Page 5 of One Thing Leads to a Lover

But he had expected to count it an easy victory.

Certainly it ought to have been. He’d wondered, at first, why General Scott had sent him. Anyone in Scott’s service of highly trained intelligence officers could have been called upon to retrieve the package Lieutenant Hopkins had been forced to abandon in a moment of desperation. Nothing about the assignment suggested, even now, the need to involve the man once accounted Scott’s best agent.

Then again, Scott’s best agent was leaving without getting what he’d come for.

Langley fished in his breast pocket for his spectacles and carefully threaded them over his ears. The green smudges of trees sharpened into individual leaves fluttering and rustling in the afternoon breeze. He could even spot the cracks and joints in the elegant stone facades surrounding him, if he chose to look.

He would have liked to have seen Lady Kingston as clearly, to have had more than an impression of dark eyes surrounded by a frowsy halo of golden-brown hair. To have been able to judge her reaction to his request by the expression on her face.

But the spectacles were noteworthy. An identifying feature. So he often went without them in public, went without his uniform, too, without anything that might easily distinguish him from a hundred other gentlemen, tallish but not too tall, with brown hair and eyes, who dressed respectably enough but far from the first stare of fashion.

In the flurry following the news of Hopkins’s predicament, there had been no time to plan a cover story more thorough than “shop clerk.” No time to compile a dossier about the woman who, through sheer happenstance, now possessed some of the most valuable information in England. Langley hadn’t expected to need either one.

Therefore, he also hadn’t expected the widowed Countess of Kingston to be so young. Hadn’t expected the pair of curious boys she’d hustled out of sight.

Armed with a duplicate copy of the volume she had purchased that morning at Porter’s, he had intended to make a simple exchange of books. Certainly he hadn’t expected to need to leave his calling card.

Would the simple etching of a magpie pique her curiosity about him?

If so, then he’d have to find a way to assuage it.

More likely, though, she wouldn’t spare him another thought. Would she even remember to return the book, as she’d promised? Worse, would she take up the suggestion of the pompous ass who’d met him at the door and send it back to the bookshop in the careless hands of a servant? He’d need to set a watch on Porter’s if that might be the case.

“Damn it,” he muttered—or perhaps he hadn’t muttered, given the shocked expression on the face of the elderly woman who drew abreast of him on Curzon Street at precisely that moment.

He lifted a finger to the brim of his hat. “Apologies, ma’am.”

Count yourself lucky it wasn’t worse.

Past St. James’s, on a street lined with establishments that catered to gentlemen—clubs, discreet pleasure houses, even a gaming hell or two—Langley wheeled into a glass-fronted shop. The bell jingled merrily, unperturbed by the force with which he’d opened the door. The high walls were lined with drawers and shelves of jars, all filled with varieties of snuff and tobacco, their perfume spicing the air.

“Right with you, sir,” called the proprietor, Mr. Millrose, a portly Black man with close-cropped silvery hair. He was perched on a ladder, leaning precariously toward a jar that was still almost out of his reach. The customer at the counter did not turn his head.

With one deft flick of his hand, Millrose swept the jar from the shelf into his arm and clattered back down the ladder, chatting amiably as he measured out and wrapped the other man’s purchase.

When the door had closed behind the customer, but before the bell dangling above it had ceased its dance, Millrose shifted his attention to Langley. “Well, sir?”

Langley spread his hands on the counter. “I’ll need a paper of the Kingston blend.”

Millrose’s gaze flickered from Langley’s empty hands to his face, betraying no hint of recognition or surprise. “Right away, sir.”

As Millrose turned toward the shelves behind him, Langley took a quick glance around the shop before ducking under an opening in the counter, sliding behind the ladder, and slipping through the door at the back of the shop.

A dozen years ago or more, when the war with France had been in its infancy, General Scott had ordered the purchase of the tobacconist’s shop, to be used as a front for the intelligence officers whose work would be endangered if they were regularly seen coming and going from Whitehall. Hidden away on a side street, tucked between some of the wealthiest and seediest parts of London, the shop still sold tobacco, just as the shingle outside proclaimed. The number of men who passed through its door was therefore perfectly unremarkable.

But below, in place of what must once have been the kitchen and servants’ quarters, now lay a warren of offices and spartan bedchambers, connected through a series of low-ceilinged passageways to what had been the kitchens and cellars of other establishments up and down the street. No one on the block seemed to know that beneath their floors, a hand-picked collection of secret agents and codebreakers worked day and night on behalf of the Crown.

No one, that was, but Mr. Millrose—Colonel Millrose, more correctly—who served as both General Scott’s aide and a purveyor of fine tobacco products. Langley had heard the man complain more than once, and only half-jokingly, that learning to recognize the different varieties of tobacco by sight and smell in order to appease the suspicions of the most particular customer had been far more difficult than learning how to break a Vigenère cipher.

Despite his impassive expression, Millrose must have been disappointed to see Langley return empty-handed. In the wrong hands—and more especially in the right ones—a codebook was a far more deadly weapon than any cannon. Hopkins had risked his life to steal this particular one.

Langley, tasked only with the simple act of retrieving it from some confused widow who’d been handed the thing while out for a shopping spree, had let everyone down. Again.

At the bottom of a narrow flight of stairs, a series of doors branched off a dimly lit corridor. Langley opened the second door on the right. He should have gone straight into the workroom and confessed his failings to the codebreakers hunched over the tables there, waiting both for his arrival and word of Hopkins’s fate.

Instead he threw himself onto a narrow rope cot, which all but filled the room that passed for his private quarters. He had inherited a house near Richmond, but he never visited it. Occasionally he reflected on the fact that he might have been sleeping on a feather mattress in a stately bedchamber overlooking a more scenic portion of the Thames.

Right now, however, comfort was the last thing he wanted.