Page 13 of A Duke in Disguise
“No!” She stepped towards him, as if she planned to snatch the book from his hands. “What I mean to say,” she continued in a calmer tone, “is that it must stay with me. It must. You can perhaps visit at this hour every Tuesday and Thursday.”
“I see,” Ash said, even though he did not see at all. But he understood that the lady was attached to this collection of dead plants. The rich, he reminded himself, were unaccountable in their fancies and predilections. “I’m an engraver by trade. I can certainly make accurate drawings of the specimens in this book, but for the fee you mentioned in the letter, you could hire a trained botanical illustrator.”
She smoothed her skirt with pale hands. “It is—I thought—if things go as planned, I might want to make a book of my specimens, in which case I would require an engraver.” He didn’t answer at once, mainly because he was confused about why she seemed almost embarrassed to speak these words aloud, but also because he realized that producing the engravings could keep him busy for months, if not years, and he did not know if he wanted to spend that much time in a house that left him feeling strangely seasick. But she took his silence as condemnation. “It’s a silly idea, forget I said anything.” Her cheeks flushed with what he took to be shame, and he knew he was not going to deny her.
“No, ma’am, you misunderstand. It’s not a silly idea in the least. Indeed, I’ve seen similar volumes for sale at bookshops.” And at quite a formidable price, no less. “I’d be only too glad to help you.”
He pulled out his paper and inks and began sketching the first specimen, a fragile plant whose flowers had dried to a dusty violet but must once have been vibrantly purple. It looked like the common skullcap that grew in every park and garden, but the label indicated that it came from Shanghai. He began sketching the threadlike roots, then drew in the wispy stem. There was hardly anything holding this plant together, no substance; fifty of them in his hand would weigh no more than his pen. Rooted in the ground and nourished by water, it must have some solidity, but dried and fixed to the paper it seemed one step away from dust.
But before his pen reached the delicate flowers, Lady Caroline rose to her feet with a start. “Oh!” she said, and pulled a timepiece out of a pocket. “I heard the door. You’ll need to leave.” Spurred on by the urgency in the lady’s voice, Ash gathered his supplies and stepped towards the door he had entered through. “No, not that way. It’s too late for that. Through the garden. I can’t show you the way, but you’ll find the mews with no trouble. Goodbye, Mr. Ashby, I’ll await your next visit.”
She dropped two guineas onto the table he had been using.
“That’s far too much,” he protested.
“I’ll pay twice as much, if you’ll only leave!” If it was possible to shout without making any more noise than wind passing through bare branches, Lady Caroline Talbot was doing it.
There was no mistaking the fear in her expression, so Ash executed a brief bow, scooped up the coins, and made for the door as quickly as he could. As he reached the garden, he heard a loud male voice booming from within the house. A jealous husband, he assumed. And one whose jealousy manifested in more than disapproval. He wondered how those pages had been burnt.
The garden was bleak in its late autumn grays and browns, a heavy mist washing out whatever color lingered on the remaining leaves, but Ash suspected that if the shrubbery had been green and the rose bushes blooming, he might have had the same feeling of confused recognition that he had earlier. He brushed aside the urge to find a bench and make sense of his confusion, and instead hailed a hackney to take him to the only place that he could even pretend was his home.
Verity could not remember the last time the building had been so silent in the middle of the day. Nate had given his assistants a few days holiday while he was away, and the result was a quiet so insistent that Verity could hardly think. Even the noises from the street were muffled by the fog that settled over the city. It was hardly past noon, but she already needed a lamp to see the pages of the book that sat before her on the shop counter.
Her first thought when she saw the flutter of movement outside the shop window was surprise that she had any customers at all on so dreary a day. Then the door opened and in marched three redcoats.
“You Plum’s sister or wife?” demanded the soldier who seemed to be in charge of the others.
“Sister,” she answered, embarrassed to hear the fear in her voice.
“Where’s he at?”
“He stepped out,” Verity said. She certainly wasn’t going to admit that he had gone to Derby for the Pentrich executions.
“When’s he coming back?”
“I don’t know. He comes and goes as he pleases.” She tried to imbue her voice with sisterly irritation—not hard, under the circumstances—rather than anything they could interpret as defiance or fear. They stood too close to her, crowding her towards the back wall of the shop, and she suddenly felt a bone-deep apprehension at being alone with a group of men. “If you happen to see him you might let him know there’s naught but beef tea for his supper,” she added for good measure, as if Nate might stroll in the door at any moment.
One of the men showed her a piece of paper, and it took her a minute to realize it was a search warrant. She watched in helpless fury as the soldiers ransacked the shop, gritting her teeth as the few unsold copies of the first issue of theLadies’ Registerfell to the floor and were crushed beneath booted feet. At least they hadn’t had a warrant for Nate’s arrest. And that, as she watched them rummage carelessly through shelves and drawers, struck her as very strange indeed. If they were looking for evidence that Plum & Company printed radical materials, they needed look no further than the latest issue of theRegister, and they needed only sixpence to see as much, not a warrant. The back room contained nothing more than a pair of printing presses, boxes of type, jars of ink, and large rolls of paper. The redcoats tossed the room anyway. She was going to lose days of work setting things to rights.
The man who seemed to be in charge said something to the other two—Verity was too distracted by the pounding of her heart to quite understand—and they left shortly thereafter, knocking over a stack of books on their way out the door.
It could have been worse, Verity told herself, her heart still racing, her hands slick with sweat. They could have contrived to knock over a bookcase so it went through the windows. Or landed on her, for that matter. Christ, she had been alone with those men. Alone, in the half-light, on a dismal day when few people were in the street. A shiver went up her spine, but she quickly dismissed her fear. There was no time for fear. There was no time for anything except the work that lay ahead of her. There never was. She sat on the floor and began putting the books back on the shelves.
“Verity.” Ash crouched beside her on the floor. She hadn’t heard him come in. “Verity.” He took her chin and made her look at him.
“Redcoats.” She scrubbed at her face with the back of her sleeve. “I’m not crying.”
“Did they hurt you?” His voice was gentle, questioning, not angry. She could imagine another man asking those words in a way that forced her to spend her dwindling supply of patience in soothing him.
“No, no. Ash, they only had a search warrant, not an arrest warrant.”
“A search warrant,” Ash repeated some time later, when he was helping her shelve books. She saw the moment he realized what it had taken her hours to work out. “Damnation. Has Nate been involved in something even more incendiary than theRegister?”
“I was going to ask if you knew anything.” The fact was that thus far, largely due to Verity’s insistence, theRegisterhadn’t strayed too far into outright sedition. That single oblique allusion to the guillotine was the furthest they had gone. But if Nate was printing pamphlets—off premises, presumably, or she would have noticed—then he could be tried for those.
Ash set his jaw. “He’d better not be.” He sighed. “Here, let’s be done with this,” he said, gesturing to the chaos of the shop around them. “This mess will keep until tomorrow. You look like you could do with a wash and a hot meal.”
She glanced down at her hands and found them covered in ink and dust. Her face had to be in much the same state. “Nan went home hours ago.”
