Lady Wynwood’s Spies, Volume 9: Shelter

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Lissa sat in a chair across from Keriah, her green-gray eyes wide and a charming smile still on her face. Keriah’s sister had always had a rather … unrestrained personality, but surely a normal person would fall into confusion, incredulity, dismay, perhaps even launch into a litany of objections.

“My dear Keriah,” Lissa said, “you have made quite a hash of your explanation, but I think I understand the most important bits. You and Phoebe have got into some sort of scrape, but Lady Wynwood is somehow helping you to resolve it, is that correct?”

“Um … I suppose?” Keriah looked torn between explaining herself more fully and keeping her tongue so she wouldn’t start prattling about secret treasonous groups and clandestine government agencies and poisonous potions and Napoleon’s physically-enhanced soldiers who might come storming onto English soil.

—from Lady Wynwood’s Spies, Volume 9: Shelter

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Zephyra had never been one of the Citadel. In fact, her older sister, Bianca, told those greedy men that she never told Zephyra about the Citadel at all.

In truth, Bianca had told her a great deal about them.

There were some things she kept from her younger sister—her gardening notes on how she created her more successful hybrids, and her experiments in trying to recreate Ward’s Blood Nectar potion.

She had told Zephyra that she only wished to protect her. But it was obvious that Bianca had feared her ambitions could be overshadowed by her younger sister, and so she had not given her any opportunity to interfere.

Zephyra had always suspected it was because Bianca knew that her younger sister was smarter and more talented than she. She ensured Zephyra would not be given an opportunity to usurp her position within the Citadel.

Zephyra didn’t blame Bianca. After all, the sisters had been forced to learn how to survive ever since their father died and they discovered that he had left his cottage and small plot of land to their male cousin rather than providing for his orphaned daughters.

Yes, Bianca had told her younger sister a great deal about the Citadel.

Which was why Zephyra knew of the attorney used by Maxham.

It was the same attorney who had been employed by her brother-in-law, Mr. Carl Jadis, and she suspected that Ward likewise availed himself of the man’s services.

Mr. Lander’s offices were not in a particularly prestigious section of Fleet Street. The majority of his clients valued discretion over display, and so the entrance to his chambers lay along the side of the building, halfway down a narrow alley.

Zephyra had brought one of the men she had hired earlier that day to pose as her footman. She had paid attention to every detail, as she always did—the coat and breeches of his livery matched perfectly, even though she had bought them from two different secondhand clothing stores. She had styled his wig herself, transforming an ancient one that she had found in the attic of her father’s townhouse by combing and smoothing it to look pristine.

She had taken his foot measurements ahead of time, on the day she first met and hired him, in order to find a pair of shoes that fit him exactly, and she had treated and polished the leather until it looked as good as new. The buckles she had attached were also brightly polished, taken from a box in the butler’s room. Only his white stockings were brand-new, for she found that clean stockings on the servants were a mark of pride among the wealthy, who could afford several pairs for their footmen to look well-groomed at all times.

The ancient, heavy outer door of the attorney’s building opened easily under her footman’s gloved hand with nary a squeak, revealing a flight of stairs to the first floor, well-lit by sconces along the wall. He stepped aside, and she entered, leading the way up the flight of stairs.

She walked slowly, for it would not do to stumble and crush the heavy black veil on her black bonnet. Even though the steps were wide and comfortable, she wore leather-soled, extra-thick cork pattens to give her several inches of height. An overly long skirt hid the pattens.

At the top of the stairs, she opened the ornately carved door herself and stepped through into the antechamber beyond.

She knew that Mr. Lander did not employ a clerk in order to safeguard his clients’ secrets, so she was unsurprised to find him waiting for her. He was a slender man, the same age as her father, which confused her at first. She knew that he was too young to have assisted the Citadel in purchasing the property in France those many years ago.

But then she saw the portrait on the wall of a man two dozen years older with similar features, and she realized his father had likely served the Citadel, and he had taken over after the elder man died or withdrew from practice.

Mr. Lander smiled at her even though he likely could see little of her face through the heavy veil. “A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Chene. My deepest condolences upon your husband’s passing.”

He reached for her, perhaps to take her hand and kiss it, but she kept them clasped in front of her. In order to pass as an aged widow, she not only walked with a slight stoop and with slow, gingerly steps—made necessary by her heeled shoes as well as her playacting—but she had also wrapped strips of cloth around each of her knuckles to mimic the rheumatism of old age. She wore fine black kid leather gloves to cover them, but he would be able to feel the softness if he took her hand.

“I have little time for useless chatter,” she said in a voice that she made low and quavering, like an old woman’s. “I have much to do today.”

