With an easy smile, she left the sisters and crossed the cobbled street. She followed it slowly uphill, then, hearing the distant tinkle she’d been listening for, she paused and glanced back. Millie and Julia were just stepping into the apothecary’s tiny shop.
Penny walked on, then turned right down the next lane.
She knew the streets of Fowey well. Tacking down this lane, then that, she descended to the harbor, then angled up into the tiny lanes leading to the oldest cottages perched above one arm of the wharves. Although protected from the prevailing winds, the small cottages were packed cheek by jowl as if by huddling they could better maintain their precarious grip on the cliff side. The poorest section of the town, the cottages housed the fishermen and their families, forming the principal nest of the local smuggling fraternity.
Penny entered a passageway little wider than the runnel that ran down its center. Halfway up the steep climb, she halted. Settling her habit’s train more securely on her arm, she knocked imperiously on a thick wooden door.
She waited, then knocked again. At this hour, in this neighborhood, there were few people about. She’d checked the harbor; the fleet was out. It was the perfect time to call on Mother Gibbs.
The door finally cracked open an inch or two. A bloodshot eye peered through the gap. Then Penny heard a snort, and the door was opened wide.
“Well, Miss Finery, and what can I do for you?”
Penny left Mother Gibbs’s residence half an hour later, no wiser yet, but, she hoped, one step nearer to uncovering the truth. The door closed behind her with a soft thud. She walked quickly down the steep passageway; she would have to hurry to get back to the Pelican Inn, up on the High Street in
the better part of town, in reasonable time.
Reaching the end of the passage, she swung around the corner.
Straight into a wall of muscle and bone.
He caught her in one arm, steadied her against him. Not trapping her, yet…she couldn’t move.
Couldn’t even blink as she stared into his eyes, mere inches away. In daylight, they were an intense dark blue, but it was the intelligence she knew resided behind them that had her mentally reeling.
That, and the fact she’d stopped breathing. She couldn’t get her lungs to work. Not with the hard length of him against the front of her.
Had he seen? Did he know?
“Yes, I saw which house you left. Yes, I know whose house it is. Yes, I remember what goes on in there.” His gaze had grown so sharp it was a wonder she wasn’t bleeding. “Are you going to tell me what you were doing in the most notorious fishermen’s brothel in Fowey?”
Damn! She realized her hands were lying boneless against his chest. She pushed back, dragged in a breath as he let her go and she stepped back.
Having air between them was a very good thing. Her lungs expanded; her head steadied. Grabbing up her skirt, she stepped past him. “No.”
He exhaled through his teeth. “Penny.” He reached out and manacled her wrist.
She halted and looked down at his long tanned fingers wrapped about her slender bones. “Don’t.”
He sighed again and let her go. She started walking, then recalled the Essingtons and walked faster. He kept pace easily.
“What could you possibly want from Mother Gibbs?”
She glanced briefly at him. “Information.”
A good enough answer to appease him, for all of six strides. “What did you learn?”
“Nothing yet.”
Another few steps. “How on earth did you—Lady Penelope Selborne of Wallingham Hall—make Mother Gibbs’s acquaintance?”
She debated asking him how he—now Earl of Lostwithiel—knew of Mother Gibbs, but his response might be more than she wanted to know. “I met her through Granville.”
He stopped. “What?”
“No—I don’t mean he introduced me.” She kept walking; in two strides he was again by her side.
“You’re not, I sincerely hope, going to tell me that Granville was so mullet-brained he frequented her establishment?”