The Captive (8 page)

“What?” The question left Gilly’s lips unbidden.

“I ate with my left hand.”

“You hold the reins with it.”

“A single rein. I can’t ride in a double bridle. I don’t trust it for that.”

“I’ve never understood why a horse must be made to suffer two bits at once,” Gilly said. “As sensitive as the mouth is, one ought to suffice. You won’t tell me about your afternoon, will you?”

“It was unremarkable. If you’ll excuse me?”

And just like that, he was on his feet. No explanation for his delay, no apology for keeping the household guessing, no effort at making conversation.

“I was
worried
about you. I’ll be ready to leave for Severn at first light,” Gilly said, though she was having doubts about the wisdom of that plan.

“As will I.” He went back to the bed of daisies and chose another victim. This one he held in his right hand, tapping against the knuckles of his left as the evening shadows gathered around him. “Prinny thanked me.”

Gilly bit into one of the strawberries His Grace had disdained to eat. “He ought to thank you. You served long and well.”

“He said…” Mercia tapped the daisy against his own nose. “He said the way I’d been treated was useful for shaming the French into concessions at the negotiating table. Useful.”

“You were treated disgracefully. Shall you mutilate that flower too?” Gilly didn’t want him to. Yes, the daisies were profuse, and only daisies, but she didn’t want him to indulge in pointless destruction.

He looked down, his expression unreadable in the gloom. Then he strolled over to the table and tucked the flower behind Gilly’s ear. His fingers grazed her jaw, probably unintentionally, but it was a sweet touch. Gentle and soothing, unlike His Grace’s mood.

“My thanks for the food. I’m sorry you were worried. I’ll try not to give you cause for it again. You’ll excuse me if I don’t join you for dinner.”

He sauntered back out the gate, into the darkening alley, off on God knew what ducal errand, while Gilly ate the last of his strawberries and wondered if anything she’d endured in her marriage to Greendale could be considered
useful
.

Gilly had grown too used to the quiet of the countryside, and her attempts to sleep in Mercia’s town house were fruitless. The streets grew quieter after dark, true, but the remaining sounds compelled the attention for being more isolated.

Then too, she was anxious. Anxious on Lucille’s behalf, hoping the duke’s reunification with his daughter lifted the child’s spirits, and hoping the child might lift the duke’s spirits.

Gilly tossed back the bedclothes and found her black silk wrapper. Was there any consolation to the new widow greater than black silk? She gathered her shawl around her shoulders and made her way to the library, intent on selecting a book for the next day’s journey. She could read in coaches, in short doses anyway.

Except even in this small task, His Grace had to frustrate her.

She rapped softly on the open library door—startling a man who cuddled up with knives was not well advised.

“Come.” He uttered the word without looking up from his desk.

“Good evening, Your Grace.”

He set his pen down with the long-suffering air of a composer interrupted by the charwoman. “I thought you were a footman coming to trim wicks and build up the fire.”

“Sorry to disappoint. What are you working on?”

“A report.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Obviously.”

His foul humor was so palpable Gilly wanted to stomp from the room. No wonder Helene had despaired of the man, despite his former good looks.

“I came to find a book, something soothing to quiet my mind, something to take with me on the journey to Severn.” She crossed to the bookshelves, which held more volumes than she could count in a month. “Shouldn’t you be in bed if we’re to be awake at first light?”

“Sleep eludes me as well.” He was up, prowling around, then poking at the fire.

“When Greendale died, the physician left me with enough sleeping draughts to put down a small herd of horses. I tried not to be offended.”

“He didn’t mean for you to use them all at once.” Now he tidied up his desk, capping the inkwell, opening and closing drawers.

“I’ve never been certain. Have you read all these books?”

“The ones in Latin, English, or French, probably. My Greek is rusty.”

“Then you might show a hint of good manners—nothing binding or impressive—and help me select a book I can take to bed with me and read in the coach tomorrow.”

“Poetry,” he said, banging a drawer loudly. He came over to stand beside her, which meant they were in some proximity, the rows of shelves positioned to accommodate one person browsing, not two. “Here.”

He took down a volume of Blake. “Bucolic, but with occasional nods toward the profound.”

“Read me a few lines.”

His scent came to her, rosemary and sandalwood, fresh, a little piney, male, and clean—even at this hour.

Had he eaten anything since he’d disappeared into the mews in the last of the day’s light?

“‘Like a fiend in a cloud, with howling woe,’” he quoted, “‘After night I do crowd, And with night will go.’ From the
Poetical Sketches
.”

