I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers (21 page)

“But why?”

“She was a free colored person, as they call people of mixed race in the islands, Miss Caulfield. A descendant of slaves.”

Chapter 19

Temptation

T
hey spoke at length, Saint trawling his memory for more about the woman Grace. When Eleanor’s eyelids unwillingly drooped, Taliesin put an end to it.

“Thank you, Mr. Saint.” She stood in the inn at the base of the steps to the bedchambers above and extended her hand. “I am grateful for your help.”

Saint took her hand. “You needn’t thank me, madam. It is my pleasure.” He lifted her fingers toward his lips.

Taliesin cleared his throat.

With a slash of a smile, Saint released her. “Until tomorrow morning, then.”

With a brief glance at Taliesin, she went up the stairs. Betsy’s voice came through the door of their bedchamber before it closed decisively.

Saint’s face lost all trace of humor. He leaned against the wall but his stance was at the ready, his right hand casually loose. Taliesin had seen him move in an instant from this posture to skewering a man through the ribs. Evan Saint, master swordsman, never rested entirely. So little flesh hung on his bones now that Taliesin wondered if he ever ate either.

Now Saint’s eyes were hooded. “What are you doing, Sin?”

Taliesin had anticipated this. “Come.” He went toward the door. “I will buy you dinner and you can glower at me over a glass of wine if you wish.”

“Make it brandy. Now that you can afford it.” Saint pushed himself away from the wall and followed in long strides and they stepped into the night’s mist. The inn sat at the water’s edge. Years ago Saint had taught him that when a man lived by water, he should never sleep far from it. In need of a quick escape, a boat could always be found. And stolen.

By the looks of his lean cheeks, his days of living off the fat of other men’s lands were behind him. Taliesin knew when the change had occurred years earlier. He did not know what had caused it.

Their boots echoed on the pier. A pair of molls standing in the shadow of a shuttered market booth called out to them.

“Not tonight, Martha,” Saint threw over his shoulder in reply. “Though I thank you for the offer.” He bowed. Then in a lowered voice said, “French pox, poor girl. But when the fleet returns, she’ll earn a few pennies. The young fellows off the frigates are randier than schoolboys. It’s like they’ve never seen a woman before. And, by the by, while I’m speaking of uncontrolled lust and imprudent blind spots—”

“Restrain yourself.” Taliesin opened a tavern door. The sounds of fiddle and pipe spilled onto the pier, the aromas of cooked fish and ale spiking memories like the prick of a sword point in a winning fight: memories of a battle nearly won. Years ago, Plymouth had been his last stop before he’d left the past behind.

They found a corner table away from the musicians. Taliesin gave his friend the seat to the right. Space for the sword to dangle at liberty. That no one demanded Saint remove it spoke to the lawlessness of Plymouth when the navy was absent, as well as to the respect men in this town had for Evan Saint’s blade.

A barmaid set a bottle of brandy on the table and two cups. Saint poured, and wrapped his hand around the tumbler. “Eleanor Caulfield,” he only said. And that was sufficient, of course.

Taliesin did not drink. He’d enough trouble keeping his head clear lately.

His friend drained his cup and placed it on the table. “You fool.”

“Probably,” he admitted.

“What do you want with her now?”

More than he should. “I promised her sisters that I would assist in the search for their parents.”

“Hire someone to do it. You have the money.”

Arabella said she’d hired an investigator. But the records of that investigator’s unsuccessful tour along the Cornish coast had not appeared before they left Combe, only a vague suggestion of the man’s itinerary.

“Not loose capital,” he said. “I’ve horses to feed and train, and people in my employ as well.” And a house from which he had barred her.

For a moment Saint said nothing. “The horse you sent me is a superb animal. Thank you.”

“What did you name him?”

“Paid.” Saint’s eyes laughed in the dim candlelight. Years ago Taliesin had told him he would someday repay the debt he owed Saint for saving him from the living grave into which he had fallen after leaving St. Petroc for the last time.