“Of course, of course.” Mr. Lander opened another door in the far wall for her, and she walked into his spacious office.

He closed the door behind them. As he hurried to his massive oak desk, Zephyra took a moment to walk backward a few steps and feel behind her for the key in the lock. She quietly turned it, locking the door, before moving forward and easing herself down into the comfortable leather chair in front of the desk.

Mr. Lander sat and picked up a piece of paper, the letter she had written to him to arrange for their appointment. “Now, you mentioned in your letter some unusual assets belonging to your husband, which you wished to dispose of discreetly. I assure you, madam, that I shall be able to do so, and the parties of the transactions shall be completely anonymous.”

Zephyra was finally able to lift the suffocating veil, revealing her face, and drape the fabric over the crown of her bonnet. The sight of her caused Mr. Lander to hesitate rather than continuing his speech.

She took a few breaths. It had been difficult to breathe under the heavy veil, and walking up the stairs had caused her to gasp as her heart raced. “I am here to inquire as to the properties owned by Mr. Seyward Maxham.”

There was a moment of shocked silence, then Mr. Lander jumped to his feet. But before he could make more than two running steps toward the door, Zephyra spoke, halting him.

“If you leave this office before I do, the footman has orders to beat you senseless.”

He stopped to look at her, both fear and defiance warring in his eyes. “You are foolish if you believe that mere bodily pain would convince me to betray my clients.”

“Won’t you sit?” She gestured toward his empty seat. “I have much to say that you will wish to hear.”

He paused in indecision, but after a long minute, he slowly made his way back behind his desk and sat down, eyeing her warily.

“I wish to know all of Maxham’s holdings,” Zephyra repeated.

She watched his eyes, and they darted ever so slightly toward his right. Perhaps somewhere behind her left shoulder. She had noticed several bookcases against the wall, and while their contents looked to be boring legal tomes, there was space for more than books on those shelves. She did not turn around to follow his gaze, but continued to watch his face.

“I safeguard the secrets of my clients most loyally,” he said as valiantly as a knight.

Zephyra wanted to laugh in derision at that blatant lie, but now was not yet the time. He needed to see her as a foolish young woman attempting to interfere in the business of men with a great deal more power than she possessed.

“If you do not agree to my request, I shall find a way to hurt your family. In the next several weeks, you shall not know when I could find them and take them.” She stood up and leaned over the desk, holding him with her eyes. “I shall cause them more pain and suffering than you could possibly imagine.”

Because he had never experienced pain and suffering himself. No, he had merely caused it for countless others.

He stiffened, but he held her gaze unflinchingly. She might have applauded his courage if she didn’t know his true nature.

“No matter your threats, I will not assist you,” he said.

“Are you certain of that?” She gracefully resumed her seat in the chair. Her head swayed slowly from side to side, like a viper about to strike at its helpless prey. “When I spoke of your family, I was not referring to your wife.”

He stiffened.

She continued, “I was speaking of your mistress, Mrs. Crowhurst, the mother of your two children. A boy and a girl, isn’t it?”

The color completely drained from his face, making his skin look as pale and dry as parchment.

“Such a shame your wife could not have children,” Zephyra said in a deceptively light voice. “But your boy has grown up to be quite fine and strong and intelligent. And you must have a successor, mustn’t you? Clients like Maxham require longevity and consistency.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. It looked painful, for the skin around his eyes tightened.

“If you did not have a worthy successor, they would take their business elsewhere,” she said. “And then they would kill you in order to safeguard their secrets. It would be terrible if something happened to your son.”

“You monster,” he raged at her, and included several other names that would have horrified her governess.

As if he had not spoken, she continued, “Although I must say, you would do well to cherish your daughter a bit more. You never know what kind of woman she might grow up to be.” She smiled at him, giving him a horrifying vision of precisely what type of woman his daughter could grow to become.

“You—”

She interrupted him, “Now, to show you my sincerity, I wanted to remove the ring from Mrs. Crowhurst’s finger.” She stifled a laugh. As if that woman had ever been properly married. “But I am afraid her finger had grown too fat, and so I took the entire thing.”

The attorney gasped as Zephyra removed a lacquered box from her reticule. The painted design was quite lovely, and she had deliberately chosen it at the secondhand shop that lay a few streets away from the attorney’s office. She wanted the elegant, delicate design to contrast the gruesome treasure within.

She set the box on his desk, facing him, and opened the lid. She had wrapped the bloody finger in one of her own embroidered handkerchiefs, and she cast the edges of fabric aside to display the plump finger and the tiny ring encircling it. His mistress had obviously not removed the ring in some time, for the joint had grown too swollen for her to be able to remove it.

