Miss Antiqua's Adventure (2 page)

A low groan and an uneasy stirring assured her that the figure was not a corpse. She reached tentatively out, then gasped as a sudden hand trapped her wrist.

“Close . . . the door.”

Her only thought being to help the man so obviously in need, she did not question this hoarse command, but obeyed it the instant her wrist was released. Antiqua then stumbled to her bedside, colliding in her haste into her maid’s trundle bed.

“Oooh, Miss,” grumbled the sleepy Lucy. “Whyever are you up?”

Miss ignored her and continued to grope for the tinder box on her night-table. At last her fumbling fingers found their desired object and in a matter of moments the light of a single candle dimly illuminated the small chamber. By its shaky light, Antiqua was finally able to see her mysterious visitor.

His sandy hair gleamed dully in the candlelight and his oval face appeared unearthly against the shadows. He was struggling to get up, causing his cloak to fall open, and she could see that he was of medium height and broadly built.

And blood . . . she could see blood seeping from a bullet hole in the side of his shirt that his coat had originally covered.

Lucy rose as well and, upon catching sight of the cloaked stranger stretched out not six feet away, screeched shrilly.

“Be quiet, you silly thing!” Antiqua snapped. She crossed swiftly to the man’s side. In another instant she was back at Lucy’s trundle. “Give me your cap!” she ordered.

“But Miss—”

“Don’t argue!” Antiqua snatched the muslin from her reluctant maid, then returned quickly to the stranger. Taking a deep, steadying breath, she bent down. She balled the cap into a bulky wad and calmly pressed the muslin against the gaping hole in his side, trying to staunch the flow of blood. The cap turned crimson. The man moaned, a dry, cracked moan that brought Antiqua’s eyes to his shadowed face.

“You! You’re the tutor I met in the coach from Calais!” she breathed.

A ghost of a smile was her only answer for some seconds. Then, slowly, painfully, he rasped, “I am . . . no tutor. I need . . . your help.”

“Shh, you must lie quiet.”

“Ooh, Miss! What’s to do? He’s bleedin’ all over my cap!”

“Hush, Lucy!” Antiqua saw that he was attempting once again to rise up. “Please, sir, lie still! I shall fetch a doctor—”

“No!”

The force of his explosive denial seemed to sap his dwindling strength. He lay back, breathing with a rattle that resounded in the tiny room.

“But your wound must be attended to,” Antiqua argued, wondering how to move him onto her bed, how to find a French doctor at this time of night.

“I am . . . done for . . . anyway,” he gasped.

“Oh, no, never say so! You need only to be properly looked after.” But even as she demurred, she knew that he was right, for the miasma of death hung about his every breath. She presented no further protest and he acknowledged her tacit agreement with a grim tightening of his whitened lips.

“How may I help you?” she asked in a curiously calm voice.

“Pocket,” he whispered in reply.

Antiqua hesitated, then began searching through the pockets of his voluminous cloak. It seemed to her an age, as she listened to his labored breathing and to Lucy’s occasional objections, but at last she pulled from the cloak a leather packet, tightly bound with dark vermillion ribbon.

The man had closed his eyes, lying as if asleep, but he now opened them to focus a dull stare upon her. For a frightened instant Antiqua feared he would be unable to explain the meaning of the packet, of why he had come to her. Gradually however, the cloud lifted from his eye and she saw recognition return.

“What is this, Mr. . . .?”

“Allen . . . Thomas Allen . . . English agent.” There was urgency in his voice, fright and pain and the desperate need to speak. He reached up and clutched the edge of her sleeve. “Vital information . . . must get to . . . England.”

Antiqua searched the pain-wracked face, seeing again the quiet stability which had drawn her secret approval during the day’s coach journey and led her now to accept his dictates without question. She sensed, too, an honesty, an integrity about him which she instinctively trusted. His lips moved soundlessly. She read the question he had no strength to ask and came to a typically impulsive decision.

“I’ll take it to England for you,” she volunteered.

“But Miss! We’re going to Paris!” Lucy put in.

“No, we are turning back to England,” Antiqua contradicted. At that moment, she looked far older, far wiser, far more womanly than her years. “Tell me, sir, to whom I must give this message.”

