Reckless Angel (25 page)

“What a humorless termagant I have taken to wife! Be still, now.”

“'Twas not in the least amusing,” she declared with an attempt at lofty dignity. Unfortunately, lofty dignity and nakedness were not natural partners, she discovered, particularly when that nakedness was clasped so firmly to a powerful and fully clothed body. Her skin rippled where it touched the softness of silk, the cold silver hardness of a button. Her nipples peaked; her buttock muscles clenched involuntarily against the hands holding them. She felt amazingly vulnerable, but it was a heady sensation and not in the least alarming. She looked up into his face and saw in his eyes the
recognition of what she was feeling. A dark eyebrow lifted quizzically, and a tremulous smile hovered on her lips in response.

“Well, now,” he drawled softly, “I seem to have discovered the way to tame a virago.” Her tongue ran over her lips, but she said nothing. “Fetch the pillows from the bed and put them on the floor by the window in the sun,” he instructed, slowly taking his hands from her.

She obeyed in silence, her blood coursing swift with anticipation, the sweet juices of arousal beginning to flow. Then she stood by the makeshift bed, watching him undress.

He sat on the chair to pull off his boots. “Lie down and close your eyes. Imagine y'are in the garden, lying naked and alone under the sun.”

She did as he said, closing her eyes, yielding herself to the warm air, the play of the sun fingering her skin as she shifted to catch it, the sensuous depths of the cushions beneath her. Her hands roamed slowly over her body, feeling the living heat of her skin, the shape of herself, the languid power of rising desire, and when those other hands joined her own in delicious exploration, she slipped into a dreamland of delight, where the mind held no sway and only the sensations of the flesh were of importance…

When she awoke, the sun was low in the sky and shadows lurked in the corners of the chamber. She stretched, lazy and languorous on the pillows, and her mouth curved in a smug smile of memory as she opened her eyes.

“You look like the cat with the cream,” Daniel said with a chuckle from the chair, where he had been sitting watching her as the sun went down.

“'Tis how I feel.” Still smiling, she rolled onto her side and propped herself on one elbow, examining him. He was once more in shirt and britches. “Did you not sleep?”

He shook his head. “Nay, the play that sent you to sleep merely served to refresh me, and I would not
miss for a minute the enjoyment of such an entrancing sight.”

Her eye fell on the strongbox resting on the marquetry chest, and other memories pushed to the forefront of her mind. Perchance, in the soft glow of after-love, Daniel would be more responsive. She sat up on her cushions and regarded him speculatively. “D'ye love me?”

A tiny frown appeared in his previously tender eyes. “Why would you ask such a silly question, Harry?”

It was not encouraging, but having fixed upon this course she decided to pursue it regardless. “Well, I do not see why, if you truly love me, you would not share with me what is in those dispatches.”

The love light died completely from the black eyes. “We have had this discussion once. I do not care to repeat it.”

Henrietta uncurled herself from the cushions and came over to him. “Please,” she coaxed, bending to kiss his forehead. “I
am
your wife and a part of you. 'Twould not be betraying the king's confidence to tell me.”

Daniel sighed and stood up, putting her from him. “I do not wish to grow angry with you, Henrietta, but if you persist in this fashion I shall become so. I have said no, and I meant it. 'Tis past time you learned that I mean what I say, and I do not tolerate pestering.”

Henrietta flushed with annoyance. “There is no need to talk to me as if I were Lizzie.”

“If you were Lizzie,” Daniel said deliberately, “there would be no need for me to say this. She is far too well schooled. Mayhap you should take a leaf from her book.” He stalked to the door, then stopped and turned back to her, shaking his head ruefully. “Oh, come now, sweetheart, let us not quarrel. 'Tis the last thing I wish to do.”

“I do not wish to either,” she said with perfect truth, cuddling into his arms. “'Twas only that I thought…Oh, well, never mind. We will not talk of it further.”

