“Alcorn, I am content here. Your concern is appreciated but unneeded. You should go.”
“I cannot leave you in the hands of…of the Traitor Baron, Cousin. Not when I know you are of limited understanding and ability. I would be remiss—”
He fell silent as Miss Danforth swished up to him, her sewing trailing out behind her like a regimental flag.
“The Traitor Baron, Alcorn? What about the traitor cousin? You pledge my hand in marriage to a man three times my age without a word to me? You expect me to step and fetch for your wife and daughters without any remuneration, to be grateful for every crumb, when Uncle Stephen charged you personally to ensure my happiness? You destroy any chance I have of maintaining a good, decent post among people who at least show me civility, and you…you failed to inform me of Aunt Hy’s passing?” Her voice rose on that last question, rose and broke.
“I didn’t want to upset you, and Aunt’s demise was a foregone conclusion, as anybody with any sense would have known.”
Which disclosure meant Upton had known exactly where to find his cousin, and he’d chosen not to, until now. Sebastian silently implored the cupids cavorting in the molding to imbue him with restraint.
“Upton, you have exceeded my patience,” Sebastian said. “If Miss Danforth chooses to remain in my household, then that is where she will remain.” And because he was a bad man, as was known by all, Sebastian could not resist adding, “We’re rather fond of her, truth be known. She is the very soul of patience and Christian charity.”
Sebastian took the soul of patience by the elbow and guided her back two steps, out of range of her cousin’s worst notions. She glowered up at him for this gallantry, but Sebastian didn’t turn loose of her.
“Of course Milly is a good girl,” Upton retorted. “My wife and I saw to her welfare and ensured no waywardness emerged, but Milly is not of sound faculties and must be sheltered from the demands of a cruel and intolerant world. I cannot answer for the sorry influence two elderly ladies had over her in recent years. Millicent, for the last time, come along.”
Sebastian wanted to drape an arm around Millicent’s shoulders. Her expression suggested she would have bitten him had he dared such overt protectiveness.
“Alcorn, please leave. I am content with my post, and her ladyship’s employ is hardly cruel or intolerant. Just the opposite, in fact.”
The ladies exchanged smiles, a compliment sincerely rendered and much appreciated.
“Then her ladyship does not know of your limitations, and we must add mendacity to your list of shortcomings, Cousin.”
Sebastian did tuck an arm around Miss Danforth’s waist. “So my aunt’s companion cannot read. What of it? Many well-bred ladies don’t trouble themselves with that effort, and my aunt employs a very competent secretary to deal with letters and the like. If you’re done befouling our morning, Upton, I suggest you allow Brodie and Helsom to escort you from the house.”
Beside Sebastian, Miss Danforth was gratifyingly quiet.
“It’s worse than that,” Upton sputtered. “Her faculties are comparable to that of a simpleton. She cannot read at all, can barely write her name, cannot read her Bible even, and that is despite every effort by competent governesses and tutors, and even my own lady wife.”
Sebastian twirled a languid finger. “Out. Now.”
Helsom and Brodie took a step closer to Miss Danforth’s relation, and that fellow, likely because he was as endowed with a taste for self-preservation as the next bullying coward, jerked his coat down over his paunch and spun on his heel.
“Don’t go after him,” Sebastian muttered, keeping his arm around Miss Danforth. “Don’t apologize, don’t plead, don’t mend fences. Don’t.”
“I want to plow my fist into his belly.”
“Don’t do that either. All that lard means he won’t feel your blow. You’re better off breaking his nose, which will hurt, and the blood will also scare him—messy business, breaking a nose, but he’s the kind who’d be more alarmed with the blood than the pain.”
She peered at Sebastian, and where he might have expected revulsion at his lapse into the thoughts and vocabulary of an interrogator, Miss Danforth instead looked intrigued.
“I would like to see him scared. I would like to see dear Alcorn terrified, and of something other than his wife.”
