Secrets of a Lady (aka Daughter of the Game)

Two pistol reports ripped through the room. Pain tore through her right arm. The only man who knew where her son was hidden collapsed in a bloody mass at her feet.

The smell of gunpowder, scorched flesh, and fresh blood filled her nostrils. She flung herself down beside Carevalo. Blood spurted from a charred hole in his brocade waistcoat, but his eyes were open and stared up at her. She pressed her hands over the wound and caught his gaze with her own. “Where’s Colin?”

His face was pale and twisted with pain, but his mouth curved in a grim smile.

Charles dropped down beside them. “You don’t want an innocent boy’s life on your conscience, Carevalo. Where is he?”

“Where you’ll never find him.” The words were hoarse.

Charles tugged off his cravat and pushed it into her hands. She pressed it over the wound. Hot, sticky blood spilled between her fingers.

“I’ll give the ring to your allies,” Charles said. “I swear it. Tell us.”

Carevalo’s gaze fixed on her rather than Charles. His eyes had begun to cloud. She had to lean close to his mouth to hear his words, so close she could feel the scrape of his breath on her skin. “You won’t get away with it.” The faint words had a hard glint of triumph. “Bow Street. Left a letter for them.”

Blood dribbled out of the corner of his mouth. His eyes froze. Mélanie seized his shoulders. “Damn you, Carevalo, tell us.” She shook him, so hard that more blood spattered over her chest.

“Mel.” Charles’s arm came round her shoulders. “He’s dead.”

She released Carevalo and sat back on her heels. She felt as though all the strength had drained from her body.

Charles pulled her to her feet and gripped both her arms. “Are you all right?”

She stared down at the wreckage of what had been Carevalo. Blood and secrets spilled onto the Turkey rug. “He could have given us Colin back.”

“Some prices are too high to pay.” His grip on her arms tightened, forcing her attention to his face. His forehead glistened with sweat. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Really, he was making an extraordinary fuss about it. “The bullet just grazed me.”

He peered at her arm, released his breath in a harsh sigh, and pulled her tight against him. His mouth came down on her hair. His hands moved over her back and shoulders, as though to reassure himself that she was really there.

She pulled her head back. “He said they’d kill Colin if they don’t hear from him every twenty-four hours. We don’t know when they got the last message. Charles, you said it yourself. Carevalo’s life was more precious than our own.”

He took her face between his hands. “We’ll find out where he has Colin. There’ll be a way.” He drew back and glanced at her arm again. He tugged his handkerchief from his pocket, splashed it with brandy from a decanter, and pressed it to the wound.

Footsteps pounded in the hall. “Fraser?” Raoul called. “Mélanie?”

Charles bound the handkerchief round her arm. “In here, O’Roarke.”

The door banged open. “We heard a shot. Good God.” Shock, such as she had rarely heard in Raoul’s voice, reverberated through the room.

“Christ, Charles.” Edgar followed Raoul into the room and froze on the threshold. “I thought you wanted to avoid bloodshed. Why the hell—”

Charles dropped his arm round her shoulders. “I took exception to Carevalo killing my wife.”

“He threatened to kill Mélanie?” Edgar said. “Why?”

“He was quite mad,” Mélanie said. “He took it into his head that I was a French agent.”

“Good Lord.” Edgar stared from Carevalo’s body to their faces. “He must have been mad.”

“Undoubtedly,” Charles said.

Raoul’s gaze moved over her face. “Are you all right?”

“Only grazed.” She realized Raoul was staring at her hands. She looked down. Her hands were smeared with blood and more of it had spattered over her gown, glistening against the black fabric in the lamplight. “Charles got his shot off before Carevalo did. Most of the blood must be Carevalo’s.” She drew a breath and went on speaking quickly. “Before he died Carevalo told us the people holding Colin have orders to kill Colin if they don’t hear from him every twenty-four hours. We don’t know when they received the last message.”

“There has to be a clue somewhere.” Charles sounded as though he would force that clue into existence by sheer power of will. He glanced from Raoul to Edgar. “You two look upstairs. Carevalo may have a manservant staying here with him. Possibly other guards, though I doubt he’d have trusted many with the knowledge of his whereabouts. It should be obvious which rooms he’s used—we’re looking for papers, letters, anything with writing on it, even if you can’t make sense of it. Stay together. Whoever else is in the house may be armed.”

Raoul nodded. “Right. Captain Fraser?”

Edgar hesitated, received a look from Charles, and strode from the room.

