was shifting to real probability.
The door crashed back, and a large man entered, wearing a mask that covered the top half of his face. “What goes on here?” he growled. His lips were flattened but Maeve was vaguely aware of her recognition of him. His feral gaze scanned the room. It landed on her, and he froze, clearly shocked.
Another man strolled in behind him, also bemasked, and bumped into the first man. “Dammit, Shuff—” He peered around the man, and his eyes widened behind his thinly veiled disguise.
Maeve drew on her inner Lady Ingleby. “Good afternoon. Lord Shufflebottom and Lord Welton, I presume?”
Shufflebottom tore off his mask and stalked over to Mr. Jervis, grabbed him by his dirty cravat, pulling the man to the tips of his toes. “What is she doing here?”
“She took off after the gel. I-I couldn’t shake her off, m’lord. Wot are we t’ do with her?”
“We can’t very well shoot her,” Shufflebottom said. “Too loud.”
“Aw, Shuff, we can’t off Lady Harlowe,” Welton said.
Shufflebottom ignored Welton. “Where’s the ring, Lady Harlowe?”
“Ring, my lord?” Maeve’s nerve endings tingled; it was a wonder she didn’t collapse from the effort of remaining cool.
“The ruby. Lady Harlowe—apologies—yourpredecessor pretended she had no notion of its location.”
Dear heavens.She looked him in the eye as the horror of her situation took a turn for the worst. “You killed Corinne.”
Shufflebottom inclined his head. “I fear I lost my temper with her. She was a pathetic little creature.”
