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“Walhouse?”

“Lied.” He did not trust himself to say more about Clive.

“So, do we have any idea where Malikov’s taken her?” Blackstone asked, getting to his feet.

“Yes.” Hazelwood saw at once that he’d erred by stopping at the coffee room entrance. His friends stood ready to help him recover Jane. But he could not accept their help, as he was about to betray the British government. “Wilde followed one of her watchers to where the fellow’s been living on the sly. He can lead us.”

“And if she’s not there?” Clare asked. He, too, was standing, with an air of impatience for action.

“We find Malikov and apply pressure. Arm yourselves.”

“Is there a plan?” Blackstone asked, sensible fellow that he was.

“I’ll tell you on the way. Let me get my pistols.” He turned away and started for the stairs.

Blackstone called up after him. “Do you want to send Wilde to rouse a coach for us?”

“No need. Coachman’s waiting,” he called down. He hoped he had not given himself away. They trusted him. It was his case. They would wait for him. He would have perhaps a quarter of an hour’s lead.

* * * *

By the light of a single lantern on a white stone hearth, Jane watched the smaller of her two captors prod the embers of a dull fire. He didn’t speak. He merely pointed his pistol her way to indicate his wishes. The scrape and clank of iron echoed in the empty room until he put aside the poker and applied a wheezing bellows. The hearth emitted a cloud of soot that made him cough and draw his wool muffler tighter around his face.

Jane stood where she’d been ordered to stand, quietly clenching and unclenching her bound hands to keep some circulation in them. The gag that bound her mouth cut into her cheeks and dried her tongue. She found it hard to breathe steadily through her nose and impossible to swallow. Her scraped knees stung.

They had not traveled far from Langford House. Jane had counted six turns of the unhurried coach, which had led them south and east to this apparently deserted house. A change in the sound of the carriage wheels told her they had entered a short, graveled drive. Then her captor had hustled her through a portico into the dark house at pistol point.

He faced the feeble fire, his hands extended toward it as it started to burn. Its glow illuminated more of the room, which wasn’t as deserted as she’d first supposed. For the moment his pistol lay on a green baize table such as one would see in a card room but littered with papers. On the floor by the table was a traveler’s satchel. Around the table at the edge of the lamp’s dim light lay mounds of bedding as if someone had kicked apart a nest of blankets and cushions. On the blackened fender sat an iron pan and an object she had not thought to see in London, a small, long-handled coffeepot like the one she’d left behind in Halab. The smell of coffee lingered in the room mixed with smells of mold and rodents. She guessed that the heavily curtained chamber must have been the reception room of some lord’s mansion before its abandonment and ruin. Without turning her head, she tried to judge the distance to the nearest door. A quick calculation told her that her guard could grab his pistol long before she reached the door.

She assumed that no one knew where she was, at least no one who would help her. Hazelwood’s plan to come for her had failed. Allegra and Phoebe might worry about her, but she now knew that Clive would lie to them as he had been lying to her. They would go to bed imagining her somewhere safe, perhaps with her grandmother, or with Mrs. Lowndes. It was a lonely thought to think of her friends ignorant of her situation curling up in their beds as if she too were as warm and safe as they were. She ached suddenly for her father and the loneliness he must feel. Of course, he would be strong and clever. He would make his captors laugh. He would keep his mind keen and always look for an escape. She straightened her spine. Her captor picked up his pistol again as a door opened and footsteps echoed across the bare floor.

Count Malikov strode up to Jane and looked her over, coolly. He reached up and pulled away the gag. Jane swallowed and worked her aching jaw. Instantly, her teeth started clicking with the cold.

Malikov crossed to the fire and gave his henchman a clout on the ear. “Is that the best you can do? It’s colder than St. Petersburg in here.”

She did not catch the man’s mumbled reply. It was the first speech she’d heard from him, and it was not English. She had assumed the man was a London ruffian hired for his muscle, but now she realized he might be something else. His features were hidden under his hat and the muffler around his face.

Malikov settled in the chair at the green baize table. She supposed he must be thought handsome with his fair looks and blue eyes. Until this evening, she had only seen him as an older version of the young men around Allegra. Now the smooth, languid manner was gone. The dropping of the pretense of civility sent a different sort of shiver through her. “Come here, girl. You have questions to answer.”

Jane stepped forward. At least she would be closer to the fire.

“Where’s your father?” Malikov demanded.

The unexpected question made her blink. “According to the B-B-British government, he’s dead.”

Malikov shook his head. “But you don’t believe that, do you?”

“He may be alive and held captive in the East. K-k-kidnapping merchants for ransom is not uncommon there.”

“But he’s no merchant, and there’s been no ransom demand, has there? Why is that? One must wonder, and one imagines that instead there was a plan.”

Again he puzzled her. She had assumed that her father’s enemies knew where he was. “I do not understand you.”

“Oh, I think you do. A year ago your father smuggled a stolen map out of Khiva. He sent you to London to retrieve that map, didn’t he?”

She shook her head. She tried to keep her gaze uncomprehending, but it was one of those moments when a different explanation of the facts appears and causes one to rearrange the details. The puzzle pieces suddenly fit together. The scrambled ivory letters make a word. Her father’s enemies did not have him. “The government brought me here when he disappeared.”

“Miss Fawkener, I do not think you understand the gravity of your situation. The Russian government does not take kindly to the theft of vital information.”