neatly in a pile on her left. Chances were whatever information he’d gathered about Mr. Lamb would be on that paper. She pulled the stack to her and thumbed through it. But instead of finding notes on Mr. Lamb’s financial activities, she found pages and pages of handwritten notes regarding Roe’s search for Constantine’s Shield. She knew very little about the antiquity other than that had been the reason Roe and Christopher had taken that fated trip to Persia.
The notes covered everything from the research to where the artifact might be found, to what he planned to do with it once he found it. Cabot was mentioned, too. Roe had obviously done extensive research on the man and had selected him carefully because of his many successful excursions in the area in question.
She flipped back to the page where Roe had made notes about Christopher. It had been her brother who discovered the initial information about the shield, and had been fascinated with the notion of discovering a real artifact. It appeared that no matter how long it took Roe to find the thing, once he did Christopher would get the credit for donating it to the museum. Without another thought, she grabbed the piece of parchment where Roe had scrawled Cabot’s address, then she left. Not twenty minutes later she found herself on the steps of Mr. Cabot’s address. She knocked, and waited.
Cabot himself answered the door, still holding a cane, though it seemed he wasn’t quite relying on it to assist his walking so much as simply carrying the thing.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
Then it dawned on her that he knew her as Grey, not Caroline. She did the only thing she could think of—she looked him straight in the face and lowered her voice. “You might recognize me from Rodale’s. I’ve come for a favor.”
His eyes narrowed, then rounded and then a slow smile spread across his face. “Well, I’ll be damned. Come in, Grey.”
Caroline smiled in return. “Thank you. I promise I won’t take up much of your time.” For the second time that day Caroline had revealed her secret. But by the time she left Cabot’s he had agreed to at least meet with Roe regarding the search for Constantine’s Shield.
…
Roe had previously made plans to follow Mr. Lamb again that evening. Though he hadn’t seen Caroline all day, when she came down to meet him for the carriage, she was dressed as Grey. But now as they sat in the dark confines of the rig, it seemed as though Caroline’s disguise would be unnecessary that evening.
They followed him first to a residence not far from Roe’s. Lamb went inside and was there for several minutes before he returned to his hack.
“Who do you suppose lives here?” Caroline asked.
“I believe this is Lady Winguard’s residence,” Roe said. “It would seem that Mr. Lamb is making the rounds of all of Dover House’s benefactors. He came to see me earlier today.”
She eyed him from across the carriage, her brows rose.
“He asked for additional funds.” He told her what Lamb had said about the orphanage in Liverpool that was closing its doors.
“Perhaps he’s not planning to play tonight,” Caroline said.
And as they followed his hack through the streets of London it seemed as if he might not. They were most definitely not going to Rodale’s. Instead, his hired hack dropped him off in front of a different gaming establishment, this one in a less savory part of town.
Roe sat across from her in the carriage, which had stopped across the street from Mr. Lamb’s hack. Caroline and Roe did their best to peer through the small windows. Another carriage rolled down the road, temporarily blocking their view of Nigel Lamb. When it had cleared, the man stood on the sidewalk. He paid the driver then assisted two other people down from the carriage.
“What is he doing?” Caroline asked.
“I don’t know. He has some companions with him, though it’s hard to tell in this lighting.” The street lighting was poor and the clouded sky didn’t provide enough assistance. The two other figures were considerably smaller than Mr. Lamb, though they wore similar attire—trousers, shirt, suspenders, though they wore no overcoat as he did.
“Young men,” Caroline said. “Boys, even.”
“It would appear so.”
Mr. Lamb spoke to the two boys, and they both bobbed their heads, then he slipped inside the gaming hell, a place called Pollard’s. The two boys disappeared into the darkness against the building.
“Strange, that,” Caroline said.