“No.” In her white silk, she looked like an avenging angel, minus the flaming sword. “My actions were of my own doing; your situation was determined before you were born. Which of us is more to blame?”
Jack suspected that was a trick question. In fact, he was quite sure that was a trick question.
“I’m not going to win either way I answer this, am I?” he said.
Jane pressed her eyes very tightly shut. “Is that all you can say?”
“I’ll take that as a no, then?” said Jack.
Jane muttered something that he didn’t quite catch. The word “mule” appeared to be involved. Somehow he didn’t think she was talking about Buttercup.
“If de la Mare is to be believed,” said Jane crisply, taking off across the room with rapid strides, “something is secured in the chamber of the novices.”
“Most likely the novices.” Jack had to hurry to catch up with her. “I’m more interested in what Mr. Samson said about the party that passed him on the road.”
Jane slowed slightly, just enough to give him time to open the door for her. “You believe our bird has flown?”
Birds. Always birds. Jack rolled his eyes at a stretch of elaborately painted ceiling. “You’ve been working for Wickham too long.”
Jane glanced at him sharply. “Why do you say that?”
They were both as jumpy as . . . extremely jumpy things. Jack gave up. He paused at the base of the stair leading up to their rooms. “I meant no disrespect to our esteemed employer. The man has an alarming propensity for avian metaphors. If I have to hear about one more eagle landing . . .”
The corner of Jane’s mouth twisted reluctantly. “Not terribly imaginative, is it? But more impressive, I suppose, than ‘the hedgehog has molted.’”
“Do hedgehogs molt?”
“I haven’t the foggiest.” She looked up at him, her expression serious. “Will you come with me to the hall of the novices?”
Jack’s instinctive protest died on his breath. It meant something that she was asking, not ordering. “It might be a trap, you know. A way to smoke us out.”
Jack’s instincts told him that anything de la Mare said should be taken with enough salt to preserve a school of cod. There was something decidedly off about the man. Again, fish came to mind.
Jane frowned, tapping her fingers against the stair rail. “That smoke works both ways. If we’re smoked, so is he.” She glanced up at Jack, her expression carefully neutral. “And there are two of us.”
There were any number of ways Jack could respond. He could shrug and say, You’re the one in charge. Or the ever-popular If that’s what you want. Disclaim responsibility, shove off any possible blame, keep himself free and clear of entanglements.
In short, take the easy way out. The same way he always did.
“Yes, there are,” Jack said, and felt as though he had just crossed some impossible gorge, and slammed hard against the other side. Trying for sangfroid, he added, “But do you mind if we change first? That dress of yours, while fetching, is more than a little bit conspicuous.”
“We’re in a monastery,” said Jane, smiling up at him in a way that made Jack’s chest swell just a little. “We should have no difficulty finding robes.”
Except that they did.
“They couldn’t be Dominicans?” Jack grumbled.
The trouble with the Cistercians was that they wore white. Difficult to keep clean. Even more difficult for creeping around late at night.
There was a brief but spirited debate as to whether two people skulking in dark cloaks were more or less conspicuous than two novices in white robes attempting to get back into their rooms. A novice might not stand out in a field of novices, but one certainly would in a dark corridor, particularly as all good novices were meant to be at mass, celebrating the miracle of Christ’s birth, not wandering up forbidden stairways into locked rooms.
In the end they went with the cloaks, which also had the benefit of being both there and theirs.
Jane, who appeared to have gotten rather detailed directions out of de la Mare, led the way. She moved silently down corridors and up stairs, noiseless in her soft slippers, blending effortlessly into the shadows. The halls through which they passed were abandoned, the inhabitants all being occupied with the Christmas mass. Another might have grown careless, might have relaxed her efforts.
But not Jane.
She was really, Jack had to admit, quite good at what she did. It was like watching a prima donna go through scales: a level of virtuosity so extreme that it gave the impression of being effortless.
The hall of the novices was located up several flights of stairs, in a suitably secluded location. Presumably, Jack supposed, so the novices wouldn’t be tempted to sin. Either that, or to protect that art collection about which de la Mare had waxed so lyrical.
There was also a rather large lock on the door.
Without losing a moment, Jane dropped to her knees, setting her candle down beside her and drawing a leather case from her pocket. The case contained several pieces of metal, all linked by a bar at the top.
Jack shielded his candle with one hand. “You have a lock pick?”
A quick twist and a click. “Don’t you?”
His wasn’t nearly as elegant. She had the deluxe set of twelve picks; his contained only four. “Well, yes. But . . .”
“I can also hit a target three times out of four, sketch a pretty scene, and cover a cushion in petit point.” Jane rose to her feet, opening the door with one smooth motion. “Shall we?”
Jack followed. There was really nothing else to do—other than apologize, and he wasn’t entirely sure he knew how.
“Is there anything you can’t do?”
“Name a donkey.” Jane held up her candle, illuminating the room. The light glimmered off rich tones of red and blue, including a lush woman wearing a great deal of hair and very little clothing. “I think we’ve found de la Mare’s art collection.”
