Roses in Moonlight

chapter 7





Samantha was in trouble.

She wasn’t quite sure when she’d gotten into a great big vat of it, but the truth was hard to deny. She would have been quite happy to be in a Nancy Drew–type level of trouble, where the danger was limited to venturing where she shouldn’t have without a flashlight, but she was well past that. This was thriller-movie-level trouble, complete with men following her, strangers sitting next to her on benches, and public transportation as her only means of escape.

Take her current situation, for instance. She was sitting on a train headed toward London. That in itself wasn’t noteworthy. What was noteworthy, however, was the fact that she was sitting three rows behind a man she had just realized she’d been seeing over the past three days in several different guises.

She wanted to argue herself out of that conclusion, but she couldn’t deny what her eyes were telling her. She supposed she might have been able to ignore the different colors of his eyes, or the changes of hair, or the glasses, or the clothes, or the languages, but there was one thing a man in a T-shirt couldn’t hide and that was his build. Even with his jacket on as it was now, he couldn’t hide the set of his shoulders.

She supposed she had her father to thank for giving her the skills that had led to that conclusion, a conclusion that had left her with panic that was running through her like a wildfire. She had altered so many costumes over the years for either him or his protégés that she could eye a build and have whatever she was working on fit without having to take measurements. It hadn’t been an ability she’d purposely set out to acquire. She had certainly never in her wildest dreams thought it might become something critical to her survival.

She had to force herself to take a deep breath or two to calm her racing heart. She clutched her backpack, her bag tucked underneath it, and hoped she didn’t look as terrified as she felt. She tried to convince herself that maybe she’d just read too many of her great-aunt Mary’s mystery novels when she was growing up—never mind all the other things Mary had slipped her when her parents weren’t looking. That helped a little. It was probably just her imagination running away with her.

And besides, what could she possibly have that anyone would want? If the Victorian embroidery had been all that valuable, the Cookes would have hired a professional to take it for them, or taken it south themselves. They certainly wouldn’t have entrusted it to her.

She looked at the map in her hands only because it made her feel like she was doing something constructive, not because she needed it. She had already memorized it earlier. She could get off the train, take the Tube, then get herself to her hotel without incident if she stayed in a crowd. Then she would . . . well, she would call . . .

She would call her brother and tell him all about what had happened to her and then have a thorough and well-deserved freak-out—

She took a deep, careful breath. No, she couldn’t do that. Gavin would lose any faith he might have had in her good sense and arrange for the Cookes to fire her. Her brother was nothing if not ruthless. And his recent bouts of generosity aside, he still looked at her as if she were approximately twelve years old.

No, she would have to handle this on her own.

She attempted a silent, scornful laugh. Handle what? Getting herself to her hotel? That was so easy, even a hapless tourist could manage that. She might even tempt fate and stop to have something to eat on the way. That might make up for the fact that she hadn’t been able to enjoy her meal at Hedingham Castle because of that German guy who had been watching her.

Only that German guy was now a grungy guy sitting in front of her.

Why was he changing his appearance?

She took another deep breath. Getting to her hotel could all be done in a calm, measured fashion. Measured, measuring, not needing to measure . . . that was really the problem, wasn’t it?

She looked at the man and wished she wasn’t seeing what she was seeing. Unfortunately, as much as she would have liked to deny it, there was no denying that not only was he the German from Hedingham, he was the Brit from the Castle in Newcastle, he was the Canadian with the moustache from York, and he was currently the scruffy-looking guy in plain clothes who had walked past her an hour ago and collapsed into the seat three rows in front of her.

“Are you unwell, miss?”

She looked up to find a conductor standing there. He checked her ticket, then handed it back to her. At least she didn’t recognize him, which she found to be rather reassuring somehow.

“I’m fine,” she said, her mouth very dry. “Fine.”

He didn’t look convinced, but she imagined she hadn’t been very convincing.

She wondered if she dared turn the tables on the chameleon in front of her and follow him for a change. She was half tempted to do it, but she could hear her great-aunt Mary telling her not to borrow trouble as clearly as if Mary were sitting next to her.

