My Rogue to Ruin, page 19
“The ring Snowley wears about his neck?” Adrian asked with misgiving.
Jacob nodded. “His signature alone isn’t enough. We need the exact ring and the special wax, so that even Snowley himself wouldn’t be able to prove a forgery has taken place.”
“Then we get the ring.” Adrian turned to Marjorie. “Have you got a plan?”
“This stronghold is crawling with guards.” She pondered the options. “The fewer people are involved, the better the chance of success. You and I must do it ourselves.”
Elizabeth bristled and sat upright, clearly on the precipice of rejecting this solution.
Jacob jumped in. “If she says she can, then she can.” He turned to Marjorie. “You know how to contact us if anything goes wrong.”
Marjorie nodded, then looked at Adrian. “Are you in?”
“More than in. I’m your apprentice from this moment forward. Tell me what you need, and consider it done.”
She smiled at him. “That is noble of you.”
He gave a lopsided smile back. “Slander! You’ll ruin my reputation.”
She reached over and ruffled his hair. “Whatever will the gossips say?”
Elizabeth and Jacob exchanged glances.
“Shite!” Adrian scrambled to his feet, startling the sheep. “What time is it?”
Jacob pulled out a pocket watch and showed him the hour.
“We have to go.” Adrian held his hand out to Marjorie. “We need to be back in the workroom in the next two minutes or the men guarding the corridor will barge in with questions.”
Marjorie scrambled off the bed and over to the door.
“I’ll see you as soon as I can,” she said to her siblings.
All three Wynchesters touched their fingers to their chests and lifted their palms toward the sky. It looked like a secret sign of some sort. Perhaps symbolizing love or unity.
“We must hurry,” Adrian told Marjorie, eaten up with jealousy at her easy, loving relationship with her family.
She nodded and slipped out into the corridor.
Before Adrian could follow Marjorie, Elizabeth’s sword rose in front of him, nearly slicing the buttons off the fall of his trousers.
“Er,” he stammered.
“Hurt her and I’ll kill you,” she whispered into his ear, then shoved him into the corridor.
The door swung shut behind him.
27
I’m sorry you’re stuck in this hell because of me,” Adrian told Marjorie as they filled their chalk molds with cheap tin and pewter.
“I was an eager and willing part of the activities that led to my confinement,” she replied. “And I’m not stuck. My siblings could smuggle me out.”
“Once,” he reminded her. “If you leave for any reason, Snowley won’t allow you back. If you did manage to sneak out, he’d redouble security to the point where a gnat couldn’t enter without his knowledge, much less a Wynchester. You’d never abandon a client or a mission. Which means… stuck. And I’m sorry.”
“I suppose that’s all true. For the record, I’m sorry you’re stuck here, too. That wasn’t the case at first, when I thought you were complicit in Snowley’s schemes—”
“I was complicit at first. There didn’t seem to be any harm in duplicating artifacts rather than smuggling them.” He rubbed his face. “I compounded his avarice with my own.”
“But that’s not why you’re here now. You’re trying to save your sister from ruin. That’s a selfless and noble aim.”
“Possibly the first selfless and noble thing I’ve done all decade.”
“When I first met you, I might have believed that. But I no longer do.” She poked his chest. “Despite your best efforts, my lord, you have given yourself away. I’d wager your dissolute, checkered past is altogether riddled with selfless and noble acts.”
“A mortifying hypothesis.” He shuddered. “You must not mention it to anyone.”
“You should mention it to Lady Iris.”
“To manipulate her into forgiving me?”
“To show her a complete picture of who you are. You’re a whole person, not a caricature. Reintroduce her to the brother she longed for all those years.”
“The first step is seeing my sister again.” His heart ached from missing her. “I was willing to wait a month or two, but I can’t devote my life to serving Snowley.”
