IT WAS HER fault, Abigail thought as she watched Mr. Wiggins snoring in a corner of the duke’s carriage. She should’ve told Mama that Mr. Wiggins knew that they were the duke’s children, that Jamie had shouted their secret at the nasty man one day. You couldn’t blame Jamie. He was too little to realize why they shouldn’t tell. He lay curled against her side now, his hair sweaty and stuck to his forehead from crying. The duke said he couldn’t stand Jamie’s bawling anymore and had mounted a horse at the last inn to ride beside the carriage.
Abigail stroked Jamie’s hair, and he made a funny little noise and burrowed closer to her in his sleep. You couldn’t blame him for crying, either. He was only five, and he missed Mama terribly. He didn’t say it, but Abigail knew he wondered if they’d ever see their mama again. Mr. Wiggins had shouted at Jamie to shut up after the duke had left. She had worried that he might leap across the carriage and hit her brother, but fortunately Jamie had been very tired by then and had suddenly fallen asleep.
She looked out the window now. Outside, green hills rolled by with white sheep dotted here and there as if dropped by a giant hand. Maybe they wouldn’t see Mama again. The duke hadn’t said much to them, besides telling Jamie to stop crying. But she’d heard him tell Mr. Wiggins and the coachman that they were on their way back to London. Would he take them to live with him in his house there?
Abigail wrinkled her nose. No, they were bastards. Bastards were to be hidden away, not taken to live with their fathers. So he’d hide them away somewhere. It would make it very difficult for Mama to find them. But perhaps Sir Alistair would help. Even though she’d not minded Puddles and he’d ruined Sir Alistair’s bag, he’d still help Mama find them, wouldn’t he? Sir Alistair was tall and strong, and she thought he would be very good at finding things, even hidden children.
She was very sorry now that she hadn’t minded Puddles better. Her lips turned down, her face screwed up, and a sob escaped before she could stop it. Stupid! Stupid! She scrubbed angrily at her face. Crying wouldn’t help anything. It’d just make Mr. Wiggins happy if he caught her at it. That thought should’ve made her control the tears, but they wouldn’t stop. They ran down her face whether she wanted them to or not, and she could only muffle the sound in her skirts, hoping Mr. Wiggins wouldn’t wake. And some part of her knew why she was crying, even as she wiped at her face.
It was her fault, all of it. When Mama had taken them from London on that awful journey north and she’d first seen Sir Alistair’s castle, she’d wished in a secret part of her heart that the duke would come and take them back with him.
And now her wish had come true.
IT WASN’T UNTIL they stopped for the night at a small village inn that the problem of traveling together struck Alistair. A man and woman traveling alone together could only be one of three things: a man and his wife, a man and a blood relative, or a man and his mistress. If anything, their relationship was closest to the last. The thought made Alistair scowl. He didn’t like to think himself anything like Lister, yet in a way, had he not used Helen similarly? He’d never even thought about marriage. Perhaps he was as much a cad as the duke.
He watched Helen under his brows. She sat staring worriedly out the carriage window as the hostlers ran to take the horses. Her full color had still not returned from its retreat this morning, and that made up his mind.
“We’ll share a room,” he said.
She glanced at him distractedly. “What?”
“It’s not safe for you to be in a room by yourself.”
She gave him an odd look. “It’s a small country inn. It seems perfectly respectable.”
He could feel his face heat a bit, and his words were rather gruff as a result. “Nonetheless, we’ll present ourselves as Mr. and Mrs. Munroe and stay in the same room.”
And he ended the discussion by descending from the carriage before she could protest farther. The inn did look respectable. A row of old men sat outside the main door, which was blackened with age. There were a fair amount of hostlers and stable boys milling about and gossiping, and in a corner of the yard, a little boy with tousled brown hair played with a kitten. Alistair felt a pain in his chest at the sight. He wasn’t very similar to Jamie, but the boy was of an age.
God, let the children be safe!
He turned back to the carriage to help Helen down, moving his body between her and the sight of the little boy. “Come inside and I’ll see if there’s a private room to be had.”
“Thank you,” she said breathlessly.
He offered her his arm in a husbandly way, and the hesitation before she laid her fingertips on his sleeve was so small that in all probability only he saw it. But he did see and note it. He covered her gloved hand with his and led her into the little inn.
As it turned out, there was indeed a small—very small—private room at the back of the inn. They settled at the rustic table next to a tiny hearth, and very soon thereafter a hot meal of mutton and cabbage arrived.
“Are you sure Lister’s headed to London?” Alistair asked as he cut into his meat. The thought had begun to bother him the last half hour or so; they might be on a wild-goose chase, haring off to London when Lister might have an entirely different destination in mind.
“He has a country estate—several, in fact,” Helen murmured. She was pushing at the food on her plate, but hadn’t taken a bite. “But he spends nearly all his time in London. He hates the country, he says. I suppose he might decide to hide the children elsewhere, but if he came in person to get them, I think he’d want to return to London first.”
Alistair nodded. “Your reasoning is good. Do you know where he might take them in London?”
