Unconsciously, she rubbed the spot on her palm, which still tingled from the touch of his tongue. It had never occurred to her that this Englishman with his devil eyes and temper to match might have a wife waiting for him back in London.
She wondered what kind of woman would put up with the miserable crosspatch.
She wondered what kind of woman such a care-for-nothing man would find so desirable, he would take her to wife.
She wondered what kind of magic that woman must know to turn the snarling tiger into a purring pussycat.
Chapter Four
With maddening persistence, the ceaseless clip-clop of the dobbin’s hooves punctured Tristan’s haze of exhaustion. Even half asleep, he could tell the carriage was moving much too slowly. What was the fool woman thinking of, meandering along this French country road at such a place with Bonaparte and his gronards but a few miles behind?
He turned his head and tentatively opened one eye. The seat beside him was empty, the reins looped over the frame of the carriage. Then why was the carriage moving? Instantly alert, he shot upright and found himself staring at the back of Maddy’s cropped curls as she walked beside the plodding horse, her hand on the bit.
“Hell and damnation, what are you doing?” he shouted.
She stopped in her tracks. “I should think that would be obvious,” she said, her voice sharp with indignation. “I am leading this miserable beast because once he stopped, he refused to start again unless I gave him the magic signal—which you neglected to tell me.”
“You couldn’t figure out how to flick the reins and say ‘giddyap’?” He raised a hand to forestall the angry reply he could see forming on her lips. “I know. I know. A woman of your station is not expected to learn the language of a coachman.
“Get back in the carriage,” he ordered impatiently. “We need to put some distance between the Corsican and ourselves before the day grows any older.” He watched her settle onto the seat and unconsciously smooth the rough fabric of her trousers over her knees as if it were the skirt she usually wore. It would take more than short hair and long trousers to conceal Madelaine Harcourt’s femininity. When she was in a better mood, he would remind her of that fact.
“I don’t suppose you’d care to explain why you issued the ‘magic signal’ that brought the horse to stop in the first place?” He flicked the reins to start the old dobbin off at a brisk trot.
“No.”
He could see she was embarrassed, and in spite of himself, he felt a smile crease his lips. “I thought not. It would be interesting, however, to learn why you considered walking preferable to waking me.”
Two bright spots of color bloomed in her pale cheeks. “I tried, but you would not wake. You were dreaming.” She glanced about as if to ascertain she could not be overheard. “Apparently about your wife.”
“My wife?” Tristan’s normal baritone voice rose to a stunned terror. “What in God’s name made you think I had a wife?”
Now it was Tristan’s turn to be chagrined. He wondered what he’d been dreaming and of whom—and what he could have said that she found so shocking. With a sinking feeling, he recalled some of the erotic pillow talk that Minette, his longtime mistress in Paris, had found so stimulating. Surely he hadn’t jabbered that sort of foolishness.
“I am not married,” he said tersely, and let her draw her own conclusions—which he could see she did, from the stiff, disapproving set of her mouth. Devil take it, let the prissy creature make of it what she wished. He was used to dealing with women of experience, not innocent young females who took umbrage at everything a man said, even if he was asleep when he said it.
They rode in strained silence for the next hour, neither willing to be the first to speak, until Tristan belatedly realized the dobbin was long overdue for a rest. “This old fellow needs water and sustenance, and so do we,” he said curtly. “I, for one, cannot remember my last meal.”
He brought the carriage to a stop at the edge of a small apple orchard bordering a shallow stream. Quickly, he stepped down, adjusted the annoying cassock that had twisted around his long legs, and released the horse from its harness. “I’ll lead him down to the water if you’ll be good enough to carry the knapsack,” he called over his shoulder.
Maddy didn’t deign to answer him, but by the time he’d finished watering the horse, she had spread out the carriage blanket on the bank of the stream and laid out a loaf of bread and two wedges of cheese.
