by Cready, Gwyn
Clare grunted. Like Bridgewater, he appeared to be an expert at hiding his thoughts.
“When I saw him last, he’d been beaten up rather badly,” she said.
This seemed to raise a small fire in those sable eyes. “Indeed.”
“The army seems to think he has betrayed England’s interests.”
“He does more for the people of the borderlands than Queen Anne or Marlborough and his bloody army,” Athena said, flushing. “As far as they’re concerned, we’re as bad as the Scots.”
Clare threw a warning look in her direction.
“I had the occasion an hour ago to be in the room where they’d been holding him,” Panna said. Aphrodite and Artemis exchanged knowing smiles, and Panna felt her cheeks warm. “He was gone and the place had been ransacked.”
Clare snorted. “No room in that castle would hold him long.”
Panna gazed at the women, wondering if it was safe to talk. Clare ignored her unspoken question, leaving Panna to guess. “I know what you mean,” she said, “and he had, er, availed himself of the facilities—we left at the same time—but he told me he intended to be back within the hour. And he wasn’t. Or if he’d made it back, he was gone again by the time I returned.”
“Which officer beat him? Did he say?”
“The colonel and his men.”
Clare’s beefy fingers tightened around his mug. “Is that all?”
She thought about the message from Reeves, and about the visit from Bridgewater’s father, and about Thomas, the boy who’d been captured and questioned, but she had no idea how much of that she should share. She hoped Bridgewater’s note would indicate that.
“He sent me with a message for you.” She pulled the note from her pocket and slid it across the table.
Much to Panna’s surprise, Clare ignored the letter and reached for her ponytail, pulling the ribboned bow free. Drawing the fabric taut, he examined its length as if he were reading a ticker tape.
“Oh, Christ.” He leapt up.
“What is it?” Panna frowned.
He held the ribbon before Aphrodite. She paled and handed it to Athena. “I’ll take the horse.”
“As fast as you can, lass.”
Aphrodite threw on a coat and grabbed a pistol from the wall. A moment later she’d flown out the door, and the thunder of the horse’s hooves filled the night.
For a second or two, Panna was shocked, but her surprise soon evaporated with the cold realization that she had served as an unwitting mule for Bridgewater. When had he written the words? She thought of the pencils hanging from ribbons on the map in the hidden room. It must have been then, while she’d bided her time imagining the possibilities of the surveying seat. Heat blossomed on her cheeks at the thought of the kiss they’d shared. She combed her memory for the sequence of events. The kiss had definitely come before Bridgewater tied the ribbon. Had the kiss only been a pretext to get her hair down so he could retie it?
The buzz of shame in Panna’s ears was so loud now, she feared that everyone in the room could hear it.
“What about the note?” she said at last.
Clare’s gaze fell to his boots. He had watched the realization of her betrayal crawl across her face. He picked up the note, broke the seal, and unfolded the paper.
“I apologize, Miss Kennedy. Though he was only arrested this morning, Bridgewater has been under watch for a long time, and the whore’s ribbon is a trick we have used a number of times to great success.”
“I am not a whore. I am a friend of Bridgewater’s—a library keeper from Penn’s Woods.”
“Oh.” Clare processed the implications of that statement and his eyes softened. “Then I can see where it would be doubly hard for you.”
Yes, being seduced by a lord so that she might serve as a living, breathing envelope for his war correspondence was not easy.
“The note,” she repeated sharply. “What exactly does it say?”
He sighed and pushed the paper toward her.
Nothing.
The paper was completely blank. Bridgewater hadn’t trusted her. He’d needed to get the message to Clare, but he had been careful not to put his faith in the crazy interloper who’d appeared out of nowhere, even after she’d made her feelings for him as clear as glass.
“In that case, I suspect you have a pretty good idea where Lord Bridgewater is,” she said with irritation.
Clare’s brow went up. “Lord Bridgewater?”
“Yes. Or Lord Adderly, or whatever this prodigal son is called.”