Daniel accepted this apparent compliance without question. He kissed her and told her to hurry with her dressing as they were expected at the Prada for a reception. “I've a powerful thirst for that Rioja I acquired from the wine merchant last week. I'll go down to the cellar and fetch up a bottle.” So saying, he left the chamber, closing the door after him.

Henrietta reached absently for her discarded smock, slipping it over her head, tying the ribbon, flicking her hair free of the collar, a preoccupied frown drawing her fair eyebrows together. She looked again at the strongbox and her feet seemed to take her across the room without order from her brain. Slowly, she lifted the lid. It was not locked. Daniel only locked it when they were traveling, and, besides, there were only themselves and the señora, who knew no English, in this house. The crisp white parchment lay at the bottom of the box, the royal seal imprinted in wax. It would take but a second to apprise herself of the contents, then she could play her own little game and outwit the Spaniards who were so intent on outwitting her. And then, when Daniel had achieved his object, she would tell him the whole and he would count this little trespass as naught. And he would surely realize that she could be taken into his confidence in all matters, and could be trusted to behave with skill and care in the trickiest of situations.

Slowly, slowly, her hand went into the box, hovered over the parchment, closed suddenly over it, and lifted it clear. Feverishly, she opened the sheet, which crackled under her fingers, and gazed upon the hard, clear penmanship flowing over the paper.

The door opened behind her. She whirled, guilt and confusion flooding her cheeks with scarlet. Daniel stood in the doorway, a bottle and glasses in his hands, utter incredulity on his face. Then the incredulity vanished, to be replaced with a look of cold disgust that started a deep, trembling chill in the pit of her stomach. She tried to say something…anything…but her throat seemed to have closed and she could do
nothing but stand there with the incriminating parchment between her hands.

He put the bottle and glasses on a side table and crossed the room, his boots clicking on the tiled floor. Without a word, he held out his hand, snapped finger and thumb imperatively. She held out the document. He took it, replaced it in the strongbox, and locked the box, pocketing the key. Throughout, his expression remained the same and the chill in her stomach threatened to overwhelm her. But he turned from her, poured wine, and began to dress in the formal garb suitable for an evening at the Prada. In silence, Henrietta did the same.

She was to remember that evening for the rest of her life. It was a memory that came to her whenever the hour was dark and the spirit low, inevitable conditions on occasion. She remembered it mostly for the quality of the silence. Even in the thronged palace, where the lilting strains of musicians and the constant rise and fall of voices provided a background of continual sound, she heard only her husband's absolute silence. Not a word had he spoken to her and whenever she felt his eyes upon her they held that same cold disgust. It was a look she had never encountered before, from anyone, and to have it directed at her by that loving, tender, humorous man, who in conflict had never shown her anything less than understanding and anything more than the occasional flash of annoyance, cut her with a hurt and shame so deep she felt as if she were bleeding from her soul.

Somehow, she managed to talk, to smile, to move as if she were not impaled by dread and shame. The magnitude of her error increased the more she thought of it, and she began to see herself through Daniel's eyes: poking, prying, refusing to acknowledge his right to privacy, refusing to accept that for him that privacy was a matter of honor, wanting only to satisfy her own gratuitous curiosity in whatever fashion conveniently presented itself. It was an appalling picture, yet she had not intended deception of that despicable kind.
She had intended nothing but good, had transgressed, she thought, only temporarily and with good cause—a cause that Daniel would acknowledge willingly once all that was supposed to happen had happened. But now there was to be no good conclusion to justify the offense, and she stood condemned by her own hand and judged in her husband's silence.

It was barely midnight when she felt him come up behind her as she stood listening to an enthusiastic discussion about an upcoming feast of the bulls.

“Have you attended a feast, Doña Drummond?”

“Not yet, Don Alva,” she replied, hearing her voice as quite level although her stomach seemed to be sinking into the toes of her dainty satin pumps as Daniel appeared at her shoulder. “But I understand 'tis a most magnificent sight.” She looked up at Daniel, her smile brittle, and said, “I do trust we will still be in Madrid on the next occasion.”

