Page 17 of A Family Of His Own
He stared at her. “Your father didn’t know?”
She shook her head. “I never thought to mention it. There was no reason to.”
Almost in wonder, he stared across the darkened gardens at the Fellows house. “So Rupert and the dispatches are over there.”
Diana released his arm and nodded. “With Evelyn, in her bed. She sleeps with Rupert beside her.”
Toby got to his feet and held out a hand to help her to hers. “I think we need to check that Rupert does, indeed, still carry the dispatches.”
“Yes.” She gripped his hand, and he drew her up, then released her to lift the bags.
Hefting one in either hand, with his cane balanced atop the right, he nodded across the road. “Let’s go.”
They walked side by side, brisk with purpose, toward the Fellows residence.
Diana felt hugely relieved to have, she believed, solved the riddle of her father’s last words.
When they came to the street and Toby juggled her bags and his cane into one hand and, with the other, clasped hers, her nerves leapt with a species of excitement, but she told herself not to be missish. They’d just had a major success; it was normal to feel giddy.
They reached the other side of the road, but Toby didn’t release her hand.
To distract herself from the consequent sensations, she determinedly focused on the practicalities. “I have a key, so we won’t need to wake the household.”
“Good.”
“That said”—reluctantly, she slipped her fingers from the warmth of his, opened the gate, and led the way up the path—“Adrian doesn’t sleep much these days. Most likely, he’ll be awake.”
CHAPTER3
Diana’s prediction proved to be accurate. On entering the night-dark house, they saw light shining from beneath a closed door on the left of the front hall.
Toby stacked Diana’s bags against the wall, placed his hat and cane on the ornate hall stand, then shrugged out of his heavy coat.
Diana had already removed her bonnet and slipped out of her short coat. She reached up to hang it on one of the hall stand’s hooks. As Toby did the same with his coat, she tipped her head toward the lighted room. “Adrian’s in the study.” She raised her gaze to Toby’s face. “How much do we tell him? Everything?”
Toby weighed the options, then softly replied, “Yes, everything. He deserves to know.”
Briefly, she studied his eyes, then nodded and led the way.
She opened the door and walked in, and Toby followed.
He closed the door as Fellows looked up from the letter he was penning. “You’re back! Did you find your treasure?”
Diana sank into one of the armchairs before the desk. “In a manner of speaking.” She briefly met Toby’s eyes, then returned her gaze to Fellows’s face. “We believe we now know where the papers are, but when we reached the surgery, Herschel was there, and he’d ransacked the entire place.”
“What?” Fellows rapidly set aside his pen, then fixed his horrified gaze on them. “What happened?”
Toby sat in the second armchair and let Diana do the telling. He wanted her to fully realize the import of what had occurred, and having to describe the details to Fellows would, he suspected, help.
He waited until she reached the point of them quitting the Kleeblattgasse house, thoroughly riveting Fellows in the process, then leant forward and caught Fellows’s eyes. “Now that you’ve heard what type of men we need to avoid, you’ll appreciate that if we’re to leave Vienna with your children safely, we need to leave as soon as possible.” He shot a glance at Diana. “By that, I mean tomorrow morning, as early as possible. If we can get out of the city before Jager and Koch get wind of where Diana has been staying, they’ll have a much harder time picking up our trail.”
Predictably, Diana frowned.
Before she could protest, Toby went on. “Jager and Koch aren’t stupid. Lazy, yes. Stupid, no. They’ll ask around and learn that you’ve been spending time here and come looking for you. We don’t want to be here when they do.”
“But they don’t know about the dispatches,” she said.
“No,” he conceded. “And the household here should be safe from anything more than inquiries. No one would imagine that your father would have hidden the dispatches here.” He dipped his head to Fellows. “In the house of a dying friend.” Toby looked at Diana. “And as far as the Prussians or anyone else knows, you don’t have any idea where the packet is, so you can’t have hidden it here, either.”
