The Traitor

by Grace Burrowes

  “I am an English baroness, lest you forget, married to a peer of the realm and soon to be mother of the next Baron St. Clair. I know an English kiss when my husband gifts me with one.”

  Or dozens. Milly touched her heel to the mare’s side rather than belabor such a point in the very lane.

  “Soon to be mother of the next Baron St. Clair? We’ve been married less than a week, madam. Do you know something else you ought to be telling your English husband?”

  “I know we indulge in marital relations with a frequency that will yield inevitable results, given that we both enjoy great good health. Will you plant the lavender?”

  They debated whether they could propagate enough plants from cuttings in what remained of the growing season, and whether those cuttings could be safely wintered over in the experimental farm’s small propagation house. All the while, Milly tried not to watch her husband’s mouth, his hands on the reins, or the muscles of his thighs as he rode along.

  “We’re not the only ones enjoying a pretty day,” Milly said as another couple approached on horseback. The gentleman rode a big sleek chestnut, and the lady was on a pretty gray. Two half-grown mastiffs gamboled along beside the horses.

  Beside Milly, Sebastian’s demeanor shifted, though she could not have said how. Fable sensed the change as well, and left off making halfhearted swipes at the foliage along the lane.

  “Milly, I cannot vouch for—”

  “St. Clair.” The Duke of Mercia touched his hat brim. “Baroness. Good day.”

  He’d brought his horse to the halt, and so had the lady. A beat of silence went by—this was the man who crafted silences sturdier than a granite garrison—before Milly realized the pause in conversation was harmless, even polite.

  “Sebastian, I believe His Grace is waiting on introductions.”

  Another infinitesimal increment of quiet, while Milly’s words penetrated the tension her husband gave off.

  “I beg your pardon, Your Grace. Your Graces.” He tended to the civilities, and Milly was pleased to note he did so sounding quite English.

  “We’re visiting a property Mercia inherited from a cousin,” the duchess explained. She was a small blond lady who watched her duke the way Milly probably watched Sebastian. “We’re having the dower house demolished, and I wanted to see that.”

  Within minutes, the men were riding ahead, and the dogs had disappeared into the hedges, leaving Milly to make small talk with…a duchess.

  “You wanted to watch a building being torn down, Your Grace?”

  Perhaps duchesses were given to eccentricity. One heard about inbreeding in the aristocracy.

  “I want Mercia to blow it up. I was married to the property’s previous owner before His Grace made me his duchess, and those were not happy years.”

  Did everybody arrive to adulthood incarcerated by memories of misery?

  “Then you should schedule the demolition for nighttime, Your Grace. The explosion will be like fireworks, and the ground will be more damp, so there’s less chance of any fire spreading.”

  “Splendid notion!” Their horses ambled along the pretty country lane for some yards before the duchess spoke again. “I wanted to hate your husband, you know. Wanted to arrange a slow, painful, disfiguring death for him. Several deaths.”

  This duchess was not eccentric, but she was apparently quite fierce. “You have revised your opinion of St. Clair?”

  “I’m considering it. Mercia seems to respect him, which I cannot fathom, but one doesn’t rush some discussions. I know whatever the tally between the two of them, Mercia regards the balance as even. There was a duel…there was supposed to be a duel, but they came to an understanding instead.”

  Her Grace fell silent, a habit she’d perhaps learned from her handsome spouse, or from those difficult years.

  “I know Sebastian has dueled, but he’s promised me he’s done with that. He has no heir, you see, and I have much to learn if I’m to be a proper baroness to him.”

  Ahead of them, Sebastian was pointing at the well-drained, south-facing field, and the duke appeared to be offering suggestions.

  “I think you are already a proper baroness to him,” Her Grace observed. “You genuinely care for him, don’t you?” The duchess was puzzled to find it so. Her expression didn’t suggest it so much as her tone of voice.

