The Traitor (22 page)

While Milly sorted through her feelings, Sebastian plundered the hamper. He was all that was considerate, offering her the choicest strawberries, encouraging her to swill a fine, fizzy vintage directly from the bottle, and buttering her bread for her. As picnics went, this one would do.

And yet, he tugged the shirt closed over Milly’s breasts and fastened two of the buttons. He sat two feet away, neither facing her nor touching her. For a man who professed to be famished, he only picked at his food and downed rather more than his share of the wine.

“The rain has stopped,” Milly said, declining more wine. “The paths back to the manor will be soaked and the trees dripping.”

Sebastian paused, the bottle two inches from his lips. “I can carry you, if you’re concerned for your hems.”

Milly was concerned for her marriage. Already, and for reasons she could not articulate, she was concerned for her marriage.

“The countryside is beautiful following a late-afternoon shower. The sun comes in at the right angle to illuminate everything, and we might even see a rainbow.” A rainbow would be a good omen, and Milly felt the need for one of those on her wedding day.

Sebastian corked the bottle without taking the final sip. “We might. I would wish that for you, Milly St. Clair.”

His expression was sweet and solemn, and sufficiently hard for Milly to look upon, that she crawled across the blanket and tucked herself against him. “Sebastian,
what’s wrong
?”

She hadn’t wanted to ask him, hadn’t wanted to pester him. A wife was supposed to know her husband and respect his privacy. They hadn’t even been married a day, and already she was begging him for confidences.

“If I tell you nothing is amiss, you will be hurt,” he said, gathering her against his chest. “I do not want you to be hurt, and yet, I don’t know how to answer you.”

At least he wasn’t pretending, or worse, condescending to her. “Talk to me. I won’t allow you to have your shirt unless you try to talk to me, Sebastian.”

The rain no longer drummed on the roof, but the stream, swollen from the cloudburst, could be heard rushing past beyond the mill’s walls.

“I could take you again, Milly, right now, and then again after that. A man’s passion usually requires some time to recover—not long for a young man, though I hardly consider myself young—but you…”

Sebastian was feeling his way, threshing through the words, separating truth from platitude in a way that cheered Milly.

She kissed his chest, felt the beat of his heart with her lips. “But I?”

“I am a stranger to pleasure, Milly.” His hands on her back could not have been more cherishing. “I know torment. I know how to use pain and deprivation to show a man his most frightening truths, I know how to wrap suffering around an experienced soldier so it consumes him the way ivy obscures then obliterates even a church made of stone. I know how to present death as a longed-for blessing. And then along comes Millicent Danforth, and this…”

He was trying so hard, and yet Milly could barely comprehend his words for the horror she felt on his behalf. “Tell me.”

“I am wary of the pleasure you bring me. I don’t understand why you are not wary too, of me, of this marriage, of this pleasure.” Then, more softly, “You should be.”

Milly relaxed against him, because in his words she found a thread of hope.

“Wariness and a care for your own survival is why you yet live, Sebastian. I am all at sea, too. One might even say I am frightened, and yet, I would not trade the past hour with you for any safe, comfortable, predictable path I might have otherwise chosen.”

Because she was wrapped in his arms, Milly felt the tension go out of him, though his tone still held some detachment.

“We will muddle on, then, though I wish you’d let me have my shirt back, despite how fetching you look in it. My grandmother made it for me, the last of her handiwork I have, and I wear it only on special occasions.”

Milly’s baron was wary, but also courageous. The occasion was special, indeed. She passed him his shirt and cast about for something to say that would reward his trust.

“I would have a promise from you, Sebastian.”

For a few moments, he hid in the process of putting his shirt on, but then he held out his wrist for her to fasten the cuffs.

“Vows weren’t enough? Making love with you here, despite the abuse to my knees isn’t enough? You must have promises too?”

“The vows were lovely, else I would not have recited them to you.” She slid the sleeve button through the hole and reached for his other hand, though she missed sorely the modesty his garment had provided her.

“What promise do you seek from me, Milly?” His tone said he’d put his wariness aside, but not out of reach.

