Agent of the Crown (22 page)

They walked like that, hand in hand, through
the woods until they reached the outskirts of Longbourne, and
Telaine, unable to bear it any longer, said, “I don’t
understand.”

He let out a low chuckle. “Wasted a lot of
effort tonight if that’s so.”

“I mean—I didn’t even know you were
interested in me.” He was a shadowy figure beside her and a warm,
electric hand in hers.

“Never knew what to say. And you always had
so many other men after you, like moths courting a lantern.”

She blushed. How to explain she’d only
flirted with them to protect her alter ego? “They weren’t—it didn’t
mean anything. Just having fun. There’s no one else.”

She heard him let out a deep breath. “I
didn’t know how to compete with them on their ground. So I decided
to compete on mine.”

“It worked.”
Not that you had any
competition. How blind have I been?

She turned her head to look at him and saw
him smile, not a fleeting one, but a wide, brilliant smile that
struck her to the heart. She’d never have guessed he had that in
him.

They reached Aunt Weaver’s yard, and Telaine
held out her hand for the spool, wishing the night didn’t have to
end. Who knew if this could even last past sunrise, whatever it
was? But Garrett set the spool down on the ground behind him and
said, “Just one thing. I’d like to kiss you, Miss Bricker, if you
don’t mind.”

It was the sweetest thing anyone had ever
said to her. She nodded, afraid to speak.

Garrett stepped close and brushed his lips
against hers. It was almost too light to feel, tender and sweeter
than honey, and she felt as if she’d never truly been kissed
before, as if all her flirtations had been nothing more than
preparation for this moment. He moved as if to step away from her,
and she made a noise of protest, put her arms around his neck, and
kissed him back.

He was only startled for a second, then his
arms were around her waist and he pulled her close, kissing her
with an intensity that set her body burning with her desire for
more. His hand slid up her back and under her hair to caress the
soft skin at the nape of her neck, his gentleness a stark contrast
to his kiss. She leaned into him and let everything else slip away,
the chill of the night, the distant cries of an owl, the weeds
growing at the edge of Aunt Weaver’s shed. There was nothing but
the two of them holding each other close and kissing as if nothing
else in the world mattered.

When they finally separated,
Garrett—Ben—brushed a strand of hair away from her face, touching
her cheek. “You are so beautiful,” he whispered, as if her beauty
might fly away if he spoke too loudly. “Miss Bricker—”

Telaine laughed. “After that, I think you’re
allowed to call me Lainie.”

There was that wide, brilliant smile again.
“Lainie,” he said, making her shiver at how his magnificent voice
caressed her name. “Lainie, will you walk out with me
tomorrow?”

She didn’t know what that meant, but at the
moment she would have promised him anything. “Yes.”

“Until tomorrow, then,” he said, and kissed
her again, slow and tender, like a promise. Then he walked away,
looking back only once before rounding the corner of Aunt Weaver’s
house and disappearing from sight.

Telaine let out a slow, deep breath, and bent
to pick up the spool. She was going to take the memory of those
kisses to bed with her. She touched her lips, and smiled. How
beautiful, and how unexpected. She strolled toward the back door.
What a tomorrow it would be.

When she opened the door, Aunt Weaver sat at
the table in the darkness, waiting for her.

“What was that,”
Aunt Weaver said. It was not a question. She sat at the kitchen
table with her arms crossed and her face at its most
forbidding.

“That was private,” Telaine said, feeling
defensive of her kisses and the young man who’d given them to
her.

“Wasn’t talking about the canoodling, though
that’s a question too,” Aunt Weaver said. “You told me you’d stop
interfering with the people of this town. You forget who you
are?”

Her words had the effect of an icy dip in the
lake. Telaine dropped the spool on the floor and sagged into a
chair. She had completely forgotten who she was. For the last
several hours, she’d been nothing more than a girl named Lainie
Bricker who’d danced and laughed and started to fall in love for
the first time. Yes, falling in love. All things Telaine North
Hunter had no business doing in Longbourne.

“I forgot,” she said in a hollow voice. “I
forgot everything.”

“You got no business fooling around with that
young man when you can’t give him what he wants,” said Aunt Weaver.
“Not fair to him. He’s a good man who never done anything to you
’cept have no common sense where women is concerned.”

