A Reluctant Courtship

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  Chilcott closed the parlor door. “Miss Morrow has brought us some sort of news she was about to impart.”

  “Forgive the intrusion. I shall depart then.” Philo headed back to the door.

  “Stay,” Meric said. “You may be of assistance too.”

  Philo paused by a shelf containing a rather large and ugly Chinese vase and leaned against it. “If you like. Haven’t been any help thus far.”

  “Go ahead, Miss Morrow.” Meric gave Chilcott a stern look. “You keep your opinions to yourself.”

  Chilcott shrugged.

  Miss Morrow began to stir her as yet untouched coffee round and round with the silver spoon tinkling against the china, in rhythm with her explanation about the visits to the prison, the success of her pies for getting attention, how Honore dared talk to the French prisoners in her halting, schoolgirl words.

  “And when we got home,” Miss Morrow concluded, “she had a folded piece of paper in her pocket. Someone slipped it in there without her knowing it.”

  “Rather a frightening notion,” Chilcott murmured.

  Meric gave him another warning glance, then returned his attention to Miss Morrow. “What did this piece of paper have on it?”

  “A date and a time.” At last she stopped stirring and lifted what must be cold coffee to her lips.

  Meric stared at her. Philo stared at her. Chilcott grimaced and opened his mouth.

  “Stubble it, Nigel.” Meric interrupted even the intent to speak. “It’s quite obvious this is a trap.”

  “The conclusion Miss Bainbridge also drew.” Miss Morrow wrung her hands. “There is one difficulty with it.” She fixed her gaze on Meric. “Miss Bainbridge intends to go regardless of whether or not she thinks it is a trap, in the event it is not.”

  “Of course she does.” Meric sighed, yet he could not stop his smile. “Which means I have to go too.”

  25

  For once, Honore thanked the Lord her wardrobe consisted of so many black gowns and gloves, kerchiefs and cloaks. She donned all of these garments, tucking her bright hair into a kerchief like a countrywoman and leaving an end loose to veil her face. Afraid Miss Morrow would join her despite her insistence that the companion remain as far from these matters as possible, Honore locked her dressing room door. Miss Morrow owned nothing black but might be tempted to borrow something of Honore’s.

  She was going alone. No one else must be subjected to danger that night. If Ashmoor insisted on coming, as Miss Morrow said he would, that was on his head. He should know better. He held more at stake than did she. Her reputation was already in shambles. Adding being in the presence of smugglers to his stock just might land him in prison again.

  Yet she would be glad of his presence. She would be glad to see him. The elements of love she included in her Gothic novel did not substitute for the companionship of the man she still loved, even if she told herself a dozen times a day he did not deserve her. The heart did not care about whether or not the loved one was deserving.

  As God does not care whether or not you are deserving. Lydia’s voice rang inside Honore’s head. None of us are, but He loves us anyway.

  He had an odd way of showing His love. Even her earthly father, for all his neglect in the name of his political ambitions, had made plans for her future, had ensured that she was safe and maintained her role in Society despite her errors in judgment.

  And she was off to make one more error in judgment—helping a man who might as soon be in league with the men on whom she was about to spy, if they were there, as be the innocent one seeking answers. Not, of course, that she was doing this for him entirely. No, she needed to know for herself. And she was bored now that she had finished her novel.

  So why did she blame God for not loving her when she so blatantly went her own way?

  The question giving her pause, she stopped on her bedchamber threshold and pressed a gloved hand to her lips. The Bible said God loved her no matter what, and forgiveness was hers for the asking. Yet she rejected God’s love and forgiveness, damaging her once close bond of faith with every willful act.

  Your willfulness does not stop God from loving you. Though she had said no such thing precisely, Miss Morrow’s voice still rang in Honore’s ears.

  Honore locked the truth away, as she was tempted to lock Miss Morrow into her bedchamber. She slipped downstairs and exited through one of the parlor windows, then pulled it closed behind her. Mavis would not look to see if it was locked. Honore had deliberately taken that chore upon herself for just this sort of occasion. Only a draft of the frosty night air would take the maid into the parlor to see if a window had been left open and then to wonder why. Worst of all, she would close and lock it, stranding Honore outside in the cold and darkness.

  Nearly complete darkness. The dark of the moon had been only a few days earlier, and now thick clouds covered the starlight. She could not see her black-gloved hand before her face. Only her movements would draw attention, so she proceeded with stealth, slipping along the tree line and out the gate to the garden of Bainbridge. The outside of the dower house fence gave her fair shelter until she reached the gate in the wall. She slipped the key into the lock—and froze.

  The lock was not engaged.

  Always this gate was kept locked except when large deliveries of goods needed to be brought to the back door or a member of the family went riding. Never in her twenty years had Honore found this gate unlocked. That it was this night left her blood as cold as the iron beneath her hands. A traitor, someone in the household involved with the smugglers, or both?

  Both, for certain.

  Instinct warned her to race back to the dower house and climb into her bed, safe and warm. Better yet, she should go to her brother and tell him someone he employed was likely in league with traitors and should be discovered and stopped.

