The Runaway Princess

  “I spoke without thinking. It is not right for me to blame you. But surely you understand now that your letter was unacceptable.”

  “The letter.” He’d mentioned the letter before. “Just what did the princess say in that letter?”

  Obviously irritated, he answered, “You know very well what you said.”

  “But I am not Princess Ethelinda.”

  With a great deal of satisfaction, he retorted, “As far as Dominic is concerned, you are.”

  Six

  With both hands, Evangeline muffled her gasp of horror. Danior was right. Revolutionaries, men who considered bombs an art form, now thought she was a princess. “Because of you—Your Highness,” she said. As she struggled free, she made his title an insult. Looking up at his face, she saw the stark contrasts of hollowed eyes and brows and flesh made pale by the rising half-moon. For the first time since the bomb exploded, she forgot about her money. “You led these revolutionaries to me. They’ve been following you.”

  “Yes. Incredible as it seems, somehow they discovered our tracks.”

  The damnable man was right. It didn’t matter whether she was Princess Ethelinda or not. If revolutionaries had indeed found them—and she had no reason to believe Danior was lying about this—then she, Evangeline Scoffield, was in danger. And this madman prince was her only savior.

  Her only current savior, she corrected herself. She’d always saved herself before, and she would find a way out of this dilemma, too. She’d use him to help her flee this place. When they were well away and had lost the revolutionaries, then she’d escape back to England, and face the consequences.

  Resolved to resume control of her life, she asked, “Where are Rafaello and Victor?”

  “They’ve gone to the stable to get our horses.”

  Scanning the area, she caught a glimpse of movement along the path. “There they are,” she started to say.

  Danior’s hand covered her mouth in a swift, silencing gesture. His voice spoke softly in her ear. “Quiet.”

  She could see them now, two strangers. Dressed in black, they walked just off the edge of the path. The light of the burning château showed her nothing of their features, for they wore black scarves. She could see only their intense, narrowed eyes, which darted back and forth as they scanned the shadows. A woman ran along the trail, panicked by the fire. They caught her, and Evangeline saw the flash of a blade as they held it under her chin. She cried out in fear. They slapped her and shoved her away, and she fled, whimpering. She wasn’t who they sought.

  Evangeline was.

  The pistols they held gleamed in the light of the flames.

  Pistols. Oh, God. She’d read about the harm a pistol could do. The damage to the muscle and bone of a limb, making amputation necessary. Or to a vital organ, with the result being . . . death. Her heart gave one hard, appalled thump, then accelerated to a nauseating speed. She stared straight ahead, afraid to move, and barely breathed as they passed.

  At last Danior said, “They’re gone.”

  Red dots swam before her eyes, and her knees gave way.

  Danior caught her as she slid down. “Don’t worry, little Ethelinda. I won’t let them get you.”

  “I’m not Ethelinda,” she said faintly.

  “Of course not, Serephinian eyes,” he mocked.

  “I told you I was an orphan.” She took great breaths of cool air. “I don’t know who my parents were. But perhaps they came from these mountains.” Perhaps they had fled the revolution Danior spoke of. She might even be noble. A countess, or a duchess.

  He stiffened. “We are royal.”

  “I am common,” she retorted.

  “If that were the truth, it would be a tragedy, for a commoner and a prince may not marry.” His voice grew as rich and strong as Turkish coffee. “And I have every intention of wedding you.”

  British society was divided by class, but Evangeline didn’t like such pomposity there, and she found she cared for it even less coming from this already overbearing prince. “And what dreadful thing would happen if a prince married a commoner?”

  “It is not proper, as you very well know. Fish mate with fish, birds mate with birds. If those who are royal by divine right mix their blood with the lower classes, it is against the natural order.”

  “Your people must love you,” she said sarcastically.

  He answered simply and with great certainty. “They do.”

  And why did she care, anyway? If the people of Baminia and Serephina wanted to be ruled by a stuffed shirt, it didn’t matter to Evangeline. She would escape this mess somehow. “What if this Dominic has the real princess and you’re wasting your time with me?”

