Enticing Temptation

Chapter 20

The Duke of Markham’s Study

            “I certainly enjoyed the dinner and the good company, Markham, but now would you please tell me why this meeting was so important?” the Prime Minister said once they were seated around a large table in Markham’s study, a table Ainsworth and his staff had placed there earlier in the day. Everyone seated around the table had after dinner drinks before them, the men brandy and the women tea.

             Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury was a man nearing sixty, balding with a graying beard and mustache. He’d been Prime Minister for almost two years. Neither Cat nor her uncle thought he was aware of their work with the Foreign Office since neither had ever had to report directly to him.

            “What you are about to hear would best be told to you Salisbury by my son and granddaughter,” Markham replied. “I’m not sure if you are aware of their work for the Foreign Office or not.”

            “No,” he replied as his head turned toward Cat’s a brow raise. “You Countess?”

            “Yes,” Cat replied. “I have for almost eight years.”

            “And I much longer,” Trey informed him. “What Catherine and I wanted to discuss with you is our last assignment and the results or lack of results I should say.”

            “I’m listening,” the Prime Minister said.

            “Over a year ago I was called into Lord Terryton’s office and asked to find the person responsible for leaking the names of two of our agents in China resulting in their deaths. I went to China on my nephew-in-law’s ship…” Trey related his part of the mission to the Prime Minister with Catherine finishing with her telling him her part.

            “You ascended a tree?” the Prime Minister said when she finished.

            Cat nodded.

            “You are an expert with a rifle?”

            “And other weapons,” she proudly informed him while Myles and the rest kept from smiling at the Prime Minister’s flabbergasted expression.

            “Yes…well,” he said. “After hearing both your stories and reading the reports written by each one of you as well as Major Bellman and Lieutenant Fanshaw’s I concur with everyone’s assessments that one of the five men you mentioned earlier is selling information. Do you think this…Zheng Ping person in China was the person paying for the information?”

            “I never learned who the person was in China,” Trey told him. “But I think since I was taken and held probably to use at some future date for bargaining with England it most probably was Zheng Ping. The man was an opium lord and able to pay the amounts of money that would be needed to purchase the information from someone here. I’m sure that Farthington was the middle man used to pass the money and information.”

            “I wish we could have captured him or Farthington to make them tell us who the traitor is,” the Prime Minister said.

            “I had no choice but to kill both,” Cat told him. “I could tell just by the way Farthington was motioning to Zheng Ping that he knew it was a diversion and wanted Zheng Ping’s men to see about Uncle Trey instead of fighting the fire the explosion created. I couldn’t risk our not rescuing my uncle.”

            “Yes, of course,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you think Colonel Bishop was telling the truth before he died that his uncle was not the person who paid him?”