The train ride was interminable, but somehow just not long enough. She spent most of that time forcing herself not to wring her hands. She was very tempted to just get up and scream for help, but for all she knew that would land her in jail. Then again, considering the craziness that seemed to be swirling around her, maybe that wouldn’t have been a bad thing.

Before she could really work up a good scream, the train pulled into the station. She had no choice but to get off with the crowd, following after her changeling, who got off in front of her. He was at least six foot two, which made him easy to keep an eye on. He didn’t look to see what she was doing, which she found oddly comforting.

Maybe she’d just been imagining things.

She watched him go, then wondered if she could just go another way and lose him. She looked quickly at the signs, made a decision, then pretended nothing was going on in what was left of her fevered mind. And she made sure once they left the tracks that he was headed to the left before she turned quickly and headed to the right.

She decided abruptly that food could perhaps wait. She didn’t run, but she didn’t amble. The only thing she stopped for was to double-check her directions so she wound up at the right hotel.

No one shouted her name as she’d hurried down the street. No one stepped in front of her to prevent her from walking swiftly with the rest of the foot traffic. Not even the desk clerk looked at her meaningfully, as if he intended to alert every bad guy in the area that yes, indeed, she had arrived and they could come and get her at their leisure. He simply handed her a key, then went back to a conversation with his coworker that seemingly revolved around what they each hoped might be left warming on the stove by the time they got home.

Samantha was fairly certain she didn’t breathe until she reached her room. She knew she would have been better off to have just crawled into bed and pulled the covers over her head, but that seemed a little too fragile even for what her family would have expected from her. She took a deep breath, then lifted her curtain and looked out the window. There was no one standing under a streetlight looking up at her. Somehow, though, that just didn’t make her feel any better. She felt watched. What other reason would there be for that man to have changed himself into three different people to try to hit on her, then a fourth to ignore her?

She paced for a bit, but that didn’t make her feel any better, so she sat down on the bed and looked at her backpack. It wasn’t large, because the one useful thing she had learned from her mother was how to pack light. It tended to offset the endless suitcases her father required for a trip across town. She dumped everything out and sorted through it.

She found nothing else but the usual necessities of travel: clean underwear, a couple of shirts, a rolled-up skirt, and bathroom stuff. She checked all the pockets and zippered pouches inside the pack itself, but they were empty. It was exactly as she’d packed it herself the morning before.

She shook her head. She couldn’t imagine she was being followed because she was so terribly interesting, but she was definitely being followed, so perhaps someone had . . .

Her thoughts ground to a halt.

Had someone planted something on her?

She had the renewed sensation of having fallen into a bad crime drama, made all the more believable by people around her pretending to be who they weren’t and an unidentified bald guy chasing her. She looked quickly at her door, but it was locked and bolted. She got up, checked the armoire, the bathroom, and under the bed, just to be safe.

She sank down on the bed and looked at her messenger bag. She’d been using it all the time and certainly hadn’t noticed anything extra in it. The only thing she had in it besides her wallet, her passport, and money was what Lydia had given her.

Samantha took the package out of the zipped compartment and turned it over in her hands. Lydia had shown her the embroidery, of course, then taken it away to wrap it up. Samantha had thought nothing of it at the time, but now even that simple act was beginning to seem a little sinister.

She attempted a light laugh, but unfortunately what had seemed ridiculous seconds ago seemed much less ridiculous at present. She very carefully undid the tape, unzipped the zipper closure, then slid the embroidery out. It unfolded to reveal itself to be nothing more than what it was.

She rolled her eyes and took her first good breath of the day. She had let her imagination get the better of her. There was nothing unusual, nothing ominous, nothing out of the ordinary. She started to put the embroidery back into its sack—

And then she realized there was more to the package than there had seemed at first glance.

She had to wipe her hands on her trousers before she was able to unwrap layers she hadn’t noticed at first. Then she picked up with a shaking hand something that had her gaping.

It was a very large piece of textile.

She held it carefully under the lamp and identified without thinking that it was Elizabethan and it was in perfect condition.

She started to shake. She could hardly believe that she was entertaining the thought, but she was absolutely sure that what she was holding in her unwashed hands was the piece of lace those ladies had been talking about on the bus back from Castle Hammond. That theft had been what had left the house in an uproar and her outside in the rain.

