Page 8 of Duke of Disguise (Ladies of Worth #4)

The Théatre des Tuileries was teeming with the best of Parisian Society on Thursday evening when Avers attended to see Mademoiselle Saint-Val Cadette in her latest play. While his interest in the actress had been piqued by Mademoiselle Cadeaux’s mention of the famed tragedienne, the performance was not his principal reason for attending tonight.

No, his reason was twofold.

Firstly, he had been summoned by Wakeford who had sent him a missive earlier today begging to meet urgently. The theatre had been deemed the least conspicuous place to meet given that the Tremaine family rented a box there for the season. The feuding cousins might, therefore, quite believably attend by embarrassing coincidence on the same night.

Secondly, Mademoiselle Cadeaux had mentioned that she and the Comte regularly attended Mademoiselle Saint-Val Cadette’s plays. Being that this evening was the debut of the actress’ latest Greek tragedy, Avers had a fair hope that Vergelles and his companion would be in attendance tonight. Given that his previous attempt to engage the Comte had failed, a casual meeting would be fortuitous, and might afford Avers another opportunity.

Arriving a short time before the play started, Avers was shown by a punctilious little man in an affectatious wig to the Tremaine box, just as the crowds quietened in anticipation of the play beginning.

“I had almost given up on you.”

“Apologies,” Avers murmured, slipping into the seat beside Wakeford. Already he could hear the strain in his friend’s voice. “I thought it best to avoid attention where possible.”

The other man didn’t respond. Avers noticed a decanter and two glasses, already filled with wine, were jiggling against each other on a side table. After a moment, he traced the cause to Wakeford, who’s left leg bobbed up and down furiously. The man’s hands were twitching too, clasping, unclasping, resting in his lap, on his leg and then on the arm of his seat.

A crease appeared in the centre of Avers’ brow. “You are the bearer of ill tidings, I assume.”

Wakeford’s frantic movements abated, as if coming back to the present from whatever awful musings had been consuming his mind, and he jerked his head around to give Avers a quick look before turning back to the stage without saying anything.

Below the box, two actors had appeared on the boards. The woman Avers took to be Mademoiselle Saint-Val Cadette. She was a beauty, and with a mournful attitude and tone she began a monologue before a scenery of shipwreck and waves.

As she finished speaking, as if by magic, the sea was rolled away, replaced by newly rising Grecian hills. Avers might have admired the cleverness of this change, from the theatre nicknamed the Salles des Machines thanks to its ingenious stage machinery, had not Wakeford’s demeanour been one of acute anxiety.

“The blackguards have stolen papers from my offices,” his friend rasped in a voice of despair. “They haven’t just got to the information and copied it out this time—they’ve taken the papers themselves. The filthy curs have dropped me well and truly in it. My superiors are threatening to have my head,” he added through clenched teeth. “The papers are sensitive in the extreme—military in nature.”

Avers’ brow rose in shock. He had been at Wakeford’s offices that morning to play his part as his reluctant cousin drafted in to work. The place had appeared to be locked up tighter than Newgate prison.

“How did they manage it?” he asked.

Wakeford shrugged despairingly, his profile one of defeat. “I don’t know. I simply can’t fathom it,” he whispered.

Avers asked, searching for a clue in his friend’s story, “Anything come through to your black room yet?”

“Nothing—but it didn’t last time—the wily dogs. I’m cursed if I know how they’re passing information on. No letters that the Comte receives are left unchecked by our men. If we can’t retrieve the papers, we suspect they’ll try and sell the information to the French—or worse, to our rebels in the Americas.”

Wakeford’s words fell like a lead weight on Avers’ chest. This now went beyond an information leak of petty papers and government missives.

“Do you suppose they’re using a cypher?” he asked, resisting the urge to reach out and stop his friend’s leg from its incessant ascent and descent.

“I’d easily believe there’s a cypher we’re not recognising, but I tell you there isn’t. I’ve had my best codebreakers on it. They can find no discernible pattern in any of the correspondence. And the Comte’s letters come from no one of any merit, just bills from bootmakers and butchers or the dullest friends and relatives. That’s why we’re convinced they’re finding some other way to communicate. We hear nothing of the secrets leaked from my offices until they turn up in the wrong hands. They’re foiling us somehow.”

