“I trust these have been oiled recently?” he asked Cleese.
“Absolutely, Your Grace.”
Quin handed Cleese the pistols and watched absentmindedly as the butler wrapped them tenderly in a fold of flannel and replaced them in a specially made case emblazoned with the Sconce coat of arms.
One duke upstairs, dead to the world.
The heir to that dukedom on a beach in France, dead—or very nearly so.
He felt as though he were living in a novel, the kind with an improbable plot and histrionic characters. At any moment a piece of armor or something equally preposterous would fall from the sky.
“We’ll take a boat from Dover,” he told Cleese, watching him pack bags of powder and shot in the case. “Send a footman ahead to engage the best captain and vessel available. We’ll anchor offshore and take a rowboat with muffled oars under cover of dark. With any luck, the marquess will be on English soil by tomorrow night.”
“I trust that will be the case,” Cleese said, looking as unconvinced as Quin felt.
The door popped open. “There you are!”
Quin looked up, and felt a surge of emotion so strong that he was dizzy. Olivia was dressed for travel. In the crisis, he had forgotten how beautiful she was: those green eyes, the color of sea glass, the mouth that was made for kissing. “Are you nearly ready?” she asked.
The very idea of allowing her on a boat, anywhere near the Channel, was unnerving. And yet he knew that he had no choice.
“We must leave immediately,” she said. He saw anxiety in her eyes, but her smile was bright and brave.
“What on earth are you carrying?” he asked, as she carefully put a basket on the ground.
“Lucy, of course,” she answered. “I’m afraid she’s not very happy with the basket, but I don’t want to risk her falling into the sea.”
He stepped forward and took her hands, looking down into those lovely eyes. “Will you please remain here at Littlebourne in safety while I go to fetch Rupert? I will have the marquess at your side within twenty-four hours, if it’s humanly possible. I’m sure his condition has improved while the courier was travelling to us.”
Olivia’s smile widened.
“I had to try,” he muttered, as much to himself as to her.
“Your mother is waiting for you in the drawing room.”
Quin took the pistol case from Cleese. With it, he was as prepared to protect his lady as he possibly could be. He was a crack shot, but he knew perfectly well that aim and a well-oiled pistol would go only so far. He would need luck.
Olivia stood at his left shoulder. “Quin, did you hear me? Your mother is waiting for you in—”
He turned and dropped a kiss on her lips. “I did hear you. I shall pay a quick farewell to Her Grace directly. Cleese, will you dispatch that footman to Dover, then collect my travelling bag from Waller, and make certain that Miss Lytton is comfortable in the carriage?”
Olivia had turned pink and rather flustered. “You mustn’t kiss me in front of people,” she whispered.
“Kiss you?” he asked, then: “Cleese, close your eyes.” As always, the butler was prompt and obedient, and Quin kissed his lady again, hard and fast. “Is this better?” he whispered back, his voice roughened by a potent combination of desire and fear. “Our inestimable Cleese did not see that particular intimacy. But may I point out, dear heart, that our butler knows everything that happens in this household and was undoubtedly aware of my intention to marry you even before I was.”
“Cleese, I must beg you to pay no heed to your master,” Olivia said, rolling her eyes. “He’s clearly succumbed to the stress of the situation.” She moved toward the door, slipping away from his grasp. “Truly, Quin, we must hurry. I am worried that we will arrive too late.” Her expression rather stricken, she added, “That is, I want to find Rupert as soon as possible.”
Quin caught her hand, pulled her back to him, and gave her an openmouthed, hungry kiss. The kind he’d been thinking about ever since he left her at the break of dawn.
When he at last raised his head, she was sagging against him, her breathing unsteady. “I will kiss you,” he stated, looking into her eyes, “before Cleese, or before the Regent himself.”
Olivia blinked up at him, growing a little teary.
“Or the pope.” He began punctuating his sentence with small kisses. “Or the emperor of Siam. Or the archbishop of Canterbury.”
A voice came from the doorway.
“Tarquin.”
