Spyfall

by Carter, Elizabeth Ellen

  Susannah hurried back to the inn ahead of the two men.

  “How’s the pirate?” Peggy asked.

  “Hurt. Get some water on, Peg. We’re going to put him in my room.”

  She continued through into the bar and unlocked the connecting door that opened onto her parlor. She entered her bedroom and pulled down the blankets on the bed before gathering a selection of bandages and bottled ointments.

  From the kitchen, she heard a cry of pain and her heart clenched in sorrow.

  Things will be different, she vowed. Things between them will be much different now.

  She would not squander a second chance.

  The two men, both dirty and disheveled, made their way through into the bedroom with Peggy following up behind.

  Susannah opened up her linen chest and pulled out two blankets. She folded them neatly into squares. They would help cushion his ankle while they addressed what to do about the swelling.

  “I’m making up your old room upstairs, Lieutenant Hardacre,” said Peggy. “There’ll be hot water waiting for you.”

  “I’m much obliged, Miss Smith,” he said as he walked Nate to the bed. “Susannah, I need to borrow Sid for a few hours if I may.”

  “Of course, whatever you need,” she said. “We’re all part of The King’s Rogues now.”

  *

  The room was warm, uncomfortably so. Despite the coolness of the autumn night outside, Olivia unlatched the sash window, propping it open a couple of inches with a block of wood.

  A lamp burned low and, even in the dim light it cast, she could see the sheen of sweat across Nate’s forehead.

  With as much quiet as care, Susannah set down the tray. She touched a cloth to the water scented with a drop or two of lavender oil and dabbed it over his brow. His right leg was exposed at the knee, elevated on the folded blankets. His badly sprained ankle was wrapped in bruised cabbage leaves and bandaged.

  She contemplated changing the dressing, but he seemed to be sleeping so peacefully, even without the dram of whiskey he’d asked for. She decided to let him sleep. That and time would be the best healers.

  The cool air from the open window brought with it the smell of damp earthiness. The rain would be here soon.

  It was very late and The Queen’s Head was quiet. Peggy had gone to bed an hour ago. Adam Hardacre had popped his head in when he returned from his mysterious errand and, apart from his meal, spent the rest of the night in his room.

  Speaking of which, she should find her own place to sleep tonight. The room on the second floor near the door that led to Peggy’s attic domain was vacant and had last been cleaned a couple of weeks earlier. She could put up with a bit of dust.

  But, with a blanket, she could sleep more or less comfortably on the settee in her parlor. Yes, that would be better. She would be close if Nate needed anything and still remain within the bounds of propriety.

  No sooner had she put a hand on the doorknob to leave, she heard the bedclothes behind her shift.

  Susannah prayed he slept.

  “You’re not leaving on my account, are you?”

  No such luck.

  “You should be asleep,” she told him.

  “I’ve slept.”

  “Then sleep some more. It’s only just gone past one o’clock.”

  “Only if you join me.”

  “No… I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “C’mon, I’m an invalid. I’m damned near helpless.”

  Susannah couldn’t help an unladylike snort.

  “Nathaniel Payne, I don’t think you’ve been helpless a day in your life.”

  The sound of more rustling bed linen caused her to finally turn around. It would be just like him to get out of bed.

  Fortunately, he hadn’t made it that far – he’d moved only enough to sit up in bed. She saw the flash of his white teeth as he hissed in pain attempting to move his foot.

  “Well, I can’t sleep now, so you have to keep me company for a while.” His reply was so near to a pout that Susannah lowered her head to hide a smile.

  “You might be wide awake, but I need to sleep.”

  Her hand covered the brass doorknob that separated her room from the parlor.

  “I’ve taken your bed.”

  The playfulness left his voice, the simple sentence sounding like the grumble of distant thunder.

  Why did he have to make this harder than it needed to be?

  “You may have it until you can stand on your own two feet – and climb those stairs.”

  “It’s big enough for two.”

  “Goodnight, Nate.”

  “No… gah! Goddammit!”

  She turned to see him struggling to get up. He knocked his hip against the nightstand and clutched the brass bedpost with both hands to haul himself upright.

  She hurried to his side. To her surprise, Nate didn’t say anything. Instead, he accepted her assistance to pivot around on his good foot and sit on the side of the bed. She sat alongside him.

  His shoulders slumped. His head remained lowered. In all, the man looked defeated, no longer was there the luck-of-the-devil charm.

  “I regret the night of our parting from that moment to this,” said Nate, his voice low. “I should never have stormed out on you the way I did. I meant it when I asked you to marry me. I still do, but I don’t know where I stand with you. One moment I think you believe this is just some fling, and the next I believed you might even be falling in love with me, too.”

  She chanced a glance at him. He offered a rueful smile and reached out, taking her hand in his.

  “But I need to know, once and for all,” he continued. “Here, now, while we’re both calm and sober. I want you to tell me, Susannah. Be honest with me – but, more importantly, be honest with yourself. I’ll respect your decision, whatever it is. But if your answer is no, then I can no longer stay because my feelings for you have been unchanged from the beginning.”

