An Honorable Deception (The Imposters #3)

Chapter 24

TWENTY-FOUR

H e needed to get below-stage, but by Yates’s estimation, he still had a few minutes—and he didn’t want to miss this part of the show.

Lavinia looked magnificent, standing there in the spotlight, every sequin on her gown showering light onto the undeserving crowd. He knew she always got nervous when she took to the stage, but no one would know it to watch her now. She was a true leading lady—in life, not just here. He could scarcely wait to see the changes she’d make in the world.

Even now, Merritt was with Samira in the auto he’d borrowed from Xavier. Even now, they were en route to the Empire House, the “respectable” portion of which would have closed for the day, where she would be the one who got the pleasure of unlocking the bedroom doors with the master keys Yates had given them after Merritt and a few of Barclay’s burliest friends wrested their way inside. He wished he could see that , too, but alas.

His place had always been more here. The stage. The highwire. The trapeze. Despite the circumstances—no, because of them—a smile tugged up the corners of his mouth.

Franco surely never imagined that his equipment would be used to manipulate gents into better behavior. Neville definitely never expected to be coaching a ragtag band of street urchins through a show meant only to distract them while they moved the supposed gunmen into the aisles, new masks in place.

To Yates’s mind, theater and circus were both achieving new heights today.

He reached for a rope that Lucy was struggling with and helped her lower the backdrop into place while one sister started the next record playing on the phonograph and another added some live violin to it to make the sound really fill the space. Two of her brothers would be lowering her, too, on the small platform she’d have moved onto, so that she’d be one more focal point on the stage.

One among many. Everyone was dancing their way out of the wings now, costumes flashing in the light, enormous feathered fans waving, a unicycle even corralling Babcock back onto his mark when he tried to make a run for it.

If only they’d brought the animals. He could well imagine what a few big cats could have added to the show.

Couldn’t fall into the very trap he was setting, though, and get distracted by the display. After tousling Lucy’s hair and earning a grin, he hurried to his own next mark, into the space below the stage. Lights were lit, a thickly cushioned pad in place under the trapdoor in case he hadn’t made it down here in time, and the boilers ready for their own part of the show.

Above, he could hear each step, the music muted by the floor, the squeak of the unicycle. He could hear Lavinia as she delivered her last lines.

“It is easy to get distracted by beauty, it is true. To get lost in the gleam and the pleasure. It is easy to slide from recreation to sin, to forget that behind the masks, there are people. But let me assure you, good sirs—they are people.”

Yates heard the clank of the spotlights as the metal shutters switched the direction of their beams. They’d be shining on the aisles now, where any of their crew not on the stage had slipped into place, surrounding the gents. They’d opted for black cloaks for the ease of it, and each one wore a theater mask from Neville’s collection.

No male or female. No rich or poor. No servant or lord.

He peeked out of one of the shielded slots at the front of the stage in time to see the fright settle on the faces he could see. It was quite the dichotomy they’d written—Lavinia proclaiming them people, yet each figure looked more like a specter, masked in both body and face.

“They could be your maids. Your chauffeurs. The postman. They could be the cabby on the corner or the paperboy watching you walk by. They could be that new face at the club or the supplicant who comes to you with an appeal for justice. They could be the tenant or the actor or the drunk you avoid on the street. Who have I found for this work?”

“We are the Imposters,” they said in unison.

Yates grinned like a fool. They weren’t, technically speaking. But he’d always liked the idea of people thinking they were everywhere, anyone. And he knew he could give this crew a field commission any time he needed them—so long as he’d pay them for the time, anyway.

“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 likely take 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 to reel. 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 his own complicity, 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.”

He couldn’t mean an actual one ... Though he wouldn’t put it past Neville to have applied some greasepaint and added an extra level of scare. But he didn’t know why that would have made Barclay frown so.

“A guest not on the list. Not sure how he slipped past the ushers, but there was definitely a body in a seat that should have been empty, for a while. Vanished again before we had a chance to get close.”

Yates glanced down at Lavinia. Lavinia glanced up at him.

It was odd, but he had no idea what to do about it. All he could say was, “Interesting. I suppose we ... wait to see. If whoever it was turns up again.”

Barclay nodded. Held out a hand. “Good working with you, Mr. A. Always available for another job when you have them.”

Yates shook. Smiled. “And see you for lessons next week. Bring the girls. They need them far more than you.”

Barclay snorted and put his fedora on, turning toward the nearest door. “Let you be the one to tell them that, mate. Me, I value my head.”

The streetlights were on in Grosvenor Square by the time Lavinia and Yates strolled up to her father’s door. It hadn’t taken nearly as long to empty the theater of evidence of their one-showing-only production and return the shell of a building to its abandoned state, especially with the many hands to help.

The original crew. And then the sixteen women and one girl Merritt and Samira had freed from the Empire House had arrived. They’d brought them there solely so that Lavinia could give them the money and train tickets she’d arranged for them, if they wanted them. The invitation to travel to her once-empty estate to recover. The promise that they could stay as long as they wished and help other women like them, if they chose. That if and when they were ready to return to their home countries, they’d have help with that too.

They certainly hadn’t meant to put the women immediately to work—but Lavinia had understood the need to blink back tears and pick up brooms. To put to rights what could be righted so simply. It was the first step on a long road.

It felt like her own first step—or maybe her second—as she rang the bell and waited for the doorman to answer.

His eyes flashed surprise when he saw her, and a bit of censure too. Henderson didn’t appreciate her recent habit of showing up in the city without letting her father know, though he never said anything.

Not that Papa was hiding anything she might stumble into. Nothing other than his own brooding silence, so much like hers.

