A lifetime of self-protection had been shattered in an instant. One man and his gift of a common household kitten had stripped away all her protective barriers and left her feeling raw, vulnerable, and very much afraid. She was trying to harden her heart against him, and he was making it impossible. Damn him, anyway.
12
The London Bookstore was packed when Katie entered. Amid the array of books, telescopes, wallpaper, and baskets available for sale, customers chatted with one another as they sipped steaming cups of chicory coffee.
Mr. Henry Knox proved to be a plump, cherubic-faced young man, and he must have been expecting her, for scarcely a minute after she entered the shop, he came bustling across the crowded room to greet her.
“Mrs. Armstrong,” he exclaimed as if they had already met. “I am delighted to see you again. You have come for your book?”
“I have,” she answered, taking her cue from him.
“Excellent. I will wrap it up for you. In the meantime, feel free to browse as much as you like.”
Their gazes met in understanding, before the bookseller departed in search of what Katie knew was more than a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works. Perhaps there were letters or secret papers inside, but if so, she would have no opportunity to have a look at them, for when Knox returned, the package he handed her was wrapped securely in brown paper and closed with sealing wax.
“Would you like it charged to your account?” Knox asked her.
“Of course.” Katie accepted the package from him and left the shop. She tucked the package under her arm and her hands in the pockets of her cloak against the cold wind of early spring. One of her hands closed around the warm, furry bundle in her pocket, and this time she didn’t cry. Instead, she smiled. So much for gold and diamonds.
She found the coffeehouse Ethan had described, and when she went inside, she found him waiting for her at a table in the corner, surrounded by several other ladies and gentlemen, most of whom she had met the night before. William Holbrook was among them, and he greeted Katie with a rather lecherous wink that she found quite irritating.
“My dear Mrs. Armstrong,” he greeted, casting a long and lustful look at her body as Ethan pulled out a chair for her. “By Jove, what is that thing?”
She looked down to discover the kitten had poked its head out of her pocket and was blinking sleepily at Sir William. “It’s a kitten, my dear sir. A present from Ethan.”
Holbrook glanced at the man beside her with a dubious shake of his head. “It won’t do, my dear fellow. You really must find more lavish gifts for your—er—friend than that.”
The implication was clear, but Katie ignored it. She pulled the baby cat out of her pocket and held it up for everyone to see as she sat down at the table. “I prefer this,” she said softly. “I’ve never had a pet.” She looked at the man seated beside her. “’Tis a better gift than diamonds.”
“Mrs. Armstrong, you are a very unusual woman,” Arnold Travertine told her with a shake of his head, watching as she tucked her present back into her pocket, “to prefer a common house cat to jewels.”
“And less of a strain on the accounts, eh, Harding?” Holbrook said, laughing at his own joke. Titters from two of the ladies present echoed him, but most people at the table just looked uncomfortable. “I’m so glad you could join us, my dear lady.”
“I’m afraid I can’t say the same, Sir William,” she answered with a yawn. “It’s barely noon, too early in the day for shopping.”
“You surprise me. I thought all women love to shop.” He shot a meaningful glance at her companion. “Especially when it is a man’s money she’s spending.”
Katie was getting quite tired of the man’s innuendoes. “Where is your wife, Sir William?” she asked sweetly. “I have yet to meet her.”
Sir William was not a discerning man, but even he knew he had gone too far. He made no more references to her position as Ethan’s mistress, and talk shifted to music and art, two topics Holbrook clearly knew nothing about. After perhaps half an hour of conversation, Ethan rose to his feet. “Mrs. Armstrong and I should be going. She still has at least four other shops to visit.”
He bade the group of his society friends farewell, and they departed. When they were out the door, Katie drew a deep breath, glad to be gone from there.
“I see you have the package from Knox. Keep close watch on it.”
“Why?” she asked. “Are there secret papers hidden inside?”
“No secret papers,” he answered. “I assure you, there is a copy of Shakespeare’s plays inside that package.”
“And something more, I’ll wager. My curiosity almost led me to take a peek.”
“It wouldn’t matter if you did,” he answered. “Anything that might be inside would mean nothing to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to.”
She scowled. “Must you always be so circumspect?”
Ethan shrugged. “Since you will have charge of the book in a few days, and knowing your insatiable curiosity, I fully expect you to look it over.”
“What do you mean, I’ll have charge of the book after a few days?”
“There is a man in Cambridge who is very fond of Shakespeare. You will need to take the book to him at the Blue Boar Inn there. A man named Joseph Bramley.”
“Who is he?”
“No one important, I assure you. He is a mechanic, I believe.”
“So is Paul Revere,” she pointed out. “Would you call him unimportant?”
“Unimportant enough that he hasn’t been arrested yet.”
Katie remembered what both Lowden and Ethan had told her about Governor Gage requiring proof of sedition before he would arrest anyone. “Because they cannot prove anything?”
“Exactly.”
“And what about you?” she whispered, and turned her head to look at him. “How long can you keep up this charade before you are suspected?”
