Since the Surrender Page 3

  He threw a quick sharp glance sideways. Interesting: the feather in the woman’s bonnet was quivering as though someone had sighed over it. Had she turned so quickly to look at him that he’d missed it? It seemed unlikely.

  Her face was still aimed at the painting; her back was still aimed at him. She seemed rooted to the spot.

  He began to need to get a look at her face.

  From somewhere in the museum he heard what sounded like…was it a giggle? A female sound. Ethereal. A trifle eerie, but then the whole damned place was. Doubtless a member of the cleaning staff taking inordinate glee in her work, since no other woman had signed the book apart from “Mrs. Smithson.”

  He craned his head toward the painting that transfixed Mrs. Smithson: it was large, blue of sky but otherwise comprised of glowing celestial shades of pink and gold and pearl, and crowded with all manner of things, trees and livestock and whatnot, and it had cherubs, too. A bloody swarm of them, like bees. His sister Genevieve, an expert on painters of nearly every provenance both popular and obscure, would likely know the reason Italians seemed to want to put them on everything. Maybe he should ask her when he returned home.

  If he deigned to return home.

  He was gentleman enough to wonder how he ought to approach an unescorted woman of apparent quality…when she finally moved. Subtly, yet discernibly: a restless tilt of her head, a slight roll of one shoulder.

  She might as well have driven a boot heel between his ribs.

  His breath left him in a single painful gust, and he stared, struggling for equilibrium, and tightened his grip on his walking stick to brace himself against the force of memories blowing him back and back through the years, to Waterloo, to Brussels, to all the other times he’d seen her do precisely that.

  And, inevitably, to the last time he’d touched Rosalind March.

  Roses. He should have known.

  Chapter 3

  Mrs. Rosalind March had known Captain Eversea was approaching even before she heard the floor squeak. She’d forgotten he had a way of disturbing the atmosphere of a place, like any proper thunderstorm. The little hairs on the back of her neck stirred with it. The backs of her arms were cold with nerves.

  He’d come. Triumph!

  She supposed.

  But now she was uneasy. She decided to allow him to approach her. Or, rather, this is what she told herself. She preferred this to the version where she hadn’t the nerve to speak to him, despite the fact that she’d been impulsive enough to send for him.

  “Your…messenger…gave me inadequate directions to this rendezvous, Mrs. March. Or should I say, Mrs. Smithson.”

  The words contained all the warmth of a commanding officer chastising a subaltern and were steeped in irony. But…oh. The voice. How had she not been prepared to hear his voice again? Deceptively gentle, dark and velvet textured: it lulled like opium smoke when the conversation was casual and close—during a waltz, at one’s elbow during a dinner party.

  In command, he could make a single word crack like a pistol shot.

  His voice was a weapon.

  The irony in it was because he understood precisely why she’d chosen her messenger: if she’d sent for him, he very likely would not have come.

  Quite rightly he associated Rosalind March with trouble.

  “And good morning to you, Captain Eversea. Very good to hear you once again exerting yourself to charm.”

  She held out her hand for him to bow over.

  As ever a gentleman—in the little niceties and rituals that bound together his class, anyway—he didn’t hesitate, didn’t twitch a brow: he bent, took her fingers lightly in his.

  Hardly a touch at all.

  She glanced down at his fingers and knew a vertigo comprised of a rush of years: she’d seen his hands cleaning weapons, absently knuckling away the black powder from his lips after he’d loaded a musket, hoisting weapons to his shoulders in drills, lifting up the heads of dying soldiers to offer water. She’d seen them lift brandy snifters, clap her husband on the shoulder in camaraderie, help silk-clad women in and out of carriages.

  She knew the weight and heat of them pressed against the small of her back during a dance. She knew how his bare fingers felt threaded through her hair, cradling her head, to tip it back to—

  She withdrew her fingers from his quickly. Her rib cage tightened, fortifying herself against a tide of memories.

