The Devil May Care (Brotherhood of Sinners #1) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Epilogue

  Author Note

  About the Author

  Other Books

  The Devil May Care

  Copyright 2016 Lara Archer

  Published by Sagitta Press

  Cover Design by Kim Killion

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author at [email protected].

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For more information on the author and her works, please visit http://laraarcher.com/

  Chapter One

  Rachel Covington felt like a common criminal. The soldiers marching her into Whitehall Palace kept hard-knuckled grips on their muskets, and one darted glances at her every few moments, as if afraid she’d attack.

  Ridiculous. She was unarmed and half his size—a poor little governess. What did he think she was going to do, scold him about his posture? Force him to eat his carrots and peas?

  The one criminal act of her life had been sneaking an extra slice of iced ginger cake up to her room one night, against Lady Greeley’s orders that servants eat nowhere but the kitchens. Hardly a trespass likely to topple the British government.

  And yet, someone clearly thought an armed guard was necessary.

  Just as clearly, Whitehall wanted something from her, or they wouldn't have sent a solicitor to Lancashire to fetch her from the Greeleys, nor would they have ordered a pack of soldiers to join them at the nearest town. The solicitor claimed the soldiers were only there for her protection, but refused to say why she needed protecting, or why she'd been summoned in the first place.

  For pity’s sake, she was no one. She knew no secrets, unless one counted Lord Greeley’s penchant for dallying with the local dairymaids, or Lady Greeley’s habit of hiding a brandy flask in her embroidery chest, just beneath the yellow floss.

  Of course, that left the slight possibility that someone had something to tell her.

  About Sarah.

  The rush of hope that went through her unsteadied her legs. But what could the British government care about an orphaned girl who’d run from home almost a decade ago? How could such a girl have survived the years in between, and if she had, why had she never let Rachel know she was alive?

  Still, Rachel had packed her meager satchel at once and come to London, despite Lady Greeley’s hysterical vows that if she left so precipitously, she’d never find work as a governess again. If there was any chance at all that Sarah was alive, Rachel had to come.

  Now the soldiers halted before an unmarked door. One rapped with his knuckles, and the door opened onto a darkened, cramped room. Rachel’s lungs seized.

  Don’t panic, she told herself. See, there’s a window. Small and grimy, but it could be shattered to get air. Besides, they wouldn’t have brought her here just to lock her in, not when she’d been as good as buried already up in Lancashire. She stiffened her spine, and stepped inside.

  In the gloom, it took another moment before she saw the two men.

  They stood behind a bulky desk, silhouetted by the glow of a sooty fireplace. The stouter of the two—big-bellied, with white bristling eyebrows and a jowly chin—gave a nod, and the soldiers retreated, closing the door with a snap.

  Rachel fought to calm her breathing. Now at least she might have answers.

  “Dear God,” hissed the smaller man, a scarecrow creature wearing a frowzy periwig that should have gone to the rubbish heap a decade ago. He blinked at her as though just slapped awake.

  “Steady, brother,” said the stout man coolly. His pale eyes assessed her without apology, in a manner she knew well: that of a man accustomed to power. A lord of some degree, no doubt.

  Rachel raised her chin and stared just as frankly back at him.

  To her satisfaction, he broke the silence first. “You are the Rachel Covington raised by Misses Martha and Mary Covington, of Stone Cottage, in Rookshead, Yorkshire?”

  Her pulse jumped: Stone Cottage had been Sarah’s home as well. The last place she’d seen her twin sister, far too many years ago. “I am, sir.”

  “And since the death of your great aunts, you have been employed as governess by Lord and Lady Greeley?”

  “Yes, sir.” She forced her fingers to soften, not curl into fists. My sister. Tell me about my sister.

  “Governess. A fine profession for a woman.” The man planted his palms on the desk and bent towards her as though to get a better view of her face. “Tell me, Miss Covington, does it bring you gratification to rear young children in godly learning and moral rectitude?”

  She glanced at his glutton’s belly, the stained tobacco pipe near his fingers. He hardly looked the strict religious sort, but zealotry could lurk in the oddest places.

  And then a terrible thought struck her.

  Good God, he wasn’t interviewing for a governess, was he?

  Despite his age, perhaps he had young children. Perhaps he’d been warned that London governesses were too worldly, and sought some strict little country mouse who’d bar all sin and corruption from the door.

  A horrible shriek of laughter brewed up inside her.

  She tamped it down, along with a rising sick feeling in her belly. I left the Greeley’s for nothing, then. Worse than nothing. But what else had she expected? Women in her position had no more business having hope than did slabs of dried beef.

  She straightened her spine. Now that the Greeleys had washed their hands of her, she had no other prospect of earning her keep. “Surely, sir,” she said, forcing a demure smile, “a woman can have no more meaningful employment than educating children in what is decent and good.”

