The Traitor (16 page)

Milly’s head came off Sebastian’s shoulder, only to be shoved gently against his shirt. He was back on his English, and sounding coolly pleased with himself.

“A fiancé?” Lady Avery echoed. “You’re snatching your aunt’s companion for your baroness, St. Clair?”

Lady Covington produced a lorgnette. “She’s a pretty little thing. Not
too
old.”

“I am
not
—” Milly began, only to find Sebastian’s mouth brushing over hers.

“My dear Millicent is not in the habit of permitting me kisses. I must apologize for having become carried away.” And then, murmured right next to her ear, “
Calme, s’il vous plaît, petite tigresse.
”

His petite tigress stifled the urge to bite him. She settled for stomping on his toes, which had no effect whatsoever.

“Blessed saints,” Lady Freddy said, clapping her gloved hands. “I own myself relieved to have a simple explanation for a small lapse. Milly, you will go straight up to bed, and, Sebastian, you shall draft the particulars for the professor to send to our friends. Ladies, shall we away? I cannot abide the idea that the Countess Thrall might be winning every hand for want of our steadying influence on the gentlemen.”

With pointed looks at Sebastian and Milly, Freddy’s companions followed her out. The professor lingered only a moment, his expression bemused.

The instant the door closed, Milly wrestled free of Sebastian’s embrace.

“What have you done?! Those, those
women
will bruit it about all over London that we’re engaged, and because of a mere kiss!”

“A
mere
kiss?”

Milly paced the confines of the foyer, arms crossed, skirts swishing.

“And Lady Freddy will be so disappointed when there’s no ceremony. You should be ashamed!”

“I should be
ashamed
? Of kissing you?”

Milly rounded on his lordship. “I’m well aware that I should be ashamed for kissing you, my lord. Well aware, but there are employment agencies in York, and a small indiscretion can be overlooked when an unattached, titled gentleman is involved. But now you’ve gone and—”

Sebastian was smiling at her, and that more than any rousing argument suggested to Milly he might not grasp the situation in all its terrible entirely.

“I cannot marry you, my lord.”

“You can kiss me, but you can’t use my name?”

“And I cannot marry you. I am a companion, in service, in case you’ve forgotten.” His smile did not falter, so Milly fired her biggest cannon. “
I
cannot
read.
What baroness cannot even read the menus put before her by the cook? Cannot read bedtime stories to her own children? Can barely follow along in the Book of Common Prayer—”

His smile shifted, becoming tender rather than pleased.

“You can sing to the children instead, tell them stories you make up, or listen to their own fanciful tales. You’re resourceful, my dear, and you shall contrive. As a baroness, you will contrive magnificently.”

Based on the pride Milly heard in his tone, St. Clair had already dispatched announcements to Lady Freddy’s cronies, cried the banns, and said his vows. He was not resigned to this dire turn of events; he was rejoicing in it.

While she…could not read. When St. Clair slipped his arms around her again, Milly leaned into him and tried not to cry.

***

“MacHugh said you may have as much time as you like to put your affairs in order. He’s offended by you, not by the entire St. Clair succession.”

Michael could not have sounded more disgusted as he rode along at Sebastian’s side.

“So I’m to get a child on my prospective wife, allowing MacHugh the comfort of knowing he won’t put Lady Freddy on the Crown’s charity when I’m laid to rest? And what if my baroness is so disobliging as to present me with a daughter? Or she doesn’t carry the child safely through birth? Am I to put MacHugh off, year to year, until my heir and spare are grown to manhood and MacHugh and I are too old to give a good account of ourselves?”

“Beating each other to death is not giving a good account of anything, and your barony is ancient enough that it likely can be preserved through the female line.”

They passed a lilac bush blooming next to a stand of yellow tulips, the lavender and yellow making a cheerful contrast to their dreary conversation. Sebastian bid Fable to pause so his rider might catch a whiff of lilac.

“What does the lilac symbolize to the English?”

“First emotions of love. You don’t have to marry the girl at all.”

“Yes, Michael, I do. Her reputation was at risk simply because she sought employment in my household, and Aunt’s cronies are not about to let my indiscretion remain a secret. Then too, Aunt caught me once before in a similar moment with Miss Danforth.”

A similarly lovely moment. Sebastian signaled his horse to toddle on.

“Milly Danforth is a companion, for God’s sake. A nobody, a nothing to Polite Society. They’ll dine on her bones for a week then go yipping and baying to their next kill. All you did was kiss her, or endure her kisses.”

