The Traitor

by Grace Burrowes

  “Miss Danforth, you must join us. Tante is preparing to deliver one of her more rousing sermons, and such eloquence deserves an audience.” Though Freddy would pull in her horns about the succession if a damsel were present—Sebastian hoped.

  The young lady remained in the doorway, her hand on the jamb as if for support—which put Sebastian’s instincts on alert. Her mouth, a full, often-smiling mouth, was grim at the corners, and her eyes…

  “Come, sit, Miss Danforth. You are upset.” Sebastian had no intention of being in the vicinity when her upset got the better of her. She would not appreciate him witnessing any loss of composure, and he would not like her for subjecting him to such a display. “I’ll find a footman to bring the teapot. I’m sure whatever troubles you, Tante will want to know of it.”

  He escaped with all dispatch and closed the door behind him, sending the tweenie trotting down the steps for the ubiquitous pot of tea. Rather than a scepter and orb, King George ought to rule the empire with a teapot and sugar tongs.

  Sebastian was about to call for his horse—the morning was pretty enough to inspire riding out both before and after breakfast—when Freddy emerged from the study.

  “There you are. Summon the phaeton, Sebastian, and prepare to drive Miss Danforth to Chelsea.”

  This was an order. Freddy enjoyed giving orders, but Sebastian could not oblige her.

  “I’ll have the coach brought around instead, the weather being unpredictable. The press of business is such that—”

  Tante advanced on him, hands on her hips. A line of Shakespeare flitted through his head, about the lady being small but fierce.

  “She has lost her only friend, Sebastian. Miss Danforth’s aunt, her only supporter in this world, has gone to her reward, and the girl buried her other aunt only three months past. She is alone, but for what kindness we can show her.”

  An aunt. Merde. It would be an aunt. “John Coachman knows the roads—”

  She jabbed him in the sternum with a bony, surprisingly painful finger. “You are competent to get the girl to Chelsea. John Coachman’s gout is acting up, and the undercoachman takes a half day today, along with the footmen. Call. For. Your. Phaeton.”

  Four more jabs right to the sternum. Sebastian had never had any call to jab a man in the breastbone before, but if he were still in the interrogation business, he would have added it to his repertoire of torments.

  “Perhaps she should wait a day, Tante. Her composure will benefit from waiting a day.” And the undercoachman would be back from swilling his wages or spending them on a pretty little tart.

  She smoothed a hand down the lace of his jabot. “Coward.”

  Ruthless besom.

  “Such an endearment will surely addle my wits.” Though her epithet was not strictly fair, unless she referred to his unwillingness to take his own life.

  “Please, Sebastian? She says if she doesn’t retrieve a few mementos from her aunt’s cottage, her cousins will sell them all, and there’s some elderly fellow who was sweet on the aunt. Milly is desperate to look in on him.”

  Milly. He’d forgotten that was her name—put it from his mind the way he could put entire years of his life from his mind—and he was not a coward.

  He was a dutiful nephew and a gentleman. In this case, it mattered not whether he was a French gentleman or an English gentleman. Either doomed him to surrender.

  “Have a hamper packed for the bereaved old fellow—a bottle of spirits to ease his loss, a decent blanket against the winter cold, comestibles, sweets, that sort of thing—and tell Miss Danforth to be ready in half an hour.”

  In half an hour, he hoped the English weather might oblige him for once and produce a steady downpour.

  Alas, that hope, like most of Sebastian’s hopes to date, was not to be realized.

  ***

  Milly did not want to tool out to Chelsea in the baron’s smart phaeton. She did not want to sit beside him in all his understated elegance, while she presented as the dowdy poor relation she was, an insult to the glorious, sunny day in her drab brown. Most of all, she did not want to risk her cousins catching sight of her.

  The neighbors had not sent word of Aunt Hyacinth’s death until Milly had no chance of attending the services or the wake, which was likely a mercy, but one Milly bitterly resented.

  “Do you have need of my handkerchief, Miss Danforth?”

