The Captive

by Grace Burrowes

  Did that matter? To Gilly, it would matter a great deal.

  Girard had tormented, but he had also protected. He’d seen to Christian’s welfare, and ultimately, spared Christian’s life—after holding him captive for months.

  And he would delight in knowing Christian was afflicted with last-minute doubts.

  St. Just sauntered into the breakfast parlor, impeccably turned out for five in the morning.

  “You’ve been up all night?” Christian asked, for he’d turned in early and left a morose St. Just to the company of some excellent brandy.

  “Nearly. Ran into my father, by the way, who’ll happily have Girard arrested and deported if you’ll let him know the location of this morning’s meeting. Said it has to do with courtesy among dukes.”

  “Please give Moreland my thanks if I’m unable, but deportation won’t be necessary.” Nor would it be easily accomplished, if Girard indeed had an English patrimony.

  “I doubt Girard would survive deportation. Word of this duel alone will mean his death, do you not see to the matter for him.”

  “Girard might welcome death.” Could life itself be a form of captivity? Gilly had nearly reached such an impasse. “His emperor is taken prisoner, he has no cause to fight for, and all his machinations were in vain. Now he finds an English barony hung around his neck, if rumor is to be believed, while any number of British officers will relish his death. This is a failed life by any standard.”

  And the notion of accommodating Girard with a tidy, quiet death did not appeal.

  “A challenging life. My coach awaits.”

  “Thoughtful of you.”

  St. Just’s unmarked coach assured privacy—and convenience in the event a body needed transport back to Town. Christian put that thought aside and followed his second out into the predawn gloom.

  The journey to the Sheffield Arms passed in silence, and like most mornings as autumn approached, saw a layer of ground fog in the low-lying areas of the terrain.

  “The air is still,” St. Just said. “A mercy.”

  “With swords, the wind hardly matters as it would have with pistols.”

  St. Just scrubbed a hand over his face. “Bloody damned farce, swords.”

  “My friend, we are soldiers. We did not sit at the ancestral pile like spiders in our webs and dally with our prey. We fought. As officers, we led the charge. We set the example. We gained the victory.”

  St. Just stared at the shadowy hills and fields. “But this charge is not for King and Country. This is a bloody damned duel, and I do not trust that Frenchman to acquit himself honorably.”

  “He will.” Of this Christian was certain. “His arrogance and whatever idiosyncrasy passes for his conscience ensure he will behave honorably.”

  St. Just said nothing, and the coach rolled into the yard of the Sheffield Arms. Christian climbed out as the sun was nearly peeking over the horizon, and made his way through the trees to the appointed location. Girard had arrived before him, a pair of foils in an elegant case open on a folding table under the trees.

  “Good morning, Your Grace.”

  “Girard. Or do we address you now as Lord St. Clair?”

  The Frenchman looked pained, but Christian no longer had to hear every piece of drivel the man spouted, so he turned his back and waited for St. Just to join them.

  The seconds conferred, and the principles limbered up with their weapons, but the surgeons were not yet on the scene.

  “You can start without the surgeons,” St. Just said. “I don’t advise it.”

  “Another five minutes then,” Christian replied.

  As a soldier, he’d seen many sunrises that might have been his last. As a prisoner, he’d gone for weeks without sight of the sun, only to find it too painfully bright when he had been given liberty from his dungeon.

  A soldier accepts the possibility of his death, particularly when he’s in captivity.

  But Christian was a soldier no longer. He was Mercia, with a responsibility to his people and to his title. He had a daughter who’d seen far too much loss and confusion in her short life.

  And he had Gilly.

  She was the still place inside of him, the utter conviction that he could not fail. She was the bright light of reason, the warmth of hope, the promise of wisdom sufficient for all the troubles a lifetime could present.

  And from her perspective, what Christian undertook with Girard was a betrayal of her.

  Quite possibly from Christian’s perspective as well.

  “The surgeons are here,” St. Just said. “You can still apologize.”

