The Traitor (9 page)

“Your dear cousin beat you, when he had to realize that beatings were unavailing toward the furtherance of your education. He denied you wages for your labor. He belittled you and suffered others to do likewise. He limited your access to your aunts until you were of age—or am I wrong?”

Milly sat abruptly on the piano bench, a bunch of dead rose petals in her hand, soft as velvet, but not the same thing at all as a plush fabric. “You make it sound as if I was a prisoner.”

He sat beside her, causing the bench to creak. There was barely room for the two of them, because St. Clair was no delicate flower.

“You felt like a prisoner. Your imagination and determination were all that sustained you, and possibly, the occasional visit from your aunts. Will you stay with us, Milly Danforth?”

Allies were not friends, but they could be loyal and useful. If one had allies, did that imply one had enemies as well? “I should cut more roses.”

He took her wrist and pried her fingers open, then turned her hand palm down, so the rose petals fell into his larger hand. Because Milly had been holding the petals in a warm grasp, their scent wafted to her nose.

“Aunt would be heartbroken to lose you, and nobody in this house cares one whit if you can read or write. Nobody.”

“
I
care if I can read or write. I’ve tried to tell myself that it’s like singing—some people have a natural talent for it, and others do not. I have no talent for letters and words.”

He swore. Milly’s ear for French was more than passable, because she’d always liked the sound of it—as if velvet had a sound—and his cursing was creative and vulgar.

“I can teach you to write your name, Millicent Danforth, but not if you let Alcorn win.”

She had no intention of letting Alcorn remove her from this household, but that wasn’t what St. Clair had referred to. “How will you teach me, when governesses, tutors, Marcus, and my aunts were unable to?”

He stood peering down at the rose petals in his hand. “It’s not complicated. You will learn your name by stitching it.”

***

“Confound it, Sebastian, you are uncanny. How could you know such a thing about my Milly?”

Aunt paced the elegant dimensions of her sitting room, Baumgartner looking on from the corner desk.

“I didn’t know it, not until Upton started with his buffoonery.” Aunt’s sitting room was pretty, full of lemony light from the yellow silk on the walls, the mirrors, and the gilt, but the room held no flowers.

“Do sit down, Sebastian. Were you guessing?”

No, he’d not been guessing. He’d been relying on the same instinct that allowed him to reduce grown men—brave, determined grown men—to weeping, undignified children. Sebastian appropriated the rocking chair by the fire and tried to fashion an answer.

“English cavalrymen riding dispatch were forever getting caught with orders in their boots, their shirts, their hats, their sleeves. A few were clever enough to make hidden slits in the leather of their saddles, or false compartments in their saddlebags. A very few admirable patriots secreted orders in their underlinen.”

Aunt liked that part about the underlinen. She lit on a cream-colored sofa and poured herself a cup of tea. “Do go on. Tea, Professor?”

“No thank you, my lady.”

“Most of those riding dispatch had simply accepted sealed orders and gone galloping off with a tidy packet of intelligence just waiting to be captured and deciphered.”

Aunt looked thoughtful while she stirred sugar and cream into her tea. “I gather you took a different approach?”

He’d taken many different approaches. “When I needed information sent to a higher command, or sent”—he shot his cuffs and did not look at Baumgartner—“
elsewhere
, I relied on the peasantry, the unlettered and the unremarkable, to relay my messages.”

“And this worked?”

“Not always.” No method, no procedure, no clever scheme had been without its failures, some of them spectacular. “I found, though, that those who could not write had prodigious memories. They had far more accurate recall of what they’d been told than those who’d merely shoved a packet of paper into their kit bag and ridden away.”

“And Milly Danforth has such a memory.” Aunt held out a plate of tea cakes to Sebastian, but not to Baumgartner, who would not bother with sweets when there was business to be transacted. “She can recite anything she’s heard practically word for word, sometimes when I’d rather she didn’t.”

Sebastian had listened to Miss Danforth often enough over breakfast, but her ability to recall conversations hadn’t registered, not until her cousin’s visit.

“She has no lap desk,” he said, “and she didn’t send written word to her aunt when she arrived here that she’d found a decent post. She has no Bible, no Book of Common Prayer with her name inscribed in it. She neither sent nor received any written communications. The neighbors got word to her not by sending a note, but by word of mouth when somebody had an errand in Town and could stop by the kitchen door to pass along the news in person.”

“To have no letters, none in any language, is a sad, sad poverty,” Baumgartner observed.

“To have that Upton swine as your sole male relation is a worse poverty yet,” Aunt snapped.

