The Traitor (31 page)

And God help him, God damn him and God help him, if he had to choose which one to protect.

“They were on foot,” the professor observed. “If he were intent on leaving the City, Anduvoir would have jumped into the nearest hack.”

Beyond the library, a door slammed elsewhere in the house.

Milly. Please, let that be Milly.

She came pelting into the library, no bonnet, no gloves. “Sebastian! Thank God you’re home. There’s a man, he’s French, he has Aunt Freddy, and you must listen to me.”

The cat vaulted onto the desk an instant before Milly slammed into Sebastian’s chest. Michael closed the door, and the professor sank into a chair.

“It’s all right,” Sebastian said. Now that he held his wife safe in his arms, everything that mattered was all right. “We know who he is, we know how he thinks. We know, and we’ll get Aunt out of there before the moon rises.”

Milly pulled back enough that Sebastian could see the desperation in her eyes. “No, Sebastian. Whatever you do, you must not go to your aunt’s aid. That’s exactly what he wants, and you must not accommodate him. It’s you he wants, and you he’s determined to see killed.”

***

“Of course, it is.” Sebastian sounded almost amused, and Milly wanted to pummel him—just as soon as she’d held on to him as tightly as her strength allowed and breathed in his sandalwood scent and kissed him to within an inch of his life.

“Shall I ring for tea?” Michael asked.

“No!” Sebastian and Milly answered in unison, Milly in a near shout, Sebastian in implacable tones of command.

“We haven’t time,” Milly said. “This man, this Frenchman, wants you to come looking for Aunt Freddy. He wanted to take me, but Freddy went out to cut some roses. His plan is…”

His plan was damned clever. Clever enough to work.

Sebastian nuzzled at Milly’s temple, a soft, soothing gesture. “Let’s sit, shall we?”

“I want to pace, Sebastian. I want to break things. He’s awful, that fellow. I think even Aunt was more scared than angry around him.”

Milly felt rather than saw the glance this comment provoked among the men.

“Did Anduvoir see you, Milly?” Despite Sebastian’s calm tone, Milly knew the question was fraught.

“No, he did not. I overheard him as he strutted and preened about his room. It’s a pleasant afternoon, and his room is at the back of some little house thirteen streets from here. He left a window open.”

To sit beside Sebastian, to hear his voice and feel him solid and strong beside her, was exactly what Milly had been craving since seeing Aunt Freddy abducted. His presence gave her the strength to call upon her memorization skills, the skills honed in a dozen cold schoolrooms and hundreds of long evenings by the fire with her aunts.

“His plan is as follows—he wanted to impress Aunt Freddy with it, or intimidate her. He has notes waiting for you all over London, sending you on a game of fox and geese to rescue Aunt. He has paid people to deny you ever came to retrieve these notes, the first of which he will have delivered right here.”

“He’s been watching us,” Michael said. “Bloody hell, I should have seen—”

“Michael.” Sebastian hadn’t raised his voice or even put much emphasis on the single word, but Michael fell silent.

“The point of this haring about is for you to be unaccounted for this evening, while Anduvoir himself assassinates the Duke of Wellington, an act for which he will see you blamed. He’ll use more notes, and some sort of poison, so that Wellington collapses before a good two dozen of his former officers at some regimental dinner. Sebastian, Anduvoir has many samples of your handwriting, and he sounded…
gleeful
to contemplate you being hanged for murder.”

“And such a murder,” the professor murmured. “The last thing the French would do is stir up a hornet’s nest this grand.”

“Which leaves us with why Anduvoir is getting up to such tricks, and how we can stop him and retrieve Freddy from his clutches.”

Milly felt Sebastian’s lips as he spoke against her temple, and yet, beside her, his body had undergone a change. He was not relaxed; he was not calm. He’d gone into a state of battle readiness beyond calm.

He rose and drew Milly to her feet, wrapping his arm around her. “There being nobody else well suited to the task, I shall present myself at Wellington’s little fete.”

“They’ll kill you,” Michael said. “If you burst in uninvited on the lot of them, their dress swords at hand, the liquor flowing freely, they’ll fall upon you like a pack of dogs, and Wellington himself may not be able to stop them.”