  But he would wonder what she was doing out at night trying to unlock an already unlocked gate. No, he likely would not ask. More than likely, he would simply lock her into her bedchamber while preparing for her exile to Somerset. She could send her pleas for Christien and Lydia to rescue her from there and wait for weeks for a response—if her letters reached them. Until he was firmly leg-shackled to Deborah, Beau was not likely to allow her to mingle with polite company, if it was in his power to stop her.

  And it was in his power to stop her.

  She took the only choice that made sense, other than staying home. She left the gate open.

  The instant she left the protection of the wall, the wind slammed into her in a staggering gust off the sea. No sailor in his right mind would go out in this. He could never go farther than the mouth of a cove without being dashed against the rocks, even if he received the great fortune of a strong ebb tide. No tide was strong enough to counter this kind of a gale.

  She was uncertain as to whether she was strong enough to withstand this kind of a gale. She started to flatten herself against the wall for as much protection as she could manage, then realized how much her black garb showed in contrast to the pale limestone. Head down so her kerchief remained over her hair and face, she trudged along the edge of a field on the far side of the road. Her skirt tangled around her legs. She gathered it in one hand and held it up to her knees. No one was about to see her calves in their black lisle stockings.

  One yard. Two. Twenty. Twenty times twenty yards from the gate, she reached the low wall for the pasture. She climbed over it. No sheep remarked at her intrusion into their terrain. Sensible if stupid animals, they were tucked up together in a sheltered corner. If she screamed, no one would hear her.

  “I do not have a reason to scream,” she said aloud.

  The wind snatched her words and howled them away.

  She increased her steps. She was not going to become involved in anything. If she was quick enough, no one would even know of her presence, perhaps not even Ashmoor.

  She hoped he would not know. Nearly two weeks away from him was good. She must keep it that way until he was proven
innocent.

  If he was—

  She brought her thoughts up short from going in that direction. The low wall on the other side of the field brought her up short with the next-to-the-top row of stones slamming into her knees. Gasping from the pain, she bent over, her hands on top of the wall, the smell of dried grass and salt spray thick in her nostrils, the taste of blood from a bitten lip in her mouth. She could not recall if she had cried out. She must not, not this close to the cliffs.

  If she did not pay more attention to her whereabouts, she would walk right off that cliff. Coming close to falling off it—or, more accurately, having it fall out from beneath her—had been quite enough of a close call for her in that regard.

  Grimacing with the ache in her knees, she climbed the wall and dropped the edge of her kerchief from her face so she could see. Though the water swelled and frothed two hundred feet below, it lent more light to the darkness. So did the white scar where the cliff had broken away.

  Had been helped in breaking away.

  She stopped halfway over the wall, knowledge blooming in her head like the nighttime fragrance of jasmine. The cliff’s destruction was not targeted at her. She knew that. The timing of her fall would have been too uncertain. But to make someone fall. To make the cliff look unstable, too dangerous to approach from above or below. To keep people away.

  So perhaps this was indeed a legitimate night for the smugglers.

  For half a dozen heartbeats, she poised on the low wall, ready to drop back into the meadow and retreat to her bed and safety. A trap that she knew of, she could either elude, since she was prepared for it, or talk her way out of. But real smugglers—especially those facing the attainder of treason and not merely transportation to Australia or a few years in Newgate for smuggling—would be more difficult to convince she was not a danger to. They would not care whether or not she was a Bainbridge or a nameless traveler, a lady or a laborer. They would kill her.

  Continuing down to the shore was simply stupidity. Running home was simply cowardice. She could not live her life knowing she might have had the opportunity to learn something of the truth and had run from it.

  She dropped down on the seaward side of the wall.

  A hundred yards along the top of the cliff, she began her descent to the shore. The tide had not quite begun its ebb. Salt spray, whipped into a froth by wind and rocks, spewed into the air, wetting her slippers, her skirt, and then her cloak the closer she drew to the water. She continued, shivering from the icy water. She must be in place before the tide began to recede. Otherwise, she would be too late, could walk straight into the smugglers, one of the escaping prisoners—anyone daring to use Bainbridge land for their unlawful activities, as though intending to implicate one of the family in their treacherous crime.

  She ground her teeth, clenched her free hand into a fist, and walked into Lord Ashmoor.

  With the kerchief pulled over her face, her vision was obscured. She had moved down the path with the aid of a hand against the wall and her feet sliding forward with care. She had kept her head down to avoid getting salt water in her eyes and saw no one until the top of her head collided with something solid—not as solid as the rock but solid enough to send her tumbling backward.

  He caught her arm and hauled her up before she struck the ground. For a moment, she stood nestled in the curve of his arm against his side. His wool coat with its scents of the sea and some distant forest, and something she could not identify, tickled her nostrils, teased them to find that elusive something else, teased her with an ache deep inside.

  She tilted her head back. Her kerchief fell away. “Is it you?”

  “Be glad that it is.” Pitched below the roar of the wind and sea, his voice was rough, close to harsh.

  “You should not be here.”