Avers kept his eyes on the play as he listened intently to his friend’s rapid words. Wakeford’s final sentence dripped with exasperation.

“And this time they have stolen the actual papers from your offices?” Avers said, going back to the beginning of their conversation. There must be something in the story they were missing—something that would enlighten them.

“Exactly that—brazen fellows. We have the place locked up and no one was seen entering or leaving the building at the time. My secretary was due to be out all day at a meeting with Stormont in Versailles, but he came back early. It was him who found my desk broken open and the papers gone.”

“And nothing was seen by your men?”

“Nothing.”

“And your staff—are they trustworthy?”

“Every man of them.”

“Servants?”

“Only my own and they’re thoroughly searched before leaving—have been ever since the first incident, much to their consternation.”

“And these documents are different from those copied before?”

“Yes—those were just documents about proposed levies.”

“And these?”

“They’re on General Howe’s recommendations for British troop manoeuvres and positionings in the colonies. The French are determined to undermine us there after their losses.”

“Worth a lot to the right bidder if battle strategy is involved.”

Wakeford shook his head. “Hardly. They’ll be out of date by the time the information makes it across the Atlantic—it’s the numbers on personnel and provisions in our forts that are the issue. My office has been asked to look at excise duties, potential losses in the conflict, and how we might squeeze the French and colonists in English markets. If those details get into the wrong hands our forces will be fighting an enemy who can identify where to attack us.”

He wrung his hands. “I tell you, Avers, this time my superiors won’t be patient. This is the third leak in as many months and by far the most sensitive. I’m finished.”

After eyeing Wakeford’s jittery movements a moment longer, Avers reached over and placed his hand on his friend’s arm, pressing it firmly.

“We’ll sort this mess out, Robert—you have my word,” he said encouragingly. “I have it in hand. Meeting here tonight was not a random suggestion on my part.” He leant forward to better see the individuals he had just caught sight of in another box.

The Comte de Vergelles and his mistress had appeared several boxes over at some point during the first half of the play. Avers wondered if Mademoiselle Cadeaux had intended to be here for the entirety of her favourite actress’s play and her master had made her late. No doubt she gave up her power to dictate her hours for his wealth and it was a trade-off agreeable to her.

The candles surrounding their box, placed carefully to illuminate the ornate gilding of the carved balconette, reflected off their golden sconces and cast the couple in an equally warm glow. It was a light in which the jewels on Mademoiselle Cadeaux’s neck were set to sparkle. Another benefit of her relationship with the Comte, no doubt.

“The scoundrel!” Wakeford cursed under his breath, half-rising from the chair.

Afraid his friend would do something rash, Avers’ hand flew out and grasped his arm in a firm hold.

Arrested mid-movement, Wakeford fell back into his seat with a frustrated thump. “The brass of the man to be swanning about here after such a thing.”

“Where else would he be?” asked Avers pragmatically. “Can’t exactly announce he won’t be attending social engagements due to his stealing of confidential papers to sell.”

This blunt justification seemed to bring Wakeford back from the brink of his irrational anger, the man’s shoulders relaxing beneath his silk jacket.

“Still deuced enraging.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Avers responded calmly.

“And you also agree he’s the one pulling all the strings of this puppetry?”

“I find him difficult to read. A man who is so concealed in conversation is a deep pool indeed. And there is a hardness about him.” Avers paused momentarily, considering the man in his mind. “Vergelles has the means, certainly, so with the facts on hand that you have given me, there is nothing that dissuades me from your opinion that he is in control. And if he is, and the man of business he’s been painted as, then he will not pass up the opportunity I have presented him with. It is too tantalising to ignore however much he may detest me.”

“His mistress looks beautiful tonight,” said Wakeford, following his friend’s gaze and offering up the comment out of nervous energy rather than any real appreciation.

