Duke of Midnight (Maiden Lane #6)(15)

Footsteps sounded in the hall outside her room. The maid was coming.

She opened her eyes and he was simply gone.

A moment later Sally the upstairs maid came in the room with her coal shuttle and brushes. Sally started when she noticed Artemis still sitting up in bed. “Oh, miss, you’re up early. Shall I send for some tea?”

Artemis shook her head, inhaling. “Thank you, no. I’ll go down for some in a bit. We came in late last night.”

“That you did.” Sally clattered at the hearth. “Blackbourne says as her ladyship didn’t get in until past two in the morn. In a right mood she is, too, for having to wait up so late. Oh, and how did the window get left open?” Sally jumped up and crossed to the window, slamming it shut. “Brrr! ’Tis too early for such a draft.”

Artemis’s eyebrows rose. Her room was on the third floor and there was no convenient trellis or vine on the wall outside. She hoped the silly man wasn’t lying dead in the garden.

“Will that be all, miss?”

A fire was crackling on her hearth and Sally was already by the door, pail in hand.

“Yes, thank you.”

Artemis waited until the maid had closed the door behind her before drawing the thin chain around her neck out from under her chemise. She wore it always because she didn’t know what else to do with what hung on it: a delicate pendant with a glittering green stone. Once she had thought the stone was paste, a pretty ornament Apollo had given her on their fifteenth birthday. Four months ago she’d tried to pawn it for more money to help Apollo—and found out the horrible truth: the stone was an emerald set in gold, which made it a treasure too dear, for ironically she couldn’t sell such a fine piece without awkward questions about its provenance. Questions she simply couldn’t answer. She had no idea where or how Apollo could’ve gotten such an expensive piece of jewelry.

She’d worn the emerald pendant for months now—too afraid to leave the damnably expensive thing alone in her bedroom—but yesterday she’d added something else to the chain.

Artemis fingered the Ghost’s signet ring, the red stone warm under her thumb. She should’ve given it back. It obviously was important to him. Yet something had made her want to conceal it and keep it a little longer. She examined the ring again. The stone had once had a crest or other insignia carved into it, but it was so battered by age that only vague lines remained, impossible to decipher. The gold, too, had the matte patina of age, the band worn thin on the underside. The ring, and thus the family it belonged to, was very old indeed.

Artemis frowned. How had the Ghost known she had his ring? She hadn’t told anyone besides Wakefield, not even Penelope. For one wild moment she imagined the Duke of Wakefield donning the motley of a harlequin.

No. That was just absurd. More likely the Ghost had either known he’d dropped the ring in her hand or simply guessed by process of elimination.

Artemis sighed and tucked the ring and pendant back under her chemise. Time to dress. The day had begun.

MAXIMUS CROUCHED ON the sloping roof of Brightmore House, fighting the urge to reenter Miss Greaves’s room. He hadn’t found his ring—his father’s ring—and the insistent beat to return was strong in his chest. Under the impulse to take back what was his, there was a subtler, softer cadence: to speak again to Miss Greaves. To look into her eyes and find out what made her so strong.

Madness. He shook off the siren’s call and leaped to the next house. Brightmore House was in Grosvenor Square; the white stone buildings around the green in the middle were new and close together. It was child’s play to travel by rooftop to the end of the square and then slither down a gutter into an alley. Maximus kept to the shadows for the length of the short alley and then once again took to the rooftops.

Dawn was near and people rarely looked up.

Had she pawned his father’s ring? The agony of the thought made him gasp even as he ran along the crest of a roof. He’d searched her room and meager possessions and the ring hadn’t been there. Had she given it away? Dropped it somewhere in St. Giles?

Surely not, for she’d made a point of boasting about having it in her possession at the ball. But she was poor—that much at least was starkly evident after seeing the room her cousin had gifted her. A gold ring would fetch enough money for some small luxury.

He waited at the edge of a crumbling building, watching as below a night soil man labored with two foully full buckets.

Then he jumped to the next roof.

Maximus landed silently, despite the distance across the alley, the only sign of his exertion the slight grunt as he rose. He remembered his father’s hands, the strong, blunt fingers, the dark hairs on the backs, and the slight curve of the right middle finger, broken as a child. His father might’ve been a duke, but he always had a healing cut or abrasion or bruise on his hands, for he used his hands without any regard for his rank. Father had saddled his own horse when he’d been too impatient to wait for a groom, sharpened his own quill, and loaded his own fowling piece when hunting. Those hands had been broad and scarred and had seemed, to Maximus as a boy, to be utterly competent, utterly reliable.

The last time he’d seen his father’s hand, it had been covered in blood as Maximus had removed the signet ring.

He dropped to the street and saw that his feet had brought him to St. Giles. To the spot where it had happened.