The Mercenary Major (13 page)

Well, last night had shown she’d done no such thing. Her brother had always said she was foolish, and just when she had been congratulating herself on confounding him, she’d proved him right. How he would laugh at her now. She dropped the scissors into the pocket of her biscuit-colored day gown and brushed the flower detritus into her cupped palm.

The door opened behind her, and she spun around. Briggs announced Ned Carr and withdrew, leaving Ned standing just inside the double doors, plainly awaiting some sign from her. Her throat was utterly dry. She swept her hand out in a welcoming gesture and scattered petals across the carpet.

“Oh, dear,” she cried, dropping down on her knees and attempting to collect the scattered blossoms. Then Ned was hunched down at her side, and his hands stilled hers.

“Letty, if one of us must be embarrassed at this meeting, let it be me.”

She lifted her head and met his gaze, drawing on all the experience of her London years for poise. “Forgive me,” she said, “for making such a piece of work of it. It is good to see you, Ned.”

“And to see you, Letty,” he answered. He extended a hand and helped her to her feet. When he released her, she invited him to sit.

He declined. “I prefer to stand until I’ve said a few things.”

“Oh—” She broke off, and her hands fluttered uselessly in protest of what she wasn’t sure.

“Let me speak,” he urged her, and she seated herself, clasping her hands together in her lap.

He stood in front of the chocolate silk sofa where she sat, and she gave herself up to watching him. He hardly seemed to have changed; he was tall and lean, with his startling white hair and sun-browned face. She suspected that she’d seen that gray coat before, six years ago.

“Thank you for including Victoria in your invitation to the Favertons. The kindness has done more good than you could have known.”

“I hoped you would let her come.”

“I almost didn’t,” he admitted. He ran a hand through his hair and turned away from her toward the mantel. “I’ve been sleepwalking for seven years, unaware of time’s passing. God knows what would have become of Victoria if your invitation had not come.”

Letty lowered her gaze and smiled absurdly at her own clasped hands. He was finally allowing himself to think of someone besides Anne. What a silly tenacious thing hope was. She had an image of a drought-shriveled plant, reviving with the first mild rain. She sensed he had turned back to her, and she lifted her head.

“I have an apology . . . or two to make to you.”

She would have demurred, not sure she could maintain her composure if he chose to speak of what lay between them, but he insisted.

“Yes, I must apologize.” His eyes asked for this favor from her, and she nodded.

“I should not have intruded so precipitately last night. It was clumsy of me, and called unnecessary attention to . . . to us.”

“No one remembers, I’m sure,” she hastened to persuade him.

“I do. You do,” he said quietly. He took a deep breath. “I should never have made you that callous proposal, Letty. It has been one of my chief regrets these six years. Please forgive me.”

“Of course, Ned. You were . . .”

“Don’t excuse it, Letty,” he said roughly. “I knew your feelings for me. I used you often enough to make Anne jealous. I . . .”

Letty lifted her chin, painfully aware that her cheeks were crimson. It was silly to be blushing now. She had never made any secret of her love for Ned Carr, not from the time she had been thirteen and he sixteen.

“I knew you knew,” she said. He had known she loved him and he had offered her a marriage of convenience, in which she would act as mother to Victoria, then thirteen, and receive in return a home of her own, free from her brother’s tiresome temper and her sister-in-law’s dependence on her. Ned had made it plain that there would be no intimacy between them, that no one would ever come between Anne and him. She had declined his offer and within weeks had established herself in London.

“I see.” His hands clenched at his sides, and he crossed to the little table under the window where she had been trimming the flowers.

Say more
, she wanted to tell him, but pride would not allow it. The silence between them was filled by the steady clop of horses’ hooves and the rattle of carriage wheels and voices crying out in the street below.

“London suits you, doesn’t it, Letty?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, striving for a cheerful tone.

“I thought so.” He turned to face her again, but remained standing near the window. “I came to warn you that Dorward is . . . apoplectic about your . . . nephew and means to cause trouble.”

Ned was watching her carefully, but Jack she could discuss with ease. “Dorward loses his temper daily about something or other, but is he inclined in this case to act?” she asked.

