Page 53

"The best revenge is not to be like your enemy."

―Marcus Aurelius

W ith all the properties to search, Ravenscroft must have had trouble rousing more help from the Horse Guards, Peregrine thought.

Because he and Hodges still managed to arrive before them, despite his delays.

And only three members of the mounted cavalry had arrived to see what so desperately required attention at this hour of the night.

A corporal and two troopers. They were further unimpressed by Peregrine enforcing the need for stealth, but this part of Lambeth was as silent as a grave.

Perry had heard the clip of the horses’ hooves coming from a distance, and had intercepted the men well before they came within sight of their target.

All five of them left their mounts some two blocks away with a wide-eyed stable lad near an inn, approaching on foot to survey the building.

The Blues had abandoned the shine and plumage, blending into the shadows with their dark blue coats.

And despite their heavy boots, they moved as quietly as they could, dodging rats and the occasional night watchman dozing against a wall.

The two-storey building stood squat and grim near the muddy waterline, where fog clung low to the ground and the stench of tar and river rot drowned out most other scents. A former cooperage or warehouse, by the look of it. Broad-shouldered, soot-stained, and anonymous.

From the front, it looked like just another brick structure with boarded windows and a heavy timber door that bore no signage. And there was no indication of their business sitting out to be discovered, in the alleys or by the doors.

But Red Hand’s messenger had been right. Sometimes, when the fitful, fetid wind blew across the water of the Thames, he could catch a bare whiff of ink and oil. There was no doubt that there was some sort of illicit press here.

But what gave him pause was a single light shining in one of the upper windows, a beacon in the darkness. Peregrine didn’t trust it. At all.

“Don’t know what to make of that. How do you think we best do this? Loud? Or quiet?” the corporal asked him.

Peregrine weighed their options, feeling his skin crawling. Even though he was also filled with misgivings about the light, he did not see how they could avoid checking the building. “We go in quietly—and carefully, if we can.”

Beside him, Hodges tightened the cinch on his pistol belt and adjusted the carbine across his back. The three guards checked their sabres and flintlocks.

They approached in a staggered line, careful not to bunch together or let their boots ring too loudly against the cobbles.

The warehouse loomed larger the closer they came.

It was ugly and inert, but not empty. Not quite.

Peregrine had the queerest sense that someone was waiting for them with the light upstairs.

At the door, Hodges crouched to examine the box lock on the front door, cracking the shutters on his lamp for more light.

“It’s a new one,” he murmured, tracing the edge of the bolt.

“Fitted recently.” The corporal tapped one of the troopers, indicating he should go around to find whatever back door existed.

“Can you open it without noise?” Peregrine asked Hodges in a low voice.

Hodges peered at it and grunted. “Given a minute.”

Peregrine gave him a nod and turned to the others, sweeping the narrow street and the empty windows of the buildings nearby. No movement. But the warehouse gave off the sense of held breath, like something inside it was waiting to happen.

The lock gave a soft click, and Hodges eased the door open with more care than he would typically bother. The air inside rolled out over them. The scent of ink and oil, yes, and paper.

But also of something sharper that Peregrine recognised from hours spent at an easel with a paintbrush. Turpentine.

The corporal bristled at the smell, also knowing what it represented. “Cover this door, Lucas,” he murmured to the other trooper. “I don’t fancy the idea of someone blocking our way out.”

“Aye, sir,” the trooper whispered back.

The three of them crept deeper inside, slowed as they checked every corner.

The air was close and hot, too warm for the hour.

A long workbench stood to one side, cluttered with rags, brass typeset, and sheaves of smeared proofs.

In the centre, the printing press itself loomed like some mechanical beast.

Hodges hissed a soft noise, examining a box that sat in a corner.

Unprinted paper of a creamy, high-quality kind.

But as Hodges held it in front of his lamp, a watermark shone cleanly through.

It was stolen paper from the Treasury—the most difficult and necessary part of creating a forgery that would pass inspection.

Likely, it had been acquired by the disaffected Godfrey Bellrose .

This was the right building, then. The place where they had created the forged exchequer bills.

Any satisfaction Peregrine had was tempered by the other details that set him on edge: a shattered water barrel in the corner, sand scattered across the floor, a bundle of rags tucked under the stairwell, and many open containers of solvent left dangerously near the lit stove.

They had the right building, but someone had laid the groundwork for a fire, planning to burn the remaining evidence to the ground.

“Corporal,” Peregrine muttered. “We are standing in a bonfire waiting to happen.”

“Agreed, Lord Fitzroy,” the man said through his teeth. “I think I shall check to see if any of the sand or water barrels are still full. And perhaps do what I can to ensure that the turpentine does not light by accident.”

Peregrine nodded, tapping Hodges’s elbow and pointing with his chin to the stairs that led up to the next level. Hodges nodded and began climbing them, careful to test each step with his weight. Peregrine followed behind.

The closed darkness of the offices on the first storey gave Perry gooseflesh.

And above, the U-shaped mezzanine and its light in the darkness beckoned.

Peregrine withdrew his own pistol, setting his hand on the rail to go upstairs.

Hodges nodded and lifted his lamp to investigate the level they were on.

The gallery overlooked the working floor, and even from the stairs, Peregrine spotted the single lantern perched on a crate atop the dry boards at one end, close enough to the window to attract notice. But there was nothing else there.