“To have the Traitor Baron as your nephew is the saddest poverty of all,” Sebastian said. “And yet, Miss Danforth has agreed to remain in our household, despite that unhappy connection.”

“Of course she did,” Aunt said. “I pay well, and my company is agreeable.”

Both men remained silent.

“I pay
very
well, and my company is
not
disagreeable,” she amended. “And you two are no gentlemen. Sebastian, be off with you. The professor and I have letters to write.”

He rose, exchanging a look of sympathy with Baumgartner. The German was in every sense in Aunt’s confidence, not a particularly comfortable honor.

And Baumgartner’s sympathy for Sebastian? To claim the Traitor Baron as one’s only male relation was indeed a sad, sad poverty.

***

Parisians were sensible people. They appreciated the great blessing of living in one of the most beautiful, vibrant cities on earth, and assembled at cafés and along the boulevards when social inclinations overtook them. An occasional stroll in the ordered and civilized surrounds of the Tuileries sufficed to assuage their bucolic impulses.

Parisians did not feel compelled to associate with cows, geese, rabbits, deer, and other beasts in their very parks, while the Londoners—yeomen all, at heart—did. Henri nonetheless chose a shaded bench in Hyde Park for his next assignation with Captain Lord Anderson, in hopes that his lordship might be less remarkable in such an environment.

Anderson did not disappoint. He came striding along in the uniform of the English gentleman—shiny boots, close-tailored doeskin breeches, blue waistcoat, brown topcoat, hat, and walking stick. His watch fob was a tasteful wink of gold, and his gloves were spotless, dyed or chosen to exactly match his breeches. He took a seat on the bench as if enjoying the pretty day, not an ounce of imagination or idiosyncrasy in evidence in his dress or his demeanor.

“Have some gingerbread,
mon
ami
.” Henri passed over a slice of sweet that would never compare with his own sainted grandmother’s recipe, but did not offend when decently covered with butter. “It’s still warm, and I bought more than I should have.”

Anderson looked momentarily nonplussed, no doubt because one did not eat with gloves on, but the English schoolboy won out over the man of fashion. He took off his gloves and accepted Henri’s offering.

“My thanks.” Anderson popped a bite into his mouth, managing to get a crumb lodged in his moustache. “Quite good.”

A bit heavy on the ginger, and a hint of cloves would have smoothed out the aroma nicely. “English gingerbread, like English ale, has no equal,” Henri said. “Have you anything to report?”

He wasn’t about to compliment the English weather. Even Anderson would pick up on that tripe.

“Dirks told me to take myself the hell off. Those were his very words.” His lordship stuffed the last of his gingerbread into his mouth, and damned if the man didn’t even chew like an Englishman—all business, like a bullock with its cud, as if food were not akin to sex in the sensual pleasure it might afford.

“Dirks is Scottish, and you are English. Does he want you to beg, perhaps?”

“I
served
with him, Henri.”

And such was the bond among Wellington’s former subordinates that it even, apparently, transcended centuries of national animosity. Henri took another bite of warm gingerbread and decided not to chastise Anderson for using his name. Half the French nation was naming its babies Henri, and he hadn’t given Anderson any other means of addressing him—nor would he.

“What about the other one, MacHugh?”

Anderson dusted his hands. “He was sitting right there when I spoke to Dirks and didn’t say a word. Dirks isn’t the man’s name, you know.”

No, Henri had not known. This Dirks fellow had enjoyed the hospitality of the Château for a mere fortnight, and at a time when Henri’s attentions had been absorbed by happenings in Paris.

“Why is he called Dirks, then?”

“Because no matter how many knives you find on him, he always has one more in some location you’d never think to look. I expect he’s bloody competent with a sword too.”

“Which means if St. Clair chose pistols, Monsieur Dirks might not prevail. Why not challenge St. Clair yourself?”

Henri put the matter as a tactical question, when what he wanted to do was goad Anderson into the sort of idiocy upon which brave English officers prided themselves.

The frustrations of fieldwork on English soil were without limit.

“I won’t do it.” Anderson spoke not with bravado, but with the sort of quiet that suggested the bedrock of his Saxon stubbornness supported his words.

“And why will you not rid two sovereign nations of the traitorous embarrassment that is Sebastian St. Clair?”

Anderson brushed the crumb from his moustache and pulled on his gloves. “He had me soundly beaten, more than once. That is not reason enough to take a man’s life.”

“You were bound hand and foot. You could not fight back. Your wounds were not tended, and your womenfolk were left to think you dead.”

His lordship stood. “My wounds were tended more effectively than they would have been in any English field hospital. I know it was part of his strategy, to alternate care and abuse, but it was not part of his strategy to work out a ransom for me. He didn’t have to do that.”

