A Duke in Disguise Page 6

  He carefully turned over the pages until he came to a delicate star-shaped blue flower. The flower’s Latin name, which meant nothing to Ash, was written carefully. But beneath that was “Buenos Aires.” The next page said Japan. He turned the page again. Damascus. Prague.

  “You have traveled far, ma’am,” he said, tasting the jealousy on his own tongue.

  “Oh, dear me, no,” she said in that brittle whisper, “I seldom leave London. I’ve purchased these specimens. I find out what ports a ship is meant to call at and seek out a reliable-looking junior officer to employ in pressing specimens and keeping them dry. There’s quite a brisk trade in these items among collectors.”

  He wanted to ask whether she sold her specimens or whether such commerce was beneath the attention of a lady, but instead he turned the page again and saw that the paper was singed at the edges. So was the next sheet, and the one after that.

  “That is why I require your help,” she said. “There was an, ah, unfortunate accident, you see. The entire herbarium was nearly lost, so I thought I’d hire a skilled artist to make me a copy. Of course it won’t be as useful as the original nor will it be worth more than a few pennies to other collectors, but it will be something. I’ve spent two decades doing this and I can’t let it go to waste.”

  He looked up from the book and regarded her carefully for the first time, examining her with an illustrator’s regard for detail. She was about forty, with dark hair visible beneath that fine lace cap. Her morning gown of sky blue muslin was of the first quality, and her India shawl had cost somebody a pretty penny. Her profile was what he supposed one might call patrician: straight nose, strong jaw, high cheekbones. But there were lines around her eyes, as if she were in the habit of squinting. She had the nervous twitchiness of a startled hare. And when he looked closely at her face, he had the same sensation of wrongness as when he regarded the staircase.

  He shook his head and returned his attention to the herbarium. “Shall I take it with me, ma’am? I expect it would take me a fortnight.”

  “No!” She stepped towards him, as if she planned to snatch the book from his hands. “What I mean to say,” she continued in a calmer tone, “is that it must stay with me. It must. You can perhaps visit at this hour every Tuesday and Thursday.”

  “I see,” Ash said, even though he did not see at all. But he understood that the lady was attached to this collection of dead plants. The rich, he reminded himself, were unaccountable in their fancies and predilections. “I’m an engraver by trade. I can certainly make accurate drawings of the specimens in this book, but for the fee you mentioned in the letter, you could hire a trained botanical illustrator.”

  She smoothed her skirt with pale hands. “It is—I thought—if things go as planned, I might want to make a book of my specimens, in which case I would require an engraver.” He didn’t answer at once, mainly because he was confused about why she seemed almost embarrassed to speak these words aloud, but also because he realized that producing the engravings could keep him busy for months, if not years, and he did not know if he wanted to spend that much time in a house that left him feeling strangely seasick. But she took his silence as condemnation. “It’s a silly idea, forget I said anything.” Her cheeks flushed with what he took to be shame, and he knew he was not going to deny her.

  “No, ma’am, you misunderstand. It’s not a silly idea in the least. Indeed, I’ve seen similar volumes for sale at bookshops.” And at quite a formidable price, no less. “I’d be only too glad to help you.”

  He pulled out his paper and inks and began sketching the first specimen, a fragile plant whose flowers had dried to a dusty violet but must once have been vibrantly purple. It looked like the common skullcap that grew in every park and garden, but the label indicated that it came from Shanghai. He began sketching the threadlike roots, then drew in the wispy stem. There was hardly anything holding this plant together, no substance; fifty of them in his hand would weigh no more than his pen. Rooted in the ground and nourished by water, it must have some solidity, but dried and fixed to the paper it seemed one step away from dust.

  But before his pen reached the delicate flowers, Lady Caroline rose to her feet with a start. “Oh!” she said, and pulled a timepiece out of a pocket. “I heard the door. You’ll need to leave.” Spurred on by the urgency in the lady’s voice, Ash gathered his supplies and stepped towards the door he had entered through. “No, not that way. It’s too late for that. Through the garden. I can’t show you the way, but you’ll find the mews with no trouble. Goodbye, Mr. Ashby, I’ll await your next visit.”

  She dropped two guineas onto the table he had been using.

  “That’s far too much,” he protested.

  “I’ll pay twice as much, if you’ll only leave!” If it was possible to shout without making any more noise than wind passing through bare branches, Lady Caroline Talbot was doing it.

  There was no mistaking the fear in her expression, so Ash executed a brief bow, scooped up the coins, and made for the door as quickly as he could. As he reached the garden, he heard a loud male voice booming from within the house. A jealous husband, he assumed. And one whose jealousy manifested in more than disapproval. He wondered how those pages had been burnt.

  The garden was bleak in its late autumn grays and browns, a heavy mist washing out whatever color lingered on the remaining leaves, but Ash suspected that if the shrubbery had been green and the rose bushes blooming, he might have had the same feeling of confused recognition that he had earlier. He brushed aside the urge to find a bench and make sense of his confusion, and instead hailed a hackney to take him to the only place that he could even pretend was his home.

