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Authors: Marsha Canham

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BOOK: Swept Away
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“This is neither the time nor place to see who can piss the farthest,” Bonaparte said. “In fact, all of you may leave me now. I need time alone to compose an appropriately contrite letter to the British captain. Cipi--did you manage to find anything resembling a palatable wine on this godforsaken islet?”

“Will a bottle of your favorite
Vin de Constance
do?”

Bonaparte dismissed the others with an impatient flick of his wrist. When they were gone, he extended his arm to take the heavy green bottle Cipriani had produced.

“You have never failed me, have you, my lifelong friend?” he mused, lapsing comfortably into the Corsican dialect they often shared when they were alone.

“And I never will,” Cipriani promised. “Let me kill the Englishman now. Tonight. We have no further use for him.”

“Ah, but perhaps we do. I am told the British admiralty has increased the reward for his capture. They want him brought to trial almost as much as they want me. How much of our true plans do you suspect he knows?”

“We have been careful to speak of it only amongst ourselves. In the letter your brother wrote, he did not mention any specific details, though I thought he was somewhat imprudent in mentioning certain people by name. It could--” Cipriani stopped. He was staring at the top of the table. “The letter. Did you move it, Excellency?”

The former Emperor of France turned and scanned the sheaves of documents, maps, dispatches that covered the wooden surface. “No. It must be there somewhere.”

Cipriani started sifting through the papers, scattering some carelessly on the floor, but his search proved futile. “It is gone.” He stopped again and looked up. “He was standing by the door when we all came in, but when I called your valet to fetch your surtout--” his eyes flicked back to the side of the table-- “he was standing here. He could have taken it. He
must
have taken it.”

“Oh, come now, Cipi. In a room full of my most trusted officers?”

Cipriani’s cold, hard gaze levelled on his master. “I warrant he could pluck the eyes out of snake and leave the serpent none the wiser.”

“Then you had best kill him,” Bonaparte agreed, his fist tightening around the neck of the bottle. By sheer dint of will he refrained from smashing it down and shattering the glass into a thousand pieces. “Kill him and get that letter back, for there can be no room for error now, Cipi. Not this close to our ultimate triumph!"

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

July 24
, 1815

 

She thought he was dead. There was nothing to indicate any life in the half-naked body that was being gently nudged to and fro in the shallow water of the tidal pool. The cuts and scrapes that marred the broad slabs of muscle across his back and shoulders were a bloodless raw pink, the skin itself was yellowed as old tallow. He was dressed only in thin linen underdrawers which ended at the knee and were secured about the waist with a slackened drawstring. He might as well have been completely naked, however, for the linen had been rendered nearly transparent by the water and though her eyes did not linger overlong, she could plainly see the sculpted curves of his buttocks, the shallow dimples in the small of his back.

With a threatening
whoosh
, the surf swirled forward, clattering across the sand and shingle to surround the still form. The blue-gray lips opened with the fresh incursion of salt water and it was there, in the expelled rush, she saw the silvery foam of bubbles.

Annaleah Fairchilde gasped and jumped quickly back. Her gaze darted around the jumbled rocks on either side of the body as if she half expected to see a dozen more corpses scattered among the boulders, but the beach was deserted as always. A treacherous fog had blanketed the coastline through the night; the last of it was just burning off in the early morning sun, but she had not heard any alarms to signify a ship blown off course, nor any church bells tolling to call out the villagers to help with a shipwreck.

Yet the body must have come off a ship. Torbay had become an important seaport during the two decades of hostilities with France and the entrance lay just to the east beyond the jutting promontory of Berry Head. There were always vessels in these waters--along with periodic stories of a body washing ashore that had not been properly stitched into a weighted shroud.

But this one was alive.

She looked down again. Thick, wet strands of dark hair lay across his face, obscuring most of his features from view. His eyes were closed, the long black lashes spiked against his cheeks. His upper torso was broad and well-defined with muscle, his thighs lean and hard as those belonging to the men she had seen climbing nimbly up the tall masts of sailing ships. The one hand that lay palm up in the sand was square, the pads of the fingers white with waterlogged calluses; the other was clenched in a fist, the arm folded under his head. It was this meager bit of leverage that had probably saved him from drowning.

