Seducing the Spy (33 page)

"Stop wasting time and get on with it, girl," Julia said briskly but gently. "You're worrying your sister."

Alberta's gaze flicked from Julia to Willa to Olivia and then back to Alicia. She leaned forward. "Are they who I think they are?"

Alicia sent an apologetic glance toward the other women as Alberta's resounding whisper carried clearly through the room. "Yes, Alberta, they are. And they're very nice too, so please get on with it!"

Alberta nodded, blew her nose energetically, and settled back on the sofa. "I am ruined," she stated with finality.

Alicia's relief that apparently no one was dead was tempered with guilt and regret. "Oh, Alberta. You didn't, did you?"

"I did. I walked out of our house and right over onto Lord Cross's land and into his house. Papa said that was enough to ruin any girl, so that's what I did."

Alicia stared at her sister in disbelief. On one hand, Alberta was no more ruined than when she'd crawled out of bed this morning. On the other hand, if anyone were to spot a young, unmarried girl of good family in this house and carry tales—yes, that would cinch matters indeed.

"But why would you do such a thing? You know perfectly well what I've been through. Why would you do that to yourself?"
And to the rest of the family
—although Alicia truly wasn't in a position to judge on that count, was she?

"Christopher's papa let him propose finally—"

"But that's wonderful! You've been waiting for Christopher forever!"

Alberta shot Alicia a quelling glance. "Christopher's papa allowed him to propose on the condition that I give my word that I would publicly denounce you and that I would never again acknowledge your existence and that from this day forward you would be worse than dead to me."

Alicia sat back. Oh, no. "Oh, Alberta. You refused, didn't you?"

Willa came to sit on Alberta's other side and put an arm about her. "Of course she did! Who wouldn't refuse such a ridiculous demand? Alberta, I hope you put Christopher in his place immediately!"

Alberta shrugged, a bit embarrassed. "I didn't precisely do it immediately. It was after the shouting and the throwing things and the slamming of the doors—"

"Heavens," Julia said with a frown. "Your father is a beast, isn't he?"

"Oh, no, that wasn't Papa," Alberta said earnestly. "That was me."

Alicia smiled ruefully at her new friends. "The red hair comes with a temper, I fear."

Olivia leaned forward, ready for a good story as always. "So what happened next? After the shouting and so on?"

Alberta dabbed at her eyes. "I told Papa and Christopher and Christopher's papa that if they wanted me not to speak to Alicia then they had better cut out my tongue, for I would never agree to it." She leaned into Alicia. "For a moment there, I thought Papa was going to do it."

Alicia wrapped her arms about Alberta. "Darling, I appreciate that you fought for me, but I think perhaps you'd better go home and agree to Christopher's demands."

Willa frowned at her. "She should do no such thing! If I had a sister, I wouldn't let anyone keep me from her."

Alicia sighed. "If you had a sister like me, you might rethink that stance."

Willa reached across to lay one hand over Alicia's. "No I wouldn't. Not for a single bloody instant."

Alberta gasped slightly at Willa's language, then giggled. Then she sat up, wiped her eyes one last time, and took a deep breath. "What's done is done, and I don't honestly know if I regret it. If Christopher thought I was capable of swearing to such a thing, then he didn't know me at all."

She looked down at herself with a sigh. "I don't know if he really loved me, or if he simply wanted me. You know, Alicia, when you look like we do…"

Alicia went very still.
When you look like we do
. Oh, yes, it could work…

Julia never missed a thing. She leaned forward. "Alicia, what are you thinking?"

Alicia shook off the thought. "No. No, we can still get Alberta out of this mess."

Julia's eyes narrowed. She looked from one sister's face to the other's. "I see. Yes, it might work."

Alicia held up her hand. "No, Julia. No. Alberta isn't part of this."

Julia tilted her head. "This is larger than simply one girl's reputation. Larger than simply four lives at stake. I would risk far more than that to have—to have a good resolution to this affair."

Alberta leaned toward Julia. "What am I not a part of?"

Julia gazed at Alberta. "Something very important. Something much more important than distancing yourself from Christopher and your father—although it would accomplish that as well."

