The Mercenary Major (7 page)

Another carriage had pulled up at the line.

“I think they are charging a toll,” said Victoria.

This time, as the people parted to let the vehicle pass, the stranger stepped from the crowd and strolled their way.

Victoria watched him approach.

Jack made his way toward the three people under the oak, quite sure he was being foolish to encounter those gray eyes again, but unable to resist.

“Brave thing you did, sir,” said the driver, coming up to Jack. “Thanks to you, there’s not a scratch on my rig. Would have been dished, sure, without your help.”

He was about Jack’s height but with a blaze of red hair and a face still youthfully rounded. Jack guessed the carriage was a new acquisition. He turned to the two girls. The gray eyes were cool and distant. The smaller girl with brown ringlets kept her head down, her hands plucking nervously at her skirts.

“You’re safe,” said Jack gently. “There’s no danger now.”

“Capital,” said the driver. “Then maybe I can get my hat back.”

Jack laughed, and the gray-eyed girl flicked the young man a glance that plainly spoke her opinion of his folly.

“I’m afraid that would be pressing your luck,” said Jack. “Your hat has been put to good use, however.”

“Extorting bribes from passersby?” inquired the gray-eyed one.

“Collecting charitable donations,” said Jack, meeting her cool stare. “Care to contribute to the Fund for the Relief of Harlington’s Poor?”

“Is that what you did to stop a riot?” she asked.

“My part was minor. The baker was unwilling to sell at prices these people could pay. A compromise was necessary.”

“Well, we can contribute, can’t we, Tory,” said the driver, reaching into his jacket pocket. “Then we should get on our way.”

“But we have to thank you,” said the brunette, unexpectedly looking up, a quick glance, like some timid forest creature.

“Yes,” said the driver. “Whom may we thank?” He offered Jack his hand.

Jack stretched out his own hand. “Jack Amberly.”

The hand extended to meet his fell, and Jack saw shock in the faces of his three new companions. He lowered his hand to his side.

“Joaquin!” called an excited voice. Jack turned. Another carriage, an open landau, had made it through the barrier and pulled up on the opposite side of the road. An elegant young woman, all in dusty-rose from the silk lining of her charming bonnet to the kid slippers peeking from beneath her hem, was descending from the carriage on the arm of a liveried footman. Her black eyes sparkled with merriment. “Joaquin!”

“Good day,” Jack said to the three young people still staring silently at him. He bowed to the girl with the gray eyes and strolled off toward the beckoning lady in rose.

“So that’s the impostor,” said Reg.

**** 6 ****

“O
ur cousin,” said Katie.

“The devil take it,” said Reg. “Can’t ask him to leave Letty’s after he saved my rig.”

Victoria stared after the pair strolling away under the oaks. Their voices drifted back on the breeze in a foreign tongue, as exotic as the beauty of the dark-haired woman. How intimate they seemed, as if they were alone rather than at the edge of a noisy throng. Victoria, too, had felt momentarily alone with Jack Amberly when his hands touched her waist and his eyes looked into hers. Now the black-eyed beauty took his arm and leaned against him as they walked.

“Victoria?” asked Katie. “Are you perfectly well?”

“Yes, of course.” Victoria shook off an odd feeling of being bereft. She supposed this dullness of spirit was a reaction now that the danger had passed.

“Then what are we to do?” Reg asked.

“Apologize, thank the man for coming to our rescue, and insist that he leave Letty’s.” Victoria hoped that her voice was as firm and steady as ever.

“That’s easy for you to say, Tory. You don’t have to face the fellow.”

“I certainly will, if you feel you are unable to, Reg,” she replied.

There was a pause. Victoria stared at the vista that still revealed Jack Amberly, his dark head tilted toward the upturned face of his companion. Perhaps she was being unfair to Reg. It would be hard to face such a man, and to compel him to do anything he did not wish to do . . .

“Hang it, Tory,” said Reg. “Of course I’ll talk to him. You’ll see. I’ll be at Letty’s tomorrow before the fellow’s coffee cools.”

“Thanks, Reg,” Victoria said.

“Now,” he said, “can we go on? We might see that balloon go up yet, and I’ve a wager on the thing with Kit Grafton.”