  “Remind me of that again, and I will challenge you, St. Just.”

  “See if I’ll volunteer to be your second twice.”

  St. Just conferred with his counterpart, a tall, broad-shouldered blond whom Christian recognized as the jailer, the last person to see Christian in captivity.

  The man who had, on Girard’s orders, freed the lost duke.

  Christian exchanged a nod with the fellow, the jailer looking better fed and better dressed, but as twitchy as ever—and not particularly apologetic.

  Upon the signal of Girard’s second, Christian took a position opposite Girard, saluted with his weapon, accepted Girard’s answering civility, and gathered his focus for the moment when St. Just would give them leave—

  “Wait!” A female voice broke the morning stillness, and four male heads swiveled back toward the Sheffield Arms. “For the love of God, you must not proceed.”

  “Thank Jesus and all the holy angels,” St. Just said. “Your countess has come to rescue you.”

  ***

  Christian, looking composed, tidy, and very much alive, shot his opponent a pointed look. The dark brute who must be Girard saluted with his foil and passed it to a blond fellow hovering near St. Just.

  “Countess, good morning.” For a man about to fight for his life, His Grace sounded perishingly steady.

  “This is not a good morning,” she said, advancing on him. “What can you be thinking?” She shot a venomous look at Girard. “And you, you do not deserve to die. You deserve to live with the agony of what you tried to do and the fact that you failed utterly to do it.”

  “Did I fail?”

  Gilly had not one instant to spare for such a creature, or for his Gallic irony. “You cannot kill him like this, Your Grace.”

  “Do you mean I am not capable of it, or I should not?”

  This distinction mattered to him, Gilly could see that, and she forced herself to pause and choose her words.

  “Of course you would dispatch him handily,” she said, her hands fisted on her hips. “But you cannot do murder. You are not some violent beast, a thing without a conscience to kill on a whim or for your own passing pleasure.”

  Greendale could have behaved thus, but not her Christian.

  Christian shot a look at the Frenchman, who was rolling down his cuffs, not a care in the world.

  “I cannot countenance a world with Girard in it, Countess, much less him strolling the English countryside like some squire with his hounds.”

  “He will die,” Gilly said. “But not by your hand. You must not. You tried to explain this to me.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” Christian was very still, very quiet, and very unhappy with her.

  Her heart, already racing, thumped against her ribs.

  “You tried to show me,” she said. “You tried to convey to me, that after years of fighting against a bitter enemy, you can lose yourself in the belief that it’s enough merely to be his enemy, even when the hostilities are over. But if you sustain yourself on that bitterness, your foe wins twice, for you are as much his slave as if you were still chained in his dungeon.”

  Christian was listening, so Gilly pushed the next words out. “I am no longer Greendale’s drudge
, no longer his marital whipping post. You tried to tell me the wars are over. I could not hear you, but you must listen to me now.”

  Girard heaved a sigh when Gilly wished an apoplexy would befall him, and still Christian stared at her, as if trying to decipher words in a foreign language.

  “Listen to the lady, mon duc,” Girard said in a voice as aggravatingly reasonable as it was damnably attractive. “I am not the one you need to kill, for the war is over, and I am among those who lost. We fight with swords so I might have the time to explain this as you drew my blood, and I perhaps drew a bit of yours.”

  Girard’s voice was the essence of civility, the French accent soft, the tension in the words razor sharp. “Ask yourself, Your Grace, how Anduvoir knew exactly when and where to capture you. Who knew what you were about, who had something—a great deal—to gain by your death?”

  “Listen to him, Christian,” Gilly said. “Marcus put the French up to capturing you. I suspect Marcus let Girard know you were spoiling for a chance to kill him.”

  “Marcus is my heir,” Christian spat. “You’re both spouting nonsense.”