  “Neither should you.” He released her slowly enough she thought perhaps he did not wish to do so. “But since you are, we need to get into place. I was thinking beneath the overhang.”

  “I was seen last time I thought I was hidden there. I have a better place.” Honore headed across the shingle, the pebbles bruising the soles of her feet in their thin slippers.

  She should have worn half boots, but they tended to make more noise when she walked. Not that the crunch of footfalls over small stones would be audible at that moment. And with slippers, she could better keep her balance on the slippery rock fragments.

  With the tide barely retreated from the base of the cliff, the shingle gleamed in the phosphorescence from the wave crests and sea foam. She could hold on to neither her kerchief nor her cloak. Her garments flapped about her, threatening to lift her off the ground like wings. Her considered hiding place would not be comfortable. If either of them was inclined to seasickness, they would surely experience it here and now.

  She reached the tiny inlet and the fishing boat large enough for only two, which her father had used upon occasion when he wanted to talk to a political colleague and be certain of not being overheard. He had fished from it too, and sometimes Honore had gone with him. She had gone out with her brother once or twice, and more often with the local children. Cassandra used it when she spent one summer collecting marine life to dissect and study, a short-lived interest, fortunately, since the smell she carried with her was worse than her later chemical concoctions.

  Honore caught hold of the salt-stiffened painter and drew the craft close to the miniscule dock. “Climb aboard, my lord.”

  “We’re waiting in there?” His tone conveyed his horror.

  “Nowhere else—” A swell of the sea yanked the rope from Honore’s hands. “Nothing else will conceal us quite so well.”

  “I’m not so certain about that.” He reached past her and grasped the painter.

  Together, they dragged the boat against the tug of the undertow. Crouching, Ashmoor held the craft steady. Or as steady as he could with wind and water swirling around the gunwales.

  “If only I could wear breeches.” Honore started to lift her skirt, then dropped it again. She could not show him her legs all the way to the knee. Her stockings covered them, but still . . .

  “I won’t look.” He turned his head away. “Just hurry.”

  Honore picked up her skirt, petticoat, and cloak and climbed onto the boat’s deck. The vessel did not boast of anything as luxurious as a cabin, merely a covered area at the stern behind the single mast—currently not stepped—and the tiller. She scrambled for the shelter and seated herself on the hard wooden bench seat. A glass stern light protected occupants of the shelter from the worst of the spray, but some of it managed to spew over the deck and beneath the overhang. If only she possessed some of those oiled skins she had heard of. They were supposed to keep a body dry.

  “Keeping hidden is safer,” she reminded herself aloud.

  A thud vibrated through the deck to her feet. Tall and dark against the night sky and cliffs, Ashmoor covered the distance of the deck in a handful of paces and ducked beneath the shelter. “Now what do we do?” He settled on the bench beside her instead of the one opposite.

  Though he must be as wet as she, warmth radiated from him. Sliding closer than the hand span of space between them would be highly improper, and yet she had to hold herself taut to stop herself from doing just that.

  “We wait.” She wrapped her arms across her middle.

  “This is highly improper, of course. If we’re caught, you will be hopelessly compromised.”

  “No one will force you to wed me, my lord.” She made her tone as cold as her hands and feet.

  “Maybe if they did—” He broke off and leaned forward. “What was that?”

  Honore shook her head. “I did not hear anything.”

  “Hmm.” He remained in that position, alert, listening, poised to spring up at any moment, but he tilted his face toward Honore. “So you think this is a trap?”

  “The information came to me too easily, do you not think?”

  “I think indeed. But a trap by whom, for what reason
—” Again he stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence and held up a hand, dark in its leather glove.

  Above the howling wind and lashing surf rose the rattle of falling stones, the scrape of boot heels on rock, voices the wind reduced to a mere murmur.

  Honore’s insides coiled like the insides of a clock with someone still twisting the key. She could not have moved if the Prince Regent himself ordered her to do so. She was not certain she breathed.

  Beside her, Ashmoor stiffened as though his middle had also been wound to the snapping point. The only thing on him that moved was his hand. He reached out and clasped hers, his fingers strong and warm even with two layers of gloves between them. Strong and warm and as taut as a harpsichord string.

  In moments, they would know who approached the shore—smugglers turned traitors in helping French prisoners escape, or riding officers ready to spring a trap with Honore and Ashmoor inside.

  Another shower of stones preceded a sharp command. “Arrêtez-vous!”

  A sharp command to stop—in French.

  Bile rose in Honore’s throat. This was no trap. This was the enemy coming to escape to once again fight against Englishmen.

  She leaned to whisper in Ashmoor’s ear. “How do they intend to get away? There is no boat here.”

  He turned his head, and his lips brushed across her cheek before touching her ear with words so soft they felt more like breaths than speech. “Except the one we’re on.”

  Madness. No one could round the Lizard at the end of Cornwall, the end of England, then cross the channel—not even to a Channel Island—in this little fishing boat.

  Except they need only reach Ireland.

  Her heart seemed to stop beating. The blood left her head, and she dropped her face to her knees. One breath. Two. She would not be sick. She would not faint.