  She pointedly looked into his face, and not at the hand gripping the horse-head-topped walking stick, his Waterloo souvenir, which he was grinding into the floor as if to punish it for being necessary. He’d always seemed etched from something more enduring than mere human flesh; he’d always seemed somehow more distinct than anyone else in any room. She was not surprised to find his face even harder now. Time and sun and pain and long nights involving God only knew what manner of male diversions had engraved lines at the corners of his eyes, sharpened and deepened the angles and hollows of his long face, made an implacable thing of his mouth. From the looks of things, it would make a veritable creaking noise should he attempt to turn it up into a smile now.

  His eyes…his eyes could still cut diamonds. Could light a mine shaft.

  They were blue.

  No: “blue” was an inadequate word for what they were.

  She turned from him to gaze at the painting. Rubinetto was painted in the corner in tiny, uneven black letters. She’d spent a goodly portion of her courage and strength on that oh-so-casual greeting, and she needed a moment to marshal more of it.

  “Hideous,” he said, with absolute authority. He meant the painting. He was frowning punitively at it.

  Wonderful. It was no comfort to discover he was precisely as he ever was.

  She’d always heard his character described in absolutes: Courageous. Loyal. Trustworthy. Brilliant. Unyielding. Relentless. Disciplined. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his judgments—regarding everything—had the permanence of monuments once he made them, and he usually made them with breathtaking speed. Her husband, Colonel March, had loved him and trusted him unquestionably. Captain Eversea’s bloody-minded certainty inspired absolute trust. His instincts in matters of warfare and men were invariably correct, and she supposed this meant he possessed an innate goodness that nevertheless seemed to have nothing of softness or easiness about it.

  But all of this also meant that forgiveness was far too ambiguous a concept for Captain Eversea. She’d given up self-recrimination as superfluous long ago. But she knew his weaknesses as he knew hers, and for this she knew he would never forgive her.

  Or himself.

  It made what she came here to do that much more difficult.

  “I suppose I ought to ask you how you fare before I ask for your help, Captain Eversea.” She no longer stifled her impulse toward directness; she no longer felt the need to charm him or anyone else. I’m not that girl anymore, Captain Eversea.

  There was a silence, which she fancied contained surprise.

  And then, wonder of wonders—one side of the mouth lifted. Creeeeak. It was a smile. Of sorts.

  Beautiful mouth.

  Best not to look at it.

  He ignored the question of how he fared, probably thinking it superfluous. “Why do you need my help, Mrs. March? And why are we…here?” He gave the word “here” the intonation he might give the words “French prison.” He cast another baleful glance at the painting, then returned his gaze meaningfully to her, as if accusing her of subjecting him to it.

  She hadn’t considered where to begin or what to say. She hadn’t said the words aloud to anyone else outside of her family, and they sounded terribly unreal in her ears when she did. She took a deep breath.

  “My sister is missing.”

  He was instantly brisk, which was bracing. “The loud one or the blond one?”

  “The blond one.” Jenny was loud; she saw no point in disputing it. “Lucy. Jenny is married two years this month. Her baby is a year now, and has a tooth—”

  He made an
impatient sound, which she knew meant, Relevant information only, please, and reminded her afresh of why it was difficult to like him. Death-defying height of his cheekbones notwithstanding.

  “Forgive me for boring you with superfluous details, Captain. Lucy was arrested for a petty crime and was to be held at Newgate for her trial. Instead she has disappeared from the prison, and has been missing now for a week, and no one seems to know what became of her.”

  It was as close to a military brief as she’d ever delivered. She felt a bit cheated: she enjoyed details.

  But his eyes had gone brighter, and the choke hold on his walking stick had eased as she spoke. Bloody contrary man was happiest in the presence of contrariness.

  He’d always liked her best when she was tart.

