Falling for the Enemy
Page 2
“I could only get one.” Serge, her younger brother by six years, emerged from the tangle of trees and shrubs lining the creek. A squirrel dangled from his hand by the tail.
She rolled her eyes. “Go back for another, then.” He held out the squirrel for her to take. She merely crossed her arms. “Papa said you need to practice.”
“Come on, Dani. You can have it skinned in half the time.”
Which was likely why her younger brother had reached sixteen and was the slowest animal skinner in all of Abbeville.
“I caught and cleaned the rabbit last night. It’s your turn.” She eyed the bloodied animal, a large stab wound gaping in its chest. “And you’ve little choice about going back for more. Mayhap we could have shared just the one had your blade hit between the eyes. But knifing it in the chest like that, you lost too much meat.”
Which her brother should have known.
Maybe he wasn’t just the worst in Abbeville at handling a knife. He had to be the most inept in all of northern France.
She pushed up from her crouched position by the fire and stood, stretching her back before turning to head upstream.
“Where are you going?” Serge called after her.
“To look for berries.”
“In January?”
She shrugged. So mayhap she wouldn’t happen upon berries, but she might find some burdock or cattail root to dig. Anything to get her away from the fire. If she lingered there, she’d end up doing all Serge’s work, and she could hardly sit still long enough for him to find another squirrel.
He likely wouldn’t return until after dark, the dunce.
She made her way along the water, sluggish from the coolness of winter, but not frigid enough to turn to ice. Leafless brambles and shrubs sprang from soil still damp from yesterday’s rain. She shivered inside her cloak and glanced up at the gray sky through the tree branches above. Home would be more temperate than this, near enough the channel’s warm waters to drive winter’s chill away.
Something rustled ahead, then a rabbit scampered out from beneath a bush and darted toward a little thicket. Within half a second, she had her blade in hand, her fingers gripping the familiar leather handle. One throw, quick as lightning and silent as a snake, and she’d have their supper.
Except Papa had all but commanded she let Serge do the hunting on their trip, saying he had to learn sometime. And she’d done most of the hunting on the way to Reims, then yesterday, on the first day of their journey, she’d killed a rabbit.
She was going to be good and obedient—for perhaps the third or fourth time in her life—and let Serge do tonight’s hunting. She sighed, her grip loosening on the knife.
As though sensing the sudden lack of danger, the rabbit stopped and turned, sniffing the air before staring straight at her.
Too easy a kill to bother with now anyway. What was the fun of throwing a knife when her target was still rather than moving? She bent and slipped her blade back against her ankle and continued down the little stream, winding her way deeper into the woods.
She could almost see the resigned look in Maman’s eyes and hear her exasperated sigh when Maman realized her eldest daughter had returned to Abbeville husbandless. Two towns, with a suitable groom yet to be found. Two! Papa claimed God had a plan for her. That she only needed to wait on Him, and everything would fall into place.
Evidently Papa didn’t understand how hard it was for her to wait for anything—let alone for God, Whom she couldn’t see or touch.
As though waiting for the right man to happen along hadn’t already taken long enough.
A rustling sounded from the trees behind her. Likely another rabbit. But no, the noise was too loud for such a small animal. A fox, perhaps?
She stilled until only the trickle of the creek over rocks and the tapping of tree branches in the wind filled her ears. Another sound, deep and rich, carried on the faint breeze.
A distant, undeniably male voice.
She reached for the knife strapped at her ankle once more, then straightened, stepping stealthily around twigs and through a tangle of saplings.
Probably not anyone to worry about. Just another traveling party stopped to make use of the stream.
Except they were settled awfully deep into the woods to be merely traveling.
Then again, she was nestled rather deeply into the woods, as well. But the trees provided ample opportunity to find game, and with only her and Serge, she didn’t want to invite trouble. She could defend herself well enough, ’twas true, but she wasn’t going to seek disquiet, either.
A different person would probably turn around and head back to the campsite, pack up and move another kilometer downstream before settling in for the night. That would certainly be the safe thing to do. The predictable, normal, safe thing.
But then she wouldn’t know who the travelers were, whether they posed a threat.
She crept closer to the voices. The cadences were low, all male but slightly different. She slipped silently between two shrubs, years of moving quietly through the woods while hunting with Papa aiding her stealth. She only needed to creep a bit closer.
Something about the voices didn’t sit right. The intonation seemed off, rough and coarse, without the gentle roll of French off one’s tongue. Perhaps if she overheard a word or two, she could better understand why they were camped so obscurely. The men could be anyone from gendarmes to army deserters to thieves.
Or they could be normal travelers having just left Reims and heading toward the coast like her and Serge.
Either way, she needed to know.
She crouched lower and inched forward. Something moved ahead, a flash of cream on the other side of the brambles. Then a cough sounded, loud and harsh and from deep within the chest.