She almost dropped it—a knee-jerk reaction to not wanting to have anything to do with it—but she wasn’t unused to handling valuable things. She forced herself to set the lace down on top of the embroidery, because that seemed the cleanest place to put it, and considered the ramifications of her discovery.

That enormous piece of lace had been hidden in a package containing something entirely different. She had been sent off on an errand to deliver embroidery that hadn’t been just embroidery, it had been a Victorian sample plus that large piece of stolen lace. The only time she hadn’t had her bag within reach had been in Newcastle when she had trusted that it was safe in her room. And the only person with access to that room had been Lydia Cooke.

Which meant that either Lydia Cooke was absentminded or she was a thief and a liar.

Samantha tried to put the brakes on her imagination, but the ride had already left the station and was rocketing up the tracks at about eighty miles an hour. She was looking at a stolen piece of lace that was worth a small fortune. She supposed she could pull out her phone and try to investigate just how much it might be worth, but it would be just her luck that Scotland Yard would be watching all textile sites and figure out who she was and where she was. She had the feeling it would all end with her in jail.

She held her phone in her trembling hands and rehearsed in her head the most coherent way possible to explain what was going on. She closed her eyes briefly, then dialed her brother. At present, she didn’t care what he thought of her. She was in trouble and he was her only hope.

“What do you want?” was the brisk answer to the second ring.

“Gavin, it’s Samantha—”

“Obviously. I can’t talk now.”

“But—”

“I’m in the middle of a deal,” Gavin said with exaggerated patience, “which means I can’t talk now. Call me tomorrow.”

“But I’m in trouble now!”

He swore. “How many days did you make it, Sam? Two? Three? That’s really pathetic—”

“I’m being followed by thugs,” she said quickly. “I’m in London and I need help.”

“Look,” he said in a low, tight voice, “I’ve got a lot of money riding on this thing and no time to indulge your stupid fantasies.”

“Please,” Samantha whispered. “Please, Gavin, I really need you—”

“I’m not your damned babysitter.”

“I don’t need a babysitter, I need a big brother.”

Well, if there was one thing that could be said for Gavin Drummond, it was that he was slightly susceptible to guilt. She could only hope she’d caught him on one of his more susceptible days.

“Unbelievable.” More swearing ensued. “All right, damn it. Can you find the gallery?”

“Yes,” she said, hoping that was the case. She had the address, because in her own way she was just as compulsive a list maker as her mother. “I can find it.”

“Then come now, if you can lose your thugs for however long it takes you to get here. Melinda can show you the back room. Stay there or when I’m finished, I won’t help you.”

“Thank you,” she managed, feeling terribly grateful.

He made a sound of disgust, then hung up on her.

It was good enough. She could get herself to his place, then get him to help her. He would see how dire her circumstances were and maybe even feel slightly responsible for getting her into the situation in the first place.

Though how in the world he would have known what the Cookes were up to, she couldn’t have said.

She folded the lace back up, flinching a little at touching it with her bare hands—old habits died hard—and then put everything back as close to its original wrapping as possible. The only thing she could say for the Cookes was at least Lydia had had the good sense to put the whole thing in a heavy-duty, archival-quality plastic zippered bag. She put it into her bag, then stood up. She didn’t want to look out the window, but she supposed she might as well. She pulled the curtain back and looked around.

There was a bald man standing under a streetlight, looking up at her.

She jumped back, her heart beating in her throat. She took a deep breath, but that didn’t help matters any.

It could have been anyone, of course. But speculation about just who he might be was enough to leave her feeling very faint. It could be a cop, which meant that she would get caught with a stolen piece of lace and tossed in jail. It could be a thug, which meant she would be caught with a stolen piece of lace and perhaps thrown into the Thames. There was nothing between those two alternatives that was in the slightest bit comforting. What she needed was a respectable gallery owner with a sterling reputation to get her out of the pickle she hadn’t purposely put herself in. She couldn’t do anything else.

She stepped out of her hotel and tried to ignore the sight of two men loitering across the street. She looked to her left as if she’d simply been looking for a taxi and thought she saw someone else she recognized, though in her current straits, she really wasn’t sure of anything.