The warm spring sun was at its zenith and a gentle, blossom-scented breeze rippled the shallow, crystalline water of the stream. It was a perfect day for a picnic—a day that brought back to Tristan memories of similar outings at Winterhaven in years past. But then there had been laughter and chatter, sometimes even a song or two, with Lady Sarah accompanying them on her guitar.
He and Maddy ate in absolute silence, the only sound the whisper of the breeze through the branches above them and the scolding of a pair of robins diverted from the construction of their nest by the intruding humans. The peace of this lovely spot seemed so removed from the tumult and chaos of Lyon, Tristan had to remind himself they dared not dawdle any longer than the time it took the ancient dobbin to recuperate.
Replete, he stretched out on the damp, sweet-smelling grass, his hands behind his head. His companion remained as she was, her back ramrod-straight, her face averted, gazing across the open stretch of meadow.
Wearily, he studied her unyielding profile. “If there is something bothering you, Maddy, we’d best talk about it now when there’s no one to hear a conversation ill-suited to a priest and his assistant. We have a long journey ahead of us. It will be difficult enough without the added problem of a misunderstanding based on something as silly as a dream I cannot even remember.”
She turned her head and regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Your erotic dreams are of no consequence to me, Father Tristan, regardless of whom they may be about. They merely reinforce my opinion of men in general.”
“Which apparently is rather low.” Tristan plucked a blade of grass and chewed it thoughtfully. “How can I defend myself when I have no idea what I said that so offended your innocent ears? I can only say that while I have never purported to be a saint, neither am I the devil I’ve been told I so closely resemble. I pose no threat to your virtue, Maddy, if that is what worries you.”
“What worries me, monsieur, is that all men are such devious creatures. The only thing I know for certain about them is that they are never what they appear to be.” Her voice held an unmistakable bitterness. “How can I trust what you or any other man tells me when it turns out my own grandfather has been lying to me about my father for the past fifteen years!”
So that was what had started all this. Tristan felt a twinge of annoyance. Why was it women always circled an issue like hawks before they finally got around to the crux of the problem? She had brushed off the old man’s deathbed confession with such apparent ease. Tristan had been fooled into thinking it scarcely registered with her. He could see now her grandfather’s perfidy had wounded her deeply.
“Even a total stranger could see le Comte de Navareil was a frightened old man who held on to the one person he loved in the only way he knew how,” he said gently. “That does not make what he did right. But frightened men and I dare say women, too, are often driven to things they are not proud of.”
She raised her chin in that arrogant manner he’d begun to suspect was her way of concealing her inner feelings. “So now, after fifteen years without a single word from him, I am to believe my father has cared about me all this time? That is asking a great deal, monsieur.”
“I have met Caleb Harcourt but once, when my brother, the Fifth Earl of Rand, and I called on him at his office on the London docks. I can tell you little about him except that he appeared genuinely anxious to have your returned to him—so much so he was willing to go to unbelievable lengths to accomplish it.” Tristan felt a stab of guilt at neglecting to mention the most important part of
that fateful meeting, but a promise was a promise, and Harcourt had sworn him to secrecy about his plan to marry her to Garth as soon as she set foot in London.
“What unbelievable lengths, mon…Father Tristan?”
“Tristan will do when we’re alone—and that is a question only your father can answer.”
“Very well, then answer me this, if you will. Why would an English lord be willing to risk his life to return a merchant’s daughter to him? My mother told me in what vast contempt the titled aristocrats of Angleterre hold the men of the merchant class.”
He had not meant to divulge anything about himself or about why he had been sent to retrieve her. She would learn such truths soon enough once they reached London. But with those solemn amber eyes fixed on him, he couldn’t bring himself to lie to her.
He pushed himself to a sitting position facing her. “To begin with, your father is not an ordinary merchant; he is one of the wealthiest men in all of England.”
“My father is paying you then.” She stared down her nose at him in the arrogant way of hers. “I hope, for your sake, he is paying you well.”
