Chapter One
Rome 1821
Pounding, urgent and loud, echoed through the room. The man on the bed ignored the noise.Perhaps it will stop.
It didn’t. “Major Bently? Are you in there?”
Bently? Jamie Heyworth covered his ears.Some damned fool wants my Uncle Charles.
“Major Bently!”
There it was again.Uncle Charles can answer.
His Uncle Charles lay dead the past eight years. Jamie peeked out from under his ragged pillow and stared at the cracks in the ceiling.
Another loud knock made his cot bounce and vibrate. It sent pain like nails into his already aching head.
“Major Bently, kindly open. You promised.”
Promised?He never made promises. He rolled to sit on the edge of his cot with a loud groan, a colorful curse, and a gasp so sharp it filled his lungs with pungent Roman air and jiggled his languid brain cells. Memory flooded back.
That morning he had no money, nothing left to sell, and no reason to get up—except more knocking. Louder.
“Stop the damned pounding,” he mumbled.
“Major, I heard your vulgarity. I know you are in there.”
Jamie’s senses began to clear, and he realized some woman pounded on his door.The vexatious chit from last night, he thought. The woman had invaded the tavern he frequented like the black crow of death and would not leave.
The little blackbird had good credit,he remembered.He eyed the three empty wine bottles on his table. He distinctly remembered only having money for one. He had spent his last coin on that bottle.She must have funded the other two. There had been food, too, he remembered, and a very fine cheese. Jamie Heyworth never forgot a good meal.
“Major, please! It is past nine in the morning, and we will be late,” the woman’s voice called.
Late for what?He struggled to recall.
After he plied her with tea and calmed her down, she had fed him some tale about dying brothers, evil nuns, a menacing count, and nieces held prisoner in a tower.Maybe not a tower, he thought. He felt sure he remembered the rest correctly.
“Major Bently!”
Ah! Bently.Using his mother’s maiden name amused him when he gave it to her. Major Lord James Phineas Heyworth, Fourth Baron—and so on—sounded ludicrous attached to his pathetic self even if he didn’t have good reason to avoid being found. He preferred not to use it. Bently sounded safer. He hoped it was.
Did I promise anything?
“You promised you would meet me by the fountain in the piazza at 8:30 this morning,” said the voice behind the door.
Her answer stunned him. He could think of no reason why he would promise some chance-met blackbird anything, much less an early morning rendezvous.
“Are you well?” the voice persisted.
No, damn it, I feel like the very devil.
“Yes. I am well. We were to meet at 8:30 in the evening, were we not?” he responded.
No sane person runs about at 8:30 in the morning.He began to wonder if the woman really was mad, one of those hysterical females who reads too many novels.
“Don’t be ridiculous. The nuns wouldn’t let us in the hospital in the evening,” she said.
Nuns again! And more infernal banging. He doubted the door, though thick as a post, could stand against his ravening crow.
