“Addie, how kind of you to come. To what do we owe the pleasure?” Lady Merritt asked in a subdued whisper, drawing Addie’s attention.
If Lord Merritt’s appearance had undergone a dramatic change, Lady Merritt’s had doubly done so. Her habitual bulldog expression was absent, replaced by bewilderment. Her powdered cheeks were streaked with gummy rivulets of tears and the hard line of her mouth looked wounded.
“I had to come,” Addie said. Lady Merritt nodded and took a deep, shuddering breath. Her husband patted her hand consolingly.
“You’ve heard about him, then.”
“Yes, of course.” She hadn’t realized the Merritts would take Jack’s masquerade so hard. Outrage, she could understand . . . but this . . . grief! And Lord Merritt! She’d have expected him to be at least somewhat mollified by the fact that Jack was not the artist he’d played at being.
“It was not our fault,” Lord Merritt said defensively.
“No, of course not. It had nothing to do with you. He told me.”
Lady Merritt stared. “He told you?”
Addie frowned. Surely Lady Merritt must have suspected their friendship—even if it had been merely an illusion. “Of course. The night of the party, when he took me home.”
Lady Merritt peered at her in perplexity a moment before enlightenment dawned in her eyes. She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oh. You’re talking about Jack.”
“Yes. Jack. Who else? His deception, his exploitation of you, your home, your friendship. He gulled us, Lady Merritt, and you must not hold yourself accountable. He was very good—”
“Yes, yes.” Lady Merritt sighed again, and leaned her head back against the cushion on the divan, closing her eyes. “Jack has been naughty.”
“Naughty?” Addie’s tone echoed her astonishment. “He uses you—he uses all of us—and all you can say is ‘Jack has been naughty’?”
“Really, Addie. I don’t have the emotional energy right now to deal with Jack’s transgressions. Lord Merritt and I have a far greater betrayal to deal with.” Her lips quivered. Lord Merritt patted her again.
“A greater betrayal than Jack’s?”
Lord Merritt squeezed his wife’s hand and cleared his throat. “You might as well be told. The rumor mills will be grinding soon enough. Our son, Evan—” His voice cracked and Lady Merritt moaned. He tried again. “Evan has entered a seminary.”
“Excuse me?”
“Evan has converted. He is becoming a . . . a . . .”
“A Roman Catholic priest!” wailed Lady Merritt and flung herself in her husband’s arms.
“There, there, Harmy.” With difficulty, Lord Merritt hefted his wife to her feet. “You’ll excuse us, Addie,” he said solemnly and proceeded to stagger through the door under the weight of his sobbing wife.
Addie stared after them, amazed.
“It’s the only thing I can conceive of that would have effected a reconciliation between them.” Jack stepped into the doorway, clad in a dark suit that could not disguise the athletic breadth of his shoulders or the hard, lean length of his legs. Her heart skipped uncomfortably at the sight of his haggard face. He’d cut his hair, she thought, aware of the irrelevance of the observance. It was not so light now, but a soft nut-brown.
“What might do the same for us?”
“Nothing.” She lifted her chin. “I have come to tell you that your supplications via my brother have fallen on deaf ears. After today, I will not meet you. I thought it only fair to inform you in person so you might not be taken unawares should we chance to pass in public.”
The muscles strained in his jaw. He took a step forward and she countered with a step back. He started to reach out toward her but then dropped his hand, his fist clenched at his side.
“Addie. You must let me explain.”
“So Ted tells me and so I am here. Please continue.” Her coldness did not alter his expression; it remained one of profound gentleness.
“Will you please sit down?”
“No. You may have instigated this interview, but I have been manipulated by you long enough. Whatever you have to say, say it from there.” She kept her gaze on his shoulders. If she looked into his blue eyes she would lose her resolve. She must not make the mistake of believing in him again.
“All right,” he said. “All right. I was, as I told you, a captain of the Gordon Highlanders. I was in the regiment for over a decade, Addie. It was my life. As it was my father’s life.”
“That was not a lie, then.”
“No,” he finally said, “that was not a lie.”
“Go on.”
“I was a good soldier. A better officer.”
“Good at killing.”
“No.” The words were instant, sure. “Good at keeping my men from being killed.”
She could not question his conviction.
“Soldiers aren’t cut from one mold, Addie. Some believe in what they are doing. Some are forced into their careers. Some are idealists. Some are brave; some are craven. A very few enjoy carnage; the vast majority are sickened by it. Some just go through the motions, marking time while they serve. Whatever their reasons, it was my responsibility to see that they did their jobs and stayed alive.”
Seeing that she was not going to respond, he went on. “There is a brotherhood amongst soldiers that is born on the battlefield. Men depend on each other and, in turn, on their commanding officers. It is the only way soldiers can expect to live. That mutual trust.”
Her determination to cling to her anger faltered. She steeled herself. Words were easy.
“I discovered that one of the officers in the Sudan had betrayed that trust. He made money by working for the very slavers we were there to vanquish. In doing so, he knowingly forfeited his own men’s—perhaps my men’s—lives.”
She could hear the rawness in his words.
“I could not let him get away with it.”
