Velvet

by Jane Feather

  And there were exceptions to every rule, but not this one.

  “I don’t deny your credentials, but I do not employ women. There is nothing more to be said. Now, perhaps you’d do me the favor of removing yourself. I don’t mean to be inhospitable …” He tried another heavily ironic smile, lifting one eyebrow. But if he’d hoped to disconcert her, he was disappointed again.

  “Very well.” She rose from the bed. “Then I’ll bid you good night, Lord Praed.” She went toward the door. “You won’t mind if I go out this way?”

  “No,” he said, seizing on a legitimate complaint. “On the contrary. Perhaps you’d like to explain why you chose to arrive in such unorthodox fashion. What the devil was wrong with the door in the first place? The house is asleep.”

  “It seemed more interesting … more amusing,” she said with a shrug.

  “And more dangerous.” His voice was harsh. “This is not a game. We’re not in this business for amusement. We don’t take unnecessary risks in the service. You may have the credentials, madame, but you obviously do not have the wisdom or the intelligence.”

  Gabrielle stood still, her hand on the doorknob, her lower lip clipped between her teeth as she fought to conceal the violent upsurge of anger at such stinging scorn. He didn’t know how far off the mark he was. She never took unnecessary risks, and this one had been entirely justified in terms of her plan. But Nathaniel Praed was not to know that, of course.

  With a supreme effort she conjured up a tone of dignified defense. “I’m no fool, Lord Praed. I can tell the difference between games and reality. Nothing was at stake tonight, so I could see no reason not to indulge myself in a little unorthodox exercise.”

  “Apart from compromising your reputation,” he remarked aridly.

  At that she laughed again, and again he was attracted to the deep, warm sound. “Not so,” she said. “The house is asleep, as you said. And even if anyone saw me scaling the walls, they’d hardly recognize the Comtesse de Beaucaire in this outfit.” She passed a hand in a sweeping gesture down her body, delineating her frame. “Would they?”

  “It would depend on how well they know you,” he said, as aridly as before, reflecting that once seen like this, Gabrielle would be impossible to forget.

  “Well, no harm’s done,” she said with a dismissive shake of her head. “And I do take your point, sir.”

  “I’m relieved. Not that it makes any difference to anything. Good night.” He blew out his candle.

  “Good night, Lord Praed.” The door closed behind her.

  He lay on his back, staring up into the darkness. Hopefully that was the end of any involvement with Gabrielle de Beaucaire. He’d give Simon a piece of his mind tomorrow. What the hell had he thought he was doing, encouraging that troublesome woman to see herself as an agent? She presumably had some romantic, glamorous conception of what was at best a dirty and dangerous business, and Simon was always susceptible to female persuasion.

  Gabrielle stood for a second in the corridor outside, hugging the shadows while she slowly unclenched her fists and breathed deeply until her tight muscles relaxed. He hadn’t guessed her tension, she was sure of it. But her entire body ached as if she’d been tied in knots. He’d accept her in the end, he had to. Simon had said it would take time and she’d have to appeal to the most unorthodox aspects of his nature if she was to overcome his resistance. She’d certainly tried that tonight, and tomorrow was another day.

  But how difficult it was to conceal her rage and the longing to hurt him as he had hurt Guillaume. Oh, it hadn’t been his hand that had wielded the knife, but it had been at his orders. He hadn’t known Guillaume, not even known his real name, and yet he’d had him murdered.

  How could she possibly seduce such a man? But she had to. She would remember Guillaume, relive his death, and then she would be able to do what had to be done.

  2

  There were two men in the comfortable study at the back of the tall house on rue d’Anjou. They were an ill-matched pair, Napoleon’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and his Minister of Police. Talleyrand, the elegant aristocrat, and the brutal-featured Fouché were as unlike physically as they were in their choice of methods and techniques. But they were both experts at working in the shadows, at achieving their purposes along the tortuous winding paths of secrecy and intrigue, diplomatic in the one case, mercilessly pragmatic in the other.