For her fierceness and her understanding, Sebastian wished, in the corner of his soul that loved the scent of lavender and missed Provence in summer, that he could give her what she wanted. Anything that she wanted, he wished he was able to give it to her.
***
He knew. Somehow, St. Clair had divined Milly’s worst secret, her greatest sorrow and most profound humiliation. He knew, and yet he stood there, all elegance and unconcern, his arm around her waist as if they were about to promenade the perimeter of some ballroom.
While Milly clutched her piecework and felt sick, Lady St. Clair bounced to her feet. “Professor, you will join me in my sitting room. I must send out inquiries regarding this Upton creature. Sebastian, a medicinal tot for the poor girl. That is a dreadful cousin if ever I beheld one.”
She patted Milly’s arm as she swept past, the professor at her side.
“Some brandy, Miss Danforth?”
The solicitude in St. Clair’s voice nigh undid Milly. She must thank him, decline, and offer her resignation. Packing would not take long, but she’d have to send for her trunk later. “I want Peter.”
St. Clair gently disengaged her sewing from her fingers and set it aside. “You want to learn to read.”
The hurt went through Milly, old, brutal, and mean. “I am too stupid. I have this on repeated, emphatic, unassailable authority, though sometimes I manage fairly well with it.”
He shifted so his arms rested around Milly’s shoulders. On some other occasion, his presumption might have made her feel trapped.
On this occasion, she was tempted to rest her head on his shoulder and weep.
“They tried to beat your letters into you?”
How did he know these things, and why did it matter to him?
“Yes. I wore letters about my neck, as if one can learn to recognize letters upside down more easily than right side up. I stared at them repeatedly, endlessly, in chalk, pencil, and ink. I recited them, and that went swimmingly—I can spell many, many words out loud, like reciting so much poetry—but I cannot read or write nearly well enough, especially if I am tired.”
His scent was a comfort, not as great a comfort as velvet fabric between her fingers, or Peter’s purr against her chest, but a comfort. And when the baron held her like this, in a loose, undemanding embrace, Milly could hide her face against the lace of his cravat.
“If I teach you how to write your name, Miss Danforth, to write it beautifully, confidently, will you stay? Will you stay for at least another month, so I might find a successor to replace you in my aunt’s affections?”
Milly stepped back to peer up at him, because his lordship wasn’t making sense. “I don’t want to leave. I told my cousin the truth—I am content in your employ, more than content.”
He did not return Milly’s regard, but instead appeared to study the bouquet in the window. The lavender was in good repair, but the roses were going quite to pot.
“I am the Traitor Baron, Miss Danforth. You heard your cousin plainly enough. I served the Corsican loyally for years and have made no apology for it. I held English officers captive from time to time, and this is not something easily forgotten. You ought to take your cousin’s concerns seriously.”
Milly stepped away and closed the cover over the piano keys. “Yes, I ought. Alcorn is not concerned for me and never has been. When my uncle grew ill, he specifically charged Alcorn and Marcus to look after me—uncle never read very well either—and Alcorn took that to mean I was his unpaid help, his cross to bear. I do not enjoy bein
g anybody’s cross, my lord.”
She did not want to be Lady St. Clair’s cross either, but was confident that good dame would never entertain such a notion.
“Marcus is another cousin?”
The roses were beyond help, so Milly took the bouquet off the windowsill, set it on the sideboard, and began removing them from the vase. Petals fell all about, but there was no help for that.
“Marcus was my cousin, Alcorn’s younger brother. Marcus did not survive the Peninsular campaign.”
His lordship went to the desk and rummaged in a drawer. “I might have held your cousin as a prisoner, Miss Danforth. Might have questioned him most rigorously. Are you still content to remain in my employ?”
The baron held a pair of shears, and despite his lace and grace, he looked—and sounded—very severe.
“Marcus was never taken prisoner. He fell off his horse and suffered a blow to the head. I ought to change this water. Roses always leave such a stench.” And why did his lordship look so relieved at Milly’s answer?
He passed the shears to her, which meant she could trim up the stems on the sprigs of lavender. “Peter is not your only ally, Miss Danforth.”
