Chapter 19 #3
“Oh, but I do,” she replied fluently in that language. “I had a governess when I was younger who said that any young woman who learned a foreign language was setting her feet on the road to perdition. So, of course, I applied myself quite vigorously to their study.”
“Of course,” he repeated dryly.
“I’m best in French, but my Italian and German are quite passable, too.”
“Your reputation…”
“Is thoroughly ruined.”
“Your brother…”
“Has already tried to kill you.” She looked pointedly at his scar. “He doesn’t know where I’ve gone. He believes I’m off to visit my friend, Arabella Norcroft.”
“The wren.”
“Don’t call her that,” she said with a hint of anger. “There’s far more to her than meets the eye. Just as there’s far more to me.” She glanced around the room. “Why should men have all the adventure?”
“This isn’t an adventure, the kind you read about, shut up in your comfortable chambers at Moreham Hall. This is real, and it’s important. A man’s life is at stake, Elizabeth, and your traveling with us will only put him further at risk.”
“You know this for certain?” she said, toying with the buttons on her gloves.
“That the French would be less suspicious of a group of Englishmen traveling aimlessly about the countryside simply because they yearn to breathe the air of freedom, than a man who was, say, eloping with the sister of an irate earl?”
“Oh no, Elizabeth Harcrest. We are not getting married.”
Elizabeth flushed, took a deep breath, then said sharply, “Did I say anything about getting married, James Dinsmore? Why would you think I would want such a thing after the shabby way you’ve treated me?
We’re eloping is what we’ll say when we’ve reached France.
Besides, it makes more sense if you’re traveling to all the centers of textile production because you’re being dragged by a young wife eager for new silks and laces, instead of being there just for simple curiosity. ”
“She has a point,” David murmured.
“They always do,” Marcus warned. “The trick is not to listen.”
James shook his head, abandoning all pretense of calm. “You want to travel with us because it’s an adventure? You want to pretend to elope, but you don’t wish to be married? This is madness, utter madness, far worse than your foolishness of walking blindfolded on a bridge.”
“Indeed.” She straightened in her chair, her eyes holding his as firmly as his arms had held her when she’d fallen.
“It is madness, but not the sort of madness you suggest. Not insanity, James. It’s anger.
When I discovered why you had come to Moreham Hall, I was livid.
And not just because you hadn’t come to set things right, but because you alone—not I—have that power.
Why should men have the power to change their lives, to change the lives of others, and women have none? ”
“Because that’s the way things are. That’s the way they have always been—”
“Things change,” she said, cutting him off. “You, of all people, should know that. I’m just trying to take control of the changes in my life.”
As am I, James thought. “You’ve chosen the wrong way to go about it, Elizabeth.”
“I might say the same about you.”
The girl was as pigheaded as her brother! He was getting nowhere with this approach, and so he tried another tack. “And what if someone you or I know should see us together in France, what then?”
“It won’t happen,” she said firmly. “Not with the places we’re going. Amiens, Rouen, they are backwaters. Paris is where the fashionable set brave enough to venture to France gather.”
“And how do you know all this? Rafe can’t possibly have confided in you.”
“Of course he didn’t.” She laughed at the outrage in his voice. “He would never do such a thing. I heard it all through the library wall.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “If your brother doesn’t know, what’s to keep us from delivering you back to him this instant?”
“You might,” she acknowledged, “but then I might tell him that you lured me here with false promises.”
“You wouldn’t!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, I suspect she would,” Marcus murmured.
“It would be your word against mine. And he might believe you. But then”—she added, her fingers tracing circles on the tabletop—“you might risk him demanding back his letters of introduction, or worse, telling his contacts not to help you at all.”
“She’s good.” David whistled through his teeth.
“This is outrageous, it’s…it’s bloody blackmail!”
She raised her eyebrows. “After what I overheard in the library I don’t think you’re the one to be making a fuss about a little blackmail…”
“This is different. We’re trying to save a man’s life.”
“And I’d like to help.” She glanced around at the men, all still wearing their cloaks and holding their hats in their hands. “From the looks of it, you were about to set off. You’re wasting valuable time sitting here arguing with me.”
“I could just kill you,” he said in what he hoped was a sufficiently menacing tone. The thought of wringing her neck did seem frightfully appealing at the moment.
“I suppose you could,” she agreed, standing up and drawing her hood over her chestnut hair. “But then you’d have to waste even more time finding a place to dump my body.”