Page 81 of A Lord Apart (The Way to a Lord's Heart 2)

“It’s not even dark yet,” she murmured. “Are we to have a wedding afternoon instead of a wedding night?”

“Both,” he replied. “And we will wake together tomorrow and every day after that.”

They dealt with buttons and laces and hooks with soft laughter and a bit of fumbling. Eagerness on both sides made up for a lack of familiarity.

Finally, they came together skin to skin, learning each other’s bodies with hands and lips. The consummation that Daniel had dreamed of for weeks was unutterably sweet, and he reveled in the sounds of excitement and satisfaction he drew from Penelope. There would be more of those, he vowed, as he discovered more about her.

Afterward, as they lay entwined, it came to him that with her, he would find the home he’d never really had.

* * *

“I wonder what it would have been like if we’d met as children?” asked Penelope idly. It was their third day in London, and they were cuddled together on the sofa in their sitting room. “We might have so easily, since our mothers were friends. In fact, it’s odd that we didn’t.”

“Mine was too immersed in her own concerns for visits,” replied Daniel. “You could see that in her letters.”

“We don’t have them all.”

“Or any reason to think the missing ones are different. And a good deal of evidence for my point.” The haze of happiness in which Daniel had been basking thinned a bit.

“I can’t believe my mother would have cared so much for a cold person. She wasn’t the least bit foolish.”

Daniel shrugged. “I can’t tell. My parents always felt like strangers to me. I really didn’t know either of them.”

Penelope sat straighter, out of the circle of his arm. “We could look through the notebooks. They’re a record of your mother’s thoughts.”

Much as he regretted the loss of their cozy interlude, Daniel was curious.

“Unless you think we mustn’t,” she added. “Because of the secrets.”

“They’re mine. I’ll look as much as I wish.”

They fetched the metal strongbox from a locked cupboard and opened it. The pile of notebooks inside looked just as they had when they’d found them. Penelope lifted them out and put them on the table under the window. “Shall we just choose one?” she asked.

“Why not?”

“You do it.”

Daniel let his hands hover over the stack. Feeling no particular connection to any, he pulled one out and set it before them. Penelope turned back the cover. “St. Petersburg, 1801,” she read from the top of the page. “Russia! Do you have the key?”

Taking the folded sheet of paper from his inner coat pocket, Daniel admired the animation on her face. His wife would never be able to resist a puzzle.

“I think we need a way to make notes about the substitutions,” she said. “It may be hard to keep track otherwise. We’ll burn them afterward.”

Daniel went to Macklin’s library for paper and pen. Penelope was bent over the notebook when he came back. “Your mother listed the number of ships in the harbor and the regiments posted nearby. She used little drawings to write words when she didn’t have any set code for them. See?”

He leaned closer to look at the line above her finger. The tiny pictures—birds, flowers, animals—looked like doodles rather than anything important. A stranger leafing through this journal would mistake his mother for a strange obsessive. Albeit one who could draw. Each image was distinct and identifiable. A rose, a fox, a magpie.

Penelope looked back and forth from the key to the page. She wrote out a word, and another. “Great heavens, I think this says… Yes, it says the Russian tsar was killed.”

“What?”

Penelope worked through more of the code. “On March 23 in the early hours of the morning, the tsar was assassinated.” She looked at Daniel.

They bent over the notebook together, but of course all he saw was gibberish.

“I think these next words must be names.” Penelope jotted them down. “Bennigsen, Pahlen. They have the code for soldiers next to them. And then it says ‘killers.’”

Daniel couldn’t quite fathom that his parents had been present for such events, still less that they’d been observing and recording for the British government. He’d always seen them as bland and heedless, their minds devoted to trivialities.

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