Freddy left to execute her assignments. She’d had a chance to say her piece, which was as much as any condemned prisoner was allowed.
***
Sebastian watched his only relative leave, and cuddled Milly’s cat as if the damned beast could bring him some comfort.
“Does Aunt think I didn’t worry for her? Didn’t fret nightly the French would make off with her for some stupid lark? Didn’t treasure her every letter? For God’s sake, I love the woman—”
He sounded more French the more exhausted and indignant he became—the more desperate he felt.
Michael scratched the cat’s chin, and a predictable rumble began.
“Shall I tell Lady Freddy of your love when Anduvoir has sent you to your dubious reward?”
“Sod yourself.” The most English foul language Sebastian knew, words he could lay claim to honestly. “I told Milly I loved her, but I botched it.”
The pity in Michael’s gaze was hard to look upon, but even when Michael dropped his hand, the cat kept purring.
“How can a man botch telling the woman who loves him that he loves her too?”
“To Milly, I used the words as a weapon. I let the wrong instincts guide me.”
“Truth can be a powerful weapon.”
“A husband’s truth, possibly, not an inquisitor’s. An inquisitor deals in threats, manipulation, fear, and false hope.”
“You never dealt in false hope.”
They were arguing history, and miserable history at that, while Anduvoir was skulking about Mayfair and Milly was without protection.
“Enough, Michael. I’m off to find John Coachman. Ask the professor to wait for me.”
A lift of Michael’s eyebrow suggested he knew damned good and well Sebastian was excluding him from the interview with the coachman. Michael’s loyalties had become suspect, and bringing Anduvoir to Sebastian’s attention would be a convincing way to allay those suspicions.
Sebastian passed him the cat and headed for the mews.
Only to be radically disappointed.
“She got out at a hackney stand in Piccadilly,” John Coachman said. “Cabs lined up in the street, patrons lined up on the walk. You can get a cab to pretty much anywhere from Piccadilly, my lord, including to King’s Cross.”
From whence the postal coaches took the Great North Road to points varied and distant.
Sebastian wanted to wring the old man’s neck. “She gave you no indication of her direction? She popped out of the carriage and simply sent you on your way?” Milly might well have behaved exactly thus.
“She said I wasn’t to worry, but to go directly home.”
The coachman wasn’t to worry. The coachman wasn’t to worry. The dread congealing in Sebastian’s chest acquired a new intensity, and a veneer of admiration. Whatever course she’d set, Milly was confident in it.
“What direction did the hackney stand face?”
“Northbound,” the coachman said.
“T’weren’t northbound.”
Giles, Sebastian’s largest footman, shifted from foot to foot two yards away.
“Now see here,” the coachy said, drawing himself up. “You’re not to interrupt your betters nor even to take notice of ’em without permission, young man. His lordship weren’t asking you—”
“Why do you say it wasn’t northbound?” Sebastian asked.
“We had to turn the coach around, and while we did, her ladyship crossed the street and hailed a westbound cab. I heard her holler to the fellow to take her to Chelsea, and she had a little satchel with her. I waved to her, and she waved back.”
A woman utterly broken in spirit did not wave at her servants across a busy thoroughfare. A fraction of Sebastian’s unease relaxed.
“You’re sure she said Chelsea?”
“Aye, milord. Driver answered her clear as day, ‘Chelsea, it is!’ Probably wanted to show the other fellows he’d landed a good fare.”
Milly had been safe and happy in Chelsea; she’d had allies there. Of course, she’d seek comfort in familiar surroundings when her marriage was no comfort at all.
“Thank you, Giles. Walk with me, if you please.”
As Sebastian traversed a short distance down the alley, he sorted through options. His first impulse was to retrieve his wife the way he’d pursue an escaped prisoner. She was his wife, and she belonged with him—belonged to him, and he to her. Except that sentiment bore a noticeable stench, not of loyalty or protectiveness, but of command and possessiveness.
His second impulse was to throw a saddle on Fable and tear out to Chelsea, which notion bore more than a whiff of desperation.
“Did her ladyship seem upset, Giles?”
“Tired, not upset.” Giles was quite sure of his conclusion. “I have six sisters, milord. Her ladyship weren’t in a taking. Them lawyers would try anybody’s patience.”
“Describe the satchel.”
Sebastian listened with half an ear, because he knew well the little traveling bag Milly had appropriated from his wardrobe. He’d carried it to France as a boy, and brought it home from France as a man. The satchel was battered, sturdy, and stored with lavender sachets when not in use.
A third option emerged in Sebastian’s mind, this one having a certain difficult rightness to it—a punishment to fit the crime, or a well-crafted penance. He was to do exactly as he’d expected his wife to do if she’d learned he’d gone off to a dawn meeting, and her all unsuspecting.
He was to sit at home and do nothing except worry and trust to her luck and her judgment. Chelsea was, after all, where Milly had kissed her husband for the first time, too.
Seventeen
Without people to love it, the cottage was no longer home. Milly had not even a cat to share that realization with. Despite a lack of appetite, she was making an evening meal of bread and cheese, when she heard a knock on the kitchen door.
