To Seduce an Angel (34 page)

“Here is a truth. I want to be Emma Portland for you, new baptized.”

“Then we are even again. I will be Daventry for you, if you will have me.”

“I will, my love, now and forever.”

A
MODEST reception followed the wedding of Sophie Rhys-Jones to Major Lucien Montclare at Woford House, the temporary home of Sir Xander Jones, his wife Cleo, their young children, and Cleo's brother, Charlie, the future Baron Woford. At their mother's wedding her three sons, the Sons of Sin, danced with every woman present repeated times. They whirled their mother and their wives and Dav's bride-to-be in giddy waltzes until the fiddlers demanded a respite.

In one of the lulls in the gay party, Dav, glancing at his watch, led Emma into the garden. It was a night of indigo skies sparkling with stars, a rare night. The garden was damp and fragrant with dog roses. The trees and bushes shed cool drops from a rain that had passed earlier in the day. Dav took Emma's arm in his to make a stroll of the circular gravel path. She was happy he knew. Plans for their own wedding were well in hand. She was no longer a fugitive from English law or from the primitive revenge of factions from Malfada.

She was no longer a prisoner, locked in, but a treasure, guarded as something precious is guarded and kept safe, guarded by a mortal angel, who would avenge any wrong against her with a fiery arm.

Only one shadow sometimes still darkened the blue of her eyes. Tonight he knew, surrounded by his family, the shadow came in moments when she remembered hers. She was good at bearing her losses. She now wore the pin he had restored to her openly, and she waited with a kind of held breath for news from her cousin. The Duchess of Wenlocke promised to send word as soon as it came to her, and she had, so Dav led Emma to the back of the garden.

She teased him that he no longer needed a ruse to be alone with her. But he led her to a gate in the high wall at the back of the garden. There a woman stepped from the shadows with bright hair, a babe in her arms, and a red-coated soldier at her side.

 

 

EMMA clutched Dav's arm. “We can save her, can't we?” The girl passed the babe to the soldier, who took the child with easy assurance. The boy, a round-cheeked cherub of near a year, patted the soldier's cheek, then stuck his thumb in his mouth to gaze at the strange proceedings of the two women.

“He's not taking her to prison, Emma,” Dav assured her.

The two women embraced and lapsed into their own tongue, a bright flow of words interrupted by tears and laughs and hiccups and sniffles. Dav offered a handkerchief. The officer deftly switched the babe in his arms and offered his own square of linen.

“She married him,” Emma told Dav.

He knew. “The duchess sent word this morning.”

“And he's taking her to Canada. He's posted there.”

“She'll be safe.”

 

 

 

THE ENGLISH CHANNEL, 1825

 

LYLE Massing, Baron Blackstone, was losing at cards, a situation he could only attribute to the rise and fall of the ship under him. The HMS
Redemption,
a naval vessel of questionable seaworthiness, had been pressed into service to bring Blackstone and a few other survivors of the Greek misadventure home.

He tried to concentrate on the cards in his hand and not think about home. At the moment he didn't have one. Blackstone Court, the ancestral seat he'd inherited from his father, had been mortgaged to pay his ransom to the warlord Vasiladi. The house was now leased to a wealthy maker of crockery. Blackstone's widowed mother and sisters had removed to a modest town house in Bath. His mother made no complaint, but in the first letter to reach him after his release, his sister Elena had double-underlined
thirty feet—
the distance between his mother's two drawing rooms in Bath. When he thought of his mother in such narrow circumstances, he grew a little reckless with his cards, and already a pile of his vowels littered the table.

Beating its way across the channel to Dover, the
Redemption
lurched and shuddered, making the yellow light waver in the smoky compartment. Lyle blinked at the unforgiving cards in his hand. His opponent, Samuel Goldsworthy, a large mound of a man with thick red hair and beard and a green silk waistcoat that glowed in the swaying light, grinned at him. The fellow seemed incapable of ill humor or of losing. The endless card game and the rolling seas had claimed the other two passengers. Only Goldsworthy and Blackstone remained at the table.

