The Deception of the Emerald Ring Read Online Free PDF Page B

the hour.
    "If you leave the note with me, your duty will be discharged. I will peruse it at my leisure and send an answer tomorrow morning. Early tomorrow morning."
    "Can't," replied the messenger laconically. "Early is as early does, but my orders are I'm to have an answer back quick-like. And that means tonight. My lord," he added belatedly.
    "Right," clipped Geoff, as the minute hand on the clock slipped another centimeter closer to midnight. "Tonight."
    Why did the War Office have to send for him tonight of all nights? Couldn't they have had whatever crisis they were in the midst of the night before, when he was hunched over the desk in his study, scanning the latest reports from Paris? Even better, they might have timed their intrusion for two nights before, when Geoff was being royally beaten at darts by his old Eton chum Miles Dorrington, who wasn't above crowing over it. And when Miles crowed, he crowed very, very loudly.
    Any night, in fact, would have been better than this one.
    Losing his temper, he counseled himself, would only waste more precious time. It wasn't the messenger's fault any more than it was the War Office's that civilization itself was being menaced by a megalomanaical Corsican with a taste for conquest. If one were to allocate blame, it lay clearly at Bonaparte's door. Which, Geoff reflected, didn't do him terribly much good at the moment. Even if Bonaparte were available to receive complaints, Geoff rather doubted he could be expected to halt his advance across Europe for an insignificant little thing like a wedding.
    Geoff's wedding, to be precise.
    Or, as it was increasingly looking, Geoff's somewhat delayed wedding. Geoff filed it away as one more grievance to be taken up against Bonaparte, preferably personally, with a small cannon.
    With a sigh, Geoff held out his hand.
    "'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,'" he muttered.
    "My lord?" The courier gave him a hard look.
    "Give me the letter and I'll pen a reply," Geoff translated. Signaling to a waiting footman, Geoff instructed in a low voice, "Go to MacTavish and tell him to go on ahead with the carriage as planned. I'll catch him up at the Oxford Arms. Tell him to give the lady my apologies and let her know that I'll be with her as soon as duty permits."
    Mary would understand. And if she didn't, he would make it up to her. She had mentioned that Pinchingdale House needed redecorating—he rather liked his study the way it was, but if Mary wanted to drape it in pink silk printed with purple pansies, he wouldn't say a word. Well, maybe not purple pansies. A man had to draw the line somewhere.
    Cracking the seal of the paper in his hands, Geoff quickly scanned the contents. They were, as he had suspected, in code, a series of numbers marching alongside Greek letters that had nothing to do with their Roman counterparts. A month ago, a note delivered within London, carried less than a mile by a trusted—if not too intelligent—subordinate of the War Office would never have elicited such elaborate precautions.
    Of course, a month ago, England and France had still been observing a precarious peace. That hadn't stopped Bonaparte from flooding the English capital with French spies, but they had grown decidedly bolder since the formal declaration of war. Even Mayfair, heart of England's aristocracy, no longer provided a haven. A mere three weeks ago, one of the Office's more agile agents had been found, a well-placed hole in his back, sprawled on the paving stones outside of Lord Vaughn's London mansion. Whichever way one looked at it, the new precautions made sense.
    They were also a bloody nuisance.
    A message in code meant that it would have to be decoded. Even knowing the key, decoding the message and coding an answer in return would take at least half an hour.
    As if on cue, the minute hand jerked into the upright position, and a pangent ponging noise rousted out the echoes from their shadowy corners.
    Refolding the note, Geoff said in a