Page 75 of Immortal Rose

He’d told her more than he’d intended to; he might not have said anything at all, if Keyes hadn’t looked at him with such blatant disappointment. The sort that made him shrivel back into the tearful boy he’d been, terrified she might leave him, too. It was unfair of her. Hugh had only done what Uncle Giles had countless times: contained the information to only those who needed to know it.

Of course he regretted misjudging the situation with Lockwood. Of course Felicity would be upset by it all. That was why he hadn’t told any of them. It wasn’t shame so much as . . .

He sighed. No, it was shame. He felt its heartless sting even now. It had to be why he’d told Lockwood about his mother—that truly had been something Lockwood hadn’t needed to know, not to complete her task.

Keyes had been right about one thing, at least. Lockwood wasn’t a prisoner. She’d shown him trust by bringing him into her family’s hidden archive. The very least he could do was trust her with his suspicions about Glenmoor. They were descending into this darkness together.

And the truth was she was nothing he’d expected her to be. She had a seemingly insatiable, maddening need to possess what others would keep from her, whether it was the impossible knowledge of perfumes or a vast fortune. That drive, it echoed with something in him.

More surprising still, he hadn’t needed to protect her from the terrifying truth; she’d simply taken it all in stride with the same aplomb she’d used to negotiate with the divinely anointed King of Albion. Though she liked to play the streetwise miss, he could hear the pains her mother had taken in her upbringing. She spoke with the elocution of a lady, even as she had the mouth of a sailor.

Lockwood was like Knights and Knuckers, the exasperating children’s game his uncle had insisted they play as some misguided lesson in managing a loss of control. Each roll of the dice was an invitation to chaos, a chance to win or lose.

It incensed and intrigued Hugh at every turn that he couldn’t immediately anticipate Lockwood’s responses, that he hadn’t yet—yet—decrypted the pattern of her. But there was something addictive about it, too. The danger of that challenge was like a yawning chasm widening at his feet, beckoning him forward toward the exhilaration of falling. Hugh had to take care to live only at that edge, enjoying the temptation but not the weightless plunge.

He hurried past the shadowed temple ruins, his steps at a quick clip as he navigated the borough’s knot of streets. By the time he reached his destination, he was a minute early to the meet.

Fleetwood was a broad lane of austere storefronts and offices; it was a place of business, where one was neither expected nor invited to linger. Better yet, the street was awash in Hugh’s favorite sort of scattered darkness, which promised anonymity and plausible deniability. He followed it to its end, before turning onto Bridle Street, winding through the back channel of an alleyway until he found the door marked for deliveries, left ajar.

Unsurprisingly, it was Audette herself who met him there, as long-necked and elegant as a swan, her downy white hair pinned back in such a way to suggest wings. Madame Audette could claim the bone structure of a Gallian aristocrat and possessed the unimpressed gaze of one as well. But when she spoke, her true self, Sally Williams, slipped through with her rip-roaring Riverside accent.

“Yer late.”

“Madame Audette, a pleasure as always to be in your presence,” he said smoothly. “I take it my man is already here?”

Madame Audette lashed out an arm, gripping the doorframe to block his path into the back room of the shop. “This here is the last time, ye hear me? Consider me account with the old canker sore closed. Kicked up his ’eels, he did, and ’e took the debt I owed with ’im.”

Hugh’s smile sharpened dangerously. “Of course.”

The modiste had been one of Uncle Giles’s best sources of information on the Patricians. He’d played the long game of funding the early years of her shop, of putting her name in the Queen’s ear, knowing modiste shops were the conduit through which all society gossip flowed.

Hugh followed her into the back room, its shelves overflowing with bolts of fabric. Dress forms with half-finished gowns circled the dark space like wraiths, waiting to judge and shred his soul for what he was about to do. He thought about asking for a candle, but no—this was business best left to the dark.

Whimpering filled the silence. Hugh reached into his coat for a handkerchief, pressing it to his nose and mouth as he rounded the last of the shelves and came upon the two men waiting for him: a pale-faced gentleman sweating through his shirtsleeves and bound to a chair with rope, and Stratford.

“Ah, there you are,” Stratford said, a handkerchief pressed to his own face. “Was worried I misheard you earlier about the time.”

The Roach, Reddy called him, for his dark hair and beady eyes, as well as his ability to slip into places he neither was wanted nor belonged. But also, Hugh suspected, for his innate ability to make one feel slightly repulsed and want to look away. That, too, was a gift in spycraft. The false beard he’d worn earlier when he’d played the role of a jarvey was gone, and now it was as if he were a different man altogether.

“No little miss tonight?” Stratford said, sounding disappointed. “I liked her.”

“You applied the Crown of Veracity?” Hugh asked instead of answering.

The perfume, which demanded the truth from its scenter or else dealt immense pain, was the most useful in his repertoire for this exact purpose.

Stratford nodded, returning the small black perfume flacon to him. “Already started questioning him. Seems you were right about his connection to Glenmoor’s secretary—”

The bound man whimpered at the duke’s name.

“—he’s been importing Gallian contraband for the duke for the better part of a year,” Stratford finished. “But he only has dealings with the secretary.”

Of course. Glenmoor never dirtied his own hands if he could help it.

Hugh turned back to the merchant, a Mr. Joseph Angleson of Bonding Street. “What sort of contraband do you import for the Duke of Glenmoor?”

The man was well into his graying age, and for a moment, Hugh feared the perfume might bring on an apoplexy. Angleson’s eyes bulged, and a sound like an unoiled hinge escaped him as he tried to resist the effects of the perfume.

“The pain will worsen as you resist and if you lie,” Hugh warned him, using his foot to turn the man’s chair to face him. He leaned down to the merchant’s level. “What contraband? Silks?”