Chapter Eleven
London, England
Inès pushed aside the drapes to glance out the salon window. Today was Gus’s reception, and she saw only two neighbors strolling on the street. No strangers lingered outside the house today. Again, she was free. No one had come to check on her.
Did an agent watch from somewhere she could not detect?
She prayed not. She prided herself that if someone did follow her, she would know the signs.
Her skin would prickle. Her hair would rise.
But she was free of all that. Had been since she arrived in England.
No one was ever there, tracking her, watching her.
She rejoiced. She despaired. Could she believe that Vaillancourt did not care about her actions here?
Je ne sais quoi. I don’t know what to think.
Luc was still in prison. She had no reason to think otherwise.
Vaillancourt would not let him go out of any kindness of his heart. That man had no kindness. Nor a heart.
“My lady?” The Ashleys’ butler, Friendly, stood at the door, tall, formidable, with his silver hair and flashing eyes that matched.
Well turned out, too, always. Today he reveled in his role.
A man of seventy or more, he had been in service to the family since he had celebrated his twentieth birthday.
He mumbled to himself often, but not today. “I see the carriages arriving.”
“Show them in at once.” Gus nodded at her man. “We are ready.”
He gave her a small bow and disappeared.
Inès strode to Gus’s fortepiano, a gorgeous, magnificent piece, German, much like the one she had purchased for herself for her new house in St. James’s Place.
Just this morning, Gus had had the tuner in to attack any problems. Inès ran her hands over the gaily painted pink roses and wild white lilies.
She was to play this afternoon and had come down earlier to make certain the instrument struck all the right notes to her satisfaction.
For the past weeks here as the Ashleys’ guest, she had refreshed her abilities with the piano, able to bring her performance on the instrument up to her previous standard.
Since she had arrived in England, she had amused herself practicing on this piano.
It had not taken her long to improve her abilities, given her extensive performances at the keyboard in the past two years.
The instrument she had enjoyed playing in Boulogne was older, not German, but French and constantly out of tune.
Regularly, she had ordered in an expert to tune it and used it to entertain herself and her guests.
Music soothed her. Eliciting drama and romance, pity and triumph from the keys had, on many occasions, consumed her worries.
She would not inhabit a house without benefit of a good piano, and she had shopped for weeks before she found the perfect one in Piccadilly.
A frisson swept through her of that day she’d purchased it.
Halsey stood before her in her mind as he had that day.
A man no woman ignored, one she met with too much admiration for his striking good looks and too much despair that she could not take him to her, as he so dearly told her with the caress of his eyes and his lips and his innate charms. A danger, that man. She could not afford him.
“Madam?” Friendly stood on the threshold once more. “Lady Ramsey and Lady Carlisle.”
Inès rushed behind Gus and embraced their two friends after her. “I am so delighted to see each of you.”
“We’ve come to enjoy your good taste, my dear.
” Amber pecked Inès on both cheeks and stood back to admire, with a brush of her fingertips, the froth of translucent ivory muslin around her throat.
“I adore the effervescent muslin. Educating all of us in Parisian fashion for those of us who have not been there in years, oui?”
Inès demurred. “I have not been in Paris for more than a year.”
The three other women paused, silent at her confession.
She had assumed none of them knew precisely where she had been or what she had done.
This statement raised those questions. Each suspected, Inès could conclude, that she had worked for Scarlett in the ensuing years, else, why had she come during the blockade?
Still, it was not protocol to ask either of those questions.
“Well, I say for myself,” said Giselle, who rose to the challenge of the silence, “I have come for your cook’s pastry.”
“Ah,” said Gus, jumping in to help save the moment, “she might rival your own skills at that.”
Amber widened her large, sultry eyes and nodded at the fortepiano. “I have come for the music.”
“Come sit down.” Gus locked arms with Amber and led her to the settee as Inès did the same with Giselle.
“I have not heard you play in so many years,” Giselle said as she sat in a chair. “I need it this morning.”
“Not well today?” Gus asked her.
“Not very,” Giselle admitted. “And you?”