  A harsh bark of laughter exploded from the shadows to her right.

  She whipped her head around. Good Lord, there was a third man in the room! All this time, he’d stood hidden in a dark recess behind a bookcase.

  Now he leaned forward just enough that the orange glow of the fireplace caught the side of his cheek, the sweep of his hair. And his eyes. They were glaring eyes, fire-bright.

  In contrast to the doughy older men, this man’s face was all taut angles, his posture full of strength and tight-leashed power. In the strange light, he could almost have been a gargoyle. Or a devil. Though she supposed he was rather
too handsome for either.

  She met his eyes directly, looked straight into those burning depths. And felt instantly scalded. Something clutched in her belly, and she took a step back.

  He hates me, it struck her at once. He hates me with everything in him.

  Why on earth?

  That harsh laughter cracked again. “Well, Helm,” the gargoyle-man said, his voice deep and silkened by the accents of an aristocrat. “It seems you’ve found yourself a little nun. A true devotress.” The eyes raked over her again, stinging like a hot blade. “She’s useless to us.”

  Useless? What in blazes?

  What use could they have hoped she’d be?

  “Patience,” said the stout man—Helm, apparently. “There’s a great deal we still don’t know. Please, Miss Covington. If you’ll allow an impertinent observation: you’re a lovely girl, even dressed severely as you are. I am aware that your great aunts left you nothing when they died, that all funds went to their Dissenters’ church. But why become a governess? Why not marry instead?”

  The gargoyle laughed again, not pleasantly. “Yes, speak up, miss.” He lounged against the wall, arrogant as a pasha, arms crossed over his chest. His eyes bored into her as if he saw straight through to her backbone. “When the time came to procure your own bread, why did you not snare a rich husband with your feminine wiles?” The corner of his mouth quirked unkindly. “Assuming you have any feminine wiles.”

  Outrage pulsed through her. “Not that it’s any business of yours, sir, but by the time my great aunts died, I’d rendered myself unmarriageable.”

  The gargoyle’s eyebrows arched. Good. She’d shocked him.

  “And how,” inquired Helm, his thick white brows rising as well, “did you manage that?”

  Her chin tipped up. “I beat the Reverend Mr. Cadwallader at chess.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “He only condescended to play with me because his usual opponent was laid up with the gout. I was, quite charitably, allowing him to win. Until he launched into a disquisition on how the organs of mathematical reason in the feminine brain are of equivalent size to those of nine-year-old boys. At which point I abandoned charity and put his king in check in three moves.”

  Helm’s eyebrows climbed even higher, twitching like caterpillars, and his barrel chest rumbled with a deep chuckle. “And how, exactly, did this render you unmarriageable?”

  She held his gaze squarely, abandoning all pretense of being a meek country mouse. “The reverend’s sermon the next Sunday concerned the evils of educating women beyond their heaven-ordained domestic duties. I was held up as a model of iniquity, and the neighbors quickly deemed me unfit for any man within the parish.”

  “On such a slight basis?”

  “I believe my utter lack of a dowry helped confirm their opinions.”

  “Poor child,” replied Helm, eyes sparkling. “You’ve suffered a grievous injustice.”

  “Not really,” she said. “There wasn’t a man in that parish I’d have consented to marry anyway. Even with a pistol to my head.”

  Now the scarecrow was chuckling, too.

  “You see, Sebastian?” said Helm, his gaze sliding meaningfully to the younger man still skulking in the shadows. “She shows promise after all.”

  “For a schoolmistress, maybe.” The gargoyle grimaced, his face a distorted mask in the firelight. “This is a farce, Helm. Give it up.” He turned and pushed at the wall behind him. A hidden panel swung backwards, revealing an even blacker space beyond, through which he vanished like a cat.

  The scarecrow started forward as if to follow, but Helm took hold of his arm. “Let him go,” he said. “He’ll make his peace with it. He knows his duty.”

  His duty? Her gaze swung back to Helm’s beefy face, her heart drumming once more. What duty? And Helm had said she showed promise. But for what?

  Enough with their games. “Lord Helm,” she said, and he startled. Her guess about his title had been a good one. “What precisely do you want with me?”

  Helm’s fingers steepled, and he rested his chin upon them, his gaze fixing her as if sighting a gun. “What I want, my dear, is the good of England.”

  “The good of England? And why should that be any concern of mine?”

  He ignored her tartness. “You have a gift for languages, Miss Covington, do you not? Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, French. I hear tell you had an excellent tutor.”

  Her skin chilled, prickling everywhere. Who in blazes had told him that? The curate Mr. Rapson, hired by her great aunts to provide moral edification, had dared instead to introduce her and Sarah to literature—mythology, pagan philosophy, love poetry. Wicked vice to the strict Dissenters of Rookshead. Only three people ever knew the truth of it: she and Mr. Rapson . . . and Sarah.

