Page 40

Her conversations with the two guides whom Mrs. Linares had recommended had been frankly disheartening. Both men had seemed honest and well-informed, and both had actively tried to dissuade her from undertaking the journey.

Ellie refused to give up so easily on the promise the map offered. She would find another way to get where she needed to go. She had five days before she risked Jacobs turning up. That was plenty of time to figure something out.

It didn’t help that she was also bone-tired. Her sleep the night before had been broken by strange dreams, none of which she could remember clearly.

She had been dreaming more often than usual ever since leaving London. She hoped it wouldn’t prove a pattern. If she was going to succeed in securing a guide and navigating her way to the interior, she would certainly need to get her rest.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Nitherscott-Watby,” Mr. Linares said from his place behind the front desk. “Will you be joining us for dinner this evening, or would you like another tray sent up?”

Ellie heard Bates enter the lobby behind her.

Shewouldprefer to take a tray in her room—but she wasn’t about to let that infuriating man think that she was crawling away in defeat.

“I will, thank you,” she replied, making sure that her words were clear enough to be overheard.

“I shall put you at the Reverend Greene’s table,” Mr. Linares replied. “His sister, who is traveling with him, is the other lady in residence at the hotel. She may help you feel more comfortable.”

“That’s very kind,” Ellie replied. “If you’ll excuse me.”

She turned from the desk, refusing to spare Bates so much as a glare as she stalked through the door into the guest wing.

?

Dinner was an ordeal.

As promised, Ellie had been seated with a Methodist reverend. His sister had spent the entirety of the meal glaring at Ellie as though expecting her to sprout horns. Clearly, the fact that Ellie was here in the colony without a man made her suspect, despite her widowish cover story.

The reverend himself was a gloomy and apocalyptic sort. Ellie’s other dinner companions were hardly better. Two of them were the pair of oversized English schoolboys she had glimpsed in the billiards room when she arrived the day before. Their names were Galle and Tibbord, and they clearly considered staying at the Rio Nuevo rather than the hotel across town to be ‘roughing it.’ The two men were on a tour of the region, and they had the sunburns to prove it. Mr. Tibbord—taller, plumper, and less confident—was apparently writing a book about their experiences. Mr. Galle—short, trim, and sporting a carefully waxed mustache—declared that he had provided all of the anecdotes worth mentioning. Based on the blatant hints he dropped, those mostly consisted of excessive alcohol consumption and trips to brothels.

Finally, their company was rounded out by Col. Jeremiah Tuttle, formerly of the Confederate Army, who spent the entirety of the meal arguing that the war between the states had been motivated by “federal overreach” rather than by the shameful economics of slavery. Apparently, British Honduras was afflicted with an entire cohort of Tuttle’s fellow rebels, who had fled here after the war to re-establish their plantations. Though slavery was illegal in the colony, as it was in all British holdings, Tuttle bragged about the benefits of cheap South Asian indentured labor in a way that made Ellie wonder whether there was really much difference.

Meanwhile, across the dining room, Adam Bates sat at a table by the veranda, which kept bursting out into raucous laughter. Everyone overtherewas clearly having a grand time. Based on the froth at the top of his glass, he was drinking a beer. Ellie had never been very interested in beer, but she fought back a twinge of jealousy all the same as she wondered whether it might taste better than the wine she had been automatically served—which was unpleasantly sweet.

Ellie still consumed more of the stuff than she normally would have (which was more or less none at all). The grating tones of Bates’s laugh and the hive-less state of his cheekbones kept driving the glass to her lips.

The alcohol made her thoughts a bit fuzzy at the edges as she climbed the stairs to her room on the hotel’s upper floor. She would probably have a headache tomorrow. She decided to blame Bates for that as well.

Ellie fumbled with her key as she inserted it into the lock. It turned oddly, and she cursed, twisting it again before she pushed the door open and stalked inside.

She froze as she realized that her room was not empty.

A stranger stood in the dim light of the oil lamp on her dressing table—a white man of perhaps fifty with ginger hair and a beard that tended toward gray. Ellie’s valise lay open beside him, its contents scattered.

The intruder was middling in height, soft in the middle, and a bit slumped in the shoulders like someone who spent most of his time at a desk. Ellie might almost have assumed that she had stumbled into the wrong room by mistake… if he had not been in the process of shaking out one of her skirts.

“Ah,” he said, looking up as she came in. “You must be Miss Mallory.”

Something slammed into her from the side.

The tackle thudded her into the wall, jolting the wooden boards under her shoulders. She twisted, opening her mouth to scream—only to have a wad of fabric shoved into it.

Ellie gagged on the cloth as someone wrenched up her arms and pinned her to the wall.

She found herself face to face with Jacobs.

How could he be here? It should have been impossible. Ellie had studied the steamer routes. Certainly, he might have taken a more immediate boat to Cuba or Jamaica from London, but there were no direct connections to Belize Town from any of those ports.

He must have hired a charter. It would have been expensive, and there would be regulatory hurdles and permits to acquire… unless Jacobs had outright smuggled himself into the colony.