A one-legged sailor was sitting in the road, scrabbling for his wooden leg and loudly bemoaning the losses from his spilled apple cart in terms that must make even the assembled urchins blush, while an old woman berated him for a drunken and careless old fool. The urchins were wriggling about under the cab for the fallen and bruised apples and tangling up the traces as they darted nimbly out of the way of the jarvey’s whiplash whenever he tried to fend off the sea of bodies suddenly surrounding his battered vehicle.
‘Hurry,’ Eloise urged and he gave her a long, distrustful look before deciding she’d gone to such a deal of trouble to get him out of that cab, he might as well humour her, if only to find out exactly what she was up to.
This time she was dressed in layer upon layer of disreputable clothes like a rag-picker’s daughter, carrying as many of his wares as she could on her own back. It certainly hid her fine figure a lot better than her last disguise, he thought as he followed her into a maze of courts and alleys and had to concentrate hard to recall the way back should he need a hasty escape from her toils. Sensing his resistance, she tugged on his hand impatiently and drew him on as swiftly as she could. He could sense her apprehension through their locked hands as he felt a prickle of awareness shiver over his own skin and knew they were being watched from dark doorways and darker rooms. Unwillingly caught up in her drama, he made himself as silent and wary as he could and hoped he managed to seem the over-eager client to Eloise’s part-time whore, although he wondered how such a client would know what delights lay under her false bulk.
He knew, even under all that ridiculous cover that must be making her sweat like a racehorse under her burden. Just the thought of her long, elegant legs under so many layers of hampering fabric—her dangerous allure threatened to slide under his guard once more and draw him into her net. He sweated himself now as she reached more commercial areas, full of workshops and small factories, and upped their pace as fast as she could without everyone coming out to watch them pass. It wasn’t their speed that made his breath come short, it was the incendiary thought of finding a space where he could be alone with her to finally slake this feral passion for her, once and for all, that had him almost unmanned with longing. Stupid, he railed at himself—undisciplined, ill-starred and just plain stupid. She’d turned him into a lust-led fool in less than a day after haunting him waking and sleeping for three weeks before that. She always seemed to affect him as fiercely as water did baked lime and he wished he’d never laid eyes on the devious jade.
Now that they were closer to the river and among the warehouses where he was probably far more familiar with their surroundings than she was, he pulled away from her. Letting her take the lead only so he, too, could be sure they hadn’t been followed, he sharpened his senses, made himself forget her as a woman as far as it was in him to do. Knowing suddenly that she was leading him to the small warehouse Kit and Ben had hired, then bought when they first set up a small business hauling coastal cargoes, he let her dart into the cover of its ancient shadow and fumble for the keys under her many layers of clothing. He opened his mouth to demand them of her, then closed it again when she hushed him and slipped the key furtively into the lock and turned it as silently as she could with both hands on the doughty iron.
Shrugging impatiently at her silent pantomime, he followed her inside and turned to help her close and relock the stout side door and inspect the gloom inside. He summoned up his captain’s senses and sent them to explore that semi-darkness and came up with nothing but a cargo of finest coffee beans destined for the breakfast tables of discerning northern households, not very fresh air still haunted by sugar and spices and other exotics, a hint of mouse and worse. Even his sixth sense could find no trace of another human being, although there seemed an unacceptable quantity of non-human ones, which reinforced his opinion that Kit and Ben should demolish the venerable old building and replace it with something a lot more vermin-proof and never mind sentiment.
‘Right, there’s obviously nobody here, so I’ll go no further into this business of yours without an explanation, madam,’ he informed her grimly.
‘Very well then, this morning I followed you to work.’
‘You followed me?’ he demanded, suddenly distrusting those finely honed senses he’d always prided himself on after all.
‘I’m very good,’ she boasted unrepentantly and how could he argue when he’d sensed not a single hint of her behind him? ‘But so was the other person tailing you through the City this morning,’ she added; this time he wondered if he had any senses left to him to have missed two of them trailing after him like a procession.
‘The other person?’
‘I used to know a parrot just like you, Captain,’ she mocked him, but must have seen the warning glint in his eyes, because she suddenly looked as serious as anyone could wish, especially a beleaguered and apparently rather simple sea captain. ‘He was a well-trained follower and belongs to a villainous crew.’
‘And how can I trust you to recognise such a man?’
‘You just can,’ she assured him and met his eyes unflinchingly, despite the dusty gloom thickening as daylight began to seep away from such dark places early.
‘But can I also be sure of your motives, Miss La Rochelle, since you seem a little over-familiar with the workings of the London underworld?’
‘You can,’ she insisted steadily.
‘For some extraordinary reason, I believe you.’
‘Why, thank you, I’m suitably flattered, of course.’
‘So you should be,’ he told her dourly.
‘Never mind all that now, we’re in the devil of a jam and have to find the best way out of it.’
‘I only have your word for that, so how do you conclude I’m in a pickle just because a man followed me to Stone & Shaw’s offices in the City?’
‘I followed him afterwards to a fashionable church where he met a supposedly clerical gentleman.’
‘Which is odd, I admit, but perhaps the man is struggling for his lost soul.’
‘And perhaps he’s also raising flying pigs, because when they parted I followed the respectable cleric to a mansion in Mayfair and waited for over an hour before I got down off my perch to try to find out why he went into that house and departed arrayed in the height of fashion among his own kind.’
‘Not a son of the church after all, then?’ he asked whimsically, but his brain was whirling with ideas as he went over all the possibilities her story presented.
‘Very far from it,’ she said disapprovingly.
‘You knew him, didn’t you?’ he suddenly realised, marvelling at her acquaintance with such fine gentlemen and instantly rigidly jealous of a man who could be a former protector of hers.
‘Only later, when I realised whose house it actually was. I can’t believe how convincing his disguise was, especially when he always seemed such an empty-headed fool when I met him at—’
She stopped, blank-faced and wary, as she bit back whatever it was she was going to say next. What a damned fool he was, he decided dazedly as he forced himself to assess Eloise La Rochelle anew. Her faultlessly unaccented accent, her unconscious elegance and that air she had of being a princess let out of her castle for a holiday and only pretending to be a female buccaneer, or even Eloise La Rochelle herself. An appalling suspicion crept into his obviously rather slow mind and he eyed her annoyingly calm countenance through the thickening darkness with hot fury clawing at his gut.
