The Captive (33 page)

“Listen to him, Christian,” Gilly said. “Marcus put the French up to capturing you. I suspect Marcus let Girard know you were spoiling for a chance to kill him.”

“Marcus is my heir,” Christian spat. “You’re both spouting nonsense.”

“Not nonsense,” Girard said. “Your cousin dealt not with me, but with Anduvoir. I commanded a garrison. I did not take captives. They were brought to me by my superiors, you among them. Your circumstances were not…” He scowled, as if the English words had evaporated with the low-lying mist. “They were not right. You were betrayed, and to allow you to leave captivity in wartime would have been to sign your death warrant. I agreed to meet you today, yes, but to warn you, not kill you.”

The Frenchman was trying to mitigate his role in Christian’s torment, though he was also, perhaps, telling the truth.

In her peripheral vision, Gilly saw Stoneleigh edge into the clearing. He led Chessie, who’d been pressed into service in the traces of a sleek, well-sprung curricle. A tense silence spread, broken only when Chessie shook his head, making his bit jingle.

Christian’s gaze shifted to take in his horse.

“Think, Your Grace,” Girard said patiently, wearily. “I was your enemy, and for that you may kill me, of course, but I am not your enemy now, and I did not kill you on the many occasions when the opportunity presented itself.”

Gilly hated Girard, but Christian was listening to him—
even
to him—and the swords were safely back in the hands of the seconds.

“He had my horse,” Christian said softly. “
Marcus
had
my
personal
mount.
The last thing I recall of the day I was taken captive is Chessie being led off, a French private on his back. I wished to God I’d at least freed my horse before I was captured. And then Marcus had my horse, my personal mount…”

A muscle in his jaw ticked twice.

“Bloody goddamned right I had your horse.” Marcus pushed through the bushes on the far side of the clearing. “I nearly had your wife too, but she was too fond of her tiara. She didn’t appreciate that I’d had you taken captive, and her unfortunate accident with the laudanum was easy to orchestrate after that. Providence took care of the boy—never let it be said I preyed on a child.”

Gilly’s whole being suffused with revulsion at the sight of Marcus, the embodiment of the same casual violence her husband had harbored, in a yet more malignant form.

“So you’ll kill me in cold blood, before witnesses,” Christian mused, “when I have no comparable weapon?” He took a fistful of Gilly’s cape, pulling her behind him and into St. Just’s arms, Stoneleigh’s curricle beside her.

“
He
was supposed to kill you in France,” Marcus said, jerking the barrel of an ugly horse pistol toward Girard. “Anduvoir promised me he’d arrange for that. Then I learned the generals always sent their best prizes off to Girard for special handling. I was a fool to trust a bloody Frog with something so important. Then you had to go and outlast the entire war and take up with her.” The gun barrel waved toward Gilly, and Christian
and
Girard
both shifted to step in front of her.

“So you tried to engineer Gilly’s death,” Christian said, “and you failed at that too.”

“Of course I tried to kill her. If she dropped a brat within a year of Greendale’s death, I would have been disinherited of the personal fortune. A male child would have seen me lose the title as well. The alternative was to live as a pauper at Greendale and hope you hadn’t taken an intimate fancy to her.”

“Marcus, you cannot prevail here,” Christian said. “Too many witnesses can testify to your violent schemes.”

“But with you gone, I will be tried in the Lords, and they never convict one of their own. Besides, who will take the word of a reviled Frenchman, a Scottish traitor, or a lawyer over that of a peer of the realm?”

Marcus raised his pistol, the muzzle aimed squarely at Christian.

Rage unlike anything Gilly had felt toward her deceased spouse suffused her. Marcus had known exactly the circumstances Greendale had forced on her. Marcus had destroyed Christian’s family, preyed on Lucy, and he intended now to do
murder
in cold blood—

Gilly did not think. Her hand closed around Stoneleigh’s buggy whip, an elegant length of black leather with a corded lash several feet long. She darted around the men shielding her, raised her arm, and brought the whip down with all her strength across Marcus’s face.