“Hmm.” Avers had chosen not to fully acknowledge Mademoiselle Cadeaux’s charms before now. They were of no import in the current situation, and besides, getting swept away with such things could have painful consequences—not something he desired.

Still, when Avers moved his gaze from the Comte to his mistress, he had to own that Wakeford had a point. Mademoiselle Cadeaux was dressed in green silk, bows and trimmings running up the open front and around the elbows of her sleeves, and the stomacher artfully adorned with silken flowers as though some woodland nymph had overseen the dressing of her this evening.

This most natural of colours contrasted with the pale smoothness of the skin of her shoulders and neck. She gently wafted a fan over herself to keep the heat of the theatre at bay, and between waves, temporary glimpses of her pale decolletage and the emerald and diamond jewels adorning it were seen. A coil of lightly powdered hair curled around her neck and ended near the jewels she wore. It had been allowed freedom from the high coiffure her hair had been styled in. Avers’ gaze moved down a fraction and he saw those dark eyes of hers keenly observing the performers on the stage.

“She has a shabby white dog,” Wakeford said. “Some stray from the streets of the city she refused to leave there—always causing a furore at parties and the like, stealing food and running amok.”

The little devil was a stray? True, he hadn’t looked like the normal lapdog of a lady. The little wire-haired canine had reminded Avers far more of the sort you’d find around a stableyard. Had Mademoiselle Cadeaux really rescued the little creature from the streets of Paris? Something in Avers’ chest twinged.

“Not that she’s free, mind—everyone in Society knows not to go near her—the Comte’s got a devilish temper,” said Wakeford. “But while you’re here, why don’t you try and forget that Curshaw chit? She’s taking London by storm with her new husband from what I hear, but that leaves Paris to you.” His voice suddenly turned sombre again. “After you’ve helped me find my papers, of course.”

But Avers was no longer listening. He couldn’t get past Wakeford’s previous words, ‘new husband’. He smarted from the sudden pain and found himself short of breath. The term should not have hit him as hard as it did. He’d known Miss Curshaw had wed some time ago. It wasn’t a surprise. Yet it struck him like a blow to the gut. For some reason it was even worse that Wakeford had said it so casually. A fact thrown out as if it did not carry with it the ability to wound.

Avers shifted, uncrossing and recrossing his legs deliberately, and rolling his shoulders back. It wasn’t as if he wanted the Curshaw girl anymore. When her true character had been revealed for the shallow and materially focused one it was—not to mention the way she had deceived Avers into thinking she really cared—he had found himself entirely put off. Yet, the betrayal did not smart any less. In fact, her total lack of feeling towards him twisted the knife a little further.

He had freely given his heart and received one in return. Or so he thought. Whether he had her heart for a short time, or whether he never had it at all, he would never know. Yet, even if it was illusion alone, believing he had her love meant that when she had so easily taken it away, when all her previous promises were reneged on, when she had shown an entire lack of feeling in response to his wholly deep love, he had broken.

That break had been so deep, so achingly painful, and so silently borne. Recovery did not seem an option. Survival, yes, but what he would be when he healed—if he healed—would be far removed from the man he was before.

Avers could not see how he could be the same when promises had been broken and love taken. And while a yearning for companionship existed, it was now tempered with a cynicism which would keep him safe.

Safe and alone.

The two gentlemen remained silent for the rest of the play—Avers lost in his thoughts and Wakeford, he supposed, absorbed by his fears.

Though Avers paid scant attention to what was transpiring on the stage, he could see that Mademoiselle Saint-Val Cadette’s fame was justly deserved. She played a tragedienne with so much raw emotion that even he felt moved by her melancholy speeches. He followed it well enough, despite a wandering mind, as he knew the Greek tragedy from school.

As the final scene played out, he caught sight of Mademoiselle Cadeaux rising and leaving the Comte’s box.

Avers rose, mind back on the task in hand, and squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “I will bid you adieu, Wakeford. My quarry has taken flight.”

Before the final lines were uttered on the stage, he disappeared silently out the back of the box, gone to hunt his prey.