“Hah!”
“Who do you think warned him? I sent that boy to get him out of Oxford. How do you think an idiot like your uncle crossed the Channel in the middle of a war?” He stopped behind her and talked to her back. “When you disappeared, I thought you’d followed him to Paris. I thought you were alone, trying to get across France through the fighting.”
She’d braided her hair for the night. It hung down in front of her in two long plaits of pale, nothing-colored hair. She tucked the braids, one and then the other, under the coat that covered her. “My uncle didn’t want me with him. My political opinions are commonplace, you see. He explained that while I was packing for him.”
Her uncle had emptied every penny from the bank. He’d taken the housekeeping money. And the rent. And the change in her purse. The landlady evicted her that afternoon. It had been a difficult day.
“You should have waited,” Jack said. “You should have trusted me to take care of you.”
“Oddly enough, I didn’t believe you.” The fire was making a determined fizzing sound as steam blew off. Smoke crouched in gray hillocks, hugging the sharp edges of the cut peat, before the draft took it up the chimney.
Memories were insubstantial as that smoke. Jack Tyler wasn’t going to hurt her again. The Jack Tyler she’d believed in had never existed.
She looked up and found him watching her steadily. She was wrong in thinking he hadn’t changed. The features lit by the fire were the same, but he’d stripped a layer of disguise off his expression, now that it wasn’t needed anymore. His voice sounded rougher at the edges.
Jack Tyler, in Oxford, had been diffident and a little shy. He’d been so charming. She would never trust charm again.
This man looked ruthless as barren countryside.
“How did you survive?” he asked softly. “You were alone. I know your uncle took every penny of your inheritance with him when he ran to France. Now I find you prosperous, well dressed, traveling comfortably. Who pays for this?”
She could have laughed. The girl he’d lied to so easily was gone. He was dealing with a wickeder woman. He wasn’t ever going to know how she made her living. “I pay my own way.”
“What were you doing in the north?”
There was tension in the words that didn’t match the simple question. Uneasiness crept along her nerves. “I had business there.”
“Which is?”
“My own. It doesn’t concern you.”
“I’m not your enemy, Elinor.”
The coat, pulled around her, suddenly felt like being held in Jack’s arms. Memory rose up everywhere in her body. Being held by this man had been so easy. So completely natural. She remembered feeling his strength through the linen of his shirt. Remembered rubbing her cheek against his hand while he stroked her and they lay together, side by side, in the fields near Oxford.
Damn him for smudging even that small, pretty dream, the one lovely image she’d rescued from the debacle. “You didn’t rouse me from a warm bed to ask why I went to York. What do you want?” She shrugged, and Jack’s coat caressed her on every side, making all kinds of promises of warmth and protection. Even his clothing lied. “You’re not going to apologize. I’m not going to forgive you. What can you possibly have to say after all this time?”
In a single sleek movement he closed the space between them. He set his fingers to turn her face so the firelight would fall on it. “Willen Castle. Lord MacClaren. The list.”
“I don’t understand.”
Heartbeats passed, flowing through her in a moment that stretched long. His expression held and held, then subtly changed. He said, “That means nothing to you. Your eyes are clear as glass.”
“After all this time, I’m still a transparent fool. Thank you.”
He wore a heavy gold signet ring. He hadn’t had that in Oxford. When he lifted his hand and set her hair back from her forehead, reddish light slid along the band of the ring. The palm of his hand was warm and dry where it touched her skin. The gold was like ice. “You cannot imagine my relief, Amica.”
“Don’t call me that.” Amica meant friend in Latin. Hearing it now was unendurable. “Don’t pretend we’re still friends.”
“We are, though, whatever I’ve done to you.” He stroked through her hair. “You’re made of loyalty. Did you know that? You can’t turn it off like a tap when you want to. I need your help.”
“No.” She ducked her head away from where he touched her.
“Let me tell you why I’m here. There’s a message in code. We know it’s headed south, right now, written in a book or on paper. It’ll be a long string of number or letters. I need to intercept that.”
