Free It Happened One Midnight (PG8) by Julie Anne Long Page B

likely wasn’t listening at all.
    Three hours later Jonathan, instead of meeting Argosy at White’s, found himself in front of the Half Moon Theater in Covent Garden.
    For if he was a condemned man, quite truthfully, what had he to lose?

Chapter 8

    A ND YET HE STOOD alone on the street except for a few surly drunks and the occasional rat strolling purposefully by, as if they were laborers off to work. The Half Moon Theater was dark; it had been boarded and shuttered, it appeared, some time ago. Across from him, a noisy pub disgorged and admitted staggering revelers at regular intervals; a listless prostitute asked him if he wanted a go at her. He politely declined.
    The moon grew brighter, the night watch called out “Midnight,” and still there was no sign of Thomasina de Ballesteros.
    “This way.”
    Christ!
    One moment she wasn’t there, the next she was.
    And she’d seen him flinch, because now she was laughing quietly at him.
    “Count yourself fortunate I didn’t shoot you.”
    “You’ll need to be more alert, Mr. Redmond, if you’re to be of use to me.”
    She was draped all over in a dark cloak again, but the husk of her voice was unmistakable. She seemed to have eyes like a cat, too, for Tommy immediately proceeded to swiftly lead him on a mazelike journey through alleys, narrow lanes, once through a park, up a staircase, across the top of one building to another, down a staircase, and he could have sworn they doubled back once to do it all again.
    “Is this an elaborate ruse to disorient me in order to divest me of my purse? Because Argosy wasn’t jesting when he said I’d been deprived of my allowance. And, really, is two pounds worth killing over? Because that’s all I have on my person.”
    “I wouldn’t dream of it. You’d just shoot me with your pistol.”
    “Oh, yes. That.”
    She turned left down a narrow street.
    “You’re awfully small to be traipsing about London by yourself at this time of night, Miss de Ballesteros.”
    “Are you about to get protective?”
    “No.”
    “Possessive?” A warning edge in her voice.
    “God, no. Merely making an observation.”
    “I have friends all over London who emerge to do business at . . . varying times of day. They’ll recognize my screams and come to my rescue should I require it.”
    They trod along in silence for a few paces.
    “You’re trying to decide whether I’m jesting, aren’t you, Mr. Redmond?”
    “I unfortunately am quite certain that at least part of your statement was true.”
    “Clever as well as pretty!” she said dryly. “This way!”
    She made a sharp right turn and then an almost immediate left. Who knew the great arterial streets of London were fed by so very many squalid little tributary alleys and side streets? She did, apparently, because on one street a drunk leaning against the wall called out, “Greetings, Tommy.”
    “Greetings, Jasper!”
    This exchange was hardly reassuring.
    “Is this really necessary?” he groused. “This circuitous route to your lair?”
    “Patience. My mystique is everything, Mr. Redmond. And what makes you think it’s circuitous? It may very well simply be the shortest route to my . . . lair.” She liked the word, he could tell.
    And she brought them to a stop in front of an unexceptional door in the side of a tall, narrow nondescript building, though most buildings could be described as nondescript in the dark. He suspected a shop occupied the bottom of it, but the windows were shuttered for the night. God only knew where they were, though he was fairly certain she’d strategically led him on an elaborate figure eight of sorts around Covent Garden for the last ten minutes, and they were likely probably only a few feet from where they began.
    He listened hard; a drunken chorus swelled up and was abruptly cut off, as if a door had thrown wide on a pub and swung shut again. The song sounded like “The Ballad of Colin Eversea.”
    She produced a key, the door creaked