A Necessary Deception (2 page)

“In April,” Cassandra said. “He’s concerned about some sort of disturbance with workers in the north.” She embraced Lydia.

Something thudded against Lydia’s leg.

“I’m so sorry.” Cassandra blushed. “I was reading before dinner and slipped the book into my pockets . . .”

“Cassandra, you must stop doing that.” Honore gave her sister a look of horror. “It ruins the line of your gown.”

“I expect she’ll walk down the aisle to her groom with a book in her pocket.” Lydia rounded the table to clasp Mama’s hands. “I do apologize for worrying you over being late. It couldn’t be helped. But no scolding. Barbara has done enough of that already.”

“And where is Barbara?” Mama asked. “She did come with you?”

“I wouldn’t dream of leaving her behind. But she insisted on seeing that someone carried our luggage to our room. She’ll get the kitchen to send us up a cold collation. I’m far too dirty to sit at the table.” After all, she had brought the prison stench with her. “But before I bid you good night, how are Papa and our brother doing? Will they join us in town?”

“In April.” Honore grimaced. “All the men are waiting until the Season starts to join us. And Beau must wait until his term at Oxford is over, of course, if he doesn’t escape to the wilds of Scotland or someplace else instead.”

“They aren’t interested in shopping.” Mama laughed. “Your father turned green when I suggested he come be fitted for a new coat or two.”

“I understand.” Lydia plucked at a frayed edge of her sleeve that she hadn’t noticed with her bracelet on. “But I suppose I must get a gown or two.”

“A gown or two,” Honore fairly squeaked with horror. “You need a full wardrobe. No more dull widow colors. It’s been three years. Indeed, you should be looking for another husband to get you out of that little cottage.”

“I’d rather see you safely betrothed and Cassandra wed, thank you.” Lydia tried not to let her shudder show at the idea of another marriage, another male to direct her life into emptiness. “I had my chance.”

“When you were with him for only a week—”

“Honore.” Mama’s gentle but admonishing tone cut the youngest sister off. “Spend your energies persuading your eldest sister to let me buy her several new gowns.”

“I can fetch my periodicals.” Honore started to rise.

“Not tonight.” Lydia waved her youngest sister back to her chair. “I’ve been up since dawn and have a cat that needs a walk. We’ll have plenty of time in the carriage to discuss fashion.” After giving them each a kiss on the cheek, Lydia trudged up to the room she shared with Barbara, where she found her cat, Hodge, staring at a knothole in the wall.

“Find a mouse?”

“Let’s hope it stays in the wall.” Barbara removed a sliver of chicken from a covered tray on the room’s table. “I had the kitchen send up some fowl for him.”

“Thank you.” Lydia held the tidbit out to the cat.

Hodge’s pink nose sniffed at the chicken. His whiskers quivered, and he snatched the morsel from her fingers. After a second piece, he began to purr.

She stroked the long, silky white fur. “You’re such a good kitty. Would you like a walk?”

“You shouldn’t go outside alone,” Barbara said. “Let me fetch my cloak and I’ll join you.”

“I’ll get one of the inn maids to go with me. You eat your supper and get yourself into bed.” Lydia affixed a leash to Hodge’s collar and carried him downstairs.

He didn’t like the leash, but she feared losing him beyond a hedgerow, so she insisted he wear it whenever they traveled. Not that they had gone farther than her family home at Bainbridge since Charles had gifted her with the kitten seven years earlier. Lydia had used the leash on him since then, so he was used to it and only occasionally tried to bite it off.

Once on the ground floor, she saw no one to ask to accompany her. A chorus of voices from the kitchen suggested the servants enjoyed their dinner. She needn’t disturb them. No one would annoy her around this respectable inn.

No one annoyed her around any of the respectable inns in which the Bainbridge ladies spent their evenings and nights over the next six days. After being holed up in one of the carriages with Mama and Barbara discussing ailments and medicaments, or with Cassandra and Honore—the former managing to read despite the bouncing vehicle, the latter ceaselessly discussing gowns and beaux—Lydia welcomed her evening strolls with Hodge. She’d spent so much time alone in the past several years that so many persons close at hand left her exhausted. Fresh air cleared her head.

Not that the air of Portsmouth smelled particularly fresh. Too many naval vessels rode at anchor in the harbor, their stench of bilges, unwashed bodies, and pea soup dinners riding on the breeze. The inn garden plants, evergreen bushes vibrant beneath a March drizzle, helped mask the odors of the harbor. Peace, aloneness . . . save for the cat happy to prowl beneath the shrubbery.

