The Duke of Olympia Meets His Match by Juliana Gray Page B

couldn’t decamp for another establishment if the company didn’t suit. Also, there was the democracy. Passengers traveling in the same class of cabin treated each other—and were treated by the crew—more or less alike. They ate the same food, they enjoyed the same entertainments, they slept under the same linens. The Duke of Olympia and the widowed Mrs. Schuyler of New York City were, for the space of five or six days, equals.
    And yet they were not.
    A few feet away, Mrs. Schuyler exhaled quietly and rose from the sofa. “Good day, sir,” she said, and her skirts rustled against the carpet as she left the library.
    He waited about twenty seconds before he followed her out of the room.
    A round of faint applause greeted his entry into the hallway, drifting up the main staircase. The charades match, reaching its thrilling climax in the saloon, two decks below. Was Mrs. Schuyler off to join them? His eyes caught the edge of her disappearing dress around the corner of the staircase as she skimmed downward to the upper deck, and he moved after her, leaning his head a few inches over the balustrade to see if she was continuing her journey down to the saloon deck or walking forward, where (he knew) her commodious shared stateroom with Miss Morrison lay on the starboard side of the ship.
    But no flash of dark aubergine wool appeared on the staircase to the saloon deck. To the privacy of her cabin, then.
    Olympia drummed his fingers on the balustrade. There was no point in following her; on the other hand, the charms of the smoking room—his usual refuge—seemed rather flat at the moment. He might return to his own spacious suite on the promenade deck (Stateroom A, as it modestly appeared on the deck plan). He had, after all, a forbidding stack of paperwork to sort through before the train whisked him off to London from Liverpool.
    But he was still no closer to discovering the identity of the agent on board the ship, despite an hour spent dissecting the final first-class passenger list in the meticulous company of Mr. Simmons. Any one of them might be a suspect, of course, but he had no means of investigating their lives and fortunes, no vast official and unofficial archives at his disposal. At the moment he had no recourse except to eliminate all two hundred and nineteen souls, one by one, using the old-fashioned methods of observation and deduction.
    Which left him only one real option; the thing he dreaded most.
    Charades.
    Olympia expanded his chest like a martyr going to the stake and descended the stairs. Possibly it wouldn’t be so bad. The teams were already formed, the game afoot. He wouldn’t actually be called upon to
perform
, God forbid. No, no. He could simply lurk about unnoticed at the back of the saloon, eyes half-hooded, six-and-a-half-foot frame half-hidden by a convenient pilaster, balancing a cup of tea in his palm as if he’d just stopped by for the refreshments. He might not even be required to applaud.
    So why did the task—a duty he’d performed countless times in countless settings, the kind of thing he used to relish—seem so damned onerous? The last place in the world he wanted to be. Had he finally grown weary of the game? Was old age at last settling down upon his shoulders? He would really rather sit in civilized conversation with an impecunious American widow of half a century than track down a dangerous opponent hidden among the passengers of an ocean liner, armed by wit and instinct?
    Yes, by God. Yes, he would.
    Perhaps God heard his plea. He had just set his toe on the rubberized floor of the upper deck landing when the noise reached him, through the gust of another round of applause: a gasp, followed instantly by a small and strangled cry.
    The familiar outraged noise of a lady whose modesty had just been offended.
    Several years had passed since the Duke of Olympia had occasion to bolt—he delegated such indignities to chaps of fresher