  The baron posed his softly accented question as he clucked the horses into a relaxed trot. His manner suggested that a few blocks past Grosvenor Square, they might turn into the park, their outing no more than a lark.

  “I have my own, thank you.” Her reply was ungracious, but that too—like every one of her disgruntlements—was a symptom of the anger that so poorly disguised grief.

  They trotted along in silence, until his lordship turned the vehicle south on Park Lane.

  “I would be lost if Freddy were to abandon me for the celestial realm.” His tone was contemplative, as if he were only now acknowledging the truth he’d admitted. “I would have nobody to scold me, nobody to hold me accountable for my numerous small lapses, nobody to look upon me as if I were a particularly exquisite arrangement of roses, when I am nothing but a man who scratches and swears and wears his muddy boots into the parlor on occasion.”

  For the baron, this was a speech, and also a bit of a eulogy for a woman not yet dead.

  “She is formidable, your aunt. My aunt was too, but in a much quieter way.”

  They both had been, Hyacinth and Millicent. They’d protected Milly as long as they could, and made the world think Milly was the one looking after them.

  “When Aunt Millicent died, Aunt Hyacinth began planning my escape into service. I would have been prey for my cousins without Aunt chiding and encouraging and plotting.”

  Mostly chiding.

  “You were named for your aunt?”

  She was pleased he would remind her of this. “Yes. I have her red hair.”

  “Auburn. I am certain your hair is auburn, in proper light. Tell me about your Aunt Hyacinth.” He was being kind, and the magnitude of Milly’s loss was such that all she could do was appreciate his compassion.

  “I call her—I called her—Aunt Hy. Everybody did, and that was a shame. Hyacinth is a lovely name.”

  Traffic was moving along, like it would not at the fashionable hour. The spring breeze brought the pungent scent of Tattersall’s. Life, as both aunts had said often, goes on.

  “You do not want to talk about your loved one,” the baron said. “As if that somehow makes them more deceased. Soldiers do not reminisce about fallen comrades easily at first.”

  She’d forgotten he’d served. Forgotten he would know a great deal about loss and about life going on.

  “Aunt Mil loved laughter, Aunt Hy loved beauty. Ours was a happy household. Aunt Hy could hardly see toward the end—I felt like a traitor for leaving her—but she said she could still feel the beauty with her hands, still smell it with her nose, still taste it in a perfect cup of tea.”

  “You did not feel like a traitor for leaving,” the baron said, slowing the team to let an enormous traveling coach lumber past. “You felt like an orphan, an angry orphan with no good choices and nobody whose guidance you could trust, because nobody had trod the path you faced. Your aunts had not been in service; they had not been married. They could suggest, but they could not know.”

  As the phaeton rolled along the park’s pretty green perimeter, the most fashionable addresses in the world on their left, Milly realized the baron was speaking from experience.

  She would rather talk of his experiences than her loss—much rather. “You felt that way. You’re English, and you ended up in the French army. You had to have felt that way.”

  He wrinkled his grand nose, the gesture Gallic, and Milly’s observation clearly unwelcome. She expected he’d absorb hi
mself in managing his horses, though he drove with the instinctive ease of a born whip.

  “I was a boy when the Peace of Amiens came about, and my mother was desperate to visit her relations in France. I spent the summer in Provence, at my grandparents’ château, and I had no concept that the Corsican and old George both were merely regrouping for another decade of war. When the truce ended, my father, of course, had to leave or face internment. Getting him out of the country was a difficult proposition. My mother would not leave me behind, but we could not safely travel with Papa. Very soon, we could not safely travel at all. Mother died that winter, without ever seeing her husband again. She was my first experience with the casualties of war, for I believe she died of a broken heart, not a simple ague.”

  So he’d gone from being an English schoolboy, albeit a wellborn schoolboy, to a Frenchman’s grandson with inconvenient paternal antecedents, all in the course of a few bewildering months.

  He steered the phaeton past Apsley House, that imposing edifice inhabited by no less personage than the Duke of Wellington.

