Exile for Dreamers (6 page)

 

Four

SECRETS

Mr. Chadwick called after us, “I didn't mean to distress you. I hope you feel better tomorrow, Miss Aubreyson. We'll call on you then, and perhaps you'll be able to give us a more thorough account.”

Georgie took the lead as we pushed through the grass heading back to Stranje House.

“He asks too many questions,” I mumbled to Sera.

“Mmm,” she agreed, and glanced back over her shoulder. “He's too curious by half. And unless I miss my guess, he'll be like a dog with a bone until he solves this puzzle. We must come up with some suitably engaging answers.”

Jane met us where the two properties bordered as she was coming back from Stranje House. Philip, our footman, trailed behind her, carrying Miss Stranje's doctoring bag and a stack of extra linens from our bandage closet. Immediately, she added the ewer and basin she carried to the footman's stack and rushed to us. “What's happened?”

Sera kept hold of my arm as she explained, “The blow to Tess's head is worse than we thought. We're taking her home.”

“Wait. I'll help you.” Jane instructed the footman to hurry on to Ravencross Manor and take the equipment directly to Miss Stranje.

He left us and we continued on our way, but when we passed the undergrowth on Stranje House's park, I stopped walking. “We may be making a mistake.” Something was gnawing at me. I needed to reconsider our hasty departure. “Sera, I think you ought to go back. Return Mr. Chadwick's coat to him. Try to convince him that he needn't come back tomorrow. You'll think of something to say.” I pulled off his coat and held it out to her. “Please. I can't bear any more of his questions. Besides, you can tell his father everything you saw without having to lie.”

“Tess has a point.” Georgie agreed with me for once. “Sera, you could help guide them as they investigate the scene. One of us really ought to be there to throw them off the scent. And it was obvious he respected you the most.”

“I don't know.” She glanced back at the young man pacing on the drive. “What if he sees through me?”

I shivered without the warmth of his coat. “He won't. You're a girl. He'll underestimate you. They always do.”

“That's right.” Jane patted Sera's arm. “You'll think of something to keep them from looking too closely at what goes on at Stranje House. You're the best of us at strategy.”

“I'm not as convinced as you are that he'll underestimate me. And Jane, everyone knows you're better at strategy than I am. You're just trying to convince me to go stick my neck out.”

Jane didn't argue. She simply glanced to her feet and shifted uncomfortably. “Perhaps, but you're definitely better at pointing out details they might not notice, or knowing which of those clues might be to our advantage if they didn't notice.”

Sera sighed. “Very well, I'll do my best.” With a determined nod, she snatched the coat from me, turned, and marched back to Ravencross Manor like a soldier bravely headed off to war.

Jane pushed aside the branches of a scrub oak and we pressed on to Stranje House. Georgie took Sera's place, and I leaned closer to her. “You do realize it was you they were after?”

Her eyes squeezed tight for a minute as if she could keep the truth out that way.

She needed to face it. “I heard them say so. They'd been told to nab the girl with the red hair, and the person who gave them their orders was female.
La comtesse.
”

Georgie caught her breath. “A countess, then—”

“Daneska!” Jane finished for her.

“Undoubtedly,” I said. “She'd also told them she'd pay extra if they killed Lord Ravencross.” I shivered even more violently, but this time not from feeling cold. “Why would she want him killed?”

Worry flashed between Georgie and Jane, followed by a conspiratorial expression that set warning bells clanging almost as loud as the drumming in my head.
They were hiding something.

“What is it?” I demanded. But they remained buttoned up tighter than clams out of water. It didn't matter, I would fish it out of them eventually.

Jane tried to smooth over the uncomfortable silence. “You
know
why. She's hated him ever since Möckern, when he…” She trailed off.

Möckern
.

The battlefield where Lord Ravencross was wounded the first time.

The day Lady Daneska's paramour died.

I'd lived it in a dream. No, not a dream, a recurring nightmare that haunted me long before I'd actually met Ravencross. Three times I'd dreamt of that ghastly humid battlefield in Möckern. I could still see the insides of the ramshackle farmhouse where they fought. Could still smell it. That house stank of rot, mold, and the coming storm. Three times I lived through that sword fight between the brothers. Two men on opposite sides of the war, one loyal to England, and the other, leader of the Iron Crown, Napoleon's secret order of knights.

