by Jane Feather
He left the livery stable and strolled through the balmy August afternoon back toward the quay, intending to sharpen his appetite for the Adam and Eve's supper with a dose of sea air. Gulls wheeled and called above the smooth waters of the harbor and the white cliffs took on a rosy tinge from the setting sun. It was a peaceful-enough scene until he saw the splash of bright orange against the gray sea wall and a curious sense of inevitability-or was it foreboding?-crept up the back of his neck.
The monkey was sitting beside her on the stone wall, examining his hands intently. The girl was staring out at the quiet harbor, swinging her legs, her wooden pattens thudding rhythmically against the stone. The only boats in the harbor were swinging at anchor and Gareth saw that the tide was running out fast. Of the performers, there was no sign.
He came up beside her. "Why do I get the impression circumstances are conspiring against you today?"
She looked up at him dolefully. "I knew I shouldn't have left my bed this morning, as soon as I saw the beetle."
"Beetle?"
"Mmm." She nodded. "Big black stag beetle in the milk churn, swimming for its life. They're bad cess, you know."
"I didn't." He leaned companionably against the wall at her side." They've left you behind?"
Miranda nodded again. "I knew they couldn't let the tide go but I didn't realize how much time I'd been away chasing after Chip." Her gaze returned to the water.
Gareth too looked out over the harbor, saying nothing for a minute, aware of her beside him and aware that he took pleasure in her closeness.
"What will you do?" he asked eventually.
"I'll have to wait for the next packet to Calais," she said. "But I gave the money I took from this morning's performance to Bert, so I have nothing. I'll have to earn my passage, but how am I to do that in this town after the hue and cry?"
Gareth's eyes fixed upon the horizon, on the slowly sinking sun. It was not foreboding he had felt earlier, but excitement, he now realized. The rush of excitement when a completely unexpected solution comes to light.
He asked casually, "Would you be interested in a proposition?"
She looked up at him, and her blue eyes were suddenly wary. But he was regarding her calmly, his mouth relaxed, curving in the hint of a smile.
"A proposition? What kind of a proposition?"
"Have you had supper?"
"How could I have?" she retorted a mite sharply. "I told you I have no money." It had been a long time since she'd broken her fast at dawn. Because of the need of one final performance before catching the afternoon tide, the troupe had gone without their midday dinner, and she was ravenous. But in her present penniless and homeless state, a night with an empty belly seemed inevitable.
"Then perhaps you'd like to share mine?" He lifted an eyebrow inquiringly.
"In exchange for what?" Her lips were dry and she touched them with her tongue. Her eyes were anxious, her voice nervous as she awaited his answer.
Gareth could see that she knew her present situation was nothing short of calamitous. He could see her eagerness to accept his offer, but her wariness told him the most about her. Despite her life on the streets, or perhaps because of it, she was not about to throw herself on a stranger's mercy. And it seemed she was not willing to use her body as currency in the usual manner of the streets, if that was what he expected in payment for her supper.
"I have a proposition to make you. I'd like you to listen to it over supper. That's all." He smiled with what he hoped she would see as reassurance, then, to allow to make up her own mind, he turned and began to walk back to the town.
Miranda hesitated for barely a minute, then she slid off the wall. Common sense told her that food could only improve her situation and instinct that she could trust his lordship. Chip jumped onto her shoulder, and they followed the earl back to the Adam and Eve.
Chapter Three
"Where is Gareth? He's been gone for more than four months." Lady Imogen Dufort paced the long gallery beneath the portraits of Harcourt ancestors. She was a tall angular woman with a disgruntled mouth, the nostrils of her long nose pinched and white.
"Passage from France is not always easy to arrange." Her husband offered the platitude although he knew that it would only incense his wife. Twenty-five years of marriage had taught him that Imogen was impossible to placate. It didn't stop him trying, however. Nervously, he rearranged the few thin strands of gingery hair draped over his white skull.
"Whoever said it was?" Lady Imogen snapped. "But it's August, not January, and the seas are quiet enough. And King Henry is outside Paris, not in the wilds of Navarre. Easy enough to reach, I would have thought, for a man with half an ounce of determination." She reached the end of the gallery and swung round, her farthingale swaying so violently it knocked over a small stool.