  “Tell me more about these aunts,” St. Clair said. He did not so much as glance at the duke’s handsome residence. “Did they tipple? Did they flirt with the curate? The baroness would lose all heart had she no flirts.”

  What to say? That Milly did indeed feel like an orphan—more of an orphan than ever? That she was frightened to be so alone, more frightened than she’d been since her own parents died? He’d listen to those sentiments, and he would not judge her for them.

  St. Clair viewed the world with a surprising sense of compassion, and yet, despite her own need for silence, despite the lump in her throat, Milly launched into a spate of chattering about Aunt Hy’s flowers and Aunt Mil’s shortbread.

  To spare St. Clair from his own thoughts of an orphaned, angry, bewildered past, she talked.

  Three

  As Sebastian listened to Miss Danforth prattle on about quilting parties and old women who held “knitting meets” with their familiars, he wondered if Wellington himself might not be behind the recent series of duels.

  Sebastian’s first year of repatriation had been calm enough. The worst he’d suffered had been scornful looks, the cut direct here and there, a smattering of snide asides—the very same fare served him during his initial months with the French Army. A few months ago, the tenor of the abuse had become more lethal, as if somebody important had gone down a list of post-war grudges and come to Sebastian’s name.

  “I have not seen you knitting, Miss Danforth, for all that you claim to have won these knitting races.” Inane talk, this, but she was trying not to cry, and Sebastian would aid her as best he could.

  “I knit at night now, when I can’t sleep. I do the piecework during the day, when the light is better.”

  “I have seen the old sailors, sitting with their tankards, knitting away as if their hands belonged to somebody else. I have seen the old women, too, knitting while cannonballs flew over their heads. Knitting must be powerful medicine for the mind.”

  “Why on earth would old women be knitting in the midst of cannon fire? Why would old women even be within hearing of cannon fire?”

  Her indignation was a tonic. Every soul on earth ought to regard the combination of old women and cannon fire with outrage. The human race should go to bed each night praying to le bon Dieu such a tragedy never befell any of their members again.

  Though it would, human nature being incorrigibly foolish.

  “I commanded a small garrison in the mountains of southwestern France. For much of the war, we had little to do but serve as a place for troops going into Spain to eat and rest.” He told this lie smoothly, because he’d rehearsed it often in his mind, which made it no less mendacious. “Some officers brought their wives to the post, and we had our share of laundresses and cooks, the same as any army.”

  Whores, most of them, and God bless them for it.

  “I cannot fathom women in the midst of warfare.”

  Miss Danforth looked less grim and peaked to contemplate this topic than to contemplate the loss of her aunts. Sebastian brought the phaeton to a halt in deference to a donkey disinclined to proceed into an intersection. The ragman at the beast’s head was cursing fluently, but in such a thick Cockney accent, Sebastian doubted Miss Danforth could comprehend it.

  “Look around you, Miss Danforth. You see the strolling gentlemen, the shop boys, the tigers and grooms, the fellows milling about outside that tavern? Pretend they’re all gone—not a fellow left in sight. Now pretend your job is to kill the enemy, or be killed by her, day in and day out. How long do you think it would take for that combination, of warfare all around and not a single member of the opposite sex among you, to become untenable?”

  The ragman lifted a whip from the cart’s seat and came around to brandish it at the donkey.

  “War is untenable,” she said. “I cannot see how anybody stands to raise a weapon at somebody who has done them no wrong, much less pull the trigger.”

  The whip came down on the beast’s shoulder, viciously hard, and Miss Danforth turned her head away. Had she not been beside him, Sebastian would have already been out of his vehicle. He passed her the reins, leaped down, and approached the donkey. The beast was tiny, its hide scarred and its tail matted with burrs. Outside the tavern on the corner—the Wild Hare—bets were being placed, probably over how many lashes it would take to get the animal moving or kill it.

  The whip came up again.

  “How much?”