  “Not nonsense,” Girard said. “Your cousin dealt not with me, but with Anduvoir. I commanded a garrison. I did not take captives. They were brought to me by my superiors, you among them. Your circumstances were not…” He scowled, as if the English words had evaporated with the low-lying mist. “They were not right. You were betrayed, and to allow you to leave captivity in wartime would have been to sign your death warrant. I agreed to meet you today, yes, but to warn you, not kill you.”

  The Frenchman was trying to mitigate his role in Christian’s torment, though he was also, perhaps, telling the truth.

  In her peripheral vision, Gilly saw Stoneleigh edge into the clearing. He led Chessie, who’d been pressed into service in the traces of a sleek, well-sprung curricle. A tense silence spread, broken only when Chessie shook his head, making his bit jingle.

  Christian’s gaze shifted to take in his horse.

  “Think, Your Grace,” Girard said patiently, wearily. “I was your enemy, and for that you may kill me, of course, but I am not your enemy now, and I did not kill you on the many occasions when the opportunity presented itself.”

  Gilly hated Girard, but Christian was listening to him—even to him—and the swords were safely back in the hands of the seconds.

  “He had my horse,” Christian said softly. “Marcus had my personal mount. The last thing I recall of the day I was taken captive is Chessie being led off, a French private on his back. I wished to God I’d at least freed my horse before I was captured. And then Marcus had my horse, my personal mount…”

  A muscle in his jaw ticked twice.

  “Bloody goddamned right I had your horse.” Marcus pushed through the bushes on the far side of the clearing. “I nearly had your wife too, but she was too fond of her tiara. She didn’t appreciate that I’d had you taken captive, and her unfortunate accident with the laudanum was easy to orchestrate after that. Providence took care of the boy—never let it be said I preyed on a child.”

  Gilly’s whole being suffused with revulsion at the sight of Marcus, the embodiment of the same casual violence her husband had harbored, in a yet more malignant form.

  “So you’ll kill me in cold blood, before witnesses,” Christian mused, “when I have no comparable weapon?” He took a fistful of Gilly’s cape, pulling her behind him and into St. Just’s arms, Stoneleigh’s curricle beside her.

  “He was supposed to kill you in France,” Marcus said, jerking the barrel of an ugly horse pistol toward Girard. “Anduvoir promised me he’d arrange for that. Then I learned the generals always sent their best prizes off to Girard for special handling. I was a fool to trust a bloody Frog with something so important. Then you had to go and outlast the entire war and take up with her.” The gun barrel waved toward Gilly, and Christian and Girard both shifted to step in front of her.

  “So you tried to engineer Gilly’s death,” Christian said, “and you failed at that too.”

  “Of course I tried to kill her. If she dropped a brat within a year of Greendale’s death, I would have been disinherited of the personal fortune. A male child would have seen me lose the title as well. The alternative was to live as a pauper at Greendale and hope you hadn’t taken an intimate fancy to her.”

  “Marcus, you cannot prevail here,” Christian said. “Too many witnesses can testify to your violent schemes.”

  “But with you gone, I will be tried in the Lords, and they never convict one of their own. Besides, who will take the word of a reviled Frenchman, a Scottish traitor, or a lawyer over that of a peer of the realm?”

  Marcus raised his pistol, the muzzle aimed squarely at Christian.

  Rage unlike anything Gilly had felt toward her deceased spouse suffused her. Marcus had known exactly the circumstances Greendale had forced on her. Marcus had destroyed Christian’s family, preyed on Lucy, and he intended now to do murder in cold blood—

  Gilly did not think. Her hand closed around Stoneleigh’s buggy whip, an elegant length of black leather with a corded lash several feet long. She darted around the men shielding her, raised her arm, and brought the whip down with all her strength across Marcus’s face.

  “For Christian, damn you,” she spat, raising her arm again. “For Helene, for Evan—”

  Nothing had ever, ever felt as right as striking Marcus with all her might, as seeing outrage and disbelief twist his handsome features while she raised three angry red welts on his cheeks and nose.