He nodded. “I do know his whereabouts.”
“I want you to take me to him.”
Clare, not a man to be forced into anything, looked at her, unmoved.
She stood. “Look, I made it here on my own. I can certainly make it back without your help.”
He caught her arm. “I cannot recommend it.”
The thought that she’d been tricked not just into becoming a mule but into placing herself willingly in the arms of a man who intended to hold her against her will made her both scared and angry.
“Does Bridgewater own this place?” she demanded, shaking her arm loose.
“What if he does?” Clare said. “I earn my place here.”
“And I suppose he calls upon you here from time to time?”
Clare’s brows knitted. “Aye, he does.”
“Of course he does. And Aphrodite, Athena, and Artemis are the women who have been carting his messages back and forth?”
“They are. And they have been doing it at great risk, I might add.”
“I’m sure. Though surely there are some rewards for the whores of a man like Bridgewater, are there not?”
“Whores?”
Clare’s face turned the color of eggplant, and Artemis and Athena burst into laughter.
“These women are my sisters,” he sputtered.
“Sisters?” Panna searched the faces of the four for signs of kinship.
The hair had thrown her—Aphrodite with her bright persimmon curls, Athena with her bangs and gleaming fall of raven hair, and Artemis with her thick moonbeam braid. Now that Panna looked, however, she could see Aphrodite’s wide nose, slightly raised at the end, echoed almost exactly on the other women’s faces and in a more masculine fashion on Clare’s. But it was the shared intelligence in the four pairs of coffee-colored eyes that settled the question.
“We may pretend to be whores when necessary,” Athena said kindly, inserting herself between Panna and Clare, who looked near apoplexy, “However, tis only an act.”
“I am terribly sorry,” said a painfully embarrassed Panna. “I—well, I am not one, either.”
For some reason, the plaintive afterthought struck everyone as humorous—well, everyone except for Clare, who was still trying to find his tongue. The women laughed again, and this time Panna joined in.
“Then you are Bridgewater’s . . . accomplices?” she asked.
“We prefer ‘colleagues.’” Artemis smiled.
“Will you at least tell me what the ribbon said?”
Clare’s face, which had just started to relax, tightened again.
“Tell her,” Artemis implored. “She risked her life coming here. She’s part of it now, too.”
Panna wasn’t certain she wanted to be part of anything, let alone an operation run by a man who would stoop to seducing colleagues to get them to ferry his messages around town. Nonetheless, she was curious about the contents of the secret message.
Clare cleared his throat grudgingly. “There was a plan to attack tonight.”
“Yes. Langholm.”
“No, that was a ruse. The real target is Carlisle. Several tons of gunpowder are making their way to the English army via Carlisle tonight.”
Panna cocked her head. “You are English, are you not? Cumbria, as I recall, is an English county. Wouldn’t you and Bridgewater want to support the efforts of the English army to protect the borderlands?”
“We do not fight over bor
ders. We fight to save lives. The gunpowder will be used to attack clans along the border.”
“By your army—Bridgewater’s army?”
He gave her a cool look. “Aye.”
So Bridgewater was the head of a rebel group that was taking justice into its own hands. It was a very dangerous game to play, with the possibility of reprisals from either side if his work was discovered.
“And the ribbon?”
He nodded toward Artemis, who handed Panna the length of pale green satin. She stretched it in her hands. “Cancel C,” he had written. Carlisle.
“Why cancel it?” she asked, but knew the answer even as the question left her lips. Because “They know.” The English army knew of the rebels’ plans to attack the caravan of gunpowder. That’s what Reeves had scratched into the bowl. That’s why Bridgewater had needed her to deliver it.
“I’m not sure,” Clare said, “but I suspect—”
“The army knows.”
“Aye.” He looked at her, surprised.
“They do. Bridgewater received a message like that earlier this evening.”
“From whom?”
Despite their seemingly open conversation, she did not want to betray Bridgewater’s source unnecessarily. “Another colleague.”