  Hope and anxiety surged in equal measure, and a yearning so great it swelled painfully against her ribcage, threatening to suffocate her altogether.

  Helm licked his lips. “May I offer a piece of advice? Quid sit futurum cras,” he intoned in Latin, “fuge quaerere.”

  The room shifted around her, the floor unsteady beneath her feet. Those words. Those particular words.

  “Did you not understand me, Miss Covington?”

  “I—I understood.” It was a signal from Sarah. It had to be. Their most cherished passage from Horace, recited nightly in their frigid room, when sleep forced their great aunts to leave off monitoring them for evidence of mortal sin. Cease asking what will happen tomorrow.

  Her head went perilously light. If this was a message from Sarah, why wasn’t Sarah here? “Do you mention this merely as a point of philosophy, sir?” she said. The air felt hot and thin, rasping against her lungs. “Carpe diem, and all that?”

  “Tell me, my dear,” he countered, his tone that of a pleasant-tempered schoolmaster. “Do you know the next line?”

  Her limbs began to tremble, but she wouldn’t let her spine soften. “Of course,” she bit out. “I have most of the Odes by heart. But you knew that when I walked in here, didn’t you?”

  “Recite the lines for me, then, if you will.”

  “Enough! Where is my sister?”

  There was something terrible in Helm’s expression—gentle and pained, but terrible.

  Oh, God. The answer to her question was written there, with no need for words. Everything she’d feared, made suddenly, unbearably real. Sarah.

  Mercifully, tears burst forth, blurring away the sight of the men. She had nothing now, and no one. No hope at all. Only a bare phrase that echoed dully in her skull: Nec dulcis amores sperne puer, neque tu choreas. “You who are young,” she whispered in English, her voice cracking, “don’t scorn sweet love, don’t refuse to dance.” Sarah’s very favorite lines from the Ode, the most sweetly cherished dreams of her girlhood.

  “And do you adhere to Horace’s philosophy?” Helm’s voice seemed to be coming from very far away. “Despite your upbringing, Miss Covington, can you approve of those who put it into practice, who dare break every rule? Who seize the moment, take risks if they must? Even if that means their lives are forfeit?”

  Dear God. Her knees wobbled. Sarah. Sarah is dead.

  “I’m afraid, my dear, we must ask you to take a great risk. A risk your twin sister took gladly.”

  The walls of the little room swayed and buckled, the lamp winked out, and the air went roaring past her ears.

  “Catch her!” someone said, but she was spinning much too fast, and the black shadows rushed out from behind the bookcase and swallowed her up.

  * * *

  Sebastian was shaking. Hard.

  It took three blasted tries to pick the lock on Mawbry’s Whitehall office door. When he stumbled inside, he had to brace himself on the desk to steady his hands before he could rifle through the stacks of diplomatic packets crammed into the largest drawer.

  He was never so glad in his life that he’d learned to pick locks. And never so glad he knew where a friend stashed his secret store of liquor. A glass
of Mawbry’s ridiculously expensive smuggled brandy was essential right now.

  A glass? No, bugger that. He’d be going through a bottle. Or two.

  The first bolt went down in a hard gulp.

  He thought he’d been prepared to see the girl. Had done perfectly well, in fact, for the first minute or so. He’d been so relieved by the gray dress, the virginal stiffness of her posture.

  Of course, there was the all-too-familiar slant of her lovely cheekbones. The full curve of her lips in that rich coral shade he knew so well. Those sent a jolt of alarm through him.

  Sal’s face. Sal’s.

  For a moment, he’d felt the edge of the horror that slammed through his brain each night like a spike. A haunting made flesh.

  But there’d been no flirtation in this girl’s manner, no sensuality. Coiled tight in that topknot, her hair looked flat and dark, with no sign of auburn fire. Her voice was mild, submissive. Her eyes cool. Her hands still as gravestones.

  A nun. She’d looked like a nun.

  Silks and ruffles and saucy curls would surely make no difference. Dress the twin up as they might, no one would ever mistake the little governess for Salomé Mirabeau. Or think she could succeed where Sal had failed.

  Seeing that, he’d thought it over and done with; he’d thought Helm’s plan could never work. Though the abandonment of that plan meant grave danger for England, intolerable loss against the French in Iberia, and probable death for himself, gratitude washed through him. He’d been relieved, so bloody, bloody relieved.

  Now he poured and drank.

  And poured and drank again. Though the brandy burned at his throat and soured his stomach. If only there were enough of it to bring oblivion.

  Because when Helm asked the girl why she hadn’t married, something came alive in the little nun’s eyes. Her voice changed, and even her posture. Beneath that meek exterior lay steel. And fire. He’d known, with instincts honed in a decade of spying for Helm, that she had the potential she needed.

  The first bottle was somehow empty already. He wrested the stopper from a second.