Mr. Lander’s breathing had become rapid and hoarse as he stared down at the present. He recoiled as far back as he could in his chair.

“Now, be not dismayed. ’Tis a mere pinky finger. A woman of leisure such as Mrs. Crowhurst could get on quite well without her pinky finger.” Zephyra’s smile faded as she said, “Although it remains to be seen if Mrs. Crowhurst will continue to tolerate your company after this little incident. I do hope your love is strong enough to withstand such trials.”

She had hired another man in addition to the one in the antechamber to assist her with Mrs. Crowhurst and her children. They had interrupted the family at breakfast in their lavish townhouse. The only two servants were easily knocked unconscious and tied up without the family being any the wiser.

Zephyra and the two men had entered the breakfast room just as Mrs. Crowhurst was haranguing her daughter over her failure to bring a wealthy lordling up to scratch at a ball the evening before. The men had acted to prevent the women from screeching, but it had been the boy who let out a high-pitched wail, and Zephyra had been forced to club him across the back of the head to keep him quiet.

She did not often hire men to help her—in fact, the last time had probably been the resurrectionists she had paid to take away the real Miss Tolberton’s body. But she had worked with the Society of the Benevolent Voice in the Wilderness for the Rescue of Souls Lost in the Darkness of Heathenism in the Long Glades for enough years to come to understand the ways of such men. They afforded respect once they saw your power.

And so, she had ordered them to hold down Mrs. Crowhurst, and Zephyra herself had cut off the woman’s finger.

The two men’s mannerisms toward her became a touch more deferential after that.

Of course, she also shared with them everything they had taken of value from Mrs. Crowhurst’s home. Zephyra had relieved her of all her valuable jewelry—the woman had an extraordinary number of pieces made from paste—and also the hefty chest of gold hidden under the floorboard of her bedroom.

The woman had no imagination. It had taken Zephyra mere minutes to find the gold.

In order to be thorough in her work, she had spent another two hours searching the bedroom and the rest of the house, but found no other hiding place or hidden wealth. By far the most valuable thing in her possession as she left was the woman’s finger.

Mr. Lander’s chin trembled, and he squeezed his eyes shut and turned away from the sight of the open box. And so Zephyra closed the lid with an audible snap.

He gave one more look of horror at her present, then he turned toward her a look of hatred and rage.

Yes, she thought, I want you to feel that sense of helpless anger. I want you to feel what I felt.

She waited for his response. It took him longer than she expected, but at last, he moved. In one swift movement, he stood and reached across the desk toward her neck.

When she had sat back in her chair, Zephyra had stealthily removed a slim dagger from her reticule. As Mr. Lander attacked her, she quickly brought her arm up and stabbed downward.

She caught the back of his hand with the tip of her blade and slammed it down onto the desk, pinning it there. He howled in pain.

Zephyra paused to listen, but the man she had hired, who had remained in the antechamber beyond the locked door, did not even shuffle his feet in response to the noise.

When Mr. Lander’s crying had quieted down to pained sobs, she said, “Now that I have your attention, I would like for you to tell me about the properties that Maxham owns.”

“If I betray him, he will kill me.”

“You should know by now that Maxham is quite rational. After I leave, you are welcome to explain that I threatened your family and injured you, and he will listen to you.”

Mr. Lander’s breath came in panting gasps as he contemplated her words. But then he nodded, agreeing with her.

Zephyra’s hands tightened on the knife that pinned his hand to the desk. That small movement of the blade made him wince.

“Maxham’s properties,” she repeated.

He raised a shaking finger to the far corner of the office, in the direction his eyes had strayed when she asked him about Maxham earlier. “In the Commentaries of the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone, eleventh edition, volume four.”

She released the knife and moved toward the bookshelf.

“You will not find anything of note,” he called to her. “Mr. Maxham sold all his other properties and only recently bought a house near Vauxhall Gardens.”

She found the heavy volume and saw that there were several neatly folded pages tucked inside it. She cast him an exasperated glance. “Really, if you wanted to announce to everyone that this particular client was special, you could not have done so in a more obvious way.”

Zephyra turned to see that Mr. Lander had managed to yank the knife out of the desk and his appendage, and he stumbled toward her with the blade held high.

She threw the heavy book at his face. It slammed into his nose, and he toppled backward, the knife falling from his hand and bouncing with a muted thud on the fine carpet.

Zephyra had hoped he would attack her. This was much more convenient than if he had tried to escape the office instead.

She grabbed the dagger he dropped and swiftly knelt beside him on his left side. His arm had flung back when he fell, and so she plunged the blade through his open palm. She had to strike with more force so that the blade went through his hand as well as the carpet and into the wooden floor underneath it.

He let out another cry of pain.

