“And you’ve never met this person? The person for whom you’re keeping the room? Just his representative?”
“We’ve never met him. Isn’t that odd? He said his employer likes to keep suites available all over the city, and this is another direct quote, ‘just in case.’” She stretched and pointed her toes. “I imagine a debauched lord of some sort, staggering to the nearest hidey hole after a drunken evening, but I honestly don’t know. The man—called himself Mr. X, if you can believe it—actually gave us half atoken, and he said that we’d know the lord when he presented the other half. Angelique and I felt ridiculous, but so far it seems more absurd than sinister. As we promised, we clean it every day. He has yet to show himself.”
Tristan took this in. It sounded absolutely mad, but he also didn’t doubt her, because frankly mad people were rife among the aristocracy. And it was too outlandish a story to invent.
But was this Mr. X involved in smuggling, somehow?
Perhaps it was just a coincidence that he took that room.
Or... perhaps Tristan was on the entirely wrong track.
The very idea formed a small, icy knot in the pit of his stomach.
All today he’d gone into cheese shops, tailors, pubs, confectioners and asked, “Big bloke with a scar promised me more cigars, has he been in? Has a friend, smaller, looks a bit like a fox.” That sort of thing. Variations on that approach.
Not one of them he’d spoken to today had seen or spoken to men who looked like that.
But he’d told his men to keep asking anyway. And to send word to him straight away if they got even a single viable response. “Use another language, Massey, if you send a message. Portuguese. I can read that, if you can write it.” Both he and Massey had acquired the rudiments of a number of languages throughout their careers.
He refused to surrender to that tight feeling in his chest of encroaching doubt.
“What does the token look like?” He realized he’d pulled his arm out from beneath her. As if touching her while he did what amounted to abusing her trust was dishonorable.
“Like maybe a crest of some kind. A half of a crest. A lion’s leg, a unicorn leg, perhaps? It’s not fancy and it’s impossible to know what it is, really.”
He frowned. Neither a crest nor a token struck any bells at all.
Bloody hell. He still needed to get into that room.
She shifted away from him a little. He’d gone tense as a board, and likely she’d noticed. She was watching him worriedly now.
It got even more tense when there was a knock at the door.
They both froze.
She pulled the coverlet over her head.
“Yes, may I help you?” he called.
“Captain Hardy?” It was Dot.
“Yes, Dot. I’m afraid I can’t come to the door just yet.”
There was a silence. He hoped Dot was too naive to reason out why, apart from the fact that he’d had a bath, which involved a state of total undress. “A man came to the door with an urgent message for you, Captain Hardy. It’s all sealed up.”
His heart stopped.
Good man, Massey, to seal it. “Slide it under my door if you would, Dot, thank you. And if you would please wait.”
There was a little rustle as she shoved it into the room.
He all but dove out of bed to retrieve it. Massey had sealed it with a blob of wax.
In Portuguese, he read:
Halligan spoke with a tobacconist four streets over who was angry because huge man with scar didn’t bring in anticipated cigars. Waiting outside for orders.
M.