She took a deep breath. “What has that to do with me?”
“The only thing I knew about this officer was that he was a member of the Black Dragoons. The man who told me died as he spoke. I couldn’t hear all of what he said, but I did hear that he’d seen some sort of evidence, some written proof of the traitor’s guilt. Before I could act on this information, I was wounded.”
She couldn’t keep herself from moving forward, just a step, but a telling one. He acted as though he did not see it. Jack would never use pity to gain an advantage.
“Under instructions from my last surviving relative, Lord Merritt, they shipped me to Gate Hall. There I recuperated under Wheatcroft’s tender ministrations. It was a protracted convalescence and by the time I was better, the war was over, the men dispersed, anything I might have found in North Africa was gone.” One corner of his beautifully sculpted lips curled in wry memory.
“How long were you at Gate Hall?”
“All spring and into summer. Long months when the only things that kept me from going mad with frustration and anger and boredom were the drive to find this traitor. And you.”
“No.”
“Yes,” he said. “I heard you taking tea on the terrace beneath my window, walking in the garden with Lady Merritt. I would listen to you, for you. I came to know you, the cadence of your footstep, the contentment in your silence. I knew the way you watched the sky by how often you were told to mind your freckles. I knew when you listened to the same bird’s song I did, for you would pause while others spoke when a thrush trilled from the meadow. I fell in love with you, Addie, before I ever saw you.”
He waited quietly, exposed and acquiescent and so very vulnerable. Everything in her heart longed to believe him. She mustn’t listen to that defective instrument again.
“You loved me so much you plotted to deceive me.” God help her, she wanted to be convinced.
His sigh was filled with remorse but he went doggedly on. “While I was recovering, I wrote letters to the War Office, to my old mates, to anyone I could think of, asking for information. Slowly,
with Wheatcroft’s help, I compiled a list of the officers who could have been the traitor. There were only a few who were in a position of enough authority or who were in the right places at the right time. And of those, four were having their portraits painted by your brother.”
“I see.”
“No. You don’t,” he said vehemently. “I didn’t have any proof. The only way I could think to find some was to get close to those men, in some guise that would not alert the traitor to my purpose. And when I heard that your brother had been commissioned to paint the very officers I suspected, I saw a way. God help me, I took it. I had to. I knew too well what you thought of soldiers. You would never have allowed me near you—or your brother’s studio.”
“Why didn’t you just tell the military authorities?”
“Tell them what?” he asked bitterly. “That on the merits of a dead native’s word I was seeking to dishonor one of Her Majesty’s most distinguished officers?”
“So you would have continued deceiving me, using me, if I hadn’t found you out,” she said.
“No!” He mastered himself with a visible effort. “No. I was going to tell you. That night.”
“Why?” she asked, trying to make sense of why he would abandon his plan. And then, suddenly, horribly, it made sense. “Oh God,” she said numbly. “It was Charles, wasn’t it?”
He stared at her, pity and misery in his eyes. “No. That is, I can’t be sure. I don’t know.” He swallowed visibly, as though trying to choke down something offensive. “I believe Sherville is the culprit but I also believe that Hoodless was involved. I am not sure in what capacity. Either as an accomplice or he knew what Sherville was doing.”
“But then why wouldn’t . . .” She trailed off as she filled in the blanks Jack had left. “You think he was holding his knowledge of what Paul Sherville was doing over his head.”
“I know it is unspeakably vile to make such an accusation without proof, which is why—”
“Which is why you want to look for that proof,” she finished. She felt numbed, her head filling with a hundred terrible scenarios: reading the newspapers’ reports; her neighbors’ sidelong glances; the taint of association that would destroy Ted’s career.
“I don’t know that there is any,” Jack said carefully. “I think the men who were robbing your house were actually sent there to look for something that Hoodless had, or they thought he had.”
“There’s nothing there,” she murmured, still trying to absorb it all. “Nothing.”
“Be that as it may, Whitehall will not be satisfied until they have searched for it themselves.”
Her head snapped up at that. “Strangers? Going through my things? Can’t you do it?”
“I would but”—his beautiful mouth twisted into a smile—“I am not impartial. Part of me would not want to find anything. I wouldn’t trust myself to be thorough.”
She stared up at him, reading the conflict revealed in his terse expression. “Addie, please. This man, whoever he is, is not only responsible for the deaths of our soldiers but also the misery of untold men and women and children sold into slavery.”
Our soldiers. Yes. Yes. Of course. A sense of rightness overcame her earlier panic and fear. How could she do otherwise? Ted would understand. “Very well.”
“They will be discreet.”
She nodded.
“I hope I am wrong, Addie,” he said with sudden savagery. “For your sake, I hope to God they find nothing that implicates Hoodless. I hope this is all happenstance and that I can search for this traitor somewhere else, where it will not affect you or those you love. Please, Addie, you must know me well enough to believe that.”
“Know you? How can I make such a claim? How can you ask it? You aren’t the man I thought you were.”
“I am that man.” He spoke urgently, willing her to believe him. And she wanted to. God, how she wanted to! “My charade was just window dressing. Beneath the mask, I am the same man.”