Fable snatched a bite of some leaves hanging over the bridle path.

“Naughty boy,” Sebastian chided mildly. “Miss Danforth is a nobody, Michael, but that makes it all the more imperative that my behavior toward her be honorable, which it was not.”

He really ought to be ashamed of himself for that, but he was too pleased by the knowledge that Milly Danforth had started the kiss that had resulted in their engagement.

“I’ll find somebody to marry the damned woman,” Michael spat.

“Dear fellow, on general principles one should not procure a spouse for any female whom one refers to as
the
damned
woman
. Miss Danforth is not pleased to have me for a husband. I don’t think she’d allow any convenient eligible of your acquaintance to so much as kiss her cat.”

The turn of phrase was unfortunately prurient, the mistake of a man who’d misplaced his native language for too many years.

“I daresay you won’t be kissing her—”

“Hush, Michael. One duel hanging over me is one too many.”

Michael turned his horse down the left fork of the path, the less traveled route, the one they always took. “You could apologize.”

“No, I cannot. MacHugh struck a stout blow before at least one witness. He wants no apology from me, he wants satisfaction, though I do wonder—”

He broke off as Fable’s head came up. The Duke of Mercia rode around a bend in the path, looking handsome and severe in the early morning light.

Sebastian gave a slow nod and nudged Fable onto the verge. For His Grace, Sebastian would have positioned his horse in the middle of a wet muck pit—and cheerfully dismounted in the same location.

“Mercia.”

His Grace checked his horse, a glossy, well-muscled chestnut with perfect manners. “St. Clair.” The duke glanced at Michael. “He’ll second you?”

“Mr. Brodie has that honor.” Again. Michael had seconded St. Clair when he’d met Mercia too, of course. And Pierpont, Neggars, and Cambert, as well.

Mercia switched the bight of his reins from the left to the right side of his horse’s neck.

“MacHugh is damned good with his fists, but he’s careless—or arrogant. He doesn’t close up his defense as snugly as he ought, and he leaves openings. His right is formidable, though he relies on it almost exclusively. Good day.”

Mercia touched a gloved finger to his hat brim and cantered off.

The duke’s short discourse was astonishing in several regards, not the least impressive of which was that it silenced Michael for a distance of two furlongs. When their path emerged near the sparkling beauty of the Serpentine, Michael found his tongue.

“I must write to my sisters at Blackthorn and ask them whether the wee piggies have sprouted wings.”

“Blackthorn is your estate in Ireland?”

Michael was silent for another half furlong, making the day nothing short of miraculous—or damned strange. “My mother’s people are Irish, and my sister Bridget married an Irish earl’s heir. My sire hails from Aberdeenshire. Hailed.”

Hence his Highland attire and his tendency to lapse from a brogue into a burr when in the grip of strong emotions.

In the face of such a revelation, Sebastian trod lightly. “Not much summer that far north.”

“What there is has no comparison anywhere in the world.” Michael petted his horse, a Roman-nosed bay gelding with a tendency to nip and spook.

“You are homesick, Michael. Many a married man does without a valet.”

A gaggle of ladies with their grooms appeared on the path ahead of them, Lady Amelia among them.

“Are you sending me away,
my
lord
?”

Holy
Mother, preserve me from the pride of the Celt.
“I could neither send you away nor summon you to my side unless you wished it, Michael. You cannot protect me from every enraged English officer who wants me dead. Your family must miss you, and they should be your first obligation.”

“As your family has been yours?”

Lady Amelia’s group passed them single file, grooms bringing up the rear. When it came Amelia’s turn to pass him—to snub him—she instead gave him the barest, most infinitesimal nod, her gaze touching Sebastian’s for only an instant.

The grooms came along on their unprepossessing mounts, and Sebastian waited until they’d passed to resume the conversation with his self-appointed conscience.

“You told me not to marry Miss Danforth, Michael, and yet marrying her fulfills both my obligations as a gentleman and my obligations to the succession—to my family. I am mindful of my obligations.”

And Amelia had acknowledged him. His engagement to Milly Danforth had become public earlier in the week, and Amelia had acknowledged him.

Michael glanced around, likely making sure nobody else could overhear.

“Do you suppose Lady Amelia feels safe from you now that you’re betrothed to somebody else?”

Betrothed was a sweet word, a word full of belonging and hope—also sadness, an emotion Sebastian used to brush aside like so many ashes in a hearth.