Whoever made up this party, one of their members seemed not much longer for this world.
A gruff voice filled the air. “I still say we’re better to travel during the day.”
The breath in her lungs turned to ice. She couldn’t have heard right. No. Certainly not. It almost sounded as if they spoke...
“He’s right,” another man rasped, followed by a small cough. “We can’t travel at night. We hardly know which way to go during the day. We’d be lost within a matter of hours.”
English.
She swallowed against her suddenly dry throat. That vile country’s navy had killed her older brother. If she never saw another Englishman or heard the language spoken again, she’d be happy, indeed.
But what were a band of Englishmen doing here?
She squeezed her eyes shut. No. Never mind. She didn’t want to know.
Definitely didn’t want to know.
Most assuredly didn’t want to know.
She simply needed to get herself and her younger brother away from this place.
She began to back away as stealthily as she’d crept up. Except, with her hands shaking and her heartbeat thudding wildly in her ears, she wasn’t stealthy at all. Clumsy, more like. Her foot cracked a dried twig, and her cloak brushed against the brambles. She paused for a moment. Had they heard?
“We’re lost now.” A third voice, higher pitched than the first two and with a hint of intelligence behind his words, spoke.
She let out a silent breath. They’d noticed nothing. Now she need only move quietly—because she could be quiet if she didn’t let panic get the better of her—back through the brambles. Then she’d find Serge, and they’d pack up camp. Dinner could be some of the salt pork and bread they carried. No need for freshly roasted squirrel now, not when they had to find a gendarmerie post and report the Englishmen.
Because Englishmen traveling through France during the middle of a war could only be spies.
What secrets would these men impart to the British government if they re
ached the coast and no one stopped them? She was glad they were lost. They could walk around in circles for the next week.
Except by then, she’d have found that gendarmerie post and explained everything. A week hence, those British spies would be moldering in some nameless dungeon, likely being tortured and pouring forth whatever secrets they’d discovered about her country.
Which was exactly what they deserved.
But first she had to get away without anyone noticing.
“What do you want us to do? Stop and ask for directions?” The third, intelligent-sounding voice dripped with sarcasm. “Or perhaps a map? I’m sure there’s a very welcoming gendarmerie station along the road to Saint-Quentin. We need only present ourselves and say, ‘Good day, sirs. Could you tell me the quickest way from here to the channel? You see, I’ve two es—”
Something crashed in the woods behind her. Danielle whirled, the leather handle of her knife clamped tightly between her fingers. But too late. A male body slammed into her from the side and crashed her to the ground.
Shrubs scratched her arms and tore at her cloak as the man rolled himself over her. She fought as he struggled to sit up while holding her to the ground. He wasn’t overlarge or terribly strong, but he plunked himself down directly atop her while trapping the forearm that held her knife beneath his knee. If she could only find some way to upend him...
“Come quickly! I’ve found a spy.”
A spy? Her?
She wasn’t a spy. She was just...well, spying, but not for the reason they thought. They were the spies, and she’d only wanted to make certain she and Serge were safe from the men camped so close to their own site.
Or rather, that’s all she’d wanted to do until she’d discovered the mysterious men were English.
“What’s that you say?” The English voices grew closer and footsteps thudded on the muddy ground.
“You found someone?”
If she was going to get free, she had to do so quickly. She’d not lie there docilely while men from the same country that had killed Laurent attempted to capture her. She brought her knee up, trying to uproot the oaf’s bottom. The man only gripped her shoulders and pressed her harder against the damp earth. She twisted and turned, but his weight made it difficult to suck in air and his knee still pinned her knife hand.
“She was watching from the bushes,” her captor explained. “I wouldn’t have spotted her except she started moving as I was coming up from the stream with the water.”
Danielle pressed her eyes shut and stifled a groan. She should have considered someone might be at the stream, should have thought to scout the area before she’d even started into the bushes. Instead, she’d turned into a complete and total idiot at the sound of one simple phrase in English.
“What’s your name?” the intelligent voice asked in English.
She opened her eyes and stared at the tall form above her, with tousled dark brown hair, an arrogant, aristocratic nose, and eyes the color of fog over the ocean. Not quite gray but not quite blue, and just mysterious enough one might stare into them a bit too long, trying to understand—
“Her name matters not,” a deeper voice snapped. “How much did she overhear?” Another man appeared above her, leaner and taller than the first, with a face so thin and wan the bones seemed to jut from it. His hands appeared just as bony, as though he hadn’t had a good meal in the past half decade. But his emaciated body didn’t stop his shrewd green eyes from narrowing at her.
She licked her lips. What should she tell them? She hadn’t overheard much beyond that they were lost and debating when to travel. Could she pretend as though she didn’t know English and hadn’t understood a word? They had little reason to suspect a woman such as her would know their language.