Breathing deeply of the piney scent of the garden, Lydia set Hodge on the crushed shell path—

And a man stepped into her path. “Madame Gale.”

His voice was low, indistinct, as though he wore a muffler against the chill.

She retreated from the stranger. “You startled me, sir. I don’t know you.”

“Nor do you need to.”

“Then I needn’t speak to you.” She tugged on Hodge’s leash.

The man glided in front of her, barring her path. “You helped Christophe Arnaud get a parole from Dartmoor Prison.”

“That’s no one’s business.” Cold in the evening wet, she stooped and picked up Hodge, turning away as she straightened. “It was all quite legal.”

The man closed his hand over her arm, halting her retreat. “You’re not going anywhere yet, madame.”

“I beg your pardon.” Lydia stiffened. “Unhand me or I’ll scream for help.”

“And create a scene? I think not. You wouldn’t want to reflect badly on your sisters.”

He was right, blast his eyes.

The man laughed. “We have some business to transact.”

“We do not. I fulfilled my promise. My debt is paid.”

“But at too high a price, I think.” The man’s fingers tapped on her arm as though he played a tune on a pianoforte. “You see, Madame Gale, Christophe Arnaud never arrived in Tavistock.”

“What happened to him?” Lydia focused all her attention on the stranger now. “I saw him leave. He had an escort. He had everything he needed. He—was he injured? Assaulted?” She squeezed Hodge so tightly the cat shot out of her arms with a yowl.

How could she have made amok of such a simple act of kindness?

“He eluded his guard and escaped.”

“Escaped.” Lydia peered through the darkness, trying to see the man’s face. “What are you saying? He was paroled from Dartmoor. He didn’t escape.”

“Not Dartmoor, my lady, England.”

“But that’s not possible.” She shook her head, sending half of her hair sliding from its pins and into her face. “He wouldn’t have had the time or the means to get away.”

“Of course he did, and you provided both. In other words, my lady, you allowed an enemy of England to return to his country. Lady Gale, you have committed an act of treason.”

Lydia’s damp cloak felt as though it were lined with lead, weighing her down from her shoulders to her heart to a sinking sickness in her belly. If this man were telling the truth, she had misread Christophe Arnaud, had looked into those beautiful blue eyes and read truth instead of the lies he’d said about his gratitude for her assistance.

No, not lies. He must be grateful. She’d given him the means to get away from his enemies.

His enemies, her countrymen. Countrymen she had betrayed by trying to make up for her failings of the past.

Her heart began to pound like the drums of approaching soldiers. She took a deep breath in an attempt to lift the pressure crushing her chest. “I would never have helped a dishonorable man, abetted the actions of an enemy. I—I thought he was—”

She stopped. She need not admit her poor judgment in character. No one need know she found Christophe Arnaud attractive as a man, appealing as a brother in Christ, touching as a man in need of help, as her husband had been when captured behind enemy lines after the Spanish disaster three years earlier.

“You gave Monsieur Arnaud a bracelet, did you not?” The man’s quiet voice purred across the space between them. “A bracelet given to you after your husband somehow didn’t manage to get aboard the transport ships and return to England.”

“Somehow?” Lydia clenched her fists. “He was a good officer. He waited to see his men safely aboard.”

“And Monsieur Arnaud just happened to help—”

“How do you know this?”

“It’s my business to know.” He released her arm and moved away from her.

Lydia took a step backward. “Hodge—”

No Hodge. The leash went slack in her hand. The cat no longer tugged at the end of the leather strap.

“Are you looking for your cat?” The man loomed up before her, a blackness against the rain-gray evening. He held her cat. The feline’s white fur shone against his dark coat. And Hodge was purring, the traitor. Another treacherous male.

Except she was the one accused of treachery.

“Give him to me,” she commanded.

“When we’re done speaking.”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“You have a great deal to say to me. To begin with, tell me, my lady, how would your husband, wounded and behind enemy lines, manage to send you an expensive piece of jewelry?”

“Monsieur Arnaud—”

“Out of the goodness of his heart for an enemy?” The man’s laugh rumbled like Hodge’s purr. “More likely it was a favor for a comrade in arms.”

“But my husband was an English—” Lydia’s stomach twisted. Only her will kept her from doubling over. “You’re accusing my husband of working for the French.”

“And the bracelet was sent to you with a coded message just for such an occasion as today—the means to get a fellow follower of Napoleon out of prison, should the worst occur.”

