“I am the Earl of Rand,” Garth said stiffly. “And this is my brother, Lord Tristan.”
“Of course. Ephriam Scruggs at your service, sirs.” The little man bent over in a bow that threatened to land him flat on his face at their feet. Righting himself, he declared, “The cap’n’s been waiting for you. Turned meaner’n a snake when you wasn’t here an hour ago. I’ll just nip in and tell him you’ve arrived.” Turning on his heel, he shuffled back across the room and disappeared through a heavy oak door. Moments later he poked his head out and crooked his finger at Garth and Tristan.
Garth’s already ashen face blanched a shade whiter. “What kind of madhouse have we stumbled into?” he whispered.
“Courage, brother,” Tristan whispered back as they crossed the waiting room under the scrutiny of dozens of watchful eyes. “I’ve a feeling the worst is yet to come.”
Caleb Harcourt’s small private office was even more elegant than his anteroom, but the giant of a man who stood behind the carved rosewood desk looked as if he would be more at home on the deck of one of his ships than in his present surroundings. His deeply tanned face had the look of old leather, his salt and pepper hair was unfashionably long, and his black topcoat, while superbly cut, looked as if he’d slept in it. He surveyed them with frank curiosity. “Which one’s the earl and which the bastard?” he asked in a booming voice.
Tristan saw Garth stiffen in anger. “I am Tristan Thibault,” he said quickly. Harcourt was obviously an insufferable boor, but he held all the aces in this particular game; to rile him now would be sheer stupidity.
“Castlereagh’s favorite spy, or so my sources tell me.” Harcourt’s shrewd eyes held an odd look akin to respect. “Thought you were in Vienna.”
“Your ‘sources’ are behind times, sir. I hope you haven’t overpaid them. I’ve been back in England these three days.”
To Tristan’s surprise, Harcourt threw back his leonine head and roared with laughter. “Insolent pup. But you’re right. My high-priced informants will find their pay packets a bit thin this quarter.”
His attention turned to Garth. “And what have you to say, my lord? Or do you let your brother do your talking for you?”
Garth pulled himself up to his full height, which was still a head shorter than Tristan and shorter yet than the giant cit. “I speak for myself, sir, when I have something to say. At the moment, you have me at a disadvantage, all things considered.”
Harcourt tapped a stack of papers on his desk with the tip of his index finger. “A considerable disadvantage, I’d say. But sit down and we’ll talk about it.” He indicated two chairs and promptly seated himself behind his desk. “No use trying to wrap it up pretty. Your father was the sorriest excuse for a man as ever God created. The only thing worse than a drunk and a womanizer is a card cheat—and he was all three. Left you in the suds, he did, and that’s a fact.”
Tristan exchanged a telling look with Garth at this cit’s audacity, but there was no disputing the truth of his words.
Harcourt leaned across the desk. “Don’t suppose you have any idea how you’re going to take care of your mother and sister, not to mention the poor souls starving to death in those broken-down tenants’ cottages on your estates.
The shocked silence in the small room was as thick and cold as a London fog.
“Just as I thought,” Harcourt said, as if by remaining mute, Garth had as much as admitted he had no idea how to solve his financial problems himself. The big man sat back in his chair, a satisfied look on his weathered face. “Very well, my lord. Here’s my proposition, plain and simple. I’ll cancel out the mountain of debts you inherited and advance you enough blunt to put your estates on a paying basis…providing you agree to two things.
Tristan met Garth’s look of astonishment with one of his own. They had discussed a dozen possible outcomes to this meeting during their long brandy-soaked night; an offer to put the Earl of Rand’s affairs in order was not one of them. As one, they turned to face the man behind the desk. “What two things?” they asked in unison.
“First, my lord, I want you’re promise you’ll work at restoring your estates yourself—not simply turn the task over to a bailiff. I’ve no use for a man, titled or not, who’s afraid of work.”
Garth swallowed hard, obviously choking on the pride he was forced to swallow. “I shall devote every waking hour to bringing things about if we come to an agreement.” He swallowed again. “My interests are of a more sober mien than those of my father.”