She didn’t care.
He went on, just as if she’d answered. “I’ve been chasing French agents up and down Yorkshire. There’s a party in Paris that thinks we’re on the verge of a homegrown English revolution. They’re sure if they put an invasion force ashore, the countryside will rise and march on London.”
“The Stuart prince thought the same. He was wrong.”
“I have most of the Frenchmen arrested, but they made a list of sympathizers in the north . . . and men the French thought they might convince. Innocent men and guilty ones and a number in between. We know the list left York on the sixteenth, on the London coach.”
Her coach. “You thought I had it.” Pain closed in.
“Stop that.” He tapped her shoulder impatiently. “I saw your name. I’ve ridden three days without stopping to get to you.”
“You think I’m a traitor, working for the French.”
“Not for one minute. Not for a bloody instant. But I had to get to you.” He looked unutterably weary. “For so many reasons.” Her mind filled up with imagining him, his coat collar turned up, leaning into the wind, and the storm getting worse. York was a long, hard ride away from here, even in good weather.
He whispered, “I was afraid one of your uncle’s damned French friends had talked you into running an errand for him. A harmless errand, delivering a letter. You would have handed it over to another French agent who wouldn’t have one reason to leave you alive.”
“You think I’m a fool.”
“I think you’re frighteningly intelligent. Lying to you took all my considerable reserves of cunning, and that was when you were nineteen. I hate to think what it would take now. But you’re trusting.”
“Not anymore. I’ve finished with that.”
“You’re an untrusting woman who meets me in the middle of the night. Alone. Unprotected.” He surprised her then. Amazed her, in fact. Swiftly, lightly, he leaned toward her. Kissed her on the lips. It was a brief clap of thunder wrapped in a great astonishment. It left not one single thought in her mind. Not one.
He said, “Go. Get back to bed. You better leave the coat behind. You don’t want to explain how you got it. And lock your damn door. There’s a French agent in this place.”
She still couldn’t think. She held the back of her hand to her mouth and rubbed. “Don’t do that again.”
“I won’t do it in a public room in the middle of the night. Not when I’m exhausted and you’re freezing.”
This seemed a good time to retreat in disorder. So she did.
She thought he muttered, “I can wait,” but she was halfway to the door, and she might not have heard him correctly.
Chapter 3
She woke to knocking on the door. Since her cot was closest, she dragged herself out of bed. Jeanne Dumont, on the trundle bed, was a blanket of two rounded humps and a graceful hand extended over the side of the bed. Miss Trimm slept on her back in the main bed with her mouth wide open, snoring magnificently.
It was dawn. It was, if anything, colder than it had been in the night. Her bare toes curled up from the floorboards, protesting, as she crossed to the door. Her breath frosted out as she leaned over to turn the key in the lock.
The door flung open to the maid and clopping footsteps and a country dialect. There was a breathless, �
�Oh, miss, I’m so sorry,” and “Ever so sorry, mum” for Miss Trimm. “The landlord asks, could you please come to the kitchen.” Yes. All of them. Something had been found in the kitchen fire. Ever so strange.
The maid disappeared to tap on the next door down the hall and deliver the same message.
So much for lying abed in the quiet and frigid dawn, brooding. She’d planned that for this morning—a long session in bed, cocooned in blankets, feeling resentful and misused. It was not to be.
They’d left the pitcher of water in the corner of the hearth, the warmest spot in the room, but still had to break ice on the surface. This time of year, the washing water was melted snow, not drawn from the well. It had a wild, piney scent to it.
Miss Trimm washed first, sponging herself off under a voluminous nightgown. But Jeanne nonchalantly stripped naked in front of the fire. That made it easy to follow suit. Then it was fumble into a cold shift and her blue dress that stuck to her damp skin. She turned to let Jeanne fasten up the buttons in back. Then it was wool shawls all round.