“That’s preposterous. He’d have no way of knowing I’d use it. I could have sold it, lost it, refused to help.”

“Could you have refused to help?”

“I—” Lydia swallowed against the bile burning her throat.

Again that purring chuckle, echoed by her unfaithful cat. “Of course not. Even if you no longer possessed the bracelet, you would have done what you could to help Arnaud for the sake of your husband’s memory.”

To prove she could succeed in one of his requests as a widow, as she had failed to do as his wife. But Sir Charles Gale would never ask her to betray England. He wouldn’t have betrayed England. He had returned to his regiment out of loyalty in the dark days when the war was going badly for England and fears of invasion were only minimally allayed.

“I erred in assisting Arnaud.” The words barely managed to emerge, though “I erred” should have slipped out with ease. She had said them far too often in the past seven years. “But it proves nothing against my husband or me,” she added with haste.

“Does it not?” He stroked Hodge’s pale coat, his hand, perhaps in a glove, dark against the silvery fur. The purr grew louder. “The Home Office and War Department wouldn’t agree.”

“The Home Office?”

“We manage matters of domestic protection. Spies and traitors on our soil.”

He might as well have thrown her feline against her middle. His words struck with the force of ten pounds of clawing cat. For a dozen heartbeats, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

And the man kept talking as though discussing the March drizzle soaking her hair and cloak. “Arnaud never took the road to Tavistock.”

“How do you know?”

“I was waiting for him.”

Cold more profound than the late winter weather ran over Lydia’s skin, penetrated to her bones, her marrow. “Why?” she whispered.

“Why did you help him escape?”

“I never—” She stopped. She need not defend herself to this stranger. This enemy.

“Where is he, Lady Gale?” the man purred along with Hodge.

“I have no idea.” She injected her tone with all the hauteur of a lady of quality, as she’d been raised.

“Why did you help a French prisoner escape from England?” The demand lashed out at her.

She winced but remained silent. The hair on the back of her neck felt as though it stood on end, rather like Hodge when he sensed a foe nearby—puffed-up fur and silence.

Yes, silence. He’d stopped purring.

A shiver crawled down Lydia’s arms. She slid a foot back, then stopped. Even if she could leave her cat behind to an uncertain fate, she couldn’t run away now. She must know what this man wanted, why he had approached her in the dark with his accusations of treason and offhand mention of the Home Office. What proof he possessed.

“You can remain as silent as you like, my lady,” the man said, shifting and receiving a protesting
mrauw
from Hodge, “but I have a fisherman in Falmouth who will swear to the fact that you were there arranging transport across the Channel for him.”

“I wasn’t.” His announcement startled the denial from her. “I couldn’t have been.”

“Can you prove it?”

“I was with someone all day.”

“Your paid companion.”

And she hadn’t been with Barbara all day. She’d gone into Tavistock before leaving for the prison. Any number of urchins loitered about. She could have sent one with a message to Falmouth, Plymouth, or anywhere in between.

“I see you understand your dilemma.” Self-satisfaction colored the man’s tone. “But you needn’t believe me. That fisherman is waiting not a dozen yards away, ready to tell you he received your message and complied.”

“But—” Lydia’s nostrils flared, as though she could smell the fisherman.

Something smelled like dead fish indeed, but it didn’t lie in the rain-washed garden.

“And I found this in a Falmouth jewelry store.” The man shifted. Gravel crunched. The light from the inn reaching the garden shimmered off metal interspersed with the dark fire of jewels. Lydia didn’t need to touch or see the object to know it was her bracelet.

“You—you could have stolen it, set upon Mr. Arnaud on the road.”

“He had an armed escort. And I have a statement from the jeweler besides.”

The bracelet sparkled in the feeble light from the lantern above the inn door. Hodge batted at it.

The man chuckled and the bracelet disappeared. “All this evidence gathering has cost me dearly.”

“Then why—?”

As though lightning streaked against the gray-black sky, illuminating the scene like day, understanding flashed into Lydia’s mind.

Blackmail.

“I can pay you nothing for your silence.” Now that she knew the game, she stood upright and composed. “I have no money.”

“I know that. But you have something I hold of more value than money—social connections.”

“I don’t—”

But of course she did through her family. Everyone who was anyone would either come to Bainbridge House or invite the Bainbridges to their homes over the next four months.

“What do you want me to do?” She would go along with him, find out as much as she could.

“Introduce my friends to your connections so they get invited to the best parties.”

“Why?” She didn’t have to feign bewilderment. “How will that help your . . . cause?”

