Maybe she should use her ill-gotten gains to move to Italy. It was warm there.
The inn was close-fitted, ancient gray stone. It looked old enough to have been in place when Roman legions marched up this road, planning mayhem on the Picts. She’d lay money the oldest parts were here in the Middle Ages, serving monks and King’s messengers and cattle drovers headed for points south. It was a ghost of a building this afternoon, the stones only a shade darker than the falling snow, the windows black squares that seemed to float in the general white. Someone had twined evergreen and holly around the iron post that held the lantern beside the door, a reminder it was only three days to Christmas.
She entered the inn called the Laughing Wench with a cold wind behind her and noisy confusion ahead.
The hall was crowded with unhappy people and haphazardly stacked luggage. One of the maidservants, in cap and apron, climbed the stairs, balancing the weight of a heavy pitcher. A bow of red ribbon decorated the newel post.
Elinor tucked her hands under her cloak. Miss Trimm and Jeanne Dumont, the other two women from the coach, sidled in behind her.
A male voice snapped, “Out of my way.” A gentleman in a fashionable driving coat elbowed her in the back. He pushed past and stomped snow down the hall to confront the plump innkeeper. It was a young man, barely in his twenties. “What a Hell of a day. I want your best chamber and the private parlor. Be quick about it.”
A proud and exigent gentleman. His carriage had barreled into the yard while the common stage was unloading. He’d barely missed running down the passengers as his carriage jockeyed into place at the door. Now it seemed he had no intention of waiting in line.
“Don’t you worry. I’ll find a place for you, sir. We’ll find a place for everyone. Ned, take that red case to the Crescent Chamber. We’ll put—”
“What are you standing around for? Show me to my room. God save me from a pack of country idiots.” The gentleman took his hat off and slapped it against his side, scattering snow. “I want dinner early. Chicken or pheasant, if you have it. And send some brandy up.”
“Well, now . . . If I had a room, it would be yours.” The innkeeper spread his hands expressively. “We’re full up, as you can see. More than full. We’re bursting at the seams, but I’ll fit you in. You’ll be sharing with the gentlemen from the coach. Inside passengers, sir. Only the—”
“I do not intend to share my chamber with a pack of louse-ridden clodhoppers and greasy clerks.”
The front door slammed open. Sharp wind sent fingers of cold down her neck. Everyone shuffled aside to let a pair of the inn’s servingmen stagger past, carrying a trunk between them. Cries of “Close the blasted door” came from the public room to her left.
“That goes in the Star bedroom.” The innkeeper pointed. “Same for the bags of them other men off the coach. That’s the black bag and t’other one beside it. The ladies’ bags go in the front—”
“If this filthy hovel doesn’t have enough rooms, you can damned well evict the rabble.” The young gentleman would have a private room or know the reason why. He didn’t give a devil’s farthing what a plaguey innkeeper wanted. “Do you know who I am?” he demanded.
“That I don’t, sir. I never seen you stop at the house before. You’ll be in the Star room, on the right at the top of the stairs. Just follow yer trunk up.” The innkeeper turned away, still imperturbably polite, to deal with Mr. Broadleigh, another demanding patron. The fashionable gentleman’s trunk bumped up the stairs to a room he would share with four or five of the clodhoppers and greasy clerks gathered around him. A neat serving maid crossed the hall from some kitchen in the back to the public rooms at the front, carrying a tray with bowls stacked on it.
“He is very tiresome, is he not?” The French girl, Jeanne Dumont, came to stand beside Elinor. “The so-demanding gentleman of such importance who travels without a valet.”
“I noticed. He has debts in London, I should think.”
Jeanne patted her workbag carefully, checking that her stitchery was safe inside, and tucked it under her arm. “One can always tell.”
“The innkeeper can too. No fool.”
They exchanged grins. They’d become Jeanne and Elinor to each other during the journey. When passengers are stuffed in a coach like neighboring herring in a barrel, they reach a certain informality.