Zephyra sat hard across his shins, pinning his legs. He struggled, but because she held both of his lower legs against the floor, he could not twist to reach the blade in his other hand.

She looked through the pages she had extracted from the book. It was as he had said—an expensive townhouse next to Vauxhall Gardens. It seemed more extravagant than what she would have expected of Maxham, but her sister had told her that he moved his place of residence quite frequently. He was the most cautious and suspicious of all the Citadel, and Zephyra knew she would never have found him if she had not already known the name of his attorney.

She glanced at Mr. Lander, who was moaning as he vainly tried to reach toward the blade pinning his hand to the floor. Each movement tore at his flesh, causing him greater pain.

“And now, the properties belonging to Jack and Ward,” she said to him.

He glared at her with red eyes filled with hatred. But then he reluctantly glanced at the bookcase and rattled off the titles of two more volumes.

Zephyra climbed to her feet in a way that would make her governess shriek in dismay. But her governess was not here, and in this office she was no longer Miss Tolberton, but Zephyra Irvine.

She had not been Zephyra Irvine in a very long time. Before she hired the two men and invaded the home of Mrs. Crowhurst and her children, it had been nearly eleven years.

When she left this office, she could become Miss Tolberton once more, or she could continue down this dark path, the culmination of all her years of planning and scheming.

For the sake of her survival, for the sake of her sister, she must not balk at what must be done.

She had tired of playing with Mr. Lander, and she doubted she could entice him to tell her anything more. In fact, she doubted he had told her everything, but it did not matter in the least.

Zephyra removed another dagger from her reticule, this one with the blade coated in something slick and dark. He did not notice the knife until she plunged it into the space between his ribs, puncturing his lung.

His initial cry of surprise changed to a long moan of pure agony as the aconite on the blade made his wound burn. He coughed up red blood like froth.

Within a few minutes, he grabbed at his chest, his breath coming faster as spittle dribbled from the corner of his mouth. His limbs trembled violently.

She leaned over him so that her face filled his vision. “Do you know why I have killed you?” she asked him, as if offering him a slice of tart with his tea.

He did not answer, but his eyes blinked up at her.

“It is true that Maxham would have listened very patiently as you told him how I threatened you and harmed you. But then he would have killed you anyway. He is very rational, after all.”

Mr. Lander was struggling to speak, and she could not tell if his fear was because of her words or because he had difficulty breathing.

“But even more than that, your life ended the moment I entered your office. This—” She grabbed the hilt of the dagger in his side and twisted it, and he writhed. “This is payment for stealing my sister’s townhouse from her.”

The house had been bought by Mr. Carl Jadis, and belonged to Bianca, his wife, after he died. It should have belonged to Zephyra after Bianca’s death, but of course, the Citadel would not allow such a valuable property to leave their hands. They did not wish to bring Zephyra into their circle, and so they stole the townhouse from her.

Two weeks after Bianca had been murdered, Zephyra secretly returned to London. The house had been claimed by another man.

Bianca had left a legitimate will naming Zephyra, yet her attorney, Mr. Lander, hid it away and submitted a forged revocation that rendered her legally intestate. He also produced a tampered copy of the old marriage settlement, where a newly forged clause now stated that if Bianca died without husband, child, or valid will, the townhouse must revert to a former holder.

The court obediently awarded the townhouse to a man whose name Zephyra had never heard before, Mr. Jonah Farnam.

Even more disastrous, Mr. Lander had forged a letter from her sister, dated a few days previous to her death, instructing her bank to “place the entire balance into the hands of my attorney, Mr. Lander, for urgent payment of outstanding obligations.” And in a single afternoon, the same day her sister died, the Citadel appropriated all her funds, as well.

The house belonged to Zephyra. The money had belonged to Zephyra. But the Citadel had stolen it from her.

This man, Mr. Lander, had aided them.

She watched him as his body convulsed, until he breathed his last. She felt that she ought to watch him, since she had been the one to take his life.

He was not the first person she had killed—she had killed a great many people over the years in her desperation to survive.

When he stilled at last, she rose to her feet and began searching through more of the books.

The two volumes Mr. Lander had indicated did indeed contain some properties owned by Jack and by Ward, and she wrote down their information on another piece of paper before replacing the books. But she also looked through the other volumes in order to be thorough.

She found papers of clients such as the nobility and wealthy merchants who desired secrecy. She also discovered some other properties owned by Maxham and Ward, which the attorney had not mentioned.

And in one of the books, she found the deed to her sister’s townhouse.

The paper trembled in her hands. It took all her strength to calm herself and prevent her from wrinkling the paper.

This is all for revenge, she reminded herself. She must be patient.

If she weren’t, all her careful planning would come to naught.