by Jane Feather
Gareth frowned. "Just a minute, Miranda!" He reached for her wrist and drew her back into the room. Miranda's eyes sparked alarm. She tried to pull away with all her sinuous strength but the fingers at her wrist tightened. Chip suddenly shrieked and bared his teeth, only Miranda's hold keeping him from jumping at the man.
"God's good grace!" Gareth released her wrist, half laughing, half exasperated. The monkey was a formidable bodyguard. "I do assure you I have no designs on your virtue. I'm just asking you to hear me out in exchange for a decent meal."
He moved away from her farther into the room. She reminded him of a fawn on the banks of a stream, quivering with wariness as it plucked up the courage to drop its guard enough to drink.
He sat down on one of the stools, rested his elbow on the table, and propped his chin in his palm. The silence in the room lengthened. Then she closed the door and stood leaning against it, her hand behind her on the latch.
"The troupe is my family," she said with a touching dignity. "And the men in my family are not pimps and the women are not whores."
"Of course not," he agreed gravely.
"I know people think that traveling players are-"
"My dear Miranda, I don't know what people think, but I am not one to make assumptions," he interrupted.
Miranda regarded him with her head on one side. A bang at the door made her jump. She stood aside as two tavern wenches entered with trays of food and drink. Miranda's nose twitched at the toothsome aromas and she found herself moving into the chamber to the table without further hesitation.
The two tavern wenches shot her assessing glances as they left. Miranda knew perfectly well what they were thinking, but since they probably sold their own bodies as freely as they filled the tankards in the taproom below she didn't take offense at their assumption that she was doing the same.
She released her tight grip on Chip, who immediately leaped to the top of the bed canopy, where he crouched chattering.
Miranda came over to the table, hungrily examining the offerings. "White bread," she murmured in awe. White bread was not the staple fare of the laboring classes on either side of the Channel. She took the second stool and waited, politely controlling her eagerness, for her companion to make the first move.
"I believe this is a jugged hare." Gareth sniffed appreciatively at the contents of an earthenware stew-pot. He dipped his knife into the pot and cut off a piece of rich dark meat, spearing it on the point of his knife. He tasted it and nodded. "Excellent." He gestured that she should help herself and broke off a chunk of the soft fresh white bread.
Miranda needed no second invitation. She dipped her spoon into the savory juice and was about to use her fingers on the meat when she remembered that her companion had used his knife. Such niceties were not the habit of the traveling folk but she was adept at imitation and followed suit. It was with relief however that she saw he didn't have any scruples about dipping his bread into the communal pot.
Gareth paused in his eating to fill pewter goblets from the leather flagon of Rhenish wine. He was covertly watching the girl at her supper, noticing how daintily she was eating, how she wiped her fingers clean on her bread instead of licking them, how she chewed with her mouth closed.
Chip leaped from the top of the bed and perched on the end of the table with his head on one side and a somewhat mournful air. "He doesn't eat meat," Miranda explained, breaking off a piece of bread and holding it up to him. "He likes fruit and nuts, but he'll have to make do with bread today."
"I expect mine host can produce a dish of raisins and a couple of apples," Gareth suggested, looking pained. "Do you think you could encourage him to leave the table? I don't care to eat in the company of even well-behaved animals."
Miranda lifted Chip off the table but he promptly jumped onto her shoulder, still clutching his piece of bread. "I don't think I can persuade him to go any farther away," Miranda said apologetically.
Gareth shrugged in resignation. "As long as he stays off the table." He took up his goblet. "Your family are French?"
Miranda gave the question rather more thought than such a simple inquiry might ordinarily have warranted. " The troupe are French, English, Italian, Spanish. We come from all over," she said eventually. "Is that what you meant?"
"What about your own family?"
"I don't know. I was found." She sipped her wine. It always embarrassed her to have to confess to being a foundling, even though she had never lacked for a sense of family.
Lord Harcourt, however, seemed to find nothing to condemn about such a careless beginning. He merely asked, "Where?"
Miranda shrugged. "In Paris somewhere, when I was a baby."
He nodded. "And how old are you now?"
Miranda shook her head. "I don't know exactly. Mama Gertrude thinks I must be about twenty. She found me in a baker's shop and since I didn't seem to belong to anyone she took me with her. And now she wants me to marry Luke. Which is absurd. Luke's been my brother all my life. How can one marry one's brother?"