  “If Dominic captured the princess, he’d be announcing it from the tops of the cliffs. He knows I’d come after her . . . you. He has dreams of holding a tribunal, as the peasants did in France, and trying us for the crime of being royal, as if killing a crown prince would lift him from the foulness in which he revels.”

  He was a snob about the common people, but he hated the revolutionaries, and with no ordinary hate. Some instinct prompted her to ask, “Are the princess’s parents still alive?”

  “The princess’s parents died in the rebellion of ninety-six, as did mine, and you know this very well.”

  In seventeen ninety-six, she had been four. “There was an actual rebellion?”

  “Of short-lived duration, but a dreadful tragedy nevertheless.”

  Suspicion crowded her mind once more. This story couldn’t be true. Nothing fit. “If your parents were killed, why haven’t you been crowned king?” she asked suspiciously. “You should have been crowned as soon as you reached your majority.”

  “I can’t be crowned king until I marry you, Princess Ethelinda.” His baritone whisper vibrated with frustration. “That is the part of the prophecy to which I am bound, and that is why I must have you, so stop playing the part of an ignorant observer.”

  How could Leona have failed to mention this vital part in the history of Serephina and Baminia? And what other things had she failed to mention?

  “I don’t like this,” she muttered.

  “Neither do I.” He scanned the area. “Victor and Rafaello—they’ve been gone too long.”

  She, too, looked around, trying to convince Danior, and herself, that she was no weakling, no feminine sniffler who had to be protected. She had to be strong, bold, crafty. She’d had to be to survive the orphanage.

  Then she ruined the effect by shivering.

  “You’re cold,” he said, although she would have sworn he paid her no heed.

  “I will survive.” She’d been colder, she comforted herself. Of course, not for a long time. And a body got used to heat on a regular basis. But she would toughen up.

  “Good, because there they are.” Gripping her arm, he pushed her ahead of him. Then he slowed. “But they haven’t got the horses.”

  The bodyguards sprinted up to them, and Victor panted as he spoke. “Horses . . . chased away. Stable . . . a trap.”

  Danior didn’t seem surprised, or even at a loss for a plan. “We’ll walk.”

  “Walk?” Evangeline wiggled her toes inside her thin-soled evening slippers. “Where?”

  “Where I lead.” Danior firmly guided her with the flat of his hand in her back.

  Victor and Rafaello led the way, skimming swiftly and silently toward the cliffs. Evangeline followed them, and Danior strode behind her, his hand ever ready to catch her should she fall—or should she try to escape.

  He didn’t need to worry. Escape, at least right now, wasn’t part of her plan.

  As the shouts of the guests and the faltering flames of the spa faded, darkness closed in around her. She found herself aware of the stillness of the night, and aware of her companions. The silence, the pale moon, and the ever-increasing darkness heightened the evening’s chill. They reached the shadow of the cliffs and there turned to pick a path along the base among the stones that had fallen from above. Ah
ead of her, Rafaello and Victor moved so smoothly, so fluidly, that they might have been wolves rejoining their pack. She knew they were there, yet she could scarcely see them. Behind her, Danior was equally invisible. The gravel beneath her feet crunched, and she knew Danior must be walking the same path, but although she strained, she could hear nothing. This trek was eerie and horrible, cold and exhausting. She shivered occasionally, then constantly, the cooling air breaching the thin silk of her gown with ease. Not even her exertion kept her warm. Each breath hurt her lungs, and although she tried, she couldn’t control her harsh breathing.

  The further they walked, the more brambles sliced at her legs, the more loose gravel covered the path, and the more painful each step became. She began to complain under her breath, then to whimper very, very discreetly. Finally, she stubbed her toe on a jagged stone. “Ouch!”

  “What’s wrong?” Danior sounded distinctly annoyed.

  “These shoes are not for trekking across uncharted territory filled with rocks and bugs.” She slapped at a lingering mosquito. She had been walking for over an hour to who knew where with total strangers as companions and revolutionaries behind them, and she thought she’d been very brave. Surely Danior could acknowledge that.

  Instead he snapped his fingers, and, silently, Victor and Rafaello moved to her side. She stopped and stared as they bent, crossed their hands, and clasped them behind her—and waited.