Gabriel's older brother almost killed him that day. Sliced his leg nearly in two. An injury he still carries. Anyone else would have died.

Not him.

Gabriel does not die easily. I prayed that today it would remain true.

His brother, Lucien, had moved in for the death blow. Instead of giving up, Gabriel swung his sword around and delivered one last protective thrust. Lucien collapsed like a toppled tree. His cheek struck the splintered floorboards, and his mouth gaped open in bloody surprise, his eyes fixed in a wide death stare.

I could still see Lucien's lifeless face. Could still feel Gabriel's desolation. Three times I have awakened to a scream that still shreds my peace. Gabriel's cry of anguish. Not for his own pain, but for having killed his only brother.

Of course, Daneska hated Ravencross for killing her lover. But I could tell Jane and Georgie were still holding something back, something that had to do with him, with Ravencross. “What are you hiding? Tell me.”

I glared at them, annoyed that they would try to keep a secret from me. I would wiggle it out of them in time. Not today, though. Today I was weary, and my head hammered like a blacksmith reworking a bent horseshoe.

“We must concentrate on the matter at hand.” Georgie's ploys are transparent. Obviously, she sought to distract me. “Think hard,” she wheedled. “Did you notice anything about your kidnappers that might lend us a clue?”

“I'm not Sera,” I grumbled. “I don't remember details.”

“Try.”

We crossed through Miss Stranje's gardens. A tangled mass of roses left to grow wild created a maze of thorns, calculated to discourage visitors from arriving in that direction. Georgie persisted with her questions. “There must be something you recall. Did they say anything else that might help us? Perhaps you noticed an accent?”

She needled as much as Mr. Chadwick, except now that I thought of it, she was right. I
had
noticed something. “The one with the injured leg had a thick French accent. But the other one, the man who came at me, the one…”
The one I killed.
I bit my lip before continuing. “His vowels were mixed up. It sounded as if he might've been from East Sussex.”

Then I remembered the worst of it. “He said she'd given him their orders when she arrived in England.”

“Ohhh.” Georgie blew air through her lips. Her brow pinched up and her freckles paled. “That means she's here. Lady Daneska is back in England.”

Jane and Maya both stopped cold. We all did. Jane turned around, her lips pressed tight. “Then we must assume they traveled here from somewhere along our coast. Close by.”

“I could be wrong. Perhaps the blow to my head has muddled things,” I said, hoping to ease their minds, except I could still hear those blackguards talking in my head.

Georgie rubbed her ear as if that might change the facts she'd heard. “This is not good. Not good at all.”

“Come on, let's get you into the house.” Jane put her arm around my waist and urged me forward.

Georgie stomped along behind us, grumbling about Daneska's brazenness at returning to England. “Doesn't she know she could go to the gallows for her treachery?”

Maya answered with a quiet but troubling truth. “I believe Lady Daneska fears very little.”

“She's an irrational creature.” Georgie's hands balled into fists. “No better than a common viper.”

A
common
viper?

No, there was nothing
common
about Daneska. Oh, Dani was poisonous, all right, but she was more like an exotic cobra. Beautiful. Mesmerizing. Deadly.

And twice as crafty.

After all, she'd fooled me from the very beginning. The two of us had lost our mothers, so I'd mistakenly thought our grief bonded us.

When I first arrived at Stranje House there had been two older girls at the school, but soon after they both made advantageous marriages, marriages that strategically placed them in key foreign courts. That left me a lone student at Stranje House until Lady Daneska appeared at our door. After her mother died, Daneska's father, one of Napoleon's newly minted dukes, sent her to live out of harm's way with her maternal aunt, Lady Pinswary, one of Miss Stranje's neighbors. Lady Daneska had complained that her aunt and cousin nearly suffocated her with boredom and that rumors about the school sparked her curiosity. But after all that's happened, I wonder if getting into Stranje House had been her objective all along.

