She tapped on his door, then let herself in. He sat before the fire in a dressing gown and silk trousers, his feet bare. His hair was damp and he remained seated when she closed the door.
“Madam.”
“I was Matilda to you yesterday in that bedroom.”
He held out his hand, and she took a seat on the hassock before his reading chair. “I was courting you yesterday. Why allow me that fiction, Matilda?”
Had he determined her motives from one stolen dinner roll? “I told you nothing can come of your ambitions where I’m concerned.” She folded her fingers over his and pressed the back of his hand to her heart. “I do not have a choice, Duncan. I have studied the board from every perspective, and very few moves are left to me.”
He kissed her fingers. “You have committed treason.”
Four words Matilda barely allowed herself to think, and he offered them calmly. “On what do you base your conjecture?” Matilda took heart from their joined hands. Duncan had reached a conclusion; he did not sit in judgment of her.
“You admit that you have involved yourself in trouble of the highest order. You are fleeing the authorities, but not the magistrates and their parlor sessions. Your crime is thus an embarrassment to the Crown, if you have committed a crime. I think it more likely that you are protecting your father, or possibly your erstwhile fiancé.
“I flatter myself,” he went on, “that you also seek to protect me. From one perspective, I am a nobody. A failed clergyman who has racketed about the Continent in the guise of a tutor, when in fact I am a duke’s poor relation. The poor relation, the tutor without students, might need some protection. From another perspective, my family is titled, we have wealth beyond imagining, I hold land in my own name and have assets many would envy. And yet, you believe that your misdeeds could bring me low. What wrong has as much power to ruin as treason?”
He rose, and Matilda was certain he intended to summon the footmen to lock her in the butler’s pantry.
He twisted the latch on the lock. “You have the privacy of the confessional. If I can help you, I will. I hope that is a statement of the obvious.”
The suitor had departed, in other words. In his place was the decent gentleman who’d first captured Matilda’s trust.
Did he still have it?
Yes, and he always would. “I have committed treason—I’m nearly certain of that—and I have been terribly, unforgivably stupid. My father’s life hangs in the balance, and I have no good options.”
Duncan went into the bedroom and came back with a quilt. He draped that around Matilda’s shoulders and resumed his seat.
“Tell me what happened and leave nothing out. Do not flatter anybody, do not protect anybody, most especially, do not protect me. The truth and the truth alone will serve, or you will depart from my household and never return.”
* * *
Duncan abetted a traitor, and by demanding the whole story from Matilda, he became an accessory to her crime after the fact—unless he turned her over to the authorities.
That was the sensible choice, and Duncan had learned to his sorrow the price of ignoring common sense. Apparently, the lesson needed some review, because for no inducement, not even to preserve his life, would he betray Matilda’s trust.
“Papa is an art dealer,” Matilda said, gathering the quilt close. “A gentleman art dealer. He’s also a sometime spy, from what I can gather. When I traveled with him, that possibility was only a passing notion, but part of the reason I married was to make certain that my path and Papa’s diverged, lest he be caught in the pay of the wrong party.”
“Your father was a free lance,” Duncan said, as the fire crackled softly and the winter wind soughed beyond the window. “A mercenary.”
“I don’t know what he was. On the Continent, the line between diplomacy, trade, and espionage blurs. Those who dabble in statecraft like it that way, while I could not abide the court intrigues and the conversations that abruptly changed topic when I joined them. Papa was always going out late at night or whispering with the servants in the pantries. I ignored the lot of it.”
This recitation apparently annoyed Matilda, which was fortunate, for it made Duncan furious. “You were part of his camouflage, to use the French word. His deception. He did trade in art, he was a doting papa showing his daughter the Continental sights. He also traded in secrets.”
She held her hands out toward the fire. “I came to that conclusion only recently. I missed the evidence: Papa never worried about money. He never mentioned needing to save for his old age, never talked about setting aside a sum for my settlements. I’m well fixed, as it happens, though I can’t touch my widow’s portion at present.”
“Your father had no financial worries, but he’d sold his soul.” Duncan had met such men, some of them wearing a priest’s collar, and he could not respect them.
“If Papa sold his soul, I know not to whom. We always had more servants than any two people required, and they were a canny and polyglot collection. Many of them came with us to London, even though Papa is done with his travels.”
Matilda shifted, so she sat in profile, expression pensive. She was pretty—many women were—but what distracted Duncan was the marvel of her mind. She was laying out a story for him with the precision of a chess match recited from memory. She had studied this board, at length, and she had avoided putting her father in check.
Barely.
“We moved every few months,” she said, “and we never stayed in the same lodgings twice. Now I know that fugitives take that precaution. Papa held dinner parties with people I could never recall meeting, and many of his art clients were amazingly uninformed regarding the pieces he had sold them. My late husband noticed that, and he was a man much preoccupied with his mechanical inventions. In hindsight, I was blind.”
As Duncan had been blind when he’d taken his curate’s post. “You were kept in the dark. Hindsight was doubtless the second-to-last imp to escape from Pandora’s box. It yet flies about the world, creating all manner of havoc.”
