Her words caught Charlotte by surprise.
As far as she could tell, their plan was going well. Why, already the invitations usually overflowing the hall table had been cut in half, a clear sign that her notoriety was well on its way to being established. Soon no one would want her at their home. Such success! she thought wryly. Who could ask for more?
Ginny should be beaming, not snapping at them.
Dand idly rubbed between her shoulder blades, his cheek burnishing the curls at the crown of her head. A seemingly tender gesture that had a not-so-innocent effect on her, stoking the warm sensations their earlier wordplay had aroused into a hotter fire. Any moment now and she would be purring. Her head would fall into the lee of his neck and shoulder and she would will him to look down at her as she lifted—
“Mrs. Mulgrew seems overset,” Dand whispered into her hair and then, to Ginny, “Should you be up?”
“I am leaving this afternoon,” Ginny intoned brusquely.
“Surely that is not wise,” Charlotte said, rousing herself from the cloud of pleasure-spiked lassitude into which she’d sunk. “You are still weak and you might yet be taken with a fever. I cannot afford—”
“You cannot afford to have me here, acting like some sort of farcical doyenne,” Ginny cut in coldly. “People may take it into their idiotic pates that I am playing the part of chaperone. Yes, yes, I know it is absurd, but the public is absurd especially when it comes to slandering those whom it wants to extol, or”—she paused tellingly—“the sister-in-law of those whom they fear. And you, my dear Charlotte, are both. And you are not helping the matters what with the way you treat Ross.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Clearly,” Ginny said, sniffing. “What are all these blushes and sidelong glances I hear tell so much about from the servants in this house and my acquaintances outside? You are supposed to be a woman in lust, not love!”
“And you,” she glared at Dand, “had best stop acting the lovesick swain and start acting like an overly possessive lover. My God, man! You said you must return to France and soon. In that time you must cement in Society’s imagination your uncontested right to Charlotte’s time and then effect a very public, very dramatic break with her.”
Dand regarded her. “You have been pulling the strings in this little puppetry show thus far, Mrs. Mulgrew and we have obliged. I have obliged. I should be careful, however, that you don’t get caught in your own devices.”
Though his expression was amiable enough, a threat lurked in his level gaze that gave Charlotte pause. Once more, Charlotte found herself wondering just what Dand Ross was capable of doing in pursuit of his goal. She suspected it was more than she realized. Worse, rather than cause her to withdraw, his untapped capacity for danger only made him more fascinating. Ginny visibly tensed. “I know what I am about. I thought you did, too.” She turned back to Charlotte. “Or did you forget?”
“Of course not,” Charlotte replied, though in truth the days had passed so quickly she had let slip to the back of her mind that the climax of this little play was to take place soon. And then…
“I will strive not to disappoint,” she heard Dand say. “You may return to your home with an easy mind. If you still own such a capacity.”
It sounded like a dismissal, an imperial one, and amazingly, Ginny seemed to heed it as such. What was going on here? Currents were sweeping along beneath the surface of this meeting, currents Charlotte had not suspected or been warned about, currents that suggested they had a prior knowledge of one another.
“Good,” Ginny answered, rising to her feet. “As for my capacity for ease, I am certain it matches your own.” Her gaze skewered him.
Charlotte, still in Dand’s embrace, felt his arms tighten fractionally as Ginny stumped from the room.
“Dand? Dangerous to me?” Charlotte asked with a smile. “I think you are mistaken, Ginny. Perhaps to an enemy he might be, but not to me. I am his…comrade.”
Charlotte had followed the courtesan up to her bedchamber and asked her point-blank about the undercurrents she’d sensed between Dand and Ginny. The celebrated beauty leaned back on the pile of pillows and sighed. She had made some negligible comment about Dand having visited her early on in their deception to make certain that Charlotte was not a cat’s-paw in this game.
That is all she would say—other than to end with a worried warning that Dand Ross might not be what he appeared to be. In fact, he might be dangerous. Charlotte neglected to tell Ginny that she already knew that.
“But he wouldn’t hurt me,” she avowed stubbornly. “He’s as faithful as a hound.”
