“One last thing,” she said, holding up her hand. “You needn’t do this. The dress will be yours regardless. You already own my gratitude.”
The little maid gave her a pert smile. “Of course I’ll do what you ask, miss. I knew the risks of working for a lady with your reputation when I come to you. My dad warned me, but I wouldn’t hear of nothing else.
“You see, I figure the greater the risks, the greater the rewards and sure enough, I already have a lovely new gown! Besides, frankly, miss, I don’t have in mind to spend the rest of my life in service. A few nice gowns could help a girl with a plan for her future.”
Dear God, Charlotte thought. And Dand thought she was a tough little pragmatist.
“Now, what is it you want me to do?” Lizette asked, carefully folding her new dress.
Charlotte told her.
“Still feeling unlike yourself, Miss Nash?” Comte St. Lyon asked solicitously.
Charlotte regarded him coolly. “Yes.”
“I hope you are not still angry about last night? I hoped you would understand that my untoward behavior was simply a means of drawing Ross into a situation where he could be taken into custody with as little distress to my guests and as much discretion as possible.”
“And what of my distress?” she demanded, knowing her color was high. Knowing this because she had applied the rouge herself before finding the comte after dinner. “You might have told me your plan. Or is it you don’t trust me? What a foolish question. Of course you don’t. Why else have you set that harridan Madame Paule to follow me and those footmen to dog my footsteps?”
“It is for your own safety, my dear.”
“And from whom am I supposed to be endangered?” she asked wrapping her shawl about her shoulders. They stood in the alcove leading to the courtyard. Lanterns hung in the tree branches bobbed like fairy globes in the developing mist.
“Ross has been taken away,” she said. “Are there other villains amongst your guest list, the guest list whose delicate sensibilities you are so determined to protect?”
He regarded her with an expression mixed of impatience and surprise, both stemming from her unexpected acuity. “You are correct,” he finally said. “I do not altogether trust you. I dare not. What I am doing is too important to my future.
“However,” he reached out and secured her hand. “I hope once this is over and we are both more certain of one of the other, you will understand and forgive me.”
She snatched her hand away. “You can hope.”
As she anticipated, he was growing weary of her tantrum and, as she had also anticipated, her temper was clearly relaxing his suspicions about her. A woman so at the mercy of her emotions could not possibly be a viable agent. Unless it was an act…But a man of such discernment, such experience with the gentle sex as Maurice St. Lyon, would always be able to tell when a woman was acting and when she was not.
“How can I make this up to you?” he asked.
“You can leave me alone. And tell your people to stop following me.”
“I am sorry. I cannot do that.”
She pouted, her lip trembling. “Fine! I promise to stay here in the courtyard in plain sight of whoever might care to look. But you…stay away from me!”
He threw up his hands. “If you insist on staying out here and catching a chill just to prove how heinous you find my company, suit yourself.”
“I shall!” she said, snapping her shawl over her head and flouncing out into the courtyard. She flung herself down on the marble bench and waited a few moments, letting the quickly thickening fog grow denser before standing up and striding to the edge of the path where the yew shrubs grew nearly as high as a man. “Comte! Are you still watching me? Answer me!”
“Yes, Miss Nash.” He sounded annoyed. “I am still here.”
“Well, since you enjoy watching me so much, watch this!” She reached behind her neck and snatched off the pendant he’d given her last night. She held it out toward his indistinct figure, standing under the arcade. The light caught the emerald. “Do you see what this is? It’s your pendant—oh!” The emerald slipped from her fingers. She dropped down to search at her feet and a few seconds later a female figure rose, the pendant held stiffly out.
“There! You can have it back!” she called out and had the satisfaction of hearing the pendant skitter on the flagstones by his feet.
“Watch her!” he clipped out and turned, stomping away.