His initial thought to replace the stolen artifacts with forgeries no longer had merit. There was no need to create duplicates when Snowley believed the originals had gone into the pot, rather than a secret pocket of Marjorie’s skirts. As long as she and her siblings kept trading contraband for scraps of inferior metal, no more treasures would be destroyed.
But they also weren’t solving the problem. New victims were being swindled every day, leaving their valuables behind and going home with counterfeit coins. He and Marjorie were treading water. They needed to stop the rising tide.
“When does your client lose her house?”
“She won’t lose her home,” Marjorie said firmly. Only after Adrian nodded in understanding did she add under her breath, “Two weeks from today.”
He tightened his jaw. “We need a plan.”
“I have a plan.”
“And it’s a good thought. Steal Snowley’s ring. Steal his sealing wax. I am on board. But how? Snowley may not have guards watching him every second, but he’ll certainly bar any doors when he’s alone. I can copy a key, but I cannot pick a lock. And unless you know how to render a man unconscious—” Adrian closed his mouth and cocked his head to one side in concentration.
“What is it?” Marjorie signed.
“Footsteps,” he fingerspelled back.
When the door swung open seconds later, Adrian was studiously stirring the contents of the crucible above the fire.
Marjorie, on the other hand, bounded up to Grinders like an overexcited puppy.
“There you are,” she admonished him. “I rang an hour ago.”
He stared at her, the hatpin in his mouth working. “There’s no bell pull in the workroom.”
“I thought about you very hard, and now you’re here!” She wrapped her arms about him for some unfathomable reason, hugging him as though he were her favorite doll and not one of Snowley’s armed guards.
Grinders peeled Marjorie off him with effort. “What do you want?”
“A sandwich,” she answered brightly. “One for Lord Adrian, too, please.”
“No sandwiches.” Grinders flicked his gaze over her shoulder toward Adrian. “Boss says work faster.”
Adrian set down the wooden spoon and folded his arms over his leather apron. “I can’t work at all with you in the same room. I can feel you breathing.”
“I wish you weren’t,” Grinders muttered as he shut the door behind him.
Adrian held up a finger until the guard’s footsteps faded.
“What did he say at the end?” Marjorie asked. “I didn’t catch it.”
“That he wishes I weren’t breathing.” Adrian rubbed his face. “Who cares what Grinders wants. What the devil were you about?”
“Working.” She returned to the chalk molds. “No plan without a contingency.”
He hurried after her. “We can’t make contingencies until we’ve finalized the first plan. We—”
Before he could continue, she reached into a hidden pocket of her skirts and pulled out… Grinders’s key ring.
“That’s why you were hugging him,” Adrian whispered.
She grinned at him. “My sister Chloe can nick anything from anyone without them noticing her presence. I haven’t mastered invisibility, but misdirection is a good trick.”
She slid the keys onto the worktable. One of Grinders’s hatpins was stuck between the ring and the keys. She tucked the pin out of the way in her pocket.
“Now then. Shall we set a record for how fast we can duplicate a set of keys?”
This time, there was no need for artistry. The new keys didn’t need to be visibly identical to the old ones. They needed to open doors.
They worked together, dividing the keys between them and making quick work of the duplicates. Marjorie clearly had much more experience and was twice as swift as Adrian. In no time at all, they had the new keys hidden behind a loose brick in the fireplace.
“What do we do with Grinders’s keys?” Adrian asked. “If we’re caught with them before we have a chance to act…”
“We do nothing.” Marjorie piled a handful of rags next to the door and placed the keys on top. “He’ll think he didn’t hear them fall because they landed on dirty linen.”
Adrian was less convinced. “That’s awfully convenient. These men are dangerous, Marjorie. We don’t have swords or pistols. This is when we need the contingencies. If you ever have to throw me to the wolves to save yourself, I want you to do it.”
She fluttered her eyelashes at him. “Don’t worry, I will.”
“I’m serious. If Snowley ever—”
“Footsteps.” He made the sign to Marjorie.