“Lady Amelia’s group came from that direction,” Sebastian said, pointing to a rise off to the north. “She saw no less than the Duke of Mercia acknowledge me with conversation, and hence allowed the smallest crack in her reserve toward me. We should get back to the house, or Lady Freddy will pronounce us late for breakfast. Thank MacHugh for his forbearance, and tell him I will meet him one week after the wedding.”

Michael swore in Gaelic and sent his bay forward in a smooth canter, while Sebastian held Fable back to a brisk trot. Lady Amelia had acknowledged him, and yet, he’d rather she’d cut him once more, for instead of indifference, her gaze had held wariness and loathing.

Sebastian was damned sick of people watching him with that same uneasy, anxious gaze, as if he’d drag them off and delight in applying manacles and thumbscrews in hopes of learning how much they owed the tradesmen or what they’d lost at the tables last week.

He kicked Fable up to the canter, and admitted to himself he was marrying Milly Danforth—he
could
marry Milly Danforth—in part because she had never once regarded him with wariness and loathing.

“Walk with me, Miss Danforth.” Mr. Brodie winged his arm at Milly, but when she leveled a stare at him in response, he managed to tack on the requisite sop to manners. “Would you mind walking with me for a moment,
please
?”

He was trainable, then. Milly doubted Sebastian would have kept Mr. Brodie about if he were not, though Sebastian—what a delight, to think of him thus—could not be choosy about his familiars.

A daunting thought, when she might well become one of them.

“A few minutes only,” Milly said as they turned down between two rows of silvery green lavender. “Lady Freddy will get into mischief if she’s left without supervision for very long.”

Mr. Brodie looked as if he had wind, or perhaps was trying not to smile. “On a horticultural farm bordering Chelsea?”

“Anywhere. St. Clair and the professor can curb her natural impulses for only so long, and then she must meddle. She’ll be telling his lordship what’s amiss with his herbs, and the gardener won’t dare countermand her directions. She’ll tell the lads how to feed that wretched donkey and demand they groom the burrs from the stable cats.”

Mr. Brodie bent and snapped off a sprig from a low-growing bush, bringing it to his nose then passing it to Milly. “Does she know what’s amiss with his herbs?”

“Only his lordship can puzzle that out, but you did not request this stroll to discuss Lady Freddy’s queer starts or his lordship’s horticulture.”

“I did not. I requested this stroll so I might return some correspondence to you.” He produced a packet of letters from an inside pocket and passed them to Milly. “I assume the professor abetted you.”

Milly glanced at the letters fleetingly, as if they were contraband, then slipped them into the pocket of her walking dress. To give herself time to sort the emotions rioting through her at the sight of her own handwriting—the professor had helped her only a little with these employment inquiries—she brushed the sprig of lavender under her nose.

“It’s a comforting scent,” Mr. Brodie said, “having only positive associations.”

Wretch. “You are saying St. Clair has been only honorable toward me. What about
my
honor, Mr. Brodie? How am I to behave honorably toward
him
?”

They ambled along, gravel crunching under their feet, the low, shrubby bushes making a pretty green carpet beneath the sun. Despair welled up as the odors of turned earth and stables imbued the very air with bucolic benevolence.

“How is your honor served by tucking tail and heading for the West Riding, Miss Danforth? Meaning no insult, you will not make St. Clair an ideal baroness. I told him to treat you to a long engagement followed by a quiet, well-compensated jilting. He listened patiently then politely told me to mind my own business.”

A capital notion, considering Mr. Brodie had sorted through Milly’s belongings and now had taken to sorting through her correspondence. Either Mr. Brodie was a very unscrupulous man, or his devotion to Sebastian was without limit.

Possibly both were true.

Sebastian stood across the field of lavender, head bare, dark hair riffling in the mild breeze as he conferred with his gardener. Milly took a moment to memorize the sight of her fiancé, just another Englishman being conscientious about his land—a handsome Englishman haunted by bad memories, a trying present, and a difficult future.

“I’m not abandoning him,” Milly said. “I’m trying to be sensible. I am a semiliterate companion, not a baroness. I cannot read a program at the theater, cannot write out my own invitations.”

Not that Sebastian’s baroness would have any invitations to send.

“St. Clair has spent at least two hours with you each day this week, working on your letters.”

“Are you jealous of me, Mr. Brodie?”

For this notion had occurred to Milly. Such was the influence of a pair of wily old ladies who’d known more of the world than anybody guessed, and such was the puzzle of Michael Brodie.

