With a leisurely, lazy action La Roque swirled the brandy around his glass. ‘Does she know what Mallington did?’
‘She refuses to believe it.’
‘I suppose that is to be expected.’
‘Mademoiselle Mallington’s portmanteau was recently stolen.’
La Roque swigged his brandy. ‘I am not surprised that her presence has roused dislike among the men. Everyone knows who her father was.’
‘I do not think that it is that simple. It is this of which I wished to speak to you.’
La Roque raised his brows in surprise.
‘I believe that she may have had hidden some of her father’s campaign journals within the baggage. I cannot be certain.’ Dammartin thought of Josephine Mallington’s reaction in his tent last night. ‘But I am convinced that it is so; I think that the portmanteau was stolen for the journals.’
‘But why would she be carrying her father’s journals?’
Dammartin shrugged. ‘Because they would not be looked for in the baggage of his daughter?’
‘Pierre, you are too much focused on Mallington. You grow obsessed over him. You do not even know that these journals were in the portmanteau. It is more likely that one of your troopers took the portmanteau as a prank because she is Mallington’s daughter. I am only surprised that it has taken so long for something like this to happen. She is, after all, a most hated woman.’ La Roque sighed, and leaning forward, placed a hand on Dammartin’s shoulder. ‘Pierre, Mallington is dead. You must put this behind you and move on, for the sake of your father.’
‘Perhaps you are right.’ Dammartin sighed and turned his gaze to the brandy glass. The meniscus did not move. The pungent aroma drifted up to fill his nostrils amid the fading smells of cigar smoke and food and low-burning candles.
‘Maybe it would be better to send Mademoiselle Mallington to travel in my company. At least then she would not be around to stir up such painful memories,’ said La Roque.
Dammartin thought of Lamont’s advice and for a moment he was tempted to accept his godfather’s offer, but that would mean an admission of Josephine Mallington’s power over him, and Dammartin was not about to admit any such thing. ‘Thank you, but no. I can handle Mademoiselle Mallington.’
The Major drained the rest of his brandy and the glass hit the table with a clumsy thump. He rose from his seat. ‘If you change your mind, you need only say the word. You know I only want to make things easier for you.’ He swayed rather unsteadily on his feet and kissed Dammartin’s cheeks. ‘Goodnight, Pierre.’
‘Goodnight, sir.’ Dammartin made his way out into the freshness of the cool night air.
La Roque stood by the tent flap and watched him go, raising a hand to bid him good-night. He stood there a long time after Dammartin had disappeared from sight, still looking as if he could follow the Captain’s trail through the blackness of night. The smile slipped from his face, and his gaze was hard and thoughtful.
Josie woke with a start, her heart beating too fast within her chest, her throat tight with emotion. She lay very still and let the image of the room in the monastery at Telemos slowly fade. She forced her breathing to slow from the ragged pant, wiped the tears from her cheeks and blew her nose.
The night was unnaturally quiet. It seemed that the silence hissed within her ears.
She pulled the blanket higher so that it tucked beneath her chin.
The moon was bright outside, casting a hint of light through the thick canvas of the tent to lift something of the pitch from the black. She forced her eyes to stay open, would not let them shut until the last of the nightmare had left her. But it seemed that nothing would stop the thoughts in her head. Even with her eyes staring up at the canvas above her head, she could see the bullets that annihilated the door within the monastery, wood splintering as if it were feeble with rot. Without mercy the nightmare pulled her once more into its clutches. Her eyes closed.
The stench of powder and blood surrounded her. The line of six men crouched across the room, her father on her left side, the bare wall on her right. It was almost as if she could feel the weight of the rifle pulling at her arms, and the terrible slowness of its loading. Her fingers did not move fast enough, snatching at bullets, fumbling with powder, and she could feel the terrible frustration at her own dull speed. The noise all around was deafening and she knew that the attack would not fail. But it was not the French who were firing through the door, it was the bandits.
