The Spy's Kiss (14 page)

“I don't care for the city,” she said quickly, before Simon could give a more complete (and more revealing) answer. “And Simon—” She paused, searching for a suitably ambiguous phrase. “Simon found that London did not agree with him.”

Clermont wasn't fooled. “Got yourself into a mess of some sort?” he asked the boy.

“I broke into the vault underneath St. Paul's with my friends Ned and Jamie,” Simon said, with some pride. “The verger screamed when he found us.”

“Dear me,” murmured Meyer, one eyebrow raised. He glanced at Serena and she knew what he was thinking:
that boy should be at school
. She was almost beginning to agree with him.

The footman reappeared, holding the door open for Bassington.

Clermont jumped up, perturbed. “Sir!” he exclaimed. “Your man must have misunderstood me; I proposed to come down and say my farewells when you had a moment to spare. I never meant you to interrupt your work to come up here.”

The earl frowned. “You sent a servant to find me? You are leaving?”

“Yes, my regrets, but my grandfather sent down an urgent summons which reached me only this morning.”

“Ah, your grandfather,” said Bassington. “Indeed.” His tone was thoughtful.

Serena saw Clermont raise his head slightly, like an animal scenting danger.

The earl walked over to the table. He had to look up at the taller man. “I understand that you sometimes wear a signet ring,” he said. “Might I see it?”

His face suddenly expressionless, Clermont untied his neckcloth, reached under his shirt, and pulled out a chain. The heavy gold ring swung at the end and made a small thunk, audible in the now-silent room, as it dropped into the earl's hand.

Bassington turned the ring over and examined the seal carefully. Serena caught a glimpse of three fleurs-de-lis encircling a diagonal bar. The raised elements were in yellow gold; the field of the signet was in white gold. The device meant nothing to her, but it clearly meant something to her uncle. He was frowning, tracing the design with his finger, nodding to himself.

Serena looked back and forth between the two men. Meyer was making no pretense of continuing work on the lens grinder; he, too, was staring at Clermont.

“You are a Condé, then,” Bassington announced, after a long silence.

“Of a sort.”

His shrug, at least, was French, thought Serena. The name Condé was vaguely familiar to her. Familiar and terrifying. Why did she know that name?

“I had assumed, between one thing and another, that the younger generation of the Condés was now extinct,” her uncle said in his usual blunt manner.

“Oh, there are still a few left. They only arrested the genuine ones,” Clermont said. His mouth had a bitter twist. “And most of my kinsmen had sense enough to leave France with their families before the slaughter began in earnest.”

The earl handed back the signet and stood silently for a moment. “You have not returned since you were sent away as a child?”

Clermont shook his head.

“Probably a wise decision,” said the earl, his face grim. “Considering what happened to your—second cousin? In spite of the precautions of your kinsmen.”

“First cousin,” was the response.

“Then your grandfather is Louis-Joseph de Bourbon-Condé? The prince?”

“Yes.” Clermont stood braced as if expecting an attack.

“That explains why I thought I recognized you,” her uncle muttered.

A prince. His grandfather was a prince. Now she knew why the name sounded familiar. The Condés were a branch of the French royal family. Their claim to the throne was thought by many to be stronger than that of the current king-in-waiting, Louis Bourbon. The man she had snubbed and lectured and accused of lying was a descendant of Louis XIV.

“Then of course you will honor his request and go to London at once.” The earl sighed. “I'm afraid the countess will be very disappointed. She had hoped you might make a longer stay.”

Clermont bowed and murmured that he planned to present himself to the countess shortly to apologize and thank her for her gracious hospitality.

Instead of the equally meaningless polite murmur she expected, her uncle beckoned to the footman by the door.

“I have an apology to make as well,” he said. He took something from the footman and dismissed him. It took Serena a moment to see what it was: a piece of rope. It took her another moment to understand its significance.

“I am sorry to say that an underling in my household has been guilty of an appalling breach of courtesy,” the earl said stiffly. “This person visited your chambers and searched your possessions. When he found this rope, recognizing it as possibly connected to that used on Clark's Hill, he cut off a sample and brought it to me.” Horrified, Serena glanced instinctively at Meyer. The pseudoscholar looked appropriately bewildered as he glanced from one man to the other, but she was certain he had engineered this little drama. He, presumably, had searched Clermont's rooms; her uncle would never have done so.

“Yes, my manservant has been visiting chandlers to see if he could find some clue as to who might have set the trap,” Clermont said. He did not look guilty or nervous. “I believe that particular sample comes from Maidenhead, but I can ask him, if you like. Does it match the rope tied to the trees, as my servant claims?”

“It seems so.”

“Would you like the rest of the coil, then? And the name of the supplier? I had thought Constable Googe was the correct person to receive the information, but I beg your pardon if I should have come to you instead.”

