The Traitor (13 page)

Strategic retreat was a tactic in every commander’s arsenal, and Sebastian resorted to it shamelessly. If Miss Danforth was in the parlor playing cards with Aunt Freddy, Sebastian was in his study, poring over pamphlets on the cultivation of herbs and flowers. If she took tea in the music room, Sebastian went riding. Avoiding her was not complicated.

Neither was it easy.

“Go to bed, Michael. If the weather holds fair, we’ll hack out at first light, and you need your rest.”

Michael set aside the volume he’d been reading—Byron?—and rose.

“You and your flowers. Are they really so much more enjoyable than your dreams would be?”

Sebastian’s dreams were usually of men in chains, spewing vile curses then begging God to take their lives, moaning for their mothers then begging Sebastian to take their lives. He had been unable to oblige them, and thus the moaning and cursing had gone on endlessly.

“My French lavender is not thriving here. I give it the best soil, the most careful pruning, the most sheltered start in life, and it does not thrive.”

Michael put Byron back up on the shelf where Aunt kept her favorite volumes. “Is your concern financial or sentimental?”

Curious question from a man who struggled mightily to hold himself above matters of sentiment. “It’s both. Go to bed. That’s a direct order,
mon
ami
.”

Michael gave an ironic salute and sauntered off into the darkness of the corridor. Only half the sconces were kept lit, another manifestation of financial worry, and the fire in the grate had been allowed to burn down to coals.

The lavender would not thrive, but it did not die either. Sebastian’s fellows at the Society muttered sympathetically, but were either too politically delicate to venture any ideas why this should be or too involved with the appearance of horticultural enthusiasm rather than the substance of it.

He tried for another hour to absorb himself in translating some old Roman doctor’s maunderings about the medicinal qualities of lavender, and was making some headway when the door creaked open.

Milly Danforth stood in the gloom, her nightclothes making her look like a pale shade. “Excuse me, my lord. I wasn’t aware the library would be occupied.”

And yet, even clad in her nightgown and dressing gown, she did not withdraw.

“Miss Danforth, hadn’t you best be in bed?”

Alone. Immediately. Dreaming virginal dreams about…her cat, perhaps?

Or Sebastian’s kiss from five days ago.

She advanced into the room, gathering a paisley shawl more closely about her shoulders. “I could not sleep. Why have you let the fire nearly go out?”

With the efficiency of a woman comfortable shifting for herself, she took up the wrought iron poker and moved the coals about, poured more coal onto the andirons, then used the bellows to inspire the flames to life. She finished by tidying up the hearth with the ash broom and dustpan, then replacing the screen and dusting her hands together.

“Perhaps I was trying to save on coal.” He would certainly hoard up images of her, auburn braid swinging down her back as she built up his fire.

She gathered the shawl around her again, a pretty blue-and-green peacock silk that contrasted with her plain bedclothes.

“Lady St. Clair knows about the jewels, my lord.”

Sebastian took a moment to fathom the mental leaps Miss Danforth had executed. “You think I let the fire go out because I need to economize, so that I might finish replacing Aunt’s jewels before she knows what I’m about?”

“She says pinchbeck and paste don’t weigh the same as gold and gems, don’t feel the same against the skin. She knows when you replace the paste with something real, and she wishes you would not bother.”

He ought to say something imperious and French, go back to his old Roman doctor, and shame Miss Danforth into leaving the room. He rose and came around the front of the desk.

“My lavender is not thriving. This keeps me awake at night, but I am like wine, Miss Danforth. I prefer darkness, cool, and calm.”

And, apparently, he preferred stubborn little redheaded women who were eager for his kisses and had middle names like Harriette.

She sidled over to the desk and appropriated his seat—an audacious move that left him with another image to memorize. “My aunts’ lavender always did well. You’ve been puzzling over this for some while.”

“How do you know?”

“This chair still holds your body heat.”

Said in all innocence, while Sebastian’s body heat decided to focus behind his falls.

“Why do you come to the library when you can’t sleep, Milly Danforth? You’ve told me reading confounds you late at night.”