“Sebastian.”
Though if he’d come for her, Milly was at least resolved they’d arrive to some understandings before she returned to his household. She tidied the crumbs off the table, touched a hand to her hair, and opened the door.
“Your ladyship.” Giles bowed low, an incongruous gesture given that he was in a workingman’s rough clothing rather than footman’s livery.
“Giles, good evening. Is anything amiss?”
He came up smiling. “That’s what I was to ask. His lordship sent me to make sure you didn’t need anything.”
Milly needed her husband’s trust, she needed sleep, and she needed courage. She glanced behind Giles, half hoping to see the St. Clair town coach in the alley.
“I wasn’t sent to fetch you unless you want to be fetched, mum. The dog cart is waiting up at the corner.”
“You’re not to bring me home?” Not that she’d allow any but her husband to escort her.
“Not unless you’d like to go home, but I am to bring you this.” He hefted a familiar-looking wicker basket.
“You may set it on the counter.” Milly stared at the basket long enough to know Peter was not among its contents, which was some reassurance. “How did you leave his lordship, Giles?”
Giles set the basket on the counter. Crockery within the wicker tinkled at the shift. “He be in a taking, you ask me, and ain’t nobody never seen his lordship in a taking.”
Oh, dear. “His hair is sticking up in all directions, he can’t hold still, and he sounds very English?”
Giles apparently found the basket worthy of study too. “He be cursin’, ma’am, in English and Frenchie both.”
Protectiveness and guilt tugged at Milly’s resolve.
“The tavern halfway down the block on the high street serves a wonderful summer ale, Giles. Perhaps you’d enjoy a pint and then check back with me?”
He bowed again. “Always did enjoy a good summer al
e.”
When he was gone and Milly had put away her bread and cheese, she considered the hamper. Darkness was falling, though the moon would be up in less than two hours. She could return to Mayfair safely enough with Giles’s escort…if she had to.
She opened the hamper and lifted a book from among the contents. The title was not easy to decipher, but Milly recognized a capital M, and kept puzzling it out, just as she’d puzzled out every word of the bill of sale she’d signed earlier in the day.
When she realized she was holding a copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, an ache started up in her throat. A letter in Sebastian’s flowing hand fell from between the pages of the book.
As she stumbled, trudged, and groped her way through her husband’s letter, Milly began to cry.
Dearest Milly,
I have betrayed your trust, and for this I can only apologize. The habit to protect those I care about is of long standing, and at times has been all that has sustained me, my only lodestar. I am blessed with a wife who can protect herself better than most, who is resourceful, resilient, and capable of making her own sound decisions. I see this, now.
I pray you will decide to resume your place beside me, and promise you most solemnly that I have presumed on your forgiving nature, at least as regards my past, for the last time.
No more duels, Milly. I vow this. No more contests of honor, not by sword, pistol, fists, whips, knives…none of it. No more lies to spare me difficult explanations, no more assuming my secrecy shows regard for any save myself. The debt to my past must be regarded as paid with interest if I am, as you say, allowing it to rob me of a future, much less a future with you.
I await your response, but urge you not to rush. Your answer matters to me so very much, I will be as patient as you need me to be.
I’ve learned that my enemies are abroad right here in London, old foes who would harm any I care about in their effort to harm me. Be careful, my love. Bad enough I jeopardize your regard with my present folly. Don’t allow the enemies of my past to jeopardize your person as well.
I remain your most loving husband,
Sebastian
***
Milly wore an old frock, one stored in the trunks Alcorn and Frieda had apparently not found in the attic. With Giles beside her in his everyday dress, they were just another young couple, tooling about in a dog cart, likely going into Town to visit relations or do some afternoon shopping.
She had waited the entire morning and even into afternoon, as Sebastian had suggested—not ordered—and her only course remained to return to her husband.
Though she was still angry with him. One heart-wrenching note did not a marriage repair. She understood better now why separate bedrooms might have some appeal, though the thought rankled.
“Traffic be a right bear,” Giles said. “Makes a man miss the village.”
“Would you rather work at St. Clair Manor, Giles?”
As he handled the reins with the competence of a country-bred man, Giles’s ears turned red. “The city ain’t so bad.”
Milly recalled his affection for one of the maids, and had the happy thought that being Sebastian’s baroness required skills other than reading menus or arguing with one’s spouse. Two servants could transfer households as easily as one, provided the young lady was willing.
As the cart rattled from Knightsbridge to the shady perimeter of Hyde Park, Milly admitted she was not traveling into London because she was ready to forgive and forget. She was ready to listen, and to be listened to.
Which might not be enough.
“Mayfair has some of the widest streets in London, and yet the traffic here is some of the worst. Makes no sense a’tall,” Giles groused.
“We’ll be home soon,” Milly said, and part of her could not wait to see her husband again, while another part of her dreaded a difficult confrontation.
Giles slowed the cart to accommodate a dray turning across an intersection before them. “What do you suppose Lady Freddy be doing out strolling without the professor?”