  A chair. They were making her a chair. If she had any doubt about their sincere belief she was their princess, this act of servitude dissolved it completely. They willingly offered themselves as a sedan for her comfort, over rugged terrain in the middle of the night.

  “Hurry,” Danior the boor said tersely. “We must arrive by dawn.”

  “Where are we going?” she demanded again.

  He answered her this time. “To the convent.”

  A convent. Sanctuary.

  Placing her hands on the bodyguards’ shoulders, she seated and steadied herself. They lifted her, and for one brief moment, memory stirred in the depths of her mind.

  Of sitting between two people as they held her in a seat made of their hands, the scent of their fear palpable, their breathing labored as they hurried up and down mountain paths similar to these. And she, too young to understand their haste, yet gripped by the need for silence and an unchildlike dread of some thing that hid in the darkness just beyond sight.

  Then the party started forward almost at a trot, Danior in front, the other three behind, and the memory sank into the abyss from which it had come.

  “Your Royal Highness, you’re cold,” Rafaello murmured.

  “No.” The night air flowed past her, but she gathered warmth from the men.

  “You shivered.”

  “A ghost walked over my grave,” she answered.

  Danior turned on them and said ferociously, and far too loudly for her taste, “There’s going to be an army of revolutionaries trampling over your graves, and very soon, if you don’t lower your voices.”

  He was glaring. She didn’t even have to see him to know it. When he was satisfied he had sufficiently cowed them, he moved on. Softly she assured Rafaello, “It’s nothing.”

  He placed his mouth close to her ear. “If you wish, you may take my cloak.”

  Now this was what a real prince should be like! Evangeline thought triumphantly. Then the triumph faded. He wasn’t the prince, he was the bodyguard. She wasn’t the princess, she was an impostor.

  “Sh,” Victor warned.

  Toady, Evangeline thought. But Rafaello seemed thoughtful, almost human despite his resemblance to Danior and that odd dedication he displayed. “I’m warm enough,” she whispered.

  Danior’s head half-turned, and she ducked. She shouldn’t care what he thought, but in her room back there he had somehow intimidated her. Probably, she thought grumpily, it was that barbaric fanfare about placing a babe in her womb and thus forcing the marriage. He didn’t frighten her; oh, no. She had seen what had happened to poor little Joan Billby when she’d gotten caught with a bun in her oven. Her mistress had thrown her out, and if Leona hadn’t taken pity on her, Joan and the baby would have been forced into the poorhouse.

  Yes, that was it. Evangeline was frightened of being left alone, pregnant, and in despair, when Danior discovered she wasn’t the real princess. She was not afraid of that extraordinary possessiveness he displayed, or the brief taste of smoky passion.

  The path slithered along the foot of the cliff, rising and falling. The bodyguards labored, walking sideways with her weight between them. They were in magnificent condition, but with each upward grade they breathed a little harder. Yet they were making good time, and probably they would soon be at the convent.

  At the convent. Could she appeal to the holy sisters for sanctuary?

  She watched the broad, dark shoulders that traveled the trail before them.

  Or would Danior make up some tale about her being mad and in need of confinement? She’d be put in a cage and put on exhibit for hoards of sniggering travelers who would say, “I knew she was a nobody.” Or she’d be manacled to a stone wall and forced to take cold water baths until she lost her mind and fancied she was the princess. She’d admit it then, and be treated like royalty all her days.

  Or be killed by Dominic.

  And she’d have to marry Danior.

  She looked ahead at the silent, darker shadow among the shadows.

  She was imagining things. Danior really thought she was the princess, and he wouldn’t let anyone mistreat her. No, more likely he’d make up some story that she was already his wife so he could keep her in his bed.

  Her mouth dried, and she tried to swallow. Her imagination had allowed the skinny, frightened, defiant orphan to make up stories when no hope remained. Her imagination had whisked her from Leona’s house in East Little Teignmouth, Cornwall, to China and the Canary Islands and Turkey. Her imagination had been a blessing.

