Her earlobes were hot; this, she knew from unfortunate experience, was a prelude to the rest of her face heating like a branding iron. “I think she was either protecting me or herself by not telling me more, because I did ask her to expound, as I am not precisely a fool. She isn’t careful by nature, but she was being careful then, which is why I think I need to take her seriously. And I shouldn’t need to explain this to you, but I know her, Captain Eversea. I all but raised her. I know her as well as you know your own brothers and sisters. And I sense when something is very amiss. Tell me, would you know if one of your sisters was afraid, no matter what she said to you?”
She knew precisely what his brothers and sisters meant to him.
Still, appealing to sentiment in Chase was generally as rewarding as spitting into the wind.
She hadn’t the faintest idea what she meant to him, if anything. The girl he’d known hadn’t been careful by nature, either. Sending for him impulsively was precisely the sort of thing that girl would have done, too.
He turned his head abruptly toward the painting.
A brown bovine that could feed a small village should it ever be roasted on a spit gazed from its center with large placid eyes back at the glowering Captain Eversea. Its tail swished upward, as if in preparation for doing what cows so often did. The cow mingled with a sage-looking horse, its great soft head drooping over a fence over which trees studded with some unidentifiable orange fruit loomed—she couldn’t be certain they were oranges, despite the fact that they were round—and flowers, red and blue ones, sprinkled the ground, peeked through the fence, trailed up the tree. Cherubs, a veritable cloud of them, hovered over the pasture. The sky was blue, but a peculiar blue, as though it might be twilight rather than daytime. This surmise was borne out when she saw the half-moon in the sky. An angel was on high, and she had her harp out and was strumming away up in the corner, her expression dreamy, her bosom startlingly robust and benippled for one so celestial.
Every creature seemed rather pleased with, or at least not at all adverse to, whatever was happening in the picture, and Rosalind knew a peculiar moment of envy.
“Why did you arrange for me to meet you here?” His tone was still interrogatory. “And why…” Suddenly, surprisingly, he sighed. “Why cows?” The last word he imbued with a puzzling hint of despair.
He turned back to her.
“Because the last time I spoke to Lucy—they were taking her away from me—she told me to go to the ‘the Montmorency Museum.’ And she said this after I asked her to explain what she’d just said about Mr. Kinkade. Twice, she said it. Repeated it. ‘The Montmorency, Ros! The Italian room!’ And her—”
“Perhaps she thinks you would benefit from a well-rounded education in the arts.”
“—tone was very…portentous. I inquired of the man who keeps watch at the entrance to the museum—”
“Helpful gentleman. Knows where everything is kept. An orderly mind.” Implying hers was not.
Oh, he was brilliant at this. She would not allow her temper to get the better of her. She had little hope of preventing this. Even now heat was creeping up her neck, and she knew her face would be a scarlet bloom within seconds.
“—and he tells me that Kinkade has made three bequests to this museum recently, and the paintings you see in this room are among them, and I thought perhaps…I thought perhaps…perhaps you knew something of his interest in art, of Kinkade, and perhaps somehow I would discover what this might have to do with Lucy…so I sent for you.”
She suddenly heard now how absurd and fragmented all of this sounded.
“Only a man of sterling character would have both the good sense to rid himself of this painting should he have the misfortune to possess it and the generosity to donate it to a public institution on the very slim chance that someone else might actually enjoy it.”
Rosalind narrowed her eyes to dangerous crossbow slits. Her cheeks were officially scorching.
Captain Eversea hadn’t changed color at all.
He stared back at her, so certain of himself, so immovable, she was surprised he didn’t slip his watch from his pocket to review the time out of sheer boredom.
Still as inflexible as the bloody Rock of Gibraltar. As the cliffs of Dover.
He waited, as one would wait to ascertain that the enemy was indeed dead after one has just shot them at close range. And then he said, “I understand your concern for your sister, Mrs. March. I wish everything good for you and your family. But I can see nothing of merit in your suspicions. I fear I cannot help.”
She knew he meant he would not.
And she knew why.
I would undo what happened if I could, she would have shouted at him.
Except, God help her, she wasn’t certain this was true. Even now. Even for Lucy.
He was done with her. As if in a dream, she saw him touch his hat by way of farewell. Saw those vast shoulders begin to turn.
And before she could reconsider the wisdom of it—before she could think at all—her hand was on his arm to stop him.
It wasn’t a gentle touch.
He halted, surprised. Drew in a short sharp breath. His eyes dropped to her hand, and for an instant he went so still she felt his stillness reverberate through her. For all the world as if he were a sword she’d just driven into the ground.
In an instant she knew her mistake: even through his fine wool coat, the arm felt as hard and unyielding as the man. The sort of arm that could hold up the earth. Had held up the earth, at one time, in the eyes of some people.
He flicked widened eyes up to her face. He dropped them again quickly. Oh, but not quickly enough. Not quickly enough to disguise it:
Want. In its rawest form. And something so very near vulnerability she wanted to…protect him from it, to apologize for it, to…
In short: it was exactly what she’d seen in his face five years ago. On that day. In that moment.