A spasm shook him, clenching and unclenching his body. When it passed he said brokenly, “Help me to my room . . . I must not die here.”

Instantly, Antiqua jumped up. “Get dressed, Lucy!”

“With him here, Miss?”

“Quit being such a fool! He shan’t look at you. Now get changed—unless, of course, you’d rather be seen wandering the passageways in your nightdress.”

After setting the packet on her bed, Antiqua rapidly shed her own nightclothes and stepped into a rumpled blue muslin gown which she had worn all day in the coach. She did not bother to button the high neck nor the tight cuffs of the long sleeves, but returned immediately to Allen’s side.

She ripped the hem from her discarded nightgown and then used the strip of linen to tightly bind the cap over Mr. Allen’s wound. The flow of blood had turned to a mere trickle, but she saw from the pallor of his face that he had lost too much. The skin stretched tautly over the bones of his face, pain dimmed the light of his eyes. He would not live much longer, she realized, and she knew a pang of sorrow. It occurred to her that she would mourn for the passing of this stranger, perhaps even more so than she had for the passing of her rogue of a father six months ago.

Not without voicing numerous objections, Lucy was at length persuaded to help lift Mr. Allen. Between them, the two young women managed to stagger down the narrow stairway with their heavy burden, though Allen sagged from their arms at the landing. Eventually they were able to regain a clumsy hold of him, then drunkenly progressed to his chamber. Fortune favored them with an absence of witnesses to their labors, a fact duly praised by the vocally disapproving Lucy.

As soon as they had deposited Allen upon his bed, where he lay struggling for each breath, Antiqua lit candles and set about doing what she could to ease the dying man’s sufferings. Lucy begrudgingly helped her remove his cloak, then poured water from the pitcher on the nearby commode into the ewer and carried it to her mistress. Antiqua dampened a handkerchief she had extracted from one of his pockets, and dismissed her maid as she began to lightly wet his dry lips and bathe his temples.

“Go start packing up our things, Lucy,” she ordered. “Do not be giving me further argumentation—you must see that we cannot delay! Whoever tried to stop Mr. Allen from delivering his information will surely attempt to stop us as well. We must be away. Now go!”

Lucy gave it as her opinion that they’d have been better off if Mr. Allen
had
indeed been stopped. A fulminating glare from Antiqua sent her out the door, muttering that she should have known better than to travel to nasty, barbarian foreign lands where strangers fell into your room in the middle of the night without so much as a by-your-leave.

Left alone with Allen, Antiqua sat quietly by his side, swathing his forehead with the dampened cloth and striving to be patient. There were so many questions to be answered and so little time to ask them, but she knew she must wait until he had regained some of the strength he had lost in the exertion of moving to his room. Dimly, she was aware of activity in the corridor beyond the door, unusual for so late at night, but she gave it little notice as she continued to wait. For her, life had become some out-of-focus dream in which only the shadows flickering eerily over Allen’s ashen face stood out with clarity.

Several times she thought this must in truth be a dream. She had not wanted to go to an unknown life in Paris and thus her mind had conjured up this fantastic mission to return her to the England she so dearly loved. Each rattling breath the English agent drew, however, told Antiqua it was no dream.

How much time passed by, she had no way of knowing, but at last Allen’s eyes opened. His breath came in short gasps.

 She bent forward eagerly. “Please, sir, I must know what this is all about.”

“Be careful,” he warned, coughing and panting and speaking in low spurts. “Bonapartists . . . plan Napoleon’s escape . . . from St. Helena . . .”

“What is in the packet?”

“Details . . .”

His face was now utterly without color, his breathing ragged once more. Leaning closer still, Antiqua inquired intensely, “But to whom shall I take the packet? And who did this to you?”

“My brother . . . William . . .” Allen shook with his attempt to catch hold of a breath.

“But who did this to you?” Antiqua questioned again in a quaking voice which sounded foreign to her own ears.

Rivulets of sweat coursed his face as he strained to reply. “English traitors . . . you must . . . be careful . . . beware Vi—”

A wracking cough convulsed his body. Blood discolored the corner of his mouth. The spasm left him lying weak against the pillow.

