Much Ado About Rogues

“Adelaide is nothing like you, and you’re nothing like her. If you were, that child upstairs would never have happened. We’re here to discuss Jacques, and why you kept him from me.”

He shouldn’t have bothered to attempt to divert her. Tess, presented with a puzzle, was like a dog with a bone. She clamped on, and wouldn’t let go. “Your brothers. Oliver LeBeau and Robin Goodfellow to your Don John. All named for Shakespearean characters, courtesy of your actress mother. Don John was a bastard, Jack. I’ve never much cared for Shakespeare, I’ll admit, but I did learn that. Are the other two characters also bastards?”

“No, they’re not. And my brothers prefer to be known as Beau and Puck. Just as I prefer Jack. Why didn’t you tell me? My son, Tess. My son.”

He may as well not have spoken.

“Are they also dark? Beau and Puck?”

Jack deserted the mantelpiece for the drinks table, pouring himself another glass of wine. He never should have brought her here. He could have taken her to his house in Half Moon Street, but he preferred the mansion as being safer for Jacques. “They favor their parents,” he said, and then turned to challenge Tess with his eyes. “You’re not going to stop, are you?”

“Would you?” she asked him, standing her ground. “You once told me you didn’t belong anywhere. I thought you were referring to your bastard birth. It had to be difficult, must still be difficult, to be the bastard son of a marquess. Neither fish nor fowl, as it were, I suppose, not knowing precisely where you fit, if anywhere. But we’re in your father’s mansion, and you clearly not for the first time. The marquess seems to be generous to his bastards.”

She was working it through, piece by piece, and Jack allowed it, mostly because he knew he couldn’t stop her.

“Is he similarly generous to your mother?”

“I suppose you’d have to ask her. He ordered a cottage built on the estate for her, and she stays there when she isn’t traveling with the acting troupe he’s bought her. It has a thatched roof. The cottage, that is. She enjoys playing the country maiden. There are a few sheep, and she dresses up like a shepherdess and carries a crook with a large pink bow on—Yes, I suppose she’s content.”

“You don’t like her, do you? Your mother. It’s not her fault you’re a bastard, Jack. That’s unfair.”

Jack laughed shortly. “True. Poor Adelaide. Clearly you sympathize with her, one bastard’s mother to another.”

Tess crossed the room swiftly and slapped him hard across the cheek. “Don’t call our son a bastard!”

Jack didn’t flinch. “Pardon me. I seem to have forgotten our marriage ceremony.”

She rubbed her hands together. Her palm probably stung; God knew his cheek felt as if it was on fire. “That’s not what I meant. It’s not what you said. It’s the way you said it. As if… as if it mattered.”

“It does matter, Tess. Christ, if nobody else knows that, I do. My brothers do. We were raised on the estate. In that sprawling country house. Raised to be better than we were. Given everything save the one thing we needed. Legitimacy. That’s not how it’s going to be for my son. I’ve already sent a message to Blackthorn. The banns are being read in the village church, and one way or another—if I have to carry you to the altar over my shoulder and drugged stupid—you and I will be married in four weeks’ time. That’s what we’re discussing tonight.”

Now he’d succeeded in diverting her.

“You don’t want to marry me, Jack,” she said quietly.

“You’re right. I don’t. I wanted to marry the Tess I knew. I don’t know you. The Tess I knew wouldn’t have kept my son from me.”

“You’ve grown hard, Jack. Cold. You were never like that with me. You’re not the man I remember, either.”

“Four years is a long time,” he agreed. “A lifetime, when you’re carrying what I’ve carried with me, knowing what I know.”

“René,” she said quietly.

It was time they had this out. “Yes, René, he’s a major part of it. I changed the plan, altering it to include you and include your brother. For that I am guilty, and I’ll never forgive myself for not excluding both of you, which is what I should have done. I knew he was hot to please Sinjon, hot to impress him, prove himself.”

“Not just Papa. He wanted you to be proud of him. He worshipped you.”

“Then he was a fool. But still, there should have been another way, and I should have found it. That’s my sin, Tess, and I admit to it. But there was more, and you know that now.”

“Papa risked René to get the Gypsy.”

Jack laughed ruefully. “That’s it? That’s all you think can be put at Sinjon’s door? My God, you’re still blind, aren’t you?”

