Sir Riley adjusted his posture and studied the tea table. Thomas, as he had since she’d arrived, appeared composed, and very definitely in charge.
“I think, Madeleine,” Sir Riley admitted at last, “we’ve developed a plan that would allow the Baron of Rothebury to be taken without force.”
We? Who is we? “You think so?” she repeated as respectfully as the situation allowed.
Sir Riley tapped his fingers together in his lap. “Three nights ago our operatives allowed two crates of opium to be stolen from a ship that docked at Portsmouth. During the week before this theft, we had men working the dock, spreading the word quietly that the opium would be arriving.” He beamed and lowered his voice. “Tonight, or tomorrow night, if his schedule remains the same, the crates should be delivered to the baron, and he’ll be taking them through the tunnel. We plan to have several men awaiting him inside it when he arrives.”
She blinked. “Inside the tunnel?”
“Yes,” he returned. “Inside and out, and additional men interspersed among the trees so there can be no escape. If we catch him in the act, along with Mrs. Winsett’s testimony, there can be a firm conviction.”
Madeleine shook her head, puzzled. “I don’t understand. How can you position yourselves if you don’t know where the tunnel is precisely? Even Thomas and I couldn’t find the entrance in the forest.”
“I spoke with Desdemona,” Thomas revealed without a shred of pomposity.
That stunned her, and she turned her head sharply to stare at him. “When?”
“This afternoon. We had a rather long conversation, and she gave me very specific information about its location, some of which I’ve already passed on to Sir Riley. She’s a very expressive and opinionated lady when engaged in direct conversation,” he drawled with a wry lift of his lips, his eyes challenging.
Madeleine refused to be baited by the innuendo and forced herself to ignore it, looking back to Sir Riley. “Why use the additional resources when I can enter the tunnel for you? I’ve all but been given permission to do so by the man himself.”
“Because I don’t want you in the tunnel, Madeleine,” Thomas stated flatly.
Her confusion slowly turned to offense, then outright anger, though she refused to let it show.
“I don’t think that’s for you to decide,” she argued just as articulately.
Sir Riley cleared his throat again. “I think, Madeleine, that what Mr. Blackwood is saying is that it’s not necessary for you to put your life in danger by entering the tunnel unguarded and alone.”
“Because I am a woman,” she maintained with little inflection.
“Precisely,” Sir Riley agreed with a satisfied grin. “We have others who can enter quickly now that we know where it is, and we think we’ve developed an excellent plan that will put no one in peril, least of all you.”
One of the most disappointing moments of her life was happening right now as Madeleine realized that Sir Riley, possibly the man she admired most in the world, was lying to her. To her, his most dedicated, trustworthy subordinate on the Continent. And she knew this suddenly because her gender had never before been an issue in her assignments. Never. She and everybody else involved knew the risks one took in this kind of work, and it was accepted unconditionally if one wanted to continue in the field. She had previously, without question, been given responsibilities that put her life in danger. Indeed, she was the only woman she knew of who worked in her capacity, and for the last six years she’d been under the extreme scrutiny of others to perform as a man would, bravely and confidently, because she was expected to fail. She hadn’t, and that’s why she was so admired. Nobody had ever doubted her strength before now, especially Sir Riley.
No, her arguments for entering the tunnel herself were sound and created the least risk for the baron discovering their intentions. Thomas and Sir Riley knew this, which meant conclusively that something here, in this room, was very definitely wrong.
Gracefully, spine stiff, she stood, though she didn’t move from her position. “Well, then,” she uttered as her palm brushed her skirt. “I can see that my usefulness and talents are no longer needed. I suppose there is no reason I cannot return to France immediately.”
Thomas said nothing, but her words clearly flustered Sir Riley, who stood when she did, gazing to the other man as if needing direction in such an awkward moment.
Thomas remained where he was, rigidly set, features hardened. Madeleine sensed the first real stirring of a momentous occasion about to take place.
“I think it’s time for me to speak with Madeleine alone, Sir Riley.”