  “I am smitten, Your Grace. Sebastian has endured much, had no allies through any of it, and still grapples with the results of decisions he had no hand in. He needs no defending, but he deserves loving.”

  Her Grace adjusted her whip. “He tortured my husband, among others. If you could see—”

  Mercia had come to find the knife a comfort. Milly still did not fathom what Sebastian had meant, and she might never.

  “I can see. I can see that Sebastian’s choices haunt him, and I can see that every man he held captive is now strutting around on English soil, nursing a grudge with more care than you likely shower on His Grace’s heir.”

  Somewhere, it was likely written in elegant, flowing, thoroughly indecipherable prose that one didn’t interrupt a duchess. Her Grace apparently hadn’t yet read that tract, because she offered Milly a smile, a conspiratorial, purely friendly smile, and she stopped fussing her whip.

  “You are quite ferocious, Baroness, and you sound like my husband. I cannot like the man you’re married to—I cannot understand him—but I like you, and I’m glad he’s married. For everybody’s sake, at some point the past must be allowed to become the past.”

  “Thank you, Your Grace. I begin to wonder if anybody knows Sebastian, or if all England is content to hate the person they think he is.”

  “You don’t hate him, and he’s given up dueling for you, so he must hold you in considerable regard.”

  Excellent points. “He also married me when he did not have to. Is your mare of Arabian extraction, Your Grace? She has a beautiful eye.”

  They shared perhaps a quarter mile more of small talk before the duchess reminded her duke that they’d promised their daughter a visit at teatime. Their Graces made their farewells and turned down a shaded lane, the duke bellowing for the dogs, who came panting and barking to his side.

  Sebastian sat on Fable, still as a garden statue. “Mercia named one of those enormous beasts Dimwit.”

  Milly could not divine the significance of this observation. “Apparently so. I didn’t catch the other one’s name.”

  Sebastian turned only his head, so his horse still faced down the lane traversed by Their Graces. “Was the duchess decent to you?”

  “She was quite friendly.” Also quite frank, and she hadn’t invited Milly to call upon her. Then too, acknowledging an upstart baroness on a back road when one’s husband asked for an introduction was no guarantee of safe conduct at the local assembly.

  Sebastian resumed watching the duke and duchess until a bend in the road took them from his sight.

  “Mercia offered me the loan of his propagation house. Said his mother was quite the rose gardener, and the building sits mostly empty. Her Grace—the current duchess—also enjoys gardening.”

  Still, he watched the empty lane.

  “Sebastian?”

  “My love?”

  Gracious. “The next step in the dance is you send them over some rose cuttings from our gardens. The white ones with the extraordinary fragrance. Your gardener will know which ones.”

  “My mother brought those with her from France.”

  “All the better.”

  Now he gave his horse leave to move forward, turning Fable back the way they’d come.

  “You called them our gardens. His Grace asked if you might call on his wife. Said she wasn’t permitted any friendships in her first marriage, and hasn’t developed the knack for finding them yet in her second.”

  The consternation in Sebastian’s eyes made se
nse now.

  “Am I to befriend a lonely duchess all on my own? I, who haven’t even the knack of baronessing yet myself?”

  “You are. I’m sure the lady has no use for me, though Mercia would probably tolerate me in small doses over a tot of brandy.” They traversed the lane in silence for some time, while Milly contemplated plain Milly Danforth from Chelsea, former poor relation, lady’s companion, and schoolroom failure, taking tea with a duchess.

  A fierce duchess and a ferocious baroness. They’d get on famously.

  “Something is different about Mercia’s regard for me,” Sebastian said as they crossed one of the numerous St. Clair sheep meadows.

  “Perhaps marriage agrees with him. Her Grace is protective of him.”

  “Marriage agrees with me,” Sebastian muttered. He glanced around, as if hoping one of the sheep might have said the words.

  “One has wondered, St. Clair.” He wasn’t professing undying love, but as Her Grace had said, some conversations ought not to be rushed.

