She was having fun. Not because of her dining companions, but because of the amused expression on Thomas’s face when she put to test all the arts they had practiced. It was to him she looked after lowering her eyes in maidenly modesty, or pouting in feigned intellectual consternation, or sighing with rapt attention.
At the end of the hour’s meal, the duke’s young son begged to escort her to where a sextet had been assembled for the guests’ dancing pleasure. But seeing Thomas go off with the Prince Regent and several other men, she demurred, and went in search of Hecuba. Her great-aunt looked a trifle pale, not surprising considering the warm, heavily scented room and quantities of rich, spiced food she’d eaten. Cat was immediately solicitous.
Helping Hecuba to a chair by an open door, Cat spread her fan and wafted the air gently over her great-aunt’s face.
“Don’t fuss, Catherine! It is nigh hellishly hot in here, and your hovering about so closely isn’t doing anything to alleviate the problem. Go off and get me an ice!”
Cat was hurrying to do so when Daphne Bernard appeared before her, blocking her exit.
“Lady Catherine, n’est-ce pas?”
Cat nodded.
“We must talk. I am intrigued by you. You set milord Barrymore a nasty knock and lead le grand homme Montrose about by the nose. How so?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Madame Bernard,” Cat replied coldly, surprised the Frenchwoman would be so bold.
The other woman laughed. “But, ma chère. We are both women, is it not so? Of two different styles, oui, but certainement, we can, how shall I say? Compare notes?”
The speculative, knowing look in the petite beauty’s face was unpleasant in its avidity. “Compare notes?”
“But yes! You are so different from Thomas’s usual type.”
“And you are more representative of that ‘type’?” Cat asked stiffly, hating herself for being drawn into this vulgar conversation, but compelled to find out what this woman meant to Thomas.
Again Daphne laughed, unfurling her ostrich feather fan and languidly caressing her décolletage. “Oh, I think that is a reasonable assumption. We share a certain history, certain affinities, certain… tastes. But you, so English! So naive and fresh! Like a glass of milk! And yet you have handled milord Barrymore most adroitly. There are depths to you, no?”
Daphne wrinkled her tiny nose. “It is a conclusion foregone. So demanding, so virile a man as Thomas would not be satisfied with less. But you are white, Lady Catherine! It is something I have said? Ah, me. Pardonnez-moi. I do not mean to offend.”
“I doubt that very much, Madame Bernard. And now, if you will excuse me?” Cat lifted her head, determined not to let this tiny woman and her insinuations upset her. Thomas had shown not the least interest in the Bernard woman. Cat swept from the room, a soft snicker following her.
Chapter 14
I would like to be in your shoes, Montrose.” His Royal Highness, Prince George, winked as he placed the crystal decanter back on the ornately carved sideboard.
The small chamber off the dining room was reserved for the chosen male guests presently in His Highness’s good graces. Tonight, however, those men present were not the Prince Regent’s boon companions, but his political advisors. After some desultory conversation, Colonel Seward had led Thomas to Prince George’s side for a personal interview.
“Well, what’s wrong with you, man? Lovely little foreign dovie and all. What say you?” Prince George asked affably.
“Mr. Montrose is finding his conscience uncomfortable,” Seward said in response to Thomas’s silence. “He is still considering Sir Knowlton’s request to meet with Daphne Bernard.”
Prince George, the perpetually adolescent product of puritanical parenting, scowled. “The foreign office fellows tell us that they have always paid the Bernard woman well for her information. In fact, we believe we heard that she originally approached us. We did not seek her.”
“Your Majesty, Mr. Montrose is not concerned with Madame Bernard. He is bothered by the moral ramifications of this meeting.”
“I can speak for myself, Seward,” Thomas said, his gaze remaining respectfully fixed on his future monarch.
The Prince Regent looked from one of his agents to the other. “Is this so, Montrose? Do you withhold aid to your country from some pedestrian notion of morality? We are disappointed, Montrose.”
