by Jane Feather
Most particularly, he knew the names and types of the boats used to transport agents across the Channel, and he knew most of the safe landing spots they used along the Brittany and Normandy coasts.
Gabrielle read the letter twice. Black spots danced before her eyes and she couldn’t think. It was as if her brain were paralyzed. Her hand was numb, she was clutching the letter so tightly, and she forced herself to breathe deeply, to relax her fingers. The letter fluttered to the carpet.
I give you this information, ma fille, to do with
as you think best. It is in the way of returning
a favor. You will understand what I mean. As
always, it is imperative that I am not involved.
I trust in your ingenuity to ensure this.
She stared down at the lines at her feet. Ingenuity! Did he know what he was asking … demanding. But she knew that he didn’t. Talleyrand had no understanding of the complexities of emotional relationships. He had no time for them. Oh, he loved, he was fond, he was capable of affection. Why else had he sent her this intelligence? But individuals and the whole labyrinthine maze of feelings could never be allowed to come between the man and his purpose.
Gabrielle bent to pick up the letter. The movement made her head spin and her gorge rise into her throat. She straightened rapidly, one hand stroking her throat, praying that the wave of nausea would recede. The sensation never left her except when she was nibbling on some plain and undemanding food, but she dreaded the times when it would sweep over her in an invincible wave and she’d have to run for the commode.
Mercifully, it faded from an acute presence to normal queasiness, and she read the letter for the third time. But now her head was clear and alternative courses of action tumbled and sorted themselves in her brain.
There was only one possible course of action. She had to warn Nathaniel before the Curlew sailed from Lymington. He’d said they would sail at the end of the week. Today was Friday. Did he mean today or Saturday?
No point speculating, or worrying. She had to leave immediately. If she rode, she could be in Hampshire by early evening. It would be hard riding. She touched her belly. Dear God, she couldn’t deal with the nausea on horseback, at least not in its acute version. But she’d noticed that fresh air seemed to help, and she had a feeling that panic might well keep a lesser problem at bay.
She couldn’t leave the house without a word. She needed to take someone into her confidence—Primmy. She’d listen to what she was told, would ask no questions, and would ensure that no one was alarmed. And a fuller explanation to Simon, just in case something went wrong.
Don’t think like that Guillaume had taught her never to anticipate the worst until she needed to. She didn’t need to yet.
She wrote at length to Simon, telling him everything except the source of her information. He could make what guesses he wished. If anything did happen, if she and Nathaniel didn’t return, then at least the intelligence would be in the hands of someone who would know what to do with it.
Primmy, as Gabrielle had expected, accepted that Lady Praed was going into the country for a few days. She didn’t question the directive that she was to consult Lord and Lady Vanbrugh in the event of any difficulties.
Jake grumbled a bit that he wasn’t to go with her, but was easily reconciled when reminded that it would mean forgoing a promised excursion to the lions at the Exchange.
By mid-morning Gabrielle was on the road to Kingston. She had a groom with her who, when she changed horses halfway, would take her own tired mount back to London by easy stages.
They rode into the yard of the Green Man in Basingstoke in the early afternoon. Gabrielle’s back was aching, as it did after a long day’s hunting, but she ignored it. She was ravenous but stayed only to select a fresh mount. The inn provided a picnic of bread and cheese wrapped in a checkered napkin, and she rode out of the yard ten minutes after entering it, leaving the groom thankfully resting his weary bones before the fire in the taproom and addressing a substantial mutton chop.
Gabrielle now rode harder than she’d ever ridden in her life, pressing the fresh horse to its limit, and delving deep into her own physical resources to find the last vestiges of endurance.
It was six o’clock when she rode up the driveway of Burley Manor. The front of the house was in darkness and her heart sank. If Nathaniel was in residence, there would be some light, in the library at least. The weary horse stumbled on the gravel and came to a halt as she reined him in at the front door. He stood hanging his head, sweat glistening on his neck.
