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Maximus nodded, tucking the highwayman’s dagger into his boot, and turned.
“Ghost.”
He stopped and looked at the captain.
The other man’s face gave nothing away. “Thank you.”
IF ONLY APOLLO could talk. Artemis frowned as she crept down the darkened hall that night, Bon Bon trotting at her heels. It was past midnight, so everyone ought to have been asleep in Wakefield House—well, everyone save Craven, who she’d left guarding her brother. The valet never seemed to sleep. One presumed he must be fulfilling his duties to Maximus, yet he somehow managed to care for Apollo as well.
Artemis shook her head. Craven was a capable nurse—though she didn’t like to think how he’d come by his experience—yet Apollo still couldn’t speak. Otherwise her brother seemed to be getting better, but every time he tried to utter a word, his throat only produced strangled sounds. Sounds that quite obviously caused him a great deal of pain. She just wished he could tell her he was better in his own words instead of scrawled handwriting.
Then she might believe him.
The corridor outside Maximus’s door was deserted. Still she looked nervously around before she tapped at the door. She might have decided to embrace her path as a fallen woman, but it seemed it was hard to quell the fears of a lifetime.
Artemis waited, shifting from one foot to another, disappointment seeping through her breast as the door remained silently closed. Perhaps he hadn’t meant to see her again. Perhaps he’d thought it only a one-time event. Perhaps he was bored with her now.
Well. She wasn’t yet finished with him.
She tried the handle and found the door unlocked. She quickly pushed it open and entered, closing it just as quickly behind her.
Then she looked around.
She hadn’t the time to examine his rooms last night—she’d been otherwise distracted. Artemis went to the connecting door through which Maximus had emerged the night before. It led to a sitting room-cum-study. Percy stood from where he’d been lying before the banked fire and stretched before coming over to greet both her and Bon Bon.
Artemis patted his head absently as she examined Maximus’s sitting room. Books lined the walls and overflowed into neat stacks on the floor; an enormous desk was completely covered with papers, also in neat, cornered stacks. The only thing, in fact, that looked at all out of order was a globe on a stand, which appeared to be draped with Maximus’s banyan. Artemis bit her lip to quell their upward curve at the sight. She wandered to the globe, giving it a gentle spin, banyan and all, before setting her candlestick on the desk and trailing her fingers across the papers. She saw a news sheet, a letter from an earl mentioning a bill before parliament, a letter in a much less refined hand pleading for monies to send a boy to school, and a scrap of paper with what looked like the beginnings of a speech in a bold hand—Maximus’s, presumably. For a moment Artemis studied the speech, tracing the words and feeling warm as she followed the clear points he laid out in making his argument.
She laid aside the paper and saw the corner of a thin book peeking out from under one pile. Carefully, she pulled it out and looked at the title. It was a treatise on fishing. Artemis raised her brows. No doubt Maximus had scores of streams on his properties, but did he ever have time to fish? The thought sent a pang of melancholy through her. Did he sneak peeks at his fishing book in between all his duties? If so, it shed a curiously vulnerable light upon the Duke of Wakefield.
Artemis picked up the fishing book and, curling into one of the deep chairs before the fireplace, began to read. Both dogs came to settle at her feet, curled together, and then quiet descended on the room.
The book was surprisingly entertaining and she lost track of the time. When next she looked up and saw Maximus lounging in the doorway to his bedroom watching her, she didn’t know whether it had been five minutes or half an hour.
She stuck a finger in the book to save her place. “What time is it?”
He tilted his head to the side, peering at the fireplace, and she saw that a clock sat on the mantelpiece. “One in the morning.”
“You were out late.”
He shrugged and pushed away from the doorway. “I often am.”
He turned to walk back into his bedroom and she set aside the book, rose, and followed him, leaving the sleeping dogs behind in the sitting room. He wore the same coat and waistcoat that he’d worn to the supper at home with Phoebe.
She found another chair and sat to watch as he peeled off the coat. “Were you out as the Ghost?”
“What?”
She nearly rolled her eyes. As if she couldn’t guess where he’d been all this time. “Were you running about as the Ghost of St. Giles?”
He doffed his wig and placed it on a stand. “Yes.”
He took a small dagger from his boot and set it on the dresser.
Her eyebrows rose. “Do you always carry that?”
“No.” He hesitated. “It’s a souvenir from tonight.”
Had he fought then? Rescued some other poor woman attacked in St. Giles?
