“Keep your mouth shut, Hart. And, Willis, if you so much as fall a step behind between now and when we regain the camp, you will receive a bullet in your retreating back.”
Arthur dismounted, not so much as looking at Scrubs. He merely followed Gates to the door and stood there while he knocked upon it.
A Negro woman answered, and Gates didn’t bother with a smile. “Are the Mercers in?”
Mercer. Where had he…? Annapolis. The house he had assumed Gates had chosen by accident. That had belonged to a Mrs. Mercer. Obviously, a family he knew, and well enough to find both their homes with ease.
The woman nodded, stepped aside to let them in, and led them into a receiving room. Arthur looked around, noting the expensive furnishings, all unquestionably imported from Europe. Whoever this Mercer was, he was doing well for himself.
Minutes later footsteps sounded in the hall, and Arthur turned to find a young man probably around his own age standing in the doorway. He wore a finely tailored suit of clothes bordering on dandy and a deep frown.
“Father? What are you doing here? We agreed I would handle—”
“Not now, Nathan. I need you to tell me everything you know about Thaddeus Lane.”
All Arthur could do was sink uninvited into a chair and wonder if anything left in the world was what it seemed.
By the time Thad had slammed the door and led Gwyneth into the drawing room, the shaking had come upon her so badly that he had to scoop her up to get her the last few feet to the couch. “Oh, sweet.” He settled onto the cushions with her in his lap, holding her tight. “He is gone. You are well. Everything is all right.”
She shook her head against him, drawing in a deep breath obviously meant to restore her control. And when that failed, then another. “No. He was here. He was right outside, and I did nothing. I just stood there.”
“’Tisn’t what it looked like from where I stood.” He hugged her even tighter and let his eyes close. Let it all flash through his mind again. The empty walk in front of the bank at ten o’clock, that unshakable feeling he must hurry home to find her, and then seeing her fighting against two grown men. A shudder overtook him too. “The struggle was only over your leaving with them? Gates did not seem to know you knew what he had done?”
She shook her head as she curled her fingers into the fabric of his jacket. “They assumed I didn’t even know Papa was dead. I said the news had reached us, which is true enough. Though I—”
“You did exactly right.” Had she made an accusation, no doubt Gates would have had that pistol aimed at her head in half a second, and he would not have hesitated to shoot her. Thad knew that down to his very core, otherwise he never would have let the man walk away—but he could not risk Gwyneth’s life. There would be another chance to apprehend her uncle.
“No. I did not.” Steadier now, she sat up enough to look him in the eye. “I figured out the trunk, and Papa has much in there for you. The top sheets came loose, and there was a mask, a cutout shape to go over that letter he sent you. It had a note on it indicating he had sent you a duplicate that must never have made it to you. I had it in my hand, Thad, and Uncle took it. He ripped it to shreds and then tossed it to the wind.”
His heart lurched. A mask. Of course. He ought to have known. Not that knowing would have helped him without the actual one in hand. And not that any of it mattered in the face of his wife’s distress. He cupped her cheek and soothed the pad of his thumb over it. “But there is other information he included? We needn’t worry about one mask then.”
She shook her head, trailing the pointer finger of her right hand over his chest in a dip, a curve, an angle. “The rest will likely make no sense without the instructions. I know how my father did things. He would not send anything, even hidden, that could be easily understood by anyone to come across it. The key is in that letter, I know it. But without the mask…”
Her finger returned to its original position and then began trailing along again. In the same pattern. Thad glanced down at her hand and then up to her clouded eyes. And he nearly cried out “Eureka!” as Father was wont to do in his laboratory. Standing with her in his arms, he grinned. “I don’t think we are without it at all, sweet.”
“Pardon?”
Why waste time on words? He merely carried her to her secretaire, set her carefully down on the chair, pulled a blank sheet of paper in front of her, and put a pencil in that twitching hand. “Draw.”
“Draw? Thad this is hardly the time.” But her fingers closed around the pencil. And how could it then do anything but what that shrouded part of her mind told it? A sweep, a curve, a sharp angle.