Much Ado About Rogues (8 page)

“Horse! Horse!” Jacques was shouting overtop his mother’s complaints.

Jack looked at Tess. She did look a bit…disheveled. Beautiful, but perhaps a little worn about the edges four hours into their ride to London, her bonnet lying partially crushed on the seat, a few locks of blond hair escaping their pins. His son was obviously a handful.

Jack smiled at the thought.
His son.
Of course he’d be a handful!

He called out to the coachman to stop the coach, and then leaned down and depressed the latch to the door. “Hand him up to me,” he said to Tess. “What he needs is some fresh air.”

Tess looked ready to object, but then a slow smile curved her mouth. Some might have called it an evil smile. “Of course. But I warn you, he doesn’t smell all that fresh, not since the last time he was sick. How long until we’re in London?”

“No more than another hour. I’ll keep him with me until we’re actually in the city. Then I want him inside with you, and the curtains drawn. Agreed?”

“Oh, yes. Happily agreed,” Tess said, handing Jacques up to Jack.
“Jacques, essayez ne pas cracher sur Papa’s bottes.”

Try not to spit on Papa’s boots?
“Very amusing, Tess. Why don’t you take a hint from Emilie, and try to nap. You look as if you could use some rest. But then, you didn’t get much sleep last night, did you?”

Insults exchanged, Jack lifted Jacques and placed him in front of him on the saddle. Tess pulled the door shut with decided force, signaling the coachman to proceed.

It was like old days come back again. The teasing, the sparring, and quite often, the competition. Except with the child now between them. And so much more.

With his left arm wrapped securely about his son’s middle, Jack leaned down to kiss the child’s soft curls, not yet used to the swift fierce feelings just being near his son engendered in him.
Mine.
What a curious thing to think.
Mine.

He’d had no future. Now he did. He’d had no hope. Yet now he was hopeful. There were no happy endings. But maybe there could be.

All that lay between him and Tess now was the past, in the forms of Sinjon and the Gypsy…and René. But was it him that she couldn’t forgive for what happened to René, or herself?

Jacques was now holding tight to the stallion’s mane and bouncing up and down in front of Jack. “Horse! Horse!
Plus rapidement!
Faster! Faster!”

“Oh, really? Faster is it? I should have known this couldn’t be your first time in the saddle, not with Tess for your
maman.
Very well,
mon enfant,
faster!”

CHAPTER SIX

“G
OOD
EVENING
, sir,” the Grosvenor Square butler said as he personally held open the rear door that led in from the mews, just as if Jack had been expected. The man was unflappable, even if he’d had to run down three flights of stairs when alerted that Mr. Blackthorn had arrived at the stables behind the Blackthorn mansion.

“Good evening, Wadsworth,” Jack responded, and then passed him the soundly sleeping Jacques. “Any harm comes to this child and I’ll have your liver for lunch while you watch. Understood?” he added in the same pleasant tone.

“I would expect no less, sir. Good evening, miss,” he then said as Tess walked into the warm kitchens, looking about her as if to get her bearings.

“Lady Thessaly Fonteneau, Wadsworth. See that her belongings are taken upstairs.”

Wadsworth, soldier turned butler, had never quite mastered the intricacies of proper butlering. However, thanks to Masters Beau and Puck, he did have fairly recent experience in these matters to bring to the subject the disposition of milady’s portmanteaus. He wasn’t blind, after all, and Mr. Blackthorn couldn’t deny this dark-haired child any more than Wadsworth could stop the sun from rising come morning. “Yes, Mr. Blackthorn, it will be just as you wish.”

Jack almost thought he’d detected a wink from the man, but discounted it as Emilie swept into the kitchens with a rapid stream of authoritative French, relieved Wadsworth of his burden and demanded to be shown the nursery.

Tess put out a hand as if to stop the butler and nursemaid as they took her son away from her, but dropped her arm to her side at Jack’s slight shake of his head.

“I’ve been told the Blackthorn butler once knocked down ten of Bonaparte’s elite private guard just by blowing on them. I imagine there was more to it than that, but I’d trust him with my son, and you should do the same. Come along. We’ll go to the drawing room and the wine decanter I’m sure is already there, waiting for us.”

“Come along? I’d rather you didn’t order me about, Jack. It only serves to make me feel rebellious, and as I’m extremely thirsty, that would only be cutting off my nose to spite my face.”

“And such a pretty nose, too. All right.” He offered her his bent arm. “An it pleases you, milady, I would suggest we adjourn to the drawing room for refreshments. Lemonade, perhaps?”

She looked him up and down, as if inspecting him for vulnerable spots she might attack. “Arrogant
and
condescending, and both displayed within the space of a minute. Two of your less attractive traits, Jack, as I recall. Just lead the way, all right? I want to get the taste of road dust out of my mouth.”