“I believe he is. Apparently, with your assistance, this major has been received everywhere.”

“Jack is Helen’s son. He is only taking the place in society that should be his.”

“You are convinced of his parentage?”

Letty stood and in a few quick strides crossed the drawing room. She looked directly up at Ned Carr and said, “Do you think I am still the silly widgeon who fell in love with you at thirteen? Do you imagine that I have managed these six years in town without learning to protect myself from unscrupulous men of every sort? Do you—”

“Stop.” He was looking at her with a peculiar intensity. He took her hands in his, and as quickly, let them go. “I have never thought you a . . . ‘silly widgeon,’ but Dorward is going to involve Bow Street in this matter, and you will want proof that will hold up in the courts.”

“Thank you.” She turned away and clasped her hands together again. They felt unnaturally warm and tingly from his touch. A terrible thought occurred to her. “You didn’t come to take Victoria away, did you?”

He was silent, and Letty prayed he was not going to claim his daughter now when everything was going just as she, Letty, had planned.

“I don’t think I could,” he said sadly. “I am presently at Limmer’s Hotel.”

“You’ll stay?” She whirled to face him.

“You won’t mind if I call upon Victoria here?”

“Not at all. I mean, you’ll see how the girls are doing. I plan to give them a splendid ball. They . . .” She stopped, amazed at the expression on his face, an expression she had never seen there before.

“Go on,” he said, smiling at her. “You’ll have to spike Dorward’s guns before he’ll let you present the girls at the same time as the major, but I’m sure you can.”

She laughed and tried to recall what she had been about to tell him, and then Briggs entered.

“Miss Coape, my lady,” he announced.

Letty managed the introductions, sent Briggs to call Victoria to her father, parted from Ned Carr, and then settled herself across from her guest and tried to recall the name and purpose of the very earnest lady sitting in the blue chair.

Soup kitchens
, it came to her.
Miss Coape
.

Jack drew lines in the condensation on his ale cup, studied a copy of Cobbett’s
Register
left behind by an earlier patron of the Swan, and waited. He was known at the tavern now, though not yet trusted. Lovett, the proprietor, had welcomed him readily enough as a morning customer, but the cheerful formalities of greeting done, the man had beckoned a boy and sent the lad running. When the boy returned minutes later, breathless, with a message for Lovett, the voice in Jack’s head spoke once, sharply.

The door of the tavern opened and a group of sailors and workingmen entered. They settled noisily at three tables in the center of the room, and then Jack noted beyond them the hunched profile of a man who had not been there earlier, a man with his back to the wall, his hat-shadowed face to Jack.

So the watcher had been alerted by Lovett. Jack ordered coffee and opened the
Register
to yet another column denouncing the policies of the government.

A man from the sailors’ table rose and headed down the hall. A door opened. Jack kept his eyes on the newspaper but concentrated on the exchange of words at the mystery door. He heard a muffled voice from within say, “Jack?”

He almost turned his head at the sound of that voice, but consciousness of the watcher kept him staring at the paper in front of him.

“Sprat,” replied the man in the corridor.

“Dine on the ninth then,” said the voice from the mystery room. Jack wanted that voice to say just a few more words.

“Eat no fat,” replied the first man. The scrape of boots and closing of the door were the next sounds.

Jack lingered over the bad coffee. He’d had better in the hill camps of the
guerrilleros
. Bertram, and now, if his suspicions were correct, Hengrave had been seduced by the secret behind that door in the dim hall. His friends were very different men, but both had shed their blood for England. To find them frequenting a tavern where sedition seemed as much as part of the fare as ale made little sense.

The answers lay in the mystery room. Bertram, when questioned, claimed he’d been playing cards there the night Jack first came to the Swan. Hengrave had disappeared. So how did one get in? Jack would figure it out sooner or later, whether the watcher wanted him to or not. In the meantime he’d like to see the watcher’s face, and he’d never get a glimpse of the man in the dark taproom.