  At Sebastian’s question, the ragman lowered the whip and turned a puzzled frown over his shoulder. “Beg pardon, guv. I’ll have the beast moving directly, see if I don’t.”

  He raised the whip again, but Sebastian forestalled the next blow by the simple expedient of snatching the whip from the man’s hand. “How much for the beast?”

  Simon gestured for his tiger, and the boy came to heel quickly, no stranger to these encounters. Simon passed the lad the whip, because sometimes a man needed two fists on short notice.

  “Yer want t’buy ’er?”

  “How much?”

  The ragman dressed to advertise his trade in an assemblage of fabrics that, had they been clean, would have been colorful enough for any tinker. Rheumy blue eyes turned crafty. “I’ve met your kind. You like to beat ’em, like to beat the wenches too.”

  The donkey stood quietly, head hanging, while the gallery at the pub had gone silent.

  “I do appreciate the necessity for the occasional display of violence,” Sebastian said, stroking a hand over the animal’s shaggy gray fur. “But I like my opponent to be able to fight back, not trussed up in harness, a bit in her mouth, and a whip in my hand.”

  On the seat of the phaeton, Miss Danforth was perfectly composed. The team stood placidly in the traces, suggesting not even her hands conveyed nervousness.

  “Two quid.”

  Exorbitant for a beast broken in spirit, foundered, and underfed. Sebastian flicked a glance at the tiger, who produced the requisite funds. “You have two minutes to unhitch your cart.”

  He climbed back into the phaeton, and before he could retrieve the reins, Miss Danforth signaled the team to walk on. His geldings—a young pair given to occasional fits and starts—moved off smoothly.

  “You were discussing your aunts, Miss Danforth.” He came off sounding like a headmaster trying to restore decorum to a classroom overtaken by chaos.

  “We were discussing the civilizing influence of women on men compelled to make war. If I hadn’t been here, you would have trounced that fellow, wouldn’t you? I would have liked to have seen that.”

  He liked the sight of her, her posture the perfect, relaxed, graceful pose of a lady comfortable with the reins. Had her knitting aunts taught her how to drive? “You like seeing men behave like animals?”

  “Of course not. I like seeing justice done. I
like that very much. The donkey was afraid of the dogs hanging about the tavern.”

  He thought of her cousins, who hadn’t had the decency to notify her of her aunt’s death. Oppressed and bloodthirsty were not the same thing. “Justice is a fine objective, bloody knuckles are not. Will you give me back the reins?”

  She looked down at her hands in surprise, then over at him. “Must I?”

  The smile she turned on him was complicated. Winsome, chagrined, a bit sad, and entirely feminine. Were she French, she’d learn to use that smile, because it made her not beautiful—her coloring was too vivid to be beautiful—but alluring.

  “No, you need not. My horses have decided they like you. This is a great compliment.”

  He liked her. He liked that she hadn’t turned up sniffy because he’d threatened a ragman, discussed money in the street, and taken up for a homely jenny who was—to all appearances—merely exhausted and in want of courage.

  Sebastian propped his foot on the fender and decided to make a clean breast of matters. “It is a failing of mine to interest myself in the fate of fractious animals. I will find the little beast work at the Chelsea farm if she can be made sound in body and spirit.”

  Miss Danforth cooed to the horses, and they lifted to a spanking trot. “You get it from your aunt, then. I’m a fractious animal, and she’s found work for me.”

  “You are not wearing driving gloves.” Miss Danforth was poor enough not to have a good second pair, and yet, Sebastian didn’t take the reins from her.

  “Your geldings have velvet mouths. I was dreading this trip, but I’m enjoying it now. Aunt Hy would like that.”

  Her smile was muted, but because he’d achieved a distraction from the near occasion of tears, Sebastian let her keep the reins and remained silent until they’d reached their objective less than an hour later.

  Chelsea was little more than a village enjoying a spate of growth owing to its proximity to London, and yet, it was still a pretty village. Miss Danforth drove them down one of the quieter streets, to a tidy Tudor house set amid a riot of daffodils.