  “Marriage to you agrees with me,” he said, clearly this time. “I hadn’t thought myself much of a bargain, as husbands go, but I seem to be rising to the challenge—aren’t I?”

  He tugged at his hat brim then glanced back in the direction they’d come. Back toward the duke who’d suggested their wives might call on each other.

  “As husbands go, I would not describe you as any sort of bargain.” Milly’s words had the desired effect of recapturing Sebastian’s attention. “As husbands go, you are an absolute treasure.” And then, because his expression had gone bashful and dear, she found the courage to add, “I adore being your baroness.”

  The ruin came into sight, the one that offered all manner of privacy amid sun-warmed stone.

  “Mercia no longer looks at me as if all he can see is the knife in my hand,” Sebastian said. He glanced down at his black-gloved hands, which held reins, nothing more.

  “Someday, I hope you can see yourself just as clearly, Husband, for I already do.”

  ***

  “St. Clair is not as easy to hate as I’d like.” Gillian, Duchess of Mercia, offered this observation as she and her spouse rounded a bend that would take them from St. Clair’s sight.

  “Your conclusions astound me, my dear. You said not one word to St. Clair beyond ‘good day, my lord,’” Mercia observed. “Is it possible these dogs are still growing?”

  “For another six months, at least.” Though His Grace would have to do much better than that if he wanted to distract his wife. “Once the pleasantries were concluded, you neatly prevented me from asking St. Clair how he slept at night after the horrors he perpetrated on your person, or how he justified drawing breath, after all the miseries he inflicted on officers defending the interests of his native soil.”

  Christian Severn had learned much about silence, but one thing Gilly knew for a certainty: he would never use silence as a weapon against her or their children. And yet, he would choose his words, sometimes choose them slowly.

  “I suggested to him that you and the baroness might strike up an acquaintance.”

  “Her, I liked, but why would you make such an overture, Christian? They are besotted. Where she goes, St. Clair is sure to follow.”

  His Grace stretched up in his irons, as if saddle weary, though they’d traveled less than thirty minutes from the stables.

  “He won’t be following his baroness if he’s dead. St. Clair has been challenged again, and the fellow who called him out is lethal on a bad day, not some strutting boy prone to ranting when in his cups. They’re using the same location where I met St. Clair, not even bothering to keep the arrangements discreet.”

  Not every husband would confide such a thing in a wife, much less in a duchess.

  “You feel responsible for this.” Christian’s sense of responsibility was bred in the bone, unshakable, and—in Gilly’s opinion—not entirely rational. “Explain this to me, lest I develop a headache trying to fathom the Stygian abyss that passes for male reasoning.”

  Ahead of them, the dogs caught the scent of something fascinating, for they both went dashing off into the undergrowth amid a great lot of flapping ears, sniffing, and woofing.

  “I was the first to challenge him,” His Grace reminded her. “Called him out at his very club, with witnesses all around.”

  Gilly’s mare wanted to chase after the dogs, so Gilly had to check her rather firmly. “And then you stood down, the both of you.”

  Christian whistled for the dogs, a piercing shriek that startled the horses and did not agree with Gilly either. Nor did it produce any dogs.

  “The gentlemen of Polite Society do not know that St. Clair and I reached an accommodation, but until I challenged him, he was permitted to live quietly, resuming civilian life like the rest of us.” After a moment of watching the undergrowth to no avail, His Grace added softly, “Wellington has forbidden me to interfere.”

  In terms of precedence, Mercia outranked Wellington, who for all his military successes was merely a first duke.

  “Wellington is no longer your superior officer, Christian. If you wish to interfere, you’d be within your rights to ascertain why Wellington has taken a hand in matters. What can those dogs have found?”

  “Running riot, no doubt. This time of year, the young of many species lurk in the hedgerows.”

  The mastiffs were both enormous and too immature to have any self-restraint around fawns, baby rabbits, fox kits—all of them helpless and unsuspecting, much like St. Clair’s brand-new baroness.

