Much Ado About Rogues Read Online Free PDF Page A

fight. She needed a man who wouldn’t walk away, even when she ordered him to go.
    So not again, never again. They’d destroyed each other once, and once had been more than enough. She was a woman now, with responsibilities and no room in her life for what might have been. She knew that when it came to Jack she had few weapons in her arsenal. But that gown should serve her as well as any suit of armor. Jack would remember, as she remembered, and he wasn’t the sort to knowingly make the same mistake twice.
    Disgusted with her temporary weakness, she stood up and quit the room. She had much to arrange before Jack returned.
    * * *
    J ACK SETTLED INTO the chair in the private room of the Castle Inn, nodding his greetings to Will and Dickie as the latter filled a glass with wine from a decanter and pushed it across the tabletop to him.
    “Learn anything today?” Will asked, using the point of his dagger to skewer a small bit of cheese and pop it into his mouth.
    “Yes. There are times your table manners can be execrable.” Jack took a sip of wine. He wanted first to hear what they’d managed to unearth while he was at the manor house. “Dickie?”
    “I agree, and we didn’t just learn that today,” Dickie Carstairs said, grinning at Will. “Oh, you want to know what we’ve managed to ferret out, don’t you? Very well. Your mentor departed this benighted village eight days ago on the public coach heading north. He carried with him a fairly large trunk, purchased just that morning, and a rather cumbersome cloth bag he declined to place in the boot but actually put down the blunt for its own seat, so that he could keep it with him inside the coach. Although he is well-known here, the bumpkins I spoke with didn’t know they were seeing the marquis board the coach.”
    “How so?” Jack asked, if only to keep Dickie talking. He already recognized where this story was leading. After all, hadn’t a part of his training been to pass unnoticed under the eyes of the villagers who had been seeing him almost daily for a year?
    “Oh, that. Yes, well, it would seem that the passenger they saw was described as looking much like a member of the clergy. One of those queer, foreign autem bawlers, you know? Wearing skirts, and with a rope of beads with a whacking great cross hanging at the end of it tied around his waist, a hat as flat and big as a platter pushed down over the cowl on his head. Kept trying to trace his blessings on everybody who came close, so the good citizens rather kept their gazes down as they steered around him, trying to avoid gaining his attention. A costume, of course.”
    “And a good one if you’re walking where you would otherwise be recognized,” Jack said, nodding. The monk disguise had been among those missing from the collection in the hidden room. There were others. “Go on.”
    Jack contemplated his wineglass as Dickie went on to explain that the stranger had taken a private room at this very inn two weeks earlier, appearing and disappearing with no regularity, probably going out and about, saving souls. But always generous with his tips as he asked that his privacy be maintained so that he wasn’t disturbed while at his prayers. He may have slept in his bed, he may not have, no one was certain. Overall, he was quiet and no trouble, coming in and out, always carrying something with him, the same cloth bag already mentioned.
    “He was slowly bringing what he needed from the manor, both in the bag and beneath his monk’s robes,” Dickie concluded, stating the obvious. “He couldn’t be seen leaving the place with a traveling trunk, he couldn’t make anyone at the manor suspicious. So he did it piecemeal, and in secret. And no one suspected. Clever.”
    Will stabbed another bit of cheese. “Clever enough to disembark at the very next village and hire a wagon for his luggage, then head out again, this time going west. And, before Dickie drags the business out too far, an old lady driving a