  Susannah looked away and squeezed her eyes tight but tears leaked from them anyway. She fought a hitch in her throat but forced the words out.

  “I’ve spent too many years of my life living in fear. I thought getting away to St. Sennen would be enough distance, but where can one escape from one’s own thoughts? There was many a time I wished my husband dead. I would dream of finding him dead on the floor after a fit of apoplexies or knifed in the back by one of his accomplices.”

  Susannah felt her hand squeezed and she returned the squeeze in full measure, grateful that, here in the darkness, Nate was her lifeline.

  “And sometimes, I’d imagine wielding the knife myself. I resented Jack so much for the way he made me feel and, in the end, I hated myself as much as I hated him. I was impotent, useless. I wanted to fade away until I was nothing. I watched him drown in the marshes. I murdered him, Nate. In my heart I murdered my husband.”

  Susannah accepted Nate’s arm around her. She leaned into him and breathed in the lavender and the arnica ointment she’d used to treat the bruises on his body.

  “Here,” she whispered, “I could be the widowed Mrs. Linwood, a woman with no past, nothing of interest, nothing to commend or condemn. I wanted to hide from myself, but I couldn’t do that either. You made that impossible.”

  “Do you really need me to tell you what an incredible woman I believe you to be?” Nate asked, his voice barely audible.

  Susannah hiccoughed a sob.

  “I’m afraid I am not the woman you believe me to be.”

  “How about you let me be the judge of that? How about you lean on me, just as I have had to lean on you?”

  She rested her head against his shoulder. Light fingers brushed her hair, comforting, soothing.

  “Sometimes,” Nate continued, “sometimes when things are so dark you can’t see, you have to take a step forward and trust there is solid ground underfoot.” He turned himself with effort to embrace her in both arms. “Call it an act of faith. Do you have faith in me, Susannah? Are you willing to t
rust in something you cannot see? Can you put your trust in me?”

  She could not answer. Instead, she wept openly with deep soul-shaking sobs as though she were crying an infection out of her system as one might sweat out an illness. In the end, she was drained and her limbs felt weighted with lead.

  *

  Nate waited until her breathing slowed, the rhythm of it deep and steady against his chest. He began to wonder if she slept in his arms.

  He ignored the incessant throb of his ankle and the weariness that seemed to be bone deep. And yet, it was enough to stroke her hair in the stillness of the night.

  It still surprised him how much her rejection had wounded him.

  He’d more or less parted on good terms with all the other women he’d known. They’d not wished for commitment, and he’d never offered it. Once upon a time, he couldn’t imagine being tied down to a life where one day seemed very much like another.

  But now, with Susannah in his arms, he wanted days upon endless days of nothing but her beside him.

  He fought a yawn and acknowledged his sudden burst of movement. Even just sitting up like this had exhausted him.

  She also hadn’t given him an answer…

  The longer she remained silent, the more certain he was she would refuse him once again. Perhaps it would be better if she went and he just went back to sleep and forgot the whole embarrassing thing as a bad dream. And as soon as he was recovered, he could go away and…

  “I trust you.”

  The three small words she whispered gladdened him as much as if she’d said she loved him. For as dense as he was, he’d realized over the weeks of their separation that to win Susannah’s love was one thing. Winning her trust was quite another.

  “Then I’ll find a place to sleep and you can reclaim your bed.”

  “Please…” she whispered. “I want to stay with you.”

  Nate swallowed against a lump in his throat.

  “I have come to accept the fact I love you,” she said, “but, in fighting with myself, I’ve hurt both of us. I thought I had lost you for good, but when Olivia and Lady Abigail suggested there might be hope, I prayed for your safe return. I didn’t dare hope there might be anything more.”

  This was too much for him to take in. He was dreaming this, surely. He nodded, or at least he thought he did. His mind was adrift in utter fatigue.

  He had a vague recollection of Susannah rising from the bed and encouraging him back into it. He did not resist; he no longer had the energy for it. And he was asleep as soon as his head fell into the pillow.

  He found himself floating on the waves, and he welcomed the familiar feel of the sea beneath him. A hand touched his, and he was no longer alone.

  Susannah stood at the wheel of the boat, directing it confidently, the bright gold rays of the morning sun illuminating her with a radiance like a goddess – like a sprite. He reached out a hand and she met him partway, twining her fingers through his, a splicing of two lives as well as two hearts and two hands.

  At some point, in the hour before dawn, he woke and found her hand in his, exactly as in his dream, before he plunged deep into another, dreamless slumber.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mid-October, 1805

  Adam Hardacre drummed a restless tattoo on the table with his fingers.

  “We need to go back to France.”

  Nate looked up from his coffee. It was a beverage he rarely partook in but its scalding black bitterness was just what he needed to wake himself more fully.

  The swelling on his ankle had gone down substantially in the last two weeks thanks to Susannah and Peggy’s treatments, although he had balked at the idea of a garlic and onion poultice.

  “For any particular reason?” he asked.

  “I want Harold Bickmore.”

  “The man is really worth dying for, is he?”

  “Better one man than tens of thousands.”

  “Does Ridgeway know about your plans to be a martyr to the cause?”