“For Christian, damn you,” she spat, raising her arm again. “For Helene, for Evan—”

Nothing had ever, ever felt as right as striking Marcus with all her might, as seeing outrage and disbelief twist his handsome features while she raised three angry red welts on his cheeks and nose.

She, Gilly, the least powerful of his present adversaries, would hold him accountable for his crimes. The
bliss
of striking him, of hurting him when he’d planned harm to so many, gave her endless strength and a towering indifference to her own fate.

He shifted, of course, away from Christian, to defend himself against Gilly’s whip, and his aim shifted as well.

Between landing the third blow and raising her arm again, Gilly perceived that she would in fact die. The ugly snout of the horse pistol took aim at her, the distance was a handful of feet, and she would in the next moment breathe her last.

So be it. Christian and Lucy would live, Marcus’s crimes would be exposed, and Gilly would die protecting those she loved.

Fighting
for
them.

A shot rang out, obscenely loud in the cool morning air, and the scent of sulfur wafted on the breeze. Gilly stood clutching the whip, inventorying her body for pain, shock, anything.

Girard blew smoke from the end of a pistol, and surprise bloomed on Marcus’s face amid the lacerations Gilly had given him.

While a bright red stain spread over the center of his chest.

He looked at the wound then at Girard, before crumpling on the ground in a heap.

Gilly dropped the whip and wrapped her arms around Christian, while Stoneleigh turned to quiet the horses, and St. Just approached the body to lay his hand on Marcus’s neck.

“Dead before he hit the ground,” St. Just said, closing Marcus’s eyes with curious gentleness.

Girard passed the gun to his second, much as he might have passed a spent fowling piece over in the middle of a pheasant shoot.

“This does not reconcile our accounts. I understand that, Duke.” Girard ambled over to Marcus’s prone form and extracted something from his watch pocket. “I am, however, rid of a portion of my guilt.”

“Tell him to
be
silent
,” Gilly said, pressing her nose to Christian’s chest. “I cannot bear to hear his stupid, French-accented voice. I am not myself, and I cannot answer for my actions. Christian, I struck Marcus, I gloried in striking Marcus. I would still be beating him if—” She couldn’t talk and get her breath, and still she held on to Christian.

“Gilly, hush. Please hush. You’re safe.”

The violence reverberated in her, part horror, part surprise, and also—God help her, God help her—part relief.

“Hold me. Don’t ever let me go.”

“I have you.” Christian’s chin came to rest against her temple, and his fingers made slow circles on her nape. He pitched his next words to a whisper. “Unless you need to be sick. Most soldiers are, after their first battle. I certainly was, even though, like you, my first battle was a resounding victory.”

She canvassed her physical state, and if anything, felt as if she’d purged herself of a toxin. “I need you to hold me, and tell Mr. Stoneleigh to retrieve his whip.”

Heat and cold shivered through her, weakness, and wonder.

She could fight back. If she had to, if she ever again found herself endangered,
she
could
fight
back
.

A woman who could fight back could manage to stand unassisted, though Christian only turned loose of her enough to dab at her cheeks with his white handkerchief.

“Apologies for the intrusion,” Girard said. “Mercia, I believe this is yours.” He tossed what looked like a blue-and-gold signet ring to St. Just. “And, my lady, you do not know the lengths I traveled to keep your duke alive when my superiors clamored to have him quietly executed or worse.

“I sent the horse to that one”—Girard gestured toward Marcus—“thinking the English would solve the puzzle of how Mercia was taken, but the English did not make the attempt. I suspect the late colonel opined to his superiors that such diligence was unnecessary. I had a letter sent through the diplomatic channels, which I’m sure was dismissed at Easterbrook’s urging. I instigated rumor, I—”

Gilly glowered at Girard, for his litany had a pleading quality, as if he longed for Christian to absolve him of his trespasses, when Gilly longed to take a buggy whip to him.

She remained bundled against her duke, as a nasty insight wiggled past her ire: at no time had Christian described Girard as a man who delighted in violence for its own sake, while she, under certain circumstances, apparently possessed that trait.

And was not ashamed of it—just yet.

“Why keep me alive?” Christian asked.

Girard arranged the two silver foils in their case and closed the lid.

