Behind the Mask (House of Lords) (38 page)

“We shall look forward to it eagerly,” Mrs. Hollier promised. Toby glared at her, but said nothing. Her husband patted Eleanor’s hand and wished her good night as they went out to their carriage.

Lady Pennethorne seemed equally excited by the idea of a costume ball. “It will be quite the event,” she said. “What a lovely way to celebrate your marriage.”

“It is not for us, of course,” Eleanor said, “but it will provide an opportunity to introduce Lord Pierce to all the local gentry.”

“I am sure you will be proud to show him off,” Lord Pennethorne said.

Eleanor balked at his rudeness, but there was no time to reply, for he was handing his wife into their carriage. Then they were speeding away down the drive.

“Lord Pennethorne is perhaps the strangest of our neighbors,” Lady Sidney said as she and Eleanor returned to the drawing room.

Eleanor could not help but laugh. “And that is saying something,” she said.

The storm hit just as everyone was going up to bed. Colin had not seen Strathmore come in, but he must have, because as he was getting ready to turn in himself he passed Crawley in the hall on his way out to take Strathmore’s place.

“No one will be out in this weather,” Colin said to him.

The hulking agent frowned. “All the same, My Lord, I think it’s best to keep up the patrols.”

Colin clapped him on the shoulder. “Stay dry.”

Crawley laughed as he went out into the first drops of rain. The man was a veritable beast, Colin thought. He wondered where Palmerston had found him.

In the upstairs corridor her met Sir John. “Everything well?” the duchess’s comptroller asked.

“It appears so. We’ve seen nothing suspicious today.” Colin carefully omitted the discovery of the body in the tunnel the day before. He had instructed his men not to tell Sir John about the dead assassin—it would do no good. The man would refuse to take the princess back to London in any case, and the more people who knew about Udad’s murdered cousin, the more likely those who should not know would find out.

“Very good,” Sir John said. “You see, it is as I said. Everything will be well. I have faith in you and Colonel Taylor, Lord Pierce.”

Colin thanked him through clenched teeth and escaped to his room.

When he reached it, however, he realized that escape was not likely to be found in the same space as his wife.

Eleanor was waiting for him, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed in her robe, her hair neatly plaited. She looked severe and unyielding, which Colin imagined was intentional. He had almost allowed himself to forget about the strange look on Eleanor’s face as she sat beside Lord Pennethorne at dinner, but now it all came rushing back.

“Well, then,” he said, taking off his coat and draping it over a chair. He loosened his cravat as he walked slowly toward the bed. “I suppose he’s told you everything.”

“He hasn’t, actually,” she said. “Just enough so that he knew I would have no choice but to confront you.”

“Damn him,” Colin swore. “The man may be a hero, but he’s also an accursed meddler.”

Eleanor brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Outside lightning flashed through the sky, the roll of thunder that followed immediately afterwards so loud that the windowpanes shook. “You’d better tell me,” she said.

Colin sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. “There’s nothing for it now,” he said as he kicked off his shoes. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Warn me?”

“That you’d rather not know.”

She shrugged. “I don’t think there’s any turning back at this point.”

With another sigh Colin leaned back against the bedpost and closed his eyes. “Five years ago, I received my first assignment with the Foreign Office. They sent me to Vienna, where all the spies on the Continent go to play. There were Russian and French and Greek and British agents intermixed with the Viennese and Hanoverian nobility. Every night they congregated in some social setting or another, and I was thrown right into the thick of it. Wellington was still Prime Minister, and he and the Earl of Aberdeen trusted no one. There were so many people being watched that I had to keep notes just to remember who I was supposed to be following that week. It was a heady time, and right in the thick of my first year there I met Angeline Meltzen. She was a glorious soprano, young and vivacious and completely irresistible, and I, convinced I could do no wrong, began an affair with her.”

He heard Eleanor’s sharp intake of breath, but he didn’t open his eyes. In his mind he saw Angeline, brassy and bold, standing before him in her girlish nightdress. What a fool he had been! “It went on for almost a year. I was convinced I was in love with her. Then one night she told me that she had been receiving threats. The men who sent them said they would kill her unless she began passing on secrets I might share with her. What I didn’t know was that she had already been doing just that for more than six months. I was young and stupid and I wanted to prove that I was more important that I really was, and I had dropped some casual comments about my work that revealed far too much.”

“So they had already been blackmailing her?” Eleanor asked hopefully.

He shook his head and opened his eyes, meeting hers resolutely. “She was a Russian spy. The act of the ingénue she had showed me was all a farce, a role she had played with other young men before. In her defense, I think she had little choice. She was born an impoverished Jew in a Russian slum, and though she had a golden voice, more was needed to get her out of Russia. The Imperial Court sponsored her career in exchange for secrets.”

“So why tell you that she was being threatened?”

Colin pinched the bridge of his nose. The air had grown so heavy that his head was beginning to pound. Outside fat raindrops bounced off the windowpanes. “She had gone too far. She had become a double agent, working for both the Russians and the French. It was the Russians who were threatening her, who had discovered her duplicity. She wanted protection from the British, which of course I could not give, though I tried, God help me. And then one night everything fell apart.” He paused, trying to collect his thoughts.

