Kate Moore (13 page)

He had made love to more than one girl in a barn, before he left home, before Humphrey had caught on to what he was doing and reminded him that he couldn’t oblige every lass that fluttered her lashes at him and be a gentleman. But the barns of his youth had been full of fresh hay and healthy animals, and even if the girls themselves had been coarse in their offerings and their demands, he had used them more gently than he had Meg this night.

He couldn’t be gentle with Meg and keep to his purpose. Had he been as gentle as he wished to be, he would have stirred her desire and then he would hardly have been able to check his own, wanting her as he did, loving her as he did, as he had for how long without knowing it. He could never have her, and he had known it from the moment in the woods when Ned revealed her name.

He certainly was a fool, but it was time to leave all his games and self-reproaches behind. He would have time for self-reproach later, years for it. Jacob had been gone perhaps ten minutes, no more than a quarter of an hour. How soon would that head start bring him to the village of Amarante and the Viper? Would the Viper elude him at the last?

He dressed hastily, pocketing the pistol once again and Croisset’s purse, now much lighter than it had been. He knelt to rouse Meg and could not resist doing it with a kiss. Her eyes opened, and incredibly she smiled. For an instant he forgot his purpose.

“We must leave, Meg,” he whispered, recovering his composure. “Jacob has taken our best horse, and I suspect he means to reach the Viper tonight.”

“Then you don’t mean to meet him?” He heard the hopefulness in her tone.

“No.”

“You don’t mean to sell him the papers?”

“No.” He owed her that much of the truth.

“Why then?” she asked, and he knew she referred to their whole adventure.

“There’s no time to explain now,” he said.

She needed no further urging. He turned once more and held his greatcoat out to screen her toilet though Esau continued to sleep. When she touched his shoulder, signaling her readiness, he pulled their blankets over the valises and led her through the shadows to the animals. He coaxed the most tractable of the remaining horses out the door and put a bridle on him. Then he mounted and pulled Meg up in front of him.

The fury of the wind was even greater than before, and distant lightning flared against the clouds, but no rain fell yet. Margaret believed they would never find their way anywhere, but, of course, she under-estimated her thief. After a dark eternity of plodding into the vicious wind that pierced her cloak and habit, she could see a garish flickering light reflected in the clouds. A few more undulations of the road brought them within view of the town, the outline of its buildings thrown into relief by a seeming blaze in the middle of its streets.

They paused in the shelter of a high wall.

“Meg,” he said against her ear, “we have been spied upon; it is time for us to do some spying in our turn. Are you game?”

“Yes,” she answered, turning to speak in his ear too.

“I want to see this Viper if I can, not meet him, just see his face and how he operates, whether alone or with others.” It was not a question, exactly, but she knew he was asking whether she dared go with him. By rights such a prospect should terrify her; she should argue that it would be prudent to flee. But she could no longer see herself as Prudence in the white cap and silver-buckled shoes. She felt infected by his daring, just as she supposed she had been by all his moods from the first.

“Yes,” she said again.

They wound their way among the outermost streets until they came to another road. Even with the wind’s roar in her ears, Margaret could hear the rush of water alongside this other road. The thief tethered the horse out of the wind where the animal might crop some grass and led Meg into the maze of streets. The lightning was close enough now that they could hear the accompanying thunder over the wind as they approached the eerie flickering light at the center of the town.

Drew stopped once to remind her of the jewels in her cape and the escape route she must take alone if any accident befell him. He did not allow her to protest. Then, except that he held her hand firmly in his, Margaret would have believed he had forgotten her. They advanced from shadow to shadow, Margaret concentrating entirely on following his lead. Much as she wished to anticipate what lay ahead, she could hear only the wind rattling wooden shutters on the houses and her own heart pounding as wildly within her breast.

In minutes they turned the corner of a street that led directly to the strange, flaring light. The wind now swirled the smoke of torches in their faces. They hugged the walls on the dark side of the street, staying out of the flickering glare, until they could see into the square itself. Margaret could not have imagined the sight that now met her eyes. In the center of a crowd of onlookers was a group of men, dozens perhaps, bearing torches and robed in the brown habits of monks. But they were like no monks she had ever seen, for each face was covered with a tall, pointed hood like a church steeple, blood-red and made the more horrifying by two holes cut in it for the eyes. It was the black, empty eyeholes that made Margaret think of an executioner, the anonymous agent of justice and death. The men were silent, and as Margaret watched, the silent marchers began to circle the square.