She told me she'd badgered her aunt into sending her to Stranje House and even offered to pay the tuition herself. Lady Pinswary finally relented, but only after issuing numerous warnings about Stranje House's notorious discipline chamber and the reputed cruelty of our headmistress.

I admit I'd been exceedingly glad of Daneska's company. In no time we were thick as thieves, competing against each other in defensive arts, playing tricks on Madame Cho and Miss Stranje. I'm still not certain why she befriended me. When Lady Jane, an earl's daughter, came to the school five months later I would've thought her a much more suitable connection. But Daneska had no interest in Lady Jane, nor in Seraphina, who joined our ranks a few weeks later. From the start Daneska had been intrigued by my dreams, and I'd thought she understood me as no one else had ever done. When in truth, the traitor had merely been learning how to best take advantage of my friendship.

I realized later, she had never felt the loss of her mother as I did. Her grief had been a pretense, a cobra's mesmerizing dance.

The only loss Daneska mourned was being a countess in her father's court.

Georgie slapped a twig out of her way. “If Lady Daneska had a lick of sense she would be afraid, because if I ever get my hands on her scrawny neck there'll be no need for a hangman. She must be made to answer for what she did to Sebastian.”

“And for her betrayal,” added Jane.

As we climbed the back steps, the garden door flew open and Madame Cho rushed out. Clearly, she'd been watching from the window. She nudged Jane and Maya out of the way and marched me into the house. The minute we were inside, she began sizing up the lump on my head. I winced as she inspected it, while evaluating me with her coal-black eyes.

“Come.” She tugged me down the hall to the small sitting room where we usually studied geography and language. “Sit.” She wrapped an afghan around me, washed the blood from my hands and face with a ewer and cloth. By the time she finished, the water in the basin had turned a sickening red. She peered closely into each of my eyes, first one and then the other. Madame Cho clicked her tongue, rattled off something in irritated Chinese, and then told me what I already knew. “You have a bad bump. Very bad.”

“I'll mend. I just need to rest.” I leaned back against the sofa and closed my eyes.

Madame Cho yanked on the bellpull, and Alice, our parlor maid, hurried in. “Bring tea.”

Alice had no sooner left than Greaves, our butler, appeared in the doorway and cleared his throat. “Pardon me, ladies, but we have a visitor.”

Madame Cho looked up, suddenly wary. I think it was because of the way Greaves said the word “visitor,” as if it wasn't simply Lady Somebody-or-Other from the village.

“We've no time for visitors today.” Jane took charge, as she is inclined to do. Not that Jane is domineering. It's simply that she excels at managing. “You may tell whoever it is that we are not at home today.”

“Begging your pardon, miss, but this one claims he carries a message.”

When Jane makes up her mind, she won't budge for anything less than an artillery shell. “Tell him to leave his message and go.”

“But—”

Georgie exhaled loudly. “Don't you see, Tess is injured. We've bodies in the field, a nosy magistrate's son, and Lady Da—” She stopped short and caught herself before sputtering all of her worries out on poor Greaves. “Not today. We simply can't allow vis—”

Greaves never interrupts, but he did that day. “A message from Lord Wyatt.”

Georgie paled and stood, staring at Greaves. Her frustration drained entirely away. Quiet as a breath, Lord Wyatt's given name escaped her lips. “Sebastian.”

“Yes, miss.” Despite the hump on his back, Greaves stood as rigid as the king's guard and solemn as an undertaker.

“I'll go with you.” Jane took Georgie's arm. “Greaves, you may show the messenger to the upstairs parlor. Thank you.”

“Wait!” I leaned forward to stand up. “I'm going with you, too. I'll not have any more secrets.”

“No. You will not.” Madame Cho clamped an iron hand on my shoulder and pressed me back down. “You must stay still. No stairs. Not yet.”

“Very well, if you're that worried about it, we'll all stay together.” Jane acted as if, in Miss Stranje's absence, she were the matriarch of Stranje House even though she was younger than me, and Madame Cho really ought to be giving the orders. But she has that air of command about her, and everyone just seems to fall in line. She guided Georgie back to the divan and issued more instructions. “You may show this messenger in here, Greaves.”