“Not very soothing. Try something else, and this time read it, please, do not draw upon the gloomy reaches of your memory.” She leaned back against the bookshelf, crossed her arms, and closed her eyes, the better to hear the beauty of the poetry and ignore the grouch reading it.

“‘He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, and mocks my loss of liberty…’ I cannot read this.”

He held out the book, and Gilly would have bet her favorite silk shawl he’d never opened it. He’d been quoting all the while. The bleakness in his eyes was unnerving.

“Today? When I did not come home?” he said, staring at the little book. “I was waiting.”

He was a foot taller than Gilly, battle hardened, and capable of meanness. He’d killed for King and Country, and endured all manner of privations in captivity, but at that moment, he was…uncertain.

“What were you waiting for?”

“The park…it wasn’t safe.”

She took the poetry from his grasp. “Explain this to me, Your Grace. I do not take your meaning.”

“I rode to Carlton House through the parks, to avoid the streets, the shops, the people…at midday, nobody’s in the park.”

“And later in the day, everybody who is anybody is in the park.” She took his arm and steered him back toward the fire, which was roaring merrily, thanks to his attentions. “You did not want to deal with the awkward questions and the well-meant stupidity.”

He frowned down at her. “I have underestimated you.”

“Most do. I prefer it that way.”

“As a widow, you’re subjected to awkward questions too, aren’t you?”

Gilly wanted to see his eyes, because she sensed his inquiry had hidden, gnarled roots, so she took a seat on the sofa and patted the place beside her.

Had Helene intended that her husband be left with awkward questions? Had she grown weary of the awkward questions related to his captivity? Was that why she’d made the choices she had?

“One isn’t supposed to be a happy widow,” Gilly said, certain in her bones Mercia would not judge her for the admission. “One might be merry, after several years’ bereavement, or peaceful, or content, but not happy. Perhaps you’ll consider me unnatural and limit my influence on Lucille, but I am a happy widow.”

He settled beside her, gingerly, as if the sofa were too hot to sit upon, and Gilly heard the poem again in her head:
“He stretches out my golden wing, and mocks my loss of liberty.”
“What was your report about, Your Grace?”

“Nothing of any import, old army business.”

“Then you won’t mind if I sit here and read for a bit while you work on it?”

His expression shifted, as if he were frowning because he was thinking too hard, not because she’d displeased him.

“I’ll be as quiet as a mouse,” she said, opening the book to a random page. “I can keep quiet, you know, when I choose to.”

“I’ve written enough for now.”

“Then find your own book,” she said, leafing through hers. “Find an old friend, and renew your acquaintance.”

He wandered off while Gilly chose a nice long poem about flowers and skies and lambs. She would not have remarked his return, except this time, he sat down like he didn’t expect the sofa to collapse under his weight. He sat close enough that the fold of his dressing gown casually draped over the hem of Gilly’s shawl.

He held another small volume, but stared into the fire, the book unopened in his hands. When Gilly yawned a half hour later and looked up again, he hadn’t moved in the entire time she’d been reading.

“I’m off to seek my bed. You should do likewise, Your Grace. Morning will be here before we’re ready for it.”

“I don’t advise rousing me from my slumbers,” he said, eyeing his book. “I take exception to violations of my privacy.”

“I do apologize, and it won’t happen again. Next time, you’ll wedge a chair under the door in addition to locking it, won’t you?” She rose and put her book on his desk.

He got to his feet as well and laid his unread book beside her Blake. “If there were a next time, which there won’t be, I’d wedge a chair under the door and push a wardrobe behind the chair.”

“I understand.”

And if she meant anything she’d ever said to him, she meant those two words.

He must have sensed this, because he studied her for some moments. Perhaps because she’d been married to Greendale, perhaps because she was tired and the day had been fraught, Gilly did not divine the duke’s intent until the very last instant.

He framed her jaw with one large, callused palm and held his hand to her skin long enough for the heat of him to seep into her.

“When I rode home today, what I put in my mind that I looked forward to,” he said softly, “what saw me past the riots and mayhem and enemy patrols in my mind, was this.” He turned his head at an angle, pressed his lips to hers, and drew back half an inch. “You brought me home today, my lady. For that you have my thanks.”

He kissed her again, on the mouth, then in the center of her forehead, the slow, deliberate
reverence
of his gestures as stunning as it was surprising.

For one bewildered moment, Gilly held his face against her hand, then left him standing alone in the shadowed library. Before she was halfway up the stairs, she was crying for no reason she could discern.

***

“I did not keep you alive for years on that godforsaken rock pile, despite the English battering at our door, Anduvoir wreaking his intrigues, the garrison whores in constant uproar, bad rations, disease, and cold, for you to throw it all away by taking ship for England.”