“And his Titian.” Jack moved his candle a little closer to the painting. The warm light moved across the woman’s skin like a lover’s touch, bringing a flush to cheeks and breast.
It was, he supposed, a Magdalene, although her rapture didn’t look entirely religious. Her lips were lightly parted, her head tilted back expectantly. Her hair, unbound, snaked down her back and around her breasts. Light brown hair, tinted golden in the candlelight . . .
The Magdalene’s hair was a riot of curls, but Jack found he was imagining straight hair instead, fine, straight hair, released from its braid, fanned out across the red brocade coverlet of the bed downstairs.
“I don’t think that’s really a Titian,” said Jane, regarding the painting critically. “Although the flesh tones are very fine.”
“Yes,” Jack managed. “Very fine.”
He walked rapidly to the other side of the room, where a very understanding Madonna nursed her infant and regarded him kindly. A heavily embellished golden cup, studded with precious stones, stood on a table covered with a cloth embroidered in yet more gold.
Jack tilted his head to look up at the ceiling. “I don’t see any signs of water damage. Do you?”
“Not in here. But we haven’t examined the cells.” Raising the candle, Jane indicated a row of doors.
Tentatively, she pushed open one of the doors. The room was a narrow rectangle with a cot, a crucifix on the wall, and a window that was nothing more than a slit in the stone, set well up by the ceiling, where it could provide a certain minimum of light, but no distraction.
She looked back over her shoulder at Jack, raising a brow. “Locked doors within a locked door. No windows.”
Jack looked back the way they had come. “Up several flights of stairs, well isolated.”
Jane rapped her knuckles against the whitewashed wall. “Thick walls.”
Jack voiced what they were both thinking. “The perfect place to hide a missing queen.” There was just one problem. “If they were here, they’re not here now.”
There were shades to silence. Jack knew them all. There was the waiting silence of the pursued: frozen, barely breathing. And then there was real silence, the silence of emptiness. There was no hastily hushed scuffle, no abbreviated sneeze. Their whispers echoed off bare walls and empty rooms. The complex was deserted.
“But they left quickly.” Jane was peering into yet another room. A blanket lay rumpled on the cot, the weave far too fine to belong to one of the novices. “Someone slept here, and recently.”
Jack paused on the threshold of another room and let out a low whistle. “Someone did more than sleep here.”
“What do you . . . Oh.” Jane stopped short, pressed against Jack’s side in the narrow doorway.
The cell was a disaster. Shards of porcelain littered the floor. A piece of paper had been trampled where it fell. A woman’s lace veil lay forgotten, crumpled in a corner.
“The Queen is known for her violent rages.” Jack gave a short laugh. “And we’re trying to put her back on her throne, God help us.”
Jane squeezed past him into the cell, stepping carefully around the larger bits of debris. She had to right a table before she could set her candle down on it. “We’re trying to keep Bonaparte off it. That’s not at all the same thing.”
Jack shrugged. “One monarch is much the same as another.”
“Don’t say that.” Jane turned sharply, porcelain crunching beneath her heel. “You sound like Nic—”
She didn’t need to complete the name. The way her lips snapped together told Jack more than enough.
Her former lover. The Gardener. In the air like a ghost between them.
“Did you love him?” Jack hadn’t meant to say it. The words just came out, hard and fast, like bullets.
Jane turned away, making a pretense of examining a glove left crumpled on the cot. Her hand trembled slightly as she lifted the leather. At last she said, “Would it justify my actions if I said I did? Or make my fall worse if I said I didn’t?”
“I never thought of you as fallen.” If he could have taken back his words, he would. He didn’t want to know the answer. Particularly if it was yes. Gruffly, he said, “Never mind. I had no right to ask.”
“No,” said Jane distantly, and Jack thought she was agreeing with him that no, it was none of his concern, until she added in the same detached voice, “I didn’t love him. I’m not quite sure what that makes me—but no. I didn’t love him.”
“It makes you a woman of sense.” Jack felt light-headed with relief. Relief for what, he wasn’t quite sure. “Not to be taken in by that snake.”
Jane shook her head ever so slightly. Her face was averted; all Jack could see was the curve of cheek and chin. “I had thought, for a time, that I might. . . . He was clever and fascinating and so very sure of himself. So very sure of me.”
All the things Jack wasn’t. Some of his euphoria faded. “Why not, then?”
Jane’s voice was low. “Because I knew him. I knew the manner of man he was—is.” She looked helplessly at Jack, deep hollows beneath her eyes, old lines at the corners of her lips. “How can there be love where there is no trust?”
Jack was put in the very odd position of simultaneously wanting to punch the Gardener for being such an unworthy human being—and wanting to thank him for being such an unworthy human being.
“You can trust him to take care of himself,” Jack said dryly.
It occurred to Jack, as he said it, that the same might be said about him. It was not a very flattering reflection.
Jane looked at him for a long moment. “Nicolas,” she said, “might have acquired a donkey. But he would have ridden it himself.”
The only sound in the room was the singing of a nightingale somewhere through that slim, high window.
And then, from the other side of the corridor, the scrape of metal in a lock.
Chapter Fifteen
They both acted instantly, without words. Jane snuffed the candle, plunging the room into total darkness. Jack drew the door closed, leaving it open the merest sliver.
