her ear, then lower, where her pulse throbbed in a frenetic beat. Gemma forced her breath into evenness, concentrating on the calming sounds of the forest—the rustle of wind in the trees, the chit-chit of a nuthatch.
Still, she couldn’t ignore the fact that she hosted a leech. While wearing a sodden gown, allowing a man she didn’t like—or maybe did—to touch her neck.
Or that she’d been slapped by a stranger. Who then had shot at her.
“There.” Mr. Knox flicked a brown blur from his fingers. “Just think, you’d normally pay a physician for the privilege of losing your blood.”
For a moment his eyes met hers, then another shot cleaved the quiet.
A smuggler, or the man on the inky horse? Mr. Knox had her by the hand again. “Let’s go.”
They hurried, twigs scratching her arms and snapping in her hair. The trees thinned and they hastened over the path and then the slick grass behind the house.
They hurried through a French door into the ground-floor library of Verity House. Amy and her husband, Lord Wyling, hurried toward her, their faces etched with fear.
Amy’s arms reached out. “Darling. Let’s get you dry, shall we?”
“Amy, there were smugglers on the hill and then—Mr. Knox, where are you going?”
He brushed past toward the hall door, Wyling at his heels. “My business cannot wait, madam.”
“It must.” She stomped after him. “You know why this happened, don’t you? You aren’t the least shocked. Who chased us and why?”
The eyes that had gazed on her with warmth earlier now stared, dull as coal dust. “I don’t know him, but he would have interrogated you and perhaps killed you because you wore this.” Her cloak was still under his arm, and he dropped the sodden mess onto a chair. “Burn it.”
This was maddening. Mr. Knox, Wyling, Amy—not one of them showing the least amount of astonishment at today’s extraordinary events. Concern, yes, but they knew much more than she did. He’d said they’d speak later. Well, that time was now. “I demand to know what’s about, Mr. Knox. And I’m keeping my cloak.”
“Burn it,” he ordered, his hand on the doorknob. “Because that man will be thirsty to silence whoever wears it.”
After leaving Miss Lyfeld in the house, Tavin and Wyling dashed up Verity Hill in the mad hope Tavin’s informant, Bill Simple, had dropped the promised clue before everything went wrong.
They’d found naught but Gemma’s discarded bonnet and a separate green ribbon, the hue of a budding oak leaf, wedged half under a stone.
It might be debris, carried atop the hill by the wind.
Or mayhap it was the promised clue to help Tavin comprehend the Sovereign’s plan. Nothing else made by human hands lay atop Verity Hill, although he and Wyling had spent more than an hour searching. No note, no sample of smuggled goods. Just a cheap ribbon lodged under a rock, its ends cut by a jagged edge.
Rubbish or clue?
What he wouldn’t give for silence to ponder things. Or to still be outside, where it was cool. Instead, he was now incarcerated in the Lyfelds’ overwarm drawing room, subjected to an incessant barrage of moans.
Eyes shut, Cristobel Lyfeld lounged on the sofa where Gemma—he’d given up trying to call her Miss Lyfeld in his head—had held hands with Hugh Beauchamp hours ago. “What will the neighbors say when they learn Gemma was mistaken for a smuggler? We will be pariahs.”
“No one will know.” Gemma perched beside her sister-in-law, blotting a compress on her brow as if she tended a feverish child.
This was ludicrous. His superior at the Custom House must be informed. In person. Tavin didn’t dare entrust a message—even a coded one—to a servant. “I must return to London with all haste. If I might—”
“I am faint! Oh!” Cristobel groaned, no closer to fainting than he was, and everyone in the drawing room seemed to know it. Wyling looked out the window, Peter studied his boots and Amy handed Gemma a cup of tea with a resigned air. Gemma alone ministered to Cristobel, murmuring words of comfort as she lifted the cup to Cristobel’s lips. She may have poor taste in suitors, but Gemma proved herself a capable, calm sort of female.
Pity she could not assist his work. Many of his hired men didn’t possess her patience.
Since their return from the forest, she’d washed and changed into a fresh white gown. A gauze scarf about her neck hid any trace of the leech’s bloodletting. “Mr. Knox, I am yet unsatisfied with your explanation.”
Of course she was. “I have told you all I can.”
She set down the teacup and hobbled toward him, favoring her untwisted foot. The scarf didn’t quite cover the kiss of the leech, after all, for the crimson Y-shaped mark was bright against her skin.
“All you’ve told us is that you work for the government and in my red cloak I looked like a certain lady smuggler.”
“Those are both true.”
“But you aren’t telling us everything. I insist to know what this is about, Mr. Knox. You owe me that.”
“Gemma.” Cristobel roused from the sofa. “Mr. Knox will think you a hoyden, speaking so boldly.”
But Gemma was right. Tavin had told her almost nothing, and if he was in her place, he’d be vexed, too. He rubbed his temple.
“Smuggling activity has increased in the area of late, with fatalities, so the government sent an investigator. Mr. Thomason. My friend.” Tavin swallowed past the sudden ache of pain brought by speaking Thomason’s name. “He was tasked with disbanding the ring led by a man who calls himself the Sovereign. But Thomason was killed.”
Not just killed. Left as a message, tied to a tree, a sovereign coin on his tongue. The Sovereign must think himself clever, leaving the coins as a signature.
Gemma’s eyes were soft. “I am sorry for your loss.”
Tavin nodded his thanks. “You can understand why it is so vital to me to stop the Sovereign, but he’s never been identified or thwarted. Until today. By you.”
Gemma flinched. Cristobel moaned.
Peter stood, and said, “When Wyling brought you to me, you said I’d be serving the Crown, allowing you to conduct your business here. You never said it would put my family in danger.”
“The danger existed long before I arrived.” Tavin stepped to the center of the room. “It met your sister on the bounds of your own property.”
“You knew, Peter?” Gemma strode past him, hands fisting. “You all knew? Yet no one thought to tell me. Even you, Amy?”
“We couldn’t, dear.” Amy bit her lip.
Overhead, the