She sprinted to the worktable and picked up a chalk mold right as Grinders swung open the door.
“I disagree,” she said loudly. “My molds are still superior to yours. Your coins may be technically perfect, but my chalk texture and chromatic essence when combined with sulfuric heat density—”
Sulfuric heat density? Marjorie was babbling random words that made no sense. Not that Grinders understood the transitive properties of metal.
Although Adrian’s and Marjorie’s backs were to the door, Adrian was able to tilt his eyes from the worktable just in time to glimpse Grinders catching sight of the keys next to the door. His hulking muscles relaxed visibly. As Grinders bent over the rags to snatch up his keys, he darted a furtive glance toward the worktable.
Adrian pretended to be wholly consumed by the argument over whose molds were superior, and tossed out a few nonsense phrases of his own to refute Marjorie’s claims.
Too relieved by his charges’ apparent obliviousness to the fallen keys to ask questions, Grinders slipped back into the corridor without announcing his presence. He closed the door softly behind him.
As soon as the corridor was silent, Adrian pulled Marjorie into his arms and kissed her.
“I can’t believe you think this is the best plan,” Adrian mouthed several hours later as they put away their chalk molds. “Instead of stealing the ring whilst Snowley is asleep, we’ll rob him whilst he’s naked in the bath?”
“He won’t know it happened,” Marjorie said. “You have the satchel?”
“I have the satchel.”
The small canvas bag strapped beneath Adrian’s waistcoat contained the tools he would need to cast a mold of Snowley’s ring. As for the scented wax, they only needed to slice off enough for a single seal.
Presuming they could reach the chamber where Snowley took his evening plunge baths undetected.
“You’re certain you know when he bathes?” Adrian asked.
“Graham memorized the schedule. As of five minutes ago, Snowley entered a large private bathing chamber that shares a wall with the kitchens. In the absence of a natural hot spring, one must use the heat from one’s fires to warm the water.”
“How dreadful for him,” Adrian said. “Plunging into a pristine pool like a king… next to the scullery, like a servant. How he must suffer.”
“The private dressing room is adjacent to the pool. That’s where his clothes and personal items will be. No one disturbs Snowley’s bath, so we won’t be bothered—or detected. We also can’t linger too long, in the event our absence from our rooms is noted, and a guard raises the alarms.”
“About that,” Adrian said. “How do we sneak out of this workroom with two armed sentinels on either side of the corridor?”
“We wait for the sign.” She pressed her right ear to the door, then stepped aside and motioned for him to listen instead. “Do you hear anything?”
“No. It’s silent as a tomb. There’s not even—” Adrian jerked his ear from the door in surprise. “Two pairs of footsteps just ran past. Joey and Grinders must have left in a hurry.”
Marjorie grinned. “Then our distraction is under way. Strangers have come to call on every door. All hands will be downstairs to guard the entrances and stairways. Which means it’s time.”
And she opened the door.
28
Marjorie crept up to Snowley’s dressing room door with a hedgehog in her bodice. Adrian followed close behind.
Her heart pounded in her ears. Each beat landed with a shocking new splash, like a piece of onyx tossed into a puddle of rainbow-hued paints. Being the Wynchester leading the charge was heady. Exciting, exhilarating, terrifying.
She placed her trembling fingers on the door handle. Locked. Adrian was right behind her. This was it. The final threshold. On the other side of this door was the dressing chamber. On the other side of that, was Snowley.
Hopefully. If all went to plan.
With trembling fingers, she pulled the duplicate keys from her pocket and tried each one until she found the key that fit. Carefully, she turned the key to unlock the door and swiftly returned the duplicate keys to her pocket.
There was no time to dawdle. All the guards should be arriving back at their posts within seconds. It was now or never.
She twisted the handle and eased open the door.
Darkness.
Adrian’s breath tickled the ear that could hear. “What in the—”
She clapped a hand over his mouth and yanked him into the room with the other. She pulled the door shut behind them.
