Page 56 of A Lady's Handbook of Espionage
“Fine. My place.”
Isabel blinked. “Your flat? With you?”
“No, with the bloody Queen.” He glowered at her. “Yes, with me. It’s not Claridge’s, but it’s got a roof. And walls. A bed with a mattress. Unless you’d prefer I track down Vale and beg her to delay her departure?”
“No.” Isabel had encroached on Portia’s kindness enough. “No, that’s not necessary. Lead on.”
*
Callahan lived in Whitechapel.
The building leaned slightly to the left. Soot-stained bricks crumbled at the corners, and the front door hung crooked, its paint flaking off, with a knocker so rusted it probably hadn’t moved in years.
As they stepped into the building’s foyer, the smell hit her first. Not filth exactly, but the particular odour of sweat and ale and coal smoke. Isabel said nothing, just followed Callahan up the stairs. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t slept in worse while on the run from Favreau.
Two floors up, Callahan fumbled with the lock at a door that looked like someone had tried to kick it in at least once.
The key stuck, and he jiggled it roughly. “Damn thing.”
“Let me.” She set down her suitcase and nudged him aside, feeling the way the lock caught. A delicate touch, a slight lift upward, and it clicked open. “There.”
He stared at her, then pushed the door wide without a word.
Isabel trailed him inside. His home wasn’t as unkempt as the rest of the building. Small, yes. Cluttered, definitely. But it was clean and cosy and she rather loved the piles of books and the worn furniture. The windows were spotless, catching what little grey light London had to offer.
“Well? What’s the verdict?” he asked, taking her suitcase from her and setting it beside his couch. “Does my modest abode meet with mademoiselle’s approval?”
“I expected rats. And more whiskey bottles.”
“The rats are on holiday, and I finished my bottles in the aftermath of Hong Kong.”
She bit back a laugh. “Well. It’s very atmospheric. I thought being in the government’s employ paid better, though.”
“It pays fine. But I like being surrounded by reminders of where I came from. Keeps me humble.”
“Now you’ve ruined my imaginings of the tortured agent in his lair with cyphers on the desk and villainous plots foiled in the dark of night. But I bet you brood magnificently by that window,” she said with a nod to one by his bookshelves.
“You spend a lot of time thinking about me in my flat, Trouble?” His voice dropped lower. “Should I be worried? Or just pleased?”
She ignored the heat crawling up her neck and wandered deeper into the room, running a fingertip over the spines of the books stacked haphazardly on a rickety shelf. Most were political tracts and histories, dense tomes with cracked leather bindings. Nothing to indicate the flat’s occupant was anything more than a scholar with middling means.
“Neither. Your predilections don’t intere—” The retort faded as she caught sight of a curio on the mantelpiece.
It was a skull. Ahumanskull with a jaunty top hat perched on its brow. Sitting there like some macabre conversation piece.
“Friend of yours?” she asked dryly.
Callahan glanced up from shrugging out of his greatcoat. “Freddie Figgs, Mad Freddie to his friends. He always did fancy himself a proper gent.”
Of course. Ofcourse, he’d display human remains like fashionable baubles. Because why wouldn’t this beautiful, infuriating creature flout the most fundamental tenets of sanity and good taste?
“You,” she announced, “are a madman. And to think, Wentworth expects me to fake marry you.”
“And you, sweetheart, are a menace. And yet, here we both are. It must be kismet.” He nodded toward a door across the small sitting room. “Come on, fake wife. Bed’s in there.”
Isabel followed his gesture, then froze.
The bed.
