Royal Renegade (27 page)

"You really shouldn't have to think endlessly about it, for it is only the logical step for you. And absurd as it is that I have to be the one to suggest it, no one else appears to have your best interests at heart—Michael. You're not attending."

"You have my best interests at heart," he echoed. "I know that."

Sarah regarded him with some exasperation, tapping his arm gently with her ivory fan. "So have you thought of favoring any girl with your suit? Really, for a cavalry officer, you don't seem interested in charging at all. Has any girl even caught your eye?"

"Yes," he murmured. Tatiana was angry, her little shoulders thrown back proudly, her enchanting mouth set in sulky lines. He smiled, remembering that she had looked just as piqued when he suggested a dictionary of cant phrases was not what she needed to become a London success. And he was right: she hadn't needed it at all.

"Michael—Michael, don't be a fool."

This low-voiced adjurement finally captured his attention. He turned to Sarah and saw comprehension dawn with anguish on her kindly face. Was he so obvious then? John had noticed right away, also. Had he lost all control of his expression, that old friends knew immediately of his hopeless passion?

"It won't suit, Michael. You know it won't. Everyone says she's meant for a royal duke or one of the Bourbons!"

"D'Annaud?" He despised the Bourbons, everyone of them, for sitting out the war safe in London and letting the British and Portuguese and Spanish fight their battles. This sort of sacrifice was the only one d'Annaud would make to restore the throne, marrying a pretty princess. His hand clenched on the champagne glass, and Sarah, seeing what he was about, squeaked a warning.

"You'll break your glass!" She undid his fingers from the stem and spirited the goblet away to a nearby table. "Tell me I'm wrong. But that look in your eyes when you see her—Oh, Michael, you idiot. You know better than to fall in love with someone so ineligible! Why, you know better than to fall in love at all. Only you don't, do you? Why? Why would you do such a stupid thing?"

Devlyn couldn't help but search out the shimmering figure in green velvet, the princess surrounded by her court. She was laughing again, and he was the only one in the room who saw the brittleness of her gaiety. "She makes me happy."

"Oh, yes, you look happy. Michael, you haven't looked so bleak since your father died and those solicitors took Devlyn Keep away. Does she return your regard? Of course she does. And you're contemplating—do you know what you're contemplating? Exploding it all, your whole life."

"It doesn't matter." He forced himself to look away, back to Sarah, who regarded him with such angry empathy. "I'm sorry, Sarah. I meant to come and see you, to be more considerate of you, to tell you farewell properly. My mind isn't working well lately."

"I should say it's not. In fact, you seem to have left that intellect of yours on Johnny Manning's smuggling vessel! What ever are you thinking? And as for farewell—oh, I knew that it was farewell when you left me last. It only hurt a bit, because—oh, I thought you would marry and have a family and find some happiness, and I wished that for you. But instead—this is not what I intended for you to do," she finished sternly. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. I can't seem to concentrate enough to find an answer."

"That's because there's only one answer. Forget her. Or if you can't forget her, go back to Portugal and remind yourself why you've been there for so long. To defend your country, your home. Do you think Prinny would let you stay in the army if you do what you are thinking to do? You'd be lucky were you not exiled."

"I have thought of all that myself. They're all irrelevant anyway, all those considerations. For whatever difficulties I might face pale in significance to hers." As he said it, he knew desperately how true that was. Her happiness was most important. If only he could convince himself that she would be happier without him

Sarah said with a sad laugh, "I'm sorry I ever accused you of being unromantical. For I think you are just doing this to prove how wrong I was."

Tatiana was bidding thanks to her hostess, preparatory to leaving. She trailed up the stairs after the countess, stopping at the top to look back once more at the ballroom. He knew that all the faces were a blur to her, except for his own. And if there was as much anger as yearning in her gaze before she swept out the door, he expected that. He'd told her he would stay away, and here he was, interfering with her peace again. He could make it better for her by following Sarah's advice and returning to Portugal a week early. But he just couldn't put the resolve together to leave her entirely.