“No, no, my boy.” Her uncle was looking embarrassed. “It is I who must beg your pardon. To search through a guest's saddlebags! Unthinkable! Needless to say the fellow will be leaving my household at once. Without a reference.” He clapped the younger man on the shoulder. “I should have remembered your promise to send your servant out to make inquiries.” He turned to go, then swung back. “By the by, I will be removing to London myself within a few days. If I can persuade my wife and my niece to accompany me, is there any chance we might see you in town?”

Clermont inclined his head. “I should be delighted.”

 

 

The earl's conference with Meyer shortly afterwards was less friendly. Bassington was furious. “You made a fool of me,” he told Meyer, nearly spitting the words. “In front of my niece and my son, to boot! A guest in my home was embarrassed, was accused, by implication, of the lowest sort of trickery—and not just any guest! A descendant of the noblest house in France!”

“That interview, I will remind you, was your idea, my lord. I was content with your promise to take the documents up to Sir Charles in London. A promise I trust you still mean to honor.”

“Certainly. Although I presume you will not object if I receive the young man at my home in London, now that these absurd suspicions of yours have been put to rest.”

Meyer raised his eyebrows. “My suspicions are not put to rest. Not at all. Mr. Clermont's composure and prompt answers prove nothing. Indeed, an innocent man would likely have been more outraged by the search of his baggage. But you are welcome to entertain him—if the documents are not in your house.”

“Bah!” The earl stomped over to his cabinet, pulled out an old tin snuffbox from behind a pile of books, and took two enormous pinches. The violent sneezes which followed did seem to calm him somewhat. “I suppose there is some sense in giving the letters to Barrett,” he said grudgingly. “After all, he has the notebooks. What's more, with both of us in town there will be no need to send drafts back and forth.”

Meyer wisely said nothing.

“The weather is improving.” The earl glanced out the window at the leaden sky and corrected himself. “Or will be improving shortly. And if London is thin of company, that makes it all the more likely I can persuade my niece to accompany us. Unless, of course, you and Colonel White have some objection to Mr. Clermont's apparent interest in my niece? Do you have proof that that, too, is a fraud?”

It was a rhetorical question, and Meyer did not bother to answer. His own observations, which were not always confined to political and military matters, suggested that Clermont was indeed intrigued by Miss Allen and she by him—however reluctant they were to acknowledge the attraction. But he did not think their romance was likely to have a happy ending.

“The man has not even been gone for two hours,” Serena said, scowling, “and my aunt is already trying to persuade me to go up to London with my uncle. I should have told her straight out that the prospect of seeing Mr. Clermont again makes an already undesirable location even less desirable. We are well rid of Mr. Clermont and Mr. Meyer both. I am looking forward to a nice, peaceful fortnight with no visitors and no constables and no missing government papers. If any butterfly-men come I shall tell Pritchett to send them away.”

She and Simon were in one of his favorite retreats, a small, windowless room accessible only from the servants' corridors. The countess had given Simon permission to fix it up as a secret hideout on condition that he always leave the door to the corridor open when he was there. She had read somewhere that children with weak lungs could become ill from breathing stale air in enclosed spaces. Simon ignored this requirement; as he pointed out to Serena, what was the point of a secret hideout if one could not close the door? The room contained three items of furniture: a lamp stand, an old armchair—granted by custom to Simon—and an even older trunk sporting an impressive series of straps and padlocks to keep prying eyes away from Simon's collection of interesting objects. Serena was sitting on the trunk. She had never, in any of her numerous visits to the hideout, seen the trunk opened.

Once she had asked what was in it.

“Things,” Simon had said darkly. “Things people don't want me to have.”

She had taken the hint, and treated the chest from then on only as a bench.

They sat in silence for a while. Simon was halfheartedly fitting together the mortise and tenon of two panels from a dismantled wooden box. Serena's eyes were closing; she felt very tired. When Simon spoke, she jumped.

“Serena, who are the Condés? Why is it dangerous for Mr. Clermont in France?”

“The Condés are a branch of the French Royal family,” she said. Her tongue formed the words, but she did not yet believe them herself.

“But why can't he go back? Your count did. He was an officer under Napoleon, even though he was a nobleman. The French are not killing aristocrats now.”

Serena barely noticed this reference to a man she had forbidden Simon, on pain of a hideous and painful death, ever to mention again. “The Condés who survived the Terror remain in exile because Napoleon considers them a threat to his power—a greater threat perhaps even than the Bourbon king.” Fat Louis, as most Englishmen dubbed him, was not a very regal figure. Serena had seen him several times in the days when she still went to London. He resembled nothing so much as a giant frog, and the newspapers took great pleasure in printing unflattering cartoons of Louis in coronation robes held up by a simpering Lord Liverpool. Across the channel it was much the same: the Bourbons were heartily despised in France. The Condés, on the other hand, were much admired, and had a claim to the throne nearly as strong as that of Louis Bourbon.

