“I think that very likely,” she agreed. “He knows I would not approve of anarchy.”
“Without arousing suspicion, we must make it difficult for him to remain vague.”
Francesca allowed herself a faint, controlled breath. There was more than money at risk. She inclined her head. “Very well, then we are agreed,” she said.
Major Manners inclined his head.
Lifting her gaze to his once more, she queried, “What do we do?”
He met her eyes, his expression calm, his voice certain.
“We set a trap.”
CHAPTER 13
Arch needed to do something with his hands, his horse or his gun, or he would begin to think himself into an insufferable humour.
Thinking had become a most unproductive occupation of late. Stuart, Fielding, and Baines were all engaged in actual work: tracing Kendall’s associates, watching taverns, comparing names, routes, pamphlets, debts, and whispers. They would make lists and reports. They had the sort of tangible progress a man could set upon a table and examine. Arch, meanwhile, found himself in the intolerable position of awaiting a lady’s pleasure.
He did not phrase it so to anyone else, of course, yet the fact remained that while his friends pursued traitors and radicals through London’s underworld, he waited upon Miss Francesca Vale’s willingness to trust him, speak to him, or place herself in danger and require him to extract her from it.
The difficulty lay in the fact that she was entirely unlike any lady of his acquaintance. Miss Vale had no wish for attendance, no appetite for sighing devotion, no talent for fluttering her way through obligations while gentlemen arranged the substance of her life in the background. If left to herself, most likely shewould dismiss half the customs of the Season as nonsense and spend her mornings reviewing tenant petitions or manufactory ventilation with greater satisfaction than she would derive from a dozen drives in Hyde Park.
His mother, however, had every expectation of his dancing attendance, and thought that expectation most natural.
Arch had risen with the fixed intention of escaping to Manton’s and spending the better part of the morning with powder, shot, and good sport. He had just reached for his gloves when O’Malley entered the room and held out his hand. “A note from Lady Upton, sir.”
Arch closed his eyes. “Do you think she has set the house on fire,” he asked, “or merely my day?”
O’Malley handed over the folded note. “I could not say, sir.”
Arch broke the seal and read the contents.
There were mothers whose requests retained some modest appearance of being requests. Lady Upton did not trouble herself with such delicacy. She expected him at the Park by three o’clock. Lady Upton wrote, in the airy tone of a woman to whom stable management was merely one more sphere in which gentlemen became tiresome.
Would you be so obliging as to collect Miss Vale on the way?
Below this, as if she had only just remembered the point that mattered most, came the postscript:Do not come resembling a highwayman.
Arch looked up slowly.
O’Malley waited.
“My mother,” Arch said, “wishes me to drive in the Park. I will need the curricle.”
“It is an unseasonably pleasant day for a drive in the Park, sir.”
“That is some small recompense.”
“I will send to Upton House for the curricle at once, sir.”
“I will require your assistance with my neckcloth when you return, if you please.”
None of them kept valets, but O’Malley had served as Renforth’s batman before returning from the war. He was a man of many talents.
Dressing for Manton’s would have required little thought. A coat one did not mind spoiling, boots fit for use and a neckcloth tied with simple precision. He was always neat and trim, as any good soldier would be; however, dressing for the Park under his mother’s eye was another matter entirely, and one that offended his principles in ways small but cumulative. Nevertheless, he was not fool enough to ignore her instructions. Lady Upton noticed details with the relentlessness of an excellent general, and if he appeared before her looking aught but fashionably put together, she would dispense with her greeting and judge him through sighs alone.
He submitted, therefore, to doing the thing properly.