Sebastian’s chin rested on the top of Milly’s head, while she clung to him.

“I am exhausted, Michael,” he said. “Weary to death of defending myself against all comers for actions that were the best I could manage at the time. My whereabouts will be impossible to deny if I attend this party, and my presence at Wellington’s table the only defense I can make. Then, too, I might be able to save His Grace’s life.”

Michael and the professor argued with him and swore and argued some more, but Sebastian’s plan made a kind of dreadful sense.

When it had been decided that Michael, the professor, and Giles would retrieve Aunt Freddy as soon as darkness had fallen, Milly found herself alone with her husband—her doomed husband.

“You’ve been very quiet,” Sebastian said, leading her over to the desk. He sat back against it, positioning Milly so she stood between his legs. “Talk to me, Milly.”

“I want to go with you.”

He kissed her, and in that kiss—sweet, tender, full of regret—he informed her that her daft notion would never form part of his plans.

“The less you’re associated with me now, the better. My suggestion for when this is all over is for you to retire to St. Clair Manor and enjoy being the Baroness St. Clair. You will be wealthy, you know, and you have a life estate in the dower house, regardless of what the Crown does with the succession.”

“I want no wealth, Sebastian. I’ve some money of my own, as it turns out. I want to grow old with you, to name our babies, to—”

Another kiss. “Milly, I know. I wish…I did not want you to hate me. I did not want my troubles to become yours. I did not want to leave you alone.”

The regret in his voice was piercing and genuine. Milly wanted to shake him to silence lest he break her heart.

“I love you.” Milly did not regret the words, only the circumstances under which she’d said them. “I love you because you are not hiding this awful business from me. You are not shutting me out as if I hadn’t a brain in my head. I love you because you could be catching a packet for somewhere far away right now, throwing your clothes into a trunk, grabbing the jewels, and fleeing, but that would only mean this nasty Frenchman has won, after you’ve fought so hard and so well against that very outcome.”

He pulled back and studied her for a long moment, his expression curious, not one Milly had seen him wear previously. “You understand.”

“I hate that you’re put in this position, but yes, I understand. Have you your knives?”

“I will not leave this house without them.”

“I’ll help you change. You must be quite the baron when you show up at this party, Sebastian, quite the English baron.”

He held her for one more instant, a moment in which Milly fought back all the arguments she had for joining him on that packet, sending him to his club rather than on this doomed outing, or trying to lock him in their rooms until this madness had passed.

Except that way would lead to more madness, more duels, more nasty Frenchmen, more war waged against Sebastian’s honor and his right to a peaceful old age.

“Come,” Milly said, stepping back and taking him by the hand. “None of your expensive cologne tonight either. You will reek of bay rum and English respectability, and make these men listen to you.”

While she would have his bottle of scent to torment herself with through all the years of her widowhood if they killed him instead of listening to him.

***

“Sir, you haven’t an invitation.”

Wellington’s staff was formidable, but no match for Sebastian’s resolve. “I have misplaced it, along with my patience. Where is His Grace?”

Something about Sebastian’s tone must have convinced the butler that here, despite a lack of uniform, was an officer expecting to be obeyed. “His Grace is in the kitchen, seeing to the final prep—”

“Get to the kitchen and tell him to not sample a single dish, most especially the mushrooms, not even one.”

The butler, a stocky fellow who could easily have passed for a gunnery sergeant in livery, blinked.

“Go, man! Your master’s life may depend upon it.” Rather than linger in the foyer, Sebastian dashed past the goggling footmen and headed for the stairs. A commotion above stairs could get His Grace’s legendary nose out of the soup pot faster than any bowing and scraping servant’s summons.

“But,
sir
! You haven’t an invita—”

“Fetch me the duke!” Sebastian bellowed over his shoulder.

He did not know the layout of Apsley House, but the dining room was readily apparent from the noise and merriment issuing from it. Sebastian forced himself to slow to a walk, a dignified, unconcerned, baronial walk.

And he tried not to think of Milly, sending him on his way with a kiss “for luck.”