“The next time we make love, you must not neglect my breasts. I will have your word on this.”

He gave her his word, his mouth, his hands, and enough pleasure that, for Milly, the walk back to the manor held rainbows, despite the shadows lengthening across the fields.

Lady Freddy stopped pretending to read the latest copy of
La
Belle
Assemblée
, which was an insipid publication, appropriate only for fidgety young girls.

“Do you suppose they’ll make a go of it?” she muttered.

The professor tapped a pencil against the blotter, though she doubted he’d been making any progress with his latest code—he hadn’t written a single digit or letter for twenty minutes.

“Theirs is a complicated undertaking.”

He was always honest with her. Their partnership thrived on such honesty, and yet, Freddy resented him mightily for it just then. “Sebastian is besotted.”

The professor had sometimes worn a beard as a younger man, when he’d wanted to appear Continental or hide his youth. Freddy could tell from the way he stroked his chin he might wear a beard as an older fellow too, and be all the handsomer for it.

“A romantic nature can make matters more difficult,” he said. “Miss Danforth—Millicent—hides a tender heart as well.”

More honesty. “I wish to hell I didn’t have such a tender damned heart.”

He rose from his escritoire and took a seat beside her, all uninvited. This was fortunate, because tenderhearted people were often too stubborn and self-reliant for their own good.

“The St. Clairs have never wanted for courage,” the professor observed. “That will serve Sebastian well in the coming days. And nights.”

He had such a lovely smile. The warmth started in his eyes, and sometimes, particularly when they were in public, it remained only there, a beauty Freddy alone was allowed to see. When they were private, though, that smile advanced like a sunrise, cascading down his physiognomy until the corners of his mouth tipped up and a subtle impishness suffused his features.

“Will you ever ask me to marry you again?”

Oh, where in perdition had that question come from? Getting old wreaked all manner of havoc with one’s dignity, and yet it created a sense of urgency too.

The smile became muted, as a sunrise becomes mere sunshine and unremarkable to most as a result. “Perhaps I shall, though I have a tender heart too, you know.”

Tender heart, tender hands. A lady of dignified years ought not to dwell on such things lest she make a fool of herself. Freddy picked up her magazine, which at least had pictures she could study. “I wish I knew what Arthur was up to.”

“Thus sayeth his duchess, frequently. The word is he’s off at Stratfield Saye, getting the place organized and making peace with her over household matters.”

This was part of the reason Freddy and her professor should not marry. An aging bachelor of Continental extraction who made his living as a gentleman of letters could linger over a pint in any tavern, stroll down any street, do business in any shop. The second husband of a widowed baroness was precluded from many behaviors useful for gathering information.

“Wellington has left peace on the home front very late in his agenda,” Freddy said, though his duchess was not the most scintillating exponent of Irish aristocracy. She had waited twelve years for her man while he kicked up his heels in India, nonetheless, and had produced his heir and spare as required, despite his conquests off the battlefield.

A woman, even a duchess, or, say, a baroness, did the best she could.

The professor took her hand, which he would not have done had Sebastian and Milly been underfoot rather than safely tucked away in Surrey. “I can send Wellington a message by means other than post.”

“And tell him what? An old flirt from his days in India wants an accounting?”

“Tell him you’re worried. Tell him you’re tired of all the games and stratagems, the war is over, and you’d like some answers.”

The hour was not late, and yet Freddy felt fatigue washing through her, resonating with the professor’s words.

“I
am
tired. Sick and tired. I can only imagine what Sebastian must be feeling. Milly will have her hands full.”

Freddy suffered a soft kiss to her knuckles.

“You do not want to know what Wellington’s answers might be. This is your tender heart at work. Wellington is a gentleman. He’s had several years to deal with Sebastian, if that were his intent. Ney was permitted a civilian life, and Sebastian was by no means a field marshal. You have no reason to assume the worst.”

All very true, and no comfort whatsoever.

“There’s to be yet another duel,” Freddy said, getting to her feet. She crossed the room rather than see the pity in the professor’s eyes. “MacHugh, that great, strapping Scotsman with the nasty mouth.”