Antiqua tenderly wiped the ugly stain away from his lip. “Do not worry, sir, I shall be most careful. Your message shall be delivered to your brother, I promise you,” she vowed with a confidence she did not feel. “Rest now.”

She wondered against whom he had been about to warn her and wondered, too, how she would get back to England, where and how she would ever find his brother once she got there. But being an optimist at heart, Antiqua left those problems to work themselves out at a later time. She bent toward him, about to question him further, but discovered that it would be no use. Thomas Allen had been released from his pain. In repose, the suffering erased from his face, he looked absurdly youthful. Antiqua trembled with a sense of loss.

Closing his eyes, she removed the cap-bandage from his side and said a quick prayer for him. She silently promised to carry his message on for him so that his death would not have been in vain. Then she blew out the candles and with a sad, small sigh, stepped into the passageway and quietly closed the door.

Chapter 3

A door opened behind her. She spun guiltily about. Across the narrow width of the corridor stood a man wearing a many-caped greatcoat and black pantaloons. The faint light of the hall lantern haloed him like some dark angel.

Eyes bluer than the Thames in June burned from a face that might have been carved from stone. His hair was more black than brown, his brows equally dark, and his nose was high-bridged above a mouth that promised either cruelty or intense sexuality. Or both. That thought made her throat go dry.

Folding his arms over his chest, the stranger leaned his shoulder against the door frame, apparently disposed to remain staring at this unexpected petite vision with the shapely figure curving only where it ought. Antiqua read the insult in the gaze arrogantly raking over her, and a fierce flush spread across her cheeks. Still, she stood her ground, enduring his stare and trying to face him down, despite the certain knowledge that she was doomed to failure.

His bold scrutiny made her acutely and uncomfortably aware of the way in which waves of thick chestnut hair framed her face in abandoned dishevelment. She knew a wish that she had had time to dress properly and could only hope he had not noted the state of disarray of her attire. That hoped died as a wickedly suggestive smile touched his lips.

“It appears
monsieur le tuteur
has spent a more pleasant evening than I,” he observed in flawless French.

The nature of his comment passed unnoticed for Antiqua’s gaze had traveled to the huge servant standing behind the presumptuous man. Her eyes widened as she saw he carried a pair of portmanteaux in each hand. This man was leaving the hotel! Even should he be traveling on to Paris, it would be better, far better, than to remain in Amiens. She realized instantly that this was a gift from Providence, and she did not intend to let it slip past her.

Her attention returned to the dark-clad man. “Oh, please,
monsieur
, are you leaving Amiens?” she asked in passable French.

Monsieur saw a pair of enormous velvet brown eyes turned upward in mute appeal. Ignoring the urgent plea in those lovely eyes, he lowered his gaze to her full red lips, lips which bespoke a passionate promise, then lower still to the gentle swell beneath the crumpled gown. She stirred nervously under his study, and he caught the wisp of honeysuckle scent.

“Ah . . .
oui, mademoiselle
,” he replied with a slight quirk of those sensuous lips. “May I perhaps be of some service?”

The tone was insolent. His eyes were those of a predator as they fixed upon the unbuttoned neck of her gown. She felt branded where his cool gaze raked across the creamy hint of her breasts. Blushing more keenly still, Antiqua forced herself to remain calm. Clearly, his behavior was an insult. Under ordinary circumstances she would have taken offense. But circumstances were far from ordinary. This was a matter of life and death. The information which had cost Thomas Allen his life made it imperative that she leave Amiens without delay. She could not afford to spurn such an opportunity.

With a halting effort, she answered, “Yes. That is, I should like to go with you.”

“Should you indeed?” A tiny ripple of sarcasm ran through his question.

“Sir, I do not think—” began the manservant, to be silenced with a quelling look.

“I—I would gladly pay for the journey,
monsieur
,” she stammered. “I’ve not much money, but—”

“
Ma chérie
, there is no need. I should be delighted to take you up,” he drawled.

He straightened and extended a hand. Antiqua stared at it in horror. Undoubtedly, Monsieur meant far more than a mere insult. She opened her mouth to put him firmly in his place when he added in a drowsy voice, “We are bound for Calais, but it shall be my pleasure to convey you wherever you wish to go.”