She had not forbidden him to attempt this, and he wasn’t sure he could have thwarted her wishes if she had.

Sebastian said a short prayer for his wife’s happiness and sauntered into the Duke of Wellington’s formal dining room.

“What the deuce!”

“Damn me, if it ain’t St. Clair.”

“You mean Girard.”

Conversation stopped as Sebastian paused near the door. “Good evening, gentlemen. Don’t let me interrupt you.”

The sound of a sword being drawn scraped through the ensuing silence, while Sebastian noted food had already been placed on the table, including several plates of sautéed mushrooms.

“St. Clair.” The Duke of Mercia gestured from his place near the head of the table. He looked elegant and relaxed even while he glared murder at Sebastian. “Best hare off, sir. Not your type of gathering.”

Mercia had rank, and so the rest of the mob might follow his lead. He also had the presence of mind to remain seated, rather than provoke a full-out charge on Sebastian.

“It’s
exactly
his type of gathering,” somebody said as another sword was drawn. “It’s a welcome St. Clair should have been given months ago in some dark alley full of garbage and offal just like him.”

Mercia’s gaze darted to the door, suggesting footmen might be creeping up from the corridor.

“Captain Anderson,” Sebastian called over the rising murmur of ill will. “Let’s talk about garbage and offal. You’ve recently been keeping company with my former superior officer. You might know him only as Henri, or perhaps as Henri Montresslor or Henri Archambault. To me and some of your fellows, he was Henri Anduvoir.”

Anderson turned so the sideboard was at his back. “I know of no Henri Anduvoir.” He tossed back a drink, while the room again fell silent.

“Short, balding, well fed. He plucked at your pride and told you a pack of believable lies without ever offering any proof of his rank or authority. Probably told you he represented the entire French nation, without any orders, letters, or corroboration—and I wouldn’t eat that mushroom, Dirks. Might give you a nasty, permanent bellyache.”

Dirks put the mushroom down and wiped his fingers.

“You’re the one who’s lying,” Anderson retorted.

Mercia set his drink aside and rose. “Anderson, perhaps you’d like to reconsider your words.”

“I’m under orders,” Anderson said, drawing himself up. “St. Clair is an embarrassment to two sovereign nations.”

The assemblage apparently agreed with this conclusion as more swords came into evidence. Mercia mouthed the word, “Go,” though Sebastian wasn’t about to turn his back on this mob.

“I’ve met this Anduvoir. Rather wish I hadn’t.” The speaker was a lean fellow of about six feet. He wore a captain’s uniform.

“Mr. Pixler.” Sebastian bowed, though the man was his social inferior. “Good evening.”

“You say Anduvoir is here in London?” Pixler asked.

“Then we’ll kill him too,” somebody volunteered.

“Not until you hear me out,” Sebastian retorted. “The lot of you are being manipulated by a Frenchman whose only loyalty is to his own schemes. Anderson goads you into challenging me, thinking he’s following some obscure orders, and you risk your lives to settle a score that His Grace put to rest decisively at Waterloo.”

“Time somebody put you to rest,” Anderson sneered. The uniformed rabble around him seconded that sentiment, and Mercia’s gaze became resigned.

Sebastian was about to reach for his knife when the sound of a bottle breaking against the edge of the table galvanized the two dozen brave fellows around him.

“Not a fair fight, gentlemen,” Mercia observed, though the comment hardly helped matters.

“As if he was fair to us,” Anderson said, brandishing a sword that looked more functional than decorative. “For two weeks I suffered his attentions, and I’m lucky I can sleep at night.”

The quiet in the room shifted, and Sebastian sensed movement behind him.

“One hears you’ve been doing something other than sleeping at night, Anderson,” said the Duke of Wellington. “And that your lady wife is to be congratulated accordingly. Gentlemen, stand down.”

For perhaps the first time in a long and distinguished military career, the Duke of Wellington was not immediately obeyed. Nobody sheathed his sword; nobody stepped back.

“He’s left us with more nightmares than any man has a right to, Your Grace.” Pierpont offered that retort, and the men closest to Sebastian edged nearer.

Wellington did not look amused. “Are you countermanding a direct order, Captain?”

