Gregory nodded briskly. “She is right.”
“No,” said Haselby, rising to his feet. “We need my father.”
“Your father?” Richard bit off. “He’s hardly sympathetic to our cause.”
“Perhaps, and I’m the first to say he’s intolerable for more than three minutes at a time, but he will have answers. And for all of his venom, he is mostly harmless.”
“Mostly?” Hermione echoed.
Haselby appeared to consider that. “Mostly.”
“We need to act,” Gregory said. “Now. Haselby, you and Fennsworth will locate your father and interrogate him. Find out the truth. Lady Fennsworth and I will retrieve Lucy and bring her back here, where Lady Fennsworth will remain with her.” He turned to Richard. “I apologize for the arrangements, but I must have your wife with me to safeguard Lucy’s reputation should someone discover us. She’s been gone nearly an hour now. Someone is bound to notice.”
Richard gave him a curt nod, but it was clear he was not happy with the situation. Still, he had no choice. His honor demanded that he be the one to question Lord Davenport.
“Good,” Gregory said. “Then we are agreed. I will meet the two of you back in . . .”
He paused. Aside from Lucy’s room and the upstairs washroom, he had no knowledge of the layout of the house.
“Meet us in the library,” Richard instructed. “It is on the ground floor, facing east.” He took a step toward the door, then turned back and said to Gregory, “Wait here. I will return in a moment.”
Gregory was eager to be off, but Richard’s grave expression had been enough to convince him to remain in place. Sure enough, when Lucy’s brother returned, barely a minute later, he carried with him two guns.
He held one out to Gregory.
Good God.
“You may need this,” Richard said.
“Heaven help us if I do,” Gregory said under his breath.
“Beg pardon?”
Gregory shook his head.
“Godspeed, then.” Richard nodded at Haselby, and the two of them departed, moving swiftly down the hall.
Gregory beckoned to Hermione. “Let us go,” he said, leading her in the opposite direction. “And do try not to judge me when you see where I am leading you.”
He heard her chuckle as they ascended the stairs. “Why,” she said, “do I suspect that, if anything, I shall judge you very clever indeed?”
“I did not trust her to remain in place,” Gregory confessed, taking the steps two at a time. When they reached the top, he turned to face her. “It was heavy-handed, but there was nothing else I could do. All I needed was a bit of time.”
Hermione nodded. “Where are we going?”
“To the nanny’s washroom,” he confessed. “I tied her to the water closet.”
“You tied her to the— Oh my, I cannot wait to see this.”
But when they opened the door to the small washroom, Lucy was gone.
And every indication was that she had not left willingly.
Twenty-five
In which we learn what happened, a mere ten minutes earlier.
Had it been an hour? Surely it had been an hour.