My Seduction (10 page)

Assassin.

It was none of her concern. Not the terrible word he’d applied to himself, nor the haunted expression in his eyes, nor the bitter amusement with which he watched her turn from him.

Thank God he’d said that, she told herself fiercely. Here she’d been thinking him a tame lamb, when at every step of their journey she had had abundant proof that he was every inch a wolf. She wouldn’t forget again. The past few days’ stress and lack of sleep and hunger had conspired to turn her unwilling dependency on MacNeill into something— No! Nothing had been turned into less than nothing.

Christian MacNeill would soon be gone from her life. She didn’t have to think about his past or his future. Nor should she. She had her own history and future to concern her.

A tap on the side of the shed caught her attention. She looked around and saw a pair of monks crouched over either end of Grace’s trunk, panting from the exertion of carrying it here. She had completely forgotten Grace’s trunk. Indeed, she had nearly forgotten why she was on this journey in the first place and what the hoped-for end of that journey would be. She would do well to remind herself.

The monks took one look at her, dropped the trunk at the door, and fled. Still weak, she fell back against the pillow. She would recuperate and then she would continue on to Castle Parnell, and this odd side trip would become an anecdote with which to regale the marquis at some not-too-distant-future dinner.

She wondered if Kit had eaten…

“Mrs. Blackburn?” The massive Brother Fidelis appeared in the open door, accompanied by a wizened white-haired antique whom Kate suspected headed the infirmary, since he brought with him various ill-smelling tinctures. With apologetic smiles and mutters from the round monk and unapologetic gibes from the ancient one, they saw her dosed and scurried off.

As soon as they left, a nervous little fellow arrived, pressed a plate of steaming beef stew in her hands, and backed out of the room, where a thickset monk waited. Ravenous, she forced herself to eat the delicious fare slowly. By the time she finished, she felt a world better and determined to ask any other visitors where Kit had gone. Before long, another twosome arrived to take the cleaned plate, but they beat a hasty retreat before she could question them.

It took Kate a while to figure out what was going on, but when she did, she broke into a wide grin: They were being sent in pairs so that they might protect one another. From her! How empowering! It might even warrant its own section in her book: Terrorizing Celibate Men. She couldn’t help giggling.

When Brother Martin and Brother Fidelis reappeared, this time to check her pulse and gauge her pallor, she swung her legs over the side of the cot, and the two monks back-pedaled from her as though she might at any moment sprout another head.

“You just lie back and rest, young lady!” the ancient Brother Martin squeaked, scooting behind Brother Fidelis who attempted to look formidable. Unfortunately, his worried expression negated any threat his size suggested.

“I feel much better,” she said, though in truth her joints felt knit together with jelly and her throat was raw. “I would like to see Mr. MacNeill.”

“He’ll come when he comes,” Brother Martin announced forcefully from behind Brother Fidelis. Brother Fidelis offered a sickly smile.

“Then I shall have to find him.”

“You can’t! You aren’t allowed. It’s against the rules.”

“I’m not a monk, so your rules do not apply to me.”

“The rules apply to everyone! Besides, he’s busy getting ready to leave.”

“What?” Kate’s light mood evaporated. He was abandoning her?

“Just for a few days,” Brother Fidelis said soothingly. “Until you’re better and can travel. He has some, er, pressing concerns he needs to look into.”

“What pressing concerns?” Kate asked.

“As to that, I couldn’t say, Mrs. Blackburn. But I do know that he asked the abbot for us to tend you whilst he’s gone.”

“He did?” she asked, oddly touched, which was ridiculous; what else was he going to do but ask the abbot? He couldn’t very well dump her on their doorstep and ride off as if she was a foundling. Well, actually he could.

“Aye. He did,” sputtered the disembodied voice from behind Fidelis’s bulk. “He’s gone daft. That’s what the world’s done to him.”

Kate had had enough of the crabbed old monk’s malicious pronouncements. “I refuse to hold a conversation with someone I cannot see,” she muttered, skirting Brother Fidelis.

At once, Brother Martin popped out on the opposite side of him, his knobby hands planted on his scrawny hips. “This is why we eschew the company of women, Brother Fidelis,” he announced darkly. “Five minutes in one’s company, and I recall all too clearly how obdurate and intractable, willful and contrary, they are. Don’t you?”

“Not really.”

“What?” Brother Martin turned a look upon his fellow monk that clearly questioned his loyalty.

“I entered the holy orders when my mother died. I was ten.” Brother Fidelis’s round face took on a beatific expression. “I was most fond of my mum. She had hair as dark as this young lady’s. I forgot how pretty it was.”

