by Jane Feather
If ever a woman knew how to dress to advantage, the countess did. Most tall women tried to disguise their height, Gabrielle made the most of it. The black riding habit had been as severely cut as her gown of the previous evening, clinging to the lines of her body in a most seductive fashion. Emerald-green braiding was the only adornment, and he seemed to remember that at her throat she’d worn a snowy white muslin cravat with an emerald pin.
How the hell had he managed to notice all that while she’d been disturbing his peace with inane prattle?
He’d obey the dictates of courtesy and wait for Simon to join them, and then he’d tell him exactly what he thought of his underhand scheming, and then he’d leave … go into Hampshire for some peace and quiet. Check on Jake.
Jake. Just thinking about the child produced a surge of unease and dismay. What had Miles been getting at last evening, when he’d asked what Jake thought of his life? What right did a six-year-old child have to an opinion on such a matter?
The boy’s brown eyes hung in his father’s internal vision. Thick-lashed, liquid, emotional. Helen’s eyes. His hair, curly, fair, with even fairer streaks. Helen’s hair. The dimple on his chin. Helen’s dimple; Helen’s chin.
Helen’s exhausted face on the pillow … so white, whiter than it was possible for living flesh. The glazing mist in the eyes gazing up at him with such desperate dependent need … trusting that Nathaniel wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her.
And he’d failed her. She’d been dead when they pulled Jake with their ghastly instruments from her body. She’d never looked upon the child whose life had taken her own.
It was six years in the past, and yet it felt like yesterday. Would the torment ever cease? Surely a merciful God had some statute of limitations on the emotional agonies of memory, the devastating misery of an unreasonable guilt that couldn’t be absolved.
The imperative summons of a hunting horn broke into the bleak circular thoughts. He picked up his gloves and whip and left the room. A day on the hunting field would banish the memories, at least temporarily. A tired body was a great panacea.
He saw Gabrielle de Beaucaire when he stepped through the front door and stood looking down at the milling throng of huntsmen, dogs, riders congregated on the circular gravel sweep before the house. The countess wore a tricorn hat with a silver plume sweeping her shoulder, and she sat a black hunter, her skirts blending with the animal’s glossy coat.
As if aware of his observation, she turned slightly and looked directly at him. He was too far away to see her expression clearly, but it was all too easy to imagine the mocking glimmer in the charcoal eyes, the small, crooked smile—he’d seen them often enough. For a moment he felt as if she were holding him with her gaze, as if she’d robbed him of the will to move. Then she bent to take the stirrup cup being proffered by a footman; a groom brought Nathaniel’s rat-tailed gray and the spell was broken. He mounted swiftly and eased his horse to the edge of the throng away from the animated conversations and shouted greetings, the curses of the huntservants as they whipped in the hounds.
Gabrielle tossed the hot spiced wine in the stirrup cup down her throat in approved fashion and handed the cup back to the footman before remarking to her neighbor, “Lord Praed really doesn’t care for his fellow man, does he, Miles?”
Miles chuckled. “You’ve noticed.”
“Hard to miss. Look at him hovering on the outskirts.” She frowned. “Any special reason?”
“He’s been like that since his wife died in childbirth six years ago. He adored her.”
“Oh.” Gabrielle was silent. Talleyrand had given her no personal details about the man she was here to seduce and betray. Simon, dear, kind Simon, drawn all unwitting into the plan, had said only that Nathaniel was a difficult man and Gabrielle would have to find her own way of dealing with him.
But she didn’t want to feel sorry for him. She didn’t want to understand him or know anything about the secret nooks and crannies of his soul. She was going to use him, pure and simple, and avenge Guillaume’s death in the process. Seeing the man as human with a tragedy in his past would clutter up the purity of her plan and its motives.
“There’s a lad … Jake …” Miles was continuing, not patty to Gabrieile’s thoughts. “Nice child, but withdrawn from his father. Nathaniel doesn’t seem to know how to handle him. I imagine because the boy’s the spitting image of his mother.”
