Page 85 of An Honorable Deception
“And they’re watching you. They’re watching your every move. One toe out of line, my good friends, one more illicit embrace, one more dishonest deal, and they’ll see. We’ll know. And so will the world. In the back of your programs, you’ll find what I mean.”
A rustling of paper, but Yates turned from the little window, getting back into position. The men wouldn’t likelytake the time to read the would-be articles that Gemma had filled out at impossible speed after pressing copies of the basic outline. They were much the same, with names and the particular sins listed out. Crimes, some of them. Skirting of the law, mostly. Social suicide if they became public knowledge.
These men didn’t mind sharing one another’s sins and laughing over them behind closed doors—but with the whole of England looking on, they’d turn on one another like hyenas. What was more, they’d do anything to keep their secrets secret.
Yates heard quick footsteps behind him and turned to see Graham hurrying into place, right on cue. They exchanged nods, and they each turned the wheels on the boilers on either side of the space. A combination of steam and smoke would be rushing now through the pipes, curling over the stage.
Neville had clapped his hands in glee when they’d said they needed that particular effect—an old favorite of theater crews everywhere, Yates knew. Right up there with ghostly greasepaint and trapdoors. Speaking of which...
Yates moved to the mat, Graham to the lever for the trapdoor.
“Consider this your call to the straight and narrow. Seek redemption. Or...”
Graham pulled the lever, the trapdoor swung down, and Lavinia dropped. They’d practiced the fall at least a dozen times, until her limbs knew the feel of it, until her knees knew how to bend to absorb the impact, her feet how to find their place against the mat. And Yates was there, too, to steady her with an arm around her waist—and then remind her they hadn’t a second to waste.
Together they hurried to another door under the stage, this one with a dumbwaiter style lift that Graham rushed toreel. Cranking the mechanism opened the door in the stage and raised their little platform all at once.
Smoke and steam greeted them the moment their heads cleared the floorboards, concealing their figures for now.
Yates gripped Lavinia’s waist. No words to make certain she was ready, relying on the silent cues he and Marigold always used—three presses against her hips as the platform stopped at stage level and the smoke rose higher, her knees bending with each press, and then the lift. No acrobatics, no tricky maneuvers they wouldn’t have time to perfect. Just Lavinia towering several feet higher than she should have been, looking as though she were floating as Yates held her above the fog.
“Or,” she called out, “meet justice. The laws you have made and twisted may not be robust enough to convict you. But God will. And in this, at least, you can consider me His harbinger.”
He dropped her back into the fog, grasped her hand, and led her back to the trapdoor, still open. They jumped easily to the mat below. As they moved back under the stage, Neville’s voice rang through the auditorium.
“Make ... your ... choice,” he boomed in his Ghost of Hamlet’s Father voice. It never failed to send a happy shiver down Yates’s spine. “Start now.”
Another clang of spotlights shifting, and this time they would focus on Babcock. The sheer number of actors on the stage and filling the aisles would have kept him in place, but those would melt away now while the eyes turned to him.
They’d written no more lines, though they’d considered dozens. This, they decided, was the better ending. To simply vanish into the wings, behind the barricades, back to the streets. To quietly unbar the doors and let the fog dissipate.
To let those men judge one another—judge Babcock. Revert to hyenas. Let the fear of seeing Lord Hemming’s daughter pierce their hearts, make them wonder if the king himself had approved this. Make them finally think about what they had to lose if they continued on their current paths of depravity and destruction.
They wouldn’t all change. He knew that. Most would probably slide back into their sins. Some would want to but refrain out of fear.
But others, a few—they would heed the call. He had to believe that. He would pray it every day of his life. That this really would be a call to salvation for some. They would truly turn to good. To God. Seek forgiveness, not only the escape of punishment. And that those men would influence the others—the ones around them now and the ones they hadn’t had time to name or research.
Backstage was silence. They moved with catlike steps away from the stage, exchanging glances and nods and smiles.
In the auditorium, pandemonium. From the sound of it, men were rushing the stage, Barremore probably leading the way. Alethia’s father would no doubt forget hisowncomplicity, the fact that he’d been perfectly fine with his brother-in-law’s behavior when he thought it only about an Indian servant. He would focus solely on the affront to his daughter and hence himself.
Babcock had plenty of time to escape, and Yates heard his pounding footsteps, his heaving breaths, as he did.
But he could still smile. Because the lout had nowhere to go. Wherever he turned, someone from this audience would know him. Would find him. Barremore would no doubt find some way to exact revenge.
Barclay materialized at Yates’s side, face set in hard lines. “They’re dead.”
“What?” He couldn’t even think what the man was talking about.
Barclay nodded toward the nearest exit. “The five missing men. Courtney and Weiss were both found shot in an alley—three times each, chest, side, and leg. Rheams’s house was still smoldering when my boys got there, he and his two friends tragically trapped inside.” A flash in his eyes. “Georgie took the liberty of planting a bit of evidence at the scene pointing to Babcock. Always going off-script, that one—but I didn’t chide him for it in this case. Ten to one that Babcock did it.”
Yates let out a long breath and pulled Lavinia to his side. He hadn’t stopped to consider that Babcock might have already acted out his own vengeance. He’d thought that when this show wrapped up, they’d have to turn their attention to catching the murderer of Mrs. Rheams.
Lionfeathers, Alethia had been right. Her uncle couldn’t stand to have anyone else take control over what he considered his. And in this case, it at once delivered and perverted justice.
But it must still be done right. They would have to put together their case against Rheams and deliver it to Victoria’s grieving family and leave it for them to decide whether to involve the police. They deserved to know that she had died seeking justice. They deserved to know what a heroine she was for trying to help those society ignored.
“One more thing.” Barclay leaned in, his brows knit now. “We had a ghost in the auditorium.”