If
it had saved him.

Annaleah glanced over her shoulder, the panic rising in her chest again, this time because she
was
alone on the beach. The cove was small and isolated, the beach less than a half mile in length and curved around water that was too shallow for anchorage, too turbulent beyond the breakers for fishermen to set their nets. The inlet itself was ringed by steep limestone cliffs, the cracks and crags populated by colonies of screaming gulls, most of which were in the air now, circling in white flashes above as if they too were waiting to see if this tempting morsel of fleshy driftwood would live or die.

Widdicombe House sat at the top of the cliffs, accessed by a steep path that had been worn into the face of the rock by a few thousand years of high winds and blowing sands. It was not a conceivable thought, even if Annaleah had been a man, that she could manipulate the dead weight of a body to the top on her own. She would have to go back for help, although she strongly doubted, in the time it would take her to reach the house and tell them what she had discovered, that the sailor would be there when she returned.

The tide was inching higher up the shingle even as she took another step back to avoid staining her shoes with salt water. Further out, beyond the jagged breakers, the surface of the sea was a calm, undulating sheet of liquid pewter beneath the hazed sky, but she knew that calm could be deceiving. Many a ship had made the mistake of sailing too close to shore and having their hulls cracked open when the currents pulled them into the rocks.

Knowing she had to make some kind of a decision, Annaleah wiped her hands on the folds of her muslin skirt and ventured close to the body again. She jumped as the icy water of the Channel scrabbled over her shoes, but there was nothing to be done for it. The hem of her dress was dragged backward and, as uncharitable a thought as it might be, she felt a momentary surge of resentment toward the unmoving body as well as the circumstances that had brought her here this day.

“Some time away with your Great Aunt Florence will do you good,” she muttered to herself, misquoting her mother’s words of a week ago. “The sheer calmness and boredom of the seaside should help sedate your own thoughts.”

Bracing herself, she reached down and gingerly curved her hands beneath the man’s shoulders, testing his weight. She was not a frail wisp of a creature by any measure, but he seemed gigantic by contrast, an utterly limp mass of bone and muscle. It took three grunted attempts and a near spill head-first into the encroaching waves before she discarded the notion of dragging him out of the sand by his arms. By then her feet were squeaking inside her soaked shoes and a good measure of her skirt was wet and dragging.

“Damnation, hell, and bother!” she said, citing three of her brother’s favorite oaths.

With one eye on the next wave scrolling over the breakers, she slogged around beside the body and tried pushing him, rolling him front over side over back until he was a few feet higher on the shore.

She stopped, her hands braced on her knees, to catch her breath, and noticed for the first time the ugly, blotched egg at the back of his skull. The skin was swollen almost to bursting, mottled blue and black, riddled with spidery red veins. It must have taken quite a blow to cause such a lump and Annaleah, feeling even more helpless than before, knelt gingerly beside him. Her hands hovered over the contusion several more seconds before she found enough nerve to lift the tangled mass of wet black hair off his neck. Assured the skin was not broken and his brain was not leaking out, she took an additional moment to study his profile but was no further enlightened. She did not recognize him, though that was hardly a surprise. In all of her nineteen years, she had visited Widdicombe House perhaps ten times, none of them made with the intentions of retaining any memories of the local fishermen and farmers who gawked openly at the well-heeled visitors from London.

It was Annaleah who gawked now, however. She had deliberately avoided acknowledging his state of near nudity and tried not to think of where her hands were placed each time she grasped his hip and shoulder to roll him. But now her gaze had wandered far below where any sense of modesty should have allowed. He was on his side facing her, and while his whole body had become sugared with a fine coating of sand, the linen of his drawers clung in a shockingly sheer layer to his lower anatomy. Her eyes, bluer than the sky above, widened and glazed appreciably at the shapes and contours molded by the wet cloth. She had heard whispers of such things, even seen a crude sketch drawn once in a parlor full of giggling females, but to actually see such a thing, to realize what an awkward burden a man carried between his legs...well, it was no wonder they often looked discomforted--sometimes even in pain.