Her employer actually sagged with his exhale, appearing visibly relieved as he tipped his head toward her once without argument. “Indeed, and I am famished and ready for a pint or two. It is always wonderful to see you, Madeleine, and I’m sure we’ll be in touch very soon.”
He bowed to Thomas. “Good evening, sir.”
Then a hush fell over the cottage while he walked to the foyer, lifted his twine coat from the rack beside the door, donned it, and exited hastily.
Madeleine didn’t know what to do or say. She just stood there, waiting for something to happen in the uncomfortable silence. She glanced to Thomas, who had yet to move from where he’d been positioned when she’d arrived a few minutes ago, but he looked unsettled now, as if he wasn’t certain how to begin a lengthy, vital discussion.
“Why did he call you ‘sir’?” she asked bluntly, beginning it for him.
“He was nervous to be here,” he readily replied without so much as a look into her eyes, lifting a hand to rub his chin with his fingers.
She folded her arms across her breasts, undaunted. “Yes, I know. I also found that odd.” When he said nothing in reply to that, she insisted, “I think it’s time for you to explain it to me, Thomas. What is going on here?”
The mood surrounding them intensified abruptly. She could feel his sudden uneasiness like a punch to the gut in her own unmistakable pangs of fear.
He turned around so that he faced the grate, studying the slow-burning fire for a moment or two. She waited, uncertain but refusing to move, feeling her heart pound in her temples and perspiration break out between her breasts.
“Do you love me, Maddie?”
The softly, gently spoken question was the last thing she expected to hear from his lips, and it caused her knees to give as her legs weakened. She sat once more, ungainly, grabbing the armrest to her left to help her.
“I—I’m not sure how that’s relevant to this discussion.”
“Do you?”
She couldn’t avoid the topic, she supposed. He didn’t seem about to let her. “I think we have become very close during the last few weeks, yes.”
He shook his head. “That’s not what I asked you.”
She shifted her feet under the tea table and smoothed her moist palms along her thighs over the silk of her gown. “I’m not certain what you expect to hear,” she countered very matter-of-factly. “I’m returning to Marseille in a day or so, and—”
He laughed harshly, cutting her off. It was a bitter laugh overflowing with pent-up resentment, irritation, and obvious exasperation. Then he grabbed the mantel with his hands and pushed himself away forcefully, turning quickly in her direction again. He crossed the space between them in two strides, grabbed her upper arm, and yanked her to her feet at his side.
Before she could attempt a protest, she read in his eyes what he intended to do. They were dark as a moonless night, hard as steel, and desperate.
“Thomas—”
His mouth came crushing down over hers, roughly, aching, pleading. She inhaled his scent, tasted him, absorbed all that he gave. She fought him initially, for a second only, or maybe it was hours, she couldn’t possibly know. Then she clung to him as his kiss deepened and grew more tender, his hands came behind her back to caress, to mold her against his hard form. Oh, God, how she wanted to be with him, needed him.
A soft so
und escaped her throat, and with that he rapidly withdrew.
She stood wavering, hands and body shaking, lips hot and yearning for more as he looked down into her eyes again, his own expressing a profound confirmation and sublime satisfaction.
Rage filled her instantly, and she wanted to slap him hard across the mouth for taking advantage of her weakness for him. But slapping him wouldn’t accomplish a thing, because it was nothing but an act of desperation. She’d never break down and strike him, and he very well knew it. Instead she relaxed her features and waited for him to release her, hoping he couldn’t feel the hammering of her heart in her breast.
He never moved, nor lowered his intense gaze.
Suddenly he grabbed her cheeks and lifted her face to within an inch of his. “Tell me you don’t love me.”
Features as bland as she could muster, she pushed against his chest, though it did no good as his strength far exceeded hers. A scream welled up inside of her, but she fought it, choking it down, choking the tears back because she refused to cry in front of him.
“Why are you doing this, Thomas?” she whispered steadily.
He shook his head very slowly, his thumb rubbing her cheek. “Because I want you to admit that you feel something, Madeleine, for me, for us. Anything.”
She gaped at him. “Of course I feel.”