“I didn’t lead him on.”

“Not sayin’ you did.”

“I was caught off guard. Did you hear him
sing to me?”

“I did.”

“I didn’t know how I felt about him. I swear
it.”

“Not sayin’ you did.”

Telaine knocked her forehead gently against
the table. “How could I have let this happen?”

“Happen you played a part got too real,” said
Aunt Weaver. “You never let yourself be too much like the
Princess?”

Telaine shook her head. “I hate the
Princess,” she said, and stopped. It was a revelation. The Princess
was vain, and shallow, and treated people like things, and she’d
always known this about her alter ego, but until that moment
Telaine hadn’t realized she hated having anything to do with
her.

“I like Lainie Bricker,” she went on. “I like
the life she has. Maybe—maybe on some level, I want her life. I
know if I had to choose a role to play I’d pick Lainie over the
Princess in a heartbeat.”

Aunt Weaver shook her head. “You’re not
seeing it clear. Lainie isn’t a role. Lainie is
you
.”

Telaine, caught in the middle of a protest,
went silent. Lainie
was
her. She’d been thinking of her as a
separate person, but now she realized that, unlike the Princess,
she hadn’t ever had to tell herself how Lainie Bricker would
behave. She hadn’t seen the people around her as part of the game,
to be manipulated toward her goal, practically since her arrival.
She had been…herself, the self that hid behind the Princess’s
cosmetics and clothing and laughed at everyone who couldn’t see
through the disguise. Lainie Bricker was just another name for
Telaine North Hunter.

But it was cold comfort. She might be Lainie
Bricker in spirit, but she was still a Princess of Tremontane and
an agent of the Crown, neither of which she could reveal to the
people she was growing to love. She was lying to them even as she
showed them her true self.

“What am I going to do?” she groaned, laying
her face on the table again. Her head ached from all the beer, all
the revelations.

“Finish the job fast. Start detaching
yourself from Longbourne. Remind yourself every day what your real
name is.” Aunt Weaver paused for a long moment. “Break with that
young man.”

Telaine felt sick. The memory of Ben’s kisses
turned sour in her mind. Tears rose in her eyes. “I don’t even know
how to begin,” she said, which was a lie. She knew all too well how
to break a man’s heart. The Princess had certainly done it often
enough.

“Tell him it was the beer. Certain sure you
put away enough of it.” Aunt Weaver stood, and Telaine looked up at
her. At this angle, her nose was a sharper, straighter line, her
expression more imperious—and Telaine knew exactly where she’d seen
her before.

She was older, of course, but even so Telaine
couldn’t imagine how she hadn’t recognized the woman before. Well,
of course she wouldn’t have; why look for someone who was dead? No,
it was impossible. She looked again. Not impossible, then, just
mindboggling. The surprise drove the tears from her eyes.

“Try to sleep,” Aunt Weaver said. She
hesitated, then laid her hand on Telaine’s head. The unexpected
kindness made the tears rise again.

She sat at the table, sightless, until she
couldn’t hear Aunt Weaver moving around anymore. Then she picked up
the spool and went upstairs. She tossed it into the store room,
heard it knock something over that rattled, and went into her
bedroom, closing the door as if it weighed as much as the oak tree
it was hewn from.

She turned on the lamp, sat down on her bed
and began unbuttoning her dress, but got only halfway before her
hand fell to her lap. She looked at herself in the mirror.
Astonishing how she still looked the same as she had only a few
hours before. Astonishing how much the woman in the mirror had done
and learned in that short time.

Telaine finished unbuttoning her dress and
pulled it off, then hung it up on its nail. She needed to get rid
of it. She’d never be able to forget any of this if it hung there
mocking her all the time.

She got into her nightgown, turned off the
lamp, and slid between the sheets. Aunt Weaver’s face appeared
behind her eyelids. It wasn’t possible. She’d have to ask Uncle. He
had to know, sending Telaine to her was far too big a coincidence
if he didn’t, but surely it wasn’t possible. It would make Aunt
Weaver a bigger hypocrite than her.