It was some moments before Jack could fully attend to Felicidad. His feet moved easily enough, but his thoughts lagged behind, lingering on images of the girl in the burgundy jacket.

“
Querido
, you are so handsome, so fine. Tell me how you became so rich.” Felicidad rubbed her gloved fingers lightly over his sleeve.

He laughed and looked at her directly. “I am not rich, Cida. Do not let this fine coat fool you. I have less money in my pockets than I ever did in Madrid.”

“Liar,” she said. “If you have no money, then you must be a very accomplished thief now, no?”

“No,” he said, “no more thieving for me, as I told you when I left Madrid. The finery is my aunt’s doing.”

“Your aunt?”

He saw the keenness in the laughing black eyes and knew that she was assessing this new information about him.

“Lady Faverton. She is my mother’s sister. She sent letters to the army about her lost nephew, and her letters found me when I joined the 95th.”

“A rich aunt? Why did you not tell me this in Madrid?”

“Her money is not my money, Cida. I could not buy you with what I did not have.”

“
Mentiras
! Lies! She gives you money now. Look at you.”

“No, Cida. My aunt bought these clothes, but I take no other money from her.”

The doubt in Felicidad’s eyes was plain. It was beyond her imagination to think of anyone refusing money. “But she likes you, no? Likes to see you so handsome, so fine?”

“Si, but I stay with her only through Christmas. What about you? You are very fine yourself. How have you come to be in London?”

“Ah, an
afrancesado
who followed that puppet Joseph, he took me to France.”

Jack looked shrewdly at her. If Felicidad had been at the battle of Vittoria when Napoleon’s brother Joseph was forced to flee Spain, she had no doubt profited from the King’s hasty flight.

“I saw that you English would win, so . . .” She shrugged. “I took precautions. Now I am betrothed to a so-rich gentleman. See what he gives me.”

She tilted her face up so that he might look upon the necklace at her throat. Any of their old comrades would retire on the wealth in that one ornament.

“It is what you always wanted. If Felipe or Julio could see you now, would they not stare? Would they know the dirty-faced urchin with the light fingers and swift feet?” Jack was sorry that girl had become the greedy woman before him. He was over his love for her, and he would not give his love again to have it scorned for his want of fortune. “I do not want what I once did,” he told her quietly.

“Perverse boy,” said Felicidad with a pout. “You are saying you do not want me. You are like a willful girl and not a man at all—to want me when you may not have me, then not to want me now when you may.”

“Cida,
you
do not want me. I have no money,” Jack said.

“Pah, you could get money. How can you not desire me, Joaquin, has your body changed? You, you are not like other men. You cannot slake your lust on any willing whore, and these Englishwomen, I know them, Joaquin, they are too cold, too proper.”

“And your English gentleman, Cida, your betrothed? Is he cold and proper?”

“He is rich, but you are hungry, Joaquin. The touch enflames you. I know.”

She touched him then, boldly, a whore’s stroke up his thigh, concealed by the folds of her gown as they stood side by side. And her touch sent a tremor through him he could not repress, but it did not stir his heart.

Jack laughed. “I remember well what you can do to me, Cida.” He pulled away from her. “Good day.” He paused. “My lady.” He signaled to her groom following at a discreet distance, and turned back toward the village. The three strangers were gone, and he must find Letty.

Letty frowned at her brother’s letter and allowed her morning coffee to cool. If she understood Walter’s ravings, Charlotte and the children and Victoria were already in London and forbidden to see her because of Jack. Walter’s blustering incoherence was a good sign, for it meant he felt threatened by Jack, and that meant Walter believed Jack’s claim to be legitimate. But if Walter had worked himself into a state, then Charlotte would be distressed and incapable of resisting him. Letty was going to have to do something to reassure her sister-in-law.

What was worse, she felt she had made little progress with Jack himself. She was pondering his resistance to the
ton
when Jack entered the sunny morning room.

He had joined her at the Stavely rout, where she had managed to introduce him to two heiresses of great beauty, but she doubted that he had been moved by either girl. If anything, his aloofness from the
ton
had seemed more pronounced. She feared nothing would hold him in London after he fulfilled his obligation to Gilling.

“You weren’t waiting for me, were you?” He glanced at her cold coffee.