From where she crouched behind the yew shrub, Charlotte silently applauded Lizette’s marksmanship. They’d traded places when Charlotte had dropped to the ground and her maid rose from the same place. Lizette, dressed as closely to Charlotte as the wardrobe would allow and having cut her brown locks in the same style, had been waiting behind the yews for the last forty-five minutes.
“Stay here for an hour. If St. Lyon returns, lift your nose in the air and stalk off in the opposite direction,” Charlotte whispered. “Watch the river after midnight and into morning. When you see a light under the window let down the rope.”
“What if you don’t come back by morning?” For the first time a quaver of fear shook her maid’s voice.
“I will, Lizette,” Charlotte promised. With or without help, she wouldn’t abandon her or Dand. She prayed that Dand was right and Ram and Kit were on their way here and that they would be able to do something. Yet even as she prayed, she could not help but ask herself what they could do even if she did find them. How could two men and a woman hope to assault the fortress St. Lyon had made of his castle? And yet the alternative, to do nothing, was untenable.
“I’ll come back, Lizette,” she repeated. “I swear it.”
“All right, miss,” Lizette said, swallowing as she bolstered her courage. “Best go.”
Charlotte moved along the edge of the yew hedge on hands and knees until she came to the far corner. There she shed her gown and donned the boy’s breeches and shirt Lizette had stolen from the laundry that afternoon. Then, careful to keep to the servants’ hall and the corridors that ran parallel to those used by the family and guests, she made her way to the kitchen and the final phase of her plan to escape undetected from St. Lyon’s castle.
Charlotte forced herself to roll limply, hoping that in the dark the tired kitchen boy wouldn’t note that the pile of refuse and carcasses and peelings and parings and rinds and feathers he dumped from the kitchen cart behind the stables outside the castle contained a human figure.
He didn’t. She waited, lying in an oozing, fragrant stew until she heard the cart wheels rumble up the steep drive and the boy’s shout for the guard to open the door. It was answered by the groan of the huge portal on its ancient hinges. Then, spitting and wiping the garbage from her face, she stood up and looked around. The quarter moon was on the ebb, but its paltry light was enough to pick out the gray ribbon of road threading over the crest of the hill. It was the only road anywhere near and thus the one on which Ram and Kit must arrive.
They had to come. Dand’s life depended on it. He couldn’t die. He could not. The thought was too devastating to entertain and she thrust it from her thoughts.
She trotted along the road until her legs ached and her shins splintered in pain. Then she walked. She walked under the bright band of the Milky Way while the owls commenced their evening hunt, sifting the wind on soundless wings. She walked until her feet were blistered in their dainty slippers and the thin, delicate soles had been worn through on the gravel road.
She had been walking for four hours when she saw them. Not Ram and Kit, but a band of men marching along in a double line, twenty at least, led by two men on horseback.
She hesitated, uncertain of who they were. They did not wear red coats and she had heard tales of how well organized the bands of smugglers and highwaymen were. They hadn’t seen her yet.
She scrambled down the side of the road and waited, holding her breath and so heard coming from one of the horsemen, a sophisticated voice drawl, “Thank God, Parnell kept s
ome of the militia at his estate to deter the smugglers.”
His companion on the other horse answered, “Thank God, he responded to Father Tarkin’s request. I think the bastard still has a soft spot for my Kate.”
It was Kit!
With a sob, she scrambled up the steeply pitched sides of the road as a familiar voice replied, “Since we are thanking the Almighty, I suppose we ought to offer up a prayer of thanks that the inimitable Mrs. Mulgrew came to her senses and revealed all in a message to the abbot.”
“Yes,” the deep Scottish burr grumbled. “And when I get hold of our little sister, it will be she who is thanking God that I don’t throttle her. If I don’t throttle her. And Andre Rousse shall pay, too, by God!”
She made it up to the road and stumbled out of the concealing bracken almost beneath the hooves of the horse, waving wildly. The horse shied and reared. She didn’t care. She grinned up at them. “Ram! Kit!”