An ugly silence spread. These men were no longer under Wellington’s command, and yet, they were guests in his home and had served under him, some of them for most of their adult lives.

And still, not one soldier heeded the duke’s mandate.

A loud crash sounded toward the back of the room, where a second door led to adjoining parlors. All heads turned to see a porcelain vase in shards on the floor.

“If you won’t listen to His Grace’s common sense, you will listen to mine.”

“Her again. I thought ye said she wasna daft,” came from another corner.

Milly swept forward through the officers, her cloak a magnificent green velvet, her red hair an artful cascade, jewels flashing at her throat, ears, and wrists.

“Baroness.” Wellington himself bowed over her hand, and the mood in the room abruptly shifted from ugly to…awkward. A lady had invited herself to a summary execution, and that, in the opinion of every officer there,
would
not
do
.

Milly curtsied prettily but none too low to the duke, then turned to survey the room.

“When a child is caught being naughty, he invariably blames his governess or his mama or his puppy, but seldom his own poor judgment. You fellows similarly blame St. Clair for your capture, but I tire of pointing out that he captured none of you. He deprived none of you of your uniforms. He challenges none of you to these
stupid
duels, and if this keeps up, I will inform your ladies of your foolishness.”

Swords lowered. The men in the room looked anywhere but at Sebastian’s wife.

“My dear baroness,” Wellington said. “If you’d permit an old soldier to have the floor?”

Milly nodded—regally—and Sebastian wanted badly to kiss his wife, also to pitch her out the nearest window if it would keep her safe.

Wellington sauntered forward, to the head of the table. “You fellows heard the baroness, and now you will do me the courtesy of listening to me as well.”

His Grace picked up a plate of sautéed mushrooms, apparently intent on snitching an appetizer.

“Don’t, Your Grace!” Sebastian fairly bellowed the words. Milly regarded him with consternation, suggesting even summary executions required a certain etiquette. “Don’t touch those mushrooms. Anduvoir fancies himself something of a gourmand, and he’s been known to use poison.”

Wellington regarded the morsel in his hand. “And you know this, how?”

“He tried to poison me shortly before Toulouse fell.”

“Oh, St. Clair.” Milly crossed the room to take his hand—his left hand, which would leave his right free to reach for his knife, should he need to defend her. “Your own commanding officer. Why would he do that?”

Wellington pitched the mushroom back onto the tray and wiped his fingers on a linen serviette. “I can shed light on that, if my officers will be so good as to sheathe their swords?”

Metal scraped; Mercia took his seat. Over by the sideboard, glassware tinkled, as if someone had resumed pouring drinks.

“Pixler was the one to alert us to your location,” Wellington said. “Your aunt knew you were in the south of France somewhere, but you’d been careful not to reveal your position in what correspondence she’d had from you.”

“For obvious reasons,” Sebastian said. Milly’s fingers tightened around his hand.

“Just so,” His Grace replied. “You could not have the baroness importuned for such intelligence. Bad enough we gentlemen must choose between duty to our loved ones and duty to the Crown. No need to put the ladies in such a position—and yet, I did. Would somebody find a chair for my guest and his baroness?”

The duke’s courtesy—referring to Sebastian as a guest, having chairs fetched—set off an alarm in the back of Sebastian’s mind.

“We’ll stand,” Milly said. “And we really can’t be staying.”

Sebastian did kiss her, right on her helpful mouth. “Your Grace was saying?”

“We learned from Pixler where you were, and we also learned the boy would have died without your intervention. The beating he took was severe, true, but he said that was more Anduvoir’s doing than yours. Then came the ransom request.”

Sebastian realized too late the direction the duke’s recitation might take.

“Many officers were unofficially ransomed, Your Grace. The French needed coin badly, despite the official position.”

“True enough, but not every officer whose family lacked the funds to ransom him found the lady of the house sitting down to whist across from your dear aunt. Seems Lady Frederica had a prodigious run of bad luck when she opposed Pixler’s mother, and somehow, I gather this is not news to you.”

Milly’s arms around Sebastian’s waist went from protective to necessary, lest his very knees buckle. “How did you learn of that?”