Matilda sent him a fleeting smile, Mona Lisa–sweet, a little wry. “I love you. I wish I didn’t. I wish you’d chased me from your home wood on the end of a pitchfork. But you didn’t.”
Duncan wanted to leap from the chair and bellow her admission to the rafters—Matilda loved him—instead, he twitched the quilt up around her shoulders. Those three words were a parting gift, unless he could convince her to stay and fight for their future.
“Thank you for that declaration,” he said. “The sentiment is entirely reciprocated, but at present, I’m attempting to focus on the unfortunate situation in which you find yourself. What caused you to flee your father’s household?”
Her smile faded like the last rays of sun from the evening sky. “I had attracted the notice of Colonel Lord Atticus Parker, a marquess’s younger son making a career in the military.”
“The war hero,” Duncan said, hating the fellow on general principles.
“Atticus is not a bad sort.”
Duncan hated him a little less. “He sought to win your hand, and all you can say about him is that he’s not a bad sort?”
“He was levelheaded under fire, fought alongside his men, and held some impossible hillside when holding it was needed. He’s dogged like that. His courting had the same quality. Flowers twice a week, chocolates from Paris on Sunday. A walk in the park on Friday morning, a waltz on Wednesday night.”
“Sounds dull rather than dogged. I expect his chess was uninspired.”
She closed her eyes. “Terribly. I lost on purpose with Atticus at least often enough to protect his pride. That should have told me something, but all the while, he was advancing his pawns, and eventually I gave him permission to pay me his addresses. I thought my father would be relieved that I was considering remarriage.”
“I met men like your father in my travels with Stephen. They fawned all over the lad, flattering him shamelessly.”
“Why flatter a y
outh on a grand tour?”
“Because those who deal in intrigue are always attempting to recruit from the ranks of aristocracy’s younger sons. Spares especially have nothing better to do than resent their lot and feel ignored, and Stephen was and is the ducal heir. A spot of lucrative espionage would have appealed to his vanity. Spying then becomes a means of blackmailing further services from the unsuspecting dupe. Stephen loathes idleness, though boredom never had a more expensive cure than crime.”
The fire popped, and Matilda started. Duncan went back to hating Atticus Parker unreservedly.
“Parker is searching for you?”
“Atticus caught me with the evidence. I was in Papa’s study because we never let that hearth go cold. I went there to fetch a carrying candle to light the sconces in the family parlor, where Atticus and I spent Tuesday evenings together. I needed to trim the wick on the carrying candle, so I rummaged in Papa’s desk for a pair of scissors.”
Duncan longed to take Matilda in his arms while she revisited this memory, but touching her would distract him unbearably.
“What time of the evening was this?”
“A little past eight. Parker would come by at nine for tea, dessert, and conversation. I am a widow, I need not be chaperoned for such a call, and thus Papa usually absented himself on Tuesday nights.”
“Your father was from home this particular night?”
“He was. I think Papa’s life was easier when I was stashed in a castle by the North Sea. My life was easier, too, though I was bored witless.”
Your husband owned a damned castle? “Parker came upon you in your father’s study?”
She bowed her head, hunching in on herself. “Worse than that. I did not find the scissors in the desk drawer, so I searched Papa’s satchel. This satchel should have confirmed his spying, if nothing else did. It has hidden pockets and secret panels all obscured by the design tooled into the leather. I was searching them one by one when I came across a document written in a combination of German, French, and Spanish.”
“Code?” Though those were hardly obscure languages to a Continental traveler.
“I sat at the desk, pulled out pencil and paper, and began translating. A lively curiosity has ever been a failing of mine.”
I am in love with your lively curiosity. Matilda would have had a half to three-quarters of an hour to work, if Parker were punctual. “What did you find?”
“Plans to invade France, I think. No specific dates, but ports of entry, potential billets, Dutch involvement, none of it quite coherent, but then, I was not the intended recipient of the information and my command of Spanish is lacking.”
“We are at peace with the French.” For now. Napoleon’s rampages had lasted most of twenty years, and warfare had become a way of life for many. Still, invading France struck Duncan as an unlikely initiative, or perhaps a contingent scenario, just as certain government offices were always prepared for the death of the monarch.
“I know what was on that page, Duncan, and I did not bring the information to the attention of any proper authority.”
“Because you did not know on whose behalf your father had possession of it.”
Matilda scooted around so she faced Duncan rather than the fire. “I suspect Atticus courted me to gain access to the house, to have an excuse to watch Papa. I had the sense Papa would rather I’d refused the colonel’s suit, but who refuses a war hero from a titled family?”
Matilda had not only refused Parker, she’d run from him. “Parker would have given evidence against your father?”
“He’s a war hero. He of all men would not abet a traitor. For all I know, he bid me good night, made straightaway for the authorities, and obtained permission to question me or even arrest me. If I had been taken into custody, Papa’s arrest would have undoubtedly followed. I dared not waste hours waiting for Papa to come home from his late-night entertainments.”
