Regency Society. Ann LethbridgeЧитать онлайн книгу.
were on, and the room was empty. He shifted his position in the tree to view it from another angle. There was no sign of life in the study.
His pulse quickened.
The front door of the house opened, and Barton appeared on the front step and paused, almost dramatically. He looked in the direction of Tony’s tree and made a grand, welcoming gesture towards the house, before signalling to a servant to bring the carriage around.
Tony sat perfectly still, straddling his branch as the carriage accepted its owner and drove away. The bastard had known he was there, and known his location as well. And he was leaving the house in plain sight and daring Tony to enter.
It was a trap, of course. But an irresistible one. Barton knew, and was taunting him.
Tony considered. If he was wise rather than clever, he would head away from the danger, and not towards. But he was tired of sitting in trees and trying to wait the man out. Now or never, then.
He dropped to the ground and made his way stealthily across the grounds to the ornamental drainpipe at the corner of the house that had served as ladder on his last entry. He rattled it, examining the areas nearest the ground for loosened bolts. It seemed secure, and so he began his ascent, working up the first flight, and the next, to the level of the window he sought.
Only to slip rapidly down. He’d dropped almost ten feet, and very nearly lost his grip before regaining his hold.
The bastard had greased the metal. Tony grinned through gritted teeth. If he had been careless, other than merely rash, he might have fallen, as Barton had intended.
He examined the stone front of the house. A more difficult climb, but not impossible. Clinging to the pipe with his legs, he pulled gloves from his pockets to cover the grease on his hands. Then he renewed his grip and reached out with a leg, finding a toe-hold in the stone of the house. And then a hand hold. And so began his ascent again.
It was unlikely that Barton would guess his route and lay another trap, but Tony felt carefully as he went for loosened stones or chiselled mortar. He was progressing nicely, within an arm’s length of the ledge beneath the window. He reached, grasped, and felt the pain before his fingers had fully closed on the bricks. When he pulled his hand away it was followed by a shower of broken glass.
He shook his hand to dislodge the shard that had poked through the palm of his glove, thanking God that the leather had taken the majority of the damage, and then reached out to brush the area clear, so that he might proceed.
An excellent effort, Barton. But not quite good enough. He examined the window for traps before opening it. It was mercifully clear and unlatched. Perhaps the next snare waited inside, since Barton did not think the window worthy of his effort. Tony made a quick circuit of the lit room before setting to work on the safe. No servants concealed behind furniture or curtains. And the key had been left on the inside of the door, as though he were invited to lock it, if he wished to work in privacy.
He turned the key in the door, and, as an afterthought, pushed a chair under the door handle as an additional safeguard. Then he set to work on the safe.
Tony tried to ignore the creeping flesh at the back of his neck. There was something wrong. He had expected the traps. But there should have been more of them. Aside from the unpickable nature of the lock, which was proceeding rather nicely, he thought. There had to be something that Barton knew, that he did not. The man would not relinquish the prize so easily, if he thought Tony could make it into the room. There must be something he was not considering, then. The thought nagged at him, as he shifted the pick in his hand to catch the next slider. Barton could not have concealed the plates on his person before leaving. They were not huge, but too large to slip into a coat pocket. He would not leave something so precious unguarded, would he?
And then the thought hit him. Barton might leave the plates unguarded to go to something he wanted more.
Tony had left Constance. Unprotected.
Even as he thought it, he felt the pick slip home to move the last slider. With a slight turn of his wrist, he opened the lock and the door to the safe swung wide.
He reached into the opening.
There were no plates within.
Constance was waiting in her sitting room until it was late enough to go to bed. Her life was falling into a familiar pattern, now that Tony was part of it. She would nap in the afternoon, and have dinner, alone. She then sent the servants to bed early and spent the rest of the evening reading before the fire until almost midnight. Then she would find her own way to her room.
Shortly afterwards, her lover would come, and they would pass the hours until dawn.
Tonight, she had chosen Byron to keep her company until bedtime. She smiled and closed her eyes. When she had asked Tony to read to her, he had looked into her eyes and recited the poems from memory.
If she was not careful, she would become quite spoiled by his attentions. When the time came to return to reality, she would remember that Tony’s behaviour was an aberration of character, and a sign of the minimal depth of their relationship. Men might spout poetry to their mistresses, but never to their wives.
But it was lovely, all the same. ‘So lovely,’ she whispered.
‘Yes, you are.’ When she opened her eyes, Jack Barton was standing in the doorway.
She stood up and backed away, until she felt her shoulders bump the wall behind her. ‘How did you get into my home?’
He smiled at her, as always. ‘You gave me your key.’
‘Only because you forced me to. And Tony got it back for me.’
‘Tony.’ Barton sniffed in dismissal. ‘He is not much of a thief if he does not realise that keys can be copied. I let him take the one, and kept the duplicate, assuming rightly that I might need it later.’
‘Get out. I shall ring for the servants.’
‘I would not advise that.’ Barton pulled a pistol from his pocket, and pointed it in her direction.
‘Go ahead and shoot. You would not dare,’ she said and started for the bell pull.
‘Not you,’ he replied. ‘But I will shoot the first one through the door, if you ring for help. If you remember my last visit, you know I am capable of it.’
Her hand faltered before it reached the pull.
Barton nodded. ‘Very good. You must agree, it is better if we remain alone. And since you have dismissed the staff for the evening, they will not disturb us.’
‘But we will not be alone for long,’ she threatened. ‘I am expecting a guest.’
‘Anthony Smythe?’ Barton shook his head in disappointment. ‘I doubt he will be troubling us again. It was very simple, in the end, to beat your lover. It is a pity that I could not be there to see him fail. But I needed to be away from the house, to lure him in.’
‘What do you mean?’ Constance felt a chill.
‘The minute I was away, I have no doubt that he rushed into the house, ready to search the study. If he made it past the traps I set for him without falling to his death, he is still in for a nasty shock. The safe he has been trying to open for the last several weeks is, to the best of my knowledge, empty. I have never had reason or ability to open it. It was left by the previous owner of the house. For all I know, the man took the key to the grave with him. If he has not found them already, I doubt that your Mr Smythe will have sense to intuit the location of the things he is looking for.
‘I fear, darling, that in his initial excitement, he may have forgotten all about you.’
Constance tried not to imagine Tony, dangling unsteadily from a ledge or lying in a broken heap at the base of Barton’s house. He had made it