“I am not being paid,” Tristan said, barely managing to suppress his anger at her sarcasm. “I undertook the task of delivering you to your father because he helped my brother out of a difficult situation.”
“Your brother, the Fifth Earl of Rand, I take it. He must have gotten himself into a very difficult situation indeed for an English lord to risk traveling across France in such troubled times as these simply to repay the debt owned a wealthy merchant.”
Damn the woman. Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone? “I am not a lord of the realm,” he said in frozen accents. “I am merely the bastard son of the Fourth Earl of Rand. But the countess is a generous-hearted woman who raised me as her own, and my half-brother and sister accepted me without question—a rare thing in the environs of the British ton. There is nothing I would not do for them. Does that answer your question?”
She shook her head. “Not entirely. You have told me your reasons for undertaking the mission, but you have not explained why my father felt you were qualified to do so.”
The lady was too astute for comfort. She was not to be fobbed off with half-truths. Hell and damnation! He might as well be honest with her. It was obvious she had no intention of giving up until she’d pestered it out of him. With a muttered curse, he threw caution to the winds. “Who better than an agent of the British Foreign Office who has lived the last six years in Paris posing as a Frenchman?”
“You spied against France during the war?”
“Not against France. Against the greedy Corsican who threatened to destroy all of Europe. Surely, as a loyal Royalist, you can see the difference.”
“I fear the distinction would have been more apparent to my grandfather,” she said coldly. “He could condone anything that furthered the cause of the Bourbons.”
“But I take it you cannot.” A hot spurt of anger surged through Tristan at being judged by this prissy French baggage. “I thought all you Royalists were loyal followers if the king,” he sneered.
She shrugged. “I very much doubt that King Louis cares any less about his own welfare or any more about that of his subjects than does the emperor.”
“Well, at least we agree on one thing.” He found himself amazed that a young woman with her restrictive upbringing should be such an independent thinker.
Maddy leaned back against the trunk of the tree beneath which she sat and studied him with unnerving intensity. “Then why did you spy against Bonaparte?”
“Certainly not to put Louis the Eighteenth on the throne of France. I have great respect for both Wellington and Castlereagh, but we part company when it comes to who should govern France. After six years of living among ordinary hard-working Frenchmen, I am painfully aware of their deep and abiding hatred of the Bourbons.”
“Which is all well and good, but you still have not answered my question. Why did you become a spy?”
Tristan fixed his gaze on the bank of dirty gray clouds gathering on the horizon and pondered how to answer her question without giving her an even greater disgust of him than she already had. He did, after all, have to spend the next fortnight as her traveling companion—and barring a miracle, the rest of his life as her brother-in-law.
“The fate of England was at stake,” he said finally. “It was the only way I could use the brains God gave me to serve my country. My brother, Garth, bought his colors in the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers. That option was closed to me; the British officer corps does not look kindly on bastards. Had I chosen the military, I would have been relegated to the ranks of the common foot soldier, and my patriotism did not extend to providing mindless fodder for French cannons.”
Maddy sensed the barely leashed anger inside this dark, intense man—anger at the injustices heaped upon him because he was born on the wrong side of the blanket. Logic warned her that an angry man was a dangerous man. By the same logic, she should be trembling with fear at the thought of spending an hour alone with Tristan Thibault, much less twenty-four hours a day for the next fortnight. Instead, she felt a strange, inexplicable exhilaration.
She had never before met a man who admitted to being a spy, and she was bursting with questions she longed to ask him. “So that is why Monsieur Forli called you the British Fox. It is your code name.”
“Was my code name. I retired from my unsavory profession once Bonaparte was dispatched to Elba. This past year I have served on Lord Wellington’s staff in Paris and as Lord Castlereagh’s aide at the Congress of Vienna.” He frowned. “And that is something, which at present I heartily regret. My face and reputation are known to too many Bonapartists in prominent places, including the infamous Citizen Fouché, who has sworn to have my head. I fear your father could have made a wiser choice of escorts for you.”