“Let me tell you about hounds, Charlotte,” Ginny said. “My father kept lion hounds when we lived in Alexandria. I was fond of one in particular, a huge amiable-looking creature that I begged my father to let me make a pet.
“He agreed, of course, why wouldn’t he? Jabari was the most gentle, docile, and slothful of beasts. Content to sleep on my bed and let me dress him in the maid’s scarves. He used to eat Turkish delight from my hand, carefully licking each of my fingers afterward.”
Charlotte smiled.
“Then, one day, my father decided I was old enough to go on a lion hunt. It was terrible. And thrilling. After hours on the veldt, the hounds cornered a great lion who’d been raiding the local tribe’s cattle herd. One after another the dogs darted in at the beast and one after another were driven back yelping, shredded by the lion’s claws and torn by its fangs until finally one hound flung himself like a spear at the creature, locking his jaws around the beast’s throat.
“Though savaged, the hound would not let go until the lion went down, his windpipe crushed in the hound’s jaws.”
Charlotte felt herself blanch at this brutal depiction.
“It was only afterward, as the men tended the dog’s many wounds that my father pointed out that the dog who’d entered the fray with such single-minded ferocity was my own gentle Jabari. I had never seen that part of him, so savage, so relentless, so lethal. It frightened me to think that an animal with such a capacity for violence had slept at the foot of my bed each night.”
Charlotte shivered. “I imagined you stopped letting him sleep in your room after that.”
Ginny laughed. “Good Lord, no.”
“Why,” Charlotte asked in surprise, “if he frightened you so?”
“Because I was his mistress. I had control of all that magnificent savagery. Do you understand the sense of power that gave me? The heady, delicious power of it? Indeed, he slept at my side for the rest of his life.” She paused, her expression wry. “But I never slept quite so easily thereafter.”
“Is there a lesson in this tale, Ginny?” Charlotte asked, aware her tone was a little brittle. The courtesan’s words too closely echoed her earlier realization: that Dand’s capacity for ruthlessness acted upon her as a potent stimulant.
“Yes,” she answered, with a lift of her exquisitely plucked brows. “Be careful you know what sleeps in your bed, Charlotte.”
St. Bride’s Abbey
August 1793
“How I envy you boys!” Brother Fidelis, who had brought the four lads their midday meal—biscuits, cheese, and beer—in a pail, paused at the entrance to the walled garden and looked around with obvious enjoyment. “To spend your days amid such beauty!”
Legend had it that long ago a crusader had brought back a yellow rose from his journeys in the Far East and given the unique bloom to St. Bride’s in thanks for the abbot having sheltered the knight’s family during the plague. The abbot had built this walled garden especially as a showcase for that rose, the only yellow one in all of the British Isles. But time and politics had diminished the Catholic population of the Highlands until there was no manpower to spare for the tending of flowers when other tasks were so urgently required. Until the current abbot, Father Tarkin, had turned the small abbey into a sort of orphanage for the grandsons and daughters of the few Catholic Scots left after the rebellion of Forty-
five and Prince Charles’s last aborted attempt to regain the Scottish crown. The father abbot had seen in the abandoned rose garden a perfect place for rowdy and undisciplined boys to use up their unfocused energy and learn obedience.
The rose garden had become the special project for the four rowdiest, strongest, and most likely to find trouble: Douglas, Kit, Ram, and Dand, the latter climbing out of the trench he was digging to grin wickedly at the benevolent and rotund monk. “Don’t deny yourself on my account, Brother Fidelis!” he called to the still beaming monk. “You can take my place anytime you’ve a mind!”
Brother Fidelis did not take offense. Brother Fidelis never took offense. Now, had Dand served such sass to the other master gardener, the crabbed and sour herbalist Brother Martin, he would have been rubbing ointment on his scrawny behind for a week. But Brother Fidelis just wagged his finger at Dand and said, “Someday you’ll appreciate what you’re doing here.”
“And what exactly is that?” Douglas, grunting under a bale of hay with which he was to mulch the transplants, paused to ask the monk.