He gripped her harder. “I want you to admit you feel passion, not physical passion, but emotional passion, an emotional attachment to me and what we’ve had together.”
She tried to shake him loose, but he wouldn’t budge. “Our relationship has been very passionate. I don’t know what more I can give you.”
She didn’t understand, or didn’t want to, and Thomas decided at that moment he would simply have to tell her everything to make her see. He wanted her to admit to loving him first; it would make the pain to come that much more bearable for her. But she didn’t comprehend what he needed to hear, and it was altogether possible she hadn’t yet realized how deeply her feelings for him went.
He released her abruptly and stood erect. She pulled away from him at once and stepped backward several feet, until she reached the other end of the sofa.
Turning away from her, he walked to the far side of the room and stared vacantly out the window to the growing darkness of late afternoon, at rooftops and one or two smoking chimneys in the distance, seeing nothing. Only silence invaded their world for minutes as she waited for him, probably dazed and certainly angry, although she did very well at hiding it. He knew he would feel exactly the same way were he in her position. He could hear her uneven breathing, but nothing else, and it affected him tremendously. He was so focused on her, only her. Regardless of her continuous denial, Thomas was almost certain Madeleine was in love with him. If she realized it herself, they might have a chance.
“I haven’t been completely honest with you about myself, Madeleine,” he disclosed quietly.
After seconds that seemed like hours, she murmured, “Again you have bewildered me, Thomas. I don’t understand.”
He drew a deep breath, squeezed his hands into fists at his sides, and briefly closed his eyes. “My name,” he revealed in a steadily building tension, “is not simply Thomas Blackwood. It is Christian Thomas Blackwood St. James, Earl of Eastleigh.”
Her breathing stopped. Silence roared, or perhaps that was only the blood in his veins. He couldn’t be sure.
“An earl?” she repeated, her voice whisper-soft and shaky, barely heard in its disbelief. “An earl…”
When at last he detected the noise of rustling skirts, he swung around again slowly to watch her sit with great difficulty once more on the sofa, clutching the armrest with tight fingers as if to keep herself from reeling. Meeting her gaze then was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, for she was bewildered and deeply stunned, staring at him with desolate, crystal-blue eyes, silently pleading that this wasn’t true, that he had never deceived her at all.
Deciding to get to the heart of the matter before the sight of her broke him into pieces, he revealed, “And I don’t work for Sir Riley, he works for me.”
“Wha—what?”
Now she shook visibly, paling markedly, her composure failing as she sagged into her corset, her beautiful eyes so lost in an astonished flurry of confusion and complex emotions she couldn’t begin to deal with right now.
There was no turning back.
He removed his jacket and waistcoat with trembling hands that he hoped to God she wouldn’t notice. Next, he untied his cravat, pulled it from his neck, then carried everything to his chair, folding his discarded clothing over the arm before walking behind it to rest his hands on the soft back, for comfort, for stability.
“I want to tell you a story, Madeleine,” he began soothingly, digging his fingers into the cushion to prevent himself from going to her, forcing himself to stand his ground while he revealed his hidden past.
She never moved, but her wide eyes peered into his, clear as glass.
“After the death of my wife, and before my accident, I was a rather gregarious man, and a randy one. I lived in the city most of the time, when I wasn’t on the Continent with some investigation or another. I played loosely with the female sex because I had the power and money to attract them. I was a widowed earl, after all, with a title and a fairly large estate. Women also found me attractive physically, so I was able to pick and discard them at my choosing. It was a game, and I enjoyed it immensely.”
She showed no outward response to that, to any of it, so he turned his attention to the glowing embers in the grate, concentrating on his phrasing, his words that had never been more vitally important.
“I told you I injured my legs in the war, and that was essentially true. But they weren’t injured in the fighting, however much I wish they had been.” She probably didn’t understand that, nor was she likely to comment on it, so he carried on. “The Home Office sent me to the bay of Hong Kong in early October of ’forty-two, just after the signing of the Nanking Treaty. My mission had nothing to do with the war itself, but was to investigate two high-ranking naval officers, Charlie Dunbar and Peter Goodfellow, both stationed on a warship near the Kowloon Peninsula to keep the peace during the tense few weeks after the initial signing. These men were rumored to be trading spices, opium, silks, and other goods on their own with high officials in the Chinese government, misreporting the goods as pilfered by the Chinese, lost at sea during heavy fighting, or simply stolen, and then keeping the money for themselves.
