Free Blackstone's Bride by Kate Moore Page A

expectancies of flies, but Violet was willing to wager that in less than thirty minutes the Duchess of Huntingdon would know that Violet and Blackstone had been seen together.
    She should go home and toss the cards of invitation to her ball on the fire.
    * * *
    Nate Wilde was on assignment far from Goldsworthy’s club passing through haunts he’d once known as a boy. At a corner where an old white church with pepper-pot turrets faced a sharp-edged brick charity school for girls, Nate turned and hunched his way down Nightingale Lane past opium dens to Wapping Highstreet in the center of London’s docks. Some might say that Lord Blackstone had the better part of the case, riding around in a fine barouche with highborn nobs, but Nate saw the promise in his work. He might be the one to find Frank Hammersley.
    In the perpetual shadow of the high dock walls, carts and wagons rumbled past, shaking the ground. Nate had left off the fashionable clothes of the club for a rough jacket and a tweed wool cap with a bill that concealed much of his face. His walk and manner changed to match his secondhand attire. A brisk breeze blew the stench of burning tobacco in his face. Near the Thames, condemned cargoes burned in furnaces day and night next to the acres of warehouses. Every shift of the breeze wafted a competing scent over him—coffee or spice or sulfurous ore or hides or the rank mud of the great river. A day in the docklands could exhaust a man’s nose.
    Goldsworthy’s informants in the customs office said the ship that brought the prince to London had carried Spanish wine and Ceylon tea. The barrels of wine had been off-loaded and sent to the vast underground vaults of the London Docks. The tea had followed a path to the merchant who bought it, Waring & Sons Bonded Tea Merchants. Nate picked out the route and followed it, noting lodging houses, taprooms, and derelict buildings along the way. If someone wanted to keep Frank Hammersley alive but out of the way in London, the dockside warren of lanes and quays made sense.
    That was the best information they had so far. Someone wanted Frank Hammersley’s family to think he was larking about on the Continent or doing some banking business in Spain, and that someone did not know the government was already on the case.
    Feeling nearly invisible, Nate wove his way through men and vehicles in the shadow of the dock’s huge walls. Flaxen-haired or brown-skinned sailors passed, speaking a medley of tongues, and grimy shop windows displayed all the gear a sailor could want, tins of meat and biscuits, brass sextants, ropes and lines coated with tar. None of the hardened men Nate passed would think twice to hear an odd accent or to see a man half dragged as if the worse for drink. Some would no doubt jump at the chance to knock a man senseless for a bit of extra coin. Once Frank’s captors had removed him from the ship, he would be as secure as any cargo in the locked warehouses or wine vaults of London.
    How they had removed him under the nose of customs officers was another question. And there was the darker possibility that the government had in mind—that Frank Hammersley had chosen to disappear and that he didn’t want to be found. No one had mentioned it openly, but Nate could read Goldsworthy now after working with him for near a year.
    The warehouse of Waring & Sons Bonded Tea Merchants proved a dead end in a row of derelict buildings. The
Madagascar
’s cargo could not have been delivered there. The row of buildings had suffered a fire. Though the brick outer walls stood, charred rubbish lay in heaps against them. The doors were chained and locked and only two portions of the roof remained at either end of the building. Nate made a note of doors and windows to sketch for Blackstone.
    Beyond the row of warehouses the river lapped the shore. Nate could see a narrow weedy path along the bank above the river. He declined to investigate that way. No sense in falling in the river