“Not right off you won’t,” Harcourt declared. “I’ve a more important piece of work needs doing on the Continent and it just occurred to me you’re the very one to do it, since my sources tell me you know France better than most Frenchies.” He raised a hand to forestall Tristan’s objections. “It won’t take but a fortnight or so, and since this whole scheme with your brother hinges on it, I’d advise you to think twice before you turn it down.”
Tristan gritted his teeth. He didn’t like the implied threat in Harcourt’s words, but he had no choice; for his family’s sake, he had to listen.
Harcourt leaned his elbows on the desk and tented his fingers. “It’s like this. My daughter, Madelaine, is living in Lyon with her maternal grandfather, a Frenchie count, but the old tartar sent word he’s dying and he doesn’t want Maddy left alone when he sticks his spoon in the wall. Well, neither do I, so I want you to go get her. I’ll send you to Calais in one of my brigs, and my captain will wait there while you see Maddy safely from Lyon—a task that should be relatively easy for a man with your background.”
Tristan gave a noncommittal grunt, deciding it prudent to hear the rest of this cit’s demands before he made any promise.
Harcourt then turned to Garth. “Which brings us to the second term in our proposed contract, my lord. What I want from you in exchange for saving your bacon is a written promise that once Maddy gets here, you’ll make her your countess.”
The faint, hopeful color that had bloomed in Garth’s face for a few moments receded like the tide vacating a beach, leaving him as pale and gray as a piece of sun-bleached driftwood. “You want me to mar-marry your daughter? I have never met your daughter.”
“Of course you haven’t. Haven’t seen her myself for fifteen years. Her mother went haring back to France, with Maddy in tow, once she found the titled biddies of the London ton wouldn’t give a common merchant’s wife the time of day. I’d but one ship then, which I captained myself, so I hadn’t the wherewithal to do anything about it. The situation is different now. I’m a rich man and I’m determined no door in London, including that of Carlton House, will ever be closed in Maddy’s face. And if spending a fortune to see a title tacked onto her name is what it takes to ensure that, then so be it.”
Harcourt pounded his fist on the desk with such force his inkwell skipped to within an inch of the edge. The sound drove through Tristan’s aching head like a team and four. Only by sheer willpower did he keep from moaning aloud.
He could see Garth was beyond worrying about appearances. Eyes closed, he pressed his shaking fingers to his temples, as if the combination of Harcourt’s bizarre proposition and the after-effects of too much brandy had pushed him beyond his limits.
Harcourt waved the stack of vowels before Garth’s nose. “Take my offer, my lord. Or leave it and suffer the consequences. You may be the pick of the litter, but you’re not the only impoverished nobleman in England.”
Garth groaned.
“How many men in your situation get the chance to put their affairs in order and take on a fine strapping wife to boot?”
“Strapping?” Garth echoed faintly. His eyes were closed and his complexion had taken on an oddly bilious tinge.
Tristan eyed his whey-faced brother nervously, but Harcourt didn’t appear to notice that anything was amiss. “So then, what do you say lad?” he demanded in a hearty baritone that reverberated through the small room like a clanging gong. “Is it agreed then—a fortune for a leg shackle
?”
Garth cast one pathetic glance in Tristan’s direction. His eyes held the furtive look of a fox that, trapped by hounds, knows his fate is sealed. “Agreed,” he said in a strangled voice and as Tristan watched in horror, the Fifth Earl of Rand fell forward onto his knees beside Caleb Harcourt’s desk and, clutching his high-crowned beaver like a basin, cast up his accounts.
Madelaine Harcourt had no way of knowing if the person pounding on the door of her grandfather’s small house was friend or foe—a fellow Royalist come to help care for the dying aristocrat or a Bonapartist bent on revenge toward the emperor’s most outspoken critic.