“Just a minute, O’Roarke.” Charles crossed the room to detain him by the door. “Carevalo knew about you and Mélanie,” he said, the words low and rapid. “He may have left a letter somewhere for Bow Street.”

Raoul nodded without wasting time on further questions. Charles steered Mélanie toward a chair that faced away from Carevalo’s body. “It’s most likely any papers are in here. Sit down for a minute. I’ll search the desk.”

“Charles, for heaven’s sake.” She wiped her hands on her skirt. “I admit it was a close call, but I’m not actually hurt.”

“You’d be pardoned for being in shock. I know I am.” His fingers were shaking where they gripped her arm. “I thought—” He sucked in his breath. For a moment, he seemed incapable of speech. “I wasn’t at all sure I could manage that shot. I thought—” His throat worked, as though he was trying to force the words out.

She laid her fingers over his own. “You should have more faith in yourself, Charles. Though I confess I had doubts about my survival myself.”

He took her hand and brushed it with his lips. “I love you.”

The words were clipped, almost harsh. Before she could answer, Charles turned back to the desk. “Carevalo had to have a way to communicate with the people who are holding Colin.”

“A newspaper advertisement?”

“Too much like his instructions to us. He’d know we might think of it.”

She lit the lamp on the mahogany desk. An innocuous, solid, English desk. The Sheffield plate of an inkpot and penknife glinted in the spill of light. A recently mended pen lay beside the knife, and a wax jack and a small globe stood in the opposite corner. The cubbyholes and drawers were stuffed with papers, but these proved to be accounts relating to the property and correspondence by a J. Grafton, who presumably was the husband of Carevalo’s mistress.

Charles tilted the lamp close to the penstrokes imbedded in the ink blotter. Mélanie tugged at a side drawer that refused to open completely. It gave way with the crack of splintered wood. She reached behind the drawer, scraped her hand on the broken wood, and felt the crinkle of paper. She drew it out. A piece of folded paper, sealed with red wax, with no imprint and no direction written on it. She broke the wax with her nail. A handful of banknotes spilled onto the desk.

“Payment to his minions,” Charles said.

Mélanie smoothed out the paper wrapping. The inside was covered with writing. QAWMW UGCC EW DSMVAWM OWCYX. PWW QI GV NYLB OIWPHQ OMGHB YCC QNGP. AWCC AYTW QGFW WHISRA QI OI QAYV UAWH QAGP GP OIHW.

She showed it to Charles. “Recognize it?”

“A simple substitution code, I suspect.” He pinned down the curling edges of the paper with his fingers. “It’s not long, but hopefully there’s enough to break it. He hasn’t troubled to run all the words together, which makes—”

Raoul came back into the room. “The rest of the house is empty. He only seems to have used the kitchen and one of the bedrooms. There’s some food in the pantry, a change of clothes and shaving things in the bedroom. Captain Fraser’s having a closer look, but I doubt we’ll find anything. No sign of a letter to Bow Street, either. You’ve done better?”

“Perhaps.” Mélanie looked up from the paper. “We’ve found a payment and a coded message, presumably prepared for the people holding Colin.”

Raoul strode into the room and stared down at the cipher. “If Carevalo had this ready and waiting, he must have been expecting a messenger.”

Charles looked up and met his gaze. “Quite.”

Raoul nodded. “Mélanie’s better at ciphers than I am, and you were brilliant at them even as a boy. I’ll keep watch in the hall with your brother.”

Mélanie looked back at the coded message. The image of Colin’s severed finger swam before her eyes. This must be how Carevalo had sent the instructions. But if this was the next message he meant to send, then the twenty-four hours between messages were not yet up. She sat in the desk chair, back straight, picked up the pen, and reached for a sheet of writing paper. “W seems to be the most frequent letter,” she said.

“It is,” Charles said. “So assuming he’s writing in English, W must be e.”

They had both devised and decoded countless substitution ciphers in the Peninsula and later in Vienna and Brussels. It was a simple enough code, used when one wanted to conceal the message but was not expecting a serious attempt at decoding. One chose a key word (treason had been a favorite of Raoul’s) and matched the letters of the word with the first letters of the alphabet. The rest of the alphabet was then displaced by the number of distinct letters in the key word. It was impossible to determine how the letters were displaced without knowing the key word and the number of letters it contained. But there were ways to break the code. E was the most commonly occurring letter in the English language, so the most commonly occurring letter in a cipher written in English was almost certainly translated as E.

