There was so much blood. He felt it streaming off his torso like a damned waterfall onto the table, but he couldn’t open his eyes to survey the damage. He hadn’t the strength. He had been held in a cell without food and with very little water for days. How could they possibly expect him to rattle off the twenty-two names if he hadn’t the strength to speak?
Of course, he would cut out his own tongue before he gave them a single syllable.
“Greydon!”
The Earl of Grenville’s voice echoed in his head, but Grenville was still in Calais, heading up the other team there. Grey must be dying or already dead.
“Too fast,” he mumbled. “Should hurt more. Don’t deserve—”
“Greydon, goddammit, pull yourself together. It’s merely a flesh wound!”
It was just like Grenville to understate the circumstances. Control panic, he always said, control the situation.
Grey laughed feebly, but it cost him. The pain was monstrous. His fractured bones vied for precedence over the nasty geyser of blood across his chest. Then he was sinking again into the black depths of unconsciousness where the pain ebbed, where the duty and disappointments of this life slipped away to nothingness. There were no more shadows to chase, innocents to protect, or king and country to defend. He had been waiting some time for this kind of black abyss to swallow him up.
Now he let it, gladly.
One
London 1819
Arctic winds cut through London, exacerbating an already harsh winter and causing the snows of February to linger into March. The cobblestones were transformed into a generous layer of muddy slush as horses and carriages passed through the streets with their usual ferocity. The gray sky, thick fog, and slush, which splattered over anything and everything daring to venture out of doors, quickly turned the beautiful capital into a dirty heap of depression.
Kathryn understood exactly why so many decided to quit such a condensed package of cold, miserable filth for the solitude of the country or warmth of Italy.
They were sane.
The unlucky few who were forced to stay or too dense to leave would not part with the warmth of their own parlors without promise of diversion in a well-lit, fashionable, and quite clean venue. Kathryn might have been born with enough brains to avoid London’s winters, but she had never had the best of luck, which was why she, along with a couple hundred of her peers, had crammed into Covent Garden to attend an opera they had all been to before.
Kathryn sat patiently in her seat well into the second aria as the latecomers straggled in to take their seats. However, now that everyone was nicely settled and properly pretending to enjoy the production below, Kathryn was slipping out. Thankfully, Lord Huntly and her mother, Lady Grenville, were seated in front of her, so they shouldn’t see her leave. As for the gentleman sitting next to her, well, he ought to wake up in about half an hour.
Kathryn had business to tend to that she had been painstakingly piecing together for weeks, important business for the Home Office. The Home Office might not exactly be aware she was taking care of it for them, but it was something they would be grateful to have done once it was off their plate. Surely.
She was bored with the little tasks the Home Office had been handing her, so she had taken the file from the Director of Covert Affairs’ desk when she had brought him the fruitcakes. Father’s old military crony, he might be; organized, he was not. He hadn’t even noticed it missing. Now she finally had an adventure amidst the humdrum of the London season.
And here she thought this would be just another year of enduring pitying glances and barely veiled insults toward being six and twenty and unwed. As if that were all a female could want in life. A man who could tempt Kathryn to a life of boring matronly duties did not exist, not after the horrors her aunt had faced under a husband’s booted heel.
As she had expected, the crème-paneled hall was empty. She picked up her skirts so she would not trip over them as she hurried through the halls and down the stairs toward the foyer. Thoughts swirled in her head of shadowed figures in capes and hoods, exchanging envelopes in dark alleys and whispering. Surely, it was not truly that exciting, but her heart began racing all the same, and she had to suppress a girlish giggle when her eyes fixed on the large doors opening out into the street.
“Lady Kathryn?”
The masculine voice calling after her had her nearly toppling over her own feet. Then a quick look over her shoulder left her momentarily speechless.
What in heaven’s name did he want? The notorious Marquess of Ainsley had said barely ten words to her in all the years she had been in London, for which she was eternally thankful. What could he possibly want with her now?
Why now?
A quick scan of the ornate and overly large foyer confirmed they were the only two occupying it. It was most definitely her he was calling after. Could he have made a mistake? Perhaps he had forgotten how respectable ladies did not speak to rakes at the opera, certainly not alone.
Kathryn let down her skirts and began a sedate pace toward the door. Only twenty feet or so to the street, it took all her willpower not to run.