Taking care to avoid the telltale crunch of broken crockery, Jane crept forward until she was kneeling beside him. She felt Jack’s arm come around her, drawing her against his side. If he’d had a pistol, he would have leveled it at the crack in the door. Since he didn’t, he did what he could do: he angled his body, using it as a shield between Jane and whatever lay outside.
It was an odd sensation, being protected. Jane might have been offended, but for the fact that the movement was so automatic.
The darkness was total, intensifying other sensations. The warmth of Jack’s skin beneath the fine fabric of his borrowed shirt. The faint scent of peat that still clung to his hair, the tinge of port on his breath that Jane could feel more than hear him breathe, her own chest moving in tandem with his. She had wound up, somehow, on her knees, with a hand pressed against his chest, another on his shoulder, frozen in tableau as they waited to see whether the sound would come again.
For a moment, nothing. Nothing but Jack’s heart beating beneath her fingers, his arm curled around her waist.
And then it began again, the creak of careful footsteps. Jane tensed in Jack’s arms, mentally cataloging the possibilities. She could tell, from Jack’s waiting stillness, that he was doing the same. That table, the one on which she had placed the candle. It was small enough and sturdy enough to use as a weapon. The walker in shadows had them penned, but they had the advantage of a half-closed door.
And there were two of them.
Of course, at the moment only one of them could see what was going on. Jane leaned forward just a little, trying to get a glimpse through the opening in the door. Her body pressed full against Jack’s, and she felt his quickly contained, restless movement before one hand clamped down on her waist, and another found her mouth, pressing a finger against it in the universal gesture for silence.
Jane tried to banish the erotic thoughts the pressure of his finger against her lips conjured, images of nipping, licking, biting.
She blinked rapidly, and recalled her attention to the matter at hand. Not Jack’s hand, she hastily amended. They were penned like rabbits in a snare; one would think she could make herself concentrate just a little bit more effectively instead of behaving like a debutante meeting her first rake.
She had never once allowed Nicolas to impede her concentration.
And what that said about her, or Nicolas, was another matter entirely. You let your head rule your heart, he had chided her. He hadn’t been amused when she had taken it as a compliment.
I don’t know whether it’s that you’re English . . . Nicolas had been on the bed, stretched out against the crimson brocade.
Or? Jane was in her dressing gown, her hair unbound down her back, frowning over a letter. Nicolas had wanted her to come to bed, but there was work to be done.
Or just incapable of true passion.
It had been designed to sting; Jane knew that. To sting and to goad, to force her to prove him wrong.
Mmm, she had said, feigning abstraction, the one thing guaranteed to deflect his carefully crafted barbs. Go to sleep. I’ll be along presently.
She had won that round, but his words had stung all the same. She had heard them before, from others—from her cousin Amy, who had considered all well lost for love, and didn’t in the least understand why Jane shouldn’t do the same; from her chaperone, who sniffed, and said such self-containment wasn’t natural, and, mark her words, one day she was going to fall and fall hard. The fact that a chaperone was meant to be discouraging rather than encouraging such behavior fell on deaf ears; Miss Gwen was interested in trouble, not propriety.
And then Miss Gwen, too, had counted the w
orld well lost for love.
There goes all the world but I, and I am sunburnt.
She wasn’t sunburnt. She was frostbitten. Cold through and through. An ice maiden, one of her swains in Paris had called her admiringly.
She wasn’t feeling terribly icy at the moment. She was painfully aware of her own body in a way she had never been before, as if a limb, previously asleep, had been woken to pins and needles. Her nipples pebbled against the bodice of her gown where her chest pressed against Jack’s, every breath, every movement rendering the sensation more acute.
She could feel the prickle of hair through the fabric of his shirt against her palm, and couldn’t stop herself from wondering what it would be like to slide her hand up beneath that shirt.
The footsteps were closer now, the light brighter. There was the sound of something clanking, metal against stone, and with that clink Jane’s brain cleared.
She was fairly sure she knew who was there. And why.
De la Mare? Jane mouthed against Jack’s finger, and felt his chin against the top of her head as he nodded.
Moving very, very carefully, he shifted a little bit to the right, making room for Jane in front of the crack in the door. Jane’s lips felt swollen where he had touched; she licked them, trying to recall her mind to her work. De la Mare. If she wasn’t mistaken . . . She eased cautiously into the space Jack had vacated.
“Vacated” was too strong a word. He had moved as far as he could, his back against the wall, one leg pulled up, the other stretched out to the side. Concentrating on de la Mare, Jane moved into the space between Jack’s legs, setting her eye to the crack in the door.
He had the chalice. The cabochon-cut jewels glimmered sullenly in the light of de la Mare’s lantern. But it wasn’t the jewels that seemed to interest de la Mare.
Jane leaned forward, and felt Jack shift uncomfortably behind her.
Taking a thin piece of paper and a stick of charcoal, de la Mare placed the paper against the side of the cup and began briskly rubbing with the charcoal. He repeated the operation on the other side, the scratching of the charcoal unnaturally loud in the silent room.