“W must be the fifth letter in the key word.” Mélanie copied out the cipher with e filled in in lowercase for all the Ws.

She stared at the paper before her and forced her mind to focus down to those black strokes of ink. The first word was now simplified to QAeGe. “I’d hazard a guess the first word is ‘there.’ Or ‘where,’ but it seems more likely he’d start a letter with ‘there.’”

Charles pulled up a stool and sat beside her. “The second word is a four-letter word without an e and with a double letter at the end. Followed by a two-letter word with e as the second letter. There will be?”

“Let’s try it. If you’re right, that gives us t, h, r, w, i, l, and b.” She rewrote the cipher with those letters filled in.

there will be DSrther OelYX. Pee tI it NYLB OIePHt OriHB Yll thiP. Hell hYTe tiFe eHISRh tI FI thYt wheH thiP iP OIHe.

Mélanie studied the message. “That fourth word must be ‘further.’ Or ‘farther.’ So D equals f and S equals u or a. And the first word in the second sentence almost has to be ‘see.’ P equals s.”

Charles leaned forward, elbow on the desktop. “In the second sentence there’s a two-letter word starting with t. That can only be ‘to’—so I equals o. And then we have a three-letter word ending in a double l. ‘Ill’ or ‘I’ll’ or ‘all,’ but i is already taken, so Y must equal a.”

“Which means the fourth word is ‘further’ and S equals u.” She pulled the paper closer.

“Wait a bit, Mel, where are we on the key word?” He reached across her and turned up the lamp. “If Y equals a, we’ve got YEL-W-AG. Looks suspiciously as though we’ve got a two-word key and it’s ‘yellow something.’ Skipping the second l, that makes O equal d.”

Mélanie took a clean sheet of paper and copied out the message again.

There will be further delaX. See to it NaLB doesHt driHB all this. Hell haTe tiFe eHouRh to Fo that wheH this is doHe.

She chewed the tip of the pen. “What does Carevalo want them to ‘see to’?” A welter of uncomfortable images crowded her mind.

Charles rested his hand on her shoulder for a moment. “Patience, my darling. Whatever it is, he can’t do it anymore.” He squeezed her shoulder, then looked down at the paper. “The last word in the first sentence must be ‘delay.’ X equals y.”

Mélanie forced her attention back to the text. “And I suspect that word at the end is ‘done,’ making H equal n. Wait a bit, Charles, we almost have it. Look.”

There will be further delay. See to it NaLB doesnt drinB all this. Hell haTe tiFe enouRh to do that when this is done.

The fingers of her left hand cramped as her grip on the pen tightened. “‘NaLB’ must be a person. What were the names of the men Roth mentioned who matched the description of the man Polly saw? Stephen Watkins was the one he thought most likely. But there was also—”

“Jack Evans, a former prizefighter.” Charles’s eyes glinted with triumph held in check. “The one who was spotted drinking in a tavern in Wapping. Which I suspect was called—?” He pulled the sheet of paper with the key-word letters toward him. “YELOW DRAGN. The Yellow Dragon. Of course. The name of Jack Evans’s favorite tavern is a key Carevalo could count on them remembering.”

Fingers trembling with the relief of the finish line in sight, Mélanie filled in the rest of the code and wrote out the whole message.

There will be further delay. See to it Jack doesn’t drink all this. He’ll have time enough to do that when this is done.

“Not a very profound message,” Charles said. “But it does tell us who.”

“But not where.” She threw down the pen. “Damnation.”

“We know the general area—somewhere close to a tavern called the Yellow Dragon in Wapping. And we know how to communicate with them. Perhaps—”

A crash sounded from the hall. They ran to the door and flung it open to see Edgar sitting on the chest of a prone man, while Raoul stood over them holding a pistol.

Edgar seized his quarry by the throat. “Where is he? Goddamnit to hell, where is he?”

“Who?” The man’s voice was thin and reedy. “I only came here because the gentleman asked me.”

“Let him go, Edgar.” Charles pulled his brother off the man and helped the man to his feet. He was more of a boy, actually, Mélanie saw in the moonlight spilling through the hall windows, a gangly youth with a pockmarked face and a thatch of sandy hair. Charles gripped the boy by both arms. “Deal honestly with us and you have nothing to fear. Lie and I warn you none of us has much patience left.” He pushed the boy against the stair rail. The balusters shook. “Why did the gentleman want you to come here?”

“To deliver a letter, he said.” The boy’s eyes were enormous, his face drained of color. “Same place as before.”