Signaling to the sleepy-eyed cook who’d just appeared in the kitchens that food would be welcome, Jack led the way through the mansion to the drawing room. While Tess collapsed rather inelegantly on one of the satin couches, he poured them each full glasses of wine and offered one to her. Only Tess could act so rough and ready and still be the most beautiful, feminine woman he’d ever seen.

She downed it in one go. Ah, the French, weaned on wine from the cradle. He sometimes wondered if she could drink him under the table.

“That’s better,” she said, holding out the empty glass to him to be refilled. “Now, I’ve had an idea.”

“Not tonight, Tess. Sinjon’s been in London for more than a week. One more night won’t matter. Either we’re in time, or we’re already too late. We’ve other things to discuss.”

She shifted slightly in her seat. “True, but I don’t want to discuss them.”

“And yet that’s just what we’re going to do.” Jack took up a position in front of the fireplace, one arm resting on the mantelpiece below a portrait of the Marquess of Blackthorn.

It proved a bad choice.

“That’s your father?” Tess put down her wineglass and stood up, walking closer to inspect the portrait of a younger marquess, handsome, blond, fair of skin and blue of eye, the portrait probably commissioned when he was much the same age Jack was now. “You don’t favor him. Is your mother dark?”

“No,” Jack answered shortly.

“No?” Tess looked at the portrait again, at Jack again. “Your mother’s fair, then? Like me?”

“Adelaide is nothing like you, and you’re nothing like her. If you were, that child upstairs would never have happened. We’re here to discuss Jacques, and why you kept him from me.”

He shouldn’t have bothered to attempt to divert her. Tess, presented with a puzzle, was like a dog with a bone. She clamped on, and wouldn’t let go. “Your brothers. Oliver LeBeau and Robin Goodfellow to your Don John. All named for Shakespearean characters, courtesy of your actress mother. Don John was a bastard, Jack. I’ve never much cared for Shakespeare, I’ll admit, but I did learn that. Are the other two characters also bastards?”

“No, they’re not. And my brothers prefer to be known as Beau and Puck. Just as I prefer Jack. Why didn’t you tell me? My son, Tess.
My son.
”

He may as well not have spoken.

“Are they also dark? Beau and Puck?”

Jack deserted the mantelpiece for the drinks table, pouring himself another glass of wine. He never should have brought her here. He could have taken her to his house in Half Moon Street, but he preferred the mansion as being safer for Jacques. “They favor their parents,” he said, and then turned to challenge Tess with his eyes. “You’re not going to stop, are you?”

“Would you?” she asked him, standing her ground. “You once told me you didn’t belong anywhere. I thought you were referring to your bastard birth. It had to be difficult, must still be difficult, to be the bastard son of a marquess. Neither fish nor fowl, as it were, I suppose, not knowing precisely where you fit, if anywhere. But we’re in your father’s mansion, and you clearly not for the first time. The marquess seems to be generous to his bastards.”

She was working it through, piece by piece, and Jack allowed it, mostly because he knew he couldn’t stop her.

“Is he similarly generous to your mother?”

“I suppose you’d have to ask her. He ordered a cottage built on the estate for her, and she stays there when she isn’t traveling with the acting troupe he’s bought her. It has a thatched roof. The cottage, that is. She enjoys playing the country maiden. There are a few sheep, and she dresses up like a shepherdess and carries a crook with a large pink bow on— Yes, I suppose she’s content.”

“You don’t like her, do you? Your mother. It’s not her fault you’re a bastard, Jack. That’s unfair.”

Jack laughed shortly. “True. Poor Adelaide. Clearly you sympathize with her, one bastard’s mother to another.”

Tess crossed the room swiftly and slapped him hard across the cheek. “Don’t call our son a bastard!”

Jack didn’t flinch. “Pardon me. I seem to have forgotten our marriage ceremony.”

She rubbed her hands together. Her palm probably stung; God knew his cheek felt as if it was on fire. “That’s not what I meant. It’s not what you said. It’s the way you said it. As if…as if it mattered.”

“It
does
matter, Tess. Christ, if nobody else knows that, I do. My brothers do. We were raised on the estate. In that sprawling country house. Raised to be better than we were. Given everything save the one thing we needed. Legitimacy. That’s not how it’s going to be for my son. I’ve already sent a message to Blackthorn. The banns are being read in the village church, and one way or another—if I have to carry you to the altar over my shoulder and drugged stupid—you and I will be married in four weeks’ time.
That’s
what we’re discussing tonight.”

Now
he’d succeeded in diverting her.

“You don’t want to marry me, Jack,” she said quietly.

“You’re right. I don’t. I wanted to marry the Tess I knew. I don’t know you. The Tess I knew wouldn’t have kept my son from me.”

“You’ve grown hard, Jack. Cold. You were never like that with me. You’re not the man I remember, either.”

“Four years is a long time,” he agreed. “A lifetime, when you’re carrying what I’ve carried with me, knowing what I know.”