She glanced up sharply, probably to see if he was insulting her. He wished he were, wished it wasn’t curiosity driving his question.

“I like to smell the books. They remind me of my aunts’ cottage.”

This admission was made as she tidied up the mess Sebastian had created on the desk’s surface. She capped the inkwell, set the quill pen in its stand, straightened his papers, and otherwise put to rights the implements of reading and writing that had caused her so much frustration in life.

“You say your aunts did well with their lavender. Did they start their seedlings in frames?”

The fire was giving off more heat, but also light, and that light played with the highlights in Miss Danforth’s hair and put a sheen on her paisley silk shawl.

“They started new plants from cuttings, not seedlings. Aunt Hy said cuttings worked better, and no, the frames were too hot for young plants.”

“What do you mean, too hot?”

She opened the ink and dipped the pen. He liked the look of her there, among his things, the pen in her hand.

“The frames are filled with fresh horse manure, and it holds heat for weeks. Aunt said it was too much heat, and too wet.”

“What has wet to do with it?”

And was this the real reason she’d come through the cold, dark house? To practice her letters when nobody would be about?

“Lavender is tough—the bugs don’t go near it, the blights and rots and such seldom bother it, but too much rain, and it falters.”

“
Rain
bothers it?” And here he’d been lavishing water on his plants, thinking to foster luxuriant growth.

She dipped the pen again. “The wetter our summers, the less the lavender grew.”

How could he have not known this? How could all those stalwart plant enthusiasts at the Society not have passed this along to him? How could his grandparents, who’d known everything about their herbs, not have imparted this signal fact?

Madam Agronomist looked up from her penmanship. “You are angry. Do not be angry at the plants, St. Clair. Would you like your seat back?”

“You lied to me, Milly Danforth. You did not come down here to sniff books. You came down here to write your name.”

And she hadn’t let Sebastian’s presence stop her.

“One can do both. You are not my conscience, St. Clair. Hadn’t you best go up to bed? One hears you clattering out of the mews before the sun is even up.”

Did one? Did
one
listen for him clattering out of the mews at such an hour?

He took his time, wandering about the room, though his objective was quite, quite fixed.

“If a man wants to gallop his horse, the early hours are the only ones suited to it. The sun comes up earlier and earlier this time of year, and the park grows crowded.”

She went back to her letters, but Sebastian was certain in his bones she was monitoring his progress as he took Byron down then replaced him on the shelf.

“You should speak to her ladyship about the jewels, sir. She is vexed with you for wasting good coin on them.”

Sebastian paused to study the fire, which was roaring along tidily.

“They are not her jewels. They are the St. Clair jewels, and she pawned them because I was off larking about in the south of France rather than tending to the duties I was conceived and born to take up.”

And she’d pawned each bracelet, tiara, and ring at Sebastian’s express instruction.

Miss Danforth considered her letters, her expression similar to when she critiqued a bouquet.

“You were off making war, you mean. Freezing in the winters, starving year ’round, earning the hatred of your countrymen on both sides of the Channel. The English considered you a traitor, while the French resented your competence.”

Damn the woman and her casual insights. “More or less. What are you doing there, Miss Danforth? Waltzing about the page unsupervised, hmm?”

As he closed the distance toward the desk, Sebastian saw that she’d known exactly what he was about, stalking her, and she’d feigned ignorance of his aims adroitly enough to keep him coming closer.

“I’m practicing. Would you like to see?”

Such boldness. He liked her boldness, but the real problem was that she trusted him. Millicent Danforth trusted him bodily, morally, logistically, every way a woman could trust a man, and her trust was a strong aphrodisiac to someone who’d arguably committed treason.

He came around the desk and sat back against it without glancing down at her writing. “Millicent, this will not do.”

“You should go to bed, then.”

“I want to take you to bed with me. I want to keep you in my bed and make passionate love to you until exhaustion claims us both, then rut on you some more when we’ve caught a decent nap.”

She wrinkled her nose. “You won’t, though. Why not?”