With every word he spoke, the more she realized he could not be from the British government. The English government didn’t need to resort to blackmail for aid.

She was being blackmailed by a French agent.

“I won’t do it.” Despite the frozen lump in her middle that had once been her liver, she spoke her declaration with clarity and strength. “I won’t betray my country.”

“But you already have.”

“Your evidence is false.”

“Then produce Monsieur Arnaud. Otherwise you must do what I say.”

“Or call your bluff.”

“Do you dare?” The man shifted. A hint of lemon verbena wafted to her nostrils. “Let’s see here. You have a brother who is a promising student at Oxford. You have a sister about to be married to a peer of the realm, and another sister about to make her come-out into Society. And we mustn’t forget your frail mother and your father’s standing in the House of
Lords.”

Lydia folded her arms across her middle, pressed hard against the desire to be sick or run or drop to her knees in surrender to the burden he dropped onto her shoulders. If she were a lone woman, she would take the chance of calling this man’s bluff.

But she had a family she’d already let down too often as she pursued her own way in the world.

If she were allowed to succeed at something in her future, protecting her family from this villain would be it. And yet . . .

“I can’t aid in your doing something to harm my country or my family,” she said.

“Your country? What makes you think it’s not mine too?”

“A manner of speech, is all.” She made herself smile so he could hear congeniality in her voice. “I speak of England as my country. But of course a loyal Englishman would be concerned about a French officer escaping back to France.”

“Indeed, I am. I have reason to believe he intends to send agents to foment trouble. You fear revolution, do you not?”

“A guillotine in Hyde Park? Y-yes.” The quaver in her words was genuine.

“So I will send you someone to help ferret out these troublemakers.”

“Indeed. Well, sir, you only needed to ask. You needn’t resort to blackmail.”

“It is necessary.” He lifted Hodge in his hands and held him toward her. “In the event you grow fearful of your role, I need a leash to keep you bound to me.”

And what a leash—the potential to cost her her life and ruin her family.

“What must I do?” she asked on an exhalation of breath.

Carrying her limp and still-purring cat in her arms, the cut leash dangling from her wrist, Lydia trudged back to the inn. Warmth surrounded her inside the entryway. Aromas of roast beef and spilled ale stung her nostrils, and her stomach roiled. Her heart ached. She thought she’d been given an opportunity to make up for resenting being a wife, for driving her husband back to the battlefield and keeping him there. All she had to do was give aid to a French prisoner who had given aid to her husband. But she’d misread the man, mismanaged the release, risked the future of everyone in her family.

Feet dragging, she climbed the steps to her bedchamber. Before she shifted Hodge so she could open the door, the latch clicked and Barbara stood between jamb and panels.

“Where have you been?” her companion demanded.

“Hodge’s leash broke.” With the help of a knife. “I had to find him.”

“And now your cloak is all muddy. You should have left him behind with that Frenchman.”

“Hodge and I haven’t been separated since Charles gave him to me as a betrothal gift. He would have been distressed.”

“Captain Gale couldn’t be distressed,” Barbara pointed out. “He’s dead, God rest his soul.”

“If God has it,” Lydia muttered.

“Lydia.” Barbara’s eyes widened with shock.

“Forgive me. I’m fatigued beyond reason. I can’t be accountable for what I say.” But of course she could. She was accountable for her words and her actions. “Where’s—ah.” She set Hodge in his box.

He sniffed at the now-empty bowl, flashed her an indignant glance from clear, green eyes, and snuggled into a nest of blanket strips.

His life wasn’t topsy-turvy. He could sleep with a clear conscience.

Although she knew her conscience was clear as far as the stranger’s accusations were concerned, Lydia couldn’t sleep. She dared not toss and turn for fear of waking Barbara, who enjoyed the sleep of the innocent—or was that naive?—so she lay awake with her eyes open. That way she managed to focus on the occasional display of lights tossed across the ceiling by a passerby with a lantern. She strained to hear snatches of conversation in the street or corridor. She recited every poem she knew by heart, anything to keep herself from thinking of the accusations, the evidence—false as it was—a pair of deep blue eyes, and a melodious voice.

Lord, I only wanted to do something right on my own.

If it only affected her, she wouldn’t care. She would retire to her little cottage on the edge of Dartmoor and keep drawing her sketches and painting her pictures, selling enough to keep the wolves from the door, since her husband had left her with an income of less than a hundred pounds a year. She had failed to produce the heir that would have had the Gale lands and income going to his branch of the family instead of to a distant relation.