  “What on earth did Lucy do?” He sounded bemused, not appalled, which was comforting and reminded her of why she’d actually liked him. He was an Eversea, after all, and their history was downright woolly with black sheep. Not to mention the fact that his own colorful younger brother had recently enjoyed a certain celebrity as London’s most popular criminal, replete with a very jaunty little tune about his exploits sung on streets and in pubs and on stages simply everywhere, and who had gone on to escape from a very public hanging.

  “She was accused of absconding with an expensive bracelet, fashioned of carnelian and onyx set into—” Another impatient noise from the captain. She inhaled her irritation. “She fastened it about her wrist in the jeweler’s shop, and stepped forward to admire it in the sunlight in the shop doorway, and then she took a few steps outside into the sunlight—just for a moment, mind you—to get a closer look, as it was dimly lit inside the shop, you see. The shopkeeper saw the incident rather differently, and a certain amount of…unpleasantness…ensued. She meant no harm.”

  “Ah.”

  And what a disbelieving syllable that was.

  Still, it didn’t contain a shred of judgment.

  Rosalind said nothing, because the disbelief wasn’t entirely unwarranted, and she was an essentially frank person. Apart from the fact that they were both very pretty, her sisters did her no credit, and no one knew this better than he did, unless it was Colonel March, who had taken them on when he married her, because she had made it a condition of their marriage. It was a risk on her part to insist upon it, and could only have been blind infatuation on the colonel’s part that he’d agreed to it. But the colonel, who could marry as he pleased and was financially quite comfortable and no stranger to risk, had seen her and been smitten and took them all away. They’d grown up with the specter of destitution, of want, hovering always. She knew Lucy’s probably futile social ambition made her more reckless than she ought to have been, and she knew precisely why that bracelet had called to Lucy.

  That, and the fact that she was a trifle feathery in the brain.

  She would greatly have preferred that the bracelet not called Lucy out of the door of the shop, but that was neither here nor there at the moment. She would have very much preferred to have an uncontroversial sister, but she loved both of them indiscriminately, and she’d never once failed to take care of them. Since her husband’s death, they were her only family.

  She wouldn’t fail Lucy now. Still…

  Loss. The prospect of it blew a cold breath on the back of her neck. If she entertained the possibility of it for longer than a few seconds, it would weaken her, and she needed her strength. She fought the urge to rub her chilled palms down her pelisse, and then she did. She never, never, never lost without a fight. All her life she’d always done precisely what she’d needed to do.

  “And why did you contact me, Mrs. March?” Another brisk question.

  This is where all the nerve and strength she’d earned in intervening years since they’d met was required.

  “Because I think William Kinkade might know something about what became of her.”

  His face closed so abruptly she actually felt a jarring sensation in her teeth. As though she’d dashed her head against something unyielding.

  She’d expected this. She’d forgotten, however, just how delightful it felt.

  Kinkade had served with Chase, and had been as close to him as her husband.

  “I am certain he would speak to you about the matter, should you be so kind as to ask him about it.”

  His face remained as immovable as the statue of William III in St. James’s Square. Eyes inscrutable.

  “He’s deuced difficult to see,” she continued, her voice considerably calmer than her stomach, which interestingly, suddenly seemed to contain spinning windmill blades. “I’ve requested to speak to him through letters to his office but I received an official reply stating he knew nothing at all concerning the whereabouts of Miss Lucy Locke. I attempted to meet with him at his offices—I appeared there one day. I was told he was unavailable. I have not yet been to his home, which would be a somewhat desperate measure, I grant you, but it would be the next step I take in my attempt to contact him. I have not yet been to the hulks, but why would they take her there? It has been a week. She is gone. Surely someone knows what became of her.”

  Her voice had become increasingly taut with her own fear.

  Her ears began to ring with his silence. The room was peculiarly still and close, both as a result of the skillfully sealed old building and the fact that Captain Eversea always seemed to use more than his share of air.

  She had the odd sense he was both watching her and listening to her, and he was taking in two very different sets of information with his eyes and ears.

  What do you see, Captain Eversea? Do I look as different—and as the same—to you as you do to me?