Milly pulled her thoughts off the speech she would deliver to her husband and followed Giles’s gesture with the whip. Lady Freddy was indeed on the arm of a strange man, or rather…
The fellow was portly, well dressed, and fairly dragging Freddy along by the elbow. Because the couple was across the way and up the street, Milly did not shout out a greeting to Sebastian’s aunt.
When she might have waved, she checked the impulse. Cold slithered down her spine, the same cold she’d experienced reading Alcorn’s helpful little note. Sebastian’s enemies were loose in London itself, and would use any means to harm him.
“I think he has a weapon pressed to her side, Giles. Lady Freddy’s in danger. His lordship warned me—”
“Then we’d best get help,” Giles said, asking the horse to pick up its pace.
“No, Giles. That fellow will make off with Freddy, and we’ll never find her. Turn the cart when next you can and then hop out. You alert his lordship.”
Giles’s expression went from affable footman happily in service, to sturdy young fellow not about to countenance foolery. “His lordship won’t like it, milady. He’ll sack me, and properly so.”
“His lordship will not like his aunt being carried off to France, or the war office, or wherever that man is taking her. I am the Baroness St. Clair, and I am ordering you to do as I say.”
Giles did not slow the cart.
“Please, Giles. I’ll be careful. Dressed as I am, I’m just another village girl about my business, and nobody will remark this cart.” Up the street, the man escorting Lady Freddy turned her down a side street. “I’ll follow them. All I’ll do is follow them. Tell his lordship that.”
Giles passed her the reins. “I’ll expect a decent character from you when he sacks me.”
“A glowing character, and he won’t sack you.”
Giles was out of the cart before the horse had halted. He loped off in the direction of the St. Clair town house, while Milly clucked to the horse and tried to look as if she drove unescorted through the streets of Mayfair as a matter of course.
The fiction was barely supportable, but as she followed Aunt Freddy and her dubious companion northward, the traffic became less fashionable and neighborhoods became less grand.
Also utterly unfamiliar.
***
“Describe the man with my aunt.” Sebastian saw the effect his captain-of-the-guard inflection had on his footman, and tried for a more moderate tone. “Giles, your position is not in jeopardy, but my aunt, and very likely my baroness, are. Was the fellow well dressed?”
Giles had found him in the music room, and Sebastian wanted answers before Michael or the professor joined them.
“He were well dressed, top hat, and fine coat, but they were walking away from us, so I couldn’t see if he had a watch chain and such. He did have a cane.”
A sword cane, likely, or a piece with a weighted handle. Old bones broke so easily.
“Anything else? What drew your eye to him in the first place?”
Giles’s brow knitted. The fellow wasn’t stupid. He was, in fact, shrewd enough to know a less than creditable answer to his betters would result in both disbelief and ridicule, and yet, Sebastian dared not prompt any particular answer.
“You must have sensed something…?”
“He walked funny, like a woman trying to draw a fellow’s notice.”
More than dress, more than accent, more than any other detail, Giles’s observation confirmed that Aunt Freddy had fallen into Anduvoir’s clutches.
“What was my baroness wearing?”
Giles described a worn brown dress, years out of fashion, one that might blend in well anywhere in London except Mayfair. As Sebastian noted the details of Giles’s description—Milly was an attractive woman, maybe especially t
o a young footman—another part of Sebastian reached for the ability to think without feeling, to make decisions based on facts rather than emotion.
Viewed in this light, Milly’s decision to pursue Anduvoir was exactly the same sound judgment Michael had shown the previous day, and yet Sebastian wanted to throttle her for it. She did not know who or what she followed. He could only pray he had the chance to throttle her.
“Has the baroness returned?” The professor’s question was casual as he stood in the music-room door, but his posture was alert, an old hound catching the scent of trouble.
“She has not. Giles, you’re excused. Say nothing to anybody of this, and that includes—”
Michael appeared at the professor’s shoulder. “I saw Giles return on foot, and it is by no means his day off.” An accusation rather than observation.
Giles hurried from the room, and a silence took root in his wake. Michael had deserted his Highland unit to join Sebastian’s guard at the Château. No sane man had joined the French cause as the English offensive across Spain had picked up momentum.
Neither did a sane man remain in the employ of a traitor universally loathed by all of Polite Society.
Abruptly, Sebastian had no more time to gather information, to consider, to equivocate.
“Michael, you are either a traitor to the traitor, or you are my friend.”
“I am your friend.” The answer was swift, certain, and exactly what a traitor would say. Michael’s expression, though, wasn’t pugnacious, but rather, damnably understanding. “We can debate my loyalties for what remains of the day, or we can solve whatever problem has you mad enough to kill with your bare hands.”
Sebastian examined his hands, which had formed into fists. Many mornings, he and Michael rode the most remote paths of Hyde Park’s several hundred acres. Michael had had myriad opportunities to murder the Traitor Baron, if his intent were that simple.
His deeper motives would keep for another day.
“Anduvoir has Aunt Freddy, and Milly is in pursuit of them. I need a map of Bloomsbury.”
“Give me five minutes,” the professor said, spinning on his heel. “The library is full of atlases.”
The Traitor Page 28