The professor rose as well, but let Freddy be the one to blow out the candles, one by one.

“Michael says MacHugh is not noted for his swordsmanship or his ability with a pistol, my dear, and his mouth is nasty, but as Scotsmen go, he’s reasonable enough.”

“Bank the fire, if you please.” MacHugh was not reasonable. He was cold-blooded, which was the worst sort of temperament for a man with a mortal grievance.

“The servants will tend to the fire, and I will escort you above stairs. If you cannot cease fretting, then send Michael down to Surrey on reconnaissance. He’s scaring the maids with his dark looks and muttered Gaelic. He too worries that Sebastian will come to harm in his wife’s arms.”

Freddy took herself into the chilly corridor and let her escort trail behind rather than wait for him to hold the door for her.

“Sending Michael down to St. Clair Manor would be an excellent notion, if I were exclusively concerned for Sebastian. You men…”

Except that wasn’t fair. The entire time Sebastian had been at war in France, the professor had been in England with Freddy, waiting and hoping while pretending to do neither.

The professor took her hand in his—he’d always had warm hands—and wrapped her fingers around his elbow. “I most humbly beg my lady’s pardon if my surmises are in error.”

Wretch, though his teasing was more welcome than his patronizing.

They gained the first landing as Freddy admitted to herself she was truly weary, and not merely tired of worrying for her nephew. “In the morning, I will dictate a note to Milly, and you and Michael will deliver it for me.”

“Isn’t sending both of us a bit obvious?”

“Sending either one of you would be obvious,” Freddy said as they neared her sitting-room door. “Sending you both suggests I want you and Michael out of my hair for a day, which is nothing but the simple truth.”

“Ah. Of course.”

In those few syllables, Freddy heard a hint of male uncertainty and felt an unbecoming gratification that she could still outthink her professor on the occasional detail. “For tonight, however, I would love to hear some poetry before I retire, assuming you’re not too fatigued?”

He opened her sitting-room door, the warmth of the room greeting Freddy before she’d taken two steps.

“My dear, I am never too tired to read poetry to you.”

He was reading to her from Dante’s
Divine
Comedy
, the language beautiful for all Freddy didn’t bother to translate half of it, when it occurred to her that the professor was waiting for Sebastian’s situation to resolve itself before he proposed again.

Sitting beside the man who’d endured wars with her, Freddy closed her eyes and worried.

***

Milly had never appreciated how a marriage—any marriage—was the sum of myriad decisions of myriad sizes, one after the other, day after day, night after night.

And each decision could either strengthen the marital bond or weaken it.

“You don’t expect me to sleep alone, do you?”

Sebastian clearly had anticipated exactly that. He jerked the belt of his dressing gown closed and kept his hands around the ends of the belt, as if he’d draw out the moment while he formed a reply.

Milly rose off the sofa flanking the fireplace in his bedroom. “Sebastian St. Clair, I am your wife, not some servant to be summoned when your conjugal urges come upon you.”

She spoke as if she were annoyed, when what Milly felt was fear. Sebastian looked so wary, so burdened by her presence in his bedroom after dark.

“You could summon me,” he suggested, and the daft man was serious.

“I would summon you every night, and then I would beg you to stay with me, Sebastian. We are
married
.”

He gave the belt a final, solid jerk. “I take it Alcorn and his lady passed each night snuggled in each other’s arms, and so you think even among those whose domiciles permit separate chambers—”

Milly advanced on him, unwilling to hear any more meanness from a mouth she’d kissed only hours earlier. “Alcorn and Frieda have separate rooms. I do not aspire to emulate their situation in any regard; moreover, they have no requirement for an heir.”

“Do you think frequent copulation requires that we share a bed? I can assure you, marital relations can be undertaken in a variety of locations and at various times of day, as our recent trip to the mill proves, Baroness.”

In his voice, Milly heard a hint of the imperious French colonel, and something…something nearing exasperation. She matched it with an exasperation of her own.

“I want to sleep with my husband, Sebastian. If you find my company objectionable, you should not have married me.”

He said something under his breath, in French.