Since the first rumor of the Corsican’s escape from Elba reached Lyon five days earlier, bands of men sympathetic to the emperor had been gathering on the street corners talking excitedly of his return to power. Today, with the news that he and his loyal grognards had reached Grenoble, these same men had taken to roaming the streets, smashing the windows of shops and homes of known Royalists. Her grandfather’s butler cum valet had already deserted his post, as had the sour old woman who had doubled as the housekeeper and Madelaine’s chaperone for the past six years. She could scarcely blame them.
Silently, she crept to her chamber window, which overlooked the front entrance of the house, pushed aside the drape, and peered out. Darkness had fallen, but the man hammering on the door was clearly outlined in the bright light of the moon. He was tall—much too tall to be one of the French aristocrats who frequented the house.
For long, terrified minutes, she stood pressed against the wall until finally the pounding ceased and she released the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. With a sigh of relief, she hurried across the narrow hall to where her grandfather lay propped high on his pillows. His eyes were closed, his breathing horribly labored, his aquiline features waxy with the look of death.
She felt sick with grief. Grandpère had always been so fierce, so proud, so impossibly autocratic. She couldn’t bear to see him like this, clinging hour after torturous hour to one small spark of life—stubbornly refusing to bow to the grim reaper until the moment he himself chose to die. Bending over him, she placed a tender kiss on his wrinkled forehead.
Without warning, the sound of breaking glass shattered the silence of the house. Madelaine’s heart leapt in her breast. Dear God! The intruder had smashed a pane in the French doors. Even now he must be reaching in to turn the knob and gain entry.
Desperately, she looked about her for a weapon to defend herself. Her gaze lighted on a marquetry chest standing against one wall and she remembered that, among other things, it contained the velvet-lined box in which her grandfather’s dueling pistols were stored. They weren’t loaded, but the intruder had no way of knowing that. Running over to the chest and opening it she lifted one of the lethal-looking firearms from the box and grasped it in both her hands.
“Is anyone here? Answer me if you are.” There was no menace in the intruder’s voice, but his strong guttural accent was that of the Paris streets. Madelaine’s pulse quickened; she took a tighter grasp on her weapon.
Moments later, a man in a dusty riding jacket and buckskin pants loomed in the chamber doorway, his head just skimming the lintel. Unruly black hair framed his thin, brigand’s face and his strange, pale eyes raked her with a look that nearly buckled her knees.
“Arretez-vous! One step more and I will shoot.” Madelaine heard the tremor in her own voice, but she managed to keep the pistol pointed at his chest, though it waved drunkenly in her trembling fingers.
“Mademoiselle Harcourt?” The stranger eyed the pistol warily. “Mon Dieu! Watch where you’re pointing that thing.” He looked again and his mouth relaxed in a wolfish grin that raised the hair on the back of Madelaine’s neck. “The next time you threaten to shoot someone, mademoiselle, you might consider cocking the pistol.”
With a sudden movement that took her completely unaware, he whipped the weapon out of her grasp with his left hand and laid it down on the top of a nearby bureau. “Also these things are generally more effective when loaded. Like this one is.” He raised his right hand and Madelaine found herself staring at a small but lethal-looking pistol. “A word of advice. Never point an unloaded gun at a man. If I had meant you harm, you would already be dead.”
Madelaine backed up until she was pressed against her grandfather’s bedstead. “Who…who are you?” she stammered, her heart pounding. “What do you want?”
Tristan returned the pistol to the waistband of his trousers and studied the woman questioning him before he answered. His lips parted in an unconscious smile. If this dark-haired waif with the boyish figure and huge, frightened eyes was Caleb Harcourt’s “fine, strapping daughter,” she was a far cry from the lusty peasant he had expected to find. He looked again. Unless he was mistaken, she was also a good inch or two taller than her intended bridegroom
He gave a cursory bow. “I’m Tristan Thibault. I have come in answer to a request from le Comte de Navareil.”
“What tale is this, monsieur? My grandfather maintains no correspondence with Paris these days.”
“Paris?” The stranger raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Ah, my accent!” He shrugged. “Be assured, mademoiselle, I come not from Paris, but London.”
Before Madelaine Harcourt could comment on this bit of information, the occupant of the bed behind her stirred. “Who’s that with you, ma petite fille?” a voice asked weakly. “Was I dreaming or did I hear him say he comes from London?”