“Making something beautiful. All those who come here seeking solace and comfort need only look here, walk amongst these paths to be reminded of God’s great love.”
Douglas cocked his head. “You really like the roses, don’t you, Brother?”
Brother Fidelis smiled. “I love them. Now back to work with you,” he said and ducked out through the garden wall’s only door.
Ram Munro heaved the heavy rock back in place atop the collapsed wall surrounding the well. He stepped back, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve and looking around. All around them the roses bloomed with careless effort, making a mockery of the four teenage boys who toiled so that they might thrive.
“What do you think, Dand?” Ram called panting to what he could see of him. Dand had dropped once more into the trench on the other side of the wicker fence separating him from Ram. Now the rhythmic appearance of a shovel rising and falling above the top-woven wicker was the only visual sign of him. “Will we ever tame this masterpiece, do you think?”
“What masterpiece?” came Dand’s grunted reply. The shovel didn’t stop swinging.
“’Tis no masterpiece!” Douglas, having dumped his bale of straw, leapt atop the half-tumbled rim of the garden well. He snapped the branch from a scrub elder and wheeled around brandishing it. “’Tis a dragon and I am Tristan come to slay it!”
“And I am Galahad!” Ram proclaimed, picking up another branch and pointing it at Douglas.
“Why not just be King Arthur himself?” Dand called out from within his hole.
“Because he never got to go anywhere!” Douglas explained, swinging his branch at Ram, who countered prettily and returned the favor. Douglas laughed delightedly. “He had to send others on his quests. I will go on my own quests, thank you very much! And have…”—his makeshift sword banged against Ram’s—“my own adventures…”—another swing and another clatter of wood—“and win my own glory. And this…”—he paused to sweep his free arm out in a gesture encompassing the whole garden—“shall be my proving ground.”
“What do you mean?” Kit demanded from where he bent some little distance away, straining to pull a massive root from where it had embedded itself in the wall separating the rose garden from the rest of the abbey. Even at fifteen years, his shoulders were as broad as most men’s.
“I think this is one of those tasks,” Douglas said, “that is meant to prepare you for your way in life.”
Dand’s head popped up over the wicker fence. “Well then, I can stop digging.”
“Why’s that?” Ram asked suspiciously. Dand Ross never had a thoughtful answer for anything.
“Because I can say with the utmost conviction that I am as well qualified to dig ditches now as ever I will be.”
Douglas grinned and with a sigh tossed down his sword-branch, leaping lightly to the ground, his play ended. “There are greater things awaiting you than digging ditches, Dand Ross. Never you forget it.”
“Aye,” Dand whispered softly as he watched the boy amble away, “I never doubted it.”
11
A castle on the Scottish moors
July 27, 1806
“A CELEBRATED BEAUTY, of impeccable if somewhat less than illustrious breeding, has taken a lover. Some Frenchie,” the Englishman, a buffle-headed Pink of the Ton named Lord Rawsett, realizing his faux pas, coughed. “I mean a Frenchman.”
“Of the old regime, no doubt,” his host, Maurice St. Lyon, said. Luckily for Rawsett, the comte was too preoccupied with this interesting bit of information to take exception to the slur on his nationality. Besides, having lived amongst the English since the revolution, he was used to bad manners.
“No doubt.” Rawsett nodded. He stripped off his multi-caped greatcoat and tossed it into the waiting arms of the footman. True to his scandal-mongering nature, Rawsett had bleated out his most impressive bit of gossip as soon as he’d crossed the threshold of the castle and spotted his host. Now he turned, sucking in a little whistle of appreciation.
“Not bad for a castle, St. Lyon, m’dear. Not bad at all.” He looked around, taking in the thick Oriental carpet, the heavy tapestries lining the freshly chinked walls, the shining parquetry floors, and the gleaming, newly installed glass in the windows.
“You should see the place I was raised,” Rawsett said. “No plumbing. No heating. No Society.”