He raised his head and nodded, acknowledging his mother. Then he looked back down at his future wife and dropped another kiss on her rosy lips. “Before any and every member of my family, including my saintly aunt, Lady Velopia Sibble, who would prefer that people communicated only with the deity of her choice, and then only in prayer.”
Olivia shook her head at him. “I shall be in the landau.” She paused before the dowager and dropped into a low curtsy, head bent. “Your Grace. You may characterize this a housemaid’s scuttle if you wish.”
“As you have doubtless surmised, I am leaving for France,” Quin told his mother, as Olivia disappeared into the corridor. “I expect to return tomorrow, either with a wounded marquess, or the body of an English hero. It need hardly be said that I am hoping for the former.”
“By all accounts, including her own, Miss Lytton did not request your company on this foolhardy errand,” the dowager pronounced. Her face wore an expression of grievous injury, and her hands were clasped like a marble saint’s. The comparison ended there: the only female saint he could think of with a voice as commanding as his mother’s was Joan of Arc.
“Miss Lytton did not have to ask for my escort,” he confirmed. “However, I shall go to France, with or without her. May I accompany you to the drawing room, Mother? The tide waits for no man, and I intend to be in Dover in three hours.”
“Given the present inclement political situation I would prefer that you did not travel to France.”
“I am aware of that.” He was running through lists in his head, trying simultaneously to soothe his mother and do the very thing that was terrifying her. “Cleese, please have some rope and a dark lantern put in the carriage. Oh, and a flint.”
His mother ignored both his statement and the presence of the butler. “I must ask—nay, demand—that you reconsider this rash and dangerous venture. Montsurrey is undoubtedly at the point of death, if not already dead. I questioned Sergeant Grooper, the soldier who arrived in the middle of the night, and he described the marquess as barely able to raise his head from his pallet. That was a full twenty-four hours ago. He is surely dead by now.”
“If the marquess has died, then I shall repatriate his body to England,” Quin said firmly, guiding his mother down the corridor toward the drawing room. “He is a war hero. It is the least any English citizen could do for him.”
“Why must it be you?” the dowager cried, the words bursting from her mouth in an uncharacteristically urgent—not to say emotional—manner. “We could appeal to the Navy! His Majesty would send a force. Or we could hire Bow Street Runners. From what I hear, they could take on a French battalion without any effort.”
“His Majesty cannot risk the impression that a British force is attacking the shores of France, and the Royal Navy would face the same problem. But these are academic issues; there is no time to lose. I am beholden to Montsurrey. I shall do this myself.”
“You most certainly are not beholden to Montsurrey! Did you not tell me that you’d never met him?”
They had reached the entry, and Quin stopped. “Mother, you know why I am beholden to the marquess. And you also know precisely why I would never allow Olivia—”
“Miss Lytton!”
He said steadily, “You understand why I would never allow Olivia to cross the Channel without me.”
She was so pale that her rouge stood out in patches on each cheek. “This rash, imprudent effort is foolhardy in the extreme. The French will shoot at first si
ght. And you haven’t even been on the water since your wife died!”
Quin’s hand curled into a fist. “It is true that I have not been across the Channel, but only because I have had no need to travel to the Continent.” Quin’s even tone concealed the pit in his chest that had yawned open at the mere idea of crossing the same stretch of water that had swallowed his son. A duke should never be prey to such emotion, and he ruthlessly pushed it away. “Evangeline’s death is irrelevant. Montsurrey needs me; Olivia needs me. And frankly, Mother, I could not face the Duke of Canterwick, should he recover his senses, knowing I had not made every effort to bring his son home.”
His mother swallowed hard. “Canterwick would not do the same for you.”
“As with Evangeline’s death, that is irrelevant. We will put to sea at Dover, and the voyage should be a mere four hours with a good wind. I expect to be home tomorrow. Smugglers do this every day, you know.”
“I am afraid of that water,” the dowager said, her voice tight as a violin string. “I almost lost you to it before.”
