Merely the Groom (Free Fellows League 2)

I’ll do whatever’s necessary to secure you as husband for my daughter, because your position doesn’t allow for scandal any more than hers does. The baron’s words came back to haunt him. Time and time again. Had he? Had the baron done more than simply blackmail him? Had he engineered the whole scheme? Colin didn’t want to believe it, and yet he knew that while the messages intercepted from the French might not be entirely true, a great deal of what they contained was.

But what was truth? And what were lies? Was it coincidence that the ship that had taken him from Paris to Edinburgh had been one of Davies’s ships? Was it coincidence that he had first seen Gillian at the Blue Bottle Inn? Or that a husband who happened to go by the name of Colin Fox had abandoned her there? Was it a coincidence that the trail the Bow Street runner followed had led straight to the War Office and the secret Free Fellows League?

What was the truth? And what was all a part of an elaborate scheme to catch a spy? And was Gillian part of it?

Colin pushed aside his cup of coffee and reached into the top desk drawer for a bottle of whisky and a glass. He poured himself a glass of whisky, downed it, and poured another. He sipped his whisky as he pulled another message from the stack of papers, this one detailing the routes of Davies’s ships. Colin studied the routes and realized that those particular ships had docked in ports that coincided with his most recent travels. But he was unable to come up with any other clues that might lead him to discover the identity of the impostor Colin Fox.

He finished his whisky, then pulled out the urgent messages Jarrod had sent Colin to decipher.

* * *

Gillian was as good as her word. She waited up for him through the long hours of the night and into the wee hours of the morning. When the casement clock downstairs struck the hour of three and Colin had still not come to bed, she decided to investigate.

She found him asleep in the study, his head cradled upon his arms on a stack of papers. A cup and saucer that had contained coffee and a bottle of Scots whisky and a glass had been pushed out of the way to the far corner of the desk.

Gillian walked over to the desk and placed her hand on his shoulder. “Colin?”

Colin awoke with a start and shot to his feet, sending papers scattering across his desk and onto the floor. A gold seal suspended from a thick gold chain rolled off the desk and landed on the carpet beneath a sheet of paper under Colin’s chair.

Gillian dropped to her knees and began picking up the loose papers at her feet.

“Leave it!” Colin ordered.

But it was too late. Gillian had already gathered a handful of papers and begun straightening them. She looked down at the papers covered in cipher. “What is this? Some kind of puzzle?” she asked, looking up at Colin.

He groaned and reached for the papers.

She handed them to him, then bent once again to retrieve the single page beneath his chair. She pulled the sheet of paper from beneath Colin’s chair, then reached for the gold seal on the chain and picked it up, too. “Can’t lose the Grantham sea

l,” she teased, as she pushed herself up from her knees. “You’ll need it for your correspondence.”

“It’s not th—” Colin could have bitten his tongue out.

“Whose is it?” she asked as her curiosity got the better of her and she turned it over to study the indention. “Shepherdston’s?” No, not Shepherdston’s. She’d never seen the Shepherdston seal, but she’d seen this one. It was engraved with the impression of a mounted knight, and she’d seen it once before in a puddle of hardened green wax.

Gillian glanced from the seal she held in her hand to the cube of bright green sealing wax sitting on Colin’s desk as shock lowered her voice to a stunned whisper. “Galahad.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

“Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,

And be it moon, or sun, or what you please.

And if you please to call it a rush-candle,

Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me”

—William Shakespeare, 1564-1616

The Taming of the Shrew

“What did you call me?” Colin asked.

Gillian supposed that someone else might be intimidated by his tone of voice and the furrow in his forehead, but he didn’t intimidate her. “Galahad,” she answered, pulling herself up to her full height and looking him in the eye. “I called you Galahad because that’s who you are. You’re Sir Galahad.”

“Sir Galahad?” Colin arched an eyebrow and pretended innocence. “Like the knight in the Arthurian legends?”

“Yes,” she replied, “just like the knight in the Arthurian legend. Sir Galahad, whose purity and virtue allowed him to see the Holy Grail.”