A burst of laughter arose from a group of men across the tavern. Saint’s hooded eyes went swiftly to the noise, and Taliesin glanced over. A woman wrapped about the waist by a seaman’s arm slipped him a sly, welcoming smile.

Taliesin turned away and met his friend’s assessing regard, as steady as his hand upon the hilt of a sword. Very slowly, Saint shook his head.

“You never used to warn me off women, Evan.”

“You never used to escort Eleanor Caulfield about England.”

“At one time you counseled me to make a new plan of attack.”

His friend’s eyes bent to the table. “Remarkably enough, it is sometimes best to let a woman get away.” His hand was tight around his glass. “Watch your back, Sin. The way my luck is running lately, I might not be alive to salvage you from the aftermath of her this time.”

“There won’t be an aftermath.” He had it under control. That he had ridden to Drearcliffe the morning after the party with every intention of finishing what they had started, despite his challenge to her—and that he had only been deflected from that foolhardy plan by her news—had no bearing on anything now. For two days he hadn’t touched her. As long as he didn’t get too close to her, he could manage it.

“I am handling it.” He reached for his empty glass.

Saint took up the bottle and finally smiled. He poured. “She’s prettier than you let on.”

“I don’t remember ever mentioning anything about her appearance to you.”

“You didn’t. Not once in two years. You told me that she read Latin. That she knew the names of every book of Holy Scripture—in order. That she could recite the first paragraphs of the
City of God
from memory. That she hand wrote a copy of the anonymously authored
Quest for the Holy Grail
for her father’s birthday, including decorative capitals. And that she learned how to ride your horse with ease in less than a month. You told me that last bit, about riding your horse, at least four dozen times. Most often with a bottle in your hand.”

Taliesin swiveled the brandy, sparks of gold dancing upon its rosy surface. “Did I?”

“You did. But you never told me that she was a beautiful girl.”

“Perhaps she wasn’t.”

“I hope, my friend,” Saint said over the lip of his glass, “that your Holy Grail doesn’t turn out to be filled with poison.”

“IT IS CALLED
The Book of Memory
.” The jeweler hefted the tome onto the table littered with books and tools and peculiar gadgets. Wiry and quick, with whiskers to his chest, spectacles on the end of his nose, and a tiny circular cap attached to the crown of his head surmounted by a strap with a monocle affixed to it, Elijah Fish radiated energy. His workshop looked more like a trinket shop than a jeweler’s, every surface covered with curiosities.

But when he opened the book, Eleanor’s attention turned entirely to the page.

She moved closer and laid her fingertips on an image in the center of the page: a crested griffin backed by stripes of blue and yellow. Circling about it were objects that bore the griffin image in various forms: a painted shield, an embroidered banner, a wax seal, and a signet ring of gold. Words and phrases in Latin were scattered about, and at the bottom of the page several lines of text in a language she didn’t know. Spanish, perhaps.

Her fingers strayed over the image of the ring. “What is this book?”

“A compendium of noble crests of all the world, Miss Caulfield.” He turned the thick stack of pages to the first. “In the year 1504 of the Christian calendar, this book was commissioned to celebrate the joining of the Kingdom of Naples with Sicily, Castile, and Aragon under the great Ferdinand II.” He nodded, his movements quick and compact. “Ferdinand himself ordered it made. He wanted to show the world his connection to all the great aristocratic houses of his day and thus all of history. There is nothing more important to a Spaniard than blood, Miss Caulfield.”

She turned the page. An emblem of a bejeweled crown set atop a standard decorated with gold and red vertical stripes filled the center of the folio. Beneath it in Latin read: “Ferdinand II, King of Aragon.”

“Why do you assume my ring came from a noble family?”

“Its quality, of course.” He stretched out his palm and twitched his fingers nimbly. “The ring?”

