streets. Clouds hid the sun, but the day was dry enough. A footman arrived with Henrietta straining on a leash. Tristan fixed the hound with a warning glance, then took the leash.
Leonora led the way out. “The park is only a few streets away.”
“I trust,” Tristan said, following her down the garden path, “that you’ve been exercising with your dog?”
She shot him a glance. “If by that you mean to ask have I been strolling the streets without her, no. But it’s definitely restricting. The sooner we lay Mountford by the heels, the better.”
Bustling forward, she swung open the gate, held it while he and Henrietta passed through, then swung it shut.
He caught her hand, trapped her gaze as he wound her arm in his. “So cut line.” Holding her beside him, he let Henrietta tow them in the direction of the park. “What have you learned?”
She drew breath, settled her arm in his, looked ahead. “I’d had great hopes of A. J. Carruthers—Cedric had communicated most frequently with Carruthers in the last few years. However, I didn’t receive any reply from Yorkshire, where Carruthers lived, until yesterday.
“Three independent replies, all believing Carruthers would know more?”
Leonora nodded. “Precisely. Unfortunately, however, A. J. Carruthers is dead.”
“Dead?” Tristan halted on the pavement and met her gaze. The green expanse of the park lay across the street. “Dead how?”
She didn’t misunderstand, but grimaced. “I don’t know—all I do know is that he’s dead.”
Henrietta tugged; Tristan checked, then led both females across the street. Henrietta’s huge and shaggy form, her gaping jaws filled with sharp teeth, gave him a perfect excuse to avoid the fashionable area thronging with matrons and their daughters; he turned the questing hound toward the more leafy and overgrown region beyond the western end of Rotten Row.
That area was all but deserted.
Leonora didn’t wait for his next question. “The letter I received yesterday was from the solicitor in Harrogate who acted for Carruthers and oversaw his estate. He informed me of Carruthers’s demise, but said he couldn’t otherwise help with my query. He suggested that Carruthers’s nephew, who inherited all Carruthers’s journals and so on, might be able to shed some light on the matter—the solicitor was aware that Carruthers and Cedric had corresponded a great deal in the months prior to Cedric’s death.”
“Did this solicitor mention exactly when Carruthers died?”
“Not exactly. All he said was that Carruthers died some months after Cedric, but that he’d been ill for some time before.” Leonora paused, then added, “There’s no mention in the letters Carruthers sent to Cedric of any illness, but they might not have been that close.”
“Indeed. This nephew—do we have his name and direction?”
“No.” Her grimace was frustration incarnate. “The solicitor advised that he’d forwarded my letter to the nephew in York, but that was all he said.”
“Hmm.” Looking down, Tristan walked on, assessing, extrapolating.
Leonora glanced at him. “It’s the most interesting piece of information we’ve found yet—the most likely, indeed, the
He looked up, met her eyes, nodded. “I’ll get someone on it tomorrow.”
She frowned. “Where? In Harrogate?”
“And York. Once we have the name and direction, there’s no reason to wait to pay this nephew a visit.”
His only regret was that he couldn’t do so personally. Traveling to Yorkshire would mean leaving Leonora beyond his reach; he could surround her with guards, yet no amount of organized protection would be sufficient to reassure him of her safety, not until Mountford, whoever he was, was caught.
They’d been strolling, neither slowly nor briskly, towed along in Henrietta’s wake. He realized Leonora was studying him, a rather odd look on her face.
“What?”
She pressed her lips together, her eyes on his, then she shook her head, looked away. “You.”
He waited, then prompted, “What about me?”
“You knew enough to realize someone had taken an impression of a key. You waited for a burglar and closed with him without turning a hair. You can pick locks. Assessing premises for their ability to withstand intruders is something you’ve done before. You got access to special records from the Registry, records others wouldn’t even know existed. With a wave of your hand”—she demonstrated—“you can have men watching my street. You dress like a navvy and frequent the docks, then change into an earl—one who somehow always knows where I’ll be, one with exemplary knowledge of our hostesses’ houses.
“And now, just like that, you’ll arrange for people to go hunting for information in Harrogate and York.” She pinned him with an intent but intrigued look. “You’re the oddest ex-soldier-cum-earl I’ve ever met.”
He held her gaze for a long moment, then murmured, “I wasn’t your average soldier.”
She nodded, looking ahead once more. “So I gathered. You were a major in the Guards—a soldier of Devil Cynster’s type—”
“No.” He waited until she met his gaze. “I—”
He broke off. The moment had come sooner than he’d anticipated. A rush of thoughts jostled through his mind, the most prominent being how a woman who’d been jilted by one soldier would feel about being lied to by another. Perhaps not quite lied to, but would she see the difference? His instincts were all for keeping her in the dark, for keeping his dangerous past and his equally dangerous propensities from her. For keeping her in sublime ignorance of that side of his life, and all it said of his character.
Her eyes on his face, she continued slowly strolling, head tilting as she studied him. And waited.
He drew breath, softly said, “I wasn’t like Devil Cynster, either.”
Leonora looked into his eyes; what she saw there she couldn’t interpret. “What sort of soldier were you, then?”
The answer, she knew, held a vital key to understanding who the man beside her truly was.
His lips twisted wryly. “If you could get access to my record, it would say I joined the army at twenty and rose to the rank of major in the Guards. It would give you a regiment, but if you checked with soldiers in that regiment, you’d discover few knew me, that I hadn’t been sighted since shortly after I first joined.”
“So what sort of regiment were you in? Not the cavalry.”
“No. Not the infantry, either, nor the artillery.”
“You said you’d been at Waterloo.”
“I was.” He held her gaze. “I was on the battlefield, but not with our troops.” He watched her eyes widen, then quietly added, “I was behind enemy lines.”
She blinked, then stared at him, thoroughly intrigued. “You were a
He grimaced lightly, looked ahead. “An agent working in an unofficial capacity for His Majesty’s government.”
A host of impressions swamped her—observations that suddenly made sense, other things that were no longer so mysterious—yet she was far more interested in what the revelation meant, what it said of him. “It must have been terribly lonely, as well as being horrendously dangerous.”
Tristan glanced at her; that wasn’t what he’d expected her to say, to think of. His mind ranged back, over the years…he nodded. “Often.”
He waited for more, for all the predictable questions. None came. They’d slowed; impatient, Henrietta woofed and tugged. He and Leonora exchanged a glance, then she smiled, tightened her hold on his arm and they stepped out more briskly, circling back toward the streets of Belgravia.
She had a pensive expression on her face, faraway and distant, yet not troubled, not irritated, not concerned. When she felt his gaze, she glanced at him, met his eyes, then smiled and looked ahead.
They crossed the thoroughfare and paced down the street, then turned into Montrose Place. Reaching her
