Regency Masquerades: A Limited Edition Boxed Set of Six Traditional Regency Romance Novels of Secrets and Disguises

by Brenda Hiatt

  She should have known he would think of that. He was attentive to details and strategy as well as to her, although once again he had not consulted her. He was intelligent and competent—in fact, a very fine man, if at times overbearing. She supposed that was the cost. Would she admire a man who did not know his own mind?

  They settled into their box a few minutes before the first performance and began their study. Covent Garden was if anything even larger than Drury Lane, and equally magnificent. It was quite difficult to make out anyone who occupied the slip seats under the roof, but at least most of the rest of the audience, from the pit to the shilling gallery at the back, could be seen.

  “If I espy anyone whom I think comes even close to fitting your description of Sweeney, I shall point him out to you,” Lord Danebridge said.

  “Do you begin looking at the top of the theater, and I will begin with the pit,” she suggested.

  “If we see him, what then?”

  “I shall have to go to him at once.”

  The performance was a spectacle, very much expanded from the story of Gulnare in the Thousand and One Nights. An elaborate setting of the magical undersea world where Gulnare lived opened the performance, which then detailed her misadventures until she was brought to King Shahzeman as a slave in the world of men. The oriental splendor of Shahzeman’s palace and the glittering opulence of Gulnare’s chamber and gifts from the king pleased the audience greatly.

  “Now there is a man who knows how to court a woman,” commented Lord Danebridge.

  “He cannot give her the one thing she desires most,” Falcon replied.

  “Which is?”

  “To restore her to her home and family.”

  The baron seemed to study her. Indeed, his gaze remained on her so long she began to feel uncomfortable. He said nothing more, but finally returned to his study of the audience.

  Several times he pointed out gentlemen who were tall and blond, but none were Sweeney. Falcon, too, failed to find the man and pinned her hopes on switching seats after the interval. When that time arrived, they had no better luck as they mingled among the crowd.

  “You are certain we have come on the proper night? Was it Tuesday for which he purchased tickets?” Falcon said much later in the evening when their search had still proved fruitless. “Perhaps the theater clerk could have given you false information.”

  “I am sorry, my dear. The information that we had was correct. Perhaps he just decided not to come—changed his mind, or received a better invitation.”

  “There are places in the shadows we could not see. Could we keep a watch by the door when people are leaving?”

  “If you wish. The problem is, which door? Some may not leave by the main entrance.”

  She sighed. There had to be another way to find Sweeney. But this time she had allowed herself to hope too much.

  They exited with a crush of other people from the boxes, and Falcon had difficulty maintaining her grip on the baron’s arm.

  “I do not think you would expect to find him in this!” he called to her as they were swept along towards the stairway.

  Jostled by the crowd, Falcon lost her footing part way down the stairs and slipped. Terrified that she was about to fall under the feet of the herd, she instinctively reached out for the railing or anything to hold onto.

  “I have you,” came Lord Danebridge’s comforting voice. He had reacted instantly as she started to go down, grasping her and pulling her to safety against him.

  She stared up at him, lost for a moment in his gray eyes, alone as if hundreds of people were not swarming past them. In his eyes she thought she could read a fierce protectiveness along with desire, a possessiveness that warmed her like fire. Would it be so wrong to become this man’s mistress? His need touched needs of her own that she could no longer deny. But she was not who he thought she was. And she could read doubt in his eyes along with everything else.

  “I wish I had you,” he whispered, releasing her carefully to make sure she had regained her balance.

  She did not know how to answer.

  They made their way out of the theater, only to face the crowd waiting for carriages in front of the building.

  “Shall we wait, or shall we walk?” the baron said. “I have no doubt we can find my carriage in the line somewhere.”

  She rubbed her arms and drew the sides of her cape down to cover them. “It is chilly and a bit damp. Let us walk.”

  The street in front of the theater was nearly filled with carriages, waiting in rows two and three deep in places. Lord Danebridge scanned the line ahead of them as they walked.

  “As I recognize the crests on these different carriages I realize I know exactly where in the theater each of their owners was sitting tonight,” he said with his characteristic chuckle. “Never have I spent an evening in such concentration upon the audience instead of the stage!”

  She chuckled too, despite her disappointment. He was holding her very close as they walked, and she felt warm and protected. There were many more people about than mere theater patrons—even at this late hour there were street vendors and beggars and women selling their favors.

  The baron spotted his carriage and guided her towards it. Although another carriage on the outside of the row blocked it in, there was room enough for them to walk between the vehicles and attempt to get in.

  “Won’t be moving for a bit yet, your lordship,” said the baron’s coachman, tipping his hat as they came up.

  “That’s all right, John Coachman. We’ll just get ourselves out of the night dampness and wait.”

  Lord Danebridge opened the door for Falcon and let down the carriage steps. As he straightened up and took her hand to assist her, she saw a look of alarm suddenly cross his face.

  “No!” he shouted. He threw his body against her.

  Falcon felt his weight crushing her back and down against the side of the carriage. At the same instant she heard the explosive report of a pistol. Her nostrils filled with smoke and the smell of burnt powder. She felt the carriage lurch as the horses whinnied and the coachman cursed, trying to hold them back. A woman screamed. The coachman on the carriage next to the baron’s whipped up his horses and pulled away. It happened all in an instant.