"Without benefit of clergy."
Miranda grinned at this dry response. "You know what I mean."
He just laughed and refilled her goblet. "So the troupe is the only family you've ever known. You speak English as if it's your mother tongue."
"I speak lots of languages," she said almost indifferently. "We all do. We travel all over, you see… Oh, Chip!" She gave a mortified cry, grabbing up the monkey, who had slid from her shoulder while her attention was diverted and was now digging into the stew-pot. He flourished a piece of carrot between two fingers before cramming it into his mouth, chattering gleefully.
"I do beg your pardon, milord. He must have realized there were vegetables as well as meat in the pot." Miranda looked stricken. "His fingers are quite clean, though."
"How reassuring," Gareth replied without conviction. "Fortunately, I've satisfied my appetite for the moment, so you might as well let him dig to his heart's content."
"It's very kind of you to feed Chip, milord," Miranda said as they watched Chip forage. "So many people seem to be afraid of him. I can't understand why, can you?"
"Your fellow players presumably accept him."
"Some of them don't like him." Miranda sipped her wine. "But he earns his keep. The crowds love him and he's very good at collecting money after our act… and Robbie loves him. He makes him laugh." Her smile was sad, her lovely blue eyes momentarily shadowed.
"That's the little crippled boy?"
She nodded. "One foot is badly formed and one leg is shorter than the other. It means that he can't do much toward earning his keep, but I share my takings with him and he does what he can."
"Whose child is he?"
"No one k
nows. He was found, too. I found him in a doorway."
Gareth was startled by his response to this simple speech, to the simple generosity and the depths of human feeling that lay behind it. The girl had so little to give, but what she had she freely shared with those even less fortunate than herself. And no one could describe the hand-to-mouth existence of a strolling player as a fortunate one. He'd grown accustomed to the idea that his own better nature had died with the discovery of Charlotte's betrayal. Life had seemed so much easier once he'd stopped expecting anything from people that he had embraced his own cynicism with pleasure and relief, but this diminutive scrap seemed to make nonsense of such cynicism.
"So what is your proposition, milord?" She changed the subject, resting her chin on one elbow-propped palm, her other hand firmly clutching Chip's jacket.
"I would like you to stand in for someone," he stated. "In my house just outside London, I have a young cousin who is frequently unwell. She looks rather like you… in fact you are astonishingly alike… and I think it might be helpful if you were to take her place in some situations that might arise."
Miranda blinked in astonishment. "Pretend to be someone else, you mean?"
"Precisely."
"But this cousin… won't she object? I wouldn't like someone pretending to be me."
His smile was a trifle sardonic and took Miranda aback. She hadn't seen such an expression on his face before. "In the circumstances Maude will not mind," he said.
"Is she very ill?"
He shook his head, and the sardonic smile would not go away. "No. Maude is more of an imaginary invalid."
"What situations are going to arise?"
The arrival of the king of France expecting to woo the
Lady Maude d'Albard. Gareth stroked his chin, regarding Miranda in a silence that she began to find unnerving. The man she had felt so easy with a few minutes before seemed to have changed. "Milord?" she prompted.
He said briskly, "That I can't tell you at this point. I don't even know for sure that I will want you to take Maude's place. I don't know if it will be necessary… in the end. But I would like you to accompany me to my house and stay there for a while and practice conducting yourself like the Lady Maude d'Albard."
Miranda's gaze dropped to the table. This sounded very strange and not entirely honest. "You want me to practice a deception, milord?"
"I suppose you could call it that," he said. "But I assure you that no one will be harmed by it. Quite the opposite. You'll be doing many people a great favor."
Miranda chewed her lip. It still sounded very peculiar. She crumbled bread between her fingers. "How long is a while?"
"Again I don't know precisely."
"But I have to go back to France and find my family," she said doubtfully. " They will wait in Calais for a week or two, but then they'll have to travel and I might never find them again."
Gareth remained silent, sensing that pressure from him would only drive her away.
"If I say I will come for two weeks…?" she suggested.
Gareth shook his head. "No, you must agree to remain until the task is completed. Then I will fee you with fifty rose nobles."
"Fifty rose nobles!" Her eyes became as round as saucers. One rose noble was more money than she had seen in her entire life. "Just for pretending to be someone else."
"Just for agreeing to pretend to be Maude," he corrected. "You may not even have to play the part."