His eyes lit briefly, acknowledging her caution, before he turned toward the window. She could see the worry in his eyes.
“What is it? Aphrodite will be able to stop it, won’t she?”
“If the army knows—” He stopped, unable to say the words. “There are fifty rebels there. More than enough to take the wagons with minimal struggle. But if the army sends a regiment . . .” He shook his head as if trying to free himself of the notion. “If Aphrodite makes it in time, she can stop them. But Carlisle is three hours from here. Longer by night.”
Panna cursed herself for her delay. “But what if she doesn’t make it in time?”
“Let us pray she does.”
Panna clapped a hand to her mouth as the realization came to her. “She doesn’t know why Carlisle has to be canceled. She doesn’t know the army knows.” Why did I have to be so damn scrupulous?
Clare’s jaw muscles flexed. “Aphrodite is very capable. She knows the towns and forests between here and there as well as I do. She’ll be prepared for anything. Three hours is a lot of time to ponder why the attack is being canceled.”
Clare stared abstractedly into the night, his forehead furrowed. Panna wondered what atrocities he was imagining.
“You’ll have saved him, you know,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“You’ll have saved Bridgewater’s life. Suspicions about him have been increasing. There are men in the army who think he’s a traitor, though they lack proof. But if they have somehow connected him to the planned attack in Carlisle . . .”
Panna thought of the note scratched into the soup bowl. The hairs on her neck rose. “What if they have connected Bridgewater to Carlisle? They know the rebels are planning to attack. How much harder would it be to figure out Bridgewater is at the bottom of it?”
“If they have, the attack will serve as proof of his treachery, and he’ll be hanged at dawn.”
Had her delay in the twenty-first century damned him to the gallows? Or would Aphrodite arrive in time? What if Panna hadn’t come at all?
She felt a little dizzy and sat down again. “Why can’t I go back to the castle?”
“The clans along the border have had enough of the English army setting up camp on their doorstep. The cannon displays are stirring the blood of the most violent factions in Scotland, which I presume was the army’s intent. Scottish raids are increasing. Three nights ago two men were found hanging upside down from a tree two miles from here. Their throats had been cut.”
Panna gripped the seat. “But Aphrodite—”
“Aphrodite has a pistol and our best horse, and she won’t hesitate to use either of them. I can take you to Lord Bridgewater in the morning, if that’s still your desire. Do not venture out there tonight. Not on foot. Not alone. You can stay in Aphrodite’s bed.”
She needed no further convincing.
He extinguished the candle hanging next to the door and paused to gaze out the window. “I’ve lived side by side with the Scots all my life, and we have certainly had our disagreements. They are canny thieves and liars, though a man in my position almost admires that. But the army’s appearance here has set the world on edge. The borderlands are a powder keg. A single spark will destroy us all.”
ELEVEN
THE MORNING LIGHT DID NOT LESSEN THE TENSION ON CLARE’S FACE, though he hid his worry in stories about Bowness, the town at the base of Bridgewater’s castle, and Annan, the Scottish town across from Bowness on the Solway Firth, the body of water along which Clare and Panna walked on their return to the castle.
Panna, whose sleep had been marred with dreams of explosions and mutilated corpses, found herself uncertain on which side of Hadrian’s Wall she stood, philosophically speaking. The rebels seemed to have carved out an unenviable third position, like an unsteady barge in the middle of the firth, waiting to be shelled by one side or the other.
Anxiety about the fates of Aphrodite and Bridgewater weighed heavily on her. Clare assured her that by asking a few discreet questions when they arrived in town, he would learn what happened in Carlisle.
As they rounded a curve, both castles popped into view— Bridgewater’s on their side of the firth and the one in the Scottish hills on the other.
“Don’t you think it’s odd that two castles ended up so close together?” she asked.
Clare laughed. “You wouldn’t if you knew the same man owned them.”
“Bridgewater owns the other as well?” she said, shocked.