When he looked back up at her a moment later, his face had changed color. Whiter now, tense at the mouth. He was furious. Furious with her for reminding him that he was a flesh and blood man. Just a human after all.
And furious with himself for allowing her to see what he knew she’d just seen in his face.
She had no way of knowing what her own face gave away. She knew she hadn’t blinked in what seemed like years.
A few frozen seconds later she slowly, slowly took her hand away, as though a sudden move might inspire him to snap it off in his jaws.
And like a wild animal slipping a tether, without another word he turned and abruptly left her.
His boot heels came down hard on the museum’s marble floors, swift and measured as a march, creating a unique rhythm with his walking stick. It seemed like part of him now, that stick.
She cupped with one hand the hand that had touched him, as though comforting it. She looked down at it. Shaken, her thoughts a kaleidoscope, her face aflame, she watched him until he disappeared through the arched doorway toward the museum entrance.
She stared long after he was gone.
Unable to move quite yet. Unwilling to move, until the echo of his presence faded.
She marshaled a half smile.
Even cliffs are vulnerable, Captain Eversea, she thought. The sea gets at them, eventually, reshaping them inexorably, giving them no choice at all in the matter.
He hadn’t reckoned on the woman she’d become.
The sea, she thought, had nothing on Rosalind March.
Chapter 4
The filthy urchin was waiting outside the museum. Chase flicked a look at him the way one might flick a hot cigar butt and strode two steps north across the courtyard, ignoring him.
Then stopped and turned back to him.
“Where can I get a strong and nasty drink in this godforsaken part of London?”
“The Mumford Arms.” Urchin promptly held out his palm for coin. “Past where they set up the fair, like, on fine days, the opposite side o the square, then down Black Cat Lane.”
Damned urchin shadowed him. He could hear the running smacks of his footsteps behind him on the pavements as the bare feet tramped through the puddles left behind by the earlier rain.
And now it was talking.
“I saw ye fight them rough coves!”
“Did you,” he said flatly.
“Proper amazin’, it was!” Out of the corner of his eye Chase saw the urchin miming kicking and swinging a walking stick as he ran. “Nivver seen anything like it! Ye’re a right divil! They’ll be talkin’ ’bout ye fer years, I ken.”
Chase ignored him.
“D’yer see the liedy, then?” Urchin pressed cheerfully. As though he had a vested interest in all of this.
“Oh, I saw the ‘liedy,’” Chase said grimly.
He in fact seemed to be running from the liedy. He slowed for that reason, to prove to himself that he was not.
A mistake. The thought of her caught up to him and in an instant she swamped his senses. Rosalind. Her name raced over his spine and tingled his scalp like fingers pulled through his hair during lovemaking. He lifted his hat and swept his hand back through his hair, then jammed his hat back down when he realized what he was doing.
What a bloody ridiculous, infuriating metaphor.
He strode forward again, just as violently, walking but not seeing. Vividly in his mind he saw her small white hand resting on his arm.
She still nibbled down the nail of the little finger on her left hand.
Why should the very fact of this make him ache peculiarly in the chest?
He inhaled deeply, exhaled gustily, and continued walking.
The low wrought-iron spiked fence surrounding the square unfurled dizzyingly forever, keeping the mythical Mumford Arms out of reach. This was an illusion of the weather and his mood, he knew. Limp, untended late summer flowers, battered by the rain, leaned through it like convicts through bars.
Which made him think of Lucy Locke, Rosalind’s sister.
It was impossible to picture Lucy in prison. Lucy was pretty, had bubbles for brains and a bosom that belonged on the prow of a ship. He could well understand why Kinkade would be happy enough to include her among his friends, but he’d never once mentioned her to him in correspondence. It was patently ridiculous to think that Kinkade would have anything to do with Lucy’s disappearance, particularly anything nefarious, and even more ridiculous that a bad painting of cows and cherubs would be at all related to it.
But Rosalind was afraid for her sister.
He found this, for some reason, unbearable.
His hand squeezed the top of his walking stick so tightly the horse head bit into his palm.
The last time he’d heard anything of Rosalind March was years after the war, from a fellow soldier: he was told she’d searched through the bodies on that blood-soaked battlefield calling for her husband until she found him, grievously wounded. That she’d visited the hospitals wherever they sprang up in Mont St. Jean and Quatre Bras: cottages, barns, the streets, homes of the wealthy—that she heard the last words of dying soldiers, held hands, changed dressings. Her husband, like so many extraordinary men, had been wounded badly and died slowly, and he’d heard that she was with him when he breathed his last breath.
So she had courage.
It didn’t matter.
He would never betray yet another friend for her by believing for an instant that Kinkade was somehow dishonorably involved in the matter of Lucy Locke’s disappearance.
She should have known better than to ask.
Well, she had known better. Which was, of course, why she’d done it with a cryptic anonymous message sent via the street rat dogging his heels. And this, he told himself, was hardly courageous.
Clever, he conceded. But not courageous.
He fought the corners of his mouth as they began turning up into a smile.
She certainly knew him.
“I didna lie about the liedy, did I?” Urchin said triumphantly. “Earned me shilling!”
Chase forbore to agree or disagree.
“Will yer buy me a strong nasty drink?” urchin tried.
