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“They will. We’ll arrange it with Jimmy Knott. I’ve been told to leave the money just across the road from here at half past seven this evening...”

Piers opened his eyes. “I will sustain at least one more visit before then. If I’m not here, they’ll flee, ignore the ransom, and try again some other time. I won’t live like that. I can’t allow you or him to live like that...”

She seized his face between her hands. “But Piers, you can’t stay!”

“It’s only a few more hours,” he said, proud that his voice didn’t shake. “And I’ve lasted this long.”

She stroked his face wildly, almost dementedly. “Piers, no! What if they decide to kill you when the ransom is paid? They’re armed, aren’t they?”

“With a double-barrelled pistol,” he admitted. “At least. But I don’t think they will. I’m to be the goose that keeps laying the golden eggs, and they think there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. There is.”

Vehemently, she shook her head. “No, Piers. Let’s go. I refuse to take that chance. I won’t let you. I won’t go without you.”

He smiled at her, just because she was wonderful and fierce and his. And here. “Yes, you will. There is the child. And besides, I need you to carry out the rest of the plan...”

Chapter Eight

April barely heard his plan, at first. Her euphoria at finding him against all the odds had been almost immediately drowned in appalled worry, for she had never seen him like this before: torn, half-demented, clinging, vulnerable...

Unless it was the night she had first met him and taken the time during her robbery of his house to pull him off his precipitous balcony where he had been swaying with unthinkable intent. She never liked to dwell on the despair that must have consumed him that night, and she was thoroughly terrified to be reminded of it now, as he talked of staying in his vile prison, as if he was choosing to die.

Yet in spite of that, his low, insistent voice began to penetrate. She had always listened to him, not just because he was educated but because he often thought in ways she did not, and his intelligence, his cleverness, was undeniable.

And when she raised her fearful eyes to his again, he no longer seemed so small and vulnerable. It was as though he were growing back into himself. He was the lord who had swaggered in disguise into Tatty’s filthy alehouse looking for her, carrying his oddity like a mascot, like a strength, and so it had proved to be. He was still Piers, still the viscount who had opened her world. And so she listened, and he made an insidious, if terrifying kind of sense.

Other things did not.

“How do they know about you and faces? Who are they?”

“I’ve been wondering about that,” he said as though he had been working the odds of some card game. “They both know, though whether they discovered together or one told the other, I don’t know. They wear the same clothes, try to talk the same way but they don’t. I think jailer number two is much as he seems, a scion of St. Giles, minor criminal and muscle for hire. Jailer number one is a decent mimic. I couldn’t tell at first if his speech was modified by travel or even education, or if he was simply mimicking jailer number two and making occasional mistakes. But I think it’s the latter. I think he was the gentleman in the carriage that stopped me in Park Lane, and I think he planned this whole scheme down to the fine details.”

“What details?”

“Like the way they enter the room, as if they’ve practised carrying pistol and tray together, always putting things down in the same place, never leaving themselves open to any attack I might make. There’s a certain...fastidiousness that I doubt troubles your average villain: they bathed my grazed head the first day, they empty my chamber pot, give me food, such as it is, three times a day like regular mealtimes.”

His lips twisted. “Of course, they also put laudanum in my beer to keep me subdued, so they don’t have to waste energy beating me up or shooting me. That is also fastidious, in its way, but then, they do want me to walk away from here when they have the money, so that they can do it all again in the future. And I think jailer number one came up with this plan because of me. My malady.”

“But how could he know? No one ever thinks of such a thing.”

Piers shrugged. “I doubt I’m unique, though I’ve never knowingly met anyone else with the problem. But if someone knew of such a condition, it would probably be easy enough to spot it in me, to test it and confirm it. So, I think jailer number one is either someone I met recently, or someone who realized recently that I could be taken advantage of in this way.”

April shied away from such a betrayal. “But we’ve hardly met anyone recently, have we? Since we came to London it’s been largely doctors and business matters. Surely you don’t suspect Mr. Pepper!”

Although if it was Pepper, there would be no difficulty getting the ransom money...

“I never thought of Pepper,” he admitted. “I always know him because he’s in his office, or he’s announced—although I suppose I could have walked past him in the street. Besides, he’s too old to be either of my jailers.”

“Who, then?”

“I’ve thought of four who are around the correct age. Haggs’s two friends whom we dined with a couple of weeks ago.”

“Mr. Dangerfield and Sir Hugo Cauldwell,” April recalled. “They’re both short of cash.”

“Exactly. As is your admirer Darcy across the square.”

She closed her mouth. “He wouldn’t, would he?” she asked uneasily. “Who else?”

“Gadsby.”