Smith took a bullet in the thigh and kept on shooting. Cleeves fell without so much as a whisper, a round red hole in the white of his forehead. The men’s muskets were firing twice as fast as Josie’s. She heard her father’s shout, We will not surrender! But as she looked through the disintegrating wood of the door she saw the face of the bandit laughing.
Josie sat bolt upright, suddenly, quickly awake. The blankets fell back, and, grabbing one up, she ran to the mouth of the tent, unfastening the flap with shaking fingers to stumble out into the brightness of the night.
The fat moon hung shining and high in the sky and stars were scattered as tiny jewelled pinpricks. The air was so icy as to make her gasp as she stood there, outside her tent, not moving, looking up at the sky, glad of the harshness of the cold, feeling the cleansing purge of the chilled night air enter her lungs. Out here, in the open, the drowsy drug of sleep had no power. She was awake in the here and now, and the nightmare seemed far away. So she stood with the blanket wrapped around her and let the peace enfold her.
She had no idea of what time it was, but she knew by the empty state of the camp and the burned-down fires that it was late. The men were all in their tents asleep. Everywhere was silent.
She had only been there some few minutes when she heard the footsteps come across the grass from the direction of the horses. She turned towards her tent, then instinctively glanced back at the presence she sensed.
Dammartin was standing at the other side of what remained of the fire, the flicker of tiny flames lighting his face from below, making him appear dangerous.
A shiver swept across her stomach. She gave a small nod of her head to acknowledge his presence and turned her face back to the tent. Her fingers closed around the flap, drawing back the heavy canvas.
His feet moved. ‘Mademoiselle Mallington.’ His voice was as soft as a caress, and when she looked round again, he was standing right behind her.
She let the canvas slip through her fingers and turned to face him. ‘Captain Dammartin,’ she whispered.
He looked devastatingly handsome.
Warning bells began to ring in her head. She took a step back and felt the brush of the tent against her shift. The chill of the ground rose up through the soles of her bare feet.
‘You could not sleep?’ he said quietly.
‘No.’ A little shake of her head, and the long tresses of her hair fluttered pale and loose in the moonlight. He was looking at her with that same intense expression as last night within the tent, before Lamont’s interruption. And for all that she knew that she should not, Josie could not help herself from looking right back.
They stared at one another in the silence of the surrounding night, without words. A tension that was taut between them holding them there, that neither seemed able to break.
He stepped closer, so that there was nothing to separate his long cavalry boots from the hem of her shift.
Nervousness fluttered through Josie. She glanced away, breaking the gaze that seemed to lock them together, knowing that she should not be standing here in the middle of the night talking to this man who was her captor, this very man responsible for the deaths of her father and his men. She had to go now, walk away while she still could.
‘I should go.’ She lowered her gaze to the polished black sheen of his boots, and made to move.
‘No.’
She felt the warmth of his hand catch gently at her fingers, and glanced back up.
The moon touched a silver frosting to his hair, and revealed each
and every plane that sculpted his face.
Josie stood where she was, captured by the magic of the moonlight and the man.
The fingers of one hand entwined with hers, anchoring her to the spot, while the other hand caressed her cheek, sliding down to her chin. Slowly, with a touch that seemed too light, too gentle to be from the tall, strong man that stood before her, he tilted her face up to his.
‘Mademoiselle Mallington,’ he said softly. ‘Josephine.’ And his eyes were filled with a depth of emotion she had not seen before and such promise.
She knew that he would kiss her, and, Lord help her, but she wanted him to, so very much.
His mouth lowered towards hers.
She stood on tiptoe and reached her face up, her lips parting in expectation.
He took her with such gentle possession as to wipe everything else from her mind, and it seemed to Josie as if she had waited all her life for this moment, this wonderful, amazing sensation that was so much more than just a kiss.
His arms stretched around her, holding her to him, his palms warm and enticing against her back, stroking her, caressing her. She ran her hands up the wool of his coat, feeling the strength of the muscle across his back. And amid the warmth of him, the smell of him, the brandied taste of him, was the feeling that this was meant to be, that she had met her destiny, and nothing had ever felt so right.