He stood and stretched and strolled over to Lovett to pay his shot, taking a few minutes to lament the state of his once fine uniform and to tell the host that he was walking toward the West End to meet a fellow officer who’d promised him a meal.

By Long Acre Street Jack knew the watcher had taken the bait and was following him, and the man was good at it, too. Jack knew well how to use a crowd to cover one’s trail, but as busy as the street was, it was more difficult for a man in uniform to succeed at tricks he’d learned as a ragged boy. Still he kept trying. The very persistence of the man following him told him how much was at stake.

In the milling crowds passing through the Seven Dials, Jack took advantage of two thieves who tried to pick his pocket, grabbing hold of the one that acted as the screen and refusing to let go until the man surrendered the soot-stained cap he wore. Jack advised the man to pick his victims more carefully and was heartily cursed for his pains.

He pulled the filthy cap on and stepped behind a column in a shadowed portico across the circle from where he’d entered. A pale girl with a smudged face and a blue shawl that had once had pretensions to finery looked him over, trying to determine whether he was prey or predator, and he beckoned to her. She arranged her shawl to reveal more of her assets and advanced coquettishly. When she drew near enough, Jack showed her a coin, and she joined him in the shadows.

“Sweetheart,” he said, “can you take a few minutes to talk to a poor soldier?” Her hand came up to grasp the coin, but he held it firmly. She stepped closer, and he leaned down, keeping an eye on the crossing where the watcher should soon appear.

“Talk?” she said, her wary eyes fixed on the coin. “A buck like you wants talk?”

“Just talk,” Jack repeated. The watcher came into the circle. The man’s hat concealed most of his face except for the tight line of his mouth. A brown mustache curved down sharply at the ends of that mouth to meet a trim pointed beard, like something out of the portraits he had shown his cousin Katie.

Jack encouraged the girl to hold her arms wide, opening out her shawl so he could appreciate her charms. He drew the silver edge of the coin across her exposed chest. The watcher’s gaze passed over them: a bent man in a grimy cap negotiating with a girl no better than she should be.

The watcher made a second circuit of the busy circle, and Jack added another coin to the one in his hand. The girl told him her name was Mary and that she was very fond of cavalrymen. Her swelling bosom pressed against his arm. When Jack saw his man take a street off to the west, he thanked the girl, told her she’d get farther if she could tell one uniform from another, and pressed the coins into her hand. Now he was the pursuer.

The watcher, apparently deciding he’d lost Jack, never looked back. The man led Jack to a block of neat houses not far from George Bertram’s lodgings. A perfectly respectable-looking servant answered the door, and the man was admitted. Jack noted the number. He knew the watcher’s build and pointed beard, his furtive manner and nervous gait. He would recognize the man anywhere.

He turned and headed for Messrs. Hopkinsons in St. Albans Street, agents to dozens of army officers, from whom he could draw the sum he needed to buy a passage to America.
Always have a way out
. It was a rule he had neglected since he’d met Victoria Carr.

**** 11 ****

V
ictoria had glanced at her father a dozen times or more between Mount Street and the park before she could say what had changed about him.

They were walking, in spite of a chill wind, and he was obliged to watch out for carriages, vendors with their carts, and other pedestrians. But his interest in the scene seemed to go beyond self-preservation. His gaze took in peculiarities of dress and manner, and he looked as if he might share a laugh with her over a few of the most notable eccentricities.

In the park they turned onto a wide avenue bordered by plane trees, leafless now, their branches arching overhead like the tracery of a Gothic cathedral. And her father questioned her about the major.

“There is nothing conclusive either way,” she told him. “Letty has complete faith in him. He is acclaimed a great hero by all who knew him in the army. Yet he freely acknowledges the most disreputable past and offers no proof of his claim except his . . . resemblance to his mother.” She mentioned the point hesitantly; it was too near the subject of her likeness to Anne Carr, about which she and her father had such different views.

After a brief silence he replied, “Evidence which Dorward will hardly accept. There’s an inheritance involved, you know. Dorward told me Letty has been fighting him over it for years, insisting that it remain untouched until some clear proof could be found to indicate that the boy died in the ambush.”