This was…this was the confounded illogic of English honor, and yet Henri attempted to argue with it. He rose, lest Anderson try to stroll away from a discussion not yet concluded.

“St. Clair extracted from you every useful detail of intelligence he could, and then extracted coin from your family for the privilege of burying you on English soil, despite the fact that neither France nor England wanted any part of official prisoner exchanges. You were abused in more ways than you’ll admit.”

Though at the time, Henri had approved wholeheartedly of the ransom. Paris did not need to know everything that transpired hundreds of miles distant, after all, and the
République
had seen some share of the coin. Occasionally.

“I am alive, sir,” Anderson said, tapping his hat more firmly on his head. “And while I will happily meet any man on the field of honor for just cause, my lady wife would rather I not keep fighting a war now concluded. If this makes me a traitor, then have an English officer of the Crown take me to task for it. I bid you good day, and my thanks for the gingerbread.”

He sauntered on, swinging his walking stick, the picture of English manhood in full bloom. Henri fell in step beside him, sparing a moment’s thought for the knife in his boot.

Buried between
mon
capitaine
’s shoulder blades, it would make a lovely addition to his so-fine and boring wardrobe.

“You’ll talk to this Dirks again?”

“I will talk to MacHugh, and then you can find another accomplice, monsieur. If England wants St. Clair dead that badly, then many should be willing to assist you.”

“Good day, then, and my compliments to your lady, and to your small daughters.”

Because he could not abide insubordination, Henri gave those last civilities just the slightest ironic emphasis. Let Anderson understand that his cooperation was not discretionary, but rather, as imperative as, and
nearly
identical with, his loyalty to the damned English Crown.

“You will need your cloak and bonnet.”

Milly admired the perfect seam stretched across her embroidery hoop, though St. Clair’s tone suggested she was to pop to her feet, salute, and trot off for the front door at double time.

“Since when does one need outdoor apparel to learn to write one’s name, my lord?”

He remained standing over her—a male tactic she’d long since lost patience with—until Milly realized he was not trying to intimidate with his size and muscle, he was studying her sewing.

“Your stitchery is very pretty, Miss Danforth.”

Flattery was a male tactic with which she’d had little experience. “Thank you.”

He drew his finger over the flowers she’d embroidered along one hem—purple irises, red tulips, an occasional spike of yellow gladiolus, and a froth of greenery. “You have sketched the pattern on the fabric, and this tells me you can copy what you see. Your colors are accurate for the subject, and I haven’t seen you wearing spectacles.”

He continued to stroke a single finger over the linen, and Milly realized that, all unaware, the baron was admiring her new summer nightgown.

Saints
abide.
She set the hoop back in her workbasket. “My vision is quite functional, though I will occasionally use spectacles when I’m fatigued, your lordship, and I am most eager to learn my signature.”

He straightened, but not before Milly noticed that her froth of greenery was the exact same shade St. Clair’s eyes had been when he’d dealt with Alcorn.

“Then prepare to walk with me. When one’s decisions can result in men losing their lives, one learns to gather information before choosing a course. I would hear from you about your previous efforts in the schoolroom.”

Escaping the house held vast appeal, even if it meant marching about with St. Clair. Milly was tying her bonnet ribbons when his lordship joined her in the foyer, his expression disapproving.

“English women do not see themselves,” he said, brushing her fingers aside. “You look in the mirror, and you think, ‘Ah, my hat is upon my head, exactly where it should be. The bow is secure, and I will not have to chase my bonnet in a sudden wind.’ You should look at the picture you make with that hat, and adjust your appearance accordingly. If there’s a sudden wind, the young English gentlemen should all be trying to peek at your ankles anyway.”

Already he was lecturing her, so perhaps there was hope for the project they were to undertake. He set her bonnet back an inch farther on her head, and retied her ribbons so the bow was off not to the right, where Milly generally tied it, but to the left and more loosely, the ribbons curling down over her heart.

“That sudden wind might carry off my only everyday bonnet, your lordship.” Though as Milly regarded herself in the mirror, she allowed that the results of St. Clair’s fussing were somehow
fetching
—even on her.

“Then I shall look a proper smitten gentleman when I go tearing down the lane after it, will I not? Come along.”

If Milly had been concerned for the propriety of walking out with her employer, her concerns were put to rest. Mr. Brodie fell in behind them, as did Giles the footman, and Rumsfeld, the senior upstairs maid.

“Are we all to learn our letters in the park, my lord?”

