to his home in Oxfordshire, you slipped the items back into his cupboards. Nice attention to detail, by the way. The only thing that confused me for a while was the intruder I encountered in Ross’s room. Then I realized he was probably sent to make certain Ross hadn’t left any written record of what he’d learned from Kincaid.”
Chernishav had given up all pretense of loading the cart. “An interesting theory,” he said. “Except of course it is only that—a theory, with no proof. You’re grasping, Devlin. And why? Madame Champagne is dead. Let it all end with her.”
Sebastian shook his head. “Taking the copy of the French War Minister’s dispatches from Ross’s rooms was a mistake. So was dumping Kincaid’s body in Bethnal Green. It was dark that night, but not that dark. You were seen.”
The Russian’s nostrils flared on a quickly indrawn breath. “This is nothing more than a pitiful attempt to disrupt relations between our two countries by unjustly accusing me of this barbarous crime. Yet even if it were true—which it is not—you forget that I am a member of my country’s diplomatic posting. According the Diplomatic Privileges Act of 1708, your law can’t touch me. I have diplomatic immunity.” He reached for a bulky portmanteau, his fist tightening around the handles as he straightened. “When the
His gaze on the silver-headed walking stick tucked under the Russian’s arm, Sebastian showed his teeth in a smile. “Your third mistake was in trying to distract me by kidnapping Miss Hero Jarvis. No one has immunity from Jarvis ... or me.”
Chernishav swung the leather portmanteau at Sebastian’s head.
Sebastian threw up his arms and caught the heavy blow with a block, staggering as the impact reverberated through his body. He saw the flash of the Russian’s boot heel aimed at his groin and leapt backward, crashing into the pile of bandboxes and trunks. He stumbled and went down.
The Russian tossed the portmanteau at him and turned and fled into the gathering gloom.
“Hell and the devil confound it,” swore Sebastian, bandboxes tumbling around him as he struggled to his feet.
He could hear the clatter of boot heels on cobbles as the Russian darted up the passage that ran along the side of the Adington Buildings. Sebastian pelted after him into a damp, narrow alley that erupted onto a deserted wharf littered with coiled hemp and piles of crates and a cluster of white gulls that rose up, screeching, as Chernishav raced across the weathered planks.
This was a part of Westminster where the stately streets surrounding the Houses of Parliament and the abbey degenerated rapidly into a warren of age-blackened houses. Distilleries and blacksmiths’ forges and scrap ironmongers’ shops opened onto coal yards and a long string of wharfs where barges from the counties upriver unloaded everything from hay to stone and timber. Now, in the rapidly descending darkness, the waterfront stood empty, the barges riding at low tide and battened down against a storm that sent streaks of lightning flickering over the roiling horizon.
With Sebastian some thirty feet behind him, Chernishav sprinted across an open stretch of planking to where the looming high walls of a riverside brewery rose, dark, soot-streaked brick against a rapidly darkening sky. The heavy, pungent smell of fermentation and hops mingled with the scent of tar and the smells coming off the water. Rows of casks turned on their sides and stored in towering stacks three and four high threw dark shadows across the yard. Chernishav ducked between the rows of casks, and a sudden stillness settled over the deserted waterfront.
The Russian had stopped.
Sebastian drew up sharply as thunder pealed slowly across the water. Then his preternatural hearing caught the quiet hiss of a well-oiled blade being pulled from its sheath.
He crept forward, his senses alert to the least flicker of movement, the betraying whisper of an indrawn breath. He had just reached the end of the first row of barrels when he heard the faint scrape of wood against wood. He leapt back and felt a gust of wind as the wall of casks beside him began to move.
They crashed down around him in a rolling, clattering, bouncing cascade of shattering staves and ringing iron. A dog began to bark hysterically, its chain rattling; a watchman shouted in the distance.
Sebastian caught the patter of footsteps running away fast. He clambered over the piles of shifting, broken barrels in time to see the Colonel disappear around the edge of the brewery.
He chased the Russian through a stone wharf, with its towering walls of roughly quarried granite and sandstone, and into the yard of a pottery factory. A flash of lightning lit up the waterfront, limning a long rambling building of rough brick with a low-slung tile roof and towering twin chimneys. Sebastian drew up abruptly at the base of a high, platformlike shelf that stretched along the end of the building and was stacked with massive earthenware pots.
The Colonel had stopped running again.
Sebastian heard a soft thump followed by a faint
Beneath the smooth leather soles of his boots, the old tiles were wet and slippery with moss. He moved cautiously up over the ridge of the roof. He could feel the residual heat from the kilns’ soaring chimneys warm on his back as he hunkered low at the far edge of the slope.
From here he looked down on the wide raised platform that ran along the back of the workshop. At the far edge of the platform, Chernishav waited, motionless, his form all but lost in the shadows cast by the hundreds and hundreds of four-foot lengths of fat drainpipe stored on end beside him. A jagged arc of lightning flashed across the sky, and Sebastian saw the gleam of the stiletto in the Russian’s hand. Around them, the rain poured, filling the air with the scent of wet clay.
Loosening his own dagger in its sheath in his boot, Sebastian dropped to the near edge of the shelf below. The impact shook the nearest row of drainpipes. Sebastian gave them a helpful shove.
They toppled slowly, the first row falling against the next, which in turn collapsed onto the next row until the entire mass of drainpipes tumbled over like dominoes in a rolling crescendo of clattering, shattering earthenware. Chernishav swung around, saw the wall of pipe crashing toward him, and leapt off the platform into the yard below.
Sebastian landed in a crouch a few feet from him, his dagger in his hand. The Russian pirouetted gracefully, his stiletto extended like a foil, his left arm curled in the classic fencing pose.
“So,” said Chernishav, his teeth bared in a smile. “Here we are.”
“You fence, I take it?” said Sebastian.
“Since childhood,” said Chernishav, flexing his wrist. “I hear you were a cavalry officer. Unfortunately, your saber is a little short.”
“So’s your foil,” said Sebastian.
“True.”
The two men circled each other warily. They were equally matched, of much the same height and build, both well trained in the arts of war. But each held a very different type of blade. The Russian’s stiletto was a thrusting weapon with no edge, while Sebastian’s dagger had carefully honed edges but was considerably shorter.
Chernishav struck first, lunging forward like a fencer thrusting with a foil, his stiletto aimed for Sebastian’s heart.
Sebastian sidestepped the thrust, dancing away easily to the right, his boots sliding over the muddy wet cobbles of the pottery yard. Lightning played across the heavy clouds pressing down on the waterfront; the rain pounded.
“The advantage is mine, I think,” said Chernishav. “You don’t have to do this, you know. Why make Miss Jarvis a widow before you have the opportunity to make her your wife?”
“You’d have me simply walk away?”
“Why not?”
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Sebastian said, “I told you why not.”
With a grimace, Chernishav struck again. Again, Sebastian skittered to the right. The repetition was