“You fled before you could incriminate your father.” Her reasoning was damnably sound. Better that Wakefield be suspected of treason than condemned to die for it. “Parker came upon you in the study?”
Even as Duncan reconstructed the chain of events with Matilda, he was plagued by questions.
What suitor could have bothered with treason and secret plans when faced with Matilda by firelight? She was no longer as underweight, no longer pale and exhausted. Duncan yearned to sketch her, to lose himself in a game of chess with her, to carry her to his bed and indulge in wild pleasures until spring.
Those longings twined around each other, forming a tangle of desire, yearning, and frustration—which Duncan ignored. Treason was the worst of the hanging felonies, and Matilda’s decision to flee the scene, while it protected her father in the short term, all but put a noose around her own neck.
“Lord Atticus came upon me in the study,” she said. “How long he’d stood in the doorway watching me, I do not know. The clock said I’d been working for less than a quarter hour. That dreadful translation held my attention. I looked up and he was there before the desk, framed by the shadows in the corridor. I folded the paper from Papa’s satchel and my notes and slid them into a drawer I could lock, then rose and greeted my guest.”
Her father’s nemesis. Duncan added Thomas Wakefield to the list of those deserving undying enmity.
“Atticus was his usual cordial self,” Matilda went on. “He turned the conversation to what sort of house I’d like, and which of London’s better neighborhoods appealed to me. I doubt I made sense, but he didn’t seem to notice my discomfiture.”
“Was the translation gone after he left?”
“The papers were right where I’d put them, but Atticus had excused himself after I’d served the tea. I was alone in the family parlor for a good ten minutes while he heeded the call of nature. He had time to pick the lock on the drawer and study what I’d written. I took the papers with me when I left.”
No seasoned soldier took ten minutes to piss. “You never had an opportunity to discuss this with your father?”
She swiped at her cheek with the edge of the quilt. “I quit the house as quickly as I could lest Atticus come back and arrest me. I also did not want Papa to admit his crimes to me. He cannot be convicted on even a war hero’s mere hearsay.”
“You have considered both turning him in and ignoring what you’ve learned.” The moral conundrum was impossible: to betray a beloved parent or one’s country?
Matilda spread her hands before her, bringing to Duncan’s mind quotes about all of great Neptune’s ocean being inadequate to wash away guilt.
“Tell me, Duncan, did you consider remaining silent about your vicar’s behavior?”
He took her hand in his and kissed her fingers. “Yes, and I have often wondered if Rachel and her daughter would be alive if I’d held my peace. Tagging along after an underpaid teacher through a bitter Yorkshire winter ruined her health.”
“I suspect despair ruined her health.”
Despair was threatening to spoil Duncan’s current plans as well. He kept hold of Matilda’s chilly hand, cradling it in both of his. “You are in a truly difficult position, and I have made it more complicated.”
Matilda sat straighter and freed her hand from his grasp. “Not if I leave, you haven’t.”
“Please don’t leave,” Duncan said. “I’m asking you not to leave, Matilda. I want a chance, at least, to consider your situation. You are arguably no longer an Englishwoman, for example, if you were married to a German fellow. Can a foreigner commit treason?”
That earned him one instant’s knitted brow. “Perhaps not, but she can be arrested for conspiring against the Crown, and Papa is still a British subject.”
“With whom did you conspire when you bolted from Town, alone, in the middle of the night? With whom did you conspire when you cut off all contact with your father?”
The puzzle called to Duncan, the odd details and ragged edges of Matilda’s story. Why had the great war hero not married previously? Where was Ma
tilda’s father now, and who was watching him? Why would such dangerous and incriminating information have been left in the keeping of an art dealer?
Though Duncan knew why. Wakefield was a seasoned spy, a reliable courier, bought and paid for. He shipped all manner of goods to and from the Continent, and could easily hide documents among his paintings, manuscripts, musical instruments, and fancy porcelain.
Entrusting documents to him was akin to hiding them in plain sight, a generally sound strategy.
“You are tired,” Duncan said. “I apologize for questioning you at such an hour, but thank you for confiding in me.”
He ought not to thank her. By sharing this tale with him, she’d all but announced an intention to flee Brightwell rather than implicate him in her difficulties. That strategy—bolting into the night—had kept her father alive and at liberty so far.
Matilda rose, the quilt wrapped about her like one of her shawls. “I’d like to share your bed tonight. To sleep with you, if that’s not asking too much. I will understand if you’d rather not have a traitor—”
Duncan lifted her into his arms, quilt and all. “You are always welcome in my bed, and I do not see that you have committed treason. I see that your own father has embroiled you in schemes not of your making, and a man purporting to be a suitor has courted your affections under false pretenses.”
He carried her into the bedroom and set her on the bed.
“Your perspective has a certain appeal,” Matilda said, scooting back onto the mattress, “but I doubt the authorities will agree. I purloined evidence of possible treason, shielded my father from the truth, and avoided being questioned by those who could get to the bottom of the situation.”
Duncan knelt to remove her house slippers. “You destroyed all of the evidence?” Smart woman.
“I burned those papers within a day of leaving Papa’s house. That feels good.”
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