Chapter Eleven #2
Inès stood there, her mind reeling, her body weaving until she finally sat down once more. “You can’t tell me,” she whispered to Giselle. “I understand. I give you my apologies. But more I give you my sincerest sympathies for what you have endured.”
Giselle squeezed both her hands. “I am safe now. We have guards.” She glanced at Gus and Amber. “All of us.”
“You as well,” said Gus.
Inès fell back to her chair. Exhausted, overwhelmed, she was at once terrified but also relieved. She had protection. Her friends knew she had done something for the cause, because whatever it was, it merited protection. “I have never seen them.”
“They have extensive training!” said Amber with a grin.
“How many?” asked Inès.
“Never ask,” said Gus.
“True. Such a waste of time,” Amber added. “And now, having said that, we will admit we each have our pasts to ponder or forget,” she continued with a toss of her vibrant red hair. “It’s helpful to remember all the good. Defeat the bad memories with the joys.”
Inès snorted. If only she could do that!
But her challenge was much the same as that which Giselle had faced when she first came here.
The very reason she was here in London, in this house, among this Society of her friends and their social connections to the ton, was because of her past. Her very sordid past.
She inhaled, her purpose driving her on. “You are right. Of course you are. Now it is a time and place to smile.”
“Madam?” Friendly presented himself with a trembling smile. “Baron and Baroness Fournier.”
Inès rose with Gus to greet them. The lady was a gorgeous blonde, tall and stately, and now married to the Englishman who had helped her escape Bonaparte’s claws. “I am thrilled you are here, my lady,” Inès said.
“I am Elizabeth, as I hope you are Inès to me.”
Inès agreed with a nod.
“I must introduce you to my husband.” Then Elizabeth drew near a tall, slim, elegant creature who gazed at his wife with the possession of a man in love.
“I hope you will come visit us in the country, mademoiselle,” he said.
“My lord, your wife has just informed me we are on a first-name basis, so I am Inès to you.”
“And I am Dirk to you, lovely Inès.” He kissed her hand in the Continental manner.
Elizabeth grinned at her husband. “Inès once worked in Paris, did you not?”
“That is true.” What more could she say? They both knew the rules of the game.
The game. Mon Dieu! So many here knew the game, played it. Inès glanced around, struck by the number of her friends and acquaintances who were involved in defeating the French madman. Fully one-third of the number of guests could be suspected of playing that game.
Then Friendly appeared once more at the door. “Madam, the Countess Halsey, Lady Jessica Ranelagh, and Lady Felicia Mannerly.”
Inès met the violet gaze of the older woman, the mother of the man whom she alternately saw in her daydreams or walked with in her restless nighttime reveries. He was not with them. Why not?
After all she had done, planned, decided about how she would treat him as merely a good friend, she nonetheless felt the stab of disappointment at his failure to attend.
Still, she drew upon her duties to greet them and welcomed the family with gusto.
“My lady, thank you for coming. We are very honored you have come and brought your daughters. Lady Ranelagh and Lady Felicia, please join us.”
The Countess Halsey, whom Inès had met at the music store, was a charming lady with stark white hair and a tall, elegant figure.
She wore a lorgnette on a string about her neck and used it as a tool to emphasize her spoken words.
After Gus’s welcome, Inès greeted her, and the lady was most gracious.
“Jessica, Felicia, and I were honored to be invited. We would not miss good company on a lovely afternoon.”
Inès appreciated her kindness. An older woman’s approbations were worth much to establish oneself among London Society. This one’s blessings were worth gold.
“I do bring apologies from my son, Lady Ashley. Halsey was suddenly detained on a business matter, but he assures me he shall arrive as soon as he can get away.”
Gus shook her hand. “We are happy to welcome him whenever he can appear. I know you are acquainted with most of these ladies, countess. Do come; I will help you renew your friendships.”
The others received the elder lady and welcomed her with varying degrees of acquaintance and affection.
Inès allowed herself the freedom to enjoy the afternoon.
#
“I doubt sending the Third Regiment of Foot to camp on the shores of Dover can be useful.” Durham stared at Halsey across his own desk. Pitt sat beside him. “Halsey, face it. We need twice as many soldiers for that plan of yours.”
Halsey shook his head. His friend was being stubborn, and to win over the prime minister, they had to form a firm front on this matter. “Then let’s get them.”