“A
cofradia
, a brotherhood. They are as old as the Inquisition,” Drew whispered.

“Is the Viper among them, do you think?” she asked, feeling some of her courage drain from her.

He nudged her and pointed. There in the forefront of the onlookers was Jacob, peering intently at the marchers.

The eerie procession passed out of the square, Jacob following. Margaret and Drew went up a parallel alley, keeping abreast of the procession as best they could. They caught up with the lead marchers again at the river, where exposure to the wind’s blast threatened the torches. Jacob had disappeared. Drew turned at once, doubling back and pulling Margaret after him until she lost all sense of their direction and stumbled with weariness. He pulled her to him then and held her tightly, allowing her to catch her breath.

Just then they heard voices. Two men were approaching along the cross street. Drew pulled Margaret into the darker shadows beneath a second-story balcony, and Margaret recognized Jacob’s voice. Her heart threatened to stop beating, her breath caught in her throat. The two men passed by with quick strides, but a banging shutter above them caused the taller, thinner man to glance over his shoulder. A flash of lightning just then gave Margaret a glimpse of his face. It was as pale as his hood had been red. The skin was stretched tautly over the bones, and a hairless, jutting forehead overshadowed eyes sunk deep in their sockets, a flattened nose, and lips so thin they hardly seemed to be there, a living death’s-head.

She wanted to scream her terror but stifled the impulse by pressing her mouth against the warm hollow at the base of her thief’s throat. He held her tightly while she shook and trembled against him. When they no longer heard footsteps or voices, he slackened his hold on her.

“Now, Meg,” he whispered, “we run.”

12

B
RILLIANT FLASHES ILLUMINATED
the first miles of their journey, revealing a steep, winding road above a river whose waters must be racing, even as Margaret and Drew were, to the Douro below. Then the lightning passed, and an icy, needling rain began. The stinging drops lashed them in waves, penetrating their clothes, treacherously filling up the ruts in the road, and crumbling embankments above them. It seemed to Margaret that the rain was the embodiment of the numbing fear that overcame her the moment she saw the Viper. Only the strong arm about her waist and the warm, steady presence at her back kept her from giving in to her fear. They would be pursued. They must escape.

When the horse refused to go further, they stumbled onward on foot. The rain lessened in intensity and then stopped altogether before first light revealed a village of narrow streets below them on the banks of the Douro itself. Drew went straight to the water’s edge. There in an inlet protected from the swirling currents of the storm-fed river were several of the odd craft Margaret had seen days earlier. The sailors,
marinheiros
the thief called them, were huddled around fires on the shore. Welcome smells of food rose in the rain-freshened air. They were a friendly lot, but only one captain, after a consultation with his two crewmen, was willing to accept the thief’s money to embark at once with two passengers. Margaret did not need a translation to understand the grave faces of the men and the assessing looks they gave the swollen river.

As the captain and his men set about readying their craft, Drew and Margaret made their way to the house of a port shipper, who, the captain had advised them, might be able to provide dry clothes. Thus Margaret found herself in a small, warm kitchen, its walls hung with bunches of drying herbs. The smell of thyme and rosemary reminded her of their afternoon picnic in the sun, and she felt a little premonition of grief to come as she struggled out of the heavy wet habit she would never wear again.

***

Her new attire was a loose cotton blouse with a drawstring neckline and sleeves to the elbow. There was a heavy black wool skirt with vertical lines of red embroidery. Both garments had been made for a woman of more substantial proportions, so Margaret was obliged to draw the neckline closed as much as she could and to allow the full skirt to ride on her hips. But there was a beautiful if worn shawl of red and green and gold. She transferred the sapphires and the ring from her finger to a pocket of the full skirt.

Margaret had needed no prompting to hurry at her task, for she much preferred the prospect of death on the river to any encounter with the Viper. In all when they pushed away from the shore, helped in the launching by those sailors who preferred to wait for less hazardous conditions, they had spent less than an hour in the village.

As a child Margaret had often run along the banks of creeks near Wynrose watching the waters carry leaves and twigs. As a young woman she had been on numerous placid excursions on the Thames. But nothing in her past experience prepared her for the sensation of being swept away as powerful surges lifted the boat and sudden turns threw her from side to side against her companion. One of these turns made her conscious that her thief, still in his rain-soaked garments, was shivering. He had ever put her comfort before his own.

“You must get out of those wet clothes,” she ventured.