The lady ignored the clatter as she continued to fume. "But Gareth, as we all know, is as indolent as a lizard in the sun. If it weren't for me, this family would sink into obscurity! The most wonderful opportunity wasted… tossed aside because my dear brother can't be troubled to bestir himself." She fanned herself vigorously, two angry red spots burning on her cheekbones, accentuating the deeply pockmarked skin. "Oh, if only I were a man! I could do these things myself!"
Miles stroked his neat spade beard and tried to appear deep in constructive thought, as if that could somehow achieve this oft-repeated ambition of his wife's. He knew perfectly well that her diatribe against Gareth had its roots in fear that some disaster had befallen him. Imogen was incapable of expressing affection, and her adoration of her brother expressed itself in fierce denial. The greater her anxiety and the deeper her love, the more negative and critical she became.
"But my dear lady, your brother has gone to King Henry," he offered finally.
"Yes, and thanks to whom?" Imogen demanded. "Would he have gone if I hadn't begged and prayed and implored him? On my knees, month after month?"
There was no answer to this. Lord Harcourt had certainly been hard to persuade. It awed Miles that his brother-in-law was impervious to his elder sister's relentless pestering. Floods of tears, terrifying rages, unceasing harassment-nothing seemed to pierce his nonchalance. A nonchalance that Miles at least believed to be little more than a facade. It fooled Imogen into believing her brother needed to be directed into the right paths for his own good and the good of the family. She hadn't seemed to notice that, regardless of her efforts, Gareth continued to go his own way.
Gareth had, however, finally been roused to a spark of interest over this business with Maude. When Imogen had first come up with her brilliant idea to propose Maude as a possible wife to the duke of Roissy, Mi
les had expected the usual sequence: Gareth would allow his sister to pester him only so far, and then he'd gently but firmly put her in her place with an absolute refusal.
But on this occasion, after a while Miles had seen a certain gleam in his brother-in-law's eye-one he hadn't seen in many a month. A look of quiet calculation even while he'd allowed his sister's passionate diatribes to wash over him.
It seemed that Gareth had seen the advantages to the Harcourts in such an alliance without his sister's vehement assistance. The Harcourt family had lost so much since the massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day, because of their loyalty to Henry and the Huguenot cause, it was not unreasonable to expect their reward now that Henry and his cause had triumphed in France.
"Have you talked again with Maude, my dear?" Miles inquired, turning his rings around on his fingers, wishing he could escape into London where he could find some convivial card-playing company in one of the taverns around Ludgate Hill.
"I will not speak with that ungrateful creature until she agrees to do as she's told." Lady Imogen's voice vibrated with suppressed violence. "I wash my hands of her." She slapped her hands together in illustration, but her husband was not fooled. Imogen was far from ready to give up her plan.
Imogen resume her pacing, then abruptly she turned to the door at the end of the gallery. She said nothing to her husband as she sailed out, leaving the door open behind her.
Miles followed at a discreet distance and when he saw her turn to the left at the end of the corridor into the east wing of the house he nodded to himself. Poor Maude was in for another savage bullying. At least this gave him the freedom to sneak out of the house on his own pursuits.
Imogen marched into the small parlor where her cousin spent most of her days. "Out!" she ordered the elderly woman sewing beside the fire blazing in the hearth, despite the warmth of the afternoon. It was suffocatingly hot in the small paneled room and the air was thick with the acrid reek of the clarified pig's fat smeared on the Lady Maude's chest to guard against chills.
The woman gathered up her embroidery and looked doubtfully between her young mistress, lying on a cushioned settle drawn up so close to the fire as to be almost in the inglenook, and the Lady Imogen, who stood tapping one foot impatiently, her brown eyes glittering with rage.
"Out! Didn't you hear me, woman?"
Lady Maude's companion curtsied hastily and withdrew.
"I give you good day, Cousin Imogen," a thin voice murmured from beneath a mound of shawls and rugs on the settle.
"Don't you dare wish me a good day," Imogen declared, somewhat idiotically. She approached the settle. The girl lying there regarded her solemnly but without fear. Her dark reddish brown hair was rather lank, her complexion had the lifeless pallor of one who is chronically short of fresh air and exercise. But her eyes were a brilliant blue.
"I will not stand for this nonsense another minute. Do you hear me, girl?" Imogen bent over Maude, spitting her rage into her face.
Maude flinched and turned her head aside. But she said in the same reedlike tones, "I must follow my conscience, cousin."
"Conscience! Conscience! What has that to do with anything?"
"I cannot believe, my lady, that you would discount the power of conscience in your life," Maude said gently. "I know you act according to your own."