“As long as I have to.”
That answer and the uncompromising tone of his voice reminded her of how determined, how ruthless, he could be. Yet he could also give her a kitten because she was afraid of mice.
That consideration, that thoughtfulness, was something she would not have thought him to have, and suddenly, she wished she could see more of that side of his character. She knew she would never get to know him that well, and she wondered why that bothered her so much.
* * *
Every time Ethan thought he had Katie figured out, she surprised him. He knew she was cynical, tough, and realistic, a survivor. He would have been hard-pressed to believe anything could make her cry, and yet the gift of an ordinary kitten had caused her to dissolve into tears on a public street. He could not understand it. Katie was not a woman who easily displayed her true feelings, probably because it made her appear too vulnerable, a protective defense he understood very well, for he was the same way, although for different reasons.
Ethan could believe Katie capable of using tears to manipulate a man, but he knew that had not been the case today. Her response to the kitten had been genuine, he was certain of that. He wondered what had caused it, what thoughts and emotions had gone through her mind at that moment, but had he asked her directly, she would not have told him the truth. In fact, she probably would have told him to sod off.
They spent the remainder of the afternoon strolling through Boston, looking in shop windows and sipping hot coffee as they watched children skate on the ice of the Mill Pond. She made no reference to the kitten in her pocket, and it was not until they had returned to her house that evening that Ethan found the opportunity to bring up the subject again.
Stephens greeted them at the door, and the butler’s expression did not change at the sight of the kitten she pulled from her pocket. He took her cloak and Ethan’s, then told them that there was a fire going in the parlor if they wished to warm themselves after their walk.
Katie laughed as she and Ethan entered the parlor
to follow the butler’s suggestion. “That man never changes expression. I believe I could have pulled the head of John the Baptist out of my cloak, and Stephens wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.”
“You are probably right,” Ethan answered, watching as she knelt on the rug before the fire, cradling the kitten in her hands. “Stephens is an impeccable butler.”
He saw her press a kiss to the top of the kitten’s head before she set the tiny animal on the rug, and he found that almost as surprising as her tears had been. “I can see you like your gift,” he commented. “Have you thought of a name for her yet?”
She nodded. “I think I’ll call her Meg.”
“Why Meg?”
“Meg was a friend of mine. At least…” She fell silent, and he thought she wasn’t going to finish what she had been about to say, but after a long pause, she spoke again. “At least,” she whispered, “Meg was the closest thing to a friend I’ve ever had.”
She looked up at him, and a shadow of something—sorrow, perhaps—crossed her face. “I envy you. You have several close, loyal friends. That is extraordinary. You are very fortunate. Don’t ever take them for granted.”
He started to assure her that he did not do so, and yet the thought suddenly occurred to him that he probably did. He knew David, Molly, Joshua, Andrew, and Adam would follow him without question down any road he chose to take, and he had never before thought of that as extraordinary or considered himself fortunate. “Thank you for reminding me,” he said gravely. “Sometimes we do tend to take our friends for granted, and we shouldn’t.”
He wanted to ask her about Meg, but before he could do so, she spoke again. “Thank you for your gift. It was very thoughtful of you.” She smiled suddenly, and the shadow was gone. “Although I don’t think it’s the usual gift a man gives his mistress.”
Ethan knelt down beside her. “Why is it so unusual, Katie?” he asked. “Because you’re not accustomed to receiving gifts from men? Or because you know from your mother’s experience that men don’t give gifts without exacting a price?” He leaned closer to her. “Or perhaps,” he added softly, “it is the thoughtfulness of it that you find surprising?”
“All of those,” she confessed. “But the last most of all.” She leaned back and lifted her chin, returning his gaze with an almost defiant one of her own. “No man ever gave me anything before, at least not anything I accepted, and certainly nothing that had special meaning to me. I am not accustomed to that sort of consideration from men. From anyone, really.”
As if suddenly thinking she had revealed too much, Katie looked away, glancing at the animal that had begun this conversation. At present, the kitten was curled up in a ball beside her, sound asleep. “She looks so small. If I get any rats, I hope they won’t hurt her.”
“It’s supposed to be the other way around,” he reminded her. “And don’t worry. She’ll grow into the job. I told you before, her mother is the terror of rodents. My kitchen maid assures me that no mouse or rat would dare invade our kitchen as long as Libby is anywhere in the vicinity.”
“Libby? Short for Elizabeth, I imagine.”
“My Tory friends would think so. But actually, you are wrong. Libby is short for Liberty.”
She laughed. “Even your cat has a political significance. Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“And what about your choice of name? Meg is probably short for Margaret.”
Katie’s smile faded. “I imagine so, but actually, I don’t know for certain.”
“You don’t know? Who was this Meg, then?”
“We met when we were both eleven years old. I had run away from the orphanage, and it was my second night alone on the streets. I was in an alley in East London. I was cold and hungry and so scared that I just started crying. Then I heard this voice in the dark telling me to quit bawling like a baby since people were trying to sleep.”