  After Napoleon, they were the two most influential and powerful men in France and, by extension, Napoleonic Europe. In general, they rarely collaborated, each leaving the other his sphere of operations, each courting the ear of Napoleon in his own way. But on this cold January night in Paris, with Napoleon preparing to face the Russian army in Eastern Prussia, they had come together to discuss the progress of a plan where both their interests meshed.

  “She was making contact this weekend at the Vanbrugh house in Kent.” Talleyrand sipped cognac, gesturing to his guest that he should refill his own glass.

  Fouché’s fingers around the delicate crystal decanter were thick and coarse, the nails ragged, tufts of hair sprouting on the red knuckles. Talleyrand tapped the tapering white soft-skinned fingers of a pampered aristocrat on the polished wooden arm of his chair.

  “What does she know of Praed?” Fouché asked before taking a deep swallow from his liberally recharged glass.

  “That he’s the cleverest spymaster the English have yet produced … that so far we haven’t been able to get close to him … that it’s her assignment to do so.”

  “And provide us with the means to remove him permanently,” Fouché declared, smacking his lips as he savored his cognac.

  Talleyrand winced slightly. Fouché was so unsubtle. As it happened, removing Nathaniel Praed was the last thing the Minister for Foreign Affairs wanted, but Fouché didn’t need to know that. It suited both of them to have Gabrielle infiltrating the English secret service, and they had combined their resources to achieve it. Fouché wanted a double agent in England to enable him to wreak havoc with that nation’s secret service, and Talleyrand, much more devious, wanted a line of communication directly into the ear of the English government. Nathaniel Praed via Gabrielle was to be that ear.

  For the moment the two men could work together toward their differing goals. If Fouché’s goal interfered with Talleyrand’s at some future point, then the Minister for Foreign Affairs would deal with it.

  “You believe the woman will succeed in infiltrating their system?” Fouché regarded his host with shrewd eyes as he posed the question.

  Talleyrand nodded. “Gabrielle’s been one of our most resourceful and intrepid couriers for the last five years, throughout her liaison with le lièvre noir. This mission requires different skills, of course, but she’s a woman of passionate convictions and determination, intent on avenging her lover’s murder. She will succeed.”

  “I wish to God I knew who’d betrayed him,” Fouché declared with a savage twist to his mouth, “To lose our top agent in such fashion! Mon dieu, it makes me want to spit!”

  His mouth pursed and Talleyrand grimaced, thinking he was about to suit action to words, but Fouché restrained himself, draining the contents of his brandy goblet in one gulp.

  There was a moment’s silence. The fire spurted and a candle flared as a needle of frigid air found its way under the door.

  “However,” Talleyrand said finally, “as we agreed, there’s a way to pull the chestnuts out of this fire. Gabrielle will turn disadvantage to advantage. Once she’s gained Praed’s trust, she will bring us, among other information, a list of the English agents presently working in France. If Guillaume was betrayed by an English double agent in our own ranks, we’ll discover it.”

  “You’re sure there’s nothing to connect Gabrielle de Beaucaire with le lièvre?”

  “Nothing,” Talleyrand said firmly. “Their love affair was known only to myself. Gabrielle, as you know, is my goddaughter. Her father was one of my dearest boyhood friends. It was natural that I shou
ld offer her my protection when she returned from England after the Revolution. She met Guillaume one night when he was visiting me in secret. They became lovers almost immediately.”

  A shadow fell over the haughty countenance as Talleyrand remembered the passion of the two young people, the overpowering attraction that had swept them into one of the most turbulent and intense love affairs he’d ever been privileged to promote.

  Fouché made no comment. Such liaisons were much more frequent than the fashionable world officially recognized.

  “Inevitably with such a passionate affair, Gabrielle discovered the truth about Guillaume and how he served France. I felt he had perhaps yielded up his secrets rather too easily …” Talleyrand shrugged with a half-smile, remembering how he’d rebuked the young man for unprofessional indiscretion. Guillaume had most vigorously defended both himself and his mistress, and he’d been proved right.