Gabrielle pounded the door knocker, trying to keep the rising panic at bay. Perhaps he was on the estate somewhere and hadn’t yet returned. But she knew that was wishful thinking.
A bolt scraped back. “Why, my lady, we wasn’t expectin’ you.” A startled elderly retainer, one of the skeleton staff left to take care of the house, stared at her in the light of the lantern he held high. The hall behind him was in darkness, just a glow of lamplight coming from the open door into the kitchen regions.
“His lordship … where is he?” She offered no explanations, clinging to the doorjamb as her legs threatened to give way.
“He be gone, m’lady, two hours since. Said ’e wouldn’t be back for a few months.”
“What time is high tide?” The sea was such a factor in the lives of these people of the tidal marshes along the Hampshire coastline that most people knew the tide table as they knew the days of the week.
The man stepped outside and looked up at the sky, where a crescent moon swung low over the river. “Ten o’clock, I believe, m’lady.”
The relief was so great that Gabrielle almost sat down on the step. But she knew that once she stopped moving, she wouldn’t be able to get up again for hours.
“Take this horse to the stable and saddle me another,” she commanded. “Quickly!”
“Aye, m’lady.” The old man shuffled off with infuriating slowness, and Gabrielle dug deep for a strength she didn’t think she had, but found something.
“Never mind, I’ll do it,” she said, taking the horse’s bridle. “Just follow me and look after this one.”
Fifteen minutes later she rode out of the stableyard, one of Nathaniel’s hunters moving eagerly beneath her. Her fatigue now enclosed her in a mind-numbing grayness, and she could feel herself swaying, her thighs barely exerting any pressure on the saddle. If the hunter decided he didn’t have a master on his back, he could well charge off on frolics of his own and she’d be helpless to prevent him. Fortunately he was a well-mannered animal and cantered easily down the lane, responding to the barest guiding nudge of her thighs or flicks of the reins.
Lymington Quay was quieter than Gabrielle had expected, but her blood sang with relief when she saw the Curlew tied up in her usual spot at the quayside. She was dark with no sign of her crew, but the sound of raucous voices, laughter, and singing came from the Black Swan. Maybe Nathaniel was in the tap room with the Curlew’s crew. It would be like him.
High tide was an hour away. She slipped from the hunter’s back and leaned against him for a minute, resting her forehead against the saddle, smelling the rich leather and the pungency of warm horseflesh. Curiously, it seemed to soothe the nausea.
Should she go into the inn and seek out Nathaniel?
But the thought of confronting him in her present weakness in the midst of a crowd of probably inebriated strange men was more than she could manage. She would go aboard the Curlew and wait for him there. It was going to be a grim encounter at best; at least it would be relatively private there, and there’d be no fear of her missing him.
She beckoned a yawning lad standing in the light spilling from one of the inn’s windows, and handed the hunter over to him, to be stabled until she collected him later. Then she went aboard the Curlew.
Immediately the combined odors of tar, fish, and the crude oil they used in the lamps swamped her, and she retched feebly over the side until the spasm passed. She dug into
her pocket and pulled out a hunk of bread from her picnic. Breaking off a piece, she chewed it slowly and it had the usual soothing effect.
She stumbled down the companionway into the small, well-remembered cabin, the scene of Jake’s hideous sickness. The cot beckoned, and with a groan she tumbled onto it, heedless of the rough ticking of the straw mattress beneath her cheek, or the smelly wool of the thin blanket that she dragged over her ….
She awoke to a dimly lit, moving, alien world that made no sense. Her sleep had been so heavy that for minutes she couldn’t move her limbs although her brain was giving the right orders. Finally she was able to turn her head and open her eyes.
Nathaniel was sitting at the small table in the middle of the cabin, a glass of cognac in his hand, watching her with a face of granite, and everything rushed upon her in a dizzying flood of memory and panic. She tried to sit up and the nausea hit her. With a groan she fell back again.
Nathaniel spoke, every soft word weighted with lethal menace. “You were warned. And by God, Gabrielle, you’re going to pay for this. Get up!”
