“Yes, I am.” And he would be, no matter what.
“Just who are you?” Leo asked with a bit more confidence now that he’d been reassured. “I don’t even know your name.”
“He is a man from Bow Street.” Lady Louisa inserted. “His name is...” She glanced at him, prompting.
“Oliver, and yes, you could say I am from Bow Street.” It wasn’t a lie. And it was best if they didn’t reveal too much ofhis identity—too many eyes and ears in this house. And the boy himself, depending on the influence of his father, might clamp up if he learned the truth. “I’ve been looking for the book for a while now.”
“Why? It’s just a bunch of strange entries.”
Oliver nodded. “They are wager entries, but many of them are written in code. It’s evidence that I need to capture a group of bad people.”
The boy’s face suddenly paled. “Do you mean that I gave the book to the criminals you are trying to catch?”
“Not exactly.” Though he could not honestly say. “The people I am looking for are women. You said you gave it to two men who had scars on their faces?”
The boy nodded enthusiastically. “They were big. One had a nasty scar cutting through the left side of his lip. The other man’s scar lined the right side of his jawline.” Leo traced the pathways of their scars on his own face. “They both had dark eyes. Almost black. Black hair as well. Brothers, they looked like.”
Oliver’s blood chilled.
“Oh, and the one with the scar on his lip had a very low voice. Almost scratchy. And they didn’t wear fashionable clothes. But they weren’t commoner clothes either. They wore everything in black. And decent boots. Polished.”
His blood turned even colder. “I see.”
“Do you know these men?” Lady Louisa asked.
“I can’t say for sure.” And he couldn’t, though everything in him roared that his fear was right. A scar that split one of the men’s lips, dressed in all black, dark features, brothers, along with interest in a book tied to an organization that smuggled goods... If his suspicion proved correct, this whole affair had just spiraled into something far worse than he’d expected.
“When did you give them the book?” Oliver asked.
“The day after my sister’s friend visited,” Leo admitted. “They said they would be watching, and I should put the book in a satchel and place it on the street. They would pick it up.”
“Did they say anything else that you can remember, anything that might give us a clue to where they are from?”
“One of the men was impatient. He wanted to get back to the Brighton.”
Brighton.
Bloody hell.
He had hoped against hope that his blooming suspicion would turn out wrong, but that didn’t seem to be the case.
If what the boy said was correct, they were not dealing with any ordinary men. They were dealing with a group of brothers that might even be worse than the duchess and her female organization.
The Bastards of Brighton.
Or so they were known. They ruled the underground of Brighton. It was even rumored they owned more than half the buildings and shops in town. Nothing happened that they weren’t aware of.
“You do know, don’t you?” Lady Louisa asked. “And it’s not good, is it?”
Oliver had hoped that she wouldn’t be as perceptive with her brother about, but her senses were as sharp as ever. “It’s not good. But it’s not necessarily bad.” Maybe. It certainly wasn’t hopeless. At least it hadn’t been the duchess’s people.
“What does that mean?” Lady Louisa demanded from him.
Oliver rose to his feet. “It means I may have an idea who they are.” It also meant his time in Ashford was over. He had to get to Brighton, post haste.
She rose as well. “And?”
“They might hand over the book, they might not.”
