“Did you bring your little pistol, or do we need to stop at your house on the way?” Kate asked as they hurried to the entryway.
“Of course I brought it.” Caro was beginning to wonder if her friend knew her at all.
Stopping in the middle of the staircase, Kate turned, her eyes wide. “On a visit to me? I was joking!”
“But I had to get here, Kate,” Caro reminded her. “Who knows what danger I might encounter on the streets of London?”
Kate’s mouth snapped shut.
“You make a good point.”
* * *
Eversham and Val arrived at the former’s home fully expecting to find their wives waiting, albeit impatiently, for news of their interview with Lord Croyden.
Instead, they found only a cryptic note from Caro:
Tate didn’t go to Brighton. Going to find his mistress’s house. Suspect that may be where he’s keeping Effie. Love, C and K
“Damn it.” Despite the brevity of the missive, Val knew precisely what Caro had meant. “Tate lied to us about being in Brighton on the day Effie was abducted. I don’t know how they found out, but if that’s true, then who knows what else he may have lied about.”
“But how would they know where this house is?” Eversham asked. “It’s not as if he advertised it.”
“If I were going to set up a mistress,” Val said thoughtfully, “and needed a house for that purpose, I’d entrust said purchase to my man of business.”
“Do you know who Tate uses?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Val grinned. “The aristocracy is bloody insular, and we all use the same people. In this case, Tate and my father share a solicitor. I saw him when I was signing papers at the firm when I took over control of the Wrackham properties after my brother’s death.”
“Well, then, what are we waiting for?” Eversham headed for the door.
Only moments after they’d arrived, the two men were leaving again.
* * *
The house, whose address they’d learned from Lord Tate’s man of business after Caro had employed a few false tears to distract him while Kate extracted the address from the file on the solicitor’s desk, was situated on a quiet street in Marylebone. It was by no means a fashionable neighborhood, but neither was it somewhere Lord Tate’s comings and goings would be overly suspect. In fact, the solicitor had said Tate specifically asked for a property where he might go about his business without interference from the other residents of the area. From the looks of the other houses nearby, which were well-kept and of modest size, the prosperous merchants and professionals who lived here would see him as just another neighbor.
“What do you think?” Caro asked. She and Kate stood just out of view of the front door of 24 Portland Place. “How shall we get inside?”
“I still think we should wait for Eversham and Val,” Kate said with a worried glance at her friend. “Or better yet, we should just go get them now that we’ve found the house.”
“But what if it were you in there?” Caro demanded. “If it were me, I’d want my friends to do whatever they could to set me free as quickly as possible.”
“You know that I would, too.” Kate frowned. “I simply think it wouldn’t hurt to be cautious.”
“That’s why I left the note. If we should meet with trouble, Val and Eversham will be able to trace us here.”
“Caro,” her friend said, affection blending with exasperation, “you know there are a hundred reasons why they might not get here in time to help us.”
Caro sighed. Kate was right. And what’s more, Caro knew that it had been her own precipitate behavior that had landed her in trouble on more than one occasion. Her instincts might be telling her she needed to find a way inside the house, but the cautious thing to do would be to come back later with Val and Eversham.
“All right,” she told Kate. “We’ll go home and wait for—”
She broke off when Kate suddenly gripped her by the arm and pulled her to where an abandoned cart rested against a nearby curb.
“What is it?” Caro demanded.
Wordlessly, Kate pointed at a man jogging down the steps of the house in question. Caro turned to Kate, puzzled. She’d never seen the brown-haired man before.
“Who is he?”
“Lord Croyden,” Kate whispered. “I recognize him from his picture in the paper. We’ve run enough stories on him over the years.”
“It can’t be a coincidence that he’s coming out of the house Tate bought for Effie.” Caro’s mind raced with possibilities. “Could they be working together?”
“They could be,” Kate said softly. “One wants her, and the other wants her out of the way. It seems to me with a little negotiation, they can achieve both ends.”
As they watched, Croyden hurried past them and rounded the corner to a side street.
“We have to get inside,” Caro said in a low voice. “What if he was there to give orders for Effie to be killed because Val and Eversham came asking questions about her? Unlike Tate, he needs her gone.”
She’d been ready to curb her impulses and wait, but now that there was a strong possibility that Effie was in immediate danger, she couldn’t leave her there.
“All right, let’s go.”
Caro threw her arms around her friend—in fear and solidarity. “What’s our plan? Should we pose as church visitors?”
“Our clothing is too posh for that. Why not introduce ourselves as new neighbors?”
“It needs to be something that will get us inside the house.” Caro tapped a finger on her chin. What was a good reason to let a stranger in your home?
“I’ve got it!” Caro said with excitement. “Before we moved to our—well, Mama and Papa’s, now—current house, we lived in Bloomsbury. One day an older woman came to the door saying she’d grown up there and wondered if she might wander through for a bit for old times’ sake. Mama was reluctant, but Papa is a soft touch and gave the lady a tour. She was quite sentimental, and even Mama was moved before the end of the woman’s visit.”
Kate looked deep in thought. “It would give us a reason to get a foot in the door at the very least. And we can talk our way past the servants if we need to.”
“I don’t think we’ll have to,” Caro said. “I can be very convincing.”
Three minutes later they were knocking on the entrance of twenty-four. It was opened by an older woman, perhaps a housekeeper, who didn’t look the least bit friendly.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” Caro began, handkerchief already in her hand. “I hate to bother you, but my sister and I were wondering if we might be able to have a tour of the house? This was our childhood home and…and—” She broke off and dissolved into weeping.
Through her lashes, she could see that the woman didn’t appear to be moved by the display.
“There, there, sister.” Kate patted her on the back. “You see, we grew up in this house and we’ve only recently lost our dear mother. And Hortense thought that it would do her good to see the site of so many of our happy girlhood—”