Page 62 of A Proposition for the Comte
Chapter Nine
Violet knew she was in trouble as soon as she climbed the stairs at Lackington’s. She had asked her guard to stay with the carriage, reasoning that a small allotted time in the bookshop would not be a risky thing. She had barely slept last night, the conversation with Aurelian running around in her head. Had she ruined everything? She could not imagine life without him there, his smile, his cleverness, his honesty.
She had seen the man about ten minutes after her arrival at the bookshop, a thickset, swarthy gentleman who made no attempt at hiding his interest in her. Leaving the less peopled section of the library she made with haste for the busiest area of the room, sitting with the pretence of reading her book, a rush of panic sliding down her backbone when she saw the man was still there. When he came over to her she looked up.
‘I have a pistol in my pocket and I need you to come with me now.’
His words were quietly said but she could hear the truth in them. Her eyes fell to his jacket pocket, the shape of something heavy there in the fold of cloth.
‘If you do not, I shall shoot a person at random and their death shall be on your head. Do you understand? I am being well paid for this mission and I mean to complete it.’
His gaze took in a young mother on the far side of the room, two small children at her side.
Violet knew he meant what he said for she had spent enough years with her imbalanced husband to recognise another of the same ilk.
With care, she placed her book to one side and stood. When he gestured for her to go out through a small door at the back she could do little else. No one watched her leave. No one looked up as though things were not quite as they ought to be. The world of books and their patrons just carried on even as she was spirited out through the back and into a dark connecting passage. Then an arm came heavily around her and a pad of sweet-smelling cloth was applied to her nose. As she struggled, her limbs became heavy and numb and then all she knew was darkness.
Eli Tucker was waiting at the front gate of Lian’s town house when his carriage arrived back in London just after six in the evening. The man looked furious and Lian’s heartbeat skipped in his chest.
Violet. Something had happened to her.
Snatching open the door to the wind and the rain he leaped out.
‘What the hell is wrong?’
‘Lady Addington disappeared at Lackington’s bookshop in Finsbury Square, sir, this afternoon around three. We were waiting out at the front with the carriage and when she did not reappear we went in to look for her. She was nowhere to be found and no one could remember seeing where she went. There one moment and gone the next. This was left on the seat of a chair in the main reading room.’
His gold signet ring sat in the palm of Tucker’s hand.
‘Someone has taken her.’
He should have stayed in London himself with the danger all around her and why the hell had she gone into the shop alone? He was furious at his own shortcomings and that of his guards, the red roar of blood in his ears.
‘Why didn’t you damn well go in with her, Tucker? Everywhere is dangerous.’
‘Lady Addington specifically asked me not to, my lord. She said she needed a moment of private reading.’
That sounded so like something Violet would say that Lian breathed in and tried to take stock of his fury. ‘Take me to the bookshop now. There must be something we can find out.’
‘I doubt anyone would be there at this time, my lord.’
‘There will be a night watchman. He will have to do.’ The fury in him mounted as he gestured for the guard to get in and commanded his driver to take him to Lackington’s.
Twenty minutes later, Lian stood in the main room of the bookshop, a gas lamp in his hand as he looked at the chair his ring had been found upon. It was a good thirty feet from the main door but only five or so feet to a smaller door at the back. Whoever had taken Violet would not wish to garner attention, though Lian found it hard to believe she would neither yell nor scream as he forcibly kidnapped her. Yet another problem to think on. The skin on his arms puckered with fear and he shook such panic away, the cold of logic a far more reassuring emotion.
Striding through the now opened door into a passageway that was small and dark, he turned to the night watchman.
‘Where does this lead?’
‘The back entrance, sir. It is usually locked, though...’ He petered out for plainly today it was not.
Peering at the ground, Lian hoped to see something, anything that could lead him to Violet. There were traces of a recent passing, the dust swirled in the sort of patterns that the hem of a passing skirt might make. Kneeling down, he shone the light closer.
‘There.’
Footprints. Boots. Above a size eleven. Where were the corresponding ones of Violet’s in the turned dirt further on? As he looked he came to the realisation there were none which meant she had been carried. Had her abductor used force to hurt her or to render her unconscious? Would it have been a blow to the head or the quieter use of some drug? He would stake his life on the latter. They wanted her alive, at least for a while, though the note she had shown him threatening death preyed on his mind.
Another door before them was also unlocked, a key and chain discarded on the ground outside. Lian picked them up and saw the cut through wide steel link. They had come prepared for the metal was thick and heavy.