“No. His grandfather owns the one over the water. But he also owned Bridgewater’s castle once. Back when this land belonged to Scotland.”
“What?”
“Oh, aye, the land has passed into the hands of Scotland a number of times over the years. Sometimes the possession is so fleeting, the mapmakers don’t even have time to record it.”
She stared at the far castle, shocked. A Scottish clan chief in sight of his English nobleman grandson? This was the stuff of novels, she thought, entranced. “His grandfather, eh?”
“Oh, aye. Though Bridgewater and he are estranged.”
“I’m not surprised. It must be terribly hard to be on different sides of a conflict.”
He gave her an odd look. “I dinna think the conflict is all that separates them.”
“Oh?”
“His grandfather disowned his mother when she fell in with his father.”
Wow. Very Romeo and Juliet.
“Then his grandfather owns this castle as well?” she asked, trying to untangle the family connections and property lines.
“No, Bridgewater owns this one. His grandfather lost it to the Crown thirty years ago. Forfeited it upon losing a battle. Oh, and an ugly battle it was. They set fire to the place. Bridgewater’s grandfather barely got out alive. Many others didn’t.”
No wonder Bridgewater chafed at England’s unflinching position on the borderlands. “But how does a stone castle burn?”
“Tis not the stone that burns, of course. Tis the wooden floors and rafters. And without the floors, which provide support, the walls collapse.”
“Which explains the ruins around the tower and courtyard.”
“Aye. Bridgewater was raised an Englishman. He purchased the ruins and restored them.”
She was just about to ask about the crypt in the chapel when the sound of hoofbeats roared up behind them. Aphrodite waved furiously, and Panna felt so overwhelmed with relief, she almost had to sit down.
“Canceled,” the redhead said breathlessly when she’d pulled her horse to a stop. “Just in time. The men had already donned their masks. It was a close thing.”
“And no one was spotted by the army?” Panna asked.
“No. But I could smell them
over the ridge, waiting to blindside us.” She spat.
“Have you heard from Bridgewater?”
She gave Panna a regretful look. “Not a word.”
“Go home, lass,” Clare said. “You’re not dressed appropriately, and we wouldn’t want anyone thinking you a whore.”
Panna laughed. “Thank you,” she said to Aphrodite. “Truly.”
The woman beamed.
“Get some sleep,” Clare called as the horse broke into a trot. “You did a bonny job.” Then he saw the look on Panna’s face. “Dinna worry about Bridgewater, lass. He knows how to take care of himself.”
She thought of him facing down the earl. “He seems to have a rough time of it with his father.”
Clare gave her a weak smile. “Family has been a source of great pain for Bridgewater. He of course doesn’t share this with me, but I have observed a deep sort of melancholy in him at times. After his mother died, I think he felt very alone.”
Which helped explain his reluctance to trust others.
Two English soldiers joined Panna and Clare on the path, which meant the discussion for the rest of their walk up the rise to the castle gate was limited to the history of Hadrian’s Wall and the weather.
The gate was a looming affair, with a spiked portcullis and tiny guardhouses built into the stone on either side. Dozens of red-coated soldiers were spread in and around the entrance, some engaged in marching drills, some peeling onions, and some loading a small cannon onto the back of a wagon. Most important to Panna, however, was the fact that no one was building a gallows.
“This is as far as I am going to go, lass,” Clare said, pulling her behind a cart. “I am not a popular figure with the army. Tis best I keep my distance. Are you certain you want to see his lordship?”
In truth, she was divided on the matter. She knew she wouldn’t rest until she was certain that Bridgewater was safe. However, discovering that the kiss she’d so enjoyed had merely been a means to an end had been a serious blow to her ego.
“I am,” she said, but she could tell Clare saw the uncertainty on her face.
“I won’t ask why, but I will advise you to take care. His lordship is not quite as smart as he thinks, but he is still a very smart and sometimes brutal man. If he smells deception on you, he will find a way to make you pay.”