Kate smiled triumphantly at the old misogynist, who without another word snatched his robes up and stalked from the shed, leaving Brother Fidelis alone with her. At his companion’s retreat, Brother Fidelis’s courage faltered. He began to sidle toward the door.

“Don’t go,” she said.

“I don’t think Father Abbot would approve.”

“Then you stand outside the shed, and I’ll stay in here. What harm is there in that?”

He didn’t look much comforted. She tried another tack. “The greenhouse is a marvel, isn’t it?”

He stopped, his face filled with pride.

“Mr. MacNeill said he and his friends built it.”

“That they did. When they were but lads. Either put their hands to God’s use or the devil will put them to his, I used to tell the abbot.”

“Very wise.” She sat down on the cot again and regarded him attentively. “But the structure. So unusual. Someone must have given much thought to its construction. Surely that wasn’t the work of mere boys. Would the architect be you?”

He turned pink with pleasure. “Well…”

“Ah!” She nodded. “I thought as much. Tell me, however did you come up with the design?”

He lowered his eyes modestly. And came in.

TEN

IDENTIFYING AND CONCENTRATING ON ATTAINABLE GOALS

St. Bride’s, 1797

“ARE THEY DEDICATED?” the Frenchman asked, eyeing them carefully.

“Yes.” Father Abbot’s gaze touched Kit and moved on to Douglas, then Dand and Ramsey. “But they serve God. Not France.”

“In serving France, they will be serving God.”

“They were meant for this!” The voice of the exiled French priest Toussaint rang with frustration. “In all of England we could search for a hundred years and never find young men better equipped to do what these can.”

“And what is that?” Douglas had moved forward.

The newly arrived French gentleman regarded him coolly, yet he answered. “Go to France and aid in the restoration of the monarchy.”

“And the Holy Church,” the abbot reminded his visitor.

“And if we do not succeed?” Dand asked.

“You must succeed,” the man said. “The time is ripe. After having the audacity to have the Holy Father removed from Rome, the Directoire falters. The people are finally sickening of their sacrilege, such as when they desecrated the cathedral of Notre Dame, renaming it the Temple of Reason and installing a whore as their priestess.” He crossed himself. “It would take little to put the so-called government into turmoil, and then? We take back France!”

Kit strode across the yard, the vivid memory of his last visit to these quarters ambushing him. How eager they’d been, with their youthful ardor, their dreams of glory, their piety and hubris.

As he walked, he was well aware of the many eyes marking his passage and the alarm in them. Let them be afraid. He didn’t give a damn about their apprehension.Or hers. He closed his mind to the image of her face, stark with confusion and fear, when he’d said the word assassin. Well, she wouldn’t have to suffer his company for a few days at least. As he wouldn’t have to suffer hers.

She knew too much about him, had come too close. There was danger there, a siren call to intimacy that he could not afford to heed. Nor did he want to. She’d become an abrasion, rubbing him raw, revealing all the hunger and desires he’d thought dead but instead had only gone dormant.

Want. Desire. Need. They didn’t coexist easily within the man he’d become. So, he would purge himself of them. And that would be easier done away from her. Away from her scent and voice and dark eyes and supple body—

He jerked open the door to the abbot’s house and let it slam behind him, moving past the young acolyte standing guard and heading for the library. The door stood open. Inside, the abbot sat behind his huge desk, waiting for him, his hands folded atop a stack of papers.

He looked exactly as Kit remembered him: the same thick thatch of white hair, the same beaked nose above the thin severe mouth, the deep-set eyes regarding the world with unruffled calm. It offended Kit that while he had changed so drastically, not only in body but in spirit, this man should seem so untouched by the world into which he’d sent Kit and his companions.

“Christian.” The abbot held out his hand to be kissed. Kit regarded it coolly. The abbot withdrew it.

“I have prayed you would return, Christian.” The same voice, imbued with quiet dignity and power.

“I didn’t have any alternative.”

“I know. Nonetheless, you are here, and I am glad.” There was not a hint of fear or reproach or disingenuousness in his manner or expression.

“Why?”

The abbot did not answer the question, as if Kit must already know and was being deliberately obtuse. “You are troubled. I would ease you.”

“Would you?” Kit smiled thinly. “Good. Tell me who betrayed us to the French.”

The abbot sighed softly. “I do not know.”

Kit’s hands slammed against the surface of the desk, making the papers on it jump. The abbot didn’t flinch.

“There were only five men who could have betrayed us.” Kit leaned across the wide desk. “Ramsey Munro, Andrew Ross, Douglas Stewart, Brother Toussaint, and myself. Douglas is dead. That leaves four.”