The kitchen was at the back of the inn in a separate wing, down a dogleg in the hall and past a thick oak door. Inside was overwhelming noise, heat, and the smell of bacon.
A dozen men, including all her fellow passengers from the coach, were gathered at the long central worktable. Burned papers lay in a row on a ragged bedsheet—a rolled newspaper, quite black and unreadable, half-burned books, and a charred letter. There were perhaps ten specimens in all. The innkeeper stood at the far end, frowning down at the piles of black, shaking his head and muttering.
Jack stood behind him, leaning on the bricks surrounding the hearth. He looked as if he’d wandered in to ask for an early cup of tea. As if he had no part in the proceedings. But the list he’d come seeking must lie, destroyed, in one of those piles of burned paper.
The coachman held his hat, turning the brim around and around. “. . . make no sense of it. Why’d somebody do that? What’s it for?”
“Mad. That’s what it is. Has to be a madman,” a kitchenmaid whispered.
“I don’t understand. This is mine.” One of the outside passengers claimed what was left of a red leather binding. “It’s my Elements of Chemistry.” He picked it up gingerly, holding the cover by one corner, but still getting smeared with black. He was the university student from Edinburgh, Timothy Fleet, a long, thin, red-haired stripling, poor enough to travel as an outside passenger on top of the coach in the middle of winter. “How did it get here? I left this in my bag last night.”
Mr. Broadleigh sensibly fetched a toasting fork and used it to poke in a pile of blackened pages. “My accounts,” he said shortly. “I want to know who’s had hold of this.” He stirred, and columns of numbers fell apart across the tines of the fork till he had nothing but a pile of ash. “Who’s been snooping in my papers? Who’s seen this?” He glared around the kitchen, impartially suspicious of the innkeeper, Jack, a nine-year-old scullery boy, Jeanne, and Miss Trimm.
Broadleigh was a London merchant, closemouthed as to what he traded in. He’d spent the seven days from York fuming at the delay caused by the snow. He had important business in London, he said. He’d established himself in the desirable forward-facing seat, taking up most of Miss Trimm’s half, shuffling papers from one folder to another, spreading this one or that over his lap, pursing his lips importantly and making penciled notes.
She’d sat across the coach from him. He had bony knees for such a plump man.
Miss Trimm marched stiffly down the row to the crumbling remains of a letter. She snapped, “A napkin, please.” Such was the force of her personality that one of the kitchenmaids hurried over with a freshly ironed napkin.
“Thank you.” Without dirtying her gloves, Miss Trimm retrieved the letter and wrapped it up neatly. “I left this in my coat that’s been hanging next to the door in our bedroom since I entered the inn last night. Anyone who had a key could have gained access to it while we ate dinner. Or during the night, when we slept, I suppose.” Her eyes dismissed the innkeeper and went directly to Jack, where he lounged by the fire, interested but uninvolved.
No fool, Miss Trimm. If anybody got up to mischief in the night, it would be Jack.
“That’s the strangest of all, isn’t it?” Broadleigh said. “Who’d go after your letter? Nothing in it of any interest, I shouldn’t think.”
“Then I suggest you refrain from thinking.” Miss Trimm directed a pointed glance from one kitchen minion to another. “If there is any reason breakfast should be indefinitely delayed, I’d like to hear of it. In the meantime . . . Jeanne. Elinor. I will be upstairs in our room. After you have located your belongings, I suggest you go to the common room and await me. I will join you shortly.” She swept out.
“Regular old Tartar, ain’t she?” Broadleigh muttered. But he’d waited till she was out of earshot. “I want to know who did this. Why? I want answers. What happened?”
The innkeeper raised his voice over the others. “Katie—” A young maid, well scrubbed and pink with excitement, stopped in the middle of swinging a kettle over the fire. “Katie here come down first in the morning, like always, to put water on and build up the fire. She found all this”—he gestured down the table—“heaped up higgledy-piggledy on the old coals. Burned, like you see. She run and called me, and we pulled out what we could.” He made half a motion, as if he’d include Jack in this history, then decided not to. “What they were burned for, I can’t say. No reason to it.”
