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‘Strewth.’ The groom stood turning his hat round in his hands. ‘You sure about that, ma’am? I mean, I’ve been seeing to the horses this morning and all.’
‘Entirely sure. Please sit in that chair there, Henry. Now, would you care for some coffee?’
Eva poured, served herself ham and eggs, made careful conversation with both men in a manner that effectively forbade the introduction of any personal matter whatsoever and finally rose from the table, satisfied that she had set the tone for the rest of the journey. ‘Where are we travelling to today?’ she asked over her shoulder as Jack pulled out her chair for her at the end of the meal.
He shook his head slightly and she caught her breath. She had been beginning to feel safe, lulled by the routine domesticity of breakfast. Of course, walls had ears, people could be bribed to pass on tittle-tattle about earlier guests. The cold knot in her stomach twisted itself together again, not helped by the squeeze he gave her elbow as she preceded him out of the room. She was not used to being touched. It was meant to be reassuring, she was sure, but it succeeded all too well in reminding her just how much she needed him.
Jack waited until the carriage had rattled out of the inn yard and Henry had turned west before speaking. ‘Grenoble, Lyon, Dijon, then north to the border with the Kingdom of the Netherlands by whatever seems the safest route at the time,’ he said without preamble as she folded her cloak on the seat.
‘Through so many big towns? Is that wise?’ The watchful grey eyes opposite narrowed and Eva caught a glimpse of displeasure. He does not like my questioning his judgement, she thought. Too bad, I want to understand. I need to.
‘In my judgement it is,’ Jack responded evenly. ‘We need the speed of the good roads and travellers are less obvious in cities. However, if we run into trouble, then I have an alternative plan.’ She nodded, both in comprehension and agreement. ‘I am glad you approve.’
‘It is not a question of approval,’ Eva snapped, then caught at the fraying edge of her temper. Grace under pressure, that was what Louis had always insisted was the mark of rulers. Grace under pressure at all times. ‘I wish to understand,’ she added more temperately. ‘I am not a parcel you have been charged with delivering to the post office. Nor does my position make me some sort of mindless figurehead as you seem to think. If I understand what we are doing, why we are going where we do, then I am less likely to make any mistakes to earn your further displeasure.’
‘It is not my place to express displeasure at any action of yours.’ Jack’s retort was even enough to tip her emotions over into anger again. He was humouring her, that was what he was doing. He wanted it both ways—he wanted to call her by her first name, carry on this pretence of marriage and sharing a room, yet the moment she tried to take an active part in their flight he fell back on becoming the respectful courtier.
‘No, it is not your place, Mr Ryder, but I thought we had agreed that for the duration of this adventure I was not a grand duchess, that you would call me by my given name. I had assumed that meant you would also stop treating me as if I was not a real person. I hate it when I visit a village and they have painted the shutters especially. How do I know what lies behind them? Are they prosperous or are they poor? How much money was wasted on that paint? I want the truth, Mr Ryder, not platitudes, not your equivalent of painted shutters.’
Her angry words hung in the air between them. She saw the bunching of the muscles under the tight cloth of his breeches and wondered if he was about to jump up, pull the check cord and transfer to the box, leaving her in solitude to fume.
Then Jack leaned back into the corner of the seat and smiled. It was not a sign of humour, it was the kind of smile she produced when she was deeply displeased, but it would not be politic to say so, a curving of thinned lips. Had that hard mouth really been the one that had slid over her warm lips with such sensual expertise?
‘Very well.’ Eva jumped, dragging her eyes away from his lips. ‘If you must have it without the bark on it. The amount of danger we are in all depends on whether Antoine wants you back, and, if he does, whether he has a preference for alive or dead.’ Eva tried not to flinch at the brutal analysis. ‘He might simply be satisfied with you disgraced, in which case we are doing his work for him—last night was enough to ruin you. Or, of course, an accident on the road has the advantage of simplicity.
‘If he wants you ruined, he just has to leave us alone, spread the rumour that you have fled with your lover and make sure every newspaper in Europe picks up the tittle-tattle.’
‘When I get back to England and I am seen to be received by the Prince Regent and the Queen—’
‘The damage will be done by then, the dirt will be on your name. No smoke without fire, they will say.’
‘I wonder, then, that you chose to share my room last night.’ Cold shame was washing over her body—what would Freddie think? Small boys were cruel; someone would make certain he heard of his mother and the smutty tales about her. ‘It was poor judgement on your part.’ All this time worrying about her reputation and knowing that taking a lover was out of the question, and now this.
‘I put safety above respectability. Better slandered than dead.’ There was a flash of white teeth in a sudden grin, then the grim humour was gone. ‘And besides, Prince Antoine has all the ammunition he needs without confirmation from an innkeeper about which beds were slept in. You were seen leaving with a man and some baggage.’ He paused, watching her face. ‘If I had pointed this out, back in the castle, would you still have come?’
‘Yes, of course I would have come!’ Of course she would have. ‘What does my reputation matter against Freddie’s safety or my duty? And what difference does it make to our choices whether Antoine wants me alive or dead?’
‘If he wants you back in Maubourg so that people can see you, while he controls you as a puppet by threats to your son, then he will have to capture you and transport you home. That requires some logistical planning, more people. It may be easier to spot. If he wants an accident…well, then that is harder to see coming.’
‘Yes, that is putting it without the bark on,’ she agreed, trying not to let her voice shake. This was the man she had begun to think she understood and now realised she had been underestimating. Jack seemed so cold, so unmoved by the fear and danger behind his analysis. ‘Are you ever afraid?’ she demanded, the words leaving her lips as she thought them.
‘Of many things,’ he said evenly, surprising her. ‘The knack is not to admit to it, not even to yourself.’
‘I am scared of spiders,’ she confessed. ‘But I am not prepared to say what else.’ Even referring to her recurring nightmare obliquely made it hideously real. Those dark passageways under the castle, the shifting lift of the torches making half-seen shapes move in corners. The rectangular shapes and the knowledge of what was in them…She pushed it away with an inner shudder. ‘I understand what you mean; it does not do to conjure such things up. Instead, tell me what I should to do to help protect us all.’
‘Do what I tell you, always, at once and without question.’
Eva blinked. She had been hoping he would give her a pistol, and show her how to use it, or demonstrate how to hit an assailant over the head, or some other active form of defence. ‘That was very peremptory, Mr Ryder.’
‘Are you going to argue about it? And call me Jack.’
‘Yes, I am going to argue, Jack,’ she said. ‘What if I do not agree with what you are telling me to do?’
‘We stand there and debate it while the opposition takes the advantage, or I hit you on the point of your very pretty chin and do whatever it is anyway.’
‘My…What has my chin got