She liked Jeanne, who had a sly, cynical sense of humor. She was very young, no more than sixteen, surely. She was one of the many desperate French émigrés who had come to England in the last few years, fleeing disorder and the guillotine in France. Jeanne was to take up work in London, she’d said. “I shall be a nursery governess, not a full complete governess. I am very ignorant, you understand. I know nothing of this business. But, then, the children do not either, so we may struggle along together.”
The other woman in the party, stiff, fierce, white-haired Miss Trimm, joined them. “There is no private parlor,” she announced. “To be more precise, there is one, but it’s being used by three gentlemen to sleep in. However much I approve of the practicality of this, I deplore the lack of propriety. We must take our meals in the public room. The place seems respectable enough at first inspection. We will sit together.” She nodded. “There. He’s taking our bags up. We should wash before dinner. In any case, our presence is not needed here.”
Miss Trimm, having laid down the law, followed the inn servant up the stairs, keeping an eye on her valise.
“I am entirely intimidated by that woman,” Jeanne said. “It is very cowardly of me, is it not?”
“Not at all. She’d intimidate the North Wind.”
“It is a good day to do that.” Jeanne glanced to where the inn door had opened again, letting in weather and the thump of boots. She paused infinitesimally. Then she said, “That is a handsome man, I think.”
Oh, to be so young and lighthearted that one was still struck by a handsome stranger. Jeanne showed her extreme youth sometimes, and her Frenchness. Would it be one of the servants who caught her eye or another traveler, stranded by the storm?
She turned to see the man Jeanne admired.
She wouldn’t have called him handsome, herself. Impressive was a better word. He was just closing the door behind him, a tall man with square features and ordinary brown hair. His eyes were the deepest possible blue. She didn’t have to see them to know that. He brushed snow off the shoulders of his greatcoat and came around to survey the hall as if he owned the establishment and were making one of his periodic inspections. He looked from face to face, piercing in his attention, till his gaze came to her.
Her heart hit in big thumps in the hollow of her chest. She would have sworn every sound in the room went silent.
She didn’t look away. He wouldn’t make her look away.
Maybe some spark of emotion crept into his bland expression. It was . . . what? Triumph? Relief? It didn’t matter. He was a genius at putting lies on his face.
His interest moved smoothly onward around the room. She realized only a second had passed.
Jeanne said, “It is not a bad thing to have a handsome man to look at during breakfast. I am fatigued beyond words with the grim scenery of this countryside. And our fellow travelers are not prepossessing, are they? I wonder who he will turn out to be.”
“We’ll never know.” She didn’t wait for Jack to strip out of his gloves and take his hat off and stroll calmly over to confront her. “I’m going upstairs.”
In the background, the young fop continued, “I am Mr. Rossiter, nephew to Lord Brampten. I could buy your sordid little pigsty of an inn and not notice the cost. Do you realize that? I’ll have your name, my good man. We’ll see whether . . .”
There must have been fops and fools of exactly that type in the Roman provinces, two thousand years ago, and innkeepers as imperturbable. And perhaps a young poet. He’d be poor, like the shabby student who’d taken an outside seat for the journey to London. There would be a pretty young wife involved in this somewhere.
She began rewriting that exchange between Mr. Rossiter and the innkeeper in her head, in Latin, as she climbed the steps.
Chapter 2
Snow fell in her dreams. They were deep, confused dreams where she felt herself still moving. She swayed and bumped endlessly in a coach and the other passengers were animals wearing frock coats and bonnets. They changed from dog to wolf. Wolf into bear. Bear to leopard. Outside, the landscape was composed of vast piles of Belgian lace.
On the seat beside her, the leopard became a fox, knitting a long scarf in many colors, holding the needles in neat red paws. “You tell lies,” the fox said softly, “in Latin. I admire that.” It had a French accent.
The stork spoke with Miss Trimm’s voice. “The place seems respectable enough at first inspection, but nobody can be trusted.” In the dream, this seemed rational for a stork to say.
In the dream, Elinor’s hair writhed around her as if it were blown by the wind. Her pale, straw-yellow hair grew till it was a curtain she hid behind. She had to part it with her hands to look out. “Nugator tells lies. It’s not me. It doesn’t count.”