Quin nodded; they both knew there was more than one way to be lost.
He picked up his mother’s hand and brought it to his lips. “You raised me to be a duke, Mother. I would disgrace my own title if I allowed a man of my rank to die on a foreign shore through my own cowardice.”
“I wish I’d raised you to be a peasant,” his mother said, her voice low.
“Your Grace,” he said, bowing with a low sweep that signaled his deep respect for his mother.
She raised her chin, and then slowly descended into a curtsy of her own. “I would prefer not to be proud of a son who is walking into clear danger,” she remarked. Her eyes were shining with tears.
“I will take your blessing with me,” Quin said, ignoring her words and answering the look in her eyes. That was something he was learning from Olivia. If he concentrated, he could tell what people were feeling, just from looking carefully at their eyes.
His mother turned and swept up the stairs, her shoulders rigid, her head high.
Twenty-six
The Dangers of Poetry under the Moon
It was almost three hours since they left the port at Dover in a vessel named the Day Dream, a schooner with a small cabin lying just above the surface of the water. Olivia stood at the porthole, watching black water fall restlessly behind their prow, as if it had somewhere to go.
“We’ll take the rowboat up an inlet, if I understand you,” Quin said from behind Olivia’s shoulder. He was pouring over a detailed map of the French coast with Sergeant Grooper, the soldier who had come to fetch them. Though to be exact, Grooper had come to fetch Rupert’s father.
Poor Canterwick. He still lay as if dead. Olivia had visited him before they set out, and had told him that she was going to France to find Rupert and bring him home. Perhaps he heard her.
“Aye,” Grooper said. “The hut is just here.” His stubby finger landed on a tiny inlet. “I memorized that town: Wizard.” His finger moved again.
“Wissant,” Quin corrected him. “I believe it means ‘white sands.’ ”
Olivia hugged her cloak tighter around her. Quin had been interrogating Grooper for more than two hours, grilling him on the exact route up the French coast taken by Rupert’s men. They’d been in a sloop, desperate to avoid capture. They had faced no problems until Rupert’s condition became so precarious that they were afraid to keep travelling.
“Burning up,” Grooper said from behind her. “Babbling of green fields and the like. And a lady he left behind.”
Olivia turned and smiled faintly at the soldier. “May I inquire whether he was asking for someone named Lucy?”
“That’s it! All the way down the coast, it seemed. Lucy, and more Lucy.” He eyed her. “I’m thinking your Christian name might be Lucy, ma’am?”
“No, Mr. Grooper, this is Lucy.” She gestured toward the little dog sleeping in a basket at her feet.
Grooper’s bushy eyebrows flew up. “First time I’ve heard a man make such a fuss over a dog, I don’t mind telling you that.”
Olivia felt no need to explain Rupert, nor his devotion to Lucy, and merely nodded. Quin was bent over the map, evidently memorizing every tiny crevice on the coastline. His coat was pulled tight over his shoulders, emphasizing their breadth. His cheekbones stood out more prominently than usual. And that white shock of hair fell over his brow.
“What worries me most is that there’s a garrison here, damn close to the hut,” Quin said, his finger sliding over from the inlet where Rupert could be found. “Have you seen soldiers conducting drills thereabouts?”
“I wasn’t there but half an hour,” Grooper said. “I’m not a man who’s a dab hand at the sickbed. I set out for England the moment we had the major settled on a pallet. He hadn’t much time.” He shook his head. “I still see his father every time I close my eyes, just listing to the side like that, and then falling on the floor. I should have told his lordship more gentle-like. I just blurted it out.”
“It wasn’t you,” Olivia said. “It was the distressing news, not you. No matter how you had phrased it, the duke stands to lose his only son, whom he loves very much.”
“I saw that,” Grooper said. “And I don’t mind telling you that every man in the company feels the same about the major. ‘The Forlorn Hope,’ that’s what they called us. Cause we weren’t supposed to come to nothing and”—he stuck out his jaw—“we was the men that no one else wanted; did you know that?”