Tess’s expression closed. “I’d like to be shown to my chamber now.”

“What was the plan?” Jack shouted to her departing back. “Think, Tess. What was the plan!”

Her shoulders slumped and she turned to him, tears standing in her eyes. “I was to be the stalking horse, the decoy, the distraction,” she said quietly. “I was to stand in the glow of the streetlamp outside Covent Garden, clutching the satchel supposedly holding the money to be exchanged for Bonaparte’s next battle plan. Reveal myself, draw the man’s attention, divert him, make him in turn reveal himself so that you and Papa could take him down once he’d taken possession of the satchel.”

“Thank you,” Jack said, his voice dripping venom. “You, not René. Out in the open, not in a Whitechapel alleyway. With only Sinjon knowing that the mission was not what we thought it was, with only Sinjon knowing we weren’t going up against some inferior French traitor, but drawing out the Gypsy, the monster he’d taught every trick he ever knew.”

Tess wet her lips as she nodded. “He would have known, yes. Papa’s used the same ploy before.”

Jack gave a quick thought to Dickie Carstairs. “And I’ve used it since, to great effect, I admit that. Making it easy for the Gypsy to recognize it and form a counter-plan of his own,” he told her, approaching her slowly so that possibly she wouldn’t bolt, run away from the truth. He spoke quietly now. “So why not put one of my children—it didn’t matter which one—out there as a decoy, and then I’d wait for the Gypsy to ignore the obvious ploy. I’d wait for him to come out of the shadows just where he knew I’d be hiding, ready to strike. Except that didn’t happen, did it? Sinjon wasn’t even looking in René’s direction when the monster cut him down.”

Tess was standing with her arms tightly wrapped around her middle, rocking back and forth as tears rolled down her cheeks. She hadn’t been there, she hadn’t seen it, the quick savagery.

But Jack had been watching. He’d been in place, ready to move, when a blur of black, hooded cloak moved across the alleyway, barely hesitating in front of René before disappearing through a narrow door previously unnoticed by anyone. René hadn’t even hit the cobblestones before the door had closed, the hooded figure gone.

Jack had run to the boy, not even remembering how he had leapt over the barrels that had concealed his position, arriving long seconds before Sinjon, who promptly knelt down, his ear close to his son’s mouth. René grabbed his father’s arm, said something Jack couldn’t make out, and then his hand fell away. He was dead, the knife in his chest to the hilt, a strange black calling card with a golden eye at its center half-tucked into his waistcoat pocket.

The Gypsy had come to that alley not to sell French secrets to the Crown, as Jack had been told, but expressly to kill. But not to kill Sinjon. René’s murder was a warning. Tess’s death would have delivered that same warning had she been the one standing in the alley.

“He thought I’d—he thought René would be safely out of it.”

“Which is where you both should have been, damn it. This wasn’t for Crown and country, Tess. This was private, one man against the other. And for what, Tess? For that damn collection.”

“You should have told me then—the secret room, the collection, all of it. You shouldn’t have let me blame you. Papa said—”

“I know what he told you. That I froze. That I didn’t move fast enough. I was closer, I should have been able to stop it. My most important mission, and I’d botched it. And I had, Tess. I should have put a stop to it all before we ever went into that alley.”

“You didn’t know then that our quarry was the Gypsy.” She put her hand on his arm. “René’s dead. We can’t either of us change that. I wish you had told me. I wish I could believe I’d have been ready to listen. Everything would have been so… different.”

Jack slipped his arms around her, pulling her close against his chest. “This time he dies, Tess. I promise you that.”

She stepped back to look at him, to watch his reaction to her next words, he was sure. “And this time I’ll be there to see him die.”

All right. Now it was his turn to look at her, watch her. “And Sinjon? What about him?”

“I don’t know, Jack. I just don’t know.”

TESS THANKED THE maid who’d helped her into her nightrail and dismissed her, already looking longingly at the turned-down bed across the large chamber. She’d been upstairs to see that Jacques was sound asleep, tucked up in a cot shaped like a swan, of all things, and that Emilie was snoring loudly in the next room, the door open between them.

Only a little more than a single day and night, and everything in Tess’s life had changed. For the first time in her life she knew what it meant to not know if one was on her head or her heels.