The fox laughed, already changing. Already half a cat. The mouth and whiskers were a cat’s mouth and whiskers.
“I’m the one who says what counts.” The bear on the forward seat reached the great pad of his forepaw across the carriage. He covered her face and she couldn’t breathe.
She fell out of the dream, thumping down, cold and trembling, into reality and night.
A hand clamped over her mouth. A body, heavy as lead, held her down, muffled her in the blankets so tightly she couldn’t break loose. Couldn’t get her hands free to claw at him. The strength was huge, hard, unfightable, male, infinitely strong, and it surrounded her everywhere.
He muttered into her ear. “It’s me, dammit. It’s Jack. Hold still and listen!” The fire had died low and orange. She saw images of it in his eyes.
It had been two years since they touched, but her body remembered. She went still.
The timbers of the old inn creaked and groaned like the hull of a ship in high seas. Outside, winds twisted and howled and pulled at the glass of the window. The draft up the chimney was a shrill, intermittent whine. In the big bed in the corner, Miss Trimm snored determinedly. The French girl slept silently in the trundle bed.
“You know me now,” Jack said. “You’ll be quiet?”
She nodded. Oh, she knew him, all right.
His hand went away, but he didn’t. He stayed, covering her with his weight, looking down. He had the same hard eyes. Even when she’d been in love with him, she’d always seen the hardness in his eyes and wondered about it.
When he was satisfied she’d be silent, he jerked his head once in the direction of the door and let her go. Noiseless, he lifted himself away from her and was gone into the dark of the hallway.
She didn’t stop for decent clothing and modesty. That was a barn door that couldn’t be locked again. She took up her wool dressing gown from where it lay across the end of the cot, put her feet into her slippers that were keeping warm next to the fire, and followed him.
The floorboards were ice cold. She could feel it through the soles of her shoes. The hall was darker than the room. At the far end of the corridor, the window was a gray square of light. The innkeeper had left a lantern burning at the front window of the inn. A little light filtered a story upward through the snow.
Jack wasn’t even an outline in the blackness. He sank into it somehow.
She said, “You practice hiding in the dark, I suppose.”
“Constantly.”
No way to tell where the man began and the darkness ended. She didn’t even hear him breathing. She followed where his voice had been and her outstretched hand touched the soft of his clothes. This was a sleeve. This, the front of his jacket. His hand, when it came up to cover hers, was warm.
She drew back. “How did you find me?”
“I asked the maidservant an innocent question about who was sleeping where tonight. You’ll be pleased to know she said you were a respectable lady and I’d best not trifle with you. I didn’t say I knew—”
She closed her fist and punched, hard. It was pure, uncalculated impulse.
She wasn’t fast enough. Her fist slapped into the palm of his hand, not his belly. He caught the blow before it landed. His hand closed around her fist and held her.
“That’s new,” he said. “There was a time you wouldn’t have hit a man. You’ve changed.” He sounded calm about it. Thoughtful.
“I’m not trusting and naive anymore. You made me very, very wise. I’ll ask again, how did you find me?”
“The coaching company. You’re listed as a passenger.”
“What?” She shook her head.
“In York, six days ago, I sent men to look at the names of everybody who’d booked passage to London. And there you were. Elinor Pennington.” She felt him move. Even knowing exactly where he was, she didn’t see it. “What have you done, Elinor? What are you mixed up in?”
Of all possibilities in the world, this was one she hadn’t expected. Jack, hunting her down, full of suspicion. A huge shiver grabbed hold and shook her. Her dressing gown was warm enough in her snug rooms in London but no match for the countryside in the dead of December. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’m going back to bed. Don’t sneak into my room again.”
He shifted his hold on her. Took her wrist and didn’t let go. “I was so sure you weren’t involved. Was I wrong? Were you part of that business, all along, working with your uncle?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. “We can’t talk here. Come downstairs.”
“Give me one reason to go with you.”