Blackness surrounded them.
Her heart thudded ominously. Marjorie could not see anything. Just pure, disorienting darkness.
Nor could she and Adrian speak. Not with Snowley on the other side of the dressing room door. She and Adrian must continue in silence.
The thought of not being able to communicate at all filled Marjorie with panic. Her hearing might not be acute, but her sight was second to none. It was the sense she relied upon for everything. Understanding her environment, parsing spoken words, gesturing with signs. Her near-perfect visual recall was her greatest gift. Without her eyes, she was lost.
Fingers unsteady, she slipped a hand into a hidden pocket. Inside was the nub of a candle, and a tinderbox for lighting it. But she could not risk the sound of steel and flint without knowing for certain Snowley was too far away or too busy to overhear.
She removed her fingers from her pocket, leaving the tinderbox and candle where they were. She reached for Adrian’s hands instead, and placed them on her hips, with her backside nestled against his thighs. She pressed hard, indicating he should keep his fingers where she held them, so that they did not knock into each other or otherwise create unintended havoc.
He lowered his head until the side of his cheek touched hers, and nodded his understanding. The slight stubble at his jaw scratched against her soft skin and sent luxurious shivers down her spine, each whisker all the more noticeable in the darkness. She did her best to ignore the decadent sensation.
Slowly, she raised her hands, feeling about the dressing room one methodical inch at a time until her fingers brushed the wooden edge of a sideboard or a large dressing table.
Her hands made careful progress along the surface, lest she knock over a bottle of perfume or other object. Her fingers brushed lawn fabric. She froze. If this was Snowley’s clothing, then she was close.
Here! Her fingertips padded against the unmistakable line of a long, thin chain. This was it!
She lifted the necklace and hefted the ring, then quickly undid the clasp. The ring tumbled into her palm. Marjorie replaced the chain on the table for safekeeping. She took one of Adrian’s hands from her hip, then placed the ring in his palm and closed his fingers about it.
He set about making the mold at once.
She pressed urgent hand signs against his abdomen. “Make two molds. Just in case.”
He spelled his response against her arm. “Don’t worry. I’ll create as many as I can.”
She returned her own hands to the table and continued to explore, memorizing the folds of each garment as she went in order to replace them exactly as they were. She just had to find the pocket with the wax. It must be…
Here! She lifted the thick stick of wax to her nose and inhaled deeply. It smelled of fire and brimstone and honeysuckle and red roses. It was unquestionably the right wax.
Quickly, she removed a small knife and set about slicing a thumb’s-width from the bottom of the wax, mirroring the precise angle. Just enough for a few seals. Once the dagger returned to its hidden scabbard and the wax coin was safely nestled in the tinderbox, Marjorie held herself as still as she could and waited for Adrian to finish his part.
Despite the fact that she couldn’t see him, his warmth and scent and color filled the darkened room. She was glad to be together. He might be a light only she could see, but his staunch loyalty and artistic essence only made him glow all the brighter.
Being expected to execute a complicated, delicate maneuver in an unfamiliar, pitch black closet was akin to being asked to perform a miracle. He was not used to missions like these. To taking orders from a woman, to fumbling around for a contingency when plans inevitably went awry.
Yet he did so without complaint, and with impressive speed. After he formed each mold, he handed it to Marjorie to safe-keep while it hardened. Two molds… three… four. A rush of affection and pride rushed through her. He was practically a Wynchester. No plan without a contingency. One of these molds was bound to work.
And if not, Adrian was talented enough to combine the best parts of each in order to sculpt something that did.
At last, he lifted her palm to his cheek. He pressed a kiss to her wrist, then placed the ring back inside her hand.
As much as she longed to throw her arms about his neck and show him what kind of kiss she’d been waiting for, Marjorie wasted no time in returning the ring to its chain and spreading the necklace back out exactly how she’d found it. Then the shirtsleeve on top, and… done.