Alicia glared at Julia. "
No
."

Olivia and Willa waited, carefully silent, but Alicia could see the hope in Olivia's eyes and the desperate worry in Willa's. Her own frantic fears threatened to drown her.

But she was the eldest. It was her duty to protect her sisters and she'd done a poor job of it so far.

Julia sat back. "Alicia, you know we must."

How could she bring in her sister, endangering her so? Yet the stakes were so very high. Alicia finally realized how it must have been for Stanton. In order to stop a madman from aiding Napoleon, he'd had to be willing to sacrifice anything.

No wonder he'd never dared allow himself to love.

Alberta, perhaps realizing for the first time that something rather more desperate than a singed reputation was at stake, looked from one woman to the other. Alberta's jaw hardened and Alicia saw the classic Lawrence stubbornness rise in her sister's eyes.

Alberta turned to Julia. "What must we do?

«
^
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Alicia made her way through the dark wood by touch and memory. She'd climbed out her bedroom window many times to spy on Lord Cross's notorious parties.

"These are my woods," she had told Julia when she had objected. "These are my hills. What servant could find his way in the dark to the precisely perfect place to watch the house, without giving himself away?"

Julia wouldn't have agreed if she hadn't been so desperately worried. Alicia played on that shamelessly. "I know where he is. I am the only one who has a double to be at Prinny's table. I am going, Julia. The most you can do is get out of my way."

Julia had the last word, however. "What do you think you'll manage to do when you find him?"

Alicia gave her a brief hug. "I'll think of something," she said. "I always do."

Now, she was not so sure. She slowly climbed the hill, taking a path much more overgrown than it had been when she was a child. She'd dressed in her darkest green, hoping to conceal herself, but there was precious little green in the wood at the moment. She had tied her hair back tightly, but the bare branches snagged and teased strands of it down nonetheless.

At last, she had worked her way around to the bottom of the far side of the hill. She knew what was going on at the house. Prince George had declared the weather fine enough—one suspected any weather would have been fine enough—to dine outside so that the spectacle could be enjoyed over dessert. Ladies would be rolled in fur and some gentlemen as well, and all would smile and suffer and exclaim upon the fine evening.

That would all stop when dessert was brought out. Alicia only hoped that no one would notice that the girl on the giant tray, masked and covered in strategically placed spiced fruit, who was carried in by six footmen and whose distinctive red hair was spread in a great fiery fan around her head, was not the scandalous Lady Alicia—as carefully arranged gossip would have it—but truly her virtuous and pure sister Lady Alberta.

The ruination of two sisters would certainly take Antonia down as well.

Yet Alicia was having a difficult time comparing that loss to the loss of Wyndham, damn it.

She looked up to the top of the hill. A figure stood silhouetted against the sky, although from the angle of the house he would be shaded by the hill behind him. It was a smallish figure, compared to Wyndham at least, but Julia had prepared her for that.

"He is ill and not himself, but he has the strength of madness on his side. Do not underestimate him. Do not let him close to you."

As she worked her way around the small ravine that carried away the runoff from the hill, she heard the cries of startled titillation coming from Cross's party.

It seemed dessert had been served. Alicia prayed that none of the drunken guests would stick their forks in anything that wasn't fruit.

Deep in the ravine, where it could not be seen from any angle unless one was right upon it, there burned a small, bright fire. A large bundle of some kind lay next to it. Alicia approached cautiously. It seemed that no one was about—and Julia had been quite sure that the comte had no minions at the moment…

In the folds of the blanket-wrapped mass, Alicia spotted a shock of white hair. The dark bundle on the ground was Mr. Forsythe. She knelt quickly and put one hand gently over his mouth before he could recognize her. She put a finger to her lips. Forsythe's brilliant eyes flashed at her impatiently. She removed her hand. "Right," she whispered. "Are you hurt?"

"I fear I am, pretty fire-goddess. He broke my legs, you see. Two swift blows with an iron rod. He says I can still work crippled, so he's going to let them heal wrong on the voyage to Paris. That way he needn't worry about me escaping." Forsythe raised his bushy brows. "Do you think that fellow might not be quite right in the head?"

