A Most Unladylike Adventure by Elizabeth Beacon

senses and sent them to explore that semi-darkness and came up with nothing but a cargo of finest coffee beans destined for the breakfast tables of discerning northern households, not very fresh air still haunted by sugar and spices and other exotics, a hint of mouse and worse. Even his sixth sense could find no trace of another human being, although there seemed an unacceptable quantity of non-human ones, which reinforced his opinion that Kit and Ben should demolish the venerable old building and replace it with something a lot more vermin-proof and never mind sentiment.
    ‘Right, there’s obviously nobody here, so I’ll go no further into this business of yours without an explanation, madam,’ he informed her grimly.
    ‘Very well then, this morning I followed you to work.’
    ‘You followed me?’ he demanded, suddenly distrusting those finely honed senses he’d always prided himself on after all.
    ‘I’m very good,’ she boasted unrepentantly and how could he argue when he’d sensed not a single hint of her behind him? ‘But so was the other person tailing you through the City this morning,’ she added; this time he wondered if he had any senses left to him to have missed two of them trailing after him like a procession.
    ‘The other person?’
    ‘I used to know a parrot just like you, Captain,’ she mocked him, but must have seen the warning glint in his eyes, because she suddenly looked as serious as anyone could wish, especially a beleaguered and apparently rather simple sea captain. ‘He was a well-trained follower and belongs to a villainous crew.’
    ‘And how can I trust you to recognise such a man?’
    ‘You just can,’ she assured him and met hiseyes unflinchingly, despite the dusty gloom thickening as daylight began to seep away from such dark places early.
    ‘But can I also be sure of your motives, Miss La Rochelle, since you seem a little over-familiar with the workings of the London underworld?’
    ‘You can,’ she insisted steadily.
    ‘For some extraordinary reason, I believe you.’
    ‘Why, thank you, I’m suitably flattered, of course.’
    ‘So you should be,’ he told her dourly.
    ‘Never mind all that now, we’re in the devil of a jam and have to find the best way out of it.’
    ‘I only have your word for that, so how do you conclude I’m in a pickle just because a man followed me to Stone & Shaw’s offices in the City?’
    ‘I followed him afterwards to a fashionable church where he met a supposedly clerical gentleman.’
    ‘Which is odd, I admit, but perhaps the man is struggling for his lost soul.’
    ‘And perhaps he’s also raising flying pigs, because when they parted I followed the respectable cleric to a mansion in Mayfair andwaited for over an hour before I got down off my perch to try to find out why he went into that house and departed arrayed in the height of fashion among his own kind.’
    ‘Not a son of the church after all, then?’ he asked whimsically, but his brain was whirling with ideas as he went over all the possibilities her story presented.
    ‘Very far from it,’ she said disapprovingly.
    ‘You knew him, didn’t you?’ he suddenly realised, marvelling at her acquaintance with such fine gentlemen and instantly rigidly jealous of a man who could be a former protector of hers.
    ‘Only later, when I realised whose house it actually was. I can’t believe how convincing his disguise was, especially when he always seemed such an empty-headed fool when I met him at—’
    She stopped, blank-faced and wary, as she bit back whatever it was she was going to say next. What a damned fool
he
was, he decided dazedly as he forced himself to assess Eloise La Rochelle anew. Her faultlessly unaccented accent, her unconscious elegance and that air she had of being a princess let out of her castle for a holiday and only pretending to be a female buccaneer, or even Eloise La Rochelleherself. An appalling suspicion crept into his obviously rather slow mind and