“I reported for duty to Captain Dunbar on the Royale, a newly christened steamship, the second of November, posing as a shipbuilder hired by the government to oversee the construction of a shipyard near Hong Kong Harbor. My false identity remained intact, and all went fairly routinely for about six months, but in that time I learned nothing regarding the men and my mission. I could not find one solid piece of evidence that suggested either Dunbar or Goodfellow was involved in illegal activity, and yet there was still an occasional report of missing cargo from the ship or fleet. It was a baffling case, and one that, over the course of several months, began to unduly distress me.”
Thomas paused and passed her a fast glance. She gazed unblinking at the chess pieces now, hands clutched together in her lap, clinging to her plum silk skirt as she balled it in her fists.
His voice grew weary as he carried on. “The worst part about this story, Madeleine, is that discovering how covert operations like this one operate, then putting myself inside of them to bring an end to the illegal activities, are the two things I do best. It’s my job. Yet in Hong Kong I couldn’t accomplish my objective by doing the task others were counting on me to do. At the time I arrived in China I’d been working for the Crown for four years in the same capacity, and never had I had such a difficult time finding the proof needed to implicate the offenders as I did on that assignment. I should have found the evidence to have them arrested, but nobody would talk, I had no clues, and I could not find one shred of solid, usable evi
dence against them. For the first time in my career I was failing.”
He squeezed the back of the chair even harder as the memories of the fateful day of his accident came flooding back. “On May tenth, eighteen forty-four, I committed the gravest error of my entire life,” he confessed in a husky tenor. “I walked alone one evening on the edge of town, taking the time to think through my options, my caution for my safety undermined by my usual arrogance, as well as the resentment and desperation I was starting to feel for my work. As I headed toward the dock, I remember hearing footsteps behind me on the vacant street, and as I turned to look at the source, I was clubbed in the back of the head. The next thing I remember was waking up inside an abandoned shipyard, trapped under a smoldering wooden pillar as the building burned to the ground.”
Thomas hesitated in his disclosure. He couldn’t even discuss the smoke that made his lungs ache with each breath and his throat burn for weeks, the vomiting and unbearable pain. The torment and hopeless fear he’d felt when he’d tried to use his legs, only to realize they’d been crushed.
“I managed to pull myself to safety, though I don’t know how,” he mumbled shakily, in a far-off voice. “I spent three weeks in hospital in China before I could return to England. When I finally arrived at home I spent two months recuperating and adjusting to the world as a man whose life, to my mind, had just been destroyed.”
He couldn’t stand still any longer, and with hands clenched into fists at his sides, he began to pace the room from the north windows to the fireplace, hearing nothing from Madeleine and unable to look at her.
“You have to understand what this accident did to me,” he stressed fervently. “All of me, not just physically. Before I left for Hong Kong I was a much-sought-after gentleman in society, admired by the ladies, pampered, wealthy, and established with friends and colleagues. Then suddenly I was nothing. Nothing. I left to do a simple task and returned a cripple, Madeleine, and I’m sure you now know how we’re treated by society.” He chuckled acrimoniously, stopped where he stood on the long, brown rug in front of the tea table, and squeezed his eyes shut. “On May tenth, eighteen forty-four I became a cripple, and for what? For what? I didn’t do anything noble. I didn’t save a life, or find myself in a dangerous place while exposing the thieves I was sent to observe and have arrested for the good of my country. I didn’t even lose my legs in the goddamn war.” Through his teeth, jaw clenched, he articulated, “I lost my legs because of my inflated arrogance and stupidity, probably when someone who was hired to kill me failed. That’s it. Nothing was ever proven, and my investigation was never solved. Quite the joke on me, really.”
Winter Garden Page 28