Michael Brodie was the son of a wealthy Scot, though he’d found it prudent to tend toward his mother’s Irish side of the family when in France. Robert Girard, as he chose to be called, suspected dear Michael had some bulldog ancestry in his lineage too—the affectionate variety of course.

“Michel, I have a desire to see once again the land of my father’s people. You needn’t accompany me.”

Michael’s green eyes lit with a zeal that boded ill for French colonels lacking an instinct for self-preservation.

“This has to do with that damned duke, doesn’t it?”

“No, it does not.” Girard waved the serving girl away, meaning no insult to the yeasty, frothy, tepid
weissbier
favored at the rathskeller. “My decision to travel has to do with being weary to my soul, and England being some place where the government will not seek to kill me, not officially. Proper fellows that they are, they have sent me letters to this effect.”

In fact, the War Office had extended informal clemency to him, in order that France might offer the same courtesy to others whom the cessation of hostilities had left in delicate straits.

Michael waved the girl over, and because he was a good-looking devil who never bothered the ladies, over she came. That they spoke English also didn’t hurt, the English being the most solvent among the nationalities thronging Vienna of late.

“
Drei
biere, bitte.
”

“Michael, are you attempting to inebriate yourself with beer?” For it would take more time than Girard had to see that accomplished, and more than three beers.

“Two of them are to dump over your fool head. You will die a painful, bloody death in England. The English gentlemen are great ones for blowing each other’s brains out or sticking one another in the lung or the gut on the so-called field of honor. The higher their title, the more likely they are to lack sense.”

“I have had enough of violence, thank you sincerely.” And to be honest, the welfare of a certain duke did also trouble him. Mercia had stayed alive for one reason—to kill his captors—and a man with such an agenda bore careful watching.

Revenge could keep a man alive against all odds, but it took a heavy toll on a fellow’s common sense.

And thus Girard did, indeed, still worry about his favorite English duke.

The beers were delivered by the smiling, handsome little brunette lady who looked about sixteen years old. They all looked about sixteen years old anymore.

Michael tipped generously, assuring both good service and privacy, and watched the serving maid as she scurried across the room in answer to a bellowed summons.

“You have a sister about her age, don’t you, Michel?”

Michael left off watching the girl and took the kind of prissy sip of his ale that suggested the foaming head of the drink was a damned nuisance. “If you’re going to England, I’m bloody well going with you.”

He ignored the question thoroughly, revealing that the sister—sisters, in fact, there being more than one—were a sensitive topic.

“The English government will not officially try to kill me,” Girard mused, “but that leaves a good dozen Englishmen who will take offense at my continued existence, your damned duke among them.”

“He’s home now, Mercia is,” Michael said, hunching over his beer stein. With his blond hair and size, he fit in easily among the locals, but his conscience meant he was not at all compatible with the prevailing sense of opportunism and self-interest loose in an otherwise lovely city.

“You should go home too, my dear, though I will allow you to join me as far as England. I get good service when I drag you about with me.”

“Are you going to England to kill him?”

“I told you, I have had enough of violence, and I am not given to dissembling,” Girard said, shoving to his feet and leaving Michael with his three beers. He tossed some coins on the table and draped his greatcoat over his shoulders, because even in summer, Viennese evenings could be chilly, and weapons could benefit from concealment.

“You don’t need violence to kill a man,” Michael said, sitting back, one big hand wrapped around his drink. “As far as the English are concerned, Robert Girard doesn’t even need a reason. He kills and torments for pleasure.”

“None of them died, Michel. You alone can vouch for the fact that none of them died at my hands, though now,” Girard said, settling his hat on his head, “it appears I continue living, without a reason to justify that either.”

He took his leave, lest Michael’s capacity for impromptu sermonizing overtake him, though the fellow had a point: Mercia’s situation required resolution, and to see to that, somebody would have to die. On his good days, Girard rather preferred it not be him, and on his bad days…

On his bad days, he could think of no place he’d rather die than merry olde England.

***

“Come.” Lady Greendale took Christian by his ungloved left hand and pulled him toward Severn’s main staircase. “You’ll hide in the library, or with your stewards or your correspondence, and that child has waited weeks and weeks to see her long-lost papa. She needs to see you’re alive with her own eyes.”

“I beg your pardon.” Christian planted his feet, stopping her forward progress—barely. The countess was surprisingly strong for her size, and apparently suffering no ill effects from having endured his kisses the previous night. “I would prefer not to be dragged up to the nursery like some errant scholar come downstairs to peek at Mama in her evening finery.”