“Possibly,” he replied, barely looking at her before directing some casual comment to one of the members of the circle. Wretchedly, Henrietta started to move away, but his voice, cold and level, arrested her. “'Tis time we made our farewells.”

After a seeming eternity of smiling, curtsying, and murmuring the polite but necessary inanities, Henrietta was enclosed in the litter, Daniel, as was his custom, walking beside as she was carried home. Surely he must say something when they reached the house. Say something…do something. In her innocence, she thought it didn't matter what he said or did, so long as this dreadful, condemnatory silence was broken.

The litter halted and she stepped out. Daniel held open the gate of the courtyard and she brushed past him, wondering sickly if she imagined his recoil as her arm touched his sleeve and her skirt swished against his knee. Inside the small, candlelit hall, he lit a carrying candle for her from the bigger one on the marble-topped table. She took it and went ahead of him up the stairs to the bedchamber. It was only as she reached
the head of the stairs that she realized Daniel had not followed her.

The casements stood open to the warm night breezes carrying the fragrance of hibiscus and lavender from surrounding gardens. The pillows that had formed the love couch of the afternoon had been replaced on the bed, presumably by the señora when she tidied up after they left for the Prada. The memory of the sensual glories of the afternoon brought an agonizing wrench. It seemed to her in this dread wasteland to have happened in another time, another place, to another person.

She undressed, listening fearfully for the sound of Daniel's footstep on the stair. The door opened at last as she stood in her smock, brushing her hair with ritual, repetitive strokes that faltered as the door closed gently. She remained with her back to the room, yet hearing his every move in the continued silence as he took off his cloak, his sword belt, his wine-red satin doublet with the sleeves slashed to reveal the fine lawn of his shirt.

Daniel sat down in the armless chair beside the bed, looking at the slight figure, who remained with averted back, again rhythmically brushing the gleaming corn silk-colored cascade as if the normality of the act would restore the world to its accustomed course.

“Henrietta, come here.”

The quiet command crashed into the silence she had begun to imagine would never be broken. Her heart jolted against her ribcage, and she turned slowly to face him. He presented such a picture of grim purpose, sitting in his shirtsleeves, arms folded across his chest, that the painful pounding of her heart increased and her stomach churned.

“Why?” she heard herself ask tremulously.

“Come here.”

Hesitantly, she went to stand in front of him. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a minute as if in utter weariness. “I do not know what to do,” he said in a near-expressionless tone. “I have
been racking my brains all evening to decide upon the appropriate course of action for a man whose wife creeps behind his back to pry into his most private affairs, who sees nothing repugnant in ransacking his possessions, possessions he has expressly forbidden her to touch, who will not accept reasons of honor—”

“Please,” she interrupted despairingly. “'Twas not like that.”

“Do you deny, then, that I walked in here and found you holding my private papers?” he demanded, cold and harsh, before she could continue. “Do you deny, then, that I took those same papers from you?”

Henrietta shook her head. What was the point of explanation when the act itself was for this man so clearly inexcusable and unpardonable?

“For some reason, I had believed it impossible that you would resort in my household to the duplicitous, dishonorable tricks of your childhood, but I should have realized, of course, that such ingrained habits of dishonesty die hard.”

Henrietta began to weep helplessly, unable to stop the tears of pain and shame welling from deep within her, but Daniel, unmoved, continued to flay her from his own depths of hurt and disappointment until her bitter sobs filled the chamber and he felt himself drained and empty of all emotion. Then he got up and left her.

She crawled into bed, shivering, aching as if she had been savagely beaten, but the bruises were to the spirit, not the flesh, and she curled tightly over her hurt, enclosing it within her, praying in futile despair for this day not to have dawned.