She did not remember that he was the enemy. She forgot all about her father and the terrible events of Telemos and the bandits. She lost herself in his kiss and for Josie, in that moment, there was nothing else.
He kissed her gently, undemanding, revelling in the sweetness of her. She tasted of innocence, of all that was goodness and light, and her purity cleansed the darkness from Dammartin’s soul.
For so long he had thought of nothing other than wreaking vengeance upon the man who had murdered his father. And now that man’s daughter was in his arms, and there was in her something so incorruptible and pure that she filled his very mind and there was no room for thoughts of his father or hers, no room for any other thoughts at all.
He wanted her, all of her, every last bit of her, all of her warmth, all of her softness, all of her comfort. She was like a fine down pillow on which a man might lay his head and never wish to rise. He wanted her and his body ached with the need.
She met his mouth with encouragement, but in it he knew her innocence. The small, soft movements of her hands against his back and the press of her body against his warmed his blood to a fire so that it seemed that he was not in the barren winter plains of Iberia but somewhere else altogether. Dammartin had never known a feeling like it, and he wanted it never to stop.
His hand slid beneath the blanket, feeling the curves of her woman’s body through the thin linen of her borrowed shift, knowing that only it separated him from her nakedness. He cupped her buttocks, pressing her closer to his hardness as his tongue entwined with hers in such erotic play to leave him breathless with desire.
‘Josephine,’ he whispered, and gentled the kiss against her lips so that he might look down into her eyes. He stroked the silk of her hair, stroked the softness of her cheek, felt the raggedness of her breath against his fingers.
‘Captain Dammartin,’ she said, and he heard his need mirrored in her breathy words.
‘Pierre,’ he said, ‘my name is Pierre.’
‘Pierre,’ she whispered as his mouth closed again on hers.
He wanted her, wanted her more than life itself.
A noise sounded. He glanced towards the tent that he shared with his lieutenant and sergeant—movement, the sleepy clambering of a man with a need in the night.
He reacted in an instant, pushing her within the flap of her tent and moving quickly round to the other side of the fire to retrace the steps he had taken not so very long ago, pretending that he had only just returned.
Molyneux appeared at the mouth of the tent, his hair ruffled, his expression sleepy. ‘Captain?’ He yawned.
‘I hope you have not stolen my bloody blankets again,’ said Dammartin.
‘Not this time,’ said Molyneux, and, crawling from the tent, pulled his boots on and made his way across the field to the latrines.
Dammartin said nothing, just entered the tent, and stripped off his clothes as best he could in the dark. As he lay down in his bed, he could still taste her sweetness on his lips. And he knew that this battle with his desire for Josephine Mallington was going to be a great deal more difficult than anticipated.
Josie lay flat on her back in her tent, the blankets loose around her. For once she was not cold. Her whole body tingled with warmth, and her lips felt hot and swollen where Captain Dammartin had kissed her. She touched a finger gently to their surface, as if she could not believe what had just passed between herself and the French Captain. And in truth she did not. Yet even as she lay there with her heart still thudding and her blood still rushing, her eyes slipped to the canvas wall on her left-hand side through which was the tent in which Dammartin slept, so close that she could have called his name in a soft voice and he would have heard her.
A strange kind of vibrancy flowed through her and it seemed to Josie that she had never felt more alive. She forgot all that had gone before, all of the bandit’s attack, all of the anxiety of the 60th’s sacrifice, all of the horror of Telemos. For the first time since that terrible day, Josie felt glad to be alive. She would not sleep, she told herself. Her body hummed with wakefulness and something that was almost joy. She closed her eyes, and sleep surrounded her like a warm woollen cloak. Josie sank into it without even knowing that she did so. She was cosy and cosseted within its dark comfort, and her sleep was untroubled.