Milly tossed the roses in a dustbin near the desk and swept dead petals into her palm. “You use a military word—ally. I hope I’m not engaged in battle with Alcorn.”
St. Clair stalked closer, nothing comforting at all about his expression or his posture.
“Your dear cousin beat you, when he had to realize that beatings were unavailing toward the furtherance of your education. He denied you wages for your labor. He belittled you and suffered others to do likewise. He limited your access to your aunts until you were of age—or am I wrong?”
Milly sat abruptly on the piano bench, a bunch of dead rose petals in her hand, soft as velvet, but not the same thing at all as a plush fabric. “You make it sound as if I was a prisoner.”
He sat beside her, causing the bench to creak. There was barely room for the two of them, because St. Clair was no delicate flower.
“You felt like a prisoner. Your imagination and determination were all that sustained you, and possibly, the occasional visit from your aunts. Will you stay with us, Milly Danforth?”
Allies were not friends, but they could be loyal and useful. If one had allies, did that imply one had enemies as well? “I should cut more roses.”
He took her wrist and pried her fingers open, then turned her hand palm down, so the rose petals fell into his larger hand. Because Milly had been holding the petals in a warm grasp, their scent wafted to her nose.
“Aunt would be heartbroken to lose you, and nobody in this house cares one whit if you can read or write. Nobody.”
“I care if I can read or write. I’ve tried to tell myself that it’s like singing—some people have a natural talent for it, and others do not. I have no talent for letters and words.”
He swore. Milly’s ear for French was more than passable, because she’d always liked the sound of it—as if velvet had a sound—and his cursing was creative and vulgar.
“I can teach you to write your name, Millicent Danforth, but not if you let Alcorn win.”
She had no intention of letting Alcorn remove her from this household, but that wasn’t what St. Clair had referred to. “How will you teach me, when governesses, tutors, Marcus, and my aunts were unable to?”
He stood peering down at the rose petals in his hand. “It’s not complicated. You will learn your name by stitching it.”
***
“Confound it, Sebastian, you are uncanny. How could you know such a thing about my Milly?”
Aunt paced the elegant dimensions of her sitting room, Baumgartner looking on from the corner desk.
“I didn’t know it, not until Upton started with his buffoonery.” Aunt’s sitting room was pretty, full of lemony light from the yellow silk on the walls, the mirrors, and the gilt, but the room held no flowers.
“Do sit down, Sebastian. Were you guessing?”
No, he’d not been guessing. He’d been relying on the same instinct that allowed him to reduce grown men—brave, determined grown men—to weeping, undignified children. Sebastian appropriated the rocking chair by the fire and tried to fashion an answer.
“English cavalrymen riding dispatch were forever getting caught with orders in their boots, their shirts, their hats, their sleeves. A few were clever enough to make hidden slits in the leather of their saddles, or false compartments in their saddlebags. A very few admirable patriots secreted orders in their underlinen.”
Aunt liked that part about the underlinen. She lit on a cream-colored sofa and poured herself a cup of tea. “Do go on. Tea, Professor?”
“No thank you, my lady.”
“Most of those riding dispatch had simply accepted sealed orders and gone galloping off with a tidy packet of intelligence just waiting to be captured and deciphered.”
Aunt looked thoughtful while she stirred sugar and cream into her tea. “I gather you took a different approach?”
He’d taken many different approaches. “When I needed information sent to a higher command, or sent”—he shot his cuffs and did not look at Baumgartner—“elsewhere, I relied on the peasantry, the unlettered and the unremarkable, to relay my messages.”
“And this worked?”
“Not always.” No method, no procedure, no clever scheme had been without its failures, some of them spectacular. “I found, though, that those who could not write had prodigious memories. They had far more accurate recall of what they’d been told than those who’d merely shoved a packet of paper into their kit bag and ridden away.”