W
hen she awoke, she was still alone, and she knew that she had been alone all night. Her body told her so as clearly as the cool, unruffled space beside her in the bed. She lay in the dawn-washed chamber, leaden with misery, her eyes still so hot and swollen with weeping that she knew the tears must have flowed even during her exhausted sleep. How had it happened? How had something so catastrophic occurred from only the happiest of motives? She had only wanted to help him. How could they continue to live together after such a horrendous happening? After those dreadful things he had said to her? She felt as she had as a young child, facing yet another day in the wilderness of rejection and unlove, before she had built up the carapace behind which the hurt soul could shelter. She had torn down that carapace since meeting Daniel, but now it seemed she must rebuild it.

He came into the bedchamber just as she had reached that melancholy conclusion. “Good morning.” The greeting was curt, and he barely glanced in the direction of the curled figure in the big bed, who mumbled a response, peeping over the bedcovers to see what he was doing. If he had slept, he had done so in his clothes, it seemed, judging by their rumpled condition as he changed shirt and britches with brisk, impatient movements.

She had to do something; in a voice hoarse with
weeping, she managed to form some words. “Daniel, 'twas because the queen wanted—”

“What?” He whirled round, staring with that same stunned incredulity. “You were spying for—”

A knock heralded the arrival of the señora with his shaving water. Her greeting was cheerfully voluble as usual, and if she noticed any lack of enthusiasm in the responses she gave no indication.

“Just do not say anything further.” The instruction came hard and clipped, once they were again alone. “I am sickened by the whole sordid, disgraceful affair.”

Henrietta gasped with the sharp pain of his words and despairingly watched him sharpen the knife blade on the leather strop, watched him go through all the routine morning actions that she knew so well. But it was if she were watching a stranger, and when he was finished and was once again his daytime, immaculate self, he left the room without a further word.

Slowly, she rose, washed, dressed, brushed and braided her hair, examined her image in the glass: a wan, swollen-eyed picture of misery. She could not possibly go out looking like this and she was supposed to attend a morning party at the house of one of the English merchants resident in Madrid. Perhaps she could send a message excusing herself. But no, she could not do that. She had somehow to lead her life as if it had not collapsed in dust around her. If she retreated into herself, she would shrivel away with self-pity.

Resolutely, she reached for the pot of rouge and applied the lightest touch to her cheekbones and lips, wishing in a perverse fashion that Daniel would walk in and object as vociferously as he had once done. Such a trivial show of annoyance could only be a relief. But he did not come in, and when she went belowstairs, she found that he had breakfasted already and had left the house.

She went to Mistress Troughton's party, sat sipping lemonade and nibbling grapes and sliced pears as if nothing had occurred to disturb the even tenor of an
existence she shared with the other young and not-so-young matrons making the best of their residence abroad. But Betsy Troughton, some six years older than Henrietta, the mother of two small children and the bearer of a third, saw something in the young woman's face that she thought she recognized.

“My dear Henrietta, you look a little peaky,” she observed, sitting down on the wooden settle beside her guest, fanning herself languidly. “Perchance y'are feeling a trifle queasy? I suffered most dreadfully myself with the first and the second, but it has been much easier this time, although the heat is at times insupportable.” She smiled confidingly and patted Henrietta's hand.

Sweet heaven, Betsy thought she was with child! Henrietta floundered, searching for the discreet words of disclaimer, and then drew breath sharply, remembering that glorious joining in the garden two weeks past. Her impulse had not been repeated since then, at Daniel's behest, and she had almost forgotten the whispered possibility that they had made a son under the Spanish moon. What if they had? Such an event would have to heal the deepest breach.

She returned Betsy's smile, letting the statement go by default, but her mind seized upon the possibility and held on with the grip of a drowning man. If she carried Daniel's child, then all would have to be well.

Once she was home again, the possibility began to take on the shape of probability. She sat in the courtyard under the orange tree and dreamed of a child, her clasped hands resting protectively on her stomach. Daniel would forgive her and they would put this dreadful time from them.