"Well," he observed with a reluctant smile, "if nothing else, I expect I've impressed you with all the unexpected facets of my character."

"Oh, Michael" was Sarah's agonized reply.

Chapter Sixteen

The next morning Tatiana hesitated, sketch pad in hand, at the top of the narrow backstairs. Buntin was out at the shops buying some velvet ribbon, the countess visiting a sick relative. If she did not encounter that toplofty butler, Tatiana could gain a half hour's peace in the garden.

Speeding down the servants' stairs, headed for a back door, Tatiana almost stumbled over a little yellow-haired maid. She was hunched in the corner of the landing and crying in a tempestuous manner that Tatiana envied.

Always sympathetic to a fellow in distress, Tatiana dropped to the step beside the girl and whispered, "Is there anything I can do?”

The little maid looked up, and the horror of her new plight quite dried the tears right out of her eyes. "Oh, no, Your—Your Highness. We wasn't to talk to you, or even to look at you!"

"Shh!" Tatiana whispered urgently. If Lady Sherbourne discovers me here there'll be the devil to pay! You're not the only one who will suffer!" After the little maid absorbed all this, Tatiana asked, "Isn't there somewhere else you can go to cry? It's so sad to see you here on the backstairs."

This almost set the girl to weeping again. "I have a room in the attic, but Daisy, she sleeps there, too, and as it's our afternoon off—we get every third Wednesday off, you see—she's, well, she's entertaining her man friend there! And—and I warn't brought up this way, ma'am! My mum raised me proper, and taught me respect for myself, but—but she's back home and I haven't seen her in next to a year and may never see her again and—Oh, if only I could tell her I was unhappy, she'd let me come home."

As the girl dissolved into tears again, Tatiana glanced nervously around her. She couldn't leave the poor girl here, exiled to the stairs where anyone might see her in her loneliness and tears. But if the countess or the butler were to find Tatiana here, the little maid would lose her position, no doubt, and Tatiana would have to listen to yet another sermon on the maintenance of the dignity inherent in her position.

"Go and get your coat," she hissed. "Go on, get it. We'll go hide in the arbor, and I shall help you communicate with your mum."

The voice of authority having spoken, the little maid was quick to comply, and in a few moments they made their surreptitious way out into the garden. "You see," Tatiana said with satisfaction as she pulled the younger girl to a marble bench in the semicircle of hedges facing the back wall, "we are quite invisible to the house. How silly the gardener is, he's cut these hedges into animal shapes. There's a dog, and is that a pig? A pig here in London!"

A little more nonsense put the girl rather at ease, and she answered "Betsy" shyly when Tatiana asked her name. "Now do you truly hate it here, or are you just a little homesick?"

Her dam breached, the maid now overflowed with grievances about the city and the housekeeper and Daisy, who was no better than she ought to be, a good deal worse in fact, Tatiana had to conclude. "You do sound just misery-laden, Betsy. Why don't you write to your mama and tell her that you want to come home?"

"But miss—I mean, Your Highness," the girl said, lifting her wide blue eyes to Tatiana's face for the first time, "I don't know how to write."

"Well, then, I'll write for you," Tatiana said briskly, propping her sketch pad on her lap and brandishing her lead pencil like a sword. "You tell me what you want to say, and I shall write it down. Then your mum can get someone to read it to her—"

Betsy regarded the pencil suspiciously but finally admitted, "The vicar's wife would, I know."

"And then she'll bring you home. What do you want to tell her?"

Slowly, painfully, the chambermaid dictated her travails, sometimes censored, sometimes embellished, Tatiana thought. When she was done, Tatiana pointed to the page. "Do you see the letter there? What does it look like?"

"Why, it looks like a fence stile," said the country girl, making bold to trace the letter with her finger and smudging it a bit.

Tatiana had no clue what a fence stile was, but said agreeably, "Why, so it does. Well, that fence stile is an
M
. It sounds just like that—mmmm. And then just there is another
m
. And that little teacup in between, that's a
u
. So you put the mmm and the uh and the mmm together and what do you have?"

The maid's freckled face contorted as she puzzled this out. "Mmm uh mmm. Mum!" she exclaimed. "It says mum!"