Nobody was ever supposed to know, save Freddy and the professor, and nobody would have believed—

“I didn’t figure it out until the third or fourth occasion of such a coincidence, and then I noticed other patterns as well. Nobody died at your hands, St. Clair, and some weren’t even beaten, and yet you had a reputation for reducing a man to tears and plucking all his secrets from him.”

“At least one secret from every man,” Sebastian said, but he’d nearly whispered the words, while his worlds—his French world and his English world—collided. “I demanded one secret to show my superiors, lest somebody else, somebody worse, be given my command.”

He was at risk for babbling out all of his own secrets, so when Milly kissed him on the mouth, he shut up.

“Yes, you extracted from each officer foolish enough to be found behind enemy lines out of uniform one bit of information—more from a few of the loquacious ones—and you found a way to return them to us more or less whole. This one you ransomed with funds from your own pocket, that one you slipped into a clandestine prisoner exchange, the other escaped after a productive interrogation session—such a pity—and was not recaptured.”

His Grace appeared to study a wine goblet half-full of a pretty ruby claret, and the only sound in the room was Milly sniffling into Sebastian’s handkerchief.

“Every officer you tortured came home,” Wellington said softly. “Even Mercia, whose circumstances were complicated, indeed. I concluded you were a far greater asset to England in your French garrison than you could have been anywhere else.”

“Nobody else—” Sebastian did not know whether to be grateful for, or furious at, Wellington’s recitation.

“Nobody else figured this out? Your aunt clearly had more than an inkling, and she begged me to extricate you from a situation that was obviously difficult and dangerous for you. You were and are a peer of the realm, the Baron St. Clair, a man serving in a war zone, who lacked legitimate male progeny, and if anybody should have been offered safe passage home, it was you.”

“Yes,” Milly said, eyes glittering. “Exactly, and yet you left him there on that miserable pile of rocks, left him without an ally, without any support, and then let these imbeciles challenge him to duel after duel. How could you, Your Grace?”

She voiced Sebastian’s own questions, because incredulity was quickly giving way to rage. The anger trickled into him, a warmth and sense of rightness to it he’d craved for years.

“Lady Frederica and I reached a compromise,” Wellington said. “I sent you a guardian angel, so to speak, and he had orders to offer you safe passage if your life were imperiled. Brodie’s first message back to us was that your life was imperiled daily by your own superior officer, by the advancing English, and by the conflicted loyalties that demanded you abuse your peers to ensure they remained in your care. He requested permission to extricate you from the Château, and I put the matter to your aunt.”

The room was quieter than a graveyard in the middle of a winter night.

“You made an old woman choose between her only living male relative and the safety of British officers held captive at my garrison,” Sebastian said, slowly and clearly, as if the words pronounced sentence on Wellington rather than verified his strategy. “Freddy chose for England, and I remained at that garrison, torturing men I ought to have served with, bankrupting my birthright and my reason, while the same old woman was left to contend with neglected estates, dwindling resources, and no family at her side.”

Had Milly not been weeping softly against his chest, Sebastian would likely have strangled Wellington right then and there. Not an entire regiment of officers would have stopped him. He would have strangled him for Aunt Freddy, for Milly, for himself, and for the men who’d challenged him, for they had been put at risk every bit as much as he.

While Sebastian frankly clung to his wife, he spared a thought for what Freddy had gone through, for the impossible choice she’d faced, much like the impossible choices Sebastian had faced.

Mercia rose. “You were betrayed,” he said quietly. Over Milly’s head, Sebastian saw him looking around the room, seeking any who would argue that conclusion. “You are no traitor to England, though England surely betrayed you. I am profoundly sorry for it.”

Mercia saluted with his wineglass. One by one, the other officers rose and offered a silent toast, until Wellington himself lifted a goblet.

“Sir, I salute you for your aid in the capture of one Henri Anduvoir, a criminal wanted by his own authorities for embezzling monies due the
République
as spoils of war—substantial sums, as it turns out.”

