He was not a man who startled easily. He was not a man given to rash action. He had a talent for patience that his colleagues found unnerving and his superiors found invaluable, and he had spent the better part of a last night watching the hired house at the bottom of Ashford Lane with the composed attention of a man who understood that the moment he moved too soon, everything would come apart.
But the woman they had just brought in through that door was not a hired entertainer or a frightened shop girl, and Marsh was very good at his job.
He had attended the briefing carefully. He had studied the description provided with the same attention he brought to everything, because in his experience the details people thought were minor were usually the ones that mattered. Fair hair. Green eyes. Slight build. Age approximately twenty-one. Last seen in London in the company of the Duke of Newbury’s household. The solicitor had added, in the flat tone of a man who had spent considerable effort maintaining professional detachment: the lady is not to be mistaken for a willing guest under any circumstances.
He had watched the carriage arrive. He had watched them bring her out and walk her to the door, and he had watched the particular straightness of her spine and the careful stillness of her hands, and he had understood immediately and with no uncertainty at all who she was.
Lady Megan Fairfax.
Marsh straightened away from the wall and was moving before he had finished thinking it. His footsteps were quick and quiet on the lane’s mud-soft surface, measured against the silence, making no more noise than the wind in the bare elms overhead. Two streets east he had a horse, hired for exactly this kind of eventuality. He had an address in Mayfair he had been given with instructions to memorize and not write down, and a second in Curzon Street. He had been told, in the flat and certain manner of men with considerable resources and very clearly very considerable motivation, that if the lady’s situation changed at any point, he was to inform them immediately, without hesitation and without stopping for anything.
Marsh was thorough and he was fast, and he did not waste time on feelings about what he had just witnessed. There would be time for that later. What there was not time for was delay.
He had the horse moving within four minutes, his coat pulled up against the sharp air and London opening before him in the grey midmorning light. He turned toward Mayfair and pressed the horse to a canter, threading through the traffic on the bridge with a focused economy of movement that sent a cart driver shouting after him.
He didn’t look back. Behind him, the house sat quietly in its lane, smoke rising from its chimneys, perfectly still. Discreet. Unremarkable.
But Marsh knew exactly where it was.
And in very short order, so would they.
CHAPTER 22
Marsh was a man of few words and considerable precision, and when he told them the address, he told them everything else too: the number of men he had counted entering and leaving, the layout of the lane as best he could judge from the outside, the single upper window with the curtain that had moved twice in the past hour.
Oliver was already moving before the man had finished.
He had ridden from Berkeley Square to Grosvenor Street in under four minutes, which was not the kind of riding one did in London unless one had stopped caring what anyone thought of it. Harry had met him at the door of Newbury House with his hat already in his hand and the look of a man who had been waiting for something to do since the moment, he’d heard his sister was gone.
They did not speak much on the way. There was nothing to say that was not better done with action.
Webb had collected six men, all former soldiers, all discreet. He’d had them ready since the previous evening, because Webb had not survived twenty years of military life by waiting until a crisis was certain before preparing for it. He met them threestreets from the address, and Oliver gave him the briefest possible account of what Marsh had told him, and Webb absorbed it with the contained steadiness of a man filing information into the correct order.
“Front and back,” Webb said. “Two at the rear before we go through the front. They’ll try to move her if they hear us coming.”
“Agreed.”
“And my lord.” Webb held his gaze for a moment. “You and the Duke of Newbury stay behind me until I know the layout of the inside.”
Oliver would have argued on any other night. Tonight he simply nodded.
The house was ordinary in the way that deliberate concealment always produced. A respectable lane, a painted door, curtains drawn against the cold morning. No sign of anything wrong. The kind of house London was full of, the kind that kept its secrets behind its silence.
They went in fast and without ceremony.
The two men Webb had sent around the back had accounted for the guard at the rear entrance before Oliver had cleared the front hall. Inside the house smelled of damp and tallow and something faintly sweet that Oliver could not identify and did not want to think about. A servant bolted for the stairs and was intercepted by Webb’s man before he’d taken three steps. Another door, another room, two of Penharrow’s men with weapons half-drawn who understood very quickly that they were outnumbered and elected not to test the arithmetic.
Oliver was already moving toward the upper floor when he heard Harry say, quietly and with no inflection at all, “That’s her.”
He followed Harry’s gaze to the closed door at the end of the upstairs corridor.
And then the door opened, and Penharrow stepped into the doorway.
He was perfectly composed. He had, Oliver realized, been waiting for them.
“My lord Astor,” Penharrow said pleasantly. “And the young duke. How gratifying. I had begun to wonder if my message had reached you.”
He stepped back into the room, leaving the door open behind him, and Oliver understood in the same instant that this was an invitation and a trap and that they had walked into it because Megan was somewhere inside that room and there had never been any real choice but to walk through the door.
