“Who is he?” she finally asked. “And why can I not meet him as I am?”
“Can you read without these?” Genny motioned to her spectacles.
“I prefer to,” Cecelia said dazedly. “They’re for seeing distances. I’m nearly blind without them.”
Genny tucked them away, and didn’t have to tell her this time to continue reading.
Cecelia, you must watch over Phoebe. She is your sister in all but blood. If the law finds her here, she’s in imminent danger. You must keep her from her brutal father at all costs.
She opened her mouth to ask Genny about this Phoebe when a cacophony of masculine commands and feminine objections filtered through the walls of the residence from the school next door. Footfalls and doors crashing with no little violence sent her galloping heart into a sprint and caused her hands to shake.
“What do I do?” Cecelia asked, feeling suddenly very young.
“What you have to,” Genny said as though the answer were obvious. “Whatever you have to. Even if it’s offering up that generous set of tits, you hear? Whatever it takes to keep this household safe. That’s your responsibility now.”
Dumbfounded, Cecelia looked down at the bosoms in question, hidden by a billowing scarlet cloak that suggested she might wear something more interesting beneath it than a sensible day gown.
When she lifted her head, Genny plunked a towering pale wig upon her crown, one so blond it might have been silver. It added at least half a foot to her already impressive height and was bedecked with enough red bows and pearls to make a Christmas tree jealous.
Genny finally seemed to relax as she arranged a fall of silvery ringlets over her shoulder. “You actually look like Henrietta, give or take twenty-five years.” She fetched a mirror from a sideboard and held it up to Cecelia.
The transformation stole her breath. She couldn’t see her entire form, of course, nor did her reflection contain the top of her ridiculous wig, but it did, indeed, appear as though she’d stepped out of a bygone century as a glamourous ingénue in the court of eighteenth-century Versailles. Her cheekbones seemed leaner, contoured by rouge, her red lips fuller and more than a little wicked, her face a ghostly shade in comparison. Her eyes lined and colored, and her lashes thickened.
She didn’t look at all like herself. She couldn’t tell if she loved or hated the effect.
That same ominous knock echoed through the residence, this time coming from the door in the garden.
“Open the door. We’ve a warrant to search the premises.”
It struck Cecelia as absurdly funny that the representative from Scotland Yard actually boasted a Scottish accent along with a voice so deep, she wondered if he could simply bellow the entire house down.
Like the wolf in the story.
And here she stood, in her red hooded cloak, waiting to be devoured.
Cecelia pressed her fingers to her mouth to hold in a whimper.
“Sit here.” Genny guided her to the impressive velvet chair behind the white marble-topped desk. “Don’t stand unless they force you to. This is your throne. Your seat of power. Besides, you’re as tall as a lamppost and would be easily recognized by that feature alone.” She produced a black lace masquerade mask from the desk and tied it over Cecelia’s eyes and nose, securing it with a silk ribbon in the back. “Just use that brain of yours to get rid of him, honey. That’s all you have to do.”
Oh, was that all? Cecelia felt it was a terrible moment to mention that in times of stress her brain tended to go on holiday.
“I’m giving ye thirty seconds to open this door or I’ll kick it in,” the cavernous brogue threatened. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”
That voice …
Cecelia’s features crinkled behind the mask.
Something about the fathomless frigidity of the brogue was familiar. As were the chills it lifted on the fine hairs of her body. A voice like that belonged in a forgotten dwelling deeper than even the volcanic forge of hell.
In that place so cavernous and cold and full of shadows, only one being could hold court there.
One being whose sole reason for existence was to punish those who were wicked.
Genny hurried to the open window and leaned out of it. “Don’t you touch that door, I’ll be down to admit you directly.”
“Thirty. Seconds,” the Scotsman repeated.
Genny pivoted, running her hands down her bodice, visibly shaken. “I nearly forget how monstrous big he is,” she breathed. “I declare, he could rip the iron gates from their hinges with one hand.”
With that confidence-shredding observation, Genny took the space of a breath to compose herself, then swept out of the study before Cecelia could ask one of a thousand questions that sprang to her lips.
Fear twanged tight in her belly. She knew of only one deep-voiced Scotsman with monstrous proportions. However, he wasn’t with Scotland Yard. He wouldn’t be able to step away from his bench as Lord Chief Justice to break in the door of a common—or uncommon, as the case may be—gambling house.
Would he?
Cecelia was suddenly so frightened, she was tempted to rip off her ridiculous disguise and bolt.
She pushed herself into the desk, tugging at the cloak’s tightly laced collar as sweat gathered beneath her wig in the hot and humid afternoon. Glancing down, she read more of the letter, grasping at anything to do other than sit and tremble as the law advanced on her.
I wish I could have met you, darling. Your letters have been a comfort and a balm to me all these years. I gave you as long a life as I could without secrets. But now it is up to you what you do with them. The school beneath my gambling enterprise is everything to me, and to the women who rely upon it. I know your heart. How good and soft it is, but you are of my blood, which means you’ve steel constructed to your spine. You’ll need it, I think, and for that I am sorry.
I’m delighted we share traits, a few of which are an affinity for numbers, codes, and formulae. These secrets I protect I have confided in no one, not even Genevieve. I have, however, written them down in a book, along with where to find the evidence you’ll need. You’ll discover the codex in a springboard beneath the top drawer of the desk at which you sit. Open the drawer and press the bottom of it. Use the Pollux cipher to decrypt the combination, which is the name of our favorite poem.
The one that pierced your heart when you were sixteen.
“Aeneid,” Cecelia whispered.
The key to the codex, Cecelia, is in the color we both find very dear.
Good luck, my heart, and goodbye.
Blinking back a bevy of emotion, Cecelia turned the clever dials, replacing the letters of the epic Greek poem title for numbers. She gasped when the bottom of the hidden compartment gave way, depositing a finely crafted diary into her hand.
She ran her fingers over the innocuous binding, finding the pale flesh color of the leather a little disturbing. Opening it, she leafed through the pages. It didn’t at all surprise her to see almost no words, only symbols, numbers, formulae. Dates, perhaps, if she remembered her Sumerian numerals correctly … or was this the Babylonian sexagesimal system? She squinted, turning the book sideways.
Voices echoed off the marble of the foyer.
Genny’s.
And the devil’s.
Even as her stomach turned an anxious flop, a part of her stirred. Parts of her. The section of her brain that came alive at the idea of solving a cipher.