Dukes Prefer Blondes (The Dressmakers 4)

He shrugged. “He may be harmless. Perhaps he simply marveled at your dress, and followed us in order to report to his disbelieving friends.”

“He might have been lurking in the vicinity for some time,” Clara said. “I know some of the scandal sheets employ nondescript persons to follow quarry and report. They’ve been keeping a close watch on me for months.”

This was a reasonable assumption, too. But the sense of trouble remained.

“Blast,” he said. “Then I’d better not debauch you in the park.”

“You told me we needed to take a rest from debauchery,” she said. “Until tonight.”

“I forgot,” he said. “This drive has turned out more exciting than I’d expected. Danger is known to be an aphrodisiac.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said.

“Maybe we’d better go home,” he said. “I can take a cold bath.”

“And our follower?”

“He can drown himself in the pond for all I care.”

Chapter Sixteen

On one side of me lay a wood, than which Nature cannot produce a finer; and, on the other, the Thames, with its shelvy bank and charming lawns, rising like an amphitheatre: along which, here and there, one espies a picturesque white house, aspiring in majestic simplicity to pierce the dark foliage of the surrounding trees: thus studding, like stars in the galaxy, the rich expanse of this charming vale. Sweet Richmond . . .

—­Kitson Cromwell Thomas, Excursions in the County of Surrey, 1821

But Radford didn’t drive home. He couldn’t. Not yet.

This was a mystery. To drive away with no answers, not even a clue, was unthinkable.

Even after he decided to take a longer route, the boy trailed them through the park and did an exceptional job of finding cover or disappearing into the scenery.

Another man might simply stop the vehicle and give chase or find another way of cornering their watcher.

Radford wasn’t another man.

“Are you lost?” Clara said.

He treated her to a raised eyebrow.

“Right,” she said. “You’d probably have to make a special effort to get lost.”

“I might be able to do it in an unfamiliar place after dark,” he said. “Though the sun is sinking, we’ve light yet, and I know this park well. If I didn’t, I’d rely on you. It’s the boy.”

“I didn’t think you could leave it alone.”

“No, it’s a curse at times,” he said. “Here I am, newly wed, eager to debauch my bride. But no, I must play cat and mouse with a brat from the London streets—­or at any rate a brat from streets of some kind. He’s too quick and cunning to be an ordinary child.”

“I know you have an excellent reason for not stopping the vehicle and giving chase.”

“Two,” he said.

“Firstly,” she said.

He looked at her. She looked at him, her expression sober, her blue eyes glinting with laughter.

He said, “If he’s the type I’m sure he is, he has a better than even chance of outrunning me. Such boys learn speed at an early age. He’s smaller than I and closer to the ground. Youth, size, and gravity are on his side.”

“Secondly.”

“Thank you, my dear, for helping with the counting.”

She laughed. What a sound! Easy, unaffected. It was a sound like the look of sun breaking through clouds. And there was the chipped tooth, her little battle scar.

“Secondly, all I’ll gain from a confrontation is the exercise of chasing him,” he said. “I could shake him, dangle him upside down from a high window, threaten him with the authorities, bribe him, or subject him to the tortures of the Inquisition. The most likely responses are defiance, silence, or Cockney humor.”

“The way the boys answered when I asked for Toby,” she said. She went on to mimic them—­with surprising accuracy—­and he realized he’d only begun to discover her.

He said, “Instead, I’m going to test his stamina. Odds are I’ll get a better look at him, and that ought to jog my memory as to what’s familiar about him.”

Radford led the spy hither and yon until twilight, when he drove into Richmond. “Let’s pay a visit to the Talbot Inn,” he said. “We can order an early and leisurely dinner. We’ll see whether he’s waiting for us when we come out.”

“How very interesting this day is turning out to be,” she said. “In so many ways.”

“Not quite what I’d planned,” he said. “I meant to take you farther afield, where the locals wouldn’t recognize Raven Radford and his beautiful highborn bride. But you’re used to ­people—­especially men—­staring, and we can claim a private dining parlor. Mainly it’ll be the waiters gawking at us and trying to eavesdrop. Or trying to memorize your dress, to astonish their wives and sisters.”

Clara thought this was a wonderful way to spend the time before the supper and education in marital intimacy he’d promised. To dine at an inn while setting a trap for a spy, or at least deducing a clue or two, was a most satisfactory, not-­at-­all-­ordinary way to start a marriage. Whatever trials and tribulations lay ahead, she did not believe boredom or suffocation would play a part.

Squirrel hadn’t ever had to deal with Raven, like some others. He hated him just as much as the others did, though. Chiver was the one who saved Squirrel when he was near beat to death, and Chiver was the one who took him into the gang and gave him the first full meal he’d ever had.

Now Chiver was dead, and everybody knew the police raid was Raven’s doing.

Squirrel hated this place, too. Trees everywhere, and hills like mountains. And the bloody great park!

But he had to be here. Husher stole clothes for him and got money from somebody—­he didn’t say who or how—­to pay for the hackney Squirrel had traveled in.

Because Jacob needed a spy, and Squirrel was the only one Raven wouldn’t recognize.

“Stick close and tell me what he does and where he goes,” Jacob had told him. “Then we’ll find a way to get him, so nobody will ever know what happened to him. We’ll do for him and slide him quiet into the river.” And he’d laughed. How he’d laughed.

Yes, it was all great larks to Jacob, but he wasn’t the one running after a carriage through trees and mountains and the carriage going on and on, round and round.

Squirrel had never been outside of London, and this was like a foreign country. Everything smelled wrong, even in the village, which wasn’t like a proper town at all.

Now Raven and his Long Meg were in the inn and could be in there for hours, in the warm, eating and drinking, while Squirrel stood outside and froze and starved and took care nobody noticed him.

It was a cold and windy night, but he had to stand away from the inn’s warmth because he had to keep clear of the lamps and lighted windows.

Raven had sharp eyes, everybody knew. But he’d never met up with Squirrel, and it better stay that way.

He waited in the stable yard. The ones who worked here were too busy to bother about him. Other sorts loitered here and gossiped. He could tell what they were: a pickpocket or two, maybe, and some girls whose kind he knew. But he didn’t know who to trust, so he kept out of their way—­had to learn how to do that a long time ago, didn’t he, unless he was looking for black eyes or broken bones.

Then Raven came out, and Squirrel had to move fast, behind a wagon.

The lawyer talked to one of the stablemen. Squirrel didn’t move, and tried not to breathe. It was dark, but they said Raven had sharp ears, too. Sharp everything. Too sharp by half.

But Jacob and Husher would dull him down, and he wouldn’t be hearing or seeing anything, ever again.

A woman who’d been loitering in the yard sauntered to the carriage as Radford was about to climb into his seat. She murmured something to him in a language vaguely like English. Not enoug

h like it, though, for Clara to understand.

Whatever the woman had to say earned her a coin from Radford, though it didn’t make him linger.

“I’ll give our follower credit,” he said as they drove out of the inn yard. “His reflexes are top-­notch, and he’s good at making himself inconspicuous. But not to her.”

“I didn’t know you had informants in Richmond as well as London,” Clara said.

“Millie used to ply her trade in London,” Radford said. “She helped me now and again. When she ended up in the criminal court for the fifth time, I saved her from transportation. The judge’s condition for leniency was, she was never again to appear at the Old Bailey. Since one couldn’t expect her to make a new life in her old haunts, I helped her move here.”