  “Gabrielle insisted on playing her own part in the service and le liévre trained her as a courier. As her cover, she took part in society as my goddaughter and the widow of the completely fictional Comte de Beaucaire, who, it’s believed, died tragically and very suddenly on his estates in the Midi. But her real life she lived in the shadows.”

  He spread his hands wide. “They met only in the deepest secrecy and waited for the moment when they could live again in the open … marry, have children.” He shook his head. “It was not to be.”

  “No,” said Fouché with a touch of impatience. He was a man devoid of sentiment. “And she will seduce this Praed?”

  “If necessary.”

  The bland statement drew a smile from the policeman. “You’re as cold-blooded as I am,” he commented, rising to his feet. “Notwithstanding the bishop’s miter, Talleyrand.”

  “An excommunicated bishop,” Talleyrand corrected calmly, rising with his guest. “One who loves his country. You will leave by the back entrance?” His eyebrows lifted.

  “How else?” Fouché agreed. “There are sharp eyes around, and our emperor would not be happy to hear that his Minister for Foreign Affairs and his Minister of Police have secret conferences.”

  Talleyrand smiled. “D’accord. I suspect that our master would regard an alliance between us as more formidable than another Trafalgar.”

  “And he’d be correct,” Fouché said with another dry smile.

  Talleyrand returned to the fire as the door closed on the policeman. He and Fouché made uneasy bedfellows, but they played a game of intrigue where the stakes were of the highest: The Emperor Napoleon was to be toppled from his imperial throne. They would work together toward this goal, using their different techniques and spheres of influence, and one day they would succeed. And when that day came, their uneasy alliance would be shattered as they became rivals for the power vacuum thus created.

  Talleyrand sipped his cognac thoughtfully. Fouché knew this as well as he did himself, but until then he was as prepared as Talleyrand to use his arch rival in the interests of expediency.

  The world didn’t lack for interest, he reflected, taking a copy of Voltaire’s Candide from the bookshelves. He riffled through it, chuckling at Pangloss’s eternal passive optimism: All’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Disagreement with that particular philosophy was one belief Napoleon’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and his Minister of Police had in common. There was always room for change.

  At Vanbrugh Court, Gabrielle slept the sleep of the just, her dreams untroubled by the obstinacy of Lord Nathaniel Praed. She awoke before the maid brought her hot chocolate, feeling as refreshed as if she hadn’t spent a part of the night scaling the walls. She sprang from bed and flung open the curtains, looking out on a perfect winter morning with pale early sun sparking off the hoarfrost on the lawn beneath her window.

  She craned her neck outside, looking along the creeper-thick facade of the house toward Nathaniel Praed’s window, wondering if he’d decided to close it after his nocturnal visitor had left. In the cold light of day, the climb from the gravel path below looked rather more daunting than it had in the night, but she’d been too set on her goal for apprehension then.

  She turned away from the window as the maid knocked and entered with a tray of chocolate and sweet biscuits.

  “You’re up betimes, madam,” the girl said, setting the tray beside the bed. “Cold as the grave it is in ’ere. Best close that window, and I’ll get the fire goin’.”

  “Thank you, Maisie.” Gabrielle, shivering in her thin nightgown, closed the window and jumped back into bed, watching as the girl bent to the hearth, expertly raked the ashes, and threw on kindling.

  “Shall I lay out your habit, ma’am?” The maid straightened, dusting off her hands as the fire blazed in the grate.

  “Please.” Gabrielle poured chocolate in a rich aromatic stream from the silver pot.

  “The boot boy blacked your boots nicely,” Maisie observed, holding Gabrielle’s riding boots of cordovan leather up to the light, examining them for any residual sign of scuff marks.

  Gabrielle murmured vague assent. It had been agreed with Talleyrand that she should travel without her own maid, relying on Georgiana’s staff. The fewer people close to her, the less dangerous any inadvertent errors would be, and she’d have much more freedom of movement if she had only herself to consider.