“René,” she said quietly.

It was time they had this out. “Yes, René, he’s a major part of it. I changed the plan, altering it to include you and include your brother. For that I am guilty, and I’ll never forgive myself for not excluding both of you, which is what I should have done. I knew he was hot to please Sinjon, hot to impress him, prove himself.”

“Not just Papa. He wanted you to be proud of him. He worshipped you.”

“Then he was a fool. But still, there should have been another way, and I should have found it. That’s my sin, Tess, and I admit to it. But there was more, and you know that now.”

“Papa risked René to get the Gypsy.”

Jack laughed ruefully. “That’s it? That’s all you think can be put at Sinjon’s door? My God, you’re still blind, aren’t you?”

Tess’s expression closed. “I’d like to be shown to my chamber now.”

“What was the plan?”
Jack shouted to her departing back. “Think, Tess. What was the plan!”

Her shoulders slumped and she turned to him, tears standing in her eyes. “I was to be the stalking horse, the decoy, the distraction,” she said quietly. “I was to stand in the glow of the streetlamp outside Covent Garden, clutching the satchel supposedly holding the money to be exchanged for Bonaparte’s next battle plan. Reveal myself, draw the man’s attention, divert him, make him in turn reveal himself so that you and Papa could take him down once he’d taken possession of the satchel.”

“Thank you,” Jack said, his voice dripping venom. “You, not René. Out in the open, not in a Whitechapel alleyway. With only Sinjon knowing that the mission was not what we thought it was, with only Sinjon knowing we weren’t going up against some inferior French traitor, but drawing out the Gypsy, the monster he’d taught every trick he ever knew.”

Tess wet her lips as she nodded. “He would have known, yes. Papa’s used the same ploy before.”

Jack gave a quick thought to Dickie Carstairs. “And I’ve used it since, to great effect, I admit that. Making it easy for the Gypsy to recognize it and form a counter-plan of his own,” he told her, approaching her slowly so that possibly she wouldn’t bolt, run away from the truth. He spoke quietly now. “So why not put one of my children—it didn’t matter which one—out there as a decoy, and then I’d wait for the Gypsy to ignore the obvious ploy. I’d wait for him to come out of the shadows just where he knew I’d be hiding, ready to strike. Except that didn’t happen, did it? Sinjon wasn’t even looking in René’s direction when the monster cut him down.”

Tess was standing with her arms tightly wrapped around her middle, rocking back and forth as tears rolled down her cheeks. She hadn’t been there, she hadn’t seen it, the quick savagery.

But Jack had been watching. He’d been in place, ready to move, when a blur of black, hooded cloak moved across the alleyway, barely hesitating in front of René before disappearing through a narrow door previously unnoticed by anyone. René hadn’t even hit the cobblestones before the door had closed, the hooded figure gone.

Jack had run to the boy, not even remembering how he had leapt over the barrels that had concealed his position, arriving long seconds before Sinjon, who promptly knelt down, his ear close to his son’s mouth. René grabbed his father’s arm, said something Jack couldn’t make out, and then his hand fell away. He was dead, the knife in his chest to the hilt, a strange black calling card with a golden eye at its center half-tucked into his waistcoat pocket.

The Gypsy had come to that alley not to sell French secrets to the Crown, as Jack had been told, but expressly to kill. But not to kill Sinjon. René’s murder was a warning. Tess’s death would have delivered that same warning had she been the one standing in the alley.

“He thought I’d—he thought René would be safely out of it.”

“Which is where you both should have been, damn it. This wasn’t for Crown and country, Tess. This was private, one man against the other. And for what, Tess? For that damn
collection.
”

“You should have told me then—the secret room, the collection, all of it. You shouldn’t have let me blame you. Papa said—”

“I know what he told you. That I froze. That I didn’t move fast enough. I was closer, I should have been able to stop it. My most important mission, and I’d botched it. And I had, Tess. I should have put a stop to it all before we ever went into that alley.”

“You didn’t know then that our quarry was the Gypsy.” She put her hand on his arm. “René’s dead. We can’t either of us change that. I wish you had told me. I wish I could believe I’d have been ready to listen. Everything would have been so…different.”

Jack slipped his arms around her, pulling her close against his chest. “This time he dies, Tess. I promise you that.”

She stepped back to look at him, to watch his reaction to her next words, he was sure. “And this time I’ll be there to see him die.”

All right. Now it was his turn to look at her, watch her. “And Sinjon? What about him?”

“I don’t know, Jack. I just don’t know.”

* * *

T
ESS
THANKED
THE
maid who’d helped her into her nightrail and dismissed her, already looking longingly at the turned-down bed across the large chamber. She’d been upstairs to see that Jacques was sound asleep, tucked up in a cot shaped like a swan, of all things, and that Emilie was snoring loudly in the next room, the door open between them.