“No.”
“Oive ’ad gin before,” it boasted.
“I don’t doubt it. It’s poison, you know. Don’t drink it again. You’ll…grow bubbies like a girl if you do.”
This horrified the urchin into silence, which Chase had known it would. He hoped he’d flee from horror.
No such luck. Chase strode on, he and his good leg and his bad leg and his walking stick and his new filthy dogged little shadow.
In the distance, beyond the square, a figure was standing on tiptoe to hang a lit lantern on an iron hook in preparation for the evening’s business. Chase assumed this was the Mumford Arms, and this inspired him to walk even faster.
“Is she yer woman? The liedy?”
“No!” he snapped. He stopped again abruptly, and the urchin stopped abruptly. Chase breathed, and sighed out roughly, in and closed his eyes again, this time to try to orient himself in his storm of memories.
Like the night she became a person to him. Not just Colonel March’s late-in-life folly.
At first Chase had been at best amused by the very fact of Rosalind March, the colonel’s new wife. She laughed too much and danced too long and with kitten-like bravery flung herself in play and flirtation at people who could just as easily squash her as be charmed by her. Like the smoldering, reputedly dangerous Captain Eversea.
Everyone had loved her.
Chase had been indifferent. He preferred far more sophisticated flirtations, and in Belgium sophisticated flirtations were routinely directed at the handsome captain and frequently concluded in a bed.
For in those weeks before the bloodbath outside of Brussels that ended the damn war, there were endless glittering frivolities hosted by Belgian aristocracy, all of which were stuffed to the brim with English aristocrats who had come to watch war as though it was puppet theater, and Chase was compelled to dance with all of the wives, including Mrs. March. The young Mrs. March was in particular captivated and flattered by Lady d’Aligny, a Belgian countess who was young, pretty, excruciatingly sophisticated, and could be ironic in five Continental languages. The two young women spent a good deal of time in hushed, bright-eyed conversation together behind painted silk and ivory fans—Rosalind’s fan a gift from Lady d’Aligny. They engaged in a ceaseless exchange of teas and drives and dinners.
Chase wasn’t convinced the d’Alignys weren’t spies; he was wary of the impulsive Mrs. March’s friendship with them; he considered her little better than a child.
He’d been in search of the punch bowl at one of the d’Aligny soirees at their magnificent palais when he’d heard Rosalind’s voice mingled with a man’s near the flung-open doors leading to the terrace. Their words had the unmistakable lilt of flirtation. He shamelessly hovered near one of the pillars flanking the double doors to listen and watch.
Rosalind and the soldier shared a low laugh, and when it faded, the soldier said, “It’s funny, but Colonel March is such an arrogant old sod that he—”
“Sergeant Maris.”
Her words were soft. But they dangled icicles. Very disconcerting from Mrs. March. She of the gossamer charm and too-easy laughter.
Chase had straightened alertly.
“What…makes you think I would tolerate hearing such a thing about my husband?” Her voice was soft and even.
There was a short silence. Broken finally by a short surprised laugh from Sergeant Maris. Who clearly hoped she was jesting.
But when she said nothing—simply seemed to actually be waiting for an answer—he began to stammer.
“But—But…Mrs. March—I thought—but he’s so—”
Chase remembered how very, very gentle her tone was. It was the compensating sort of gentle employed by people who had great respect for the power of their own tempers. She was gentle because she was furious.
He had been fascinated.
“You thought wrongly, Sergeant Maris,” she continued in that gentle, gentle tone. “He is my husband and your commanding officer, and as such he will have your respect at all times and you will refer to him with respect at all times. I have enjoyed our conversation because until now you have been all that is respectful. I shall forgive you this one transgression and I shall not share our conversation with my husband. If I ever hear you saying such a thing about him ever again, I will make very certain you are flogged.”
All said nearly apologetically. All said quite softly.
But she impaled that soldier with a stare.
For a long moment he seemed helpless to move away from it. Finally he slunk tentatively, awkwardly, away from her, bowing and muttering apologies, as if she were indeed armed with a pike.
She had stared after him, pupils flared, delicate jaw set, cheeks pink. Apparently lost in thought. And then at last she took a deep breath and seemed to sigh it out.
She flicked her eyes up. They flared in surprise when she saw Chase.
She knew instantly he’d witnessed all of it.
She went very still, and an interesting variety of emotions chased each other across her face, as if in that moment she could not decide whom to be.
And then she gave up; she’d been caught. She shrugged one shoulder. Then, chin up, held his gaze for an inscrutable moment or two, awaiting his reaction, his verdict.
He hadn’t been able to help it: he smiled crookedly, and brought his hands together in slow, silent applause. Bravo, he mouthed. She’d done almost precisely what he would have done.
She bit back a smile. White teeth sinking briefly into her full, soft bottom lip: he remembered that image for a long time after.
And then she gave a deep, theatrical, sardonic curtsy, which deepened his smile, and she glided away toward one of her sisters, who’d been flirting a little too overtly with another soldier for most of the evening, which is what they did most evenings. Rosalind March, he’d realized then, was forever looking after her sisters.
Since the Surrender Page 4