“Well, what would happen if he did go back?”

“Most likely, Napoleon would shut him up in the dungeon at Vincennes and then shoot him.”

“He would not,” Simon said scornfully. “This is 1814. No one can put people in dungeons and shoot them.”

“Tell that to Mr. Clermont's cousin.”

There was another silence.

“What happened to the cousin?” he asked after a minute, conceding defeat.

“Napoleon kidnapped him from another country, smuggled him back into France, put him in the dungeon at Vincennes, and shot him in a ditch in the middle of the night.”

“You're making that up. I would have heard about it. My father would have had one of his shouting sessions where he stomps through the hall cursing Napoleon.”

“You have heard about it, although it happened years ago. Mr. Clermont's cousin was the Duke of Enghien.”

Simon's mouth opened, then closed. “The one with the dog? The one in the picture?”

“The one with the dog, yes.”

The duke had been shot when Simon was a toddler, but English boys still repeated, with ghoulish fascination, the story of the duke's dog, who had howled at the site of his master's death for a full day, exposing the murder to the world. And ladies of a certain age still sighed mournfully over portraits of the fair-haired victim. Even the most flattering renditions of Napoleon could not match the delicate features and gilt hair of the boy duke, so tragically cut off in the flower of youth. The picture Simon referred to had now disappeared—it had been cut out from
The Ladies' Mercury
and pinned up in Mrs. Fletcher's off ice—but it had shown the duke, his pale lips gasping out his last breath, slumped against a stone wall, with the dog gazing mournfully at his face.

“Then Mr. Clermont cannot go back to France.”

“Not at the moment.”

“That's good.”

“Why?” she said, caught off guard.

“I like him,” he said, shooting a quick glance at her to catch her reaction. “In fact, I think we
should
go to London. He could help me assemble my telescope.”

“You're forbidden to go to town,” she reminded him. “Your mother said her nerves could not endure another episode like St. Paul's.”

“I could make her change her mind,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”

“All I need do,” he pointed out, with a malicious smile, “is tell her that if I am allowed to go,
you
will agree to come.”

“And what makes you think I will agree?”

“Because,” he said, with an angelic expression, “you don't wish to deprive your beloved young cousin of a treat.”

“Try again,” she advised.

He abandoned the halo. “Because you want to go. Or at least you don't want
not
to go.”

“I do not. That is, I do. Oh, for heaven's sake! Stop trying to confuse me. I do not wish to go to London. Is that clear?”

He gave her a contemptuous look, pushed himself out of the chair, lit a candle at the lamp, and went to the door. “I am going to find my mother,” he announced. “Now is the time to stop me.” He stood, arms folded, for a long, insolent moment.

She glowered at him, but didn't move.

“Put out the lamp when you leave,” he said. She heard him humming cheerfully as he darted off down the corridor.

“Damn you, Simon,” she muttered.

 

 

Whenever she felt in need of advice or support, Mrs. Digby sought out Mrs. Fletcher, her most faithful ally in the war against certain undesirable elements in the earl's household. Thus Mrs. Digby found herself at eleven in the morning sitting in a stiff-backed walnut chair in the housekeeper's office and sipping a glass of cordial, which Mrs. Fletcher had offered in spite of the early hour.

“And so your Mr. Clermont is leaving us?” said the housekeeper, pouring herself a small glass of her own. “This is very sudden! You don't suppose he and Miss Serena have quarreled, do you?” Mrs. Fletcher, like most of the female servants, had fastened on Clermont as an ideal husband for Serena. He was suitably tall, he had (as Lucy put it) “such an air about him,” and, most importantly, he seemed unintimidated by his potential bride's sharp tongue.

The nurse set her glass down. “No, indeed. Let me finish, do. He calls me to his room, as I was saying, and the luggage piled every which way, and his man running in and out, and he sits me down, very polite, and tells me how grateful he is for my care of him. And he presses something into my hand, as I've already mentioned, and a very tidy sum it was, I don't mind telling you, not that I took it right away, for, as I told him, it was only my Christian duty, but he insisted and I'm sure I'm very much obliged to him, for it's not every young gentleman would be so gracious to an old woman who had seen him make a cake of himself cursing and thrashing about in the middle of the night.”

She ran out of breath, and the housekeeper prompted her: “What then?”

“Then I thank him and start to get up, and he stops me, and what do you think he does?”

“What?” said Mrs. Fletcher, on cue.