He crossed to her side of the table, as if he meant to give her a hug or a kiss of greeting but stopped short of doing so, and she affected not to notice his change of intention. Instead he reached for her coffee and replaced it with a fresh cup.

“I don’t wait as a rule,” she told him. “But I wanted to talk about last evening. Was it as bad as you’d expected?”

“Hardly. No more damage than a minor skirmish.” He helped himself to coffee, eggs, and toast from the sideboard, settled in a chair across from her, and cradled the delicate cup in his hands.

Letty read a certain amount of ease and contentment in these small acts and carefully concealed her satisfaction by lifting her own cup to her lips.

“So, was there no lady present who caught your eye?” she asked.

“None,” came the reply. He opened the
Morning Chronicle
Briggs had placed on the table. Letty struggled briefly with her impatience, and let it win.

“Isn’t it time you told me why you resist ladies so scrupulously?” she demanded.

Jack lifted his gaze from the paper and looked at his aunt. Even in the revealing light of day she looked more his age than hers. She had tucked her glorious hair under a simple cap, an artless arrangement that emphasized her delicate features and slender neck. The white collar of her gown had the look of a schoolgirl’s frock, and though she had lived in London among the
ton
, she seemed to know less of their snobbery and hypocrisy than he did.

“Lady Letitia, you won’t find a wife for me in London among your friends.” But as he said it, he had a recollection of a pair of cool gray eyes that had disturbed his sleep.

“Tell me why not, Jack,” Letty said, apparently undeterred by his plain speaking.

“Very well.” Jack straightened, but having agreed to explain, he didn’t know just how to begin. His own disillusionment had been so thorough. First Felicidad’s seduction and betrayal, then his initiation to the social world of Wellington’s staff. Wellington had encouraged him to think of the staff as his family, and his position in the 95th had deluded him briefly into thinking that he had wiped out his years in the streets of Madrid.

He had gone to dinners and balls proudly wearing his new rank. His fellow officers had been cordial and welcoming, but the young misses had been impossibly distant while several married women had been impossibly close. A captain renowned for his success among the ladies had offered Jack enlightenment.

It was a matter of face or fortune, the captain had explained. It was best to have both, but if a man could have only one, well, he judged, Jack was better off with a handsome face than a handsome fortune. Wealth, after all, allowed a man to marry only one woman. Trust a woman to know right down to the pound what her worth was or what she would be willing to sell her virtue for, the captain had said. But a handsome face, the captain suggested, would allow a man to seduce a thousand.

Jack might have laughed off the captain’s cynicism had he not seen so clearly in his mind Felicidad offering him her virtue, the exclusive use of her young body, in exchange for his protection and a share of his profits.

Now as he explained what he could to his aunt, he observed in her expression not disappointment or even sympathy, but rather a glowing excitement that lit up her eyes. He knew that look. It was Letty’s rescue look.

“You have behaved exactly as you should have, Jack,” Letty said. “You must have nothing to do with mercenary girls. That is why my idea is so perfect. We will find you a girl so rich she has no need of fortune, a girl who can marry for love.”

“Lady Letitia,” he began, and stopped. She was looking at him with a particularly earnest intensity in her light eyes that he found difficult to combat. “Would you turn me into a fortune hunter?” he asked. “I’ve been a thief, a
guerrillero
, and a soldier. I was hoping to enter a more honorable profession next.” He pointed to a notice in the paper of a linen draper’s business for sale. “Gilling and I thought we . . .”

“Oh, yes, Jack, we must certainly help your friends, but at the moment we are speaking of you.
You
must marry, and you must not consider the ordinary sort of girl who arrives for the Season with strict instructions as to the acceptable rank and income of her suitors. You must think of Eustacia Hagwood and Sarah Nevins and . . .” She faltered briefly and recovered. “Lovely girls, and endowed with such fortunes each can a marry a groom or a chimney sweep if she chooses.”

Letty made him laugh, just as she had with her desire to save the elephant, but he was coming to respect the tenacity with which she pursued her objectives. Wellington had hardly been more determined. Jack stood. “I don’t think an heiress will do for me, my lady, but if you can find a girl who’ll take me, knowing what I am, such a girl I want to meet.”