"Exactly!" Tatiana couldn't have been more pleased had the girl discovered gravity. "Now you spell it here at the bottom. Just think how happy your mum will be to see her name there in your own hand! I'll help you hold the pencil. There, see? Aren't you proud?"

"Can I write 'love' too?" the girl whispered, her fingers tense under Tatiana's guiding hand.

"Of course you can. That's an
1
—it's just a line down, and then a circle, that's an
o
and a
v
that looks like an arrowhead, do you see? And the
e
, well, it doesn't look like anything much, does it? Almost another circle, perhaps. Now that says
love
! What do you think your mum will do when she sees that?"

"She'll cry," the girl predicted, her own blue eyes welling up. "And she'll want me home. But it's so far away, Bincombe is, almost to Weymouth."

"Weymouth?" Tatiana echoed, an idea forming in her mind. She could help Betsy, and have a reason to speak to Michael again. "Would it help if you had a position to go to, and some funds to get you there?"

"Could you—oh, miss, Your Highness, that would be—" Betsy reached out her hands, then drew them back, but her glowing face was enough of an embrace.

"You just go on as you have, and I shall let you know what you should do when I have been able to make arrangements for you. And I'll be sure and post this for you. Go on, now, and no more tears!"

A good deed was its own reward, she thought as the girl scampered back toward the kitchen door. For Tatiana had felt some of her own sadness dissipate as she helped little Betsy. But the ache returned when she heard a cool voice behind her. "I suppose you expect me to employ the chit at Devlyn, for surely you know no one else around Weymouth."

She whirled around to see Michael there, leaning against the wall, half-hidden by a hedge trimmed into the shape of a cat. He wore a fur-trimmed blue cavalry cloak flung back from one shoulder and looked so dashing, so brave, that she almost couldn't speak. She couldn't ask why he was here, or why he came to the ball last night, after saying he could not bear to see her. But her native curiosity overcame her aching throat. "How did you get in here?"

He nodded at the ten-foot stone wall. "Climbed it. Scouting on the Peninsula has taught me to overcome obstacles. But I wasn't sure I remembered how."

She kept her tone light, although her heart was torn between happiness and anguish at the sight of him. "I never thought you, of all people, would choose such an unorthodox entrance. Why not just knock on the front door?"

"I did, and I was told you weren't home. Not home to me, at any rate." His arrogant face was expressionless, but she sensed his anger and the question he did not ask.

She drew her breath in sharply, her cheeks pinking with anger and cold and his nearness. "The countess, of course. Oh, that interfering—she's so determined to marry me off to Cumberland because she wants to be a lady-in-waiting again. She won't refuse Fallenwood or the count, you see, for she thinks that they will push the prince up to the mark. But you—" She closed her mouth, knowing she had said too much again, classifying Michael with those other men, her legitimate suitors, when he wasn't one at all.

"But I am worse than useless," he finished dryly. "I thought it was something of the sort."

"Never say you even suspected that I would be so rude," Tatiana said, genuinely distressed. But then, looking up at him through her lashes, she added, "Even if you did say you never wanted to see me again."

"Is that what I said?" The sudden bleakness in his voice frightened her somehow, for it matched her own bleakness of spirit. Oh, if they could only talk about this, talk freely, as they did in France, as friends. But it was too dangerous now, too hard to confront what they both must feel.

"In any event," he resumed, looking away toward the fortresslike house, "I thought to bribe a maid to take a message. I should have known the only maid in evidence would be out here learning to read. And you in the December air without a cape or bonnet."

"In Russia—"

"I know, I know. This would be likened to a midsummer day," he finished, his tone light again. "So I have heard, repeatedly in fact. Well, if you didn't catch your death from your dip in the Gulf of St. Malo, I imagine you are utterly invulnerable to cold." He crossed the distance between them in a few long strides and sat down beside her on the bench, taking her chilled hands in his. This friendly gesture gave her some strength. She even looked up at him with a smile that he returned after only a moment. "So what have you obliged me to do for this maid of yours?"