Merely the Groom (Free Fellows League 2)

“No, sir.” Pomfrey glanced at Gillian, then back at Colin. Colin nodded, and Pomfrey elaborated. “He’s having his supper in the kitchen, and we’ve made room for him in the servants’ wing.”

“Is he expected to return tonight?”

“He didn’t mention it,” Pomfrey answered. “And the dispatches are sealed.”

Colin toyed with the stem of his wineglass. Sealed dispatches usually contained enciphered messages—messages that had been deciphered and required action by Colin or messages that required Colin’s help to decipher them. And the fact that Jarrod had sent him the dispatches while he was on his honeymoon meant they were important.

Although he hadn’t yet seen or read the dispatches, he was willing to bet that he was about to resume the mission that Baron Davies and his Bow Street investigator had interrupted. He exhaled. “Please have a pot of coffee sent to the study,” Colin said.

“Yes, sir.” Pomfrey turned on his heel and left the dining room as quietly as he’d entered.

“Colin?” Gillian reached over and placed her hand on his. The butler had spoken so softly that she hadn’t been able to hear his side of the conversation. But she had heard Colin’s side, and she recognized the look of concern on his face. “Is something wrong?”

He looked across the table at Gillian. Her cheeks and nose were sunburned, and he knew that other parts of her anatomy were also sporting a new pink color. “The world is about to intrude on our honeymoon.”

Gillian sighed. “We knew it couldn’t last forever.”

That was true. But he’d thought it would last the week. He thought he’d be granted that much. Four days wasn’t enough. Four days wasn’t nearly enough. “I thought it would last a sennight,” Colin told her. “At least.” But he was scheduled for France at the end of the week, and Colin had no choice but to attend to the mission.

He finished his dinner and pushed his plate aside. “Excuse me, my sweet, but Pomfrey tells me urgent messages to which I must attend have arrived from London.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked, as he stood up and walked around to her side of the table.

“I won’t know until I re—” He’d almost told her that he had dispatches to read. “See what work Jarrod sent up from London.”

“Jarrod?”

“The Marquess of Shepherdston. We share several business interests.”

Gillian pretended to understand, though Colin offered no further explanation. “Oh.”

He leaned down and brushed his lips against her hair. “I may be quite late coming to bed,” he said. “You’ve had a hard day winning sailboat races and collecting the bounty for it. No need for you to wait up.”

“You’ve had an equally hard day losing sailboat races and distributing the bounty.” She smiled at the memory of the hours they’d spent in the labyrinth after the toy sailboat races. I’ll wait up for you no matter how late it is.”

* * *

G,

Sorry to interrupt your holiday, my friend, but duty calls in London. Your schedule is fixed, and we require your presence as soon as possible.

As ever,

M

The message, written in code, was addressed to G, which stood for Galahad, and signed by M, which stood for Merlin, Jarrod’s code name.

It was Colin’s summons back to London and had been accompanied by a stack of coded messages marked urgent. He stared at the stack of messages he’d spent the better part of the evening deciphering. They had been opened and resealed with Merlin’s seal, so Colin knew that they had been opened and read in London, but Jarrod made it policy not to send the deciphered messages, only the originals. These originals had come from one of the French agents operating in Edinburgh. Colin pulled out his most recent copy of the French deciphering table. The messages were written in a form of numeric code. His deciphering table saved a tremendous amount of time in the deciphering process because it showed the numbers and their alphabetic equivalent in current use. But the French had begun changing the code in recent months, rearranging numbers to make code breaking more difficult. Colin had studied Conradus and been taught by George Scovell and Colquhoun Grant, and he knew that anyone with a full command of the French language and the knowledge that e was the most commonly used letter in the French language, or that words ending in double letters most frequently ended in ee, or that et which meant and was the most common word in the French language, or that a single letter on its own was an a, y, or a consonant with an apostrophe could begin to decipher the messages without too much trouble.

No, the problem with these messages wasn’t breaking the code but believing the message. Bloody hell and damnation! They were wrong. They had to be. Anything else was unthinkable.

But the source of the information contained in these messages was impeccable. He knew the agent. He’d recruited her. And she’d never been wrong before. But there was always a first time, and this appeared to be it. Because, according to these, his father-in-law, the baron, Lord Davies, was in league with the French. Davies’s ships transported French agents and government officials to ports of call in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the major port cities of Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. According to these, everything that had happened since that night in Edinburgh had been part of an elaborate ruse to draw the real Colin Fox into the baron’s trap.

Everything. Gillian’s elopement and abandonment in Edinburgh. The baron’s investigation and the hiring of the Bow Street runner. All of it was a ruse to force the real Colin Fox into declaring his true identity.

And it had worked like a charm. Not only had the real Colin Fox declared his identity, but he’d married the baron’s daughter. According to these, the baron had used his daughter as bait. And Colin had walked into the trap with his eyes wide open.

It couldn’t be true. And yet...