“We are all to enjoy a bit of fine weather while it holds,” he replied. “Aunt runs Giles about mercilessly, and the maid—Clothilde, Chloe, I forget her name—is enamored of him.”

“Her name is Rumsfeld.”

“Not to Giles it isn’t.” This observation was made with no humor whatsoever, merely another detail to be managed as St. Clair supervised the subordinates under his authority.

“What would you like to know about my attempts to read, my lord?”

“Everything.”

Everything
took them to the park, along the Serpentine, and past children playing with the loud good cheer engendered by a sunny spring day. Everything included a recitation of tutors, punishments, and more punishments, humiliations, and small glimmers of hope doused by buckets of despair.

“Shall we sit?” St. Clair asked, gesturing toward a bench in the shade.

Giles and Chloe—Chloe Rumsfeld—had taken a bench a few yards off, and Milly did not see Mr. Brodie anywhere about.

And still, the baron put more questions to her: Was a slate any more helpful than pencil and paper? Did memorizing a recited spelling inform her attempts to make the letters with her hand? Could she recognize words without being able to name the letters in them?

“This is not easy for me to discuss, your lordship.”

“Do you suppose this recitation of beatings, beratings, and deprivations is easy for me to listen to?” he retorted. “If I lamented your miseries, waved my handkerchief at you, and allowed my distress to become obvious, would your story be less painful?”

He sounded testy. The way Milly’s aunts had often sounded when their aches and pains were troubling them.

“I think you marched me away from the house, away from what’s comfortable and comforting to me, to shake loose my confidence. I am much attached to what confidence I have, your lordship, and I can assure you, if teaching me to write my name involves surrendering my dignity into your hands, I’ll keep my ignorance a while longer.”

Milly’s only sign that he’d heard her was a slow blink and a pursing of his lips, while across the path, Chloe laughed at something Giles said.

“I cannot like—” The baron paused and glanced around. “You should not have been beaten. A gratuitous beating will have the opposite of its intended effect; witness, the beating intended to humiliate you only made you more proud.”

At the oddest moments, he turned up French—or something.

“I’m not arrogant.”

“Proud, Miss Danforth, is no relation to arrogant. Come along, you have caught me at my game, and I have a sense of how to start on our objective.” He assisted Milly to her feet and kept her hand wrapped around his arm.

“What have you learned that you didn’t know when we left the house, my lord?”

Milly asked, because
she
had learned things. When he’d taken his hat off and set it beside them on the bench, she’d learned that the sun could find red highlights in his dark hair. Because that same sun caught the fatigue etched around his mouth and eyes, she’d learned that he was tired, even this early in the morning. She’d learned that his scent was a pleasure that eclipsed the rare day of fresh air in London’s often odoriferous surrounds.

She’d learned that in the deceptive openness and pleasantry of a sunny morning, she would tell him things she hadn’t shared with anybody else—about birchings, about days of bread and water, about having her knuckles smacked until they were red, swollen, and bleeding.

About typical schoolgirl tribulations that had felt like the torments of the damned.

“What I know now, Miss Danforth, is that you are resourceful, determined, and clever, though one certainly had suspicions in this regard previously. I
know
you will soon be writing your name.”

His utter assurance—his arrogance—on this point was lovely.

“I want the whole thing, you know, complete with Harriette.”

His forward progress never faltered. “I beg your pardon?”

“Millicent
Harriette
Danforth. I want all three names, not some little squiggle in the middle that stands for Harriette.
H
’s aren’t that difficult. They look like divided doors when both halves are fastened, the kind you see in stables and dairies.”

“So they do. What other letters have you noticed lurking in odd locations?”

Milly prosed on as they passed blooming lilac bushes, though she did not tell him that when a lady stood with her arms at her sides in an evening gown, her décolletage resembled the letter
M
, particularly if she were well endowed. How a poor relation spent her evenings among the wallflowers was not his concern.

“Miss Danforth, you will not take offense when that blond gentleman offers the cut direct.”

The baron’s voice had changed, gone smoother and harder, more English and more commanding officer both. A tall, trim fellow came striding toward them. Every aspect of his attire, every aspect of his bearing shouted that he was Quality, and likely titled Quality at that.

She saw the moment when the man recognized St. Clair, saw not a hesitation in his stride, but a slight angling forward, as if a chilly wind had arrived of a sudden. His gaze flicked over St. Clair then landed on Milly, to whom he offered the slightest gesture in the direction of a finger to his hat brim.

“St. Clair.”

“Mercia.”

The encounter was over in an instant, and yet Milly suspected her escort was not merely surprised, he was astonished.