She shrugged, looking weary and depressed. “It could be anywhere. He has a main house, of course—a huge town house in Grosvenor Square—but there are several other properties that he owns.”
An unwelcome thought intruded. He carefully broke apart a crusty roll and, with his eye on his task, asked, “Where did he keep you?”
She was silent a moment. He buttered the piece of roll without looking up.
Finally, she said, “He gave me a town house to live in. It was on a small square, quite nice, actually. I had a staff to look after the house and serve me.”
“The life of a duke’s mistress sounds very elegant. I’m not sure I understand why you bothered to leave him.” He raised his eyes as he bit into the buttered bread.
Her face was flushed, but her blue eyes sparked with anger. “Don’t you? I don’t think you understand much about me, really, but I’ll endeavor to explain. I’d been his plaything for fourteen years. I’d borne him two children. And he didn’t love me. He never loved me, I think. All the jewels in the world, all the servants and the town house and the beautiful dresses were not enough to make up for the fact that I’d let myself be used by a man who didn’t really care for me or my children. In the end, I decided that I was worth more.”
She shoved back from the table and stalked from the room, fortunately refraining from slamming the door behind her.
Alistair thought about following her immediately, but some innate male instinct told him it was safer to wait just a bit. He finished his meal in higher spirits than he’d begun it. The knowledge that she no longer loved Lister—if she ever had—was a salve to his soul. He took the plate that Helen had abandoned and went up to the room he’d procured for the night for the both of them.
He tapped softly at the door, half expecting her not to answer—she was very mad at him, after all—but the door cracked almost at once. He pushed it open, entered the little room, and shut and locked it behind him. She had moved across the room after letting him in and now stood at a tiny gabled window, her back to him, in her shift with a shawl thrown over her shoulders.
“You didn’t eat any of your dinner,” he said.
One elegant shoulder rose in a shrug.
“It’s a long journey to London,” he said gently, “and you’ll need to keep your strength up. Come eat.”
“Maybe we’ll catch up to Lister before London.”
He looked at that slim, brave back, and the tiredness that he’d been holding in check all day nearly overwhelmed him. “He’s got a head start. It’s not likely.”
She sighed then and turned, and for a moment he thought he saw tears sparkling in her eyes. But then she ducked her head and came toward him, and he could no longer see her eyes. She took the plate of food from him but then didn’t seem to know what to do with it.
“Sit here,” he said, indicating a small chair before the fire.
She sat. “I’m not hungry.” She sounded like a small child.
He squatted before her and began cutting her meat. “The mutton is quite good. Have a bite.” He proffered a piece on the tines of the fork.
She met his eyes as she accepted the bit of food from him. Her eyes were wet, harebells that’d fallen in a stream.
“We’ll get them back,” he said softly. He stabbed another piece of meat for her. “I’ll find Lister and the children, and we’ll get them back, safe and sound. I promise.”
She nodded, and he carefully, tenderly, fed her almost all of the plate of food before she protested that she could eat no more. Then she climbed into the single bed, and he stripped to his breeches and snuffed the candles. When he got into bed, she lay facing away from him, still and lonely. He stared at the dark ceiling and listened to her breathing, aware that he was hard and pounding with want. They lay thus for a half hour or more until her breathing roughened, and he realized that she was weeping once more. Then he turned to her without a word and pulled her stiff body into his arms. She shuddered against him, her sobs still muffled, and he simply wrapped his arms around her. After a bit, her body slowly lost its rigidity. She softened and relaxed and cried no more.
But he still lay awake, hard and wanting.
Chapter Fourteen
Princess Sympathy took the ring and put it on her thumb. Instantly, the iron bars of her cage turned to water and splashed to the ground. As her cage disappeared, so did the cage that held the swallows. They burst into the air, circling in joy. Truth Teller gave the princess his worn cloak, for she had no other apparel, and led her to where the horse was hidden. But when she saw that there was only one horse, she stopped.
“Where is your mount?” she cried.
“I had only money for one,” Truth Teller replied as he lifted her to the saddle.
The princess leaned down and touched his face. “Then you must lie when the sorcerer returns. Tell him a witch has taken me. He will do you a great harm if he thinks you have helped me!”
Truth Teller merely smiled and slapped the horse’s flank, sending the beast galloping down the mountain. . . .
—from TRUTH TELLER
A week later, Helen placed her hand in Alistair’s and stepped down from a carriage drawn up in front of the Duke of Lister’s London residence. She looked up at the tall, classical building and shivered. She’d seen it before, of course, but she’d never tried to enter it.
“He won’t see us,” she said to Alistair, not for the first time.
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
He held out his arm to her, and she placed her fingertips on his sleeve, amazed at how accustomed she’d become to this in the last week.
“It’s a waste of time,” she muttered in a feeble attempt to quell her clamoring nerves.
“If I thought that Lister would merely hand over the children, then, yes, it would be a waste of time,” he murmured as they mounted the front steps. “But that is not my sole aim today.”
She stared up at him. His hair was neatly clubbed back, and he wore a black tricorne and reddish-brown coat. Both were newer than any other article of clothing she’d seen him in before, and she had to admit he looked rather nice—an imposing gentleman.