“What is it?” Colonel Christian MacNeill asked his brother-in-law.
Ramsey Munro, marquis of Cottrell, canted one of his elegant brows and surveyed the ragged, filthy creature gamboling beneath their horse’s hooves. “Begad, Kit, I do believe it’s Charlotte!”
27
Comte St. Lyon’s castle, Scotland
August 16, 1806
TRUE TO ST. LYON’S WORD, the guard returned with a tin of water for Dand to drink, threw it in his face, and with a satisfied grunt retreated to the other side of the tower door. Dand could not have cared less. Since Charlotte had left he had strained to hear any sound that could tell him whether she had succeeded in escaping from the castle. When the hours had passed without so much as a raised voice, he had allowed himself a smile.
Smart, devious, clever Lottie. His darling. His love. She’d escaped.
Now he stared out the window trying to decide if it was lighter in the east or not as he worked obstinately at the bolt embedded in the rock wall. He could definitely feel it grating against the stone and a little drift of dust had begun trickling from the bottom of the ring. How much longer would it take to unseat it from its ancient mooring? However long it took, he thought with a dry smile. It wasn’t as if he had much else to occupy his time, though in his mind he followed Charlotte as she crested the road to the south and disappeared into the wilds.
Ram or Kit would find her. Or, if not them, eventually a croft or a drover. She would use that quick tongue and quicker mind to find her way home. And that should be enough for him. But it wasn’t. Loving Charlotte had made him greedy. He wanted to be with her, to spend long years working, laughing, debating, planning, and making love with her.
He hoped that when Ram and Kit arrived they wouldn’t require much of him in the way of additional aid. That Kit and Ram were coming was a notion to which he stubbornly clung. Absurd, when in all probability, they would all be captured and end up back in LeMons dungeon. And wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony?
As he laughed, he heard a sound outside the door. The guard mumbled, a male voice replied. A familiar voice. Even though he had expected to hear it, his heart still thudded at the sound.
The door opened a few inches and stopped as if the person on the other side hesitated.
“Come in, Douglas, me lad,” Dand said.
The Nash town house, York
1801
“How Dougie would have loved that,” Ram Munro said, his smile even more sardonic than usual. “The vow of service to the beautiful virgins, the rose, the symbol of our fidelity, given over to their care…he would have swooned with delight!”
Kit MacNeill shot him a sharp, assessing glance, his heavy jaw, pared down by so many months in LeMons dungeon, bulging. “Yer not mocking the dead, are you, Ram Munro?” he asked setting a large hand on the slender young man’s shoulder.
Angrily, Ram shook it off. They stood at the bottom of the drive leading to the Nash house like three barristers with different clients at a land hearing, uncertain and suspicious of one another, wanting only to each go his own separate way. And yet, most of their lives they’d been as close as brothers.
But betrayal, Dand Ross had discovered, tended to sever even the strongest ties. And these men believed that one of their number had betrayed them and those who’d depended on them, a betrayal that had resulted in the death of the best of them, their undeclared leader, Douglas Stewart.
Dand could have put their minds at ease, could have healed the wound that cut them off from one another. But that would entail another sort of betrayal, of one who had already paid the ultimate sacrifice for his…weakness. So he said nothing, though it ate at his heart and played havoc with his conscience.
“What do you think, Dand?” Ram turned to him, his dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “You’ve been awful quiet. You were never quiet before. Not even in the dungeon. Not until after they took Douglas to the guillotine.”
Dand gave him a flat, unfriendly look. “I told you before and I’ll tell you again, one last time and that is all: I did not reveal a bloody thing to the warden nor to anyone at LeMons.”
Kit spat savagely onto the dirt street, “Aye! And I’ve sworn the same thing! And Ram, too, for that matter! But we know that one of us is a liar, don’t we?”
He wanted to say no. But because of the love he once bore Douglas Stewart, he remained mute.