No, she definitely didn’t want to hear this. “I expect he’ll get over it,” she said with a shrug. She could hear how cold and callous she sounded and was aware of Miles’s disapproving surprise. But there was nothing she could do about it.
“The huntsman was saying they’re going to draw Dunnet’s Spinney,” she said, changing the subject. “They usually find there.”
“Let’s hope it’s a good day.” Miles offered her a half-bow and moved away with a touch of frost to his smile.
The huntsman blew up for the start and the hounds set off in a baying, snapping exuberant pack, the whippers-in bawling at them in a language only they and the dogs could understand. The meet moved down the long driveway, Gabrielle expertly ensuring herself a position in the front just behind the hounds, the huntsman, and the huntservants.
Nathaniel watched her maneuvering with an eye of reluctant respect as he edged to the front himself. Gabrielle de Beaucaire was clearly an aggressive rider who knew her way around the hunting field. Something he was obliged to admit that they shared. Even if he had to ride beside her, he wasn’t prepared to hang back. He drew alongside her mount, offering a brief nod of greeting.
“Are you as reluctant for conversation on horseback as at the breakfast table, Lord Praed? Or may I venture to address you without having my head bitten off?”
The question was asked in dulcet tones, accompanied by a sideways glance of glinting amusement and more than a hint of challenge. Some force seemed to emanate from her. He’d felt it the night before, but it seemed even stronger now. Again he had the sense that she had marked him for something, that she knew something he didn’t. He’d thought the purpose of her nighttime visit had explained that feeling, but it was just as powerful now.
“So long as you don’t sing that damned song,” he said, and found himself smiling.
The smile was a revelation. Instead of brown stone, his eyes became a warm, merry hazel. The lean features softened, little crinkly lines appeared at the corners of his eyes, and his mouth lost its harshness.
Gabrielle realized with a flash of astonishment that Nathaniel Praed was a very attractive man when he wanted to be.
“A-hunting we will go; a-hunting we will go,” she sang softly, laughing. “It’s your fault, Lord Praed, for reminding me. Now I can’t get it out of my head again. We’ll catch a fox—”
“Gabrielle, stop it!”
“I’ll need an inducement, sir.”
Pure mischief. But suggestive mischief. He could hear the suggestion as clearly as if she’d articulated it. His mind whirled. The woman was flirting with him. He hadn’t flirted with a woman for eight years, not since he’d met Helen. It wasn’t Helen’s style, she’d been too innocent and straightforward.
He realized that he no longer knew how to respond with the right touch, and the realization made him feel as tongue-tied and embarrassed as a schoolboy.
“I was thinking,” she said, her voice now serious, offering welcome distraction from his ineptitude. “I was thinking that you could give me some kind of test so that I could prove how useful I could be to you.”
“What?” His exclamation was low but nonetheless forceful.
“A test,” she said patiently. “A task to perform … some information to get … or—”
“Quiet!” he said, making a chopping movement with his hand. “Of all the indiscreet—”
“No,” she interrupted. “Not indiscreet at all. How could anyone know what we’re talking about? Even if anyone was listening. We’re well ahead of the field.” She gestured behind them. It was
true they were riding alone at the moment.
This fact, however, did nothing to defuse Nathaniel’s outrage. He cursed Simon for exposing his identity to this loose-tongued woman who clearly thought that the deadly serious business in which he was involved was some kind of game.
“I don’t know what the hell Simon thought he was doing,” he said with low-voiced fury. “No one, I repeat, no one, outside the government and the service knows what I do. Not even Miles. And now you have the temerity to chat with total insouciance about a matter of life and death in the middle of a goddamned hunting field!”
“You exaggerate,” she said, not a whit put out by this attack. “I’ve already proved to Simon how useful I can be, which is why he agreed to present me to you. You can ask him all about it.”
“Oh, I intend to, believe me,” Lord Praed said grimly.