“We would need twice the money to pay them all!”
“Can you afford to have Bonaparte laugh at our little army?” Halsey argued. “We must make our numbers look stronger.”
“Are you impressing the Austrians and Prussians with these so-called numbers?” Durham asked him.
“Yes! Why not?” Halsey had devised a plan to use a regiment, and with earthworks and supplies, to make it appear as if it were three regiments camped on the southern English coast. But convincing Pitt and Rafe was a bigger challenge than he had anticipated.
“Bonaparte faked his attack on us, posting his army in Boulogne for two years, shouting at us, scaring the locals half to death. Why don’t we terrorize him?
Now that he is gone from the Atlantic coast, he is vulnerable there, no matter the blockade.
His navy is a little fish in the waters we control. ”
“No!” The prime minister swept a hand through his thinning hair, strode to the window, and looked out on the street. “I cannot send such a prize as the third from its quarters in Canterbury to the shore for a ruse like that.”
Halsey fumed, but kept his anger. Pitt did not care for vitriol. “Then give me a different regiment. I don’t care which one. Give me home guard, if it comes to that. I must increase the numbers if Carlisle’s and my plan is to succeed. And we must begin now.”
“You think Bonaparte cares about what we do?” Pitt challenged him.
“Of course he does!” Durham was out of the chair by Halsey’s desk.
“He has decided not to invade us for now—and turned the other way. He is mad to defeat the Austrians. But if he wins against them, never doubt that he will turn his sights back to us once more. We have not the army strength here to fight him off. We did not when he had his Grand Army in Boulogne last summer, and we don’t have it now. ”
“But we have sent rumors abroad that we have doubled our army, trained them well, too,” Halsey pressed his friends. “Plus, we won at sea at Trafalgar and deterred him from crossing the Channel.”
Halsey had private knowledge of how the Earl of Carlisle’s new wife, Giselle, had been instrumental in ensuring that Bonaparte’s efforts to cross the Channel would fail.
He knew because he had helped Carlisle rescue Giselle from French agents who knew what she had done.
Giselle had achieved a miraculous ruse, drawing false landscapes that were fed to the French and the architects of the fleet.
Though he had talked with Scarlett Hawthorne about Giselle’s work, as had Carlisle and Durham, he had not asked if she worked for the lady who ran her own espionage network.
To ask was not what one did. Agents kept their own knowledge.
Inference and accident aided Halsey and his group of men to understand Scarlett’s.
She had told him what was necessary and that was all.
Giselle, the lady implied, had worked for Scarlett, who had paid her to feed drawings through Scarlett’s group across the Channel and into the hands of French shipwrights and admirals.
The deception was the most successful feat of the year.
The French—who may have suspected the drawings they received were false—had stopped building amphibious landing vessels.
Whether they had learned that the calculations they used to build those vessels were wrong was the cause, he did not know. No one did.
But the current threat of the Austrians to Bonaparte’s hold on Rhinish German principalities had persuaded Bonaparte to pull his Grand Army from the Channel coast in Boulogne and send his two-hundred-thousand-strong army east. As of this week, agents had informed Halsey, the French army marched toward the Austrian border.
Still, Halsey would not tell the prime minister that the British were safe from French invasion.
Never was it so or could be. Bonaparte held a special bitterness toward the British.
He would never stop looking at them with envious eyes.
So Halsey would never allow William Pitt, the Younger, to believe that they were all safe behind the blockade of the Royal Navy.
He had to build another ruse to scare the French into dividing their soldiers into smaller segments so that he could more easily fight and defeat them.
But that seemed to be a victory for another day. Pitt left the meeting with Durham, both saying only they would think on the matter.
Halsey sighed. Enough work for today. He was going to a reception where his darling Inès was in attendance.
His day would not be complete until he saw her smile at him once again.
#
Halsey arrived late.
His mother and two sisters had already departed. Only a few guests remained.
“The party is nearly done.” Inès greeted him at the salon door and looped her arm through his.
“I was sorry to miss it.”
“I was sorry you missed me at the fortepiano. I wanted to impress you.”
“For that, ma chérie,” he said in low and decadent tones, “you need nothing but your lovely self.”
“You turn my head with every word.”
He grinned down at her and patted her hand on his arm. “I like to succeed in all my efforts.”