Swept Away (47 page)

“Yes, well,” Anthony said looking down at Ramsey, “that appears to be one problem we have resolved anyway.”

Emory shook his head. “No. I am not so sure we have.”

“Whyever not?” Anthony demanded. “You heard yourself he was in London, in Whitehall during the time your so-called
forged
orders were dispatched. He moved about as freely as Wessex or Barrimore or...or me, for that matter. My French is nearly as excellent as Barrimore’s and I was called upon more than once to help in translations when there were so many dispatches pouring in daily.”

“Did you know the codes?” Emory asked.

“Would I confess to it in this roomful of excitable individuals if I did?” the viscount snorted.

It was a fair point Anthony had made and Annaleah glanced at Barrimore to see how he was reacting to being called excitable. His face was granite, his body rigid. Only the thumb of his left hand moved, rubbing the empty place on his middle finger where his ring should be.

She looked down at his hand again and felt a small shiver run across the back of her neck.

How many times had she stared at that ring, watching it wink in the sunlight or gleam by candlelight as he turned it round and round his finger? It had been an inheritance from his maternal grandfather along with minor estates and titles belonging to the Ashworth heir-- something she was certain only a handful of people would be able to include in the recitation of his lineage. But Anna's mother, a scavenger for the smallest piece of information that might be of benefit to a prospective marriage, had gone through an endless litany of insignificant details a hundred times.

The shiver turned into a slow, cold flush that began at the nape of her neck and spread downward, leaving everything frozen in its wake.

Annaleah had commented on the ring once--most likely out of annoyance--and had been corrected in her misinterpretation of what she thought was a wolf sejant in the crest. It had been a fox sitting back on its haunchs. A rarely used element in family arms, but it was in the Ashworth crest and Barrimore had not lost the ring at all. He had deliberately removed it on the offchance someone might notice it again.

On board the
Intrepid
, he had claimed his French was strictly formal, yet Anthony had just said it was excellent--as it would have to be, logically, if he worked with coded dispatches going to and from enemy territory. Earlier, on the coach to Gravesend, she had been suspicious of all his questions, but he had managed to neatly defuse them. Only minutes ago, he tried to focus attention on Wessex, and then he had simply, coldly shot Ramsey...hoping what? That the dead colonel would indeed be made the scapegoat?

She looked up and found his eyes waiting for her. He knew what she was thinking and so did she. It was him. He was the fox. He was Le Renard.

CHAPTER 27

Anna glanced over at Emory, but he was talking to Wessex. Anthony was bent over the table pouring another glass of brandy, blocking her view of the captain and consequently impeding his view as Barrimore swiftly closed the gap between them. He wrapped the fingers of one hand around her arm and something painfully sharp gouged into the small of her back, piercing through her pea coat as if it was butter.

“Say one word,” he murmured, “and I will sever your spine. You will spend the rest of your days in a chair with wheels on it.”

She closed her mouth and swallowed her cry. His face was only inches from hers, his eyes like two shards of green ice.

“W-why?” she gasped. “
Why
?”

Instead of answering, he dug the point of the blade deeper into her skin causing a distinct wetness to trickle down beneath her shirt. “Ask if you might excuse yourself. Claim faintness, anything, so long as it gets us out of this cabin. And if you try anything, anything at all, I will kill you, and then I will kill your lover. From this moment on, I have absolutely nothing to lose, Miss Fairchilde, so you had best believe me.”

She did. She had no reason not to. His eyes, his voice were dead calm, his fingers were like iron pincers around her arm.

“Now, if you please,” he said calmly. “Do it.”

She shifted her gaze back to the four men huddled at the end of the table. Why did they suddenly seem so far away? Why were none of them aware of the little drama taking place less than a dozen paces away?

“Excuse me,” she managed with more force. “I hate to trouble you, Captain, but would it be possible for me to go out on deck for some fresh air? It...it is suddenly so close in here, I...I find myself feeling unwell.”

Maitland scraped to his feet at once with an apology. “Forgive my lack of sensitivity, Miss Fairchilde. I will have someone escort you immediately.”

“I confess to feeling a little warm myself,” Barrimore said from behind her. “I would gladly volunteer my company... if no one has an objection, that is.”

Annaleah imagined this last bit was added with a concessionary smile in Emory’s direction, for he looked over and the quick flash of concern that had wrinkled his brow gave way to a crooked grin.

“If Anna has no objections, I can think of none.”

“It is hardly your place to object or not, young man,” Maitland reminded him dryly. “Since I have not yet decided what is to be done with you.”

Emory acknowledged the captain’s dilemma by offering a faintly mocking bow, then moved toward the door to open it as Anna and Barrimore came around the end of the table.

Annaleah’s legs felt like two stumps of wood and her heart was beating so loudly in her breast she felt sure he had to hear it when they drew near. His attention was not entirely focussed on her, of course, for he was still trying to hear what Wessex and Maitland were saying as they resumed their conversation.

She stepped out into the bright burst of sunlight and, at the urging of the hand Barrimore kept gripped tightly around her upper arm, headed across the quarterdeck to the narrow flight of stairs that led down to the main gun deck. More of a ladder than steps, she knew Barrimore would have difficulty keeping close to her, and he could hardly show the knife in plain view of the sailors and soldiers working all around them. There were members of the crew standing by the cannon, more balancing up in the rigging, flashes of red and white in the uniformed infantrymen on all decks. If she stumbled, pretended to lose her balance, screamed...

“Don’t even think about it,” he warned. “You will only cost another innocent man his life.”

“You are quite despicable, sir,” she said.