The look the Prince Regent spent on Thomas was chill in the extreme. Colonel Seward’s expression remained a habitual bland, emotionless one.
“It is morality which has made this country the mightiest in the world, Your Highness,” Thomas answered evenly. “It is the very foundation of your realm, the gift of greatness which we, your loyal subjects, humbly offer you, our sovereign.”
George was silent a moment before clapping Thomas on the shoulder. “Begad! Well spoken, Montrose. We find ourself sympathetic to you. What is it then? The redheaded chit? Dashed lovely! We will see that she is well away from the ‘field of battle.’ ‘Field of battle,’ must tell Skeffington that one.” He chortled.
“Your Highness, is there no other person with whom Madame Bernard might negotiate?” Thomas said with a hint of desperation.
But Prince George was now bored with the proceedings. In light of his munificent assurance to Thomas, he simply could not comprehend any further impediment to the proposed meeting so he retreated into imperial disdain.
“We do not know. We find your attitude most unbecoming. Be guided by the knowledge that we have trusted you. Good God, man! Lady whoever-she-is shan’t know a thing about it!”
“But I shall, Your Highness,” said Thomas, aware he trod close to arousing the mercurial royal temper.
Rather than anger, George responded with unconcealed impatience. “You will do what you must. It is ultimately what each of us do. Some with less choice than others.” His pudgy face fell into doleful lines before he was led away by yet another military attaché to yet another advisor.
“Thomas,” Seward said, watching the retreating form, “I have delivered a message to Madame Bernard informing her you will meet her in your suite at the Old Ship at one o’clock.”
“You presume.”
The elegant, slender man shrugged. “You are here. I took that as acquiescence and have done what I deemed necessary. The Bernard woman demanded you act as courier. It was part of her price.” A little frown marked Seward’s still countenance. “I find your ingratitude unfathomable. Has not the Prince Regent himself assured you that your Lady Catherine will be otherwise occupied during the pertinent time?”
“Why have you forced my hand in this sordid affair?”
“Have I forced you? You are your own man, Montrose. More so than the rest of us, to whom this is a career. In the past, had you ever been captured in your ‘fact gathering,’ you might have sustained some embarrassment, some discomfort, but ultimately you would have been returned to your comfortable Devon. In your unofficial capacity, you have avoided the hazards that others face; you have never put more on the line than your sexual prowess or your intellectual vanity.”
“Considering how you feel, Seward, why did you press so hard for my recruitment?”
The other man held his gaze. “You were useful. You were certainly much more useful in your youth as an immoral opportunist than you are now. If I have a distaste for you, it is primarily for that reason: Your conscience—or code or whatever you will call it—has rendered you useless to us. The foreign office, and I, begrudge you that.” Seward scowled. “I have no doubt you will comply with this request. It is part of your code, is it not? How pleasant to have the luxury of a code.”
A quarter of an hour later, after Thomas left, the Prince Regent had Seward brought to him.
“Will he meet with the Bernard woman, do you think?”
“Most assuredly, Your Highness. Montrose’s sense of duty is unimpeachable. Whether he will be able to bring himself to secure the information once the meeting is in progress,”
or more to the point, whether he will be able to once again play the gigolo, thought Seward, “is subject to doubt.”
The Prince Regent pouted. “Can you do nothing to encourage his cooperation, Seward? We are too involved with other matters of state to bother with the details. That is your function, is it not? But the Bernard woman has proven useful in the past. Or so Sir Knowlton implies.”
Seward nodded. “True, sir, in the past her information has been accurate. But now? We have no way of knowing, Your Highness. Unfortunately, Montrose is as aware of this as I. It will be hard to convince him to compromise his integrity for an untested bit of disclosure.”
Seward was aware of his unfortunate choice of words as soon as he uttered them. It was rare he bobbled so badly. The Prince Regent’s face immediately assumed a mask of imperial outrage, reddening the heavy folds of his jowls.