  She, Gilly, the least powerful of his present adversaries, would hold him accountable for his crimes. The bliss of striking him, of hurting him when he’d planned harm to so many, gave her endless strength and a towering indifference to her own fate.

  He shifted, of course, away from Christian, to defend himself against Gilly’s whip, and his aim shifted as well.

  Between landing the third blow and raising her arm again, Gilly perceived that she would in fact die. The ugly snout of the horse pistol took aim at her, the distance was a handful of feet, and she would in the next moment breathe her last.

  So be it. Christian and Lucy would live, Marcus’s crimes would be exposed, and Gilly would die protecting those she loved.

  Fighting for them.

  A shot rang out, obscenely loud in the cool morning air, and the scent of sulfur wafted on the breeze. Gilly stood clutching the whip, inventorying her body for pain, shock, anything.

  Girard blew smoke from the end of a pistol, and surprise bloomed on Marcus’s face amid the lacerations Gilly had given him.

  While a bright red stain spread over the center of his chest.

  He looked at the wound then at Girard, before crumpling on the ground in a heap.

  Gilly dropped the whip and wrapped her arms around Christian, while Stoneleigh turned to quiet the horses, and St. Just approached the body to lay his hand on Marcus’s neck.

  “Dead before he hit the ground,” St. Just said, closing Marcus’s eyes with curious gentleness.

  Girard passed the gun to his second, much as he might have passed a spent fowling piece over in the middle of a pheasant shoot.

  “This does not reconcile our accounts. I understand that, Duke.” Girard ambled over to Marcus’s prone form and extracted something from his watch pocket. “I am, however, rid of a portion of my guilt.”

  “Tell him to be silent,” Gilly said, pressing her nose to Christian’s chest. “I cannot bear to hear his stupid, French-accented voice. I am not myself, and I cannot answer for my actions. Christian, I struck Marcus, I gloried in striking Marcus. I would still be beating him if—” She couldn’t talk and get her breath, and still she held on to Christian.

  “Gilly, hush. Please hush. You’re safe.”

  The violence reverberated in her, part horror, part surprise, and also—God help her, God help her�
��part relief.

  “Hold me. Don’t ever let me go.”

  “I have you.” Christian’s chin came to rest against her temple, and his fingers made slow circles on her nape. He pitched his next words to a whisper. “Unless you need to be sick. Most soldiers are, after their first battle. I certainly was, even though, like you, my first battle was a resounding victory.”

  She canvassed her physical state, and if anything, felt as if she’d purged herself of a toxin. “I need you to hold me, and tell Mr. Stoneleigh to retrieve his whip.”

  Heat and cold shivered through her, weakness, and wonder.

  She could fight back. If she had to, if she ever again found herself endangered, she could fight back.

  A woman who could fight back could manage to stand unassisted, though Christian only turned loose of her enough to dab at her cheeks with his white handkerchief.

  “Apologies for the intrusion,” Girard said. “Mercia, I believe this is yours.” He tossed what looked like a blue-and-gold signet ring to St. Just. “And, my lady, you do not know the lengths I traveled to keep your duke alive when my superiors clamored to have him quietly executed or worse.

  “I sent the horse to that one”—Girard gestured toward Marcus—“thinking the English would solve the puzzle of how Mercia was taken, but the English did not make the attempt. I suspect the late colonel opined to his superiors that such diligence was unnecessary. I had a letter sent through the diplomatic channels, which I’m sure was dismissed at Easterbrook’s urging. I instigated rumor, I—”

  Gilly glowered at Girard, for his litany had a pleading quality, as if he longed for Christian to absolve him of his trespasses, when Gilly longed to take a buggy whip to him.

  She remained bundled against her duke, as a nasty insight wiggled past her ire: at no time had Christian described Girard as a man who delighted in violence for its own sake, while she, under certain circumstances, apparently possessed that trait.

  And was not ashamed of it—just yet.

  “Why keep me alive?” Christian asked.

  Girard arranged the two silver foils in their case and closed the lid.