Unmasked Read Free Page B

turned it over. On the back was written the words Peacock Oak, the estate in Yorkshire where Charles had his country seat.
    Nick saw the inn servant at the front of the crowd, his face thin and terrified in the flickering light. He walked over to him.
    “You were standing near to Lord Rashleigh when he was talking to the girl,” he said. “Did you hear anything they said?”
    “Are you the law?” the servant demanded.
    Nick thought of Lord Hawkesbury and wondered what he would make of this mess. “Near enough,” he said.
    The servant shook his head. There was the sweat of fear on his upper lip and he wiped it away with his sleeve. “He asked if there was a place where they could talk and she said to wait a few minutes and then to follow her across the street. That was all.”
    Nick held out the card with the golden peacock on it. “Have you ever seen that before?” he demanded.
    The inn servant held the card up to the light, peering at it. Then he recoiled, and pushed it back into Nick’s hands. He cast one, fearful glance over his shoulder.
    “That’s Glory’s calling card!” He turned an incredulous look on Nick. “Have you not seen it, sir? It’s been in all the presses. Glory leaves her card when she robs her victims!”
    A hiss went through the crowd, a strange indrawn breath of fear and excitement, for there was only one Glory and she was the most infamous highwaywoman in the country. Everyone knew her name. No one needed an explanation.
    Nick straightened up. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said softly.
    He remembered the touch of the girl’s lips on his. She had kissed like an angel. He felt part shocked, part incredulous, to think her a criminal and a murderer. It seemed impossible. He had thought her honest and even now some instinct, deep and stubborn, told him she could not have killed Rashleigh, though the evidence was right in front of him. The wig, the mask, the knife…And his cousin’s fallen body that reminded him so sharply, so heartbreakingly, of Anna….
    He thought about the strange tension he had sensed in the girl when Rashleigh had entered the room. She had recognized the Earl. Perhaps she had even known him. She had told Nick that she was waiting for someone and that someone must have been Rashleigh himself. All her actions that evening must have been calculated. She had lured Rashleigh outside to kill him in cold blood.
    “Shall I call the watch, sir?” The landlord was at his shoulder, his face strained and sweating in the half-light. “Powerful bad for business, this sort of thing.” He saw Nick’s face and added hastily, “Terrible tragedy, sir. Friend of yours, was he?”
    “No,” Nick said. “Not my friend. But he was my cousin.”
    The landlord gave him a curious glance before beckoning the bar servant over with a message for the watch. Nick knew he should go directly to tell Lord Hawkesbury what had happened but he lingered a moment longer, his eyes scanning the dark warren of streets that wound away into the dark. He thought fancifully that the faint, incongruous scent of flowers still seemed to hang in the air. For a second, above the creaking of the inn sign, he thought that he could hear the tap of her heels, see a flying shadow melt into the darkness of the night. He knew he would never find the girl again now.
    Word of the murder was rippling through the crowd. People were gathering at the end of the street to peer and point and whisper at the sight of the infamous Earl of Rashleigh dead in the gutter. And beneath the whispers ran the words “It was Glory. Glory was here. She did it, it was her…”
     
     
    L ORD H AWKESBURY was not amused.
    When Nick and Dexter Anstruther were ushered into his presence the following morning he was clearly in a very bad mood indeed.
    “This is the most godforsaken mess, Falconer,” Hawkesbury barked, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers. “Murder and sedition on the streets of London, the whole capital