  Maisie bustled around with jugs of hot water, lacing, buttoning, brushing hair, all the while chatting cheerfully about her pregnant sister’s latest ailments and the poacher the gamekeeper had caught during the night. Gabrielle allowed the chat to wash over her, murmuring vaguely when it seemed required. Her own thoughts were fixed on the day ahead and how best to renew her attack on Nathaniel Praed.

  An hour later she made her way down to the breakfast parlor, humming an old nursery rhyme softly to herself: A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go. We’ll catch a fox and put him in a box. A-hunting we will go.

  But her quarry today would be more than just Reynard.

  A footman jumped to open the door to the breakfast parlor and she went in to find herself alone with Lord Praed.

  “Good morning, sir.” She greeted him with a casual smile as if she had never climbed into his bedchamber and sat on the edge of his bed in the middle of the night. “We seem to be ahead of the others.”

  “Yes,” he agreed shortly, barely looking up from his plate.

  “A lovely day,” she persevered, lifting the lids of the chafing dishes on the sideboard. “Yes.”

  “Perfect for hunting.”

  There was no reply.

  “Oh, forgive me. Are you one of those people who hates to talk at the breakfast table?” The crooked smile was faintly mocking.

  Lord Praed’s response was something between a grunt and a snort.

  Gabrielle helped herself to a dish of kedgeree and sat down at the far end of the long table, as far from her taciturn breakfast companion as she could manage. She hummed the silly nursery rhyme to herself as she buttered toast, studiously avoiding looking at Nathaniel.

  “Must you?” Lord Praed demanded abruptly, a deep frown corrugating his forehead, the greenish-brown eyes filled with irritation.

  “Must I what?” She looked up in innocent, puzzled inquiry.

  “Sing that damn song,” he said. “It’s getting on my nerves.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said with a serene smile. “It’s getting on mine too, but I can’t get it out of my head. It’s going round and round. You know the way these silly songs do.”

  “No, I’m happy to say I don’t know,” he snapped.

  Gabrielle shrugged and reached for the coffeepot. “I must say, Lord Praed, that if I disliked company at breakfast as much as you do, I’d make quite certain I breakfasted alone.”

  “That was exactly what I was trying to do. Most people don’t appear in the breakfast parlor before half past seven, by which time I’m long gone.”

  “My, that was a long speech,” Gabrielle observed admiringly. “Could you pass the milk, please.”


  Nathaniel pushed back his chair with a noisy scrape on the polished floor, picked up the silver creamer, and marched the length of the table, depositing it beside her coffee cup with such force that milk slurped over the top.

  “Thank you,” she said sweetly, mopping at the spill with her table napkin.

  Nathaniel stared down at her for a minute in impotent exasperation. Then he spun on his heel and marched out of the room, narrowly avoiding a collision with Miles Bennet and Miss Bayberry, who were deep in chatter as they entered the breakfast room.

  “Morning, Nathaniel.” Miles greeted his friend cheerfully. “I suppose you’ve breakfasted already in splendid isolation.”

  “On the contrary,” Nathaniel said, and went on his way.

  Grinning, Miles held out a chair for Miss Bayberry. “Good morning, Gabby. I gather you’ve disturbed our friend’s need for solitude at break of day.”

  “So it would seem,” Gabrielle agreed tranquilly. “He should eat in his room if he hates company that much.”

  The table filled rapidly with avid hunters, and Gabrielle went up to her room soon after to fetch her hat, gloves, and whip. Nathaniel Praed had been in riding britches and coat, so presumably he intended joining the hunt. Although, if he was as morose on the field as at the breakfast table, it might prove difficult to engage him in pointful discourse. But it was always possible that the opportunity for some more unconventional contact might present itself.

  Nathaniel also traveled without personal servants, for much the same reasons as Gabrielle. He straightened his stock in front of the mirror and dusted off his top hat against his thigh. He looked neat and conventional, but unremarkable. The Comtesse de Beaucaire, on the other hand, had taken his breath away when she’d first walked into the breakfast parlor, although he trusted he hadn’t given her the satisfaction of seeing it.