“You can’t yell at me here.”
Oh, but he was so bloody sure of himself. She knew, just knew, he was smiling. “Fine.” She twisted her hand free—he didn’t stop her—and stalked ahead, skimming the backs of her fingers along the wall to find her way. She tripped a little on the first step. Stumbled again where the stairs turned at the landing. She ignored Jack’s hand on her arm. She didn’t need him to help her.
On the ground floor, there was light, a long strip of it under the door to the public room. That was where they were headed. Jack skirted round her and opened the door. “In here.”
It was marginally less cold. She walked down a long, narrow, white-washed room, reeking of smoke and ale, ancient and recent. The ceiling was low and crossed by black oak beams. At the far end, where the fire was banked on the hearth, Jack knelt to pile bricks of peat into the ash, on top of the live coals.
He didn’t look up as she came close, just went on with building up the fire. He said, “I looked for you, Elinor. There is not one corner of this kingdom I didn’t have men out, combing the bushes for you.”
“I was in London.”
“Where there are few bushes indeed. That accounts for it.” He rearranged chunks of peat, laying them on the flames that licked upward, using his fingers as if the fire didn’t dare burn him. “I looked in London.”
“It’s a big place.” And he wouldn’t have thought to look for Elinor Pennington in the rookeries of Whitechapel.
The warmth drew her to the fire. Maybe the chance to talk to Jack drew her just as much. She edged forward to the stones of the hearth and wrapped her arms around her. The cold pressed in from every direction. “I spent hours planning what I was going to say to you if ever we met again.”
“I had a few choice comments saved up myself. Maybe we’ll get around to them.”
Jack rose to his feet. He hadn’t changed at all in these two years. He was a solid, muscular man of wide shoulders and narrow hips. He still wore his hair a little too long, as if he couldn’t be bothered to keep it tidy. Stark lines marked out his cheek and jaw and a wide forehead. It was an ascetic, intelligent face. He’d passed himself off as a scholar when she knew him in Oxford.
He pulled off his coat and settled it over her shoulders before she figured
out what he was up to. “Put this on.”
It was dark gray wool, warm on the inside. Jack had always given off heat like a stove. “I don’t want this.”
He set one of his boots on the iron fire basket and scowled at the fire. “Humor me. You’re more eloquent when your teeth aren’t chattering.”
She didn’t want to accept even this small kindness from him. But she didn’t follow her first impulse and let the coat slide off and fall to the floor. That would be silly and melodramatic. It was a cold night. Somebody should make use of a perfectly good coat, and Jack wasn’t going to. He knew she was too sensible to let it go to waste. He was a master at manipulating people.
Even when she’d been in love with him he had really, really annoyed her.
“You ran from me in Oxford.” He hacked the words out in little blocks of anger and set them down in a neat row. “I told you to stay put. I told you I’d come back and explain.”
“I had a full collection of lies from you, Mr. Tyler. Bushels full. Quite sufficient, thank you.” That was her own careful array of sarcasm. He’d left himself in shirtsleeves and waistcoat. He must be freezing. Good.
He looked at her sideways. “After everything we’d done, you couldn’t wait three days to hear what I had to say.”
“You were going to tell me you were a spy for the government. You would explain that you’d used me to worm your way near my uncle. You’d say how very important it was. Maybe you’d thank me for helping you.”
That silenced him for a full three seconds. He stood glaring. “Your uncle was the center of as vicious a nest of French spies as I’ve ever seen. He might be harmless, but they weren’t. I was disposing of that lot, some of them armed, when you took off. I told you, ‘Give me a day or two.’ I said, ‘I’ll explain every damn, bloody thing you want.’ ”
“You came to arrest my uncle. If he hadn’t got away, you’d have dragged him off to the gallows.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He pushed away from the fireplace and began pacing back and forth behind her. “We don’t kill men for being political idiots. We leave that to the French. Do you think the government wants the most respected Latin scholar in England thrown in a London prison, churning out political tracts and writing letters to the Times? Sending him to France was the smartest thing I ever did.”
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