Taliesin and Mr. Saint waited in the shop without, with Betsy sitting in a chair by the door. Now Eleanor drew the ring from her pocket and placed it in Mr. Fish’s hand. Adjusting the monocle over his left eye, he bent to the worktable and affixed the ring in a clamp with the stone facing upward.

It felt right to allow this. Safe.

Eleanor’s fingers trailed over the book. It was at least a thousand pages.

“How does one search through this? Has it an index?”

“No. The hubris of noble families of the time was in their confidence that everybody knew who they were. The crests begin in the lands of the Empire and wend their way through Europe and Britain then finally Iberia. After that are a hundred pages of Oriental and Arab insignia and a few fanciful native emblems from the Americas, though I suspect they were inventions on the part of the publisher. It took several decades for this book to be completed and by then American savages were becoming very fashionable, of course.” As he spoke, he studied the ring through the glass.

Her nerves tingled with familiar excitement. She had shared this sort of studying with Taliesin for years. Driven to best him at every task Papa gave them, she had worked until her eyes were sore from reading and her fingers blistered from holding a pen. But she had not always won. Just as now, he hadn’t let her.

She wished he were in the workshop now. He stood not five yards away on the other side of a door, and yet she missed him. If he were here, he would employ his strong hands with great care on the precious books and trinkets, studying them in silent concentration, and she would watch him and not be able to breathe.
She could not breathe
when she looked at him
. If this was her penance for sinning with him at Kitharan, she could not regret it.

“Shall I begin at the beginning, and look at each page?”

“You needn’t.” Mr. Fish’s fingers twirled a screw and the ring came free of the clamp to fall into his palm. He offered it to her. “I recognize this symbol.”

Her lips whispered, “What is it?” She took the ring and held it toward the light from the window. The T symbol shone through the red stone quite clearly. On the ring it was more stylized than the scribbled symbol on the manifest, with an elaborate under-curl on the left top bar of the T, a flourishing up-curl on the right, and a sweeping diagonal line that curved inward toward the center of the vertical bar.

Mr. Fish shifted a thick section of pages toward the end of the book. “It is the symbol of the house of Torres.”

“Spanish? But I thought my mother was English.” She remembered her mother’s voice, as clearly English as hers and her sisters’ now. “I believe my father was English as well.” She only remembered him in uniform, tall and handsome and kind.

The jeweler turned several pages deftly. “Yet the ring she gave to you is most assuredly of Spanish origin, Miss Caulfield. Look.”

At the center of the open page was the T-shaped symbol: the curls at the upper left and right were precisely the same, and the curve of the diagonal identical, though the triangle it made was solid. Drawn in black and accented in gold, it sat atop a bed of deep crimson. Drawings of a shield, a banner, and a ring exactly like hers surrounded it.

“Mr. Fish.” She touched a fingertip to the letters at the bottom, and her finger quivered against the page. “I don’t read Spanish. What does this say?”

“ ‘The House of Torres, descended in the line of Ferdinand of Castile, lords of’— Ah, curious. It is written ‘Al-Andalus.’ That, Miss Caulfield, was the Arab name for the province which was conquered from its Muslim overlords during the Christian reconquest of Spain. The proper name is Andalusia.”

“What does it mean that it is written Al-Andalus here?”

“Perhaps that the lords of the House of Torres traced their blood proudly through Arab lines as well as Spanish. Perhaps they wished to be recognized as such. Those Spaniards, you know, had a remarkable lot of pride. And well they should have. In that era, they were unconquerable.” He shrugged. “Eh, but it needn’t indicate that. It could merely mean that the scribe assigned to this page liked the Arab word better than the Spanish. Perhaps he was of Arab origin. There were plenty of them around at that time, of course, descendants of Muslims who had been in Iberia for seven hundred years, then forced to convert to Christianity or suffer exile during the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand.”

Exile
. A word reserved for gentlemen. Rather, in this case,
deportment
.