  Chapter Sixteen

  For a moment, neither Falcon nor Lord Danebridge moved.

  “My God! Are you shot?” she asked.

  “No. Are you?”

  She shook her head. She was sitting on the pavement, her back pressed against the wheel of the carriage. The baron still half-covered her with his body.

  “Are you unharmed, my lord? Is the señora?”

  “We are all right, Coachman. Did you know that driver?” Lord Danebridge shifted his weight from her and began to get up. As he used his arms for leverage he suddenly groaned and sat back on the pavement beside her. Putting his hand to his right arm, he brought away gloved fingers covered with blood.

  “You are shot!” she said in alarm.

  “Ruined a perfectly good coat, it would seem.”

  Falcon struggled to get to her feet, aware that by now people had begun to congregate. The coachman had climbed down from his box.

  “Please, help me to get him into the carriage,” she said to the man urgently. “Take us back to my lodgings.”

  Word was beginning to spread among the crowd. “What happened here?”

  “There’s been a shooting!”

  “By Jove! Has there, then?”

  Indeed, Falcon thought—disbelief had been her first reaction, too. Only now was she beginning to tremble in response to the shock of what had occurred. The coachman helped her up the steps after Lord Danebridge and quickly climbed back on his box.

  “Make way, if you please, sirs and ladies. The man needs a surgeon,” he called to the curious onlookers. Somehow he managed to maneuver the horses and coach out of the squeeze and away.

  Falcon closed her eyes in relief, only to see again stark images from the instant of the shoo
ting. Smoke from the pistol’s charge hung in the air. At the carriage window opposite theirs she had seen the gun barrel withdrawn and caught a glimpse of a face—one mostly hidden in the darkness of the carriage compartment. In that split second of suspended time, however, light from the street had reflected off his hair. Blond hair. With a mixture of anger, disbelief, frustration, and alarm, she realized that Sweeney had found her.

  “I am all right,” Lord Danebridge said, wincing as the motion of the carriage jostled him. “Could you just… give me a hand? My handkerchief is in the inside pocket of my coat…”

  Falcon turned to him, collecting herself. She must not think about Sweeney now. Lord Danebridge had been shot. He had thrown himself between her and Sweeney’s pistol—he could have been killed! Blood was oozing between his fingers as he kept his hand over the wound. A small trickle ran down his sleeve.

  “Right-hand side. If you please,” he said.

  Reaching inside his clothes seemed to Falcon a very intimate thing to do, but it was no time to be missish. She found the bit of linen and gave it to him.

  “Is it very bad?”

  “I shall live—tis a mere scratch. Do you intend to tell me what is going on? That pistol was aimed at you.”

  “Are you so certain? What if…”

  “No, no more lies. I have invested my blood in this now, and I have a right to know.”

  Did he? She hesitated.

  He was regarding her with a steady gaze. “Talk. I want the truth, Miss Colburne, and I want it now.”

  Falcon was too shaken by what had already happened to be able to hide her shock when he used her name.

  “I… why did you… how long have you known?”

  Jeremy felt a little surge of triumph. He was right! And if he had made a mistake by revealing his guess, it was too late now. “I did not know for certain until just now. I have known something was not right from the beginning.”

  “And yet you have helped me! I do not understand you.”

  “This is not about me. You are the one whose life is apparently in danger. Why?”

  She sighed. “Sweeney murdered my parents. He also left me for dead—I do not know how he has discovered that I am not. I have been hiding my existence ever since it happened.”

  “So you are a threat to him. That explains the masquerade. And the other two men, the one at the Tower and the other one?”

  “Participated in the murders.” She looked at him with anguish in her eyes. “They were never even suspected of any wrong-doing. I swore to avenge my parents and see justice done.”

  “Would you tell me what happened?” He asked very gently.

  She bit her lip and looked away, but not before he saw the pain that crossed her face. She is in far greater pain than I, he realized.

  She began to talk haltingly, in a ragged voice, telling him things he had already learned about her father—who he was, his officer’s rank and regiment. She described the beginning of Moore’s retreat to Corunna—the snow and ice, the roads like quagmires, the deprivation, suffering, and frustration of the troops who had wanted to fight. Chaos had reigned when they reached Astorga only to find Romana’s starving, typhus-infected Spanish troops already there before them. Homes and storehouses were pillaged; drunkenness and disorder claimed the day.

  “Six of us became separated from our battalion—my parents and me, and Sweeney and the other two. They were drinking. They went a little ahead of us, and when we caught up to them they had stopped at a church and were looting it. My father—my father tried to stop them.”

  She paused, and he could see she was fighting for control, her fists clenched tightly in her lap and her lip quivering. He waited.

  “My father and Sweeney started arguing… they were both angry. And then—then Sweeney pulled out his saber and struck my father down. He killed him. My mother started screaming, and Timmins pulled a pistol out of his belt and shot her… just like a suffering animal.”