“We do not ask our subjects to compromise their integrity! We assume the integrity of loyal Englishmen is above reproach! If Thomas Montrose ascertains any information through an informal meeting with a foreign adventuress, we gladly welcome it. But he is in no way to be coerced into doing anything which belittles him in either our eyes or his own! Is this understood, Seward?”
Seward bowed low, so the tightening lines of his face could not be read by the enraged Prince Regent. He kept his eyes firmly fixed on the floor until His Highness, in a melodramatic fit of pique, stomped off. Only then did he raise them, his own face flushed with emotions he seldom gave voice to. Even to himself.
Too often lately, Seward felt constrained by the atrociously naive moral niceties of aristocrats playing on the fringes of political subterfuge. Their power to affect the course of nations rubbed him raw. Dilettantes dallying, trying to make the game of politics conform to rules of etiquette, and in doing so, risking the lives of men and women who knew this game had no rules.
Seward was tired unto death of pandering to the vanity of dabblers. He had tried to beg off from this particular assignment, knowing the parties involved would not be objective, pragmatic, acting for one purpose and one purpose only: the advancement of England as a world power. They would be acting for England, true, but always in tandem with their own motives, motives tied up in nebulous, shifting concepts of moral, racial, and class superiority. But he’d been ordered to comply, it being deemed that the curiously respectful animosity between Montrose and himself would prove a viable tool in the proceedings.
And now the Prince Regent further tied his hands, just as he had found the chink in Montrose’s armor, found the raw nerve on which to press. Even before the disastrous affair with the Leons woman, it had been obvious for several years that Thomas Montrose’s considerable skills were being lost to them. His distaste for his function had grown with each passing week. The foreign office had managed to keep him on only through the judicious use of his skills. Nothing outré was assigned him. He only worked with the most blatant conspirators, those whose sole motivation had been greed.
Seward had cannily ascertained that Montrose was too aware of his own convoluted motives to destroy weak, self-deluded conspirators with their own frailties. He simply had lost the stomach for pulling the wings from flies. And now only his sense of honor compounded by his sense of guilt forced him to agree to this meeting with Daphne Bernard.
Seward remembered from years past the tortured expression on Montrose’s face when he’d handed in his resignation and blithely announced his intention of buying a commission. Seward had seen a mirror of that pain tonight.
Still, it would be best for Seward to remind himself that Montrose was no fool; he knew his strings were being pulled. It was Seward’s job to make sure the strings were strong.
Thomas stared out of the dark hallway window overlooking the enclosed garden at the back of the Pavilion. His knuckles whitened with the force of his grip on the sill. There was no relief from this damnable web. He would meet with Daphne Bernard later in the evening.
If nothing else, the meeting with Seward and Prince George had brought home some hard truths. Truths he had been running from ever since Cat Sinclair had ordered him to her side in a Devonshire pasture. He braced his arms against the sill.
Hopes, Thomas had learned, die hardest in those unused to them. They were a novelty and novelty, Thomas thought, had been the main pursuit of his adult life. It had all been very well to eschew morality for the good of England. But hadn’t the danger, the pitting of his skills and intellect against the collective ones of France, been the real reason he had bartered his honor? Hadn’t England been nothing more than a ready excuse for reckless, self-gratifying titillation?
True, his tenure as an officer at Salamanca had been honorable. Some would say heroic. And his horror at the cruel, stupid, tragic reality of war had been genuine. He found he would do much to prevent the senseless waste of life, even barter what little remained of his personal honor by “meeting” with Daphne Bernard.
But even if the desire to circumvent war was what motivated him now, it was an unforeseen by-product of his initial reasons for entering the seedy, nefarious world of espionage.
No, he couldn’t absolve his history in the light of belatedly discovered principles. He couldn’t absolve himself at all. And, certainly, he could not offer himself to Cat. Cat, who assumed wickedness to be a matter of décolletage.
It wasn’t even that she was too good for him. He was too much a realist to spend his life as a martyr or waste it on a hair shirt of useless self-recriminations. No, he was simply too old for her. Not in years, but in lifetimes of self-indulgences, unpleasantness. Shadowy, tawdry years of excess and debauchery.
