Page 32 of A Spy’s Guide to Seduction

A suspicion hit her at his easy acceptance of their plan. “What will you be doing?”

“Me?” He halted, his hand on the knob. “I thought I’d follow Phil round to his club.”

“Wait. That’s not your plan.” Emily scrambled up from her chair.

“It’s not?”

Emily closed the gap between them, tempted to jab him in his bruised ribs. “You may have fooled your aunt with that act, but it doesn’t fool me.”

“I never fooled my aunt. She never doubted that I was on the path to ruin and would end in hell.”

The momentary glimpse into his unhappy boyhood stopped her.

He looked amused at her confusion. “You don’t think I should go to Phil’s club?”

“I know that’s not your plan.” Then she got it. “You’re going to see that Russian in jail, aren’t you?”

His expression sobered at once. “Where he’s being kept is no place for a lady. And the chances of his saying anything are very little.”

“Nevertheless, if we are partners in this enterprise, you’ll take me with you.” She held up her hand with its extravagant ring. “My love.”

Chapter Twelve

It must be acknowledged that the husband hunter will find villains enough in London, though they will hardly be of the sort she encounters in her favorite novel. She is unlikely to meet dangerous brigands or daring pirates, but she will inevitably meet the careless, the indifferent, the self-concerned, and even the heartless among her male and female acquaintance in the great metropolis. Backstabbing, gossip, and betrayal are their weapons, and they are quite as capable of causing misery as any villain who would pursue the husband hunter across oceans and down American rivers to achieve his wicked ends.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

Lynley ducked to enter the office of the governor’s house of the prison. In the little room a pair of clerks bent over their work behind a wainscoted partition. It might have been the anteroom of any ordinary business except for the turnkey at the door and the open ledger in which visitors were to inscribe their names and the name of the prisoner they wished to visit.

The servant who examined their credentials offered Emily a pen. The ruse they’d invented for the visit depended on her, and she’d been the one to think of it. Count Malikov was being kept in one of the cells for condemned men, under an assumed name. He mixed with no one.

As far as prison officials knew, the man they had in custody was Thomas Culley, who had killed a man during a housebreaking. This afternoon Emily was to be his distraught wife, desperate to take leave of him before the Recorder’s report would fix his fate and he would move toward his inevitable end.

She was dressed in fine black wool and wore a hat with a black veil as well. She looked as little like her lively self as it was possible for her to look. She carried a square of linen in her hand, which she pressed occasionally to her eyes. A tremor ran through her as she signed the book. She scarcely glanced Lynley’s way, though she leaned on his arm as they waited for the chaperone who would accompany her. Lynley could sense her impatience to get on with it.

The chaperone arrived, a clerical-looking man in black.

“Mrs. Culley?” he asked.

She nodded.

“You are allowed a quarter hour only. You will speak through the grate. A guard will be in the space between you and the prisoner. Do you understand?”

She nodded again.

“Come along then, ma’am.” The chaperone nodded to the turnkey, who opened the office door.

They stepped into the lodge with its sets of heavy shackles on the wall and faced an oaken gate, bound with iron and studded with nails. The turnkey opened the gate and motioned for Emily and her chaperone to pass through. For a brief instant Lynley could see a narrow stone passage that seemed to dead-end in a turning.

“Remain ʼere, sir,” the turnkey said.

The gate closed on her, and Lynley’s heart contracted briefly. She was smart. She was cool under fire. She’d be fine. They had studied the layout of the prison. He knew where the narrow passage would take her, and where she would descend to the ward of cells for the condemned. He looked at his watch. She would return in half an hour. He could wait.

In Jerez it would be the siesta hour. There, Lynley had learned how to stretch out on any surface and summon sleep to pass the long, indolent afternoons before he could return to his horses and his work. He had learned that one’s impatience could not hurry the clock along, but the prison lodge held no sofa, not even a bench for waiting out the time. The irons on the walls offered no comforting distraction.

He returned to the office where she had signed the book. The clerks continued their work without looking up, the scratching of their pens purposeful and regular. Nothing on the shelves drew his notice. Nothing on the walls engaged his attention. An unfamiliar restlessness consumed him. The room permitted no more than two strides in either direction. He set himself a steady pace. He was not a man to imagine trouble, so it made no sense that his mind should now count the gates she would pass through.

One of the clerks looked up. “Sir, do ye mind? Can ye settle?”