“Will you help me, Meg?” he began, and then the teasing light in his eyes abruptly faded. His voice when he spoke again was full of self-reproach. “No, I don’t mean it. I have subjected you to enough impropriety already. Turn away, my girl, for we no longer have your book.”

She did as he directed, unable to suppress the feeling that her time with him was slipping away, just as the green banks of the river seemed to slip away from them as they passed by. When she turned back to him, he was attired like one of the crew in loose dark trousers, a rough white shirt, and woolen vest. He handed Meg his watch and pistol and Croisset’s purse. Then he knotted his wet clothes into the discarded jacket and tossed the bundle into the river.

“I don’t understand,” she exclaimed, for his action recalled her unanswered questions of the night before. “Where are the earl’s papers?”

He settled himself on the deck next to her, accepting half of the rough blanket in which she was wrapped, before he answered.

“They are at the bottom of the sea, Meg,” he replied. He did not look at her, but what she could see of his face suggested the attitude of a man ready to be condemned or, at the very least, reviled.

“Then you never meant to sell them to the French?” He shook his head.

“But why did you steal them?” she asked, striving to speak in a reasonable tone.

“I had heard about certain leaks of Wellington’s plans and suspected . . . a trusted man. I knew he would be tempted by the particular information in that letter.”

“Then you are an agent of the government yourself,” she cried, relieved beyond measure.

“No.” His denial was vehement, and she felt it like a blow. “No. The man who meant to steal them is my . . . enemy. I acted for personal reasons only. Do not cast me as the hero of the piece. You must not so deceive yourself about me.”

She was silent a while, aware that his denial was also a denial of any friendship between them. When she felt she could command her voice, she began to question him again, for she wanted the truth, however painful.

“You stole the papers so that your enemy could not?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And you impersonated this other man when you met Croisset?”

“Yes, as you guessed.” At least he was answering her.

“But you did not mean to give the papers over to Croisset?”

“No. I meant to anger Croisset with my demands for money so that he would not deal with my spy again.”

“You meant to return the papers?”

“When it was safe to do so. But then I saw that I might take Croisset’s place. Croisset is not the top man in the hierarchy. I wanted to follow the chain that led to the Viper to see if I could break it. And then you were there and . . . Croisset’s purse.” He paused. “For a poor man, having gold to throw down from a fat French purse was great fun while it lasted. There is just enough left, I think, to buy our way home.”

“Home?” she echoed. The word had an oddly hollow sound.

“Yes, home,” he replied. He reached for her hand under the blanket and held it between his. “It is time for you to finish your season and find a husband.”

“But I do not wish to find a husband among the
ton
,” she said quietly.

The hands holding hers shook slightly, but his voice was steady in answering her. “Nevertheless, it is what you must do,” he said.

“And you think I shall succeed in winning a man’s regard now, after an unexplained absence, when I hardly found dancing partners before?” She meant to make a joke of it, but she had allowed herself to forget London so often and so completely in this other life she had been living that she could not easily think of resuming the awkward role she had briefly played there.

“You underestimate yourself, Meg.”

“But I do not underestimate the difficulty of reentering society.”

“Your parents will have been advised by the earl to be discreet about your disappearance. We will find out from Ned what has been said, and I will think of something.” This last was spoken with a grim determination unlike anything she had seen in him before.

“And you?” she asked, her throat suddenly dry and tight. “Will you resume your old life? Will you marry?” She had been unable to keep from asking it.

“No,” was all he said, and she was left to puzzle over which of her questions he had really answered, for the captain came forward to tell them they were approaching some rapids and must secure themselves firmly to the boat.

There were few words between them for the remainder of their river journey. Once, he assured her that if they reached the portaging sheds at Vila Nova de Gaia on the south bank of the river ahead of their enemies, they would be safe. He did in truth know someone in the port trade who would be able to put them on a ship for London.

After the rapids had been negotiated, they dozed in the sun or watched the changes in the landscape of the shore. Margaret did not wish to move from the position they had taken at the captain’s warning, so she continued to lie, cradled between her thief’s legs, leaning against his chest. She did not stir or give any sign that she noticed when he stroked her hair and kissed the top of her head. His mood today, if she understood him at all, was one of quiet grief like her own.

As their
barco
entered the wide stretches at the mouth of the river and approached the aging sheds, he returned to his customary quickness of thought and action. Before night had fallen, he had arranged their passage home, and Margaret found herself ensconced with all propriety in a private cabin on a “fishing” ship bound for London. Yet another lie smoothed their way, but she hardly noticed it. She had books and proper clothes and time. She could look back on her adventure and be glad she had lost neither her virtue nor her life, only her heart.

