Read Celeste Bradley - [The Liar's Club 02] for Free Online Page B

shook his head. “Sorry, James. I know you think you’re ready for the field, but there is too much at stake with this case.”
    “I thought you called it a make-work errand for some overstuffed pompous idiot?” James toweled off and pulled a shirt from his stack of clothing.
    Dalton handed James his waistcoat and cravat. There was a meeting of the Liars in a few minutes, but Kurt had insisted that James not miss a day of training. “It is. But dissenters come in many sizes. Even a small character like Thorogood could have surprising power to drum up sympathy for a cause. The popularity of those cartoons is growing by the day.”
    James grinned as he created a cursory knot in his cravat. “I think they’re rather good, myself. Remember the one that skewered Sir Mosely for taking the orphanage funds for himself? How he was portrayed as a reverse St. Nicholas, stealing the stockings? I pinned that up at home.”
    “Don’t forget the furor which ensued from that, costing Mosely his position on the board and embarrassing several other lords.”
    James was affronted. “As it should have!”
    “Precisely.” Dalton nodded. “As I said. Power.”
    “So far. Sir Thorogood’s cause has been to aim the public eye at the unfair differences between the classes,” James protested. “You yourself are something of a reformist, remember?”
    Dalton raised a brow. “That I am. Still, there exists the possibility that the reformist platform is being used now to gather popularity, and that something other is motivating Sir Thorogood. Else why the secrecy? Why can’t we discover who he is?”
    “That editor Braithwaite still won’t talk?”
    Dalton shook his head and held James’s coat for him. “There’s nothing for him to tell. The caricatures are delivered by a servant roughly every two weeks at no specified time. He pays cash at delivery, and no addresses or accounts are used at all.”
    James shrugged into his coat. “So follow the servant.”
    They climbed the stairs from the lower training level to the main floor. Dalton wanted to collect one other Liar for the meeting.
    “I’ve put Peebles onto that already. He’ll be watching the
Sun
, and Braithwaite has agreed to give him a sign if the servant shows up. It may take a while, for the last delivery contained enough drawings for several issues. In the meantime, we’ve moved on to the secondary plan.”
    When they entered the outer rooms of the “school,” they spotted the founders of the Lillian Raines School for the Less Fortunate in the front study. A lean dark man stood with a curvaceous woman turned out in the latest fashion. James stepped past Dalton to sweep the lady into a most improper hug, considering that her husband stood not two feet away.
    “Aggie!”
    “Jamie, put me down! You know Simon hates it when you do that.”
    “You never should have married the old codger, Aggie. He’s made you boring.” James bussed his sister’s cheek.
    Agatha laughed and cast a plea to her husband. “Simon, do I bore you?”
    Dalton watched as Simon turned his head to give his wife a profoundly smoldering glance. Agatha blushed in response, her jest with James forgotten, her eyes only for her husband. The two were the very picture of a newly wed couple in love.
    Dalton smiled tightly. It hadn’t been all that long ago that he himself had imagined a very different outcome with Agatha Cunnington for one impulsive moment. He’d done his best in the end to keep Simon and Agatha together and a good thing, too. Agatha had proven to be far too unpredictable to make a proper Lady Etheridge.
    Then again, women like Agatha seemed to be something of a rarity. Oh, there were plenty with generous figures and pretty faces, and perhaps even a few with brains—but he couldn’t seem to find one with heart.
    Real heart, an understanding of true loyalty and allegiance—at least to something other than fashion and gossip.
    “I don’t suppose there are any more like her