“Besides,” Gabrielle continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “I’d have thought it made good sense to have conversations where secrecy is vital in such public places. No one would ever suspect anything. And no one can hear a thing. It seems like a very sensible tactic to me. One could pass on a nugget of precious information in the middle of a dinner party without anyone being any the wiser if it was done cleverly.” She shot him a sideways glance, one black eyebrow raised quizzically.
Nathaniel ground his teeth. It was perfectly true and a tactic he favored himself. But to hear it expounded in self-defense by a spoiled, bored society woman was almost too much to endure.
“Cry truce,” she now said. “You know I’m right. And I can safely promise you that I am never indiscreet. I’ll not betray your confidence. Simon knows that. But then, he knows me rather better than you do, although I hope that will soon be remedied,” she added pensively.
“Madame, that is a hope I am afraid I do not share.” With compressed lips he fell back as they reached a hunting gate leading into a covert. The hounds surged forward and the hunt followed in relatively slow single file.
Nathaniel hung back, allowing Gabrielle to get well ahead. There were only two ways to deal with trouble: confront it or run from it. The latter struck him as the only sensible course when dealing with the trouble embodied in the Comtesse de Beaucaire.
Gabrielle rode on, wondering if she’d moved one step forward or two steps back. There’d been that moment of warmth and humor, but had she negated it by moving too quickly? But she had to move quickly. She had only this week. Once the spymaster left Vanbrugh Court, there was no knowing when she’d be in his vicinity again, let alone under the same roof. Certainly it was unlikely she’d have such a good opportunity another time to work on him.
The huntsman’s strange vocalizing among his baying, searching pack suddenly changed tenor and her head snapped up, all thoughts of anything but the fox banished with the familiar surge of excitement that curled her toes in her boots.
The huntsman’s horn blew, a long two-note resonance in the frosty air. The hounds in full cry tore across the covert, and then came the bellow from one of the huntservants that sent the blood coursing through Gabrielle’s veins.
“Gone away!” Someone had seen the fox break from the covert.
The huntsman blew the note for any who’d failed to grasp the message and the entire field surged forward, breaking out of the trees, hooves pounding the frozen ground, breath steaming in the frosty air.
A long slope of meadowland lay ahead, and Gabrielle abruptly pulled her mount aside as the riders plunged past her.
“Nathaniel!” she yelled as she saw him pulling ahead of the main body. “This way!”
She was unaware that she’d used his name in her urgent need to attract his attention. She was aware now only that he was as eager and intrepid a huntsman as she was and she would share with him her own private knowledge garnered from hunting this land in childhood.
He veered toward her without conscious reflection of his own, and she charged ahead of him, giving him a lead to the far corner of the meadow.
He registered the massive bramble-studded thicket hedge in a kind of daze as Gabrielle’s horse gathered itself for the jump.
It was impossible, he thought. A suicide jump. And then his own mount was collecting himself, adjusting his stride, and he was sailing through the air. Only when they landed on the other side did Nathaniel absorb the wide ice-covered ditch they’d also had to clear at the base of the hedge behind them.
Of all the wild, reckless madwomen! But he had no time for further thought. She was racing ahead of him across a flat field toward a mercifully lower hedge at the bottom, and the excitement of the chase was in his blood, the frantic baying of the hounds sounding ever closer, the squall of the huntsman’s horn filling his ears.
They sailed over the hedge and he saw they were way ahead of the field, right up behind the huntsman and his hounds, and the fox was a smudge of reddish-brown streaking toward a spinney to the right of them.
Neck and neck, they pounded behind the hounds and into the spinney, the rest of the field some hundred yards behind them. The pack of hounds abruptly lost direction and began rushing around in confused circles, yipping frantically.
Gabrielle drew rein just in time to stop herself from overtaking the hounds and committing the cardinal sin of destroying any scents in the process.
“He’s gone to ground,” she gasped. “I don’t know whether to be glad or sorry. Wasn’t that a wonderful run?”
Her hat was slightly askew, dark red ringlets escaping from its confines. The translucent pallor of her complexion had taken on a rosy glow and the dark eyes were alight. Nathaniel’s head spun again.