She couldn’t get up, not yet, not without throwing up. “You don’t understand—”
“Get up!”
Oh, God! She thrust her hand into her pocket and found the last piece of bread.
Nathaniel stood up in one swift, angry movement, sweeping the glass to the floor. It crashed against the metal bolt of the table and broke.
“If I have to put you on your feet, Gabrielle, you are going to wish you’d never been born!”
Gabrielle crammed the bread into her mouth as he advanced on her, and with one desperate, fervent prayer that her stomach would behave, sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the cot.
“On your feet,” Nathaniel stood over her, his face a mask of fury, his eyes deadly.
She swallowed the bread almost whole. Her head was spinning and she was suddenly more frightened than she had ever been in her life. If he was like this now, when he believed she’d merely defied his prohibition, what was he going to do when he learned the truth?
“Listen,” she said, her voice thin. “You have to listen to me … why I’m here.”
“On your feet,” he repeated with the same soft savagery.
Gabrielle stood up slowly as the words tumbled in desperate explanation from her lips. “Fouché … Fouché has broken one of your agents in Calais. He knows all the landing places in Normandy … the boats you use … I came to warn you.”
Nathaniel face was bloodless in the dim lamplight, his eyes now dark holes in his ghastly complexion. “So you are working for Fouché,” he said in a voice devoid of emotion.
“No!” Gabrielle shook her head vigorously. “No, not Fouché, never Fouché.”
“Then you’re working for Talleyrand,” he stated in the same flat voice.
“Yes. But—”
“Whore!” He hit her with his open palm, and she fell back on the bed, her hand pressed to her cheek, her eyes stunned.
“Whore,” he repeated. “I trusted you. I believed in you. I loved you, God forgive me.” He bent and grabbed her arms, pulling her up.
He was submerged in a rage so wild, Gabrielle couldn’t recognize him. This was not the Nathaniel Praed she knew—father, lover, husband, friend—a man of humor and great passions, abiding loyalties and deep privacies. This man had moved into a world where ordinary rules didn’t apply and where ordinary human sensibilities were suspended.
Somehow she had to bring him back before something dreadful, irrevocable, happened.
“Please, Nathaniel,” she cried as his fingers bit deep into her arms and his unseeing eyes blazed with a ruthless rage. “Please. I’m having a baby!” It was a desperate plea, and for a minute she thought he hadn’t heard. And then his hands dropped from her arms and Nathaniel reinhabited his eyes.
“You’re pregnant?”
She nodded, relief washing through her, turning her legs to jelly. She sat on the cot, conscious of the stinging in her cheek and the deep ache in her arms where his fingers had bruised.
“Please, will you listen to me. I have to tell you everything and maybe you’ll understand a little.”
Nathaniel stepped back from her. There was still bitter hostility in his eyes, but he was in control of himself. He said nothing. Gabrielle swallowed. She was about to betray her godfather, but this time she must think only of herself—and Nathaniel, and Jake—and the child she carried.
“It begins with a man you knew as le liévre mir ….”
Half an hour later the story was told and the silence in the dim, fusty cabin was weighted with the words and emotions of that half hour.
“You used me,” Nathaniel said finally. “You’ve been using me from the first moment we met. Even your gift of love, the allegiance you swore … everything. It was all part of it.”
Gabrielle gazed down at the floor. She had no words of defense. He spoke only the truth. “Yes,” she said in a low voice. “You’re entitled to see it like that. But there is another way to look at it. I have—had—old loyalties to Talleyrand, to the memory of Guillaume, as well as new ones. I tried to find a way to reconcile them both.”
She looked up, meeting his eye, reading the great hurt and bitterness. “Nathaniel, we’re both spies. It’s a vile business … but necessary. We both know that. I did what I thought best.”
He opened his mouth to speak, and suddenly the quiet was shattered by the sound of a musket, followed by another, and then a volley of shots. The fishing boat lurched violently and there was a cry of pain from the deck.