His Grace paused for a considering sip of claret. “The French asked for our aid, which took no small toll on their pride. Anduvoir was here to see you killed—you had put those sums into his hands to be delivered to his superiors—but Anduvoir also sought to plant evidence that you had stolen that money, too. I hope you consider matters between you and the Crown acceptably addressed after this day’s work, for the Crown considers itself in your debt.”

Sebastian managed to ask the only pertinent question. “You have Anduvoir in custody, then?”

“We do. Brodie reported the address by messenger earlier today and demanded my aid in seeing your aunt to safety. Seems a certain Frenchman tried to interfere with the King’s men when about the King’s business. Dreadfully stupid of him. Mortally stupid, I should think.”

“Don’t think it,” Milly snapped. “Make sure of it, if you please.”

“I rather agree with the lady,” Mercia drawled.

A chorus of “hear, hear” followed, though to Sebastian, the words and the goodwill they embodied rang hollow. The only solid thing in his awareness at that moment was the woman who still held on to him for dear life.

“St. Clair, will you and your lady stay to enjoy the meal with us?” Wellington asked.

His Grace was extending an olive branch, and though the officers might be willing to let the past remain in the past, Wellington’s overture presaged not merely tolerance, but acceptance.

Approval, even, from the most respected subject of the British Crown. Though this might for years have been the answer to prayers Sebastian dared not admit to even himself, now it mattered not in the least.

“I think not,” Milly said. “St. Clair, I am quite fatigued. If you would please take me home?”

Sebastian did not glance at Wellington or Mercia, or anybody else who might have ventured an opinion, for the lot of them could go to blazes.

“Of course, my dear. Events have been wearying in the extreme.”

She took his arm, but they did not escape without Mercia—the man certainly knew how to make his opinions known—instigating a round of applause, in which Wellington himself joined.

***

Milly forced herself to loosen her grip on Sebastian’s hand. “Tell me you are not about to run down this street, tearing your hair and screaming French obscenities.”

“I am not.”

He walked along beside her, while Milly stifled the impulses she’d just named. For a good two dozen yards, she managed to hold her silence.

“Sebastian, how
are
you?”

He kissed her knuckles. “Quite well.”

Milly lasted a dozen yards this time. “Talk to me, Husband, or so help me, I will lose my reason.”

Right there in the street, with fashionable carriages rumbling past on the way to an evening’s entertainment, Sebastian stopped and wrapped her in his arms.

“I am walking out of the Château again, but this time, I am taking my heart, my soul, and my future with me. The prospect will take some getting used to.”

Milly caught a whiff of lavender from the small bouquet she’d affixed to his lapel not two hours earlier. “Will you take your baroness with you?”

His arms slipped away, and he resumed walking, not even taking her hand.

“What nonsense is this, Wife? We’re married. I was thinking of moving to Patagonia with you.”

Milly held her ground as he strolled off. “Sebastian, I
left
you. I purchased my own establishment in Chelsea as insurance, in case our difficulties could not be resolved. I’m worse than Wellington, who was at least trying to win a war.”

His lordship came stomping back to her side.

“You did not leave me. You shut me out, in the same manner I had first demonstrated to you. We are done with such folly. Did you read my letter?”

She’d memorized his letter. “Yes. The letter was very prettily written.”

By the light of the streetlamp, Milly saw that her answer had baffled him.

“You came home on the strength of a pretty letter? I bare my soul to you, offer my most profound and heartfelt sentiments…?”

She did not want him marching off into the darkness, so she took his hand. “The letter was very nice, but the book decided me.”

Sebastian allowed her to tow him in the direction of their home. “You came back to me for
Mrs. Radcliffe
?”

“I came back to you because my heart and soul were in your keeping, and if your sole fault was protectiveness toward me—a protectiveness which was apparently well-founded—then I stand guilty of the same transgression toward you. I could not leave you to deal with those enemies you referred to by yourself, and I could not forgive myself if I’d added to your worries when your enemies were skulking about London itself.”

He looped her arm through his, as a proper escort would, or as a man intent on preventing a woman from fleeing might. “Mrs. Radcliffe told you that?”

“Yes.”

Milly’s husband had more patience than she, because he let her wander along at his side in silence until they were nearly home.