“You’re mad,” he declared. “Of all the crazy, reckless pieces of riding! There had to be an easier way over that hedge.”
Gabrielle looked at him as if he’d taken on some strange, alien shape. “Of course there was. But we wanted to be ahead of the field.”
“That’s no excuse.”
She continued to stare at him in incomprehension. “What are you saying?”
“That it was a piece of the most foolhardy risk-taking I’ve ever witnessed,” he said flatly.
“Well, why did you follow me if you were scared?”
“I was not scared. It was all right for me to take the fence; my mount is bigger and more powerful than yours.”
“Oh, wait a minute,” she said softly. “This is nothing to do with horses, is it, Lord Praed? This is to do with what men can do and women can’t … or do I mean shouldn’t!”
“You can mean what you wish,” he said. “But you’ve demonstrated yet again that you lack the qualities to join the service. I told you last night that reckless endangerment of oneself and others is unacceptable.”
“Nonsense,” Gabrielle said stoutly. “There was nothing reckless about that. My mount is one of Simon’s hunters. He’s well up to the weight of a grown man, let alone mine, and very powerful. Besides, I’ve jumped that fence hundreds of times. Georgie’s family estates march with the Vanbrughs’ and I hunted this land almost every winter until a few years ago.”
“You don’t stop to contemplate consequences, madame,” he declared. “Such habits make for a dangerous and untrustworthy partner.”
Impatiently he glared around at the frustrated pack of hounds, the cursing huntsman, and the milling riders as they straggled into the spinney. “This is going nowhere. Why don’t they move on and draw another covert?”
“They’ll move to Hogart’s Wood in a minute,” Gabrielle said thoughtfully. There was no point defending herself verbally against such a wealth of misguided prejudice. They’d end up in a shouting match that would achieve nothing. A different, more challenging approach was needed.
“If you’ll excuse me, Lord Praed, I think I’ll make my way to the wood now. There’s a shortcut. You won’t wish to take it, of course, since it involves another rather sizable hurdle. But I’m sure you won’t miss anything if you follow the body of the field.”
She turned her horse and cantered off down the ride leading out
of the spinney. Hooves sounded behind her with satisfying immediacy, and she smiled to herself, leaning low over the horse’s neck as they emerged onto a stretch of gorse-strewn common land. She nudged his flanks and the animal broke into an easy gallop. She hadn’t exaggerated when she’d said he was well up to a weight considerably more than her own. It gave her the advantage of speed in this race she was running with Nathaniel Praed.
They raced across the common, up a relatively steep hill, and then down the other side. The obstacle she intended to jump was a ten-foot stone wall at the bottom of the hill bounding the orchard of a sizable farmhouse. Hogart’s Wood lay on the far side of the orchard and the hounds would have to be taken around the wall. An intrepid rider could thus ensure he was on the spot when the hounds drew the wood.
Nathaniel didn’t know why he was following her. Except that she’d needled him again with that derisive challenge. Except that he couldn’t seem to keep his distance. Except that he seemed in her company to follow impulse in as headstrong a fashion as the Comtesse de Beaucaire.
He saw the wall ahead—mellow golden stone in the crisp sunlight, dwarfing the horse and rider pounding toward it. He wanted to yell at her not to be a fool, but the black was already gathering himself for the effort and he knew he couldn’t risk putting the animal off his stride by startling him. A hesitation would be enough to throw him off balance, and if his hooves so much as clipped the top of the wall at that height and terrifying speed, he would go down, hurling his rider to the ground like a cannonball from the breach of a gun.
He closed his eyes involuntarily and when he opened them again the wall was almost upon him and it was too late to bring his own hunter to a halt even if he’d wanted to. The animal, like all horses, simply followed his leader in blind trust.
For a dizzying moment they were in the air and then landed with a jolt on solid ground amid the apple trees of Farmer Gregson’s orchard.
Gabrielle’s horse stood panting, reins hanging loose from his neck. On the ground beside him lay the still figure of his rider, her hat flung several feet from her body, her black habit spread over the damp, dark green grass beneath the trees.