Hurrying downstairs as quietly as he could, Peregrine went in search of Hodges and the offices. The first office’s door was cracked ajar, but as Peregrine pushed it further open, the copper smell of blood wafted out .

Bodies. Lower class men, by their clothes—the forgers and printers, Peregrine guessed, by the ink on their arms. And lying across the pile of bodies, one other shape that was far more familiar, his hand lax atop his carbine.

Hodges.

Peregrine rushed forward, reaching for the man’s neck to check for a pulse. And he found it—slow and steady. But the man’s hat was missing, lost when he had been bludgeoned across the back of the skull and left here with the dead.

A footstep broke the silence behind him, and Peregrine surged to his feet.

An older man’s figure emerged. Tall, composed, and clad in the sort of tailored coat that didn’t belong in Lambeth at all, let alone a warehouse at three in the morning.

The lamp in his hand shaded his face oddly, but Peregrine saw enough to recognise him.

“Lord Fitzroy,” Duke Chandros said, voice calm, as though greeting him at a club. “I was wondering when you would arrive. You took a little longer than I expected.”

Peregrine sized up the situation in an instant.

He was younger, stronger, and certainly determined enough to overpower the older man.

But if that lantern fell in the wrong spot, the building, and those inside, would go up in flames.

The guards were too far below to offer any immediate help.

And so, Peregrine forced back his urge to repay the man for what he had done to Hodges.

“You will have to forgive my delay, and my surprise. I didn’t expect you here at the scene of your villainy, Chandros,” Peregrine countered. “Much less standing over bodies.”

The duke cocked his head in agreement. “I do not enjoy getting my hands dirty, and the Maker is certainly a dabber hand in killing. But he is busy doing his final parts, as I am doing mine. And I had a feeling you might find your way here after finding Goldbourne. So I waited, and lo! Here you are.”

Peregrine remembered that ticking sense of doom that had plagued him these past two weeks. That sense that his mother’s plans marched forwards to some timetable of their own. “I hope that you don’t imagine you somehow will survive allying with my mother, Chandros.”

The duke smiled softly, an expression which gave Peregrine nearly as much of a chill as watching humanity leave his mother’s eyes had. “No, I don’t expect to survive it. And neither do I expect you to understand why I am playing this role.”

“By all means. Test your logic out on me,” Peregrine snarled.

“You are such a tragedy,” Chandros murmured, raising his lantern so he could better study Peregrine in the light. “You inherited her intellect and skills of deduction. Her charm, her memory. Everything, really, except that sense of ambition that drives her to such astonishing heights.”

He wanted to laugh. “Do not tell me that you admire her.”

“Of course, I do! Oh, I admit, it took me far too long to overcome my prejudices. A mere woman, after all! l regret it took so long, because I wonder how much more could have been done if I had taken a place at Marian’s side while you were still a child.”

The statement raised Peregrine’s hackles. “I shall remind Your Grace that my mother is a monster. Although judging by the blood currently on your hands, perhaps you consider that a tolerable flaw.”

The older duke shook his head. “No, Fitzroy. The flaw is borne in you, and that is why it is so regrettable. In the end, your sentimentality ran too deep to be cut away. To the flock, of course, the wolf must always seem a monster. But I look at your mother and I see the most splendid predator this world has ever seen.”

“You are barking mad to countenance her actions,” Peregrine hissed. “There is nothing to commend her for.”

The duke tsked . “Here is where we will perhaps fundamentally diverge in opinion. Given the struggles you have had keeping up, I think even you must agree, she possesses one of the greatest minds of our age. Watching the way her thoughts work, completely untempered by matters of morality—it has been breathtaking to behold. The only thing that would have been more spectacular would have been completely winning over the marchioness and also pressing her clever mind to work. But Selina’s a pale star compared to the sun. ”

“Lady Normanby has a soul. She would never do the things my mother would.”

“And more’s the pity. That was another wretched piece of luck, by the by.

Not only did Selina limit herself, she grew attached to the misbegotten son and placed herself on the wrong side as a result of things.

We might have broken the back of England before now, the three of us.

Perhaps four—but Goldbourne was too concerned with the size of his purse for my liking anyhow. ”

Peregrine shook his head. “To what end?”

“That would be telling. But you already know the British empire looks down the road towards its end, Fitzroy. Change is in the wind. The colonies grow fractious. The Crown and Parliament are the corrupted legacy that needs to be cleared away, weighted down with small minds who cannot fathom how to build a greater empire. Your mother has shown me what we could build. I am too old a man now to be of much use. But I would see the world burn if it cleared the ground for her foundation.”

Peregrine stared at the man. “My mother’s empire was built on evil. You can’t hide what she’s done. And when the truth comes to light—when they finally see her for what she is—they’ll cast her down.”

“No, they won’t. Goldbourne and I have done our part.

I know you have seen our efforts. The accounts in your name.

The silenced past. I left a letter to be delivered to the press in a few days’ time.

My shocking confession will ensure the blame for the counterfeiting will fall on my head.

The Maker will erase the final few names from the books, and there will be no proof of anything your mother has done, except in the rumours of a few people unable to prove it. ”

Duke Chandros shuffled backwards from the doorway, holding the lantern high. “The truth will die with us, Fitzroy. And the story I left behind? That is what they will remember.”

“Chandros! Stop!” Peregrine shouted.

But the duke’s arm was already in motion, and he hurled the lantern over the railing to shatter on the floor below.