  Verity could not remember the last time the building had been so silent in the middle of the day. Nate had given his assistants a few days holiday while he was away, and the result was a quiet so insistent that Verity could hardly think. Even the noises from the street were muffled by the fog that settled over the city. It was hardly past noon, but she already needed a lamp to see the pages of the book that sat before her on the shop counter.

  Her first thought when she saw the flutter of movement outside the shop window was surprise that she had any customers at all on so dreary a day. Then the door opened and in marched three redcoats.

  “You Plum’s sister or wife?” demanded the soldier who seemed to be in charge of the others.

  “Sister,” she answered, embarrassed to hear the fear in her voice.

  “Where’s he at?”

  “He stepped out,” Verity said. She certainly wasn’t going to admit that he had gone to Derby for the Pentrich executions.

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “I don’t know. He comes and goes as he pleases.” She tried to imbue her voice with sisterly irritation—not hard, under the circumstances—rather than anything they could interpret as defiance or fear. They stood too close to her, crowding her towards the back wall of the shop, and she suddenly felt a bone-deep apprehension at being alone with a group of men. “If you happen to see him you might let him know there’s naught but beef tea for his supper,” she added for good measure, as if Nate might stroll in the door at any moment.

  One of the men showed her a piece of paper, and it took her a minute to realize it was a search warrant. She watched in helpless fury as the soldiers ransacked the shop, gritting her teeth as the few unsold copies of the first issue of the Ladies’ Register fell to the floor and were crushed beneath booted feet. At least they hadn’t had a warrant for Nate’s arrest. And that, as she watched them rummage carelessly through shelves and drawers, struck her as very strange indeed. If they were looking for evidence that Plum & Company printed radical materials, they needed look no further than the latest issue of the Register, and they needed only sixpence to see as much, not a warrant. The back room contained nothing more than a pair of printing presses, boxes of type, jars of ink, and large rolls of paper. The redcoats tossed the room anyway. She was going to lose days of work
setting things to rights.

  The man who seemed to be in charge said something to the other two—Verity was too distracted by the pounding of her heart to quite understand—and they left shortly thereafter, knocking over a stack of books on their way out the door.

  It could have been worse, Verity told herself, her heart still racing, her hands slick with sweat. They could have contrived to knock over a bookcase so it went through the windows. Or landed on her, for that matter. Christ, she had been alone with those men. Alone, in the half-light, on a dismal day when few people were in the street. A shiver went up her spine, but she quickly dismissed her fear. There was no time for fear. There was no time for anything except the work that lay ahead of her. There never was. She sat on the floor and began putting the books back on the shelves.

  “Verity.” Ash crouched beside her on the floor. She hadn’t heard him come in. “Verity.” He took her chin and made her look at him.

  “Redcoats.” She scrubbed at her face with the back of her sleeve. “I’m not crying.”

  “Did they hurt you?” His voice was gentle, questioning, not angry. She could imagine another man asking those words in a way that forced her to spend her dwindling supply of patience in soothing him.

  “No, no. Ash, they only had a search warrant, not an arrest warrant.”

  “A search warrant,” Ash repeated some time later, when he was helping her shelve books. She saw the moment he realized what it had taken her hours to work out. “Damnation. Has Nate been involved in something even more incendiary than the Register?”

  “I was going to ask if you knew anything.” The fact was that thus far, largely due to Verity’s insistence, the Register hadn’t strayed too far into outright sedition. That single oblique allusion to the guillotine was the furthest they had gone. But if Nate was printing pamphlets—off premises, presumably, or she would have noticed—then he could be tried for those.

  Ash set his jaw. “He’d better not be.” He sighed. “Here, let’s be done with this,” he said, gesturing to the chaos of the shop around them. “This mess will keep until tomorrow. You look like you could do with a wash and a hot meal.”

  She glanced down at her hands and found them covered in ink and dust. Her face had to be in much the same state. “Nan went home hours ago.”

  That got her a wry smile. “I can bring you hot water, Plum.”

  He was right, though. She did feel better after she washed, using the kettle of hot water he left outside her door. A quarter of an hour later she was sitting in bed, wrapped in a warm dressing gown, when Ash knocked at the door of her room carrying meat pie and a cup of tea.

  Ash, she realized, was the sort of man who could procure pork pie at a moment’s notice. A man who would make one a cup of tea without being asked, and do it without acting like it was a grand favor. He placed both cup and plate on the table beside her bed, and was half out the door before she had even managed to thank him.

  “No, wait,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure, Plum.”

  “Stay? If you don’t have anywhere else you need to be?” She hated asking. Asking for help was one step removed from requiring it, and in Verity’s experience a woman who couldn’t take care of herself was a sitting duck. Far better to practice self-sufficiency at every step.

  A look passed over Ash’s face, something she couldn’t quite define. A sort of gentle, fond frustration. “There’s nowhere I need to be,” he said, making for the chair in the corner of the room. But the chair was covered with a stack of books, a cloak, and a few shifts that needed mending. He turned towards the bed and made a gesture for Verity to move over. She slid to the side, tucking her legs under the quilt and holding the plate of pork pie in her lap. The mattress dipped as Ash sat beside her, on top of the covers. She could feel the heat coming from his body, could smell the rosin and asphaltum that got under his nails while he worked and never quite came clean. When she swallowed the next mouthful of pie, she let herself sink against his side.

