by Jane Feather
And there was something different about Gareth, too. His previous dynamism had returned. And it could mean only one thing. Gareth had found a cause. He had a plan. And this unknown girl slowly emerging from the soap bubbles was definitely a part of that plan. Finally, all his sister's loving scheming had paid off and her brother had returned to himself.
Imogen's little pebble eyes narrowed. The girl's physical resemblance to Maude was certainly uncanny, disturbing even. In the right clothes and with the right bearing, she could easily pass as a member of court society. Dressing her would be no problem, but what of her bearing, her conduct? Where had she come from? What made Gareth think that some ragged gypsy, which is what she looked like, could pass for a member of the highborn d'Albard family?
The girl's wet hair clung to her well-shaped head, setting off her long white neck and accentuating her features-the wide mouth, small, straight nose, slightly rounded chin. But it was her eyes that drew Imogen's attention. Such an amazing deep blue, fringed with the longest eyelashes, and their expression, stubborn, challenging, was so powerful, so utterly self-determined, that it disturbed Imogen. They were not the eyes of a girl who could be easily manipulated.
But they were Maude's eyes. How many times had Imogen seen that look in her young cousin's cerulean gaze? A look that utterly belied the girl's invalidish pallor and dying airs. Not that there was anything invalidish about this girl. Her thick, creamy complexion, freed of dirt, and marred only by a few scratches, had a healthy pink tinge, and if the rounded muscles in her arms were anything to go by, her frame, although slight, had a compact strength to it.
Had Gareth dallied with the girl? Her appeal was becoming increasingly apparent as she rose and stepped out of the bath. She was not like Charlotte, not in the least, not physically. But there was something there, some disturbing current of physicality that set Imogen's scalp crawling with recognition.
"Who are you?" Imogen demanded without volition. "Where do you come from?"
Miranda took the towel held out by one of the maids and wrapped herself securely. It was thick and fluffy, unimaginably luxurious. "I met milord in Dover," she replied. "I belong to a troupe of strolling players."
Imogen's response to this reminded Miranda of a turkey gobbler. Her wrinkled chicken-skin throat worked and her eyes popped. A vagabond! Gareth had brought home a vagabond! A criminal, like as not. A thief. Nothing would be safe in the house.
As she stared, Miranda swathed her hair in another towel, then stood, regarding Lady Dufort calmly.
Imogen turned on her heel and left the chamber. The girl was a ditch-draggled harlot, but Gareth saw something else in her, and for all that she loathed to acknowledge it, Imogen too could see that there was a quality to the girl that belied her antecedents.
Imogen unlocked Maude's bedroom door, flung it wide so that it crashed on its hinges, and sailed in.
Maude was huddled in shawls on the settle beside the empty grate. She was alone. The present regime permitted Berthe's attentions but twice a day, in the morning and the evening. Despite the warmth of the day, Maude looked cold and pinched, her eyes blue-shadowed, her lips pale. But she regarded her custodian steadily, although she made no attempt to rise.
"I give you good day, madam." Her voice was as pale as her countenance but it was steady.
Imogen glanced around the room. Maude's dinner tray bearing the bowl of gruel, the hunk of black bread, and the flask of water sat on the table untouched.
She had come into the chamber merely to find a suitable gown for Miranda to wear, but now as she looked at her cousin's pale, stubborn countenance her anger rose. She was in a mood to do battle and she would not be defeated by this ungrateful whelp. There would be no need for Gareth's deception with the vagabond, if Maude did as she was bid.
"Lord Harcourt has returned," she announced, stepping farther into the room. "You will appear at the dinner table and make your reverence to your guardian."
"But of course, madam, I would not be lacking in courtesy to Lord Harcourt," Maude said, drawing the tasseled fringe of the shawl through her fingers.
"You will make your submission," Imogen stated, coming very close to the settle. "Your guardian has a marriage proposal from the French court and you will submit to his wishes."
Maude raised her head and Imogen almost drew back from the bright, triumphant clarity in her eyes. "No, madam, I will not. I have converted and was baptized in the Catholic church last week. No Huguenot of Henry's court would wish to wed me."
Imogen stared at her, her eyes seeming to bulge, her nostrils turning white, her mouth falling open, revealing the many toothless gaps. "You hussy!" She slapped the girl with her open palm and Maude reeled on her seat, but the triumphant, almost fanatical glitter in her eyes didn't waver.
"I am a Catholic, madam," she repeated with a ferocious satisfaction. "Father Damian conducted my conversion."