Nathaniel, his pistol in his hand, was already at the companionway.
“Fouché!” Gabrielle murmured. How long had she been asleep? Were they already out of the protection of the Solent? The horrified realization dawned that despite everything, she’d failed in her mission. If she hadn’t fallen asleep, they wouldn’t have sailed unwarned. And she must have slept for hours, her exhaustion had been so overpowering. Why hadn’t Nathaniel woken her? How long had he sat there, feeding his anger, watching her, while they sailed into danger?
She had her own pistol, as usual, in the pocket of her riding habit and leaped for the companionway on Nathaniel’s heels. The scene on deck was nightmarish. Dan and his crew lay in a heap by the deck rail, and the deck seemed to swarm with black-clad figures, moonlight glittering off their knives and cutlasses.
The French boat stood off their bow, a boarding net covering the short distance between the two vessels. How had it happened so fast? They must have appeared out of the darkness, that volley of musket shot the first warning. The Curfew’s crew must have been overpowered almost without resistance.
Nathaniel sprang forward. His pistol spoke and one of the boarders fell to his knee, clutching his shoulder. Nathaniel had a knife in his hand now, and was in the midst of the group, slashing, kicking with deadly accuracy, whirling from side to side with the grace of a dancer and the savagery of a warrior.
Gabrielle fired her own pistol into the fray, reducing Nathaniel’s opponents by one. She grabbed a broken spar from the deck and brought it down on the head of one of the men grappling with Nathaniel. But the two of them were vastly outnumbered and unable to reload their pistols.
Gabrielle struggled in the grip of two men, their faces blackened with cork. She kicked sideways, drove her elbows into the belly of the man holding her from behind, but it was futile. Her arms were wrenched behind her, twisted upward, and she screamed in pain.
Nathaniel with a cry of fury spun from his own deadly combat at the sound, and a man behind him brought the barrel of his musket down on his head with skull-shattering force.
Nathaniel dropped to the deck. The man kicked him in the belly, but he lay unmoving.
“Nathaniel!” Gabrielle surged forward against her captors’ hold and screamed again at the agonizing jolt in her arms. She swore at them, calling them every vile name she could think of, heedless of nothing but her terror that Nathaniel, lying so still with a livid swelli
ng on his forehead, was dead.
Someone silenced her with a brutal blow across her mouth, and she tasted blood from a split lip. Then she was being bundled below. They threw Nathaniel down the companionway behind her, and she gave another scream of outrage, struggling with renewed strength. But she could do nothing to save herself from the ropes. They bound her wrists behind her and tied her ankles and dumped her on the floor. She lay watching as they bound Nathaniel in the same way, and she took some comfort in the reflection that if he were dead, they wouldn’t bother to bind him.
She listened to them talk as they completed their work. They were going to leave four men aboard the Curlew to bring her with the prisoners into Cherbourg harbor. Their own cutter, the Sainte Elise, would continue to sweep the sea along the French coast for any other vessels on their list.
Gabrielle kept very still and silent even when they kicked at Nathaniel’s inert body on their way out of the cabin. Her head was now very clear. If there were only four of them, they’d have a chance to overpower them with the advantage of surprise. How many of Dan’s men were alive? They’d be bound too, of course. But if she could just get free …
She was lying on her back against the table. Nathaniel lay some three feet away from her, on his side, his back to her. She could see the ropes around his wrists. They were thick and tight, tighter, she thought, than the ones at her own wrists. She had enough play to move her wrists against each other, although not a hope of sliding a hand free.
Nathaniel groaned and her heart leaped. He was still alive, but when she called his name softly, there was no response.
She turned her head gingerly on the hard floor and her eye caught a glint under the table. It took her a minute to realize what it was. The glass Nathaniel had swept from the table in his anger. The glass that had broken against the steel bolt of the table.
Her heart began to beat fast, the blood pounding in her temples as she thought what this meant. Broken glass, a jagged edge—a cutting edge. If she could reach it …