Imogen's color deepened. How could she deny it without digging a hole for herself? "You will obey," she said coldly, straightening. "That is all I came to tell you. You will obey those who have authority over you. And I will use whatever methods are necessary to ensure your obedience." She turned to the door.
"You could break me on the rack, madam, but I will not act against my conscience."
The thin voice followed Imogen out of the room and she ground her teeth in frustration. Gareth would have to deal with the girl. It was for him to compel her obedience. He was her official guardian although typically he had always left the hard work to his long-suffering sister.
Who had nursed the girl through her incessant ailments? Who had overseen her education? Who had taught her the meaning of her social position, the obligations of her lineage? Who had had first responsibility for the ungrateful brat's welfare?
Imogen, furious, posed these rhetorical questions to the air and quite without regard for the truth of the matter. The number of hours she had actually spent involving herself physically with her young charge's welfare could be counted on the fingers of both hands.
Once more alone, Maude plaited the fringe of the shawl lying across her lap. Her features while not exactly weak were not drawn with a strong line, but there was something arresting in the blue eyes.
"Berthe." She spoke without looking up from her plaiting as her elderly companion returned. "Fetch the priest tonight. I will make my conversion this night and then there is nothing they can do to me. The advisor to Protestant King Henry cannot marry a Catholic."
"Are you certain you're ready to take such a step, mignonne?" Berthe bent over her, laying a hand on her forehead.
"I have taken instruction, and now I am ready to convert," Maude stated with a stubborn flash in her eyes. "Before Lord Harcourt returns, I will make absolutely certain that I am ineligible to play this part they would have me play for their own advancement."
"I will send for Father Damian." Berthe smiled, stroking the lank hair back from the girl's forehead. Her dearest wish was about to be fulfilled. For twenty years she had struggled to save the soul of the girl she had nursed and cherished as if she were her own child. For twenty years in a country where to profess Catholicism was to be persecuted, she had struggled for a conversion, and now it was within reach.
Maude closed her eyes under the soothing strokes of Berthe's fingers. Lady Imogen would be beside herself, but she would discover that all the torments of the saints couldn't shake her young cousin's faith. She would show them all what true fortitude was.
The landlord of the Adam and Eve didn't look best pleased at the return of the monkey. "I trust that wild beast won't be roamin' around, m'lord."
"I shouldn't think so," Gareth said carelessly. "Show me to that private chamber you promised me and then bring supper for me and my companion." He gestured to Miranda, moving her in front of him.
Molton's little mouth pursed but he turned to ascend the stairs ahead of them.
"His mouth looks just like a chicken's arse," Miranda observed in an undertone, taking a firm hold on Chip.
"An accurate if infelicitous comparison," agreed Lord Harcourt, gently prodding her to follow the fortunately oblivious innkeeper.
"In here, m'lord. Clean and sweet as you c
ould wish." Molton lifted the latch on a small narrow door under the eaves and flung wide the door with a grand flourish. "Nice an' quiet it is, too. Away from the street and the taproom. An' there's no washday until Wednesday, so you'll not be disturbed by the girls heating the coppers below."
Gareth glanced around the apartment. The ceiling was so low he had to duck his head, but the bed was of a reasonable size. A round table and two stools stood beneath the small window that was graced with a narrow window seat. The air was stuffy, infused with the acrid residue of lye and the sickly smell of the soap made from rendered beef fat wafting from the washhouse below. But it was private and far enough away from the main part of the inn to ensure continued privacy.
"It'll do," he said, drawing off his gloves. "Now see to that supper and send up a couple of bottles of Rhenish."
"Aye, m'lord." Molton bowed, his little eyes darting toward Miranda, who stood just inside the door, clutching Chip. "The young person'll be stayin', will she?" An oily lascivious note was in his voice.
Gareth turned slowly and stared at him. Both indolence and humor had vanished from the brown eyes and the landlord backed out hastily, closing the door behind him.
Miranda wetted her lips that were suddenly dry again. The landlord's question, but even more Lord Harcourt's refusal to answer it, had banished her hunger. Her previous wariness returned in full measure. How could she possibly know that a complete stranger could be trusted? His lordship might appear unthreatening but Gertrude had said many times that smooth surfaces were also slippery, particularly when it came to gentlemen.
She reached for the door latch with the hand that wasn't holding Chip. "I… I think I've changed my mind, milord. I… I don't think I'm interested in a proposition and it wouldn't be fair to take your supper in bad faith."