  Tears had started to flow down her cheeks, and now great wracking sobs began to work their way up from deep inside her. He wanted to take her into his arms, but how could he? He was bloody and would be even more so if he released the pressure from his wound. That was not likely to give her comfort. He felt helpless.

  She hugged herself, as if she were suddenly freezing. “Pumphrey said, ‘What about the girl? She saw.’ You could hear the panic in his voice. Sweeney grabbed his pistol and fired at me…” She waited until she could control the sobbing, then continued in a hollow voice. “I hit my head when I fell, and they apparently believed that I was dead. I remember little more. Triss found me and took me to the local priest. The good padre hid me from the French who came through Astorga the day after our own troops and he tended my wounds until I could be moved to a convent up in the hills to finish my recovery. I was weak from the loss of blood and became very ill from the infection. I should never have survived.”

  She was calmer now; her anguished grief was subsiding. Indignant anger was slowly building in its place.

  “The Spanish were so generous to me and yet our deaths were blamed on them! Triss wrote me. No one considered that our own soldiers might be capable of such a monstrous deed. It was assumed we had been attacked by townspeople incensed by the rampaging soldiers or by desperate soldiers from Romana’s army. ‘An accident of war,’ Triss says they called it. Even he did not know the truth until he received my first letter to him. That was many months later.”

  “Why did you not go to the authorities?”

  “We were in the middle of a war. The regiments were constantly moving, I was moving. It would have been almost impossible. But more, what Sweeney did, as an officer, defies every principle and assumption on which our army is founded. Our military protects itself. Do you think they would have appreciated my opening their eyes? They would not have believed me. Yet I knew if I revealed myself, I would be in danger.”

  “You came back to England to track the men down.”

  “The war kept me trapped in Spain. I have waited almost five and a half years for this. How could I live, knowing what they did?” She hesitated. “Now I expect you are appalled.”

  “By what you are doing? No.” How could mere words begin to convey his feelings? “What you have been through appalls me. It is almost unimaginable, unbearable. I am so sorry.” His voice might carry his concern and sincerity, but only action could show her the true depth of what he felt. And he could not move.

  “I thought I could continue to conceal my identity until I had found each of them and brought them down in my own way,” she said bitterly. “Oh foolish hope! I could not even do that! But I did not think I had revealed myself to anyone.”

  But she had. As soon as she spoke the words, he realized there had been one person to whom she had revealed the truth. Her father’s solicitor, Mr. Fallesby. Surely there was no connection between the lawyer and Sweeney! It made no sense.

  “I do not know how Sweeney could have found me out. Even Timmins and Pumphrey do not know who I really am.”

  “Could they not have reasoned it out? Guessed?”

  “Pumphrey is in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital with no idea of who put him there. He never even saw me. Timmins said he did not know where Sweeney was. I believe he was too upset to lie.”

  “That does not preclude the possibility that Sweeney knew where Timmins was. Perhaps he could have contacted him after your visit.”

  “But why would he?”

  Despite his own pain, Jeremy fixed his mind on the question. “I do not know.” Perhaps Sweeney had been reading the papers, and had seen the speculations about the “Spanish Spitfire”. Would that alone be enough to start the man making inquiries? It did not seem likely.

  There was another question puzzling him that she had not even thought to ask, and that was how Sweeney knew she would be at the theater. “You are certain your assailant was Sweeney?” he asked. “Could it have been anyone else?”

  “I did not get a close look, but the
re is no one else who would have reason to kill me.”

  If she was telling the truth, finding Sweeney had suddenly become urgent, only now the man would be more difficult to find. If only I had pursued the search more diligently before this! Jeremy thought. But then, he had not known the man was a threat to the señora—Miss Colburne. He would have to put all his available resources to work on it now.

  “Tell me everything you can about this fellow Sweeney.”

  Falcon ushered Jeremy up the stairs to her rooms at Mrs. Isham’s, where she and Maggie and Benita tended his wound. It was a task she was well familiar with, but not one she had ever expected to practice in England. They set to work at once and soon had the wound cleaned and the arm neatly bandaged. He was fortunate. The ball had only grazed his flesh.

  While they worked, Jeremy looked about him thoughtfully, trying to keep the pain at bay. Never before had Miss Colburne allowed him into the sanctuary of her rooms. Dared he to hope that he had gained a step in her trust by offering his life for hers? Or was he only so privileged due to the practical demands of the present situation? He was pleased that she had not wanted him to walk bleeding into the house at Fitzharding Street. But what encouraged him was the fact that she had finally shared a part of her story with him.

  There was still much more to learn. His first order of business in the morning would be a stop at the office of his superiors. He would see what information they had uncovered for him, and he would set in order an intensified hunt for Sweeney.

  The ladies sponged off his coat sleeve as best they could, and when he was once again fully dressed, his appearance was considerably improved. Still, he hoped his mother would not see him when he got in. Thank God she had not been with them!

  “Remind me not to dance any vigorous dances that require use of the arms at the ball tomorrow night,” he said glumly.

  “Ball?”

  “Have you forgotten that when we were at Drury Lane, Lady Wallingham invited us to the ball for her daughter Penelope? You should have since received a written invitation.”