“And Milly Danforth has such a memory.” Aunt held out a plate of tea cakes to Sebastian, but not to Baumgartner, who would not bother with sweets when there was business to be transacted. “She can recite anything she’s heard practically word for word, sometimes when I’d rather she didn’t.”
Sebastian had listened to Miss Danforth often enough over breakfast, but her ability to recall conversations hadn’t registered, not until her cousin’s visit.
“She has no lap desk,” he said, “and she didn’t send written word to her aunt when she arrived here that she’d found a decent post. She has no Bible, no Book of Common Prayer with her name inscribed in it. She neither sent nor received any written communications. The neighbors got word to her not by sending a note, but by word of mouth when somebody had an errand in Town and could stop by the kitchen door to pass along the news in person.”
“To have no letters, none in any language, is a sad, sad poverty,” Baumgartner observed.
“To have that Upton swine as your sole male relation is a worse poverty yet,” Aunt snapped.
“To have the Traitor Baron as your nephew is the saddest poverty of all,” Sebastian said. “And yet, Miss Danforth has agreed to remain in our household, despite that unhappy connection.”
“Of course she did,” Aunt said. “I pay well, and my company is agreeable.”
Both men remained silent.
“I pay very well, and my company is not disagreeable,” she amended. “And you two are no gentlemen. Sebastian, be off with you. The professor and I have letters to write.”
He rose, exchanging a look of sympathy with Baumgartner. The German was in every sense in Aunt’s confidence, not a particularly comfortable honor.
And Baumgartner’s sympathy for Sebastian? To claim the Traitor Baron as one’s only male relation was indeed a sad, sad poverty.
***
Parisians were sensible people. They appreciated the great blessing of living in one of the most beautiful, vibrant cities on earth, and assembled at cafés and along the boulevards when social inclinations overtook them. An occasional stroll in the ordered and civilized surrounds of the Tuileries sufficed to assuage their bucolic impulses.
Parisians did no
t feel compelled to associate with cows, geese, rabbits, deer, and other beasts in their very parks, while the Londoners—yeomen all, at heart—did. Henri nonetheless chose a shaded bench in Hyde Park for his next assignation with Captain Lord Anderson, in hopes that his lordship might be less remarkable in such an environment.
Anderson did not disappoint. He came striding along in the uniform of the English gentleman—shiny boots, close-tailored doeskin breeches, blue waistcoat, brown topcoat, hat, and walking stick. His watch fob was a tasteful wink of gold, and his gloves were spotless, dyed or chosen to exactly match his breeches. He took a seat on the bench as if enjoying the pretty day, not an ounce of imagination or idiosyncrasy in evidence in his dress or his demeanor.
“Have some gingerbread, mon ami.” Henri passed over a slice of sweet that would never compare with his own sainted grandmother’s recipe, but did not offend when decently covered with butter. “It’s still warm, and I bought more than I should have.”
Anderson looked momentarily nonplussed, no doubt because one did not eat with gloves on, but the English schoolboy won out over the man of fashion. He took off his gloves and accepted Henri’s offering.
“My thanks.” Anderson popped a bite into his mouth, managing to get a crumb lodged in his moustache. “Quite good.”
A bit heavy on the ginger, and a hint of cloves would have smoothed out the aroma nicely. “English gingerbread, like English ale, has no equal,” Henri said. “Have you anything to report?”
He wasn’t about to compliment the English weather. Even Anderson would pick up on that tripe.
“Dirks told me to take myself the hell off. Those were his very words.” His lordship stuffed the last of his gingerbread into his mouth, and damned if the man didn’t even chew like an Englishman—all business, like a bullock with its cud, as if food were not akin to sex in the sensual pleasure it might afford.
“Dirks is Scottish, and you are English. Does he want you to beg, perhaps?”
“I served with him, Henri.”
And such was the bond among Wellington’s former subordinates that it even, apparently, transcended centuries of national animosity. Henri took another bite of warm gingerbread and decided not to chastise Anderson for using his name. Half the French nation was naming its babies Henri, and he hadn’t given Anderson any other means of addressing him—nor would he.
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