Chapter One
London 1818
“This is abad idea,” Elise whispered, her blue gaze flicking down the empty hall.
“Mrs. Dove-Lyon is out on the floor and there are no guards stationed on this level.” Anna squinted at the door in the dim light from the porcelain sconces on the wall and grinned at the brass lock. There’d be no need for the weighty ring of skeleton keys hidden beneath her pelisse.
A three-lever mortise.The Lyoness may as well leave the door unlocked.
“We’ll be in the Devil’s own scrape if they catch us,” Elise said.
“You always say that.” Anna gestured toward the unrolled canvas housing her tools. “Hand me the bent nail—no, the one with the smaller nail soldered through the end.”
Elise placed the handmade tool in Anna’s waiting hand, her thirty years of age more than enough time to perfect the deep frown that turned an otherwise pretty face into the classic scowl of a disapproving chaperone.
She’d get over her condemnation, because tonight, Elise was charged with more than keeping Anna to the straight and narrow line of propriety.
Tonight, she was the lookout.
A good thing too. Elise had an uncanny ability to head off trouble when Anna was so keen to fall headfirst.
“I always say it, and I’m always right,” Elise said, her searching gaze constant, her head tilted to pick out voices from the stairs leading to what was said to be scandalous rooms upstairs, or to the lower level, where a constant flow of gentlemen gambled.
“Notalways.” Anna kept one hand on the fluted glass knob while the other teased the opening of the lock.
To think the Lyon’s Den used such a lock on the main office. With what was whispered to transpire behind closed doors here, one would have imagined these secrets to be guarded by a solid oak six by six door the width of a carriage.
“Name one time—one time—when your ideas didn’t end with us running from an enraged headmistress or nearly flayed alive by your brother or some worse creature?” Elise demanded, a dark curl falling over her forehead.
Anna rolled her eyes, the tool sliding into the hole in the lock, the nail on the end catching the first lever. “You exaggerate.”
“Remember when you meant to pick Mr. Felstmire’s lock to the goat’s pen? But what youdidwas unlock the neighboring gate where the enragedbulltook offense at an interrupted night’s sleep?”
Anna paused. “Is that why there was so much screaming?”
Elise threw her hands in the air. “You are impossible.” She slumped unceremoniously against the wall with no regard for the printed cotton dress borrowed from Anna’s wardrobe. The older woman being taller and slenderer in build, there were a good two inches between the floor and the dress’s hem and arather unflattering gaping at her bosom. “I shall wait here until the next disaster hits.”
Anna sighed. Another twist around the second latch. “So dramatic. I’ll remind you wealmostget caught but never do.”
No headmistress, relation, or enraged bull had ever caught Annabeth Greene by the horns.
Elise didn’t seem comforted. “Listen to yourself. You are not a locksmith’s daughter any longer. You are now the sister to a lord. Think of what getting caught here would do to your brother’s standing.”
There was a tightening around Anna’s heart, like a fist squeezing. “I’m doing thisformy brother. That woman knows more than she says.” No matter what Bow Street claimed, Mrs. Dove-Lyon must have had files, receipts,somethingAnna could use to find Will. “You said yourself that she was hiding something.”
Elise had come, in disguise, the past sennight and gambled on the woman’s side of the hell. It had killed Anna to sit in the carriage two streets down and wait every night, but William’s request that she attend more society functions of late had made her face too recognizable.
She did havesomesense of propriety. A thimbleful at least.
Elise huffed. “I saidit would be easy to hide something, not that I’d discovered anything.”
But Anna would. She redoubled her focus on the lock, turning her tool with the slightest of adjustments. The third lever only need be teased into latching free.
“That lock is unpickable,” Elise said, tension clear in her tone. “We should leave before we’re—”
Clunk.
Anna grinned as the bolt gave. A glance over her shoulder. “You were saying?”