“I offered to find you another husband to marry you in his stead.”

First her letters handed back to her, and now this? Milly took another fortifying whiff of Mr. Brodie’s sorry excuse for an olive branch.

“Whatever can you be about, Mr. Brodie? If you agree that I’m not a proper fiancée for his lordship, if you’re willing to go to that unimaginable length to thwart this marriage, why sabotage my attempts to investigate employment opportunities elsewhere?”

He was silent for a moment, then gestured to a bench that bordered the lavender. Milly took a seat, though lounging about in the sun without her bonnet would get her a crop of freckles that would take weeks to fade.

“I’ve changed my mind, that’s why. For whatever time he has with you, I think St. Clair could be happy. He doesn’t care that you struggle with your letters. I think he likes it, in fact.”

The very problem in a nutshell.

“And two years from now, when I am still mistaking
p
’s,
b
’s, and
d
’s, Mr. Brodie? Will his lordship enjoy instructing his poor, stupid baroness then? When I cannot help my children with their letters? When one of my children turns out to share my affliction?
When
Sebastian’s heir cannot sign his name any better than I can sign my own?
Will he still enjoy pitying his wife then?”

The notion of sending her son off to Eton to be beaten and taunted and made a laughingstock for something he could not help, could
never
help…

A handkerchief appeared in her lap, snowy linen bordered with delicate lace, and monogrammed with the initials
MBO
. Milly had to trace her finger over the big, flourishy
B
to be sure what it was.

“Cease sentimentalizing, Miss Danforth. St. Clair will hire the appropriate tutors and work with the boy himself, the way he’s worked with you, assuming he’s alive to see his son grow.”

Milly blotted her eyes with the handkerchief, the lavender scent on her fingers mingling with vetiver. “You are such a ray of sunshine, Mr. Brodie. One can see why Sebastian treasures your company.”

“If you’re to marry him—and I hope you do—you should do so with your eyes open. Many would rather he were dead.”

“You refer to all those English officers he stretched on the rack? They want him dead?”

“For some of them, it was worse than that.”

He spoke quietly, no teasing, no prickliness. The real Michael Brodie had come forth, and Milly liked his quiet reserve far better than his posturing and pride.

She was not as comfortable with the sense of remorse he exuded. Was he sorry for what Sebastian had done, or did Michael Brodie have his own regrets?

“Sebastian doesn’t speak of it,” she said. “He starts to, then he checks himself, as if my cousin never sent me letters telling me what war is really like. As if my aunts’ old friends never reminisced on the same subject.”

Late at night, several hours into the Madeira, while Milly embroidered in a quiet corner and hurt for old men who would never be free of their memories.

Mr. Brodie shifted, as if the hard bench pained him.

“St. Clair has a talent for knowing when somebody is telling the truth, and he has a talent for knowing how to make them want to tell that truth—to him.”

In Milly’s experience, this was accurate. Based on very little information, St. Clair had realized she could not read well.

“And these officers, they did not want to tell him anything?”

“Their names, their regimental affiliations—the same information they’d impart if they’d been captured in full uniform. If they told him that much, there was a chance St. Clair could negotiate a quiet and thoroughly improper ransom for them, though he was under no obligation to do so. They knew, though, that the price for that ransom was information.”

A sense of dread washed through Milly while, across the field, Sebastian clapped his gardener on the back. “He made traitors of them.”

“No, he did not. He had most of them at least nominally beaten by the guards, limited them to scanty rations and inadequate warmth. He fashioned some scheme of pain and deprivation for each man, calculated to most efficiently part that man from whatever scruples guarded his tongue. They each surrendered something to him, and in fairly short order.”

“They surrendered their honor, their self-respect, and so they must hate him for it.”

“That was his plan and his gift to them—that they suffer at his hands so they might hate him for it enough to survive, rather than hate themselves, but his plan was flawed.”

Milly waited for the rest of the explanation, while Sebastian stopped to pet the donkey. The creature would always bear scars, but it held still for a good scratching under its hairy chin—all trust had not been destroyed. There was hope.

For the donkey.

“The flaw in his plan was that he measured his captives by his own standards,” Mr. Brodie said. “Had he been taken prisoner and some truth flogged out of him, he would have understood it to be part of the normal course of war. He would not have wasted years later hating his gaolers, or hating himself for his humanity. He might hate the memory, hate all war, but not the people involved.”

