Chapter 13 #2
“We will be soon enough. Already people are suffering.”
“Not in England.”
“In France. Like plague, the misery spreads. Unchecked, it will spread throughout the Continent, cross the Channel, and spill onto our shores.”
“And what is it you would have me do?”
“Go there.”
“They are in the midst of a revolution, not exactly the time for a grand tour.” James attempted to keep his tone light, to conceal his shock.
“I want you to establish a network so that we might work towards the end of this vicious new government.” Grenville sat back in his chair, his dry fingertips pressed together in a gesture oddly reminiscent of prayer. “Tell me, James, have you anything better to do with your time?”
Did he have anything better to do with his time?
“Well, my Lord Grenville…” I could continue to dance attention upon Anne, listen with half an ear to her gossip, while pretending not to notice how people eye my face and whisper behind their hands.
He’d made a game of it, catching the stares and holding them, gauging the expressions in their eyes.
Disdain, pity, revulsion, intrigue, attraction—he’d seen it all.
It no longer amused him. Society no longer amused him.
“Why me?” he asked at last. “I’ve no particular skills. ”
“Ah, but you do.” Grenville tapped his fingertips together. “You remain cool under pressure. You’ve a quick mind. More than that, you’ve an ability to move easily amongst different sorts of people, to establish a rapport, to lead them…”
An image of Elizabeth leading him into the library flashed in his mind, and James stiffened. “To seduce them, don’t you mean to say?”
Grenville pressed his fingertips together. “Not a word I would have chosen, no. Though I suppose one might argue that effective leaders have seductive qualities…” He spread his hands dismissively. “But this is a matter of honor.”
He thought then of Anne, and how she’d encouraged him to think of her revenge in terms of honor. “So,” he said, allowing bitterness to bleed into his voice, “you believe me honorable enough to spy?”
“I believe you honorable enough to engage in what will be a dangerous and most important mission.” Grenville placed his hands flat on the table and leaned forward. “I have seen you fight—with courage, with skill, and with passion.”
“Need I remind you that I lost?”
“I was there. I saw what happened. You chose to let Moreham win.” Grenville’s eyes narrowed their focus to the thin red line on James’s cheek. “You gave him his satisfaction, but you would not apologize. You offered your life rather than forswear what you knew to be true.”
James began to protest—he didn’t know what was true, not then and not now.
He only knew that when Moreham’s steel had pressed against his throat, he could not say he was sorry for touching Elizabeth.
He knew that as surely as he knew he would never touch her again.
He fell silent, and emptiness swept over him.
It was emptiness, he knew, of his own making.
He’d allowed himself to drift through life, purposeless, nudged occasionally in some direction by his sister’s anger, or his father’s madness. He’d jested with friends that life was short; it should be spent in pleasure, not wasted in struggle. But the truth was darker.
He feared the seeds of his father’s madness might lie buried within his own mind.
Even now they could be growing, the tangled vines of delusion.
Anne’s obsession with Rafe troubled him deeply.
Even more troubling was his own obsession with Elizabeth.
For what else could it be? He’d only touched her once, yet no matter how he tried to weed thoughts of her from his mind, or memories of that night, they flourished.
He told himself it was society that no longer amused him, but he feared the truth was that the absence of Elizabeth Harcrest was what left society wanting.
Wasn’t this how madness began?
He should have let Rafe kill him that morning.
“You are very quiet, James. I realize I have approached you with a matter that is shocking, overwhelming even. I suppose I should have prepared you in some way, but time is of the essence.”
James snapped from his thoughts back to the present. He stared at Lord Grenville, still amazed at the turn their conversation had taken. It was time to make a change in his life.
He needed to stop mooning about things that could not be…
“I need an answer now, James. I have waited long enough for you to heal. You can do this job. Come, man, what do you say?”
He had been asked, in all seriousness, to become involved in an adventure as far-fetched as any his father, in his dementia, might conceive.
His lips curled at the irony. He continued to study Grenville’s face across the table, a man who had once been friends with his father, a man so like his father…
Was Grenville deranged, too? “You’d like me to establish a network… ”
“That’s it precisely. It will be a simple thing, you’ll see.” Grenville hesitated, then added, as if it were a small thing, hardly worthy of mention, “But more importantly, there is a gentleman we’d like you to assist in leaving France.”
“No doubt someone who the new government in Paris would prefer remained as a guest of their country?” James picked up his wineglass as if fascinated by the contents.
“Someone the French would dearly like to have as a guest of Madame la Guillotine. You have heard of Calonne?”
“Louis XVI’s former finance minister? Isn’t he here in England, organizing the émigrés?”
“Not simply organizing. He has a scheme to buy up masses of the new currency, the assignat, inflating the value and at the same time spreading forged assignats throughout the country.”
“Speculation. Isn’t that bankers’ work?”
“Which is why we have need of the services of a particular banker, a gentleman who is currently hiding from the authorities near Rouen.”
“And is that all?” Twirling his glass by the stem, James was fighting an overwhelming urge to laugh, though whether at Grenville’s schemes or his own decision to join him, he couldn’t decide. “Or do you need me to storm La Force and fight the National Guard single-handed?”
“Not single-handed, no, indeed.” Grenville rubbed his hands together. “But it needs to be done rather quickly—within the next two months. I’ve handpicked a team of men to go with you—sometimes a tad unruly—but no doubt you can manage them. All fluent in French, as you are, all with unique skills…”
“I can only imagine,” James murmured, wondering who among the three of them, he, his father, or Grenville, was most mad.
“…skills that I’m sure you’ll find most useful. And I shan’t need you to do anything quite so dramatic as the things you’ve just named. As for the network, well, you’re in luck. It shouldn’t be too much trouble; most of the groundwork has already been laid.”
“Has it?”
“Yes, although…” Grenville paused. “There is one more thing I should mention.”
James looked across the table, noticing how the old man’s gray eyes seemed to gleam in the candlelight. “Yes?”
“You’ll need to pay a little visit to Rafe Harcrest, the Earl of Moreham.”
James nearly snapped the stem of his wineglass.