“How did you know it was me?” He looked older, premature lines carved into the corners of his mouth and forehead, but then Douglas had ever been a fretter.
“What is this, Dougie?” Dand asked. “No greeting, no embrace for your long-lost brother?”
“How did you know it was me?” Douglas asked again, slowly entering the room and skirting the perimeter, his gaze darting hither and yon as if he suspected some trap, as if he did not believe the evidence of his eyes and that Dand was only pretending to be chained to the wall.
Dand shrugged. The movement set needles into the muscles of his shoulders. “Captain Watters, Reverend Tawster, Lord Rawsett—they’re all anagrams for Stewart. You always loved to embellish everything.”
Douglas smiled, a little bitterly. “And you never appreciated it.”
“I never had the need,” Dand rejoined. “A man either did a thing or he didn’t. He either was noble or he wasn’t.”
Douglas laughed. “You never understood true nobility. You think because you didn’t squeal to Gardien you were noble? You just endured pain better. Like a dumb beast.”
The laughter abruptly ended. “It was your fault, you know,” Douglas whispered.
“How so?”
“In the dungeon, that night they brought you back after…branding you. You remember?” He was very close now and he stared into Dand’s eyes with terrible earnestness, a trace of the boy he’d been lingering there, still scared, still aching.
“Yes.”
“I asked you if you’d told Gardien the names of our confederates and you said no. You even laughed, mocking me, saying no, you were just as good as me.” Douglas tipped his head, his mouth clenching as though to hold back tears. “But I had told Gardien. And I looked at you as soon as you said that and…and I saw that you knew it!”
Douglas flung himself around, running his hand through his short dyed hair. “I couldn’t bear that. I knew you would tell the others.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
Douglas did not hear him. “Unless you thought I had made up for it by dying.” He was reliving some potent, terrible memory. “The thought of them, all knowing that I’d failed, that I’d dishonored myself when none of them had…the idea of them looking at me like you had…” He gasped as if in physical pain. “I couldn’t live with it.”
“But you couldn’t die with it, either,” Dand said coldly.
“But I did!” He snapped around, his head nodding violently and now Dand could see the madness that had seized Douglas Stewart, virulent and filled with self-hatred. “I arranged with Gardien for my own death. I told him I would tell him anything he wanted to know, any names, any bits of in
formation, anything, if he would just stage my death so you would honor me!” His voice broke at the last, filled with self-pity.
Dand would have felt sorry for him then, would have given him all the sympathy he was begging for, except…“But that wasn’t the end of your deal with Gardien.”
Douglas stopped sniffling and lifted his face. His eyes were red-rimmed but assessing. “What do you mean?”
“You staged your death so we would think you died heroically, the first of us to go under the blade. But you arranged with Gardien for us to be next.”
Douglas’s eyes narrowed.
“That was the deal, wasn’t it?” Dand asked. “We were to be killed a few days later, just long enough to do justice to your glorious memory. Long enough for me to feel guilty for doubting your integrity, your nobility, and for Ram and Kit to spend their final days blessing your name.
“Quite a nice little mourning party you had planned for yourself, Douglas. Too bad Colonel Nash mucked up the works by trading himself for us.”
Douglas didn’t even bother to deny Dand’s accusation. “Gardien couldn’t resist the coup of acquiring a national hero like Nash. He betrayed me!”
Seeing the disgust in Dand’s eyes, Douglas lurched forward, grabbing a handful of his hair and slamming his head back against the wall. Pain exploded in the back of Dand’s skull and lights tripped across the black velvet of his vision.
“I should have been celebrated, I should have been a hero! Instead I have lived in France, making myself useful to thieves and traitors and despots. Because of you! You and Ram and Kit. Because of you three I couldn’t come back.”
He laughed suddenly, the sound shrill and manic. “But like Lazarus, I am about to rise from the dead. I will regain everything I once had and more.”
My Surrender Page 27