“For two reasons. First, I know what it is to be in dire circumstances, far from home, with no good options. I was a boy when the Peace of Amiens stranded me among my mother’s people in France. My choices were to join the English captives or, eventually, to join the French army—to kill my father’s people or be held prisoner by my mother’s. Delightful options,
non
? Your choices were no better—treason or torture—and yet you found a way to prevail with your honor intact. I respected your tenacity. I was inspired by it, in fact.”

Girard spoke softly, much as Christian had weeks ago when Gilly had first barged into the ducal parlor, dreading the confrontation even as she handed a duke of the realm orders.

And while part of Gilly wanted to drag Christian away from the sunlit clearing, another part of her ached for a boy—not a cavalry officer, a boy—who’d fallen victim to the pervasive injustice of war.

Girard turned his face up to the sun slanting through the trees. Viewed objectively, he was a handsome man, and, Gilly also admitted—grudgingly—a man who bore the marks of a soul-deep exhaustion.

“You should also know Anduvoir caused significant awkwardness by capturing a duke who was quite obviously an officer in possession of a uniform,” Girard went on. “And he further humiliated himself by failing to extract any intelligence from you whatsoever. As a consequence, Anduvoir was denied every possible promotion, which prevented him from much foolishness. There is more to it, but your silence saved not only English lives, but French lives; therefore, on the peculiar abacus that passes for my moral reckoning, you were condemned to live.”

Girard’s manner was patience edged with a detachment that bore a tincture of madness—or perhaps the confessional zeal of a misguided, heathen saint.

And while Gilly could on an abstract level feel compassion for the wreck war had made of Girard, she had no wish to linger in the man’s presence.

“The other reason?” Christian asked.

Girard smiled faintly, a sad, tired caricature of what might have been a charming grin, and somewhere above, a songbird offered the day a silvery, sweet greeting. “You will have your confession of me, eh, Mercia?”

“I will have the truth.”

“You are owed that.” Girard regarded the body as he went on speaking, his accent becoming all but undetectable. “We are of an age, Your Grace. Had war not intervened, I would have started at Eton after spending time with my grandparents in France. You and I would have been in the same form, probably belonged to the same clubs, played on the same cricket team. We would have been nearly neighbors, for the St. Clair seat is less than a day’s ride from your own home. One could say your battle was my own, and you fought well enough for both of us.”

Girard looked away, but not before Gilly caught a hint of self-consciousness in his frown. Or perhaps he was bewildered to be making this confession without benefit of torture, bewildered that Christian would even listen to him.

As Gilly herself was bewildered to find a man—a flesh-and-blood man, with regrets and scars of his own—behind the beast who’d haunted Christian’s dreams.

As the bird paused in its serenade to the new day, Stoneleigh spoke up: “This Frenchman has committed murder in peacetime on English soil. Greendale’s gun was not trained on him, and Girard cannot claim he was defending his loved ones.”

Girard examined his fingernails, as if the threat of hanging was of no moment to him, and perhaps it wasn’t.

“Gilly?” Christian looped his arms around her, which was fortunate given that the state of her knees had become unreliable. “What shall be Girard’s fate?”

The big Frenchman—Englishman?—shot her a look. His green eyes were flint hard, but in them, Gilly saw…a plea, and not for freedom. For understanding, perhaps?

All she knew was that the man she loved was no longer driven by a need to do murder—and
neither
was
she
—and indirectly, she had Girard to thank for her own survival.

Also Christian’s. “His fate is up to you, Christian.”

Christian must decide for himself when the war ended and life began anew. All that remained for Gilly was to love him, regardless of his decision.

He closed his eyes and leaned on Gilly, truly leaned on her, as he had when she’d first joined his household and he’d barely been able to sleep through the night, keep down a cup of tea, or sign his name.

“Then Girard goes about his business, and I go about mine.”

“My thanks, Your Grace, for your mercy.” Girard bowed low to Gilly, collected his second, and disappeared into the morning fog.

***

“Lucy is more taken with the adventure of riding all the way up to Town with you than she is traumatized to know Marcus is dead.” Christian might have been discussing the weather, not murder most foul, and murder narrowly averted.