But there were no signs of forgiveness over the next few days. Daniel tried to look at the event dispassionately, to see it simply as an act of childish defiance perpetrated out of pique, an act he could have dealt with in disagreeable but straightforward fashion. But this was an act that flouted every tenet of their marriage—of any marriage. Wives did not spy upon their
husbands and take the fruits of their spying to the enemy. He had known her to be inexperienced and unsophisticated, but he had believed her honest, one who would recoil in horror from such a contemptible suggestion. Instead, his wife had violated his trust and his privacy in the most despicable fashion, demonstrating her utter rejection of his values of decency, honesty, and respect. He tried to find excuse in her childhood, but she had been perfectly aware of her wrongdoing. He could not get out of his mind's eye the image of her, standing there holding his papers, the crimson tide of guilt and confusion flooding her cheeks. Shaken to the core, his implicit faith in her honor destroyed, he could not imagine how he could ever trust her again. And without trust of the most fundamental kind, how could they possibly live together in any degree of harmony?

He behaved toward her with a distant courtesy and slept in a small room adjoining the bedchamber. Rarely looking at her, he failed to see the effects of this treatment as she struggled with despair and loneliness, becoming drawn and pale. Despite her earlier resolution, she retreated from the social round and hugged tightly to herself the hope, rapidly becoming conviction, that soon she would be able to give him news that would bring instant pardon.

Absorbed by unhappiness, Henrietta ceased to plan, to attempt to alter anything in the drear life that had descended upon her, even to pay attention to what was going on around her, until one morning, when the marchioness of Aitona paid her a visit.

“My dear Doña Drummond, we have missed you at court,” she said, examining her hostess with sharp eyes. “I trust you are not ailing. Her Majesty is most concerned to know that all is well with you.”

“Her Majesty does me too much honor,” Henrietta replied, and surprised herself with a slight caustic note in her voice as she remembered that Her Catholic Majesty had been largely responsible for the present wretched state of affairs. “I am perfectly well, madam.
May I offer you some refreshment?” She pulled the bellrope for the señora. “A cup of chocolate, perhaps?”

“Thank you.” Her guest smiled with only her lips and arranged skirts and petticoats around her as she took a seat. “It has been very hot. I can well understand why you would prefer to remain at home in the cool. But I do trust you will attend the concert at the palace on the morrow. I bring Her Majesty's most ardent invitation.”

Refusal was impossible if she was not upon her deathbed, and Henrietta acquiesced as graciously as she could, pouring chocolate for her guest and offering a bowl of the sweetmeats so beloved of the ladies of the Spanish court. Then the idea hit her with the speed and illumination of a shooting star. Her happy plan to aid Daniel's mission had gone devastatingly awry, but that did not mean she could not still pursue the original goal. In the second or two before Daniel caught her red-handed, she had read some portion of the king's dispatch. The damage was already done, so what did she have to lose, and mayhap she could still do Daniel some good even if he would never lay the credit at her door.

“I have been thinking about our little talk, marchioness,” she said carefully, and was rewarded by a swift flash of interest in the other woman's eyes, a slight stiffening of her shoulders.

“Indeed, Doña Drummond?”

Now what had she read exactly? Something about the expected arrival of an envoy to the Spanish court from Parliament…would that be of interest? Why would it? Presumably it was news the king of Spain already possessed, so why would he need to hear it from Daniel? “It is a matter of some amazement to me how King Charles's messengers manage to deliver His Majesty's dispatches to such far-flung places,” she said cautiously, sipping her chocolate, finding that some life seemed to have returned to her body to energize her numbed brain.

“It is certainly amazing,” concurred her visitor. “It's to be assumed that His Majesty King Charles must have a most efficient information network. I am sure he would know, for instance, about the diplomatic activities of his father's murderers…of where they might be sending envoys, perhaps.”