“These captives of his, they hate him so they need not admit they hate themselves.”

“You perceive the problem.”

Milly understood that Mr. Brodie’s disclosures were made out of a charitable impulse, though from him it was a scarred, battle-weary version of kindness. He was acquainting her with the horror Sebastian endured daily and nightly, because Sebastian was unlikely to burden her with these truths himself.

The donkey butted Sebastian’s hand, begging him for one last scratch.

Milly folded up the little handkerchief and stuffed it among her inquires to the agencies in Yorkshire.

“The Duke of Mercia acknowledges St. Clair, Mr. Brodie. Surely that example must carry some weight with the rest of the officers?”

“Mercia was the exception. He gave up nothing, and in a sense, St. Clair guarded him more closely than any of the others—also tortured him the worst, though much of that must lie at the feet of St. Clair’s superiors. It’s not my story to tell, but you should ask him. Mercia is not to be trusted.”

This from a man about whom nobody in the household seemed to know much of anything? “Is anybody to be trusted, Mr. Brodie?”

“St. Clair has the special license.”

That was a qualified “yes.” Mr. Brodie—was that even his name?—trusted
her
, somewhat.

“His lordship and I are agreed a quiet ceremony will serve best. How do you know I’ll not leave him standing at the altar?” Mr. Brodie standing beside him, of course.

This question earned her a smile, a sweet, unlikely, charming smile from a man who snooped, stole correspondence, and was like no valet Milly had ever heard of.

“I can’t allow it, Miss Danforth. You’ve learned to dodge and duck, to bluff when you had to, and to remain out of sight to the extent possible. You would have been a wonderful spy, particularly given that you never forget a word of what you’ve heard. I’ve concluded, though, that St. Clair is right.”

Across the field, a homely little love-struck donkey watched her new favorite turn and stride in the direction of the bench.

“Right about what, sir?”

“St. Clair could not care less about your penmanship or your letters. What he treasures is your trust, my lady. You are acquainted with the salient features of his past, and yet, they move you to neither pity nor horror. You accept him, and he accepts you.” Mr. Brodie rose and extended a hand to her. “Don’t you think it’s time you accepted yourself?”

Milly rose, shook out her skirts, and tried to pretend Mr. Brodie’s question didn’t land at her feet like a lit Catherine wheel, sending sparks flying in all directions.

“You stole my employment inquiries because, upon reflection and after trying to talk St. Clair out of this marriage, you think I will make a passable baroness?”

“You will make an excellent baroness, and I only borrowed those inquiries. If you try to send them again, I will not stop you. But ask yourself, Miss Danforth, do you truly want to turn your back on a worthy man who esteems you greatly, and consign yourself to a life of quiet, lonely anonymity? Do you deserve only that?”

He tucked her hand around his arm and patted her knuckles, as if he understood what a troublesome question he posed.

Mr. Brodie was a pestilence of a man, but he’d given Milly insights into her prospective spouse nobody else could pass along, save St. Clair himself. Then too, when he referred to St. Clair, his voice held both respect and affection.

Much as Milly’s did. On that thought, she allowed Mr. Brodie to escort her back to the baron’s side, the unsent inquiries crackling softly in her pocket.

***

Across the plot of lavender, Milly led Michael Brodie around the gravel paths. She’d link arms with him and tow him along for a few paces, then pause and bend to sniff at a plant or examine a flower. Michael waited with a patience Sebastian knew was foreign to his nature, then let himself be led off to some other clump of shrubs.

“She’s pretty, your lady.”

The head gardener was a man by the name of Kincaid, a big, fussy, cheerful soul who’d served on the Peninsula and knew more about hard work than about plants. Kincaid might have been forty, he might have been sixty, and his weathered, sandy blond looks and bright blue eyes would change little if he lived to be eighty. Sebastian had never seen him with clean fingernails or wearing a frown.

“She’s beautiful,” Sebastian said. “She’s also trying to bolt before I can get her to the altar.” The professor had passed along that tidbit, resorting to Spanish to convey his message, lest Freddy or one of her spies overhear him.

“Skittish, then. The smart ones know how to lead us a dance, don’t they?” Kincaid winked and strode off, a man in charity with the world—and him six months sober, too.

Except Milly did not believe herself to be smart, and Sebastian knew in his bones she hadn’t sent inquiries to agencies in the North as any sort of game. He marched himself across the field, intent on securing the would-be fugitive—also on rescuing his friend.