She checked her map because it seemed like something a normal tourist would do. Her brother’s gallery was down by the new incarnation of the Globe, which wasn’t all that far away. She thought about the Tube, but she supposed it might be safer to stay on the street where there were people.

She walked quickly, but hopefully without giving any indication of her distress.

Or at least she did until she realized, fifteen minutes later, that what was standing between her and the Globe was a blasted street fair. It was as if Renaissance England had been reconstituted right there in front of her. She supposed it was great for the tourists, but it wasn’t doing anything for her.

She looked over her shoulder on the pretext of seeing where she was and saw that instead of that stranger from across the street, the man who was following hard on her heels was the identity-changing man from the train. And he had given up any pretense of not watching her. She gasped, then turned back forward and ran into the crowd.

That was perhaps what saved her. She found a seller of costumes and threw money at the woman in return for an Elizabethan servant’s dress that she pulled down over her head and an apron that she had help tying around her. The latter handily covered her messenger bag, which contained something she most definitely shouldn’t have had in her possession.

“In a hurry, are you?” the woman asked pleasantly. “Are you one of the players?”

“Sure,” Samantha managed. “And I’m lost.”

“Just up the way, on the right before the theater,” the woman said with a smile. “Break a leg.”

Which was preferable to breaking her neck, or having her neck broken for her. She rushed through the rest of the stalls. Her vow to leave the 1600s behind wasn’t panning out very well at present, but that could be fixed, she was sure. She looked over her shoulder and found that she was still being followed by the tall, heaven-only-knew-what-color-eyed guy who had been stalking her for three days now.

Maybe he knew about the lace and thought she had it.

She started to run. That went fairly well until she ran into a group of young men who had obviously hit the mead several times already that day. They were happy to accept her into their little circle, though she wasn’t particularly eager to remain there. She ducked under arms and went sprawling onto a grassy spot right next to them. She pushed herself up, then saw she was in the middle of a circle of mushrooms. She crawled to her feet, brushed her hands off, then looked down and realized the mushrooms were still there, but different. Unless she had gotten completely turned around, the side that had been open was now closed. As if it hadn’t bloomed yet.

And that was very, very weird.

She looked behind her, then realized that the guys she had recently become quick friends with were gone as well. Maybe she’d been longer at the task of brushing off her hands than she thought. She stepped out of the mushroom circle, because, frankly, it gave her the creeps. She looked at the vendors and frowned. There were tents enough there, to be sure, but it was as if someone had dumped a very large bucket of authentic over everything. She wondered briefly if maybe she had bumped her head, but there was no bump there that she could feel.

She looked over her shoulder and there was the Globe, though it was looking slightly more rustic than what she had seen five minutes ago.

She looked around for her pursuer. She supposed that was the only bright spot in the gloom, because he was nowhere to be found.

Then again, neither were sidewalks or nice, tarmac-covered streets.

She pulled her phone out of her bag and frowned. She had power, but no signal. She looked over her shoulder at that ring of mushrooms in the grass, then at the air shimmering there in the middle of that ring.

That was odd, wasn’t it?

She sniffed. London in the summer was pretty fragrant, but somehow that had just been kicked up a notch. Well, several notches, really. She thought she might lose what lunch she had managed to gag down.

She looked up, then realized there was not a single tall building within her line of vision. Not only that, the buildings that she could see were something out of a vintage period movie. And the language was, well, it was rather more authentic than she would have expected for modern-day London.

She wondered if maybe she had actually suffered a bonk on the head that had landed her in some sort of self-inflicted hallucination where everyone was living out their lives in her least favorite time period. Well, perhaps that wasn’t completely accurate. She didn’t really dislike Elizabethan England. She just didn’t want to be responsible for curating its treasures—or those of any other vintage, as it happened—any longer.

She frowned. How was it possible that everyone around her could be sharing in her delusion?

And why were those men over there looking at her as if she had just walked out of a fairy tale—and not one they had been happy to listen to?

She decided that there were two things she needed to do: first, blend into the crowd; and second, get rid of what people were following her for.

And the sooner she saw to both, the happier she would be.