Page 70 of To Save a Scoundrel’s Soul

With a final kiss to Mickey’s forehead, Valentin carefully detached himself. He sat on the side of the bed, refastening his trousers. Mickey turned his head away, hardly able to look.

“Come with me, Mickey? If not now, soon. When you have missed me too much to bear my absence any longer.”

Mickey shook his head as a tear made its way down his cheek, uninvited. “I wouldn’t know how to find you.”

“Yes, you do.” Valentin indicated the bookcase. “You have maps, atlases, travel journals. Listen. This—you, us—is worth a thousand priceless parures. Saying goodbye to you now tears the heart from my body.”

“I feel it too.” Mickey’s throat closed over. “But for now, it is the only way.”

Valentin stood. “For now? Then this is not goodbye, London, so I shall not draw our parting out any longer. This is merely au revoir.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

London, 3 MONTHS LATER

THE OLDER MAN, tallish, but lean of build and with the beginnings of a stoop, had strolled past the discreet entrance to Squire’s three times in the space of half an hour. Sidney first noticed him yesterday, leaning against an oak in the square opposite.

“Was here this morning, too, doing the same thing. Don’t look like trouble, but then trouble never does until it’s cosied up in your best chair by the fire, sipping your favourite brandy, and trying to bamboozle one of our young nobs out of ten guineas. Shall I invite him in, ask him his business?”

“Why not,” Mickey replied, returning to his dull accounting. Seated at his desk in Tommy’s study, he worked alone. Tommy was somewhere on the floor below in his private rooms, entertaining Ashington and inadvertently fuelling Mickey’s sense of aloneness even more.

His gaze drifted beyond the window to the trees in the square, now bearing blossom. Sidney’s interruption should at least have stirred something—anything—within him. But there was nothing, only the usual vague indifference, still hanging around him since Valentin left. “Send him in here.”

Sidney rarely needed to strongarm people. Once he’d flexed his muscles at them, they tended to come willingly. This man was no exception. As Sidney suggested he take a seat—the unspoken threat apparent if he didn’t—Mickey made a point of disinterestedly not lifting his gaze from his accounts.

“There are no laws forbidding members of the public from loitering outside this establishment, sir,” Mickey observed, crossing a line through an item in red ink. “But it tends to make our Sidney here nervous.”

“I’m not looking for trouble, Mr Maurice,” answered the man placidly.

Mickey couldn’t place his pleasant accent. Not town—west of town, perhaps, or down near the coast.

“No?” He crossed a line through another item, annotating the margin with a date.

“No,” the stranger repeated. “I’m here to find a man who goes by the name of London. Important fella here at this highfalutin club; rubs shoulders with the bigwigs. By all accounts, he’s a good-looking devil, too, though he doesn’t know it.”

London. Mickey’s hand hovered over the inkwell as the page in front of him twisted and blurred at the edges. His quill, still between his ink-stained finger and thumb, felt heavier than it had a second ago. Slippery too. Carefully, he placed it on the desk, and only then did he trust himself to properly look up—into a pair of moss-green eyes, cloudier than the pair filling his restless dreams, but a remarkable moss-green, nonetheless.

The visitor nodded at him. “I’ve been watching the coming and goings, and I reckon you fit the bill, Mr Maurice.”

A rush of images spilled into Mickey’s consciousness, images he’d tried to hold at bay. The older man wasn’t as handsome as Valentin, his nose too large for his face, his chin weaker. He lacked the Frenchman’s poise. But there was no mistaking who he was.

“Sidney, could you leave us for a few minutes?” The words tumbled from him, too sharp, unformed, causing Sidney to hesitate.

“It’s quite all right, Sidney. Mr Roberts is known to me.”

*

PACING, MICKEY DISCOVERED, helped his equilibrium. No wonder the duke employed it so often. “Your son is…is well?”

“Blooming, sir.” Roberts gave a satisfied smile, seeming more at ease without Sidney at his back. “Always done right by his old pa, that’s for sure. His business here in town brought him a tidy sum. Worth the journey.”

“Do…do you understand the nature of your son’s business, Mr Roberts?”

“Trading,” he said. “On behalf of gentlemen needing a few bob in a hurry; they use Val to sell things on, and he takes a cut.”

He certainly does. Mickey recalled the story of Bonaparte’s Devil’s Diamonds. Cut every single one of them out of the tiara, if the tale were true.

“Only quite small items of value,” Roberts continued. “Paintings, bits of jewellery, and the like. But they soon add up.” His voice was full of admiration. “That’s my understanding. He was always clever.”