“I loved an illusion.”
For some reason he seemed to take heart at her despairing words. “No. Let me prove it,” he pleaded. “Give me a chance.”
“A chance.”
“Let me court you, Addie. I won’t make any demands. You will see that I am a gentle man as well as a gentleman. Test me all you want. I love you, Addie. Let us start again. That’s all I ask.”
Her head spun. He’d lied and deceived her but he had also revealed why he had done so and his reasons were substantial. And honorable. She hadn’t any answers. Nothing but experience to fall back on.
And her experience had been bitter.
“Just give me a chance to prove myself to you.”
She could refuse him and she intuited he would never bother her again. Or she could take a chance and discover once and for all if she could trust her suspect heart.
“All right,” she heard herself say. “A chance . . . a test.”
Why did you join the Highlanders?”
Jack looked up from the tray of silk ribbons the Covent Garden vendor had called him over to examine, as surprised by her question as she was to have asked it.
It had been two weeks since he had told her about Charles. Since then, true to Jack’s word, the men from Whitehall had most discreetly searched her house and, true to her predictions, come away empty-handed, a fact that had released both Jack and herself from Charles’s specter. And though Addie had no doubt that Jack continued his hunt for the scoundrel who’d betrayed so many, knowing that his investigations need not cast a shadow over her life, she allowed him to court her openly, a courtship that was restrained and gentle and unflagging.
And allowed her to ignore his military record.
Occasionally others would draw from him a story about his tenure, but when they were alone, it was a topic she never broached and he never introduced. Which was ridiculous, she realized. Being a cavalry captain was as much a part of him as . . . as . . . as his brogue.
Now, though surprised, he answered readily enough. “One doesn’t join a Scots regiment, Addie. One is born to it.”
“Rather like being born with a caul?” she asked.
He met her derision with genuine amusement. “Yes. Now that you mention it, it is rather a mystical thing. A boy has to be given to the regiment from birth.”
She smiled at that. He always managed to turn her attempts at brusqueness on end. “Come now.”
He placed a hand across his heart. “’Tis true. My father told me that a full company of Highlanders in dress uniform arrived for my baptism, where they gravely presented my mother with an infant-sized kilt, sporran, and badge, and suggested to her—strongly—that I should be dressed in it for the ceremony.”
She chuckled. “And what did your mother do?”
“Being a good, honest Englishwoman, she refused to have anything to do with their hocus-pocus.”
“Your father must have been gravely disappointed.”
“As good an Englishwoman as my mother was, my father was an even more devious Scot. It was only after the service that she discovered my nappy had been pinned with the Gordon Highlanders’ badge. My fate, as it were, was sealed.”
She burst out laughing and he smiled, his strong white teeth gleaming in his tan face. His good humor was irresistible, drat him. She simply could not provoke his temper. And she wanted to see what form Jack’s anger took because each day, she had fallen more in love with him.
They continued strolling through Covent Garden, the rest of their party having drifted some distance ahead, leaving Addie alone with Jack. Not that this was any great surprise. Jack always contrived to be close to her. Not obviously. He would never make her the object of speculation.
She wanted to ask another question, amazed that this was so. But, in truth, those few stories Jack had related of his service riveted her. He never chronicled the details of warfare, as Charles had loved to do, describing the carnage and slaughter. When Jack had spoken of actual battle it had been obliquely and then with
great sadness.
No, mostly his tales had opened worlds for her. He’d conversed with pashas and sultans, visited great temples and palaces, feasted in a tent under a desert sky, and traveled on roads built by civilizations that predated Britain by thousands of years. It was fascinating.
“Well, Addie?” Jack asked quietly, cutting into her thoughts.
“Well what?”
“Have I passed muster yet? I love you. I will always love you. Marry me.”
She stepped away from him, pretending interest in a street vendor’s gaudy bits of jewelry. He had asked before, many times, and each time she’d had to stop herself from crying “yes” and relinquishing her heart once and finally to this—stranger’s care.
She studied him from the corner of her eye, as he stood braced, awaiting her reply. In some ways, he actually did look like a stranger.
His natural grace was now apparent. He moved with the casual confidence of men accustomed to command. His stride was open, relaxed. His face, no longer forced to exaggerated expressions, was even more handsome. There was firmness about his mouth as well as sensuality. His eyes were open and clear. He was watching her now, tenderness and longing in his gaze.
“Addie?”
“I really cannot say. If you’ve grown tired of courting me, by all means quit the game.” She should have been pleased by how cavalier she managed to sound.
“This isn’t a game. Say you’ll marry me.”
She faced him, raising one brow. “Are you trying to force me into making a decision prematurely?”
“No. I would never try to force you to do anything. I am not like—”
She swung away before he could utter Charles’s name. Each day, her memory of her dead husband grew more vague. His actions, once the source of night terrors and day tremors, now only engendered anger that he had taken so many years from her.
She had gone half the length of the street before Jack caught up to her. His hand on her arm was light but unyielding.
“Addie, forgive me.” His gaze devoured her face, awakening a deep thrill in response. “Lord, you are so beautiful,” he breathed ardently before abruptly stiffening.
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