Wiser perhaps, Maddy thought, but not nearly as exciting. Tristan Thibault might be moody and bad-tempered most of the time, but she doubted he would ever bore her—something every other man she had known had managed to do within half an hour of meeting him. She smiled. “It seems we have something else in common besides a distrust of the Bourbons. Fouché was a sworn enemy of my grandfather and I have probably inherited his hatred.”
Tristan frowned. “All the more reason why we should put France behind us with all possible haste.” Tossing aside his blade of grass, he rose to his feet. With a curse for the cassock that once again tangled about his legs, he strode the few steps to the grazing nag.
“Hurry up and get in the carriage,” he demanded in a voice sharp with impatience as he slipped the harness over the horse’s head. “We have tarried here far too long thanks to your everlasting questions. We need to put some miles behind us before we’re forced to take shelter from that storm gathering in the north.”
She could see he was regretting having confided so much about his colorful past and angry with himself for letting her questions plague him into doing so. His black brows drew together in a scowl fierce enough to send anyone in his path scampering in fright.
Anyone but her, that is. After fifteen years with her grandfather, she defied anyone, including this contentious Englishman, to try to intimidate her with a fit of temper.
At her own pace, she wrapped the remaining bread and cheese in the huckaback toweling Father Bertrand’s housekeeper had provided. At her own pace, she walked to the carriage and settled herself beside her companion. “You may proceed now, Father Tristan,” she said calmly and earned herself a muttered obscenity that could have curled the tail of a Paris gutter rat.
She merely folded her hands in her lap and ignored him. If she had learned anything while living with Grandpère, it was that one should always begin a new connection as one meant to go on.
Tristan wasn’t certain exactly how he had expected Maddy to react to his confessions of his illegitimacy and his former profession, but her calm acceptance caught him by surprise. She neither questioned him further nor comme
nted on what he had already divulged. In truth, she said no more than a dozen words for the balance of the long afternoon. Still, the silence that stretched between them was oddly companionable, almost as if they were old friends rather than merely two strangers thrown together by a whim of fate.
For the first two hours after their stop they traveled through orchard country. Mile upon mile of glorious pink apple blossoms and snowy plum blossoms lined both sides of the narrow road, and with the rising wind whipping through the trees, the carriage was soon awash with their silken petals. He watched them settle onto Maddy’s dark curls and smiled to himself at his fanciful turn of thought when he likened them to tiny pink and white butterflies.
Eventually, the orchards gave way to lush, green meadows dotted with grazing sheep that reminded him all too keenly of the small holding in Suffolk that Garth had once promised him. He doubted it would ever be his now. With Caleb Harcourt holding the purse strings, Garth would be in no position to be so generous to his illegitimate brother.
One of the fields was being plowed for spring planting, and the peasant farmer removed his hat and bowed as their carriage approached. “You must make the sign of the cross, Father,” Maddy whispered. “He expects you to bless his planting.” Tristan dutifully signed, relieved that his disguise seemed authentic enough to fool a believer, then crossed himself again for good measure. He was not a superstitious man, but he winged a silent apology to the papist God for his heresy just in case.
With each mile they traveled northward, the clouds grew darker and the wind stronger until at dusk Tristan felt the first drops of rain spatter against his cheeks. Night would soon be upon them. He was tired and hungry and though she made no complaint, Maddy looked near exhaustion. But search as he might, he could see no sign of an inn or posting house ahead.
Within moments, the rain started coming down in earnest and driven by the wind, pricked Tristan’s face like hundreds of needles. Maddy’s curls were soon plastered to her head and water dripped of her chin. Her coarse peasant’s shirt clung to her in places that plainly revealed she was anything but the boy she pretended to be, and Tristan’s reaction to the bewitching sight was most definitely not that of a priest. As much in self-defense as concern for her, he pulled her jacket from beneath the seat and wrapped it around her shoulders.
The Misguided Matchmaker Page 6