She found him in the library, as she had expected she would, a fire laid in the hearth and a cup of tea at his side. It would keep him up half the night, but she suspected that was the point. His dreams didn’t seem to treat him well these days.

Yates’s fingers curled more tightly around hers, and his thumb stroked over her knuckle.

Lavinia drew in a long breath. “Good evening, Papa.”

“Vinia?” He started, spun in his chair to verify, presumably, that he hadn’t imagined her voice, and then leapt to his feet. Pleasure lit his eyes, though without the worry that often chased it. This time, the joy multiplied and spread into a grin when his gaze dropped to her hand in Yates. “Oh, praise God. It’s about time. I was beginning to worry that even months in his company wouldn’t do the trick, what with how often you flitted back here.”

That was why he’d been frowning at her appearances in Town? He’d been trying to play the Mrs. Bennet card, as Alethia had said her own mother would have done?

Yates chuckled, but she could feel some of the tension melt out of his arm.

Her father was rushing toward them, arms outstretched. He gave her a tight embrace, kissing the side of her head, and then pulled Yates in, too, holding him tight for four long seconds and then patting his back and stepping away. “If you’re here for my blessing, let me make it easy. You have it. You’ve always had it.”

It was Lavinia’s turn to rub her thumb over Yates’s knuckle. It had been six long years since he’d known a father’s embrace. His approval. Given the way his nostrils flared, it meant as much to him as it did to her, knowing that Papa was so ready to welcome him to the family.

Of course, this was Yates. “Might want to hear us out first, my lord. For starters, you ought to know I’m strapped. Father left us with nothing.”

Papa’s brows drew together, but there was no surprise in his eyes. If anything ... apology? He motioned them inside, toward the sofa across from his chair. “I feared as much. I tried for years to get him to curtail his spending, or to make investments to cover them. He always said he would, but then he’d fund a new outbuilding or bring in a new troupe for months on end. I intended, after you and Marigold had time to sort through it, to talk to you. Offer my aid, if you needed it. But then the fever struck and...”

He paused, shook his head, and lowered himself back to his chair while they sat across from him. “I’m sorry. I was so distraught, I could think of nothing else. And then, once I could, it seemed you had landed on your feet. Or at the very least, tightened your belts enough to weather the storm. I let myself think you’d have come to me if you truly needed advice or a loan.”

“We managed.” Yates smiled, his expression peaceful. “Still are. I can’t exactly keep Lavinia in the luxury to which she’s accustomed—”

“Oh, bah.” Papa waved that away and reached for his tea. “You know very well she has her own fortune, enough to set the Tower to rights and manage the estate from her mother’s people besides. If I can give you nothing else, my dear, I have at least provided that security, such as it is.”

“You’ve given me much more than that, Papa.” Lavinia rose and moved to perch on the arm of his chair, so she could slide an arm around his shoulders and rest her cheek on the top of his head. “You’ve given me the things that matter most. Love. Faith. Family.”

Papa sighed and patted her knee. “I wish I could have made that family what it ought to have been. When I see what she’s done to you, how haunted you so often look...” He sniffed and shook his head. “But there’s light in your eyes now. I suspect you’re responsible for that, my boy.”

Yates flashed a grin, but he shook his head too. “We can credit only the Lord for that—but I’m blessed to bask in it.” He held Papa’s gaze, and love for him swelled in her chest as she saw the respect in his eyes, the determination. “I’ve always loved her—I imagine you know that. I always will. She is the only one in the world for me.”

Lavinia smiled. “Well. Mustn’t forget Penelope.”

As their laughter lightened the mood a bit, she shifted back to her seat beside Yates. She needed his hand in hers again for this next part.

When she drew in a long breath, Papa arched his brows, amusement still dancing on his lips and in his eyes. “What are you bracing yourself for, Vinia? Want the wedding to be quick? I won’t argue. He’s been courting you twenty years already. Long enough of a wait, I say, and if the biddies want to gossip about it, let them.”

She did appreciate that—a long engagement seemed silly for them. Not that Yates had proposed yet. But that wasn’t what had her so nervous. “Actually, the gossip is what I want to address—but not about me and Yates. I may have...” She paused, moistened her lips. “Borrowed a bit of your reputation.”

He blinked. “I’ve always said whatever is mine is yours, but I can’t quite think what you mean with that.”

She glanced at Yates for fortification. It wasn’t that she thought her father would mind how she’d leveraged his sterling reputation and many connections, exactly. It was that he’d be shocked that she’d done it, especially if he knew how. “Let’s just say that I discovered some unsavory secrets amongst the family of a new friend, and by extension, quite a swath of society.”

Papa’s face went sober, his eyes dark. “There is nothing you could have uncovered that would surprise me—but I’d hoped to shelter you from that.”

She scooted forward, his words blowing air on the coals in her spirit. “I know. And I understand the love that inspires that stance. But sheltering us from the world doesn’t spare our eyes from seeing evil, Papa—it spares evil from the light that would reveal it. It provides the cover it seeks. It’s only when we tear down those walls and look at the truth straight on that we can hope to change things.”

He’d never looked at her with anything but love—even so, no look had ever quite been this one. Not only affection. Respect. “Does this change you want to effect have something to do with the reputation you borrowed from me? I rather hope so.”

Yates squeezed her fingers. Lavinia smiled in relief. “Glad to hear you say so, Papa. Because I may have led several dozen men to think that if they don’t change their ways, Lord Hemming and his daughter were prepared to act as avenging angels. And I may need your help in establishing a new charity—rather quickly, I’m afraid. I have quite a few women already on their way to Mother’s estate.”

“Avenging angel, you say?” Papa’s eyes gleamed. He rested his elbow on the arm of the chair and braced his chin against his hand. “This sounds like quite the story. Tell me about it, love—and what I can do to help.”