And even if she wanted to answer their questions, she couldn’t manage to speak more than a word or two with an English ignoramus sitting atop her stomach and squishing the air from her body.
“I daresay she didn’t overhear anything,” the raspy voice spoke from the other side of the brambles. Then that horrid coughing filled the air again.
“A woman like her isn’t going to know English,” the dunce atop her proclaimed. At least he was useful for something besides squishing the breath from her body. “Lord Westerfield is right.”
Lord Westerfield? She nearly groaned, would have if she possessed the ability to breathe.
She moved her gaze between the two men standing above her, their patrician noses and arrogant bearings suddenly more than mere circumstance. As if finding regular Englishmen hiding in the woods wasn’t trouble enough. She’d somehow stumbled into a nest of aristocrats.
Just her luck.
“Try in French, Halston.” The thin blond man nudged the darker haired one—Halston, evidently.
Halston scowled at the other man. “You try in French. You’re the one who’s spent the past year and a half in this wretched country.”
“The only French I found use for were curses. The rest of the language I’d like to forget as quickly as possible.”
Danielle bit the side of her lip. This was probably supposed to be the moment she turned grateful for all those horrid English lessons her mother had forced upon her while growing up.
Except she still didn’t feel all that grateful—though it was rather helpful to know what they were saying instead of being left to guess their intent.
And now that she had a moment to consider, she’d best not speak in English. She might lay pinned beneath a wiry man who felt far heavier than he looked, but she still had two things to her advantage. First, her captors didn’t realize she understood their words, and second, they didn’t know about Serge.
If she managed nothing else from this debacle, she would at least keep them from learning of her brother.
“Stand her up, Farnsworth. Let’s have a look at her,” the blond commanded.
“She’s a person, Kessler, not some dog,” Halston growled.
The two men stared at each other, the air between them igniting like the sudden spark of a flintlock. Then Kessler turned away and the man atop her began to rise.
She tightened the grip on her knife, waiting for the perfect moment...
Chapter Two
Gregory had never seen anything more astounding. One second the woman was lying docilely beneath Farnsworth’s hold, and the next she’d reversed their positions, flipping his valet to the ground and sitting atop him, a knife pressed to his throat.
“Come any closer, and your servant dies.” The woman spoke in a calm, controlled voice, and judging by the fierce look etched across her face, she wasn’t bluffing. The French words fell comfortably off her tongue, only confirming what they’d already suspected. She knew not a lick of English.
Something sick rolled through his stomach. Why had he brought Farnsworth on this wretched journey in the first place? As though endangering himself, his brother and Kessler wasn’t enough.
He took a step closer to the woman, but her grip on the knife only tightened and her lips pressed into a thin white line. How was he supposed to get her off Farnsworth if she wouldn’t even let him approach?
“Lord Gregory,” Farnsworth gasped, evidently not minding moving his throat to speak despite the wicked-looking blade pressed against it. “I could use a little help here, if you don’t mind. Perhaps you might find my service to you worth a guinea or two and be willing to—”
“Silence!” the woman snapped.
Though the pronunciation in French was quite different from English, Gregory had no trouble recognizing the word.
He reached into his pocket and fished out two napoleons, speaking to Kessler without taking his eyes off the woman. “We can let her go.” Once he convinced her to leave Farnsworth unharmed, that was. “She couldn’t have understood what we were saying.”
Of course Kessler would have to argue with him. Though he did agree on one point: the woman was trouble, plain as day, with all that thick black hair ready to tumble from beneath her mobcap, those sharp blue eyes, quick reflexes...
And the blade.
She’d lain meekly under Farnsworth the entire time they talked about her, and somehow they’d all missed she had a blade. “Ah, shouldn’t we be more concerned about her freeing Farnsworth at the moment than us freeing her?”
Kessler waved his hand absently in the air. “She’s only a wench. Surely she can’t hold him for more than a minute or two, and then we’ll need to know what to do with her.”
True, they needed a plan for after she released Farnsworth, but first and foremost, they needed to get that knife away from her and his valet off the ground.
“Excusez moi.” He stepped closer to the woman, the rusted French bumbling over his tongue. He cringed a bit, and a trace of a smile curved the woman’s lips. But at least she didn’t press the knife closer to Farnsworth’s throat. “I give you my word that we won’t hurt you, but we have a few questions.”
Kessler made a disapproving sound, but what did he expect the woman to be told? That they wouldn’t let her go? They’d have to eventually. They could hardly cart another person all the way to the coast just to make certain she didn’t run off and inform the gendarmes of their whereabouts. A napoleon or two would likely keep her silence for the next half century.
“Leave it be, Kessler,” Westerfield said from where he lay on his blankets, his weak voice ten times more alarming than finding a woman spying on them through the bushes. Though if Gregory had to pick between some foul lung disease or a half-crazed Frenchwoman holding a knife to his neck, he might just pick the lung disease.