Which was the outside of too much. Milly took the last two steps so she could jab a finger at his chest. “Speak English. If we’re to have our first argument, we’ll at least have it in the same language.”

He trapped her fingers in his, his grip warm. “I am sorry. I had not realized I spoke French.” He kissed her knuckles with his eyes closed, the way a Papist would kiss a rosary or sacred relic. “I do not want to argue with you, Milly.”

“You do not want to sleep with me. Why?”

He stroked his fingers over her knuckles. “I married a stubborn woman.”

“Determined,” Milly said. Also worried, for him. “Give me a reason to abandon you each night, and if it’s a sound reason, I’ll accommodate it. My parents never spent a night apart once they married, and I would hear them as I fell asleep, talking over the day’s events or reading to each other. Their voices would grow quieter and quieter as my fire burned down.”

She’d forgotten this. Forgotten thousands of nights, each one the same, each one a piece of the pleasant, unremarkable puzzle that was her life before she’d been orphaned.

“You have so many good memories.” Sebastian tugged her by the wrist back to the sofa and took a seat beside her. “Did they become bad memories when your parents died? Did those memories torment you by illuminating the magnitude of your loss?”

She curled up against him, and he obligingly wrapped an arm around her.

“I never thought of it like that. Your English boyhood soured on you that way, didn’t it?” Because he’d traded a happy childhood, not for the grudging charity of relations, but for a war in which he had no allies.

He was quiet for a long time, while the fire settled on the andirons and Milly kept questions behind her teeth.

“I have nightmares, Milly. I thrash and mutter in my sleep. I wake up in a cold sweat, screaming obscenities in two languages. I cannot promise you would be safe, were I to waken in your embrace.”

And worse than all of it—which was awful enough—Milly sensed he was ashamed of himself for allowing his dreams to be haunted.

She shifted, so she was straddling his lap. “I cannot abide this, Sebastian.”

“I am sorry. I should have told you before we married, I know, but one doesn’t—”

Milly cradled his jaw with both hands, so he could not elude her kiss. “I cannot abide that you must suffer this way. Is it the same dream each night?”

Her kiss or her question seemed to foil his flight of self-castigation. “Often it’s the same, or it’s variations on the same theme.”

“You will tell me, please.”

“So we can share my nightmares?”

Milly brushed his hair back from his temple, where he’d turn gray and distinguished long before she would consider abandoning him to his nightmares. “So I can understand.”

He lifted her off of him, carefully, and set her on one end of the settee. Before Milly could lodge her protest, Sebastian lay down on his side, his head pillowed on her thigh. He crossed his arms over his chest, as if settling in for a nap.

“This is cozy,” Milly said, stroking his shoulder.

“You will recall I tried to spare you this recitation, Baroness.”

She fiddled with the silky dark hair at his nape. “You will recall I am your wife.”

His smile was faint, fleeting, and sad.

“At the same time it became clear to me that the English advance across Spain would not stop, and that France’s cause was doomed, a duke came into my keeping. An English duke, and a man of more mental fortitude than you will find in six lifetimes did you spend them scouring the entire earth.”

He fell silent for a time, staring at the fire while Milly traced the shape of his ear.

“My duke was the reason I could keep Anduvoir cowed, the reason the guards never rebelled, the reason the other prisoners had time to heal in body and spirit. Before I could set him free, it became the duke who tortured me, and not the other way around… The pain that man could endure would have felled all the rest of Wellington’s staff put together, and for a time, it felled me.”

“Mercia?”

“Mercia. Christian Donatus Severn. On his silence rested the safety and well-being of every Englishman, Frenchman, dog, and cat at the Château. I could not turn my back without my own guards, my own commanding officer, attempting to break him, and they all failed. Thank God, they failed, for any success on their part would have seen the end of my role as the authority over captured English officers.”

“Mercia acknowledges you.” Though it made little sense, given what Sebastian was disclosing.

“He had enemies more diabolical than a mere provincial French army colonel with a foul temper and a sharp knife, and after a time, I think Mercia understood that my intent was not to destroy him.”

“Others sought to destroy him?”

“They were not successful.”