“I get stronger each day. The sickness in the morning does diminish with each new baby.” This was Gus’s third pregnancy. “The recovery from childbirth takes longer.”
“Too much to do to keep a family running,” added Amber, who was many months along in her own third pregnancy. “But I would not change it for the world.”
“Marriage,” said Inès, “looks good on each of you.” I wish I were able to claim that for myself.
“You will play for us today, I hope?” Giselle leaned over to squeeze her hand.
“I don’t wish to bore the guests.”
“Your command of the keyboard has thrilled so many in Paris,” Amber declared. “Now those in London will be able to enjoy it.”
“How do you feel that you will soon be on your own?” Giselle said, her blue eyes level on Inès. She took her gloves off but positioned her arms in such a way that was odd.
A week ago, Giselle had shopped with Inès for china and tableware.
The two of them had talked about how Giselle had gotten by when she first came to England from France more than a year and a half ago.
At first, she had found it difficult to be alone in a strange country.
She spoke English, so that was not a problem, but she did not speak of the reason she had emigrated to England.
She did not need to. Not to Inès, for she knew.
Against all the rules of espionage protocol, Inès knew the reason for Giselle’s posting here in England.
That knowledge came not from any informant or slip of the tongue by Giselle.
Oh, no. Inès knew because she herself had been a recipient of Giselle’s excellent work.
One look at the fine product her longtime friend had produced so that the French might be deceived, and Inès knew the artist. She knew the stroke of Giselle’s pencil, the brush of her hand with charcoal, the dexterity of her use of oils.
Oui, quelle horreur, to realize that it was sweet Giselle Laurant who drew landscapes of English coastal towns—and who might die if she were captured or killed because of it.
Inès had breathed not a sigh, not a murmur of her knowledge.
Not to her protector. Not to her runner in Boulogne.
Not to the privateer-smuggler, Jacques Durand.
Certainly never to Scarlett or Todd Carlton.
If she had, they would have been horrified to witness her breach of the code.
But in truth, it profited her nothing to tell of it to anyone.
She kept her silence, for if she uttered any more about her past, who knew what connection might occur to link Giselle to the person responsible for her landscapes’ acceptance by the French Admiralty?
Inès felt a flash of fire through her heart. Was Giselle sought by Vaillancourt even now? Was there a price on her head? As there most definitely is on mine.
She struggled to focus on Giselle. Her challenges. Her past.
Scarlett and Todd Carlton knew who she was and what she had done.
But to them, she would say nothing. They would never speak of it.
Inès had performed a valuable service to the war effort.
She’d done it in secret. She’d done it alone.
And she had helped in a small way to change the course of the war against Bonaparte.
The greater public would never learn how that change had occurred.
Inès shook off the dread that seized her heart and focused on the conversation Giselle had opened, smiling at her lovely childhood friend.
“I am happy to be here in London,” she told her, there in the lovely salon whose gay springtime pinks and ivories lifted her spirits.
“It will be the first house of my own I’ve ever had.
It’s the first one I’ve felt secure in for many years.
” She fell silent, the memories of her family’s chateau on the Loire flooding back.
Tears welled. She sniffed, angry with herself for her sensitivities.
She must become tougher. Stronger. Bolder. “I’m sorry.”
Amber pressed a handkerchief into her palm. Giselle took hold of her hand.
It was then that Inès noted the scars upon her friend’s hands and forearms. “What are these? How did this happen?”
Giselle seemed to coil in on herself. “I was attacked last summer.”
“No!” Inès groaned. “By whom? Why?”
But the looks that traveled among the other three told of the unspeakable.
“Inès,” Giselle began, “you must not fret. They are not painful.”
“Perhaps not now!” Inès was angry, bitter. “But then you were tied, lashed, and for a long period. Who would dare such a thing?” She rebelled at her friends’ calm discussion of this—and stood. “Tell me!”
“I was abducted. Held. Tied. Clive saved me. Lord Halsey and Lord Ashley. Langley, too.”
Inès studied the faces of each one of her friends. “And your abductor? Who was that?”
“The leaders escaped. But three were taken to the local gaol.”