And of the three, St. Lyon guessed, Rawsett would miss Society most. The man was the consummate rubbish merchant. A pattern St. Lyon had noted amongst the sons of country gentry who’d flown their dodgy ancestral manses for the bright lights of Society. Once there, they seldom willingly went back to their country estates. From what St. Lyon could gather from the pretentious nobody, so it had been with Rawsett.
“I have had all the most modern conveniences installed and every creature comfort provided for,” he said. “I hate being discommoded as much as you, Rawsett, m’dear.”
“And you have certainly staffed yourself well, too.” Rawsett wiggled his fingers at the discreetly silent pairs of footmen standing by the entrance and at two large windows, men chosen for loyalty and fighting abilities rather than the usual well-turned leg and Apollonian good looks. “Must cost you a bleeding fortune. But then, one can’t have too many servants, eh?”
“Not when one suspects his home has been targeted for theft,” St. Lyon answered. Twice in London he had apprehended thieves sent to steal the letter. Unfortunately, they had been hirelings, kept in the dark as to their employers’ identities and thus no amount of persuasion had elicited any useful information. He would give much to know the names of those who worked against him—not only so that he could cut out the threat at its source, but also because he could then sell that information for a great deal of money.
“I trust your journey was not over-strenuous?” he asked Rawsett.
The young man’s mouth pursed with annoyance. “One can only expect such when traveling in these savage parts.” He gave a delicate little shudder. “But for you, dear St. Lyon, I willingly gave up the bright lights and fine company of the season. I know you appreciate my sacrifice, especially because the fascinating transgression I just mentioned was unfolding as I left.”
“Oh, I do!” St. Lyon enthused.
Rawsett, with his dandified and overly scented curls brushed forward over his pale forehead and wearing one of dozens of pairs of chicken-skin gloves dyed to match a preponderance of waistcoats in every conceivable hue, was a complete tulip. But a useful one. And unexpectedly shrewd.
Indeed, it had been Rawsett who’d brought him the letter he was planning to auction. The citified turnip had come upon a “dying old Froggie Royalist” during his travels in the Italian states—the Grand Tour being closed to him—and had been pressed into returning the gentleman’s personal effects to his relative in Rome.
True to what St. Lyon knew of Rawsett’s character, the self-involved ass had forgotte
n his promise until he’d been introduced to St. Lyon upon his return to London earlier this spring. With that enormous ethno-centricity for which the English are well noted, Rawsett had decided that one Froggie was as good as another and prepared to deliver the dead man’s things into St. Lyon’s hands.
But when St. Lyon had recognized the Royalist’s name, something in his manner tumbled Rawsett to the fact that he held something more interesting than a few “Frenchie love letters and such.” Nipped by curiosity and greed, he’d decided to examine the dead man’s possession before giving them into St. Lyon’s care. One of them had been a little cylinder and its accompanying and extremely suggestive letter. Rawsett knew then that he had Something of Value.
But then, just as St. Lyon was preparing to relieve Rawsett of his burden—and consequently his life, too—the English tulip had evinced an unexpectedly astute streak and, realizing that he was in no position to achieve the full value of his find, suggested that he and St. Lyon enter into a partnership, asking for his share a very reasonable percentage of what St. Lyon knew would prove a fortune. Not being a particularly bloodthirsty man, simply a businessman, St. Lyon had agreed. Besides, gentry, even country gentry such as Rawsett, were generally eventually missed. Rawsett had other uses, too. He seemed to know everything about everyone.
“Ah, yes. The celebrated beauty. Anyone I know?”
Rawsett pulled a face and looked about, as if afraid of being overheard. “Oh, I should think so,” he intoned heavily.
“And she is?”
Rawsett inhaled and expelled the name on a heated rush of breath. “Miss Charlotte Nash!”
“Miss Nash?” St. Lyon echoed, amazed. True, Ginny Mulgrew had hinted in her letters that the vivacious young Charlotte had been over-testing Society’s indulgence of late, but he would never have guessed this, from a gently bred lady!
“Yes.” The pomaded fop could not contain a trill of delighted laughter. “So young. But so hot-blooded. One should have seen it coming, I suspect. Well,” he leaned forward confidingly. “Actually, I did.”
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