  He put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close as if it were the simplest thing, as if this closeness were not unprecedented throughout the entirety of their long friendship. But her body fit against his with a familiarity that could have deceived her into believing that she could have Ash like this, that their friendship could exist between their bodies as it always had between their minds.

  “When you want to talk about Nate, I’m here.” His voice was low, and she felt the rumble of it against her cheek.

  She burrowed into his side, hiding her face in his shirt. “I don’t want to. I don’t know what else there is to say.”

  “He’s like a brother to me, and I don’t want him to be hurt.” He stroked her hair and she leaned into the touch. “But he isn’t my brother. He’s yours. While I think something has to be done to keep him safe until this blows over, it’s not my place to act, at least not without your say-so.”

  He was doing her a favor by broaching the topic first, by acknowledging that there were things Verity could do to keep Nate out of prison. Unpleasant things, things she didn’t want to think about. But nestled in the crook of Ash’s arm, she thought she could almost face this problem. With his heart beating under her cheek, she felt less alone, almost like she had a partner, an ally. “He has to leave the country,” she whispered. The thought had been creeping in at the edges of her consciousness for days, weeks, but saying it aloud felt like a betrayal. “But he would never agree to it.”

  “He might when he learns you had redcoats threatening you.”

  “They weren’t threatening me.”

  “What they did to the shop was a threat. They’re showing you how easily they can do harm and how unafraid they are of any consequences.” His voice was strained, his arm stiff around her. “He also might if he has enough money to set up as a printer in Boston or New York.”

  This was too much for Verity’s nerves. She let out a high-pitched laugh. “I can hardly pay Charlie’s wages, let alone such a great sum of money as it would take to set up a new establishment.”

  “I can help with that. I do have money saved.”

  “No,” she said automatically. “I manage on my own.”

  “I know you do. But it would be my pleasure to help keep Nate safe.”

  She was wondering how long she had to wait before repeating her rejection of his aid, when he spoke again. “If Roger had been unable to pay for his trip to Italy, I would have helped. And you would have too, I think.”

  “True,” she said tentatively. “But Roger was your dearest friend.”

  With a single finger, he tilted her chin up so she faced him. She held her breath. “Do you really need me to explain this?” He let out something between a laugh and a sigh. “Of course you do. You’re important to me. You and Nate both.” His words were straightforward and innocuous, but his voice was soft, his gaze intent on her. “You’re dear to me, Plum.”

  Verity never knew what to say to expressions of fondness, beyond the absurd urge to protest. But hearing those words from Ash made her realize how much they were true for her as well. She mumbled something that she hoped he’d interpret as a return of the sentiment and then tucked her head under his chin to avoid looking him in the eye.

  “Even with the money, I don’t think he’d agree to go,” she said. “He believes he’s fighting for a worthy cause. Hell, he is fighting for a worthy cause.”

  “You could go with him. He might agree in that case.”

  The words hung there in the silent room. “I couldn’t,” she said. “And—no, Ash, I won’t. My life is here.” You are here, she wanted to say. She knew, as she formulated the thought, that Ash being in a place was reason enough for her to want to be there too. But that was terrifying, too much like letting another person dictate the terms of her life, so she pulled hard on the reins of her mind and thought about another reason she could not leave: if Verity and Nate both left, Ash would be alone. She knew him well enough to understand that his early l
ife had been marked by a series of losses. And even if she could have asked Ash to go with them, which she would never do, because all his clients and connections were in London, he couldn’t undertake an ocean voyage of three months. She shuddered at the memory of how laid up he had been after crossing the channel with Roger some years ago. Ash had suffered a seizure on board, recovered somewhat in Calais, and then suffered another seizure on the way home. “A ship is not a convenient place to have an episode, Plum,” he had said with his characteristic dryness, but the haunted look in his mentor’s eyes had told her of the true danger.

  But it wasn’t only concern for Ash that made her resist leaving. She didn’t want to be parted from him. Those months he had spent in Bath had been hard enough, even though she had tried not to admit it to herself. She had missed seeing him, missed their easy conversations, but it had been more than that: when she was with him she felt warm and whole in a way she didn’t otherwise. She didn’t want to give that up.

  She would, though. She would leave Ash, she would do whatever it took to keep Nate safe and sane, and she’d do it with the full knowledge that she was giving away even more of herself, that she was complicit in her own self-effacement.

  Chapter Five

  This was the third time Ash had visited the house on Cavendish Square, and while his sense of creeping familiarity in the foyer had not diminished, he had grown accustomed to it. What he found more disturbing was the hush that seemed to blanket the house in a fog of nervous silence. The servants moved on cats’ feet, quick and silent. Each of his prior visits had concluded with Lady Caroline hustling him out the garden door when a man arrived home, and each time he had been relieved to be out of that house, almost gasping for air once he stepped outside.