To Seduce an Angel (3 page)

Inside the pyramid the boys squirmed and positioned themselves to spy on her. At any moment he expected them to erupt from their hiding place with wild whoops. He prepared himself to step in and put a comforting arm around her shoulder. If she sensed the boys meant mischief, she didn't show it. She circled the pyramid, collecting slates and pencils and stacking them on a chair facing the dark entrance.

When the room grew quiet, she stopped and touched the pocket of her gown, as if she had something tucked there. He smiled to himself. If she had something there, a good luck talisman perhaps, and still possessed it, the lads had lost their touch. Lark and Rook could lift the feathers from a strutting cock, and he'd not miss them.

Her gown fell back in its near-shapeless line, and she folded one hand over the other, a gesture of perfect self-containment. It irked him. He felt his fists tighten on the sword and his jaw clench that she should be an expert at retreating into herself. It spoke of a past about which he wanted to know nothing.

Her voice, low and sweet and surprising in its authority, interrupted the thought. “Once upon a time,” she began.

He did not know the story. It was like the old stories he had heard as a child, but unfamiliar too. He doubted it was English at all. A part of him believed she was making it up on the spot, or at least altering it to suit her audience, for there were seven sons of a poor woodcutter and his wife who had no more money. The wife took a threadbare cloth and wrapped it around the last of the bread, and they sent their two oldest sons out into the world.

Dav thought he could listen to her voice if she talked about laundry, and he certainly did not mind looking at her. The story continued with the journey of the woodcutter's sons.

“Off they went down the road, and passed men working in the fields, and building a great church, and selling goods, but no one offered them work. As they sat at noon to eat their bread, a flock of little brown birds landed in the branches above and hopped about their feet. The birds chirped and chirped.”

Here the storyteller paused and wrote upon a slate, her pencil making a birdlike cheep. She put the slate aside and resumed the tale of the hungry boys, who ate and went their way, leaving the empty cloth but not a crumb for the birds. As the sun was setting, they met an ogre, and the storyteller lowered her voice to a gruff growl. “ ‘What do you have to say for yourselves?'

“When the woodcutter's sons replied, ‘Nothing,' the ogre said, ‘Then you'd best come work for me.' He led them to his house at the edge of a wood and opened an oaken door crossed with iron bars. ‘In here,' he invited. The boys stepped forward, and he shoved them down stone steps and locked them in darkness black as pitch.”

In the way of such stories the second pair of sons met the same fate as the first. They, too, waved away the birds and left behind their mother's scrap of cloth but shared no crumbs. Again the girl wrote on the slates. Again the woodcutter's sons had nothing to say for themselves when questioned by the ogre, and down into the cellar they went.

She paused, and the room held its breath. Her gaze didn't waver, but Dav felt her awareness of him. He had tightened his grip on his sword. She told the story as if she knew just what it was to be locked in that fairy-tale cellar, and she made him feel it, too, his heart beating in his chest. When she began again, his hands relaxed.

“At last the woodcutter and his wife were so hungry they sent their youngest sons out into the world with bread tied in neat bundles. These three passed the men in the fields, the church builders, and the busy market, but no one offered them a job. Hungry and weary they sat on a log to eat their bread. When a flock of birds flew near, the youngest said to his brothers, ‘Listen, the birds want to speak.' He held out his hand with crumbs upon it. A bird hopped down at once and pecked them up. And when the three brothers rose to go on their way, they brushed the remaining crumbs onto the ground for the flock.”

This time when she paused, Dav knew that she had reached the turning point. Now the brothers would get it right. Kindness, that was the point of the story, he felt sure, an easy moral lesson and there an end. He felt disappointed.

Her concentration was perfect. She seemed so caught up in the world of the story that she did not notice rustlings and whispers from inside the pyramid.

Consciousness of her femaleness thrummed in him like the low vibration of some powerful machine. Her gown seemed insubstantial, like cloud or water, loosely clinging to her form. He liked the look of her springy golden hair that might escape its bonds and her wide blue eyes and the way she wavered between trembling courage and contained purpose. He put her age at twenty or so. It occurred to him that she would have to be a prodigy to have the scholar's knowledge of languages and maps and math she claimed to have.

“The last three of the woodcutter's sons soon met the ogre, who asked them, ‘What do you have to say for yourselves?'

“The youngest opened his mouth to answer when the flock of birds flew round and set up such a din of beating wings and chirping that a person could not hear himself think. The ogre shouted and waved and drove the flock to the rooftop except one bird who settled on the shoulder of the youngest son and chirped in his ear.”

The girl stopped speaking and put down the slate in her hands. Her voice dropped as if she had come to the last words of the tale. Dav could sense the edge of anticipation in the boys. She stood contained and cool, unmoved by the tension of the unfinished story.

“Well, wot happens?” came a voice from within the pyramid. Slaps, grunts, and rustling hushed the speaker. Someone whispered, “Let 'er finish it.”

Dav did not know whether to be amused or annoyed that she had engaged him in this test of patience. She had violated the fundamental rule of storytelling by leaving the woodcutter's sons trapped in the ogre's cellar and her audience unsatisfied.

He could call a halt to the lesson and thank her, but if he did so, he, too, would not know the story's end.

He was sure the boys could see her, but she gave no sign of impatience. Again there was movement in the pyramid, and Robin, at eight, the baby of the band, poked his blond head out of the tunnel. “Please, miss, are you going to say wot 'appens?”

In a flash Dav realized the unfinished story had been her strategy all along. But she showed no sign of triumph at this first victory. She was patient, Dav would give her that.