Eleanor put a hand on his knee. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said softly.

But he did. He had gone too far into the story not to finish it. Taking a deep breath, he said, “I had made a contact in the French government, someone who thought they could give me information about a plot to overthrow the new Belgian king. We were to meet in an alley near the Louvre. But Angeline had also found out about the meeting—Lord knows how. By then I had become circumspect enough not to reveal any more to her. She had decided to try and buy back some credit with the Russians by telling them about the meeting, and when they appeared on the scene I panicked. Swords were drawn, reckless words were exchanged, and before I knew it two of them were dead. The third fled, and, convinced that Angeline had betrayed them, tracked her down. We found her body on the edge of the Seine a week later.”

Her fingers were trembling on his knee. “How awful,” she said.

“It was,” he agreed. “Needless to say, I was given a thorough dressing-down, sent off to Paris to lick my wounds for a few months, and then exiled to Brussels.”

“And you believe it’s your fault she’s dead.”

Colin closed his eyes again. “Not really,” he said. “Once I did. But after they told me what she had been, after I realized that she had been using me...well, let’s say that I’m no longer convinced. She had dug herself into a very deep hole by the time I met her. Still, the whole thing was a debacle, though I think the younger men at the Foreign Office see me as some sort of hero for killing those men.”

“And how do you see yourself?”

For a long while he considered her question in silence. At last he said, “I was never cut out to be a spy. I was a fool to believe that I could do it. I am wiser now. I will not make the same mistakes again.”

“Let us hope so. I would hate to end up in the river.”

His hand shot out and gripped hers. “Don’t even joke about such a thing,” he said. “I promise you, if there’s ever the smallest chance that you might be put in harm’s way, I’ll give up the work.”

She squeezed his fingers. “No, you wouldn’t,” she said, coming onto her knees so that she could lean over and press her lips to his. “I wouldn’t let you.”

He knew then that he had fallen, that any small chance of escaping this with his heart intact had evaporated. She was everything he had imagined Angeline to be: brave and strong and fearless. But she was also everything the poor, dead spy had never been. She was gentle and caring and selfless, and he knew that she would never betray him. How could he not fall in love with such a woman?

He put his arms around her and pulled her into his lap. “It has to be fate,” he said. “I never really believed in it before, but how else can you explain a woman so perfect falling right into my lap?”

“I’m no angel, Colin.”

“No,” he agreed, sliding one hand beneath her robe, delighted to find that she wore nothing underneath. “No, you most certainly are not, and that’s what makes you perfect.” He leaned forward and pressed his lips to her collarbone.

Her fingers brushed through the hair at the back of his neck. “You don’t have to worry about me being afraid, Colin,” she said softly as he tugged at the tie of her robe. “All you have to do is touch me and I forget my fears. It’s quite the talent.”

He slipped his arm around her and laid her back onto the coverlet. “Allow me to further demonstrate my skill,” he said, tugging his shirt over his head.

She giggled beneath him as he pulled open her robe and ran his hands down her body. When his fingers found her hot core, she was already wet, and his whole body shook when she purred at his touch. She worked the buttons of his trousers, spreading her legs wider as his fingers delved inside her. When she had freed his erection she stroked its length. “Take me now, Colin,” she begged.

He covered her body with his, his mouth meeting hers in a passionate kiss as he thrust inside her. She gasped with pleasure and wrapped her legs around him, lifting her hips so that she could take him deeper. He rested his elbows on the coverlet and drove himself into her very core, and she closed her eyes and murmured his name. It did not take long for them both to reach the height of their pleasure, and as his seed filled her Colin caught himself saying a silent prayer that they might always have this—not the pleasure, but the joy in each other that they felt in this moment, so overpowering and intense that he thought he might be overwhelmed by it.

When he withdrew from her would have pulled her into his arms, but she rolled atop him and slipped out of her robe. Then she removed his trousers. “I want to feel your skin against mine,” she said, laying down and allowing him to hold her as the thunder rumbled away over the Broads. The sound of the rain had died while they made love, and now the stillness that followed a storm descended over the house.

For a long while neither of them spoke, and he thought that perhaps she had fallen asleep. But then she stirred against his shoulder. “Mmm,” she said, taking a deep breath, “now that the air is clearing you can smell the valerian blooming.”

He sat up. “What did you say?”

“I said that the valerian is blooming down in the rose garden,” she said, sitting up as well. “What’s the matter?”

“There’s valerian in the rose garden?”

She nodded. “There used to be a great many herbs there. The woman who was the cook before Mrs. Parkinson grew them. But since she died most of them are gone. Mrs. Parkinson does not have her green thumb. Only the valerian thrives, but it would do that no matter what, stubborn thing.”

Suddenly the pieces began to come together in Colin’s head as he recalled the bootprints and the netting beneath the arbor. Whoever was helping the Serraray had to be close enough to Sidney Park to have collected the valerian from the garden and used it to poison two men. That left precious few candidates, many of whom Colin trusted.