Damnation was too mild a fate for such a woman. “You want me to say that a gentleman’s honor forbids it. You are longing for me to give you that lie, but I am not honorable, my dear. I am the Traitor Baron, my days are numbered, and those whose loyalty I claim are put in danger.”

“Everybody’s days are numbered.” He heard her aunts speaking, heard the toughness and scorn of old women in her tones, and wanted to scare her out of her complaisance.

“I have been challenged four times in the last six months, Milly. Poison was attempted before that, and recently my horse’s bridle was tampered with. Somebody badly wants me dead. So I take you to bed and romp away a few hours with you and get a child on you. Then we must marry, and you become not the discreet dalliance of a disgraced baron, but his widow. Your social doom is sealed by that fate, and I cannot abide such a thought.”

Because she deserved better, and because Sebastian could not bear the weight of even one more regret on his heart.

***

His lordship was trying desperately to shock her, while Milly wanted desperately to impress him with her letters.

“I will not marry you,” she said. Not for all the
e
’s,
o
’s,
l
’s, and even
v
’s would she worry him like that. “I am not of an appropriate station, for one thing, and I expect somewhere there’s a rule about baronesses being able to read and write. I confess the romping part piques my curiosity.”

He swore softly in French but remained close to her, half leaning, half sitting on the desk. This late, his scent was softer, more spice, less sandalwood, and Milly had all she could do to keep her eyes open and not breathe too obviously through her nose.

“The romping part would be the ruin of you.” The way he said it suggested romping might be the ruin of him as well, which notion both intrigued and saddened.

“You lecture me when you could be kissing me, and then tell me you have no honor. There’s an inconsistency in your actions, my lord—or in your kisses. But no matter. I can find kisses and romping aplenty. I suspect your Mr. Brodie would oblige me easily enough were I simply plagued by curiosity.”

She’d shocked
him
, which gave her no satisfaction at all, when she’d been trying to make a point.

“You will not torment Michael the way you are tormenting me, Millicent, and we will not romp.”

She tossed the pen aside and moved the inkwell to the corner of the blotter.

“You dratted man, I could not care less about the romping. It’s
you
who plagues me. When Vincent kissed me, I wanted to wipe my mouth with my handkerchief. When you kiss me, I want to take my clothes off, and your clothes off too.”

He studied his hands, and by firelight, his expression was long-suffering to the point of martyrdom. Milly heard Shakespeare whispering from the shadows,
Will
all
great
Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hands?

“There will be no taking off of clothes, Miss Danforth. You are merely inquisitive, reckless, befuddled by your curiosity, and quite possibly by grief and”—his expression grew a trifle mean—“loneliness. Many a proper English lady has propositioned me, and do you know what they wanted, Miss Danforth?”

He was near shaking with the force of his ire. “Those gentle flowers of English womanhood wanted me to bind them and beat them. To blindfold them and
play
at being the French colonel. They would offer me the cut direct should I ask them to dance, but they wanted me for their toy in private. I understand the need to use any means available to win a war, but I do not understand this depravity.”

Milly perceived that more than outraged, St. Clair was sickened by the propositions he’d received—genuinely shocked and bewildered.

“They did not see you as a person, just as you could not afford to see the English officers as people, but rather, as pawns on a chessboard.”

He closed his eyes. “Those Englishmen were my countrymen, and I was a traitor to them. I gained a reputation for knowing how to deal with English officers, for making them yield secrets to me even they didn’t know they were keeping.”

St. Clair was attempting a confession or a condemnation of himself; Milly wasn’t sure which, but she did know she wanted to take him in her arms when he spoke like this.

“Every time you describe your role, you paint yourself as more and more of an animal, and less and less a man.” And he let her see more and more of the cost to him for having played that role.

He opened his eyes. “I
am
an animal, a traitorous animal, but I’d rather be honestly viewed as that than as any woman’s toy, ever.” He touched Milly’s chin, so she had to look him in the eye. “
I
tortured
those
officers, Milly.
I studied them, toyed with their trust, and determined how best to wrest from them their dignity, their health, their sanity. Among the English I gained the sobriquet ‘The Inquisitor,’ and I was very, very good at what I did.”