***

The London to which her thief brought her in little more than a week’s time was as foreign as Portugal had been and infinitely less inviting. She felt she had had her bearings briefly at the dockside, but the twists and turns they had taken in the shabby hack defeated her efforts to find any familiar scenes. It was as if they had followed some mole underground and become lost in a maze of tunnel-like alleys whose upper stories approached each other like the sides of an arch.

She hardly knew which of her senses was the most offended by her surroundings. Certainly the eyes could not be pleased by the crowded disorder of the buildings, the cracks, the peeling faded signs, and the layer of greasy soot on everything. The ears, too, were assailed by a din that was forceful, energetic, but without cheer, a collective note somewhere between a groan and a snarl. She was grateful she could give no name to the foul odors that hung in the air.

In their hasty passage from the hack to a tiny room on the upper story of one of the raddled buildings she saw but a few of the inhabitants of the district. These appeared either wretched or predatory, and the language they spoke did not sound like her native tongue. So when the thief told her she must not open her door or venture out for any reason in his absence, she believed him. But she did look out the grimy window cautiously and with increasing frequency, for it was a long day and she had to fight a rising desperation about her circumstances.

It was a most puzzling reaction to events. For now that she was to be returned to her parents within a matter of hours or at most, a day, she felt a sense of some impending catastrophe which she was powerless to prevent. He was going to restore her to her former life, and she would never see him again. All that had happened in Portugal would be no more than a dream, and one moreover that could never be told. There would be no one whose recollection of events and places would serve to strengthen her own.

Already he had withdrawn from her. During their crossing, she had seen him only at the captain’s table and had had nothing but the most formal assistance from him to and from her cabin. There had been no hint of impropriety, nor any laughter. She had spent the weary hours considering ways in which they might continue their acquaintance, but she had come up with none. She wished to believe that he felt something of what she felt, that he had come to think of her as a friend, but she had to acknowledge that his actions since they left the river had given no encouragement to her hopes. He had perhaps enjoyed the adventure, but now that it was over he could put Margaret aside and go on. And what would he go on to? She realized she was hardly nearer to the truth about him than she had been when she first called him a thief.

The noise of the street, which had increased in volume through the day, was if anything more raucous now in the waning light, and she was taken by surprise when he knocked. That he was weary was evident in the lines of his face and the subdued color of his eyes. His clothes shocked her more than she wished to show, for he had dressed very much to suit his surroundings in a worn and stained drab coat and ill-fitting breeches over the rough shirt and wool vest he had acquired in Portugal. His boots were unrecognizable as a gentleman’s pair for the mud and scrapes. And his eyes told her he knew very well what she thought. He now had the appearance of a thief in all but his face.

The room was no bigger than the one they had shared in the tiny village before Amarante, and though it lacked the fleas, it was otherwise as spare in its furnishings. He placed a bundle, fragrant with the savory smell of meat pie, on the small table and moved to the window, putting as much distance between himself and Margaret as the room would allow. The two actions brought a lump to Margaret’s throat.

“Your parents are at Haddon,” he said without preamble. “I have arranged a respectable escort for you, so that you may meet them with no impropriety attached.”

“Thank you,” she said, afraid to attempt more until she could be sure of the steadiness of her voice. She suspected that tears would drive him away from her immediately.

He encouraged her to take a meat pie. She unwrapped the warm bundle and took one of the crumbling pastries. She sat on the edge of the bed with her pie in her lap, breaking off a bite and taking it to her mouth only when she sensed he was tensely waiting for her to do so. As soon as she did, he turned his back on her. The feeling suggested by his movement was so exactly the opposite of her own that the pie in her mouth seemed dry and flavorless and hard to swallow, for it was her greedy wish to see enough of him in this hour to last through all the years of her life.

“Ned reports that your parents have been at Haddon since your disappearance,” he continued, as if obliged to offer an explanation. “They have put it about that you became ill there, but the servants’ gossip is that you ran away. The earl employed a Bow Street Runner, but the man was unable to trace you beyond Upton, where he found your mare stabled at an inn. I am afraid your mother and father have had a bad time of it. Their unhappiness is yet another charge you must lay against me.” He spoke quietly, like a man in defeat, not at all like the bright, laughing young man she knew. The pie in her lap grew cold while she tried to think of something to say to bring back her teasing companion.