It was immaterial that he no longer pursued those courses, just as it was immaterial that years ago they had ceased to be factors in his life. They had been once. They had molded and affected him, whether to the good or the bad. Even were he to swear an oath of eternal chastity—which he would not—he could not offer for her. He could not wait tensely through the weeks and months, wondering which figure from his past would rise up and disclose to her, in graphic detail, his history. Perhaps even tell her the pitiful tale of Mariette Leons and her son.
And it would happen. The world, his world, was too fully populated by eager whisperers.
He could not be there to see the distaste, perhaps even the horror, the stories would nurture. He could not be there to see her pull away, to feel the first coolness, the gradual distrust, to intuit the first, unspoken thought, “A leopard can’t change its spots.”
He could not. He could not spend the years growing increasingly to love her and have her grow to love him, only to watch that love die. And that was the most damnable of all: the knowledge he might have won her heart. Aye, he was well punished for his impertinent hopes: he’d had a small taste of what her love might have been. Because, against all reason, she was growing to have an affection for him. He was too well versed in the language to miss the subtle, telling signs: her delight with his company, the way she looked around a room for him, the intimate smile when she found him.
He dared not—no, he must not—remember the feel of her in his arms, her intoxicating response to his kisses. Instead, he must dissuade her of her affection before she discovered the sort of man for whom she’d developed a tendre. How strange. Perhaps he was developing a taste for masochism.
He swung away from the dark vista before him. But first, he thought desperately, a dance. Just a dance. Just one more small memory to add to the others. Another lesson he could surely bear to learn. A dance was no great thing.
He was walking too quickly. His haste invited comment, but he could not rein in the need to see her. He stopped at the entrance of the room, his great height allowing him to look easily over the crowd.
She was there, bent over her great-aunt, who was shooing her away. With a patent expression of disgust, Cat straightened and set her hands on her hips.
As though she felt his gaze or heard his voice whisper in her ear, she turned. Their eyes locked. He moved toward her, once
more too quickly, too eagerly. It would never do to draw unwelcome attention to her. He forced himself to approach at a leisurely pace.
“Is it really all that much fun, standing about with a group of men and drinking brandy?” she greeted him. Her calm, slightly disapproving tone was balm to Thomas’s tightly stretched nerves. She was so matter-of-fact, a perfect contrast to the years Thomas had spent in near theatrical high tragedy.
“I think this new custom boorish in the extreme,” she continued. “If men want to be alone, let them go to their clubs. But to invite a woman to dine and then summarily abandon her is nothing short of rude.”
“I swear never to abandon a lady again for the questionable pleasure of brandy and snuff.” Fool, thought Thomas, mask your delight.
“And snuff!” she exclaimed, well launched on her tirade. “Disgusting habit. People, perfectly nice, well-dressed people, ending up looking like sugar-sprinkled seedcakes.”
Thomas lifted his brows. “Now I must forswear not only the company of men, but also snuff. You demand much for the pleasure of your company.”
She suddenly grinned. “I know.”
“If I am to forfeit my harmless indulgences, you must forfeit your time. They have struck up a waltz,” he said, holding out his hand. “I warned you that you must dance. And, as your instructor, I am compelled to sit judgment over your abilities before I let you loose on the rest of these pitifully hopeful males.”
He looked over at Hecuba. “If I may?”
Hecuba muttered under her breath. “Yes, yes, yes. Take the chit away and keep her there so she ceases her irksome hovering.”
Thomas led Cat out, placing one hand at her waist, the other enveloping her much smaller one. She set her hand atop his shoulder. And then they were dancing.
He was not a dance master, but his performance on the floor was more than adequate. As a rake, it was only to be expected. And yet, it felt so perfectly fluid, so effortless, dancing with her. A full, quick twirl and she was smiling, giddy with the sheer delight of it, closing her eyes against the distraction of colors and lights, never questioning the direction of his lead.
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