Everybody started talking nineteen to the dozen, arguing, commenting, demanding the innkeeper find out who’d done this. Maidservants, the innkeeper’s wife, and a tall, gaunt woman who seemed to be the cook carried on preparing breakfast as best they could, around the corners of the room.
Jeanne slid through the chatter. She chose a charred black book midway along the row, then wrinkled her nose at the soot left on her fingers. They all knew this particular volume. She’d been sharing it with them in the coach, mile after mile, for the last three days. Lettering on the cover read . . . oetry for Young Ladi . . . Most of the pages were gone.
“So. I will not practice my English in this book anymore, I think.” She held the volume away from her skirts, walked to the fireplace, and tossed the book on the flames. “I have spent good moneys upon it and barely memorized three of the poems, which were very dull. And now I must wash my hands. Is all the country of Lincolnshire full of madmen? It is bad enough that one must freeze in this place without the burning of the books.”
She went to the sink in the scullery. Timothy, the university student, laid the pitiful remains of his chemistry book on the fire and followed after her, a few respectful but interested paces behind. Broadleigh gave the ashes of his accounts one final whack with the toasting fork that sent showers of ash in all direction and strode out, demanding breakfast.
Jack said, “Anybody else? We have some prime literature still laid out on the table.”
His eyes rested on Elinor. Nothing stood between her and the force of Jack Tyler’s curiosity. She’d thought, once upon a time, that his focused intent, his unswerving demand for answers, showed the mind of a serious scholar. It was the mind of a spy, instead. His patience was that of a cat at the mouse hole.
The other two outside passengers, brothers from York, carpenters, disclaimed all knowledge of the written word. The driver admitted he didn’t read, “much.”
That left her, didn’t it? So many curious, expectant eyes.
The table held another letter, newspapers, and a copybook, such as a student might fill with schoolwork. The cover of the copybook was intact and the pages burned, as if it had been laid facedown on the fire.
The copybook was hers, of course. Her next poem. Some Latin already written. Some English. She’d drafted dozens of stanzas.
All that work, gone. Hours of jiggling words, searching for exactly the right phrase. Lines of poetry she’d never get back. Notes on the Latin that would take hours to resurrect. She felt like pou
nding on the table with a toasting fork herself.
And now, every page of that book was ready to betray her. She’d even made some rough sketches to show the illustrator. She wanted to blush, thinking about them. She wasn’t about to go over there and lay claim to it. She said, “The newspaper is mine. You may dump it unceremoniously into the fire.”
Jack studied her narrowly, being enigmatic.
It was no madman who found a way into her room to rifle through her belongings, who dared to invade luggage a few feet away from men who slept uneasily to the music of one another’s snores. That kind of theft called for quiet feet and light hands and an intimate acquaintance with lockpicks.
The French agent Jack was hunting would be that skilled. Jack would too.
What did it all mean? Maybe the Frenchman realized he was cornered in this snowstorm and burned his secrets before they could be found. Maybe all these other papers were gathered in and sacrificed to disguise that one destruction.
Maybe it was just meant to look that way.
Or Jack could be in the middle of some deep game of his own. Laying snares for the unwary. He could have set this stage to watch how everyone reacted. It was far too early in the day to sort this out.
They put Jack on the trail of hard, violent men, but she was willing to bet he was more dangerous than any of them.
I have to get out of here. She left a veritable Greek chorus behind her, deploring and remarking at length.
Chapter 4
The innkeeper had given the most comfortable table in the public room, the one cozily close to the fire, to the three women traveling on the coach. Chivalry was found in the oddest corners of life. There was a blunt, imperturbable solidity to the innkeeper. His well-run inn with its bustling, cheerful maids spoke of a simple decency in the master of the house. He took a watchful care of the respectable single women sheltering under his roof.
Mischief and Mistletoe Page 11