Imogen opened her mouth on a screech of rage. Her voice rose in a thrilling throb of wild fury, carrying through the open door and resounding through the house. Maude picked up the vial of smelling salts from the table at her elbow and silently proffered it. Imogen dashed the bottle from her hand so that it rolled into a far corner.
In the parlor below, Gareth paused, his goblet halfway to his mouth. Miles sighed. They were both accustomed to the sounds of Lady Dufort losing her temper. "Wonder what's upset her?" Miles asked vaguely into his goblet.
Gareth set his own on the table and left the room, his cloak swirling about him as he took the wide stairs two at a time. Chip abandoned the basket of fruit and nuts that had occupied his attention since Miranda's disappearance and bounded after his lordship. But when they reached the head of the stairs, the monkey paused, head cocked as he sniffed the air. Then he raced away in the direction his instincts told him he would find Miranda.
Chapter Eight
Gareth, who had expected sparks to fly at some point, assumed that Miranda was the cause of his sister's tantrum. But when he reached the landing, he realized the tumult was coming from Maude's bedchamber at the end of the corridor.
He hurried toward the sound, entering his young ward's chamber through the wide-open door. "For God's sake, Imogen, you'll wake the dead!"
Imogen turned on Gareth, hot color suffusing her cheeks then fleeing to leave them bloodless. "She… she…" A trembling finger pointed at Maude, who had risen from the settle at the earl's entrance. "She says she has converted. She's abjured. She's a Catholic!" With a little moan, she sank down onto a chair, for once too stunned by this disaster to continue with her diatribe, but she continued to stare at Maude as if the girl had suddenly spro�
�uted cloven hooves and horns.
Gareth absorbed the implications of this piece of news in silence, his calm countenance revealing no indication of the furious whirl of his thoughts. It appeared his options were now reduced to one. Miranda, instead of being a second string to his bow, must now play first fiddle. At the back of his mind had been the possibility-no, more than a possibility, almost a certainty-that Maude could eventually be persuaded to accept the husband chosen for her. Miranda's part was merely to be a stopgap while Maude came to her senses.
Once Maude was safely betrothed to Henry of France, after a reasonable interval Miranda's surprising reemergence as the missing twin of the d'Albard family could be arranged. There would be nothing to connect her with the girl Henry had wooed.
He had thought that in time he would be able to arrange a secure marriage for her-one not quite as brilliant as her twin's, but one that would nevertheless bring wealth and consequence to her family as well as to herself. The duke of Roissy could well be interested in the connection. And if Miranda didn't wish for that future, then she could return to the life she had known, no one any the wiser for the deception, and she herself all the richer for her experience. Not that he gave the latter possibility any serious consideration. No one in their right minds, snatched from a rough and almost inevitably short existence on the streets, would seriously reject the new identity Miranda would be offered.
But Maude's conversion changed everything. Henry could not consider a Catholic wife and Maude had put herself way beyond persuasion. So now Miranda must be groomed in earnest to take her sister's place, to advance the cause and ambition of the d'Albards. Miranda must wed Henry of France.
His original plan had been audacious enough, had carried enough risks, but this…? And yet excitement surged through him, the stimulation of challenge, the thrill of ambition. It was so perfect. Miranda carried the Harcourt birthmark. How could she fail to slip easily into her rightful place? How right and proper it was that she be returned in such spectacular fashion to her family.
But the risks were very great. Henry, a man once so dreadfully deceived, now so swift to see treachery, must never know of the deception. He must never know that the girl in the portrait was not the girl he made his queen. If he once discovered the lie, the earl of Harcourt would become the king's bitterest enemy. The queen of England would know of it, and the Harcourt family would be ruined for generations to come.
But it could be done. Gareth didn't know if Henry would remember the existence of the other d'Albard baby, but he guessed not. A young man of nineteen, whose mother had just been murdered, who was struggling in a web of politics and treachery of which he was the focus, would have had little interest in the domestic affairs of his advisors. And Francis d'Albard, so locked in bitter grief, had refused ever to refer to the missing infant after his wife's death.
The baby had remained a nameless victim of that night of horror, and not even Maude knew of her twin. Francis had barely been able to endure the sight of his surviving child. It was almost as if he blamed the babies for their mother's death… If Elena had not been hampered by her children, perhaps she could have escaped the mob. So the one child was lost to memory as completely as if she'd never existed and the other was orphaned in reality even before her father's death when she was two.