The big man could not conceal his satisfaction with the situation. “Lad, those cards you're holding are worthless. Let me offer you a way out.”

Blackstone felt an unsettling prick of wariness, as if the man could see his hand. He made a joke. “Is this the moment when you suggest that I marry your quiz of a daughter?” If Goldsworthy had such a daughter, Lyle might do it. He had few options to recover his estate.

Goldsworthy gave a head-splittingly hearty laugh. Lyle had suggested such a marriage in jest, but as if in protest at the idea of his marrying, his careless memory threw up a flash of laughing black eyes and soft, creamy breasts. He shook it off. That opportunity had long since passed. No doubt the chit had married while Blackstone was in the hands of Vasiladi's bandits.

“Nothing so clichéd, lad. All I ask is that you enter my employ for a year and a day.”

Lyle wondered how calculated the phrase was. A year and a day, the amount of time he had been a captive; a year and a day, in which Byron had died and the freedom fighters who had sought to throw off the Turks had fallen into rival factions, apt to cut one another's throats.

He peered again at Goldsworthy. The man looked ordinary enough in spite of his oak-like size and the absurd invitation to employment. He was taller than Blackstone by four inches or more and wider than any of the berths offered on the ship. Blackstone put his age at somewhere between forty and fifty. He looked like a great leafy tree with his russet coat, walnut trousers, and the green waistcoat. For all the stirring of Lyle's instincts at the man's turn of phrase, the fellow probably had a warehouse on the Thames stuffed with bolts of muslin or sacks of coffee beans.

Goldsworthy and the
Redemption
had appeared in Koron harbor at that singularly delicate moment in Blackstone's negotiations with the bandit when the money was about to change hands and there was suddenly no reason to suppose that Vasiladi would follow through with the release of his hostages, including a score of young girls and boys who had been pressed into slavish roles by the warlord's army.

“I suppose you're a cesspool cleaner or a pure collector.”

“Nothing so fragrant or so tame, I assure you, lad. Something rather more suited to your talents.” Goldsworthy took a long pull on his ale.

“We didn't meet in London, did we?”

“Not at all.”

“You can't have a high estimate of my talents based on our little game.”

“You are a charming fellow—”

Blackstone shot Goldsworthy a skeptical glance. For a moment there had seemed a sharp gleam of cunning behind the genial mask. “I've hardly charmed you.”

“Still among your own, among the ton, you move with grace and ease, wear a well-cut coat, show a pretty leg on the dance floor, and perhaps off it, drive and ride to an inch.”

“All of which hardly recommend me for anyone's employ.” His companion's knowing look, like a schoolmaster's, was becoming annoying.

“Except mine. You'll be invited everywhere, and I want you to attend as many of the season's events as you can.”

Maybe there was an ugly daughter after all. “And for submitting to the endless social whirl?”

“I will pay off all your debts, including the mortgage on Blackstone Court.”

“I beg your pardon.” Blackstone stared hard at the man who seemed to know more of his business than anyone outside of his solicitor.

“Come with me to my club, and I'll explain.”

“Your club?” The blunt fellow did not strike Blackstone as a clubman.

“The Pantheon Club on Albemarle Street. I've a post chaise meeting the ship. It will take us directly there.”

Not to Bath and his mother's reproaches, but to London and a chance to repair his fortune. Goldsworthy certainly knew how to dangle temptation. He didn't he trust the man. A year and a day had the suspicious ring of a catch somewhere, as if one were staking one's soul.

“Who are you?”

Goldsworthy frowned. “You can't have forgotten already.”

“Not your name. Who are you? What's this mysterious position you're offering? Am I to sign a contract in blood?”

Goldsworthy grinned broadly. “No bloodshed required, lad. Your word will do, and I'll explain at the club. You'll like the coffee, and the floor won't pitch under your feet.”

If the fellow called him
lad
one more time, Blackstone thought he might lean across the table and choke him.

The pile of scraps on which Blackstone and his luckless fellow travelers had pledged their funds to Goldsworthy lay on the table. He glanced from them to the dismal cards in his hand. Luck was certainly against him.