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Even if the man had walked right past him without a word the day after. And now he was a father and Haggs did not seem to know where his friend was. Well, Lord Petteril was one of life’s eccentrics, though Cauldwell would be proud to call him friend.

Whistling, Cauldwell snatched up his keys and left his rented rooms for another busy day.

***

INSTEAD OF GOING NEAR the ruins in Saracen Street, April slouched along the other side of the street, past the low cottage that interested her. It had two windows to the front. One was shuttered, the other glazed but hung with a heavy, dirty net curtain. The front door was old but stout enough. She saw no movement there, but that didn’t mean no one was watching her. Impossible to tell if the place was abandoned.

Or was it the unassuming headquarters of Raddle’s mysterious “new player”?

The yard and the workshop next to the cottage were deserted, apart from a couple of stray dogs who regarded her without interest. The flimsy building had no windows, and the roof was half off. It was so bleak, even the vagrants appeared to have rejected it. She walked on purposefully toward the taller building. Like most in Seven Dials, it had once been a fine, stuccoed gentleman’s house, before it had been broken up into several dwellings and then each of those into several more, neglected and uncared for. One of the chimneys had broken, bits of stonework were missing, and the windows were nearly all boarded. Shadows seemed to lurk around the corner, though they vanished as April moved on.

She thought the place was probably a rookery, perhaps newly under the control of the “player”, and her blood ran cold at the very idea of Piers being held in such a place and by such people. Life was too cheap for them. They would as soon knife you as look at you. Even their habitation tended to be riddled with traps for the unwary. The uninitiated could die by accident or just get lost in the maze of passages and cellars, stairs that went nowhere, and trapdoors that opened without warning under your feet or above your head...

She was not stupid enough to show any interest in the place, or to give it a particularly wide berth as though frightened of what lay within. Although she was. She walked on around the corner and along the length of the building until she came to the next alley.

She had to snarl at a lad who emerged from a doorway in her direction, but otherwise, she saw no one. Whatever caused the emptiness in this small area, it could be working in her favour. Surely anyone who had noticed her would have challenged her by now? She might not look much of a threat to anyone, but she was eminently threatenable. Only no one had bothered. Gradually, she worked her way to the back of the disused yard, from where she could see more rows of boarded windows in the large house. A couple of dirty children sat on a dry, broken fountain, throwing something unspeakable from one to the other. There would be no slipping quietly into the rookery, she knew. They had their own ways of detecting and dealing with uninvited guests. She would have to go in openly and she would be a fool to risk that unless she knew for certain Piers was there.

She hoped very hard that he was not, for her chances of finding him, let alone getting him out, were negligible. Even with an army of constables at her back.

On the other hand, sneaking through a broken fence board into the workshop yard, she rather thought she was right that this place was deserted. Which was odd. Overcrowding was so rife here and people so desperate, that they spilled into any vacant space that offered shelter of any kind. Why weren’t they here? Had they been warned off? A rookery certainly made an uncomfortable neighbour.

A stone wall divided the empty yard from the much smaller one behind the cottage. Both back yards were on an upward slope toward the buildings, but unlike the deserted work yard, the cottage’s was scrubby dirt with bits of grass, a few brambles and nettles. It might have been a garden once. In fact, this and the workshop yard might all have been the garden of the big house turned rookery. Not that it mattered.

The back of the cottage had a low door—to a cellar perhaps—and one boarded window. She sat down in a corner of the little garden to watch and listen.

For Seven Dials, the area was far too quiet, as if it had been cut off. She could hear people and bustling activity in the distance, beyond the high wall that separated this alley from the blank, gables next to it. No one moved in the cottage, unless it was behind the cellar door or the boarded window.

Of the buildings that overlooked the ruin where she was supposed to leave the ransom money, this cottage was the only one she had a chance of investigating safely—safely for her and for Piers. The half-open workshop wasn’t secure enough for a prisoner; the rookery would ensure both of them died and were never found. But here...

Her attention focused on the boarded window. Was she imagining the faint noises that came from there?

Standing, she tugged the breeches away from her skin, for the ground was damp, and moved closer to the building. It was bare stone and not in good repair, although the small door looked stout enough. She wondered how easy it would be to pick such a heavy looking lock. Hands in pockets, she fingered the picklocks and spanners she had brought just in case...

Oddly, it was the window that still drew her. She could no longer hear anything from up there. It had probably been her imagination. The old stone between the window and the ground looked as if it provided plenty of hand and foot holds, so she shouldn’t even need the rope currently holding Piers’s breeches up at her waist. She took another step forward and paused.

She hadn’t heard anyone approaching the front of the building, but now she heard a faint click, like a smooth lock turning, and the whisper of a well-oiled door opening and softly closing. She froze, her gaze locked on the cellar door, her ears straining for the slightest sound.

Someone was in the cottage. At least one person, though she could hear no voices. They would surely be at the front of the house, in the room with the shutters or the filthy net curtain...

Which meant they were nowhere near her.

She reached for a handhold in the stone and began to climb.

Chapter Seven

As far as Piers could tell, the board was bolted oto the stone of the outside wall. There was no way he could unbolt it from this side, and the chances of his glass shards making so much as a dent in the iron bolt were non-existent. Still, there could be no quick escape. So he settled down to scraping and shaving the wood.

It was painful, slow and mind-numbingly dull. He tried to keep his brain active and alert by going over his memorized descriptions of both his jailers and mulling over the people who might be his jailers, the people who might have betrayed him. Or to whom he had betrayed himself.

Darcy, his rakehell of a neighbour, was only one of the many people of whose acquaintance he’d needed to be reminded. But he did remember the man’s amiability, and the agony with which he had once confessed to being afraid he had committed a terrible crime while drunk as a wheelbarrow. Piers recognized that it would hurt him—and April—if Darcy had turned on them...

But whoever the culprit, Piers knew it would hurt. Darcy was far from the only man he had failed to recognize. Even at White’s with Jeremy Gadsby, some stranger had greeted him by name. Jeremy had asked who it was and Piers had murmured, “No idea.”

These days, he sailed into social events with superb indifference. April called it “being the viscount”, and it worked as well for him as the vague, friendly smile with which he greeted all hails and encounters until he worked out who the devil he was talking to. It didn’t just happen with slight acquaintances either. It could be his own family, his oldest friends out of context. Someone, somewhere, had worked out his problem and was using it to go free after robbing him of three thousand pounds—and upsetting April, which was even less forgivable.

He did not doubt that she was upset, with this crisis adding to that of childbirth... Unspeakable.

Voices within the building caused him to stop and lay down the glass. They were male voices, though he couldn’t make out the words. One of them laughed, and then they both faded.