‘You say that he kissed her?’ Major La Roque narrowed his eyes and peered at the man before him.
‘Yes, sir, and with a great deal of passion.’
‘And there have been no other incidents of this nature?’
‘No, sir, apart from those of which you already know: when he kissed her in punishment for her slapping him, and in his tent the other evening he had her in his arms. Had not Lamont interrupted them, I believe that he would have kissed her then.’
‘And the night they left the campsite together, you are sure there was nothing then?’
‘Nothing other than talk.’
‘And what talk! The journals will prove most useful. You have done well so far. Your loyalty will not go unrewarded.’
Lieutenant Molyneux smiled and took the proffered glass of brandy from Major La Roque’s hand. ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘So, there is something between Captain Dammartin and Mallington’s daughter. What do you think of that?’
Molyneux sipped the brandy from the glass that he had been given and looked cagily at his superior officer. ‘I confess I find it most surprising, sir, given the history of their fathers.’
‘It is a damnable abomination, that’s what it is.’ La Roque poured the rest of the brandy down his throat and set the glass down hard upon the table. ‘What is she like, this Mademoiselle Mallington? Is she pretty? Does she have a figure to drive a man’s senses from his head?’
Molyneux cleared his throat, unsure of how much to reveal.
‘Come, come, Molyneux, do not be shy. Tell me, do you find her distasteful?’
The Lieutenant swallowed hard. ‘No, she is…a most attractive woman.’
‘Good.’
Molyneux glanced up quickly, the surprise clear across his face.
‘Captain Dammartin does not know what he is doing. The shock of meeting Mallington has affected him. But he will disgrace himself if we let him continue as he is. This Mallington woman will turn him into a laughingstock. The next thing we know, he will be crawling between her legs. What would the Emperor say to that? Jean Dammartin’s son ploughing Mallington’s daughter!’
Molyneux kept quiet.
‘Jean would turn in his grave,’ said La Roque. ‘Dammartin was my friend. I saw what that bastard Mallington did to him. And I’ve still g
ot the scars of what he did to me.’
Molyneux nodded, placatingly.
‘It is up to us to protect Captain Dammartin.’
‘Yes, sir. Perhaps you could forbid him from seeing her, move her into the care of another company.’
‘You have much to learn of human nature, Molyneux. If I take her from him, all I shall succeed in doing is to make him want her all the more. No, we must be a little more clever than that…’
Molyneux took another sip of brandy.
‘I have another little job for you, Lieutenant.’
‘Sir?’
The Major smiled. ‘It might not be all that bad if you try to forget who she is, and you did say that you found her attractive.’
Molyneux looked across at La Roque.
‘I have heard that you have quite a reputation with the women, Lieutenant, so I am sure that what I ask will not be beyond you. We must all do what we can for the good of our country, must we not, Lieutenant?’
‘We must, sir.’
‘Good, for here is what I want you to do…’
Josie awoke the next morning in a panic, her eyes springing open immediately.
She could hear the milling about of soldiers. Footsteps, chatter, clank of mess tins, the smoky aroma of coffee and of burnt wood. Daylight shone bright through the paleness of the canvas.
There was only one thought in her head and that was the French Captain’s kiss. Dammartin had kissed her and she had kissed him back with just as much vigour, and with every bit as much wanting. She gave a groan and buried her face against the pillow.
She had kissed him! He was French and her captor. He was the captain of the force that had destroyed her father and his men. He was the man that believed her father guilty of a heinous crime. Josie clutched a hand to her forehead. Fraternising with the enemy—the phrase seemed to taunt her.
What was this madness that seemed now to overcome her in Dammartin’s presence? Nothing could excuse it. Her behaviour was worse than reprehensible. She was a disgrace to the British, a disgrace to her father and the men of the 60th that had died. And yet if Dammartin strode into her tent this very moment and took her in his arms, she could not trust her foolish, selfish, traitorous heart that she would not kiss him again.
The Captain's Forbidden Miss Page 15