  The man grinned. “He does and he wasn’t terribly happy.”

  “And that makes you happy?”

  “Upsetting the boss? No. Wringing that bastard Bickmore’s neck would though. Seeing him in irons on his way to a traitor’s death is the next best thing.”

  Nate reached for his coffee once more. “Hung, drawn, and quartered?”

  Hardacre’s grin turned savage. “I’d gladly wield the blade myself.”

  “Well, you’d better have a plan, I’m best man at a wedding next week.”

  “I will have. You can be sure of that. But today, I’m intending on returning home and spending some time with my wife.”

  Nate nodded. “I know how much getting Bickmore means to you. Whatever you need is yours.”

  Hardacre rose from the table and clasped Nate on the shoulder but said nothing. Indeed, nothing further needed to be said.

  He started to move away from the table but seemed to have a second thought. He turned back. “Join me in Truro after Clem and Peggy’s wedding. You’d be welcome to bring Susannah with you, too, if you like. I know Olivia would be pleased to see her again.”

  Nate put on what he hoped was his most noncommittal face and gave only a nod in acknowledgement.

  “Susannah and I still have a lot of things to work through,” he said.

  “Love is never easy is it?”

  Nate shook his head.

  “Well, if anyone can work things out it’s you and Susannah. Sometimes you have to trust that love is enough and everything else in the world be damned. Not that there’s anything you can do about the rest of the world anyway.”

  Nate chuffed. “Thanks.”

  Adam nodded and slung his satchel across his back and left by the inn’s front door. From his place by the window, Nate turned to look out. He saw Adam’s figure distorted through the glass as he made his way up the path to the crossroads and the mail coach direct to Truro.

  His new friend’s endorsement was welcome, but not so surprising considering the man himself was somewhat newly wed. It was Sir Daniel and Lady Abigail’s little operation which still had him shaking his head. Deadly serious espionage on one hand and jolly families on the other. And yet, somehow it worked.

  All he had to do was persuade Susannah to accept his proposal.

  He could do that. At least, he was sure he could do that…

  In deference to the superstition of not seeing the bride a day before the wedding, the groom, his son, his best man, and a few close friends drank in The Rose and Crown in the heart of St. Sennen until Sitwell yelled for the third time that the bar was closed.

  The band of a dozen wove their way through the darkened streets of the village and Clem broke into song.

  The very notion of it very nearly made Nate stone cold sober. In all the years he had known the man, he had no idea he could sing – and sing so well!

  Come live with me and be my love,

  And we will all the pleasures prove

  That hill and valley, dale and field,

  And all the craggy mountains yield.

  There we will sit upon the rocks,

  And see the shepherds feed their flocks,

  By shallow rivers to whose falls

  Melodious birds sing madrigals.

  Unable to resist, one, and then another of their band took up the song.

  There I will make thee beds of roses

  And a thousand fragrant posies,

  A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

  Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

  Nate joined in halfheartedly. He was not a tuneful man. And after his recent experiences in France, he was also a cautious man.

  A gown made of the finest wool

  Which from our pretty lambs we pull;

  Fair lined slippers for the cold,

  With buckles of the purest gold.

  Nate considered what was the worst thing that could happen to them here in the village. Probably an irate home owner dumping a chamber p
ot over them to silence the caterwauling. Nevertheless, he kept his eyes attuned to the shadows where, in larger ports, footpads and cutpurses lurked – sometimes in gangs – to confront the ill-prepared and inebriated.

  A belt of straw and ivy buds,

  With coral clasps and amber studs:

  And if these pleasures may thee move,

  Come live with me and be my love.

  Nate shook his head in a vain attempt to sober up. He was being overcautious. This was St. Sennen for God’s sake, a village of three hundred in a district of more cattle than people. And yet he saw a figure in the shadows following them.

  The band of revelers thinned as they peeled off to their own homes. Now they were four.

  They crossed the green to be only a block away from Clem’s shop. Under the guise of stumbling, Nate bent and took a look behind him.

  “That ole ankle of yours still givin’ you grief?” Clem slurred.

  “Yeah,” he replied. He glanced behind once more. The shadow was a lot closer than it was a couple of moments before.

  He got to his feet and made as if to hurry off after his companions. They stumbled into an alleyway between the two buildings that Clem and his son Sam used as a short cut to their shop in the next street. But Nate lingered in the shadows just inside the alley and waited.

  The street returned to silence, apart from the purposeful steps of the man who trailed them.

  Nate estimated the man’s distance and counted down his footfalls until he turned into the alley.

  He sprang at him, shoving him until his back collided against the stone wall.

  “Why have you been following us?”

  “Um… me? I’m on my way home to my bed!”

  The accent was wrong for these parts despite the man’s attempt to disguise it. In the shadows, he had difficulty making out the man’s features. Out from under his cap hung hair gone to grey but there was nothing frail about him.

  “Then you’re a long way from home, my friend.”

  The nervous voice disappeared.

  “Then let’s say I’m looking for a place to stay in these parts.”

  “And you thought you’d follow us home and knock on the door looking for a place to sleep… or try to rob us?”