Chapter 8
Damien would have burst into laughter at the challenging look in the young gypsy’s eyes if he did not understand the remorseless instincts of the seven men—three former army officers, a farmer, two noblemen, and a journalist with a brilliant mind and a black heart—assembled in the tower chamber. Each man either held a grudge against the Crown or had deluded himself into believing that anarchy and upheaval served some greater good. Personally Damien thought all but three of them to be irrevocably deranged. Damien did not for a moment believe that their grievances justified the killing of innocents in the street.
He pushed open the trapdoor with one arm and waved his other arm over his head in a prearranged signal to indicate that the arsenal aimed at his forehead should not be put to use. “It is Sir Angus,” one of the conspirators muttered, “and high time, too. Where the devil have you been?”
All but one of the various firearms disappeared inside greatcoats and evening jackets. The pen in the journalist’s hand remained poised above the table. Damien climbed into the tower with a sheepish grin, allowing the trapdoor to thud with a clatter that made several men seated around the oaken table cringe at his apparent disregard for secrecy. He could almost hear the women underneath the room cursing at the thunderous noise.
Still, to have exhibited tender manners at this point would have only awakened suspicion. The clatter, he suspected, would give the gypsy woman and her companion a chance to breathe and stretch their muscles.
These men did not even trust their own mothers. As a relative newcomer to their conspiracy, “Sir Angus” must measure his every step.
“My apologies, gentlemen. The damned thing slipped.”
“Where the hell have you been?” demanded the farmer, in his white hat and high-topped boots.
Damien stroked his mustache. His lips itched under the annoying accessory. He wondered if he’d rubbed any of that caustic potion on his mouth without thinking.
“Waylaid by a maid?” guessed the impoverished and clearly inebriated Lord Brewster of Shropshire.
Damien pulled a chair from the table to the corner, where a glimmer of crimson satin peeked out from beneath a moth-eaten blanket. A letter. A gypsy who made reference to Macbeth and wrote letters? His instincts argued again that she was more than she appeared to be.
“Your silence condemns you,” Lord Ardbury said with disdain. “Could you not control yourself when everything we have planned is at stake?”
“There’s more to it than that,” Damien said, his demeanor deliberately unapologetic. “One of us should take measure of our surroundings in the event of discovery.”
The former army major at the table grunted. “It was a sacrifice, I assume, to sleep with a woman on our behalf? I hope you didn’t strain your back too much for all the actual riding you’ll need to do soon.”
“Did I admit that I slept with anyone?”
“Sit down, Sir Angus,” the journalist said, glancing up from the map he had drawn of contingent forces across England where a slew of riots were to occur.
Anarchists.
Damien had intended to return to London to reunite with his family; instead, the moment he set foot on British soil he had been asked by a high-ranking family member in the Home Office to become involved in a countrywide conspiracy.
“I prefer to stand with my eye to the window,” he said. “I remind you that we are purportedly enjoying a country house party. A guest could wander this way at any time.”
Lord Ardbury nodded in reluctant agreement. “Lord Fletcher was to make sure that did not happen. Where is the man, anyway? Did he indicate to you at the party that he might wish to become one of us?”
“He gave me the impression that he has no idea of our true intentions,” Damien said. “And, in my opinion, he is not reliable enough to even consider.”
“What do you mean?”
“From what I learned tonight, he isn’t the one who held a grudge against the government. It was his first wife, and she wanted revenge for her son’s death. He built this tower to ease her grief. I don’t believe he has the spine to help us.”