Page 116 of The Viscount's Seduction
Chapter 23
Bakeley clutchedthe edge of the carriage seat as they turned a sharp corner. “What was the note you received?” he asked.
Across from him, his father remained silent, his face shadowed and unreadable.
His nerves jangled, and frustration gnawed at his empty stomach. “Did it have to do with the missing gunpowder?” Bakeley prodded. “And where the devil are we going, Father? This isn’t the way home.”
The meeting had been an interminable mix of waiting, talking, and speculating that stretched through the dinner hour. Radicals were gathering. Gunpowder had gone missing from a storehouse. Other matters were discussed, but Bakeley’s presence had turned the talk into coded innuendo, each official talking around his own interest. No wonder the common sewers wouldn’t work.
Hours into the ghastly event, a note was slipped into Shaldon’s hands, and here they were now, headed to God knew where.
“Do you remember Fox?” Father asked.
“The Whig politician?” Charles James Fox was long dead.
“No. The American painter.”
His skin crawled with memories and he blinked them away, not that Father could see in the dark. His memories of Fox were all tied up with his father’s capture by the French, his own quick trip to Ireland for that hobgoblin horse, and his mother’s sudden and tragic death.
“Yes,” he said.
“He’s come to London also.” Father’s flat tone belied an undercurrent of emotion, and damned if Bakeley could identify what that emotion was.
He’d soon find out, so he held his peace.
Bakeley setdown the tumbler and rubbed his hand on his trousers, then stopped. It was the move of a green schoolboy, and rude to boot. Their host had fallen on hard times, but the drink was good, though the rest of the room was shabby.
He studied the glass again in the dim light of two candles and a smoking lump of coal. Perhaps it wasn’t quite as dirty as he’d thought. He lifted it and let the amber liquid warm his throat.
Fox had excellent brandy, but it was a pity he hadn’t more coal. The wall of tall windows in this strange little chamber had no covering to keep out the chill late winter wind that seeped through loose seams in the window caulking.
“Fox, you must let me help you.” A fatherly kindness warmed Shaldon’s words, one that Bakeley did not often hear.
Fox raised bloodshot eyes. Hell, he wasn’t much older than Bakeley, but he looked it. His coat was worn, his neck cloth rumpled. Ten years earlier, he’d been better-dressed, healthier.
Ten years earlier, the man had gone from patron to patron, never keeping regular rooms. Now, he lived in this one room and another through a narrow door, left slightly ajar.
They’d startled their host, who was well into his cups. He’d not expected to see such a fast response to his note.
Now Father was dragging his feet. Why?
Bakeley glanced at that open door. “Is there someone else here with you?”
Fox laughed. “So you’ve grown into Shaldon’s son, I see. Go and have a look, Bakeley.”
Shaldon nodded. Bakeley took a candle and poked into the adjoining room, one hand upon the pistol in the pocket of the great coat he’d decided not to shed.
The room held a narrow bed and some neatly folded clothing and the acrid odor of paints.
Fox had spent months at Cransdall, painting portraits, a grand one of their mother, and one of the heir, the spare, and Perry together. Then he’d disappeared, shortly before Lady Shaldon’s fatal accident. He’d gone to the Continent on the King’s business, some whispered. Or he’d gone there to paint.
He ought to have earned enough commissions as a portrait artist to live better than this.
Though, perhaps this wasn’t the artist’s life. Perhaps this was the spy’s life. One could never be sure with his father’s acquaintances.
The men murmured in the adjoining room, their voices lowered now that he’d left them.
He raised his candle higher and strained to hear words while he looked around. Canvases lined the wall, a box of oils and brushes propped to keep them from falling.