"Oh." A deep frown corrugated her brow.
"But I'm afraid the monkey is not included," he said gently.
Her response was immediate. "Oh, no, then I couldn't agree."
"You would throw away fifty rose nobles for the sake of a monkey?" Gareth was so incredulous he lost his carefully preserved calm.
Miranda's mouth set and she said firmly, "Chip belongs to me. Where I go he goes."
It was the set of her mouth that convinced him. How many times had he seen Maude look exactly like that, the same damnably stubborn expression in the cerulean eyes, the same line of the mouth? Henry would never know the difference between the two of them.
He bit the bullet and accepted the ultimatum. "Very well. But God help us all when Imogen sees him." "Who's Imogen?"
"My sister. And I'm afraid you will not like her." He stood up on the words. "Are we agreed, Miranda?"
Miranda continued to hesitate. With fifty rose nobles she could do anything. Even buy Robbie the special shoes that would lift his shorter leg. The cobbler in Boulogne had said he could make such shoes for a lame person. But he wanted five guineas for them, and where was a strolling player to find five spare guineas? Until now.
She looked up, met his dark eyes, grave and unsmiling now, but she was once again struck nonetheless by the steadiness, the sense of security, that emanated from his large loose-limbed frame.
He held out his hand and silently she took it, as she stood up. "We are agreed, milord."
His hand closed warmly over hers, then he smiled and all the gravity was chased from his expression. "Good, I believe we shall deal extremely well, you and I. But it's late and we must leave at dawn. You may sleep up here tonight since you are now in my employ, and I suggest you go to your rest now. It'll be a long and tiring ride tomorrow." With a little smile, he raised her rather grubby hand to his lips. "I give you good night, Miranda."
She touched her hand where his lips had brushed, swamped with a mixture of wonder and embarrassment. No one had ever kissed her hand before.
The door closed behind him before she could recover enough to return his good-night.
Chapter Four
It was two hours later when the earl of Harcourt set down his tankard of rum punch in the taproom and made his way back up the narrow staircase to the chamber above the washhouse. His carrying candle threw his greatly elongated shadow ahead of him on the half-timbered plastered walls. He stepped carefully over the stack of dirty supper dishes neatly piled outside the door. Miranda apparently had some inclination for housekeeping.
He lifted the latch and entered the chamber. It was dimly lit by the moon shining through the small unglazed window. He set down his candle and gazed around, his eyes somewhat unfocused. The landlord's rum punch had been potent and the company in the taproom surprisingly convivial.
He blinked, frowning. The room appeared to be empty. Then his eye fell on the bed and a very small mound beneath the covers on the far side.
He picked up the candle again and approached the bed. The soft yellow light illuminated a slender white arm curved on the pillows, a pale turned shoulder, and two very bright eyes as the monkey, curled in the crook of Miranda's neck, regarded the earl somewhat balefully.
Gareth stood looking down at Miranda and deba
ted. She was naked, but that was only to be expected. No one slept in their clothes. He should have thought about where she was to sleep but it hadn't occurred to him. He glanced around the chamber. Apart from the floor and the narrow window seat, the bed was the only option.
It seemed his intention to have a bed to himself, a privilege for which he'd paid handsomely, was to be thwarted, he thought ruefully. Reaching over, he eased the pillow out from under her head.
Miranda was lost in the depths of a pleasant if ill-defined dream. Feather beds were a rare luxury in her life and the warmth and softness of this one had lulled her to sleep within minutes of clambering into it. But she was a light sleeper and her eyes flew open the minute Gareth leaned over her. Disoriented, she blinked in the yellow light of a candle held close above her, for a moment unable to place the face gazing down at her.
Then she remembered. She flung an arm over her eyes to shield them from the light. "Is something the matter, milord?"
"Only that I hadn't expected to find you in my bed," he replied, shaking out the pillow he'd removed from behind her head.
Miranda sat up, the covers falling to her waist, revealing a pair of small but perfectly formed breasts and an amazingly narrow rib cage." There didn't seem anywhere else and I don't take up much room. Everyone I share a bed with says I sleep very still. I won't disturb you."
Gareth was not so sure about that. Naked women in his bed were inclined to disturb him.
"I'm sure you're a very considerate bed partner," he said, leaning over and thrusting the pillow beneath the quilt down the middle of the bed. "However, since I may be a somewhat less tidy sleeper than you, we'll create a little separation."