“What would you have me say, Christian? If anyone had confessed, I could not tell you.”

“I want the name of the man who betrayed us, who is responsible for Douglas’s murder. And I will have it. By God, I will.”

“I hope you are taking an oath and not making one?”

With a strangled sound of frustration, Kit pushed off the desk, wheeling around. “Then tell me this: Who among us would you judge capable of this sort of betrayal?”

“I cannot conceive any of you capable of such treachery. Not Ramsey, not Andrew,” the abbot said quietly. “Not you.”

Exasperated, Christian raked the red-gold hair back from his face. “What of Toussaint, then? I have not seen him. That alone surely indicates a guilty—”

“Brother Toussaint left the monastery five years ago and returned to France. He went to minister secretly, at great risk to himself.”

“Did he?” Kit’s voice dripped doubt. “And what have you heard from him since?”

“It is feared that he was found out and executed,” he answered obliquely.

Kit’s eyes narrowed. “But you are not certain.”

“No,” the abbot reluctantly admitted. He rose to his feet. “Can you not let this go? You have a young woman—”

“She is not mine,” Christian said. “She is an obligation. I honor my commitments, and she is one of them. When I have finished with her, I will find Douglas’s murderer.”

“Yes,” the abbot agreed. “And when you find him, what will you do then, Christian?”

A wolfish smile flashed on the young man’s sundarkened face. “Not turn the other cheek. That I can assure you.”

“ ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’ ”

“And I am an instrument of the Lord. Isn’t that what you taught me?”

“There is darkness in you, Christian, that never was there before.”

“I was never branded before, Father Abbot,” he replied coldly. “Not every fire refines the spirit. Sometimes it simply burns.”

A smoking oil torch fitted into a sconce beside the door flickered maniacally, spitting light across the dark walls. In the center of the room, a shallow brazier smoked and flamed, and before this stood the warden, his hands clasped behind his back, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet.

“I have a gift for you.” With a smile, he hefted a long iron rod from the fire. The end, twisted into the shape of a stylized rose, glowed orange in the dark room.

“I refuse to believe that.”

“Believe what you want. I did once. I believed in us.”

“You would have done better to have believed in God’s plan.”

“I thought we
were
God’s plan!” The words came from his soul, anguished and heated. Then the expression of anguish faded, leaving only a cold, hardeyed young man. “That’s not why I came.”

“Why then, Christian?”

“I found a garland of roses. Yellow roses.”

“Where?” the abbot asked, startled.

“In the old castle ruins across the moor. They were laced around a dead rat’s throat.”

The creases alongside the abbot’s nose deepened as he stared unseeingly at the paper under his hand. “What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know,” Kit answered. He did not know what the abbot’s game was, but until he did, he would not be handing him any free information. “I want to go back. Have a closer look. But”—his gaze fell—“I cannot take her.”

A pause. “What are you doing with this young woman, Christian?”

“I am her guard.” He shrugged elaborately. “Driver, if you will. I am seeing her safely to Castle Parnell.”

The abbot’s gaze sharpened. “Castle Parnell is in Clyth, is it not? Clyth is a dangerous place these days, filled with many troubled souls. The marquis and his family have been visited by tragedy recently.”

“How would you know that?” Kit asked, considering the straight-backed old man speculatively. The abbot had always seemed to know more than his place as the simple leader of a cloistered order might suggest. Even when Kit had been a boy here, the abbot’s reach had been subtle but long-ranging. “And what have troubled souls to do with the marquis’s recent bereavement? The deaths of his brother and sister-in-law were accidents.”

“So I have heard.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“I have no reason not to,” the abbot answered mildly. “I only know that where poverty and desperation are living cheek by jowl with wealth and privilege, there is fertile ground for mischief.”

Kit did not know whether to give credence to the abbot’s suspicions. “I would like to leave Mrs. Blackburn here. With you. I want to see if I can pick up the trail of whoever left that rat. Barring that, I’ll ask about the countryside if anyone might have seen a stranger traveling through these parts.”

“I fear you’re hunting a ghost, Christian.”

“I’m not hunting. Not yet. Not until I have delivered Mrs. Blackburn safely. Until then, I am simply studying the field. When I do hunt, I’ll not come back empty-handed, I promise that.” He held the abbot’s considering gaze. “Will you keep her?”

The abbot nodded. “All right, Christian. We will tend your Mrs. Blackburn until you return. But return before the Sabbath.”

“Three days,” Christian promised. “And she’s not mine.”