So there it was. The Spanish court wanted to know how much King Charles knew. Daniel would be as completely impervious to the question direct as to gentle hints, and for as long as he withheld this information, so the king's audience would be withheld from him. King Charles had enjoined Daniel's silence, so presumably His Majesty preferred to keep the nature and extent of his own spying activities a secret from all but those of whose loyalty and support he was assured. King Philip IV had not yet made overt and unconditional offer of either.

“It's to be assumed Parliament would wish to gain acceptance in the courts of Europe,” Henrietta said noncommittally.

“Yes,” murmured the marchioness. “One would assume so. How is your husband's mission progressing, Doña Drummond?”

Henrietta smiled blandly. “Unfortunately, not as speedily as he had hoped, madam. His Catholic Majesty appears monstrous busy these days and has little time to receive visitors.”

“Her Majesty, like all clever wives, has her husband's ear, my dear,” spoke the marchioness deliberately. “And like all such wives, uses her influence with great care. I am certain she could be persuaded to advance Don Drummond's cause.”

“That would be most kind in Her Majesty,” responded Henrietta. “I understand from my husband that King Charles is greatly concerned about Parliament's diplomatic activities. He would be less so, I think, if he had some idea of how extensive they were.” She picked at a loose thread in the lace of her sleeve. “In the isolation of The Hague, 'tis proving difficult to hear who has been approached by Parlia
ment's envoys extraordinary…or so my husband says.” She looked up and smiled innocently, before adding the sauce to the dainty dish of her mixing. “I understand our king has charged my husband with the additional task of discovering whether His Catholic Majesty has been approached, or can expect such an approach. I do not suppose you would know, would you, madam? If I could pass such information on to my husband, it would certainly impress him with my acumen, and I daresay he would confide in me to an even greater extent in the future.”

And that should be thoroughly convincing, Henrietta thought with the first flash of contentment in days. If King Charles did not wish the Spaniards to know what he knew, then she had done her bit to ensure that they were completely at sea. Her visitor was murmuring that it was not the sort of information she was privy to, but Doña Drummond should keep her wits about her and her eyes and ears open. Thus would she surely learn much that would assist her husband.

“I trust I have already done so in some small measure,” Henrietta said directly, rising as her guest began to take her leave.

The marchioness merely smiled and nodded. “You have much wisdom, my dear, for one so young.”

“I have been most fortunate in my teachers,” Henrietta replied pointedly.

But Harry's elation did not last long once her guest had left and the hot, stifling silence of the house settled around her again. She heard Daniel come in, and her heart sank with the now-familiar unhappiness at the way she knew he would greet her.

He came into the small parlor. “You have had a visitor?”

“The marchioness of Aitona,” she agreed dully. “I am bidden to a concert at the palace on the morrow.”

He stood looking at her for a minute and her heart yearned toward him, begged for a smile, just the hint of affection in the black eyes, just a touch of the old humor. But there was no change in his expression as
he went over to the side table and took up the sherry decanter, filling a goblet to the brim with the rich golden wine. “I understand that the Troughtons are leaving Madrid. They are journeying overland to San Sebastián and taking ship for France.”

“Oh,” she said. “Do you know when?”

He shrugged. “At the end of the week, so I heard. 'Tis a little sudden, but they were brought news of the ship sailing from San Sebastian and decided to take it, not knowing when there would be another. You should visit Mistress Troughton and bid her farewell.”

“'Tis too hot for visiting,” she said listlessly.

“Nevertheless, you cannot remain immured in the house indefinitely,” he returned. Strangely, Henrietta had not realized he had been aware of her retreat from the outside world. “Besides,” he continued with an edge of sharpness, “you cannot be backward in the courtesies. Mistress Troughton befriended you when you arrived. You owe her a farewell visit.”

“Aye,” she agreed in the same flat tone. “I will wait upon her in a day or so.” She thought she would choke in this deadly atmosphere with this complete stranger in her husband's body and hastily rose to her feet and made for the door, her fingertips pressed to her lips as she concentrated on keeping back the tears.