She supposed he saw the answer—or maybe just her fear—in her face, because he didn’t wait for her reply but thrust her into the little room and slid the panel closed. Whirling around, she heard a latch click as a thick blackness swallowed her. She choked down a scream.
The air in the cubbyhole was musty and old smelling, like the man and the rest of his house, only nastier. It was so dark she wondered how the blazes he thought she was going to steal something when she couldn’t see anything but a tiny pinprick of light about level with her head. She went to press one eye against the speck of light and realized it was a peephole, contrived to give a good view of the room beyond. She watched as he nestled his pretty piece of glass inside a velvet-lined red leather box. Then he shoved the box in the drawer of a nearby console and yelled, “I’m coming, I’m coming,” as the knocking at the front door sounded again.
Jenny took a deep, shaky breath. She’d heard about some old houses having hidden cupboards like this. Priests’ holes, they called them. They had something to do with Papists and such, although she’d never quite understood what it was all about. She wondered what would happen to her if the old goat never came back to release her. And then she wished she hadn’t wondered that, because it made the walls seem to press in on her, and the blackness became so thick and heavy it felt as if it were stealing her breath and sucking the life out of her. She leaned her forehead against the wooden panel and tried to breathe in sucking little pants. She told herself that if Papists used to hide their priests in these cubbyholes, then they must have contrived a way for the panel to be opened from the inside. She began feeling around for the catch, then froze when she realized the voices from the front hall were coming closer.
Pressing her eye to the peephole again, she watched as the nasty old codger backed into the room. He had his hands raised queerly, sort of up and out to the side, like a body trying to ward off a ghost or something. Then she saw the pistol in the hands of the old man’s visitor, and she understood.
The old cove was talking fast now. Jenny held herself very still, although her heart thumped in her chest and her breath came so hard and fast it was a wonder they couldn’t hear it.
Then she heard a new pounding on the front door and someone shouting. The visitor holding the gun jerked around, distracted, and the old goat lunged.
The gun went off, belching flame and pungent smoke. The old man staggered back. Crumpled.
Jenny felt a hot, stinging gush run down her legs and realized she’d just wet herself.
Chapter 2
“B
ut it was supposed to be mine,” wailed George, Prince Regent of Great Britain and Ireland, his plump, feminine face florid with rage as he paced wildly up and down the marble-floored room. “What the devil was Eisler thinking, getting himself murdered like this before he could deliver it to me?”
“Shockingly inconsiderate of the man,” agreed the King’s powerful cousin, Charles, Lord Jarvis, without the slightest betraying hint of amusement in his voice. “Only, do calm yourself, Your Highness; you don’t want to bring on one of your spasms.” He caught the eye of the Prince’s private physician, who was hovering nearby.
The doctor bowed and withdrew.
Jarvis’s immense power did not derive from his kinship with the King, which was distant. It was his peerless blend of stunning intelligence and unswerving dedication to the preservation of the monarchy combined with a cold, unblinking ruthlessness that had made him indispensable first to George III, then to the Prince Regent. For thirty years, Jarvis had maneuvered from the shadows, deftly blunting the inevitable repercussions of a dangerous combination of royal weakness and incompetence complicated by a hereditary tendency toward insanity. If not for Jarvis’s capable stewardship, the English monarchy might well have gone the way of the French, and the Hanovers knew it.
“Any idea who is responsible for this outrage?” demanded the Prince.
“Not yet, my lord.”
They were in the Circular Room of Carlton House, where George had been hosting a musical evening when some fool carelessly dropped the news of the murder of Daniel Eisler within the Prince’s hearing.
They’d had to clear the room quickly.
The Regent continued pacing, his movements surprisingly quick and energetic for a man of his girth. Once, he’d been a handsome prince, beloved by his people and welcomed with cheers wherever he went. But those days were long gone. The Prince of Wales—or Prinny, as he was often called—was now in his fiftieth year, grown fat with self-indulgence and dissipation, and despised by the nation for his spiraling debts, his endless extravagant building projects, and his increasing fondness for expensive jeweled trinkets.