  Now, her ability to fantasize placed her between the sheets with Danior, and trapped her between anticipation and fear.

  In her quietest voice, she asked the bodyguards, “What would you gentlemen do if you knew I wasn’t the real princess?”

  To her surprise, Victor answered. “I’d drop you right here in the middle of the path and let the revolutionaries pick you up.”

  Victor, she discovered, had no sense of humor at all.

  Danior whirled around again. “Santa Leopolda’s bones!” Plucking her out of her living chair, he said, “If they can’t keep you quiet, I can.”

  Seven

  Danior didn’t, as Evangeline feared, throw her over his shoulder again. This time he held her against his chest—and he was warm. Not like the faded warmth she’d received from the other men, but really warm, like the blacksmith’s forge back in East Little Teignmouth, Cornwall.

  “If we get caught,” she muttered, “it’ll be because of your shouting, Your Highness.”

  “I was not shouting.”

  Of course he wasn’t, it was only that his voice didn’t go below a rumble, much like a subterranean volcano. “Almost.”

  He put her on her feet so fast that she thought he was going to leave her for Dominic. Instead, he removed his cloak, turned his back, and squatted on his haunches. “Climb on,” he said quietly.

  She, too, kept her voice to a murmur. “Wh . . . what?”

  “Climb on my back.”

  She glanced around, half expecting to see Victor and Rafaello ready to make her obey. They’d faded into the darkness. “Why?”

  “I need my hands free.”

  What he said made sense, but . . . she looked down at her evening gown. The fine silk skirt was gathered beneath her bosom, with cotton petticoats beneath. “What about my . . . limbs?”

  “What about them?”

  His obtuse ignorance fed her stubbornness. “They’ll be exposed.”

  “It won’t be the first time I’ve seen your legs, nor carried you this way. Remember how, when you
were a child, you used me as your horsie?”

  “No.” She wanted to stomp her foot, but that would hurt the blisters that had formed. “No!”

  “We don’t have time for these games. Dominic can’t be far behind. Get on, girl!” Then Danior corrected himself through clenched teeth. “Highness.”

  She couldn’t prevail. She either had to walk in her thin shoes and ruin her feet and with them her chances of ever escaping from this madness—or she had to get on his back. But she remembered something from her years of research. A tip from a sixteenth-century Italian mediator. When your enemy is backed into a corner, that is the time to negotiate. “Evangeline,” she said.

  “What?”

  “My name is Evangeline. If you’ll call me that, then I’ll get on your back”

  “I don’t believe this.” His tone made it dear he’d been driven to the limit.

  “Dominic can’t be far behind,” she reminded him.

  His teeth gleamed, his breath rasped, his hands twisted, and she realized he was mangling his own cloak rather than her neck. For one moment, she wondered if he would attack. Then, in a goaded voice, he said, “Get on my back . . . Evangeline.”

  She’d won. Oh, God, she’d won a skirmish with Danior! She wanted to jump, to yell, to dance. But the mere fact he’d surrendered—a novel experience for him, she was sure—told her the danger did indeed nip at their heels.

  This adventure was a little too real for comfort.

  He turned his back again, and she leaned into him, wrapped her arms around his neck. Shaking out his cloak, he gathered it around them and fastened it loosely at his throat, effectively tying them together. To keep her warm, she knew, and probably to conceal her light-colored gown beneath the enveloping black. But it gave her a claustrophobic sensation, and when he rose she just dangled there by her arms.

  That detestable name rumbled through his chest. “Ethelinda?”

  He obviously knew how to negotiate, too. “Oh, as you demand.” She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he started down the slope after his bodyguards.

  Not since the orphanage when the girls huddled together for warmth had she experienced such familiarity—and this was not the same sensation at all. Her arms rested on his shoulders, her head was at the level of his. She could smell the scent of his hair. Her bosom pressed against his back. She experienced his every breath, and found herself pacing her breathing to his. The base of her torso, a place that had tingled when he’d kissed her, rested against his spine, and the movement of his body gave her an odd thrill, much like the scientific experiment she’d once done for Leona. Electricity, Leona had called it, and it had knocked Evangeline off her feet.