She opened her eyes and stared into the
blackness. She couldn’t let Ben court her with this false identity
between them. It wouldn’t matter that she only lied about her name
and family, that everything else about her was genuine. It would
still be a lie. But Lainie—
Telaine
could never bring herself
to hurt him. So the Princess would have to.

A careless laugh, a mocking smile—“Oh, I was
so drunk last night I can barely remember what we did!”—and the
usual drill of studied ignorance of his presence, of refusing to
meet his eyes. Oh, yes, the Princess was
very
good at what
she did, which was keep any man at a distance no matter how it hurt
him. Telaine rolled over and sobbed into her mattress. The Princess
would do the breaking, but Telaine would have to watch Ben’s face
as he realized the Lainie he cared for didn’t care for him. Her
first love affair, and she had to kill it.

She drifted into a restless sleep, waking
once to see the shape of the dress on the wall and sit up, heart
racing, thinking it was Morgan in her room. She woke again before
dawn to empty her bladder, then finally, as dawn made its way
through her curtains, she slept for real.

She woke at nearly noon, head aching more
from the restless night than from the beer, with a bad taste in her
mouth (
that
was probably the beer) and a sense that
everything was wrong with the world. When she came more fully
awake, she remembered that was true.

She punched the mattress in anger at what she
had to do, anger at the Baron for bringing her to this place, anger
at herself for being so weak. Then she rolled out of bed and began,
wearily, to dress in her everyday clothes. She avoided looking at
the dress hanging like a green blot on the wall.

Removing the glowing strips of copper turned
out to be an all-afternoon job. She unwound the string, laying it
out in the yard, prying off each folded strip as she came to it,
and some of them were fastened tightly. It was every bit as tedious
as she’d imagined.
Next time, I’ll do it differently
, she
thought, then remembered there wouldn’t be a next time and had to
stop working for a minute while she controlled her bitter
tears.

Then she wound the long, long string of wire
and brass rings back on the spool, gritting her teeth at the memory
that she’d had help with this the night before. He was working at
the forge in blissful ignorance of what she was going to do to him.
She swept the bits of copper into a cloth bag and wrapped it to the
spool with the end of the string of lights.

It was after four o’clock when she finished.
She was hungry, but going to the tavern meant passing the forge,
and she wasn’t ready to face Ben yet. She went down to the kitchen
and dug up some leftover pork pie, which she ate standing over the
sink. If she’d been in a better mood, she’d have been amused at the
image of the Princess eating with her hands out of a pie tin. Right
now she didn’t want to think of the Princess at all.

She rinsed her mouth and hands and the empty
pie tin, scrubbed it, and set it in the drying rack. She checked
her watch. 4:35. When did people “walk out” together? What did it
even mean? Were they going to parade down the main street for
everyone to see? The pie threatened to reappear, and Telaine
clenched her back teeth together hard to keep it down. She had to
figure out a way to keep Ben from looking like a fool, going out
proudly happy and coming back like a kicked puppy.

She went back up to her room and lay down on
the bed. She would make a clean break and that would be that. He’d
never know he should be thankful to her. Then she’d start pressing
the Baron hard. If she could get him away from Morgan, she could
manipulate him into taking her to the fort. Something about the new
guns—they’d have the new guns, right? Suppose she said there was a
flaw in some of the batches and she’d offer to check them over? It
could be something she’d heard, some rumor floating around
Ellismere. He’d probably believe that. Find out what Harroden was
shipping, find out why, go down the mountain and never come
back.

“Suppertime,” said Aunt Weaver from the
doorway.

Telaine swung her legs over and sat up. “What
does ‘walking out’ mean?” she asked.

“Means declaring you’re courtin’, in public,”
Aunt Weaver said. “Bein’ seen together, and so forth. If that young
man has gotten to that point so quickly…” She shook her head
compassionately. “Best do it quickly. Give him plenty of time to
get over it.”

Telaine pushed past her without a word. She
ate in silence and then sat in silence, waiting in the sitting room
on the uncomfortable chair. The rug curled up at one corner,
revealing that its mat backing had been nibbled by mice. Aunt
Weaver had tactfully retreated upstairs. It was so quiet she could
hear her own heartbeat. That traitorous organ insisted on pumping
blood through her body against all reason.