“That was Meg?”
“Yes. The next morning, she woke me up with a kick in the shin and handed me half a loaf of bread still warm from the baker’s oven.”
Ethan grinned at that. “Stolen, of course.”
“Of course.” Katie shook her head as if in disbelief. “To this day, I don’t know what made her decide to help me, but she did. She taught me how to steal food off a cart in the marketplace. She also taught me how to pick a man’s pocket or a woman’s reticule without getting caught, where to sell the stolen goods, and how to know I was getting a good price for them. She even taught me some confidence swindles. We worked as a team for nearly eight years, which is safer than doing it alone.”
Katie looked at him. “Meg saved my life. If I had not met her, I might have died of hunger or cold. Or I might have been forced into prostitution, which would have been worse than death.”
“Yet you say she was only the closest thing to a friend you’ve had. I would call her a special friend indeed.”
Katie shook her head. “Oh, no. It isn’t the same thing as your friendship with, say, Joshua. You see, on the streets, what matters is to survive. If it had come down to saving me or saving herself, Meg would have let me hang without blinking an eye. Because of that, you don’t get too close to people. You can’t.”
“A hard way to live,” he commented, and watched her jaw set.
“That’s the way it has to be. You get used to it.”
“What happened to bring you to the colonies?”
“Meg and I got caught lifting the purse of a West End toff, who turned out to be an earl, a very wealthy and powerful man. Stealing is always a very serious offense, but in this case it was especially so, as you might guess. I went to prison and was committed to transportation to the colonies. Meg was not so fortunate.”
“What happened to her?”
Katie’s lips tightened, and she looked away. “They hanged her in the public square. The only reason I didn’t hang with her was that the judge thought I was pretty and took pity on me. But I was forced to watch them hang Meg—to teach me a lesson, I imagine, and to help me realize the error of my ways.” She shook her head and stood up. “For goodness sake, let’s talk about something else. Or better yet, let’s play chess. There is a set on that table.”
He was surprised. “You know the game?”
“My mother taught me. She felt it was an accomplishment every mistress should have.”
Her words struck Ethan like a punch in the stomach. “What do you mean?” he asked, following her across the room. “Your mother expected you to follow in her footsteps?”
She shrugged as if it was a matter of no consequence. “I am sure she knew it was a possibility for me when I grew up. After all, she taught me to read and write both English and French, she taught me cards and chess, and she drilled etiquette, manners, and the peerage into me as if it were military training.”
“In other words, she gave you all the accomplishments required of a mistress?”
“Well, it wasn’t because she hoped I would marry above my station.”
“But you were only a child.” Ethan was not a man to be easily shocked, but the idea that a woman would prepare her young daughter for such a life did rather shock him. “My God.”
Katie shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “Look at it from her point of view. We had no money, no influence, and no connections. And I was illegitimate. What other ambitions could she possibly have had for my future?”
He remembered her words that morning in Molly’s kitchen about connections and money being so important, and he knew the answer to her question was none. “Let’s play,” he said abruptly, and sat down.
She took the chair opposite him at the small table. “Keep in mind that I’m not very good at it,” she warned him. “Partly because I’ve had little practice, and partly because my mother did not teach me to play well.”
“Of course not,” he muttered. “It wouldn’t do for a mistress to be skilled at the game, because she should always lose to her lover anyway, isn’t that right?”
“But I won’t le
t you win,” she told him firmly, “despite what you told Holbrook today. And I don’t have to, since I’m not really your mistress.”
“If you really were my mistress, I can assure you, I would not want you to lose a chess game on purpose to bolster my pride.”
If you were really my mistress, we would be too busy making love to play chess, anyway.
Ethan studied her in the lamplight as they played, and he took a great deal of pleasure in imagining all the delights having Katie for a true mistress would offer. God, he wanted her.
He would not have thought it possible, but she was even more beautiful now than she had been the day he first saw her in the marketplace. The three weeks that had passed since then had brought about some subtle but unmistakable changes in her face and form. Good food had caused her to gain some much-needed weight, though she was still far too thin. The sharp lines of hunger and deprivation he had first seen etched into her face had softened, showing her beauty more plainly than ever. And yet it was not her beauty alone that intrigued him and ignited his desire for her. It was something else.
She looked like an angel, but she could lie like a demon. She could steal a man’s watch quick as lightning, but she would refuse any jewels he might give her. She was so jaded, but the gift of a kitten could make her cry. It was the astonishing contrasts within her that he found fascinating.
She moved her bishop and glanced across the table at him, realizing for the first time that he was staring at her, not at the board. Something of what he was thinking must have shown in his face, for a slight blush tinged her cheeks, and she spoke hastily as if to divert his attention. “I’ve told you a few things about my past. Why don’t you tell me something about yours?”
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to know how a man who once fought for the king could change into a radical rebel and fight against him.”
“Radical?” He lifted an eyebrow. “Is that what I am?”
“Very much so, as if you didn’t already know it. Ethan, what happened to change your outlook?”
The Charade Page 17