“He asks me about Miss Serena! He did it well, began by talking about young Simon, but he didn't fool me one bit, and sure enough a moment later he mentions her, as if by accident, talking about how fond she is of her cousin and next he wants to know does she ever go up to Town, and has she any young men come calling. Not in so many words, of course, but it was clear what he was after.”

Mrs. Fletcher's round eyes grew rounder. “And what did you tell him?”

“Nothing I oughtn't, never fear. No need to let every gentleman who visits hear about that rascally French count, if he was a count, or even an officer, as we've all wondered many times since. These days every Frenchman seems to be the viscount of this or marquis of that, and how is anyone here in England to know? Poor girl, she was so happy, and her bride-clothes all made up, and the banns about to be read, which was a thing I couldn't quite approve of, since he was a Papist, but the vicar would do anything to oblige her ladyship. And then one day in walks Lucy to make up his fire in the morning and he was clean gone, just vanished, and a very fine gold clock and two candlesticks with him, as well you remember.”

“
I
think his lordship should have given the alarm at once, sent word to the garrison that a French prisoner had escaped, but her ladyship was so overset he let it be. Mind you, that was before I found the candlesticks missing!” Mrs. Fletcher gave an instinctive glance at the locked cupboard full of plates on the far wall of her office.

“Well, then, of course I didn't say anything about it, merely mentioned in passing that Miss Serena had suffered an Undeserved Sorrow in her life. I didn't wish him to think her unmarried by choice, after all! But what I
did
say was that there's no call for her to spend her days playing nursemaid to her cousin and companion to her aunt. She ought to have a home of her own, that's what I told him. What does the earl pay Jasper Royce for, if Miss Serena spends more time with Master Simon than his own tutor? A more useless young man I have never seen—losing his lordship's important letters, letting Simon run wild one minute and lecturing him the next. I know her ladyship had hopes he and Miss Serena would make a match of it, but he seems a mighty poor prospect to me. As for Mrs. Childe, with her fancy gowns and her suite on the second floor, which is twice the size of Miss Serena's rooms, where is she when her ladyship needs help with welcoming visitors, or looking over the linens, or writing invitations? She was a penniless widow when the earl took her in, but you wouldn't think it to look at her, would you?”

The two women were silent for a moment in the happy contemplation of their undying hatred for the aforesaid widow.

“If you ask me, Bertha Childe likely had something to do with that Frenchie running off,” said Mrs. Fletcher darkly. “Thick as thieves, they were. And her twice his age or more. Disgraceful.” She turned her thoughts back to the subject at hand. “Inquiring after rival suitors, was he? So that's the way the wind blows! A pity he's been called away to town, then.”

“You haven't heard all of it, Eliza. Just as I get up to go at last—and I was there a good quarter hour, at least, and nearly all of it talking about Miss Serena—Master Simon comes bursting in saying, ‘I did it!' Those were his very words. ‘I did it, sir! I've persuaded her to come!' Now what do you think of that? No need to ask who ‘her' is, is there? And then not five minutes later her ladyship calls me in and tells me we are all to go up to London at the end of the week!
All
of us. Including Miss Serena.”

The housekeeper's mouth thinned. In her mind the first person who ought to receive word of major upheavals in the earl's household was herself. But she was able to satisfy her pride a moment later, when Pritchett knocked on the door and informed her that the countess would be down to consult her in a few minutes on a very important matter.

“Thank you, Mr. Pritchett,” she said, with a gracious smile. “In case you have not yet heard the news, you should know that his lordship and the entire family will be removing to the house in London at the end of the week. I think we should keep this to ourselves for today—no use getting all the upstairs maids into a twitter—but if you could spare two footmen to go up to the box room tomorrow to begin bringing down the trunks, I should be very much obliged.”

 

 

So, thought Julien as the chaise pulled out onto the London Road, Miss Allen had—as his aunt would say—“made herself a reputation.” Mrs. Digby, under the impression that she was being wonderfully circumspect, had proceeded to give hints a child of five could have untangled. Some French officer captured in Portugal had grown bored waiting at Boulton Park to be exchanged. He had amused himself by toying with a much younger Serena and had then broken both his parole and her heart by escaping. It had evidently been quite a scandal. He wondered cynically how much of that scandal had been fueled by Mrs. Digby's notions of discretion and loyalty. In the course of asserting that Serena had nothing to apologize for, the nurse had revealed nearly the entire story of the aborted marriage; worse, to bolster her claim that it had been a perfectly respectable match, she had felt obliged to deny (and therefore relate, in detail) a very salacious story about a gamekeeper discovering the couple together in the woods at dawn. No wonder Serena Allen didn't care for London anymore. Someone with her pride would be certain that every whisper, every averted glance, held condemnation. Or worse, ridicule. He knew, because he had lived his entire adult life with the same poisoned fog hanging over every social occasion.