  “Lucy fell in with a crowd that included him,” she continued, as if the conversation actually consisted of two sides. “Or rather, she moved rather on the fringes of a crowd that included him. Wealthy, fast, not all of them…wholesome. This I discovered later.” She faltered on that last word. It had taken courage to say it to that steely face. “She…admired…him greatly, I know. She said something to me that led me to believe that he might know—”

  “‘Deuced’?” Chase said so suddenly and sharply she gave a start. “Did you say ‘deuced,’ Mrs. March? Next you’ll be smoking cigars and drinking brandy and throwing your legs up onto furniture and spitting.”

  “Surely not spitting.”

  A beat of silence.

  And then, oh so reluctantly, both corners of his mouth turned up and he was smiling. His entire dazzling, difficult self was in that smile. He looked twenty years younger than the thirty and then some he must have been, and her heart, the bloody traitor, did a hard flop in her chest, like a supplicant flinging itself at his feet.

  She’d once worked so hard to earn his smiles.

  And then she’d needed to learn to withstand them, the way one needed to learn to adjust to giddy altitudes.

  What an idiot she’d been once.

  Her jaw set, her spine straightened. She didn’t need or want his approval now. She needed his help.

  They both knew she didn’t deserve it.

  The light of the smile faded naturally, and he simply looked at her. She endured his not entirely dispassionate scrutiny, her chin up. He could look and look all he liked, but he wouldn’t find her—that girl who’d never dreamed that the unspoken role of the wife of a colonel was to be, in a way, all women to the men—mother, sister, lover—by proxy. The girl who’d been too young and far too busy merely surviving to develop her own very useful code to live by, the way Captain Eversea had. She’d fumbled her way through, utterly in the dark, and had finally lit her way by flinging charm indiscriminately and everywhere, like fairy dust. Astonishingly, the charm had both dazzled and camouflaged, and everyone was too blinded by infatuation—which she’d admittedly rather enjoyed—to notice she was frightened and out of her depth and often bored and resentful when she should have been grateful and gracious and all that was mature.

  No one had noticed, of course, except Captain Evers
ea.

  In the end, however, she’d inadvertently spun a trap out of her own charm.

  For herself and for Captain Eversea.

  “You do still consider Kinkade a friend, Captain Eversea?”

  “Of course. I’ll see him tonight at Lord Callender’s do. But why on earth do you think Kinkade had anything to do with it?” He’d come to some conclusion in that moment of studying her. His tone established distance: it was cool and inquisitional.

  She refused to panic. “Because he works in the Home Office, and he would be able to see and review the petitions for freedom for condemned felons. And though Lucy has not yet been tried, he’s intimately acquainted with the people who work for the prison, with the Charleys, with the magistrates. Surely he can help discover what became of her. She has high social aspirations—Lucy does—and I fear they were encouraged because she is pretty and flighty and it amused these people to encourage them, not because they feel any real regard for her. When I went to see her in…” She cleared her throat, as she would never say the word easily. “…in prison, she said, ‘Fuss not, Rosalind. Billy is going to help.’ She sounded nervous.”

  Silence.

  “You’re basing Kinkade’s involvement in a disappearance on the hopeful surmise of an infatuated girl?”

  His tone would have been flat but for the maddening whiff of incredulity. How dare he. Lucy was her sister—not a “disappearance.” But in his way he was making it very clear that she was implying an insult to Kinkade’s character and that this was dangerous ground for her to tread upon, indeed.

  “She wouldn’t tell me anything else. She seemed…afraid. Downcast.”

  “Anyone who isn’t a looby would be afraid and downcast in Newgate.”

  Temper licked at the edges of her words. “I think she might have been afraid of him. Of Kinkade.”

  “I cannot imagine how this could possibly be true.” Quick and detached and bored.

  She stifled an actual growl.

  He sensed it, and seemed to like it: his gaze sharpened into something like a dare. Challenging her to raise her game.