“Whereas you are every bit the whore Ramsey accused you of being. And a surprisingly enthusiastic one too, I might add. You succeeded in shocking me rather profoundly the other night when I went back to the cabin and saw you spread out on his desk, clawing at him, bleating his name each time he rutted into you.”

She stopped and turned her head. “You saw us?”

“Briefly. I had expected your lover would be occupied on deck steering his ship out of the fog and you would be standing alongside him.”

“You went back to steal the papers.”

“He does not take to following orders very well. He was supposed to destroy all communications between himself and Wessex’s office.”

They had nearly reached the ladder. The sun was in the westerly sky shining through the shrouds, making a checkerboard pattern on the deck. The air smelled of salt and fish and the heat radiating off the oak planking. Her foot truly did stumble on the way down the narrow rungs, but Barrimore had hold of her jacket and kept her upright. At the bottom, he forced her to turn toward the open gangway in the rail.

There were twenty feet of deck between him and freedom, and while Annaleah had never really pondered a situation where she might be called upon to make a noble sacrifice for king and country, she knew she could not let him reach that opening. Good men--fathers, sons, brothers, lovers--had died in the hundred days of renewed fighting that followed Napoleon’s escape from Elba and Barrimore had been instrumental in making that escape possible. He had used Emory Althorpe then thrown him callously to the wolves, and if not for the sheer luck of her taking a walk on a hazy morning in her aunt’s cove, the true magnitude of this most recent deception might not have been discovered until it was too late.

She looked up at the tall mizzenmast that stood before her, at the fat rolls of sail furled to the spars and remembered hearing a quote someone once said about it being a good day to die.

“Move,” he said in her ear.

“First tell me why. Why did you do it? You are a rich man, an important man. You belong to the nobility for pity sake, how could you do something so contemptible, so disgraceful, so...so
dishonorable
?”

“If we had a month together, dear lady, I could possibly explain my motives, but since we are reduced to minutes, suffice it to say the vast reserves of wealth attributed to the Perry name were illusionary. My father squandered nearly penny he inherited on gambling and bad investments. There was not one estate that did not come to me burdened under staggering debts, so much so, they were in danger of being sold at a creditor’s auction.”

“Money?” She stopped again and this time, turned fully around to gape at him. “You betrayed your country for money?”

“Do without it for few years, and you would be surprised how very important it becomes. And it was not my intent in the beginning to ‘sell out my country’. It began innocently enough with a few hundred pounds here, a few hundred there for information that could have been obtained a dozen different ways. No one tells you, however, when you are young and stupid and blaming all the world for your woes that once you sell your soul to the devil, he is an unforgiving bastard. He grabs you by the guts and holds on fast and even if you want to break away, he has the power to eviscerate you before your peers. By the time I realized this, it was too late to back away, so the object then became to push forward. This--” he waved a hand to encompass the
Bellerophon
-- “was to be my last foray into the darker side of intrigue and afterwards...well ...America is the land of opportunity, they say. I was truly hoping you would come with me.” His gaze raked appreciatively over the high bloom of color in her cheeks, the glossy tangle of her hair. “You would have made a magnificent duchess. You still could, you know, for Althorpe will never clear his name. Neither will Wessex, I’m afraid.”

“He has the dispatches. He can prove they are forgeries.”

“How? By the watermark?”

Annaleah did not think she was capable of feeling a deeper sense of horror, but when she saw the coldness of his smile, she knew she was wrong. “There was no change in the mark?”

“A rather creative piece of impromptu gibberish, I thought.”

“Oddly enough,” a familiar voice said from behind them, “we were just discussing that.”

Barrimore spun around. Emory was standing in the sunlight, his long legs braced apart to counter the gentle roll of the deck. Wessex, Anthony, and Maitland were formed up beside him presenting a formidable phalanx of grim faces, though none as grim as the one staring along the steel barrel of the gun Emory was aiming at Barrimore’s head.

As hushed as the crowded deck had been when they came on board, it was twice as silent now as men stopped what they were doing to watch the facing off of the nobleman and the notorious privateer. On a signal from Maitland, a line of scarlet-clad infantrymen formed up across the quarter deck rail, another mustered forward, the click of hammers being cocked on their muskets the only sound on the still air.

The blade forced Anna’s head back against Barrimore’s shoulder. She closed her eyes against the sharp sting of the edge slivering through the skin. She did not have to see the look on Emory’s face, or on the faces of the other men to know that the warmth she felt trickling down her neck was blood.

“I think I have more than enough leverage to reach shore,” Barrimore said, his voice silky in her ear.

“Even if you do. Even if you manage to get off this ship, where can you go? How long can you hold a knife to her throat before your arm tires, or you take a false step--” Emory was hissing the words through his teeth now-- “or turn your back, knowing that I will be right behind you.”

“You have an alternative to suggest?”

“We can settle it right here, right now. You win, you leave the ship unmolested with a guarantee of safe passage as far as the shore.”

“Now see here, Althorpe--” Maitland began.

“Agreed,” Barrimore said, cutting off the protest. “You and I, here and now, the victor goes free--assuming of course we have the captain’s word as an officer and a gentleman that the terms will be honored.”

Anna held her breath. The ship, it seemed, held her breath as well, for what little breeze there was died and the pennants flying high on the masts wilted and fluttered down around the oak. Anna was aware of Barrimore’s heartbeat against her back and the tension in the fingers that gripped her arm. She could not judge how deeply the knife had cut her, but it felt as though there was a veritable torrent of blood pouring down to soak her shirt front.

All eyes, however, were on the gruff face of Frederick Maitland. “Damn you, Althorpe,” he muttered, “this should be left to a higher authority.”

“On board this ship, sir, you are the highest authority. You are both judge and jury. And if you are willing to let this thing be settled here and now, I am more than willing to oblige the man.”