A slap of cold water against her ankles served to break the spell and, with her skin hot and her breath dry in her throat, she pushed and rolled and heaved again until he was lying in the soft, powdery sand well above the scalloped tidewater mark. With a final shove, her hands skidded forward onto his chest and she fell forward, sprawling half across his body.

It had the same effect as falling over a rock and the air left her lungs with a loud
whoomf
. Conversely a similar breath left his mouth with a small fount of seawater, followed by a shallow gasp and a much larger rush as his body began to violently reject the notion of drowning. Annaleah grabbed his jaw and turned his head while he wretched and spewed salt water through his mouth and nose. His eyes remained closed and his body clenched tight around each spasm, but eventually the heaving stopped and he collapsed limp on the sand.

Able to draw unimpeded breaths again, a faint hint of color began to seep back into his skin. His lips remained blue, but the dreadful yellow cast began to fade, revealing the true shading of his bronzed skin. The sand had caked over much of his face and as Annaleah brushed some of it off his eyes, the long lashes shivered and opened a slit. For the briefest of moments she found herself staring into eyes so dark they looked like holes burned into the center of his head. For those same few seconds she held her breath, for there was so much anger and pain in their depths, she almost missed hearing the harsh croak of words that were forced through his lips.

“They have to know the truth.”

“Wh-what? What did you say?”

A hand, with fingers like iron bands and a grip that threatened to snap the fine bones in her wrist, reached up and grabbed her. “
They have to know the truth. Before it is too late.”

“I...do not know what you mean, sir,” she stammered, shocked by the strength of his hand, shocked by the power of his eyes boring into hers. “What truth, sir? Who has to know?”

His lips moved again, but there was no breath left to give substance to the words. The pressure around her wrist eased enough that Annaleah was able to pry his fingers loose one at a time and free herself. By then, his eyes had shivered closed and his head had lolled to the side.

Thoroughly shaken now, Annaleah pushed to her feet. She glanced one last time at the rising level of the waves, then turned and began running across the soft sand toward the base of the cliff. Yards of wet muslin tangled around her ankles weighing her down, and her shoes squelched like sponges with every awkward step. At the bottom of the steep path she paused to brace herself, then climbed as quickly as she could, heedless of the brambles that tore the flimsy folds of her skirt.

At the top she paused again, her chest burning, her cheeks flushed red, and wondered that she had not noticed how truly far her great aunt’s house sat from the edge of the cliffs.

Once regal and elegant on its perch overlooking the sea, the same sands and winds that worried away at the rocks on the cliffs had eroded the crumbling brick facade of Widdicombe House. The windows were scarred and pitted, most them opaque on the seaward side. The steeply canted roof, with its rows of gables and forests of chimneys, showed patches of cracked and missing slates.

None of this impacted much on Annaleah at the moment as she hoisted her skirts and started running through the long, wind-swept waves of sea grass. She passed the gnarled skeleton of the tree where she had left her bonnet hung on a branch, and wondered if she should go first to the stables to see if old Willerkins was up and out yet tending to his prize beauties. He was nearing eighty, as ancient and weather-beaten as nearly everything and everyone else at Widdicombe House, so she dismissed his usefulness and stayed on the path to the house, hoping against hope the waterman--a comparatively young bulwark at the age of fifty--would be in the kitchen hunched over his morning meal.

All of the utility rooms, she discovered as she blew through the rear door, were empty. There was a crusted tureen of porridge on the kitchen table and a wooden trencher littered with crumbs to suggest someone had been there recently, but her breathless shouts drew no replies.

This came as no debilitating shock either, since her great aunt, Florence Widdicombe, retained only a handful of servants to tend to the upkeep of the entire household. Apart from Willerkins there was a housekeeper, cook, and maid of chambers; a footman, yard man, a waterman, and a boy to run errands and do light chores around the estate. On the less useful end of the employment scale, there was Throckmorton, the timekeeper, whose only task so far as Annaleah had been able to determine was to keep all the clocks in the house wound and to ring a small brass gong three times a day. There was also Ethel, the chicken-plucker, a woman who had so impressed her aunt at a fair some years back--she could kill, eviscerate, and pluck a chicken clean in under two minutes--that Florence had taken her home and employed her ever since for the exorbitant sum of three shillings a month.

BOOK: Swept Away
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