Alicia kept her gaze on the capering figure on the hilltop. "I am quite sure he is not, but neither is he stupid. Have you seen Wyndham or any others of the Four?"

Forsythe blinked up at her. "I think the comte is not the only one who is not stupid. And no, I've not seen them. Are they missing?"

Alicia couldn't allow the panic to rise. "You stay here and keep warm. I will… I will figure something out."

The Chimera could have been well gone with Forsythe by now—so something else was keeping him here. Why would he stay simply to watch the festivities below?

He was watching—waiting—but for what?

Why don't you simply ask him?

Even as Alicia stood and began to make her way closer to the madman, her mind was cataloguing that idea under things best thought through first. She pulled the letter opener from her bodice. It seemed a pitiful thing now—here in the dark, heading for a madman. A pistol would be worse, for she was a poor shot indeed.

What's the worst that could happen?

She could die. No, worse, she could die before she found Wyndham, and then Wyndham would die.

That would definitely be the worst thing that could happen.

She topped the hill, some distance from the madman intent on the scene below.

"One, two, three, four," he said to himself with a chilling cackle. "Four, three, two, one…"

Alicia stationed herself behind a tree trunk and got her bearings. As it had been when she was a girl, the panorama of Lord Cross's celebration spread out before her like a golden picnic. She could clearly see the first table where Julia, Willa and Olivia sat. She could also see the giant dessert tray, laid before the Prince Regent—with Alberta's brilliant hair and buxom displacement of fruit gaining a bit too much of his majesty's attention.

Alicia felt the damp of the night air sinking into her clothing and her bones. The estate smelled of chill and damp no longer held at bay by the greenery.

Alicia shivered. "This," she muttered to herself, "is a very bad idea." She turned on her heel.

It slipped in the muck, making her flail wildly for a moment to keep from doing a facer in the mud. When she righted herself, the man was standing only a few yards away. He was horribly scarred. Great spreading purple lines, half healed, ravaged his face. There was no telling what he'd looked like before, but now he most surely looked like a nightmare. In addition, his knife was much larger than hers.

"Good evening, pretty whore."

She would remember that voice for the rest of her life. It was him, the man in the garden. Remembering how his cruelty had twisted her own thoughts about, Alicia stepped back.

"I foolishly thought I could stop you. I have changed my mind," she said.

The man nodded politely. "As you wish. I shall simply kill you outright then."

He meant it too. She could see it in the flat depthless gray of his eyes. Truly, those eyes were more frightening than any hideous scarring could be. She had the feeling that he'd been a monster long before he'd been wounded.

And now she was alone with the monster. Her belly crawled at the way he would soon speak to her, the way he could see right into her. Why had she thought herself a match for the monster?

"You are an incredibly stupid woman, did you know that?"

At moment, it was all Alicia could not to nod her head in agreement. The smooth power of the viper's voice poisoned her from within.

He turned to gaze back over the grand spectacle being enacted before them. "They call themselves by predators' names, did you know that? Your precious Royal Four—the Cobra, the Lion, the Fox and the Falcon." He laughed, a crazed gravelly sound that made Alicia's skin tingle with fear. "I find I prefer creatures like humans." He looked at her. "Man is a clever beast—for all the cleverest beasts are the one who are both hunter and hunted."

Man. It was so very typical. Alicia felt her temper rise, with gratitude and fear combined, because right now wasn't the best time to become peppery with the man. "Then I must be twice as clever as you—" Oh, heavens, there went her mouth again. "For I am a woman and my kind has been hunted since the beginning of time." Now she was good and fiery. "I left my father and my lover behind because I will not allow a man to dictate what I think of myself. I am not about to start allowing it from an ugly, rotting, scarecrow of a man!"

"That wasn't nice."

She frowned. "I never claimed to be nice. That's merely an assumption that people make because I'm pretty."

A nonsmile curled the edge of his scarred lip. "A dangerous assumption I won't make again, I assure you."

"Well, you're a fast learner, at least. Do try to retain this—we are not going to allow you to kill them."