tell you that it will not rain, Sophie, and a bit of wind and drizzle does wonders for any young girl’s countenance. Keep up, Margaret, and you, too, Lainie. Florencia, hold your mother’s hand as she has asked you to or I will instruct Molly to take you home immediately.’
Florencia conceded, even as Eleanor promised herself that this would indeed be the last walk she took with Martin’s very bossy younger sister.
Already the first spits of rain worried her gown and she drew her daughter in closer.
‘Up ahead there are some trees. We will shelter there until Harold returns with the coach.’ Even Diana had her limits of enduring a storm.
A line of oaks looked very isolated and forlorn in the wet. Still, she could do nothing except follow the group as they dashed towards them.
It was then that she saw them. Two men walking at an angle, cutting across the grass and looking straight at her. The tallest of them seemed vaguely familiar, though she could not for the life of her think how she could know him.
Grabbing Florencia’s hand, she pulled her towards her family, shouting out for Diana to stop, but already the strangers were on her, the first one leaning down and calmly picking up her daughter. Florencia screamed even as Eleanor did not allow her fingers to break contact.
‘I would advise you to let the girl go, madame. Any histrionics will make it difficult for both of you.’
In French!
The carousel of her mind spun backwards and stopped. This was the man who had burnt her thigh at the Château Giraudon with the red-hot tip of his smouldering cheroot. Shaking his words away, she reached for Florencia, fear making her movements heavy and slow.
‘Let go of her, right now.’ She could barely recognise the sound of her own voice.
But he did not listen, turning his back and taking the path away from the others. Hurrying to follow, she saw Diana behind them, shouting and gesturing. Too far away. Another man she had not seen suddenly reached out, his arm about her waist, lifting her off her feet as he jammed a heavy sack over her head. A sick plunge of nausea made her stomach lurch and she stumbled, the movement taking all breath from her body and making her see points of dancing black.
‘Florencia.’ The word hurt to say, but she tried again. A short curse in French stopped her as a hard object connected with her head. Then there was only darkness.
Cristo crouched against one of the piles under the warehouse, quiet against the river water. The sun slanted against the glass of a dirty window above him, smears of age and grease and dust. The only sunbeam for miles, he thought, his eyes scanning the alleyway winding up around the corner, the dark press of buildings sending shadowed danger into everything.
He was here because Etienne Beraud was in London. The Foreign Office had told him when Cristo had contacted them about the blackmail notes Eleanor had received, but he had disappeared, a known French spy who could only be up to no good.
Today, however, Cristo had intercepted a note with the name of his old rival upon it and written in a code that had been easily broken, a note that told of a safe house they were using by the docks.
Swearing softly, he rubbed at his left eye, aching from a punch he had failed to escape the evening before last when the piece of information had fallen into his hands.
Paris seemed to reach out and consume him again, the subterfuge of ten lonely years lying heavily across the last weeks in England when his body had begun to uncoil into something approaching a normal life. With a hat pulled down over his eyes he was the man he had once been, the knife strapped to his ankle sharp and honed and another one hidden beneath the folds of his shirt equally as keen. He made his breathing slower by sheer dint of will, a trick he had learned from endless nights of marking time.
Finally, just as the sun had gone and the moon had taken its place, there was movement and the sound of footsteps on the wooden decking.
Hoisting himself up, Cristo stayed under the shelter of shadow, a silent shape stalking his quarry without sound. When he was close enough he pulled the knife from his belt, the silver tang of it heavy in his hand as he pressed it against the throat of the one he had caught.
‘Pas un mot, vous comprendez?’
Not a word, you understand?
As the man realized the danger, his fingers reached for his pocket. Cristo pressed his blade in harder and they instantly stilled.
‘De Caviglione.’
‘Dupont.’
Manners in the heart of death-dealing.
‘Where is Beraud?’
‘I do not know.’
The blade nicked through the cloth, drawing blood.
‘Wrong answer. Where is he?’
True fear beaded Dupont’s upper lip and the bottom one began to quiver.
‘In the building with the tower next to this one! He has your lady.’
‘He …? What …?’ Anger made the words lethal and fear chilled Cristo to the bone. ‘They have Eleanor? Why?’
The time to tread carefully was long gone and Dupont, reading his fury, began to sob. ‘I did not know he planned to do this. The child is only young …’
A child as well? Florencia.
Lifting the heavy hilt of his knife, he brought it down hard across Dupont’s temple and left him face down on the dirtied cobblestones.
Beraud’s lair was exactly where Dupont had said it would be and Cristo came in through the back door, dispensing with the locks in less than a minute.
Two men outside the room on the second floor were on guard. He met them in French with his beret pulled down low.
‘Beraud wants you downstairs now …’
By the time he had finished speaking they had seen his eyes and by then it was far too late. They fell quietly for large men and he dragged both into an empty room at one end of the corridor, binding their mouths, feet and hands with strips of leather he had brought with him for the purpose.
A chink of light showed beneath a door at the end of the passage way and even as he listened he heard the quiet crying of a child.
Eleanor came back to consciousness in a room that smelt of fish. Florencia was tucked in beside her, sobbing quietly. When Eleanor brought her finger to her mouth to ask for silence, she could hear the sea lapping at the floorboards.
A warehouse on the dock. She was sure that was where they had been taken and the next thought made her temples throb. If they were transported by boat out of London, anything might happen to them. Fear dried her mouth.
Lifting