Milly used their linked arms to tow him onward. “Steady on, St. Clair. I expect he was but an earl or a viscount. They tend to frequent the park on pretty days, the same as the rest of us, and being a useless lot, they have all the time in the world to perfect their manners.”

“That, my dear, was no less personage than His Grace, Christian, Duke of Mercia, a man whom I hold in the highest esteem.”

“Not a bad-looking fellow,” Milly said, and then she chattered on because she had the sense St. Clair was so rattled, he needed her words to focus on. “One sees the occasional duke, and it’s often a disappointment. They go bald, get fat, have bad teeth and nervous laughs just like the butcher and the coachman. Duchesses are no better. They’re supposed to be nigh to royalty, but the association doesn’t seem to lend them any immunity from human foibles. One need only look to the Regent himself—I suppose I’m flirting with treason—but the man’s stays are said to
creak
, and that can hardly—”

“Millicent, I’ve met dukes before.”

Millicent. His pronunciation of the
i
suffered a bit crossing the Channel, but she liked it—Meelicent. Doubtless, St. Clair had met that very duke before, and not under ideal circumstances.

“His Grace was in want of charm,” Milly said. “You and he have that in common.”

They walked for a few more paces. At some point, Mr. Brodie had rejoined their little foot patrol, while the baron remained thoughtful at Milly’s side.

His silence was convenient for Milly, because she had much to consider. The thoroughness of the baron’s questioning, the care with which he’d staged his interrogation, and the ease with which he’d adopted the role of interrogator suggested familiarity with that terrain—and Milly had been questioned before.

“Why can’t you learn, you
stupid
girl?”

“
When
will you apply yourself? Children half your age learn this easily!”

“Are you
trying
to earn a beating?
Another
beating?”

All in aid of imparting to Milly an ability to read her Bible. Such Christians, her cousins.

And yet, the question that lodged in her mind as she made her way home beside a silent St. Clair was different from the ones shouted at her in the schoolrooms of years past. What remained to plague her was St. Clair’s question.

“Do you think this recitation of beatings, beratings, and deprivations is easy for me to listen to?”

She’d seen the care St. Clair took with his aunt, seen the way he inconvenienced himself for an intransigent donkey. Milly had even tasted the man’s kiss, and yet, she had thought that very thing.

She had thought, and part of him had wanted her to think, that her suffering mattered to him not at all.

***

“You thought to show Miss Danforth how Polite Society torments its outcasts,” Michael said. He paused as if to admire the shine on the boot he was polishing. “She didn’t even notice when Lady Hutchings snubbed you.”

Michael was a caring soul, which would be his downfall one day, if it hadn’t been already. He assiduously polished a tall boot that was not exactly dirty, so the dear fellow would not have to look at Sebastian at the mention of Lady Hutchings.

“Why do you not leave those for the boot boy? I pay the lad good coin, and he does a decent job.”

Michael remained firmly planted on his humble bench in the saddle room. “When a fellow—a valet sort of fellow—has only one pair of good boots, he likes to care for them himself. Rather like when he has only one horse or one wife.”

Sebastian took down a bridle that hadn’t been tied up properly. “Have you a wife, Michael, secreted away somewhere? A fiancée perhaps?”

Michael set his boot down
carefully
, suggesting he’d perhaps wanted to hurl it at his employer—which was interesting.

“You had a fiancée, my lord, and she gave you the cut direct this morning before Miss Danforth and half of Polite Society.”

“Not for the first time, and not quite. Dear Amelia will be trying to give me the cut direct when she’s doddering about on her canes and I’m in my Bath chair—assuming I live that long, which I shall not. A true cut requires that one pass the glance over the object to be cut, a distracted, unseeing glance—as if a faint stench has been detected—and then one turns the eye on the middle distance. Amelia has some way to go before she perfects it—there’s too much of the shop about her antecedents, I’m thinking.”

Michael stuffed his hand into his boot, dipped a rag in boot black, and started at the toe of his footwear.

“She’s damned pretty, your Amelia, but she would have been a chilly night’s work in bed. The point is, Miss Danforth didn’t notice. She didn’t notice when the Pierpont whelp turned off the path rather than cross his steps with yours. She didn’t notice when Lady Fleming and both of her escorts turned their backs on you.”

Sebastian looped reins through bridle parts in an intricate arrangement, one that would keep the leather supple, ensure no parts were left trailing, and look pretty hanging on a shiny brass hook—rather like tying a woman’s bonnet to show off her features to best advantage.

“Lady Fleming is some relation of Amelia’s. You will polish a hole in the toe of that boot,
mon
ami
.” Sebastian moved on to the next bridle, which happened to belong to Fable.