And now that was how it must remain if a d'Albard was to marry the king of France. If Miranda was to become Maude forever, then Maude herself must disappear. There would be no point now in a triumphant acknowledgment of a lost child. The real Maude would have her heart's desire and retire from the world to the seclusion of the convent, and her sister would take her place in the world. It could be done.
When he finally spoke, his tone was equable. "So you've abjured, my ward."
Maude nodded. "I had to follow my conscience, my lord."
"Yes, yes, of course you did," he said with that swift glitter of amusement that Miranda would have immediately recognized but that astonished Imogen and Maude.
"I will not have her under my roof!" Imogen declared, her voice trembling with passion. "I will not have a Catholic under this roof. She's to be cast into the streets-"
"I can just imagine how that would look to the civilized world," Gareth observed with the same dry amusement that left his sister staring at him in silence.
Maude gathered her shawls more tightly around her. She was disconcerted by the earl's calm reaction to her heresy, although Imogen was behaving exactly to form.
"Is someone being murdered?" a low, melodious voice chimed from the still-open doorway. All three occupants of the chamber turned to look at Miranda, both head and body still swathed in towels. Chip, chattering happily, danced around her feet. Before anyone could say anything, however, Miranda had stepped into the room, her astounded gaze on Maude.
"It's like looking at myself," Miranda said in awe. She touched Maude's arm as if expecting to find an illusion that would dissolve into the air. But her fingers met flesh and bone.
Maude stared back. "Who are you?"
Gareth stepped forward, placing one hand lightly on Miranda's shoulder. "Miranda, this is the Lady Maude d'Albard. Maude, this is Miranda, until recently a member of a band of strolling players."
Maude's still-startled gaze found Chip, who was regarding her curiously with his head on one side. "Oh, goodness!" she said, bending down toward him. "And who are you?"
"This is Chip." Miranda remained still and the earl's hand on her shoulder was a warm presence. She was confused, confused by this girl who looked so exactly like her, confused about how it made her feel. Instinctively, she looked up at the earl, and he read the bewildered question in her eyes. He could give her no answers, at least not yet. He moved his hand up from her shoulder to clasp the nape of her neck, and he felt the slight quiver run over her skin, followed by the almost imperceptible relaxation of the taut muscles in the slender white column.
"But he's delightful." Maude held out her hand to Chip, who promptly took it, bringing it to his lips in a courtly gesture that sent Maude into a peal of laughter. A sound he had never heard before, Gareth realized with a small shock.
Imogen snapped out of her horrified trance. She saw her brother standing with his hand on the vagabond's neck, his posture so easy and relaxed; and the girl seemed unaware of the casual attention, as if it was something she was perfectly used to. Imogen's scalp crawled. She rose to her feet, forgetting Maude for the moment.
"It's unseemly that the girl should be standing here wrapped in nothing but a towel. Go back to your bedchamber immediately, girl. I'll bring clothes to you. I
t's disgraceful that you should know no better than to wander around the house half-naked."
"She's hardly half-naked, Imogen," Gareth protested, and indeed the towel was large enough to cover Miranda's small frame twice over.
Unbidden, the vivid memory of that slight body rose to fill his mind's eye. The rounded bottom, the slim, muscular thighs, the sharp bones of her hips, the tangle of fair curls clustering at the base of her flat belly. His loins stirred and his hand dropped from her neck as suddenly as if the pale skin were scorching his palm.
Abruptly he demanded, "Why is there no fire in here? I was under the impression my cousin required its heat at all times."
Imogen sniffed. "I have forbidden her a fire."
"And adequate victuals and the attentions of my maid." Maude straightened and cast a pointed glance at the unappetizing tray on the table.
Gareth followed her eyes and his expression grew grim. "I said I would not permit my cousin to be coerced."
Imogen sniffed again. "You are too soft, brother. And look what your lenience has produced. Overindulgence will never bring your ward to a proper sense of duty."
"My ward, it seems, has decided that her duty lies in the service of God," Gareth said dryly. "I doubt any of us could find fault with that."
Gareth strode to the armoire and began to go through its contents, drawing out silk hose, a lawn chemise, a lace petticoat, saying over his shoulder, "I trust you don't mind sharing your wardrobe in an emergency, cousin?"
"Not in the least, sir." Maude was still regarding Miranda with a rather wary interest. "I would think the gown of periwinkle blue would suit her." She frowned. "What color's your hair?"
