This was likely true. He had his ways.
“What is this question?”
“I would like to ask them...” Tristan paused. He almost didn’t dare say it aloud. “...if they’ve purchased cigars from a large man, built like a bear. Scar beneath his ear. Or a small man, with a pointed face.”
“Sounds like the Miss Gardners’ brothers, sir.”
Tristan regarded him grimly.
Realization dawned on Massey’s face. “You don’t mean...”
“A suspicion. It’s been growing for some time. The larger one doesn’t speak in company. Perhaps because it’s a struggle to disguise his voice. Always looking down, ostensibly shyly but likely because they don’t want anyone to look very closely at their faces. And they both tried toleada waltz last night. It was disastrous.”
Massey’s face twitched, picturing this.
“They hadn’t a notion about what to do. They retired for the evening the moment the music stopped. I wonder if they know who I am.”
“They must be getting desperate about now, if so, Captain Hardy.”
“That’s my concern as well. And furthermore... think about it, Massey. People come and go from the stables all the time with carts and carriages. Perfect way to distribute contraband. No one would give it a thought. Do you remember the gang in Kent?”
“Tunnels?” Massey said, after a moment of mulling.
“Tunnels,” Tristan confirmed.
Massey gave a low whistle. “You don’t think...”
“I don’t know. But I want every man to ask around, save the ones watching The Grand Palace. Visit again the merchants we spoke to. Any locals you see smoking.”
“Done, sir,” Massey said.
“Something still troubles me about that room on the low floor, however. I think Margaret Gardner was trying to get into it the night I saw her in the hallway. But she—or he—has failed all this time, too.”
They sat in silence apart from chewing and the noise of the pub around them, men, smoking and spilling and sweating. Tristan yearned for a bath. He felt like the detritus of this hunt for smugglers—the smoking, the spilling, the sweating of all the men in pubs like this one—was beginning to settle on his skin.
Come to me,he’d begged. Would she? The very thought of his hands against her skin made his entire being contract with a barbed longing.
A few moments later, he said, “Massey?”
“Yes, sir?”
“How did you, er, know?”
Massey’s brow furrowed. “Know, sir?”
Tristan considered saying “never mind,” but it would be unlike him to back down from something he’d started. “About... Emily.”
Massey stared at him, wonderingly, eyebrows diving.
And then something in Tristan’s expression, in his demeanor, made it clear.
“Ah!Know.Well. That I loved her?”
Tristan held very still. Didn’t Massey know the wordlovebelonged in a class with words likegrenadeortyphoon? It was not to be bandied about lightly.
“I knew straight away, somehow,” he said. “She was always on my mind, like. At first. And then one day we were at a house party and after dinner she had a little sauce on her cheek and she didn’t know it and... I just knew that I loved her. Takes you that way sometimes, doesn’t it?” Massey said mistily.
Tristan didn’t know.