"It will take too long," Penelope interrupted. She didn't touch the sherry. She looked directly at Alaric, her gaze intense, completely stripped of the deference she had worn the night before. "If you start buying his debts, he will notice. He is brutal, Alaric, but he is not stupid. He will trace the money back to the Duke of Cuddon. And then he will start asking why a duke who never spoke to him is suddenly trying to ruin him."
Alaric stopped, the glass halfway to his mouth. She was right. He had been blinded by anger, thinking like a naval captain planning a frontal assault.
"Then how do we break him?" Alaric asked.
Penelope was silent for a long moment. She looked down at her hands, the thumbs rubbing absent-mindedly against the swollen knuckles.
"When I was in Yorkshire," she began, her voice dropping, taking on a detached clinical tone. "I was not permitted to leave the house. I was rarely permitted to leave my rooms unless he required me for dinner guests. But on the nights he drank until he passed out in his study, I used to slip out. I would clean his desk."
Alaric frowned. "You cleaned his desk?"
"It gave me a reason to be out of my room," she explained, a flicker of dark irony in her eyes. "If he woke up, I was just a beautiful wife tidying his affairs. But while I cleaned, I read."
She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, bringing her face closer to his. The scent of lavender soap drifted toward him.
"Carlisle is a viscount, but he is a greedy one," she said. "He secured a contract 3 years ago to supply timber for the Royal Navy's shipyards at Portsmouth. It is a massive contract worth thousands of pounds a year."
Alaric nodded. "I know of it. Oak from his Yorkshire estates."
"It isn't oak," Penelope said softly.
Alaric froze.
"It's elm and cheap pine," she continued, her eyes locking onto his. "He ships it from the Baltic on unmarked schooners. Brings it to his land in Yorkshire and restamps it with his estate seal. He is charging the crown for prime English oak and supplying them with rotting timber. He keeps the difference."
Alaric's blood ran cold. If a ship of the line were built with cheap unseasoned pine, the hull would rot within a year. In a heavy storm or under cannon fire, the wood would splinter and fail. Hundreds of sailors would drown. As a former naval captain, the sheer treasonous scale of the fraud made Alaric's stomach turn.
"Treason," Alaric breathed. "Defrauding the Admiralty during a time of naval expansion. Was a hanging offense, even for a peer."
"He keeps a ledger," Penelope said. "A small red leather book. He keeps it locked in the bottom drawer of his desk in his Mayfair townhouse. It details the Baltic shipments, the bribes paid to the port inspectors, and the true cost of the timber. Everything."
She leaned back in her chair, finally picking up the glass of sherry. "You don't need to buy his debts, Alaric," she said, her voice a razor-sharp whisper. "You just need to steal that book. Give it to the Admiral. They will strip him of his title, seize his estates, and hang him at Newgate. A dead man cannot claim property."
Alaric stared at her. The scullery maid was gone. The weeping victim in the ash was gone. Before him sat a woman who had forged herself into a weapon of absolute destruction. She was brilliant. She was ruthless. And for the first time in 5 years, Alaric felt something entirely unfamiliar blooming in his chest. Hope.
"His townhouse is in Grosvenor Square," Alaric said, his mind already calculating the logistics. "It will be heavily guarded. Servants everywhere."
"Not on a Tuesday," Penelope said, taking a small sip of the sherry. "On Tuesdays, Carlisle hosts a private card game that lasts until dawn. The servants are confined to the basement and the kitchen so they do not see which members of parliament are smoking opium in the drawing room. The study is on the ground floor facing the alley."
Alaric set his glass down. He looked at the fragile, bruised woman sitting opposite him. "You planned this," he realized, a slow smile touching the corners of his mouth. "You've been planning this for years."
Penelope lowered her glass. Her eyes were hard, flat, and colder than a winter sea. "I was waiting in the dark, Alaric," she said. "I just needed a thief."
The rain in London didn't fall. It loitered. It hung in the air like a damp, freezing breath, coating the cobblestones in a layer of treacherous black grease. Alaric stood in the mouth of a narrow alleyway connecting to Grosvenor Square. He did not look like the Duke of Cuddon. He wore the rough oil-stained canvas coat of a Thames dock worker, a heavy woolen cap pulled low over his brow, and boots that had seen the inside of a shipyard. In his right pocket rested a heavy iron jimmy. In his left a loaded flintlock pistol.
He waited. The shadows clung to him. Across the street, the imposing facade of Viscount Carlisle's townhouse loomed against the night sky. The upper floor windows blazed with yellow light. Faint strains of a pianoforte and the harsh braying laughter of men deep in their cups drifted down to the street. Tuesday night. The opium and faro were flowing exactly as Penelope had predicted.