Chapter Three

      Cassandra smoothed down the wool of her pantaloons and pulled up the generous collar of her jacket. It was cold in the London wind and it had already begun to spit.

      Damn, she cursed, for the sound of the rain would dull her hearing and she knew that dawn wasn’t far off.

      Lord Nathaniel Lindsay had returned to his town house a quarter of an hour ago, and by his gait as he descended from the carriage she knew he had been drinking.

      Perfect.

      The thick line of trees in the garden surprised her. She would not have imagined him to sanction such a shelter, for intruders could easily use the screen to hide behind. Making her way through the green-tinged darkness, she sidled along the undergrowth until she came to the windows.

      The first sash was rock solid. The next one moved. Unsheathing her knife, she pressed it into the crack and shifted the lock. One second and it was rendered useless, clicking into access. With an intake of breath she lifted the wood, and when she perceived no threat she raised it farther.

      Waiting, she listened to the sounds of the room. A single last fall of wood in the grate as the warm air greeted her, a clock in the corner marking out the hour.

      She was over the barrier in a whisper, turning to the chamber and waiting as her eyes accustomed themselves.

      * * *

      ‘Shut the window and join me.’

      He knew she would come for he had seen a shadow that was not normally there against the stone wall on the opposite side of the street. This window had always been loose, a trick of wet wood or poor craftsmanship, he knew not which.

      To give her credit she barely acknowledged the shock. A slight hesitation, one less certain step. He wondered if she held a knife in her hand and thought perhaps he should have bothered to arm himself. But he would not have harmed her. He knew that without a doubt.

      ‘Lord Nathaniel Lindsay, the heir to the title of St Auburn?’ Her voice was tight, tinged with more than a hint of question.

      ‘At your service, Mademoiselle Mercier. And now you are all grown up.’

      ‘A fact that you hate?’

      He laughed at that because her surprising honesty had always appealed to him, though the sound held little humour. ‘I survived, but others did not. The names I presume you gave to Lebansart made it easy for him to mark them off as English agents. Didier and Gilbert Desrosiers were like lambs to the slaughter. Good men. Men who had never wronged you in any way. Men with allegiances to England and who had only ever wanted to serve this country.’

      The blood seemed to disappear from her face. One moment her cheeks were rosy from the outside cold and in the next second they were as pale as snow.

      ‘You were a spy, too? My God, that explains why you were there in France and in Nay in particular.’

      ‘They call them intelligence officers now.’

      ‘You were a spy for the English army?’

      ‘The British Service.’

      ‘Not just the army then, but the quiet and hidden corridors of a clandestine and covert agency. Are you still?’

      He did not answer.

      ‘I will take that as a yes, then.’ The blood had returned to her face, and she did not waver as she went on. ‘I didn’t come to offer excuses for what I did at Perpignan, my lord, nor for exoneration.’

      ‘Then why did you come?’

      ‘To give you this.’

      She took a ring from her pocket and he recognised it immediately. His mother’s, the emerald as green as it had been all those years before.

      ‘I took it and I should not have. For all the other things that I was, I was never a thief.’

      ‘God.’ Thief of hearts, he thought. Thief of lives. Thief of the futures of two good Englishmen caught in the crossfire of politics.

      ‘Celeste died for nothing. At least those agents of England that you speak of perished for a cause they believed in. A righteous cause. A cause to take them into Heaven and be pardoned by our Lord for it.’

      ‘You came tonight to tell me this?’ His voice shook with bitterness.

      ‘No. I came to say that nothing is as black and as white as it seems, and the documents I saw were there for others to see as well.’

      ‘Yet you memorised them and gave the information back to the one person you should not have.’

      ‘Guy Lebansart was only one man who might have wanted them dead. France was seething with those who would harm anyone with loyalties to England. Perhaps they held your name, too?’

      ‘I doubt I was on any index of names.’

      ‘Then you doubt wrong,’ she said and turned to the window. ‘From the moment you rescued me there was danger.’

      And then he understood. ‘So you traded our freedom for intelligence? Hell.’ So many questions and so few answers. Yet something was not quite right. And then the penny dropped.

      ‘I was the one you bargained for?’

      The nod she gave him was almost imperceptible. ‘Indeed, that was a part of the story, but now I need a favour, Lord Lindsay. I need the right to go on with my life without having to look behind at the chaos, waiting for it to catch up.’

      ‘And nothing else?’

      ‘Nothing.’

      Her voice was measured. No extra emotion. No telltale sign of weakness or feeling. She had sacrificed the lives of others for his and she knew there was no honour in any of it. It was not thanks she had come for. Neither was it a penance. Celeste was probably more of a part of it than anyone, for Sandrine had always been like a mother lioness over any perceived tarnishing of her cousin’s memory and she might have been fearful about the recount of his knowledge of her.

      The complex layers of guilt and shame mixed in strangely with integrity. She had not needed to come. He hadn’t further want for the ring and no explanation could absolve murder.

      ‘You whored in exchange for my life?’

      She shook away the words. ‘You know nothing, Colbert.’

      ‘Lindsay,’ he corrected her with a cold and hard fury.

      ‘If I had not traded the information, you would have been dead.’

      ‘And instead...?’

      ‘You lived.’

      Her eyes flickered to the scar that ran across his jaw on the right side.

      ‘Death might have been kinder.’

      She raised her fist at that, the hand of ruined and knotted skin. ‘You think I did not wish that, too, many times after I left you, the blood of those I’d named wrapped about the heart of my guilt? But there is no book written on the rules of war, my lord, and I was a young girl trying to exist in a world that had forsaken me. Anton Baudoin had taken the documents from a man he had murdered a few days before you came to Nay. I had no idea as to who those mentioned within it were.’

      Silence filled the space between them for the time it took the clock in the corner to chime out the hour of two. It was why he had come to find the Baudoins in the first place, pointed in the direction by intelligence garnered after the agent’s murder. Then she spoke again.

      ‘You think I should have trusted you enough to make a run for it at Perpignan and believed that the impossible might be probable there with a hundred enemies at our heels and many more behind? You believed in that option of faith?’

      ‘Yes.’ Simple. Heartfelt.