“Only you can finish the story.”

Robin crawled out and sat at her feet. Savage whispers hissed at him from the tunnel. “'Ow can we finish yer story?”

She looked as solemn as the little boy. “Each must answer the ogre's question.”

“'Ow do we know wot to answer?”

Swallow's head emerged. “Robin, ye nodcock, it's wot the birds say, isn't it?”

The girl handed Robin a slate. “I've written their words for you on these slates. There's a word for each to tell the ogre.”

Jay and Raven crawled out next, a matched pair of ruffians at ten. She handed out more slates.

Finch came out, bringing her bag. He gave it to her and accepted a slate in exchange. The boys sat, looking at each other's slates without speaking until a voice from within the pyramid muttered, “Idiots.” Dav knew their dilemma and wondered if they would admit it to a stranger.

At last Swallow admitted, “We can't read.”

Lark and Rook slid out of the tunnel and stood, arms crossed over thin chests. “And wot do we care? Words don't slay ogres.”

“Besides Daventry can read. As long as we've got 'im, we don't need 'er.” Rook looked to Dav for support.

Instant debate started.

“She could stay until she teaches us to read.”

“But only seven words.”

“A week, then.”

“'Oo wants a blinkin' girl around for a week? Girls, useless as warts.”

Dav held up his sword, and they fell silent. “We vote then. Who wants to keep her for a week?”

“A fortnight.” The girl's voice shocked him. There was an unmistakable hint of desperation in it that woke all the instincts that had kept him alive for three years in the streets of London. She was not the ancient scholar he'd expected, nor was she what she appeared to be.

“I will stay a fortnight. No less, or not at all,” she declared firmly. She had control of herself again, except for her eyes.

He felt the boys' gazes on him. He knew the smart thing to do, the thing his brothers would advise. But his street self was awake in him now, alert to snatch any good thing that came his way. She was a prize, a windfall from a passing wagon, a treasure washed in on the tide. The desperate flash of need in those blue eyes told him so, told him that whoever had once possessed her had let her go. She was his for the taking. He would have the end of her story.

“Miss Portland, you may have your fortnight. Prove yourself a worthy tutor to my boys, and you may have the position.” He made it sound like a gentlemanly request, reasonable and aloof.

She did not thank him, but he did not miss the relief in her eyes.

“Tea, lads. Take the sword,” he ordered. Lark took the hilt, and Jay and the others lined up to carry the long blade. Where he could lift it with ease, the weight of it made them stumble awkwardly, like pallbearers shuffling solemnly under their burden.

Dav was left with the beautiful stranger he'd hired without a glance at her credentials, wondering irrelevantly, where she would sleep.

THE sound of the boys berating one another as they maneuvered the heavy sword echoed up from the stairs. Perpetually hungry, they would head directly for the kitchen to pester Dav's old cook, Mrs. Wardlow, for cakes or beef pies. Miss Portland had held them spellbound with her story for as long as they could be held.

He led her to a bare little room beyond the stairs with some idea that the room would suit a tutor. But he saw at once that he could not put her there. The room was bleak, but strategic. He passed through it often to escape the house. No doubt it puzzled her.

He was alone with her now, free to look at her as much as he liked without anyone's notice or suspicion, free to touch if he wished.

He watched her try to compose her features. The blue of her eyes, darkened by the agitation of the previous moment, brightened with relief. Naturally he wondered at it. Her faded, overlarge gown suggested an empty purse and the likelihood that she'd soon be or had been reduced to beggary, a fall from respectability that could be fatal to a woman. She pulled the old rose cloak back about her and tied the ribbons at her throat with hasty fingers as if to protect herself from his scrutiny. He knew concealment when he saw it.

He had little private experience of women. His history was against it. Taken at thirteen and kept for two years by his kidnapper, he had missed any time of innocent curiosity about females. Free at fifteen, he had formed his band of urchins and worked at survival. They had been nearly inseparable for five years, first in the streets of London, then in his mother's house. But he had not become a monk. He had no objection to enlarging his experience of the female sex with this woman who had fallen into his power.

He could see that the details of her story did not add up. Her elegant person in the ill-fitting clothes and her capacity for invention did not match her regal posture and desperate desire for the position. He did not think her a fortune hunter, but he could not say what she was. She seemed to have a dogged resolve that only necessity could teach. She had put herself into the story she told. Of that he was sure, though who her ogres were, he could not guess. Her wary eyes said she knew a world more dangerous than any schoolroom.

Emma squeezed her palms together to contain a giddy rush of relief. She had time. The fortnight stretched endlessly before her, time enough to plan a major campaign, and she had only herself to free, not Tatty or the babe. But it was hard to feel triumphant with Daventry's heavy-lidded gaze on her. His eyes puzzled her, a cool and silvery gray, like a lake surface at dawn with everything hidden underneath.

When she looked into those eyes, she could not tell his age. His face was too severe to be youthful, his manner too cool. His face was rather like a statue of eternal youth, carved in stone. Straight brows, deep-set eyes, sharp-cut lips. The boys for all their scrawniness had the soft roundedness of boyhood in their faces. But in Daventry's face there was no softness except in the loose wheat-colored hair that framed it. She now saw darker strands under the wheat to match his brows and lashes.

Her first impression of him as a warrior angel lingered. His white linen shirt with its missing sleeve gave him the look of a robed angel with bared limbs. His sword arm, curved, powerful, and bare drew her unwary gaze. Each time her gaze slid to the dense bulge of muscle there, she thought of angel defenders at the gates of heaven and hell. Looking into his eyes, she thought there was nothing those eyes had not seen.