“Where?” Charles’s grip on the boy’s arms tightened.

Fear glistened on the boy’s face. “I don’t give them to anyone. I leave them.”

Charles pulled the homespun of the boy’s shirt taut. “Where do you leave them?”

“At Covent Garden Market, between the railings of St. Paul’s, at the south corner.”

Charles closed his eyes for a moment. Mélanie let out a gasping sigh and thought she heard Raoul do the same.

“When did you leave the last one?” Charles asked.

“This morning, round seven. Sometimes he has me go twice a day, but today it was just once. I don’t know anything about it,” the boy insisted in a quavering voice. “I met him when I came here to fish. My brothers and I’ve always fished here. There’s never anyone about, ’cept in the summer. But he said I was poaching, only he wouldn’t turn me in if I delivered the messages for him.”

Raoul looked at Mélanie. “Did you break the code?”

“Yes.”

“So we have a way to communicate with them.”

“My thoughts exactly.” Charles looked back at the boy. “You’re coming to Bow Street with us. We may have a message for you to deliver after all.”

Even on the far side of three in the morning, the candles guttering and the smell of gin stale in the air, the Brown Bear Tavern bustled with activity. Mélanie noted that her appearance in the common room drew less attention than it had in the afternoon. Perhaps the customers considered that any woman abroad at this hour couldn’t possibly be a lady.

Four men of the Bow Street Patrol were clustered round a table. Yes, they said, in answer to a question from Charles, Roth was there, upstairs, writing up notes. They found him in the room where they had talked before, bent over a table in his shirtsleeves, a pencil in his hand.

He looked up at their entrance. “What’s happened?”

Charles closed the door and advanced into the room, pulling Mélanie with him. He had his arm round her shoulders, as he had for the whole of the drive back from Chiswick. The ring, retrieved from Carevalo’s body, was once again strung on his watch chain, though it seemed strangely irrelevant now. Their hope of finding Colin lay with the sandy-haired youth whom Raoul and Edgar were holding by either arm. “Ted here has been taking messages from Carevalo to the men holding Colin,” Charles said.

Roth’s gaze took in the splotches of dried blood on Mélanie’s gown. “Where’s Carevalo?”

“Dead.”

Roth’s only reaction was a brief flicker in his eyes. “Did he die in giving you the information?”

“No, we found it afterwards.”

Roth pulled out a chair for Mélanie. “Then I’ll assume his death was unavoidable, as I trust you would not kill the man who knew where your son was kept.”

“Quite,” Charles said. “You’ve spoken to Addison?”

“He gave an admirable account of your discovery of Mrs. Constable, especially as he doesn’t seem to have been present for most of the key scenes.” Roth grimaced. “Constable recovered consciousness convinced a couple answering to your description killed his wife. I think we’ve finally managed to persuade him otherwise. I have men searching for this Victor Velasquez, but we haven’t found him yet. Don’t tell me it turns out Carevalo killed her?”

“No.” Charles recounted what had happened, glossing over Carevalo’s attack on Mélanie as drunken madness.

Roth stared at the coded message, held down by two empty tankards on a splintery table. He raised his gaze to Ted, who was sitting quiet and wide-eyed on the cot with the blue blanket. Then he looked at Charles and Mélanie. “You could write a message in this code?”

Mélanie nodded. “We’ll have Ted plant the message in Covent Garden. We have to make sure it’s there well before seven. We’ll cover the area and follow whoever picks up the message back to where they’re holding Colin.”

Roth nodded. “Seemingly straightforward. But I’ve known the most straightforward plans to go awry.”

“Precisely. So in the letter we’ll tell them to bring Colin to a rendezvous point tomorrow night. If it comes to that, we’ll be there to take him from them.”

Roth considered. “My compliments, Mrs. Fraser. That’s not without risk, but it’s about as good a plan as we could devise.” He pulled his coat off a chair back. “You get to work on the message. I’ll assemble men to keep watch in Covent Garden.”

An involuntary noise of protest escaped her lips.

“You can’t do it yourselves,” he said. “You might be recognized.”

“If you’re going to suggest we remain behind—”

He gave her a full, genuine smile. “Mrs. Fraser, I’ve got to know you a bit in the last forty-eight hours. I wouldn’t dream of it. You can wait in a coffeehouse on the edge of the market, as I will myself.” He moved to the door. “I’ll muster the troops. And then, Mr. Fraser, I’d be obliged if you’d give me any other information you have about the death of Elinor Constable.”