  “Lady St. Clair believes her husband is safe from honorable gentlemen who want to blow his brains out. I do not like that she’s being deceived, Christian. She pronounced herself smitten with the brute.”

  His Grace let forth another ear-piercing whistle and bellowed for the dogs by name in what his daughter called his Papa-Is-Vexed voice.

  “He’s smitten with her too, though I doubt he realizes it. Said ‘his Milly’ likes to garden. I can ask Wellington for more details, though Old Hookey doesn’t take well to pestering.”

  A rustling in the bushes suggested the mastiffs were heeding the duke’s summons.

  “Consider this, Christian: the Baroness St. Clair will not take kindly to being widowed a week after saying her vows, and the aggravation that was Bonaparte will pale compared to the wrath of that woman if harm befalls her baron, particularly if those who could have aided him did nothing.”

  “You don’t even like him.”

  “True.” The dogs emerged from the hedgerow some yards up the lane. “But I love you, and you feel responsible, so you must bother dear Arthur, regardless of his temper. You haven’t refused his most recent invitation, you know.”

  His Grace heaved a martyred sigh. “Another hail-fellows-well-met at Apsley House?”

  Gilly gave him the date, upon which, she knew for a certainty, he had no other obligations.

  “You see before you a doomed duke, then. Some matters do not admit of handling by post. What is that smell?”

  As the dogs bounded closer, tongues lolling, plumed tails swaying in the breeze, Gilly caught the same sweet, noxious odor. “Whatever it is, it’s quite dead, and your dogs have thoroughly rolled in it, Your Grace.”

  “My dogs?”

  “You brought them into our home.”

  They argued agreeably all the way back to the stables, though when they went into the house, Gilly penned an acceptance of Wellington’s invitation—His Grace’s penmanship being deplorable—and Mercia signed it. He grumbled, he complained, and he generally tried his duchess’s patience first—and then rewarded her patience generously—but he did sign it.

  Fifteen

  “I do not understand this.” Henri affixed a perplexed look to his features and studied the scarred table, into one corner of which some philosopher of the grape had carved the words, “F
uk the Frogs.”

  “She’s married him,” Upton reiterated. “Married a damned baron, and her the closest thing to a dimwit.”

  Upton sounded more bewildered than affronted, as if barons were immune from mating with dimwits, when in Henri’s experience, intellectual abilities were the last thing a titled lord considered in a prospective spouse.

  “I thought women required the permission of their next of kin before taking a spouse in this most civilized country. More ale?” The women of France, of course, no longer tolerated such interference, which was fortunate, given that few adult Frenchmen were extant to do the interfering.

  “Please. Milly’s of age. She’s damned on the shelf, in fact, or she was, so she can marry where she pleases. Mrs. Upton is in quite a taking, quite a taking indeed.”

  Hence Mr. Upton’s refuge in this cozy tavern.

  Henri lifted a hand to signal the barmaid. “Your lady, she is not pleased to have a baroness in the family?” Because what was wanted here was not wallowing in self-pity, but action.

  “Any other baroness would do famously,” Upton said, swiping his finger around the rim of his tankard then licking the wet digit. “Milly has gone and married the Traitor Baron, though, and that’s rather a different thing altogether.”

  “Ah.”

  Upton was marginally sober—the man could hold prodigious quantities of ale—and he was sly, but not particularly astute. The single syllable—a bit knowing, a bit commiserating—provoked him to turning an annoyed gaze on Henri.

  “What? I’m not in the mood for any of your Frenchie subtleties, sir. Mrs. Upton in a taking is a formidable challenge to a man’s peace.”

  “The ladies have no strategy.” Henri fell silent while the barmaid replenished Upton’s drink, but he waved her away rather than befoul his own palate with any more English ale.

  “The ladies have a damned lot of strategy, most of it intended to keep a fellow from his marital bliss, if you know what I mean. My wife is the only lady to have three children and remain almost a virgin.”