Olivia shook her head.
“The other recruiters for the army wouldn’t take us, and we were just left behind, for one reason or another. They thought I was too old, though I know the battlefield as well if not better than any man. There was a few who had been lamed in the service, and they were told they should just go home.”
Olivia made a sympathetic noise.
“Go home! Go home and do what? Take up knitting? You don’t tell a soldier to go home just because he lost a few toes or has a gammy leg.”
“But the marquess didn’t agree?” she prompted.
“In the beginning, I was as nervous as any. He doesn’t think the same as the rest of us, that was plain. But then I saw what he was about. And once I saw that, I would have followed him anywhere.”
Olivia beamed at him. “Up the ramparts, in fact?”
“That’s right. See, the other companies as had tried before, they always went in the middle of the night, thinking to surprise the Frogs. But of course they didn’t. Well, the major, he said we would just walk up there around noon or so and do it. He didn’t seem to be worried about it at all, and so none of us were either.”
“That’s the attitude of a born leader,” Quin said. He had straightened, pushed the map to the side, and now leaned on the table, listening.
Grooper nodded. “By then we’d marched across Portugal to Badajoz, and we knew he was a decent chap. Listened to us, he did. And told us what he thought, and didn’t talk down.” He paused. “Mind you, he was an odd thinker.”
That was a kind way of putting it, to Olivia’s mind. “So you took the fort.”
“Easy as pie,” Grooper said, his chest swelling with pride. “See, the Frogs was all eating. And when they eat . . . they eat. They go three courses, four, five. All of them, even down to the lowest soldier. The major, he worked it out. He’d had a French tutor, see, and he knew what they were like. And he told us in a way so we could all understand it, too.”
Olivia smiled. She loved thinking of Rupert being greeted with respect rather than less-than-thinly-veiled contempt.
“We knocked out a few sentries right off, and then we just took the fort. And we didn’t kill many of them French soldiers either; we let them run straight from the lunch table to San Cristobal. The major, he doesn’t hold with killing, not unless you have to save your own life.”
Olivia smiled. “That’s Rupert.”
“Did the marquess sustain his injury in the fight?” Quin asked.
G
rooper shook his head. “It was the damnedest thing—if you’ll pardon me, my lady. We was all done and we held the fort for three days, till the English forces could get back to us. They didn’t think we had a chance, you see. Not after all the earlier attempts had failed.” The disgust in his voice spoke for itself.
“We held that fort, and we did it nice, too. We had all the Frogs in the stockade, but we gave ’em blankets and plenty of food. Because the major said that a Frenchman deprived of his food will fight like a cornered rat. Sure enough, once they were all snug and well fed, they didn’t seem to mind much. Never even tried to get out.”
“Then what happened?” Olivia asked.
“The major, well, he liked to walk about on those battlements at night,” Grooper said. “The guard up there . . .” He cleared his throat. “Well, he said as how the major was reciting poetry.” The last word came out reluctantly, as if he were confessing that Rupert had begun smoking opium.
“Reciting poetry is not generally considered to be a hazardous activity,” Quin observed.
“Not one for poetry myself,” Grooper acknowledged, managing to imply that he considered poetry to belong in the same category as treason. “The major was up on those battlements, walking around and looking at the moon, and he took a header.”
“He was looking at the moon?”
“We found a scrap of paper behind with a bit of verse on it, all about the moon. At any rate, the fall knocked his brains about. He didn’t even wake up for a day and we thought he was gone for sure. But then he started talking of this Lucy—we thought she was his lady wife—so we decided as how we should get him back to England. Wellington’s doctor, he said that we had to wait till the major died and just bring back the body.”
“I’m glad you didn’t wait,” Olivia put in.
“The major wasn’t like the rest of them commanders. He really cared.” Grooper’s voice was a bit rough. “We put him in a cart and brought him to the shore, then we took a sloop and brought him up the north coast of France easy as pie. And we would have come across to England, except we thought it was making him worse, with the pitching of the waves. It hurt his head.”