Tristan stared past the wild-eyed young woman to find a frail, silver-haired old man with a nose like an eagle’s beak and deep-set eyes that searched him out in the shadowed room.
“You heard right, sir.” He stepped to the foot of the bed. “I have been sent by Caleb Harcourt to find his daughter and take her back to London as you petitioned.”
“Dieu soit loué, my prayers have been answered in time. Take her, monsieur. Take her to safety before the Corsican fiend reaches Lyon—before his evil minion, Fouché, takes revenge on the granddaughter of his old enemy.”
“No, Grandpère! Do not speak so.” Madelaine Harcourt grasped her grandfather’s thin hand. “Do not ask me to leave you and go to a father who has never wanted me. You will only force me to disobey you—something I have never before done.”
The old man’s smile was tender and his rheumy eyes glistened with moisture. “It is not you who leave me, ma petite fille, but I who leave you—and where I go, you cannot follow.”
He grimaced, obviously in pain, and his hawkish features took on an even more ghastly pallor. “The Anglais who is your father does want you. He always has. Have you never wondered who provided the funds that kept us in comfort all the years of Bonaparte’s rule, when most Royalists were destitute?”
He gasped for breath. “Forgive me,” he murmured, his voice fading to a whisper. “I deceived you about your father because I feared I would lose you if you knew the truth. It was your foolish mother who was at fault, not her English merchant.”
Madelaine Harcourt raised his withered hand to her lips. “It does not matter. I would never have left you anyway.”
Her words were lost on the crusty old aristocrat. As Tristan watched, the fingers clutching his granddaughter’s hand fell slack, his eyes drifted shut, and with a final heart-wrenching sigh, he relinquished his tenuous hold on life.
Chapter Two
Madelaine Harcourt threw herself across the inert form of her grandfather in a paroxysm of grief that totally unnerved Tristan. He crept silently from the room, leaving her to grieve in private, but the sound of her racking sobs haunted him long after he could no longer hear them. It was obvious she sincerely loved the old man and felt his death had brought her world tumbling down about her ears—much as his had tumbled some twenty years before when he’d witnessed the accident that had left his poor mother crushed beneath the wheels of a runaway carriage. Even now he could feel the bewildering emptiness, the searing pain that had scarred his young soul forever.
He stood at the window of the small first-floor salon and stared into the darkness of the winter night, wondering how he was supposed to handle this latest development in this supposedly simple assignment Caleb Harcourt had blackmailed him into taking.
So far, everything that could possibly go wrong had done so. First, that monumental fly in Europe’s ointment, Napoleon Bonaparte, had had the ill grace to escape from Elba and land at Provence on the very day Harcourt’s frigate put Tristan off at Calais. Word of the Corsican’s return had spread like wildfire across the country and thousands of former soldiers had donned their war-stained uniforms and flocked to the emperor’s cause. Over and over, as he rode the long miles south to Lyon, Tristan heard the cry, “Down with the hated Bourbons! Vive I’empereur!” Caleb Harcourt couldn’t have picked a worse time to send a former British spy into France to retrieve his Royalist daughter. They would need the devil’s own luck to make it safely back to England.
Then he’d scarcely finished introducing himself to Madelaine Harcourt’s grandfather when the old fellow closed his eyes and breathed his last. Now he must convince a grief-stricken young woman to put her life in the hands of a complete stranger representing a father she had not seen in fifteen years.
“Monsieur Thibault?” Madelaine Harcourt’s voice interrupted his musings, and he turned to find her in the doorway of the salon. She was deathly pale and her eyelids were red and swollen, but all things considered, she looked remarkably composed. The lady was obviously made of sterner stuff than her fragile appearance would lead one to suppose.
“I will need your help, monsieur.” Her voice sounded flat, devoid of all expression. “I have wrapped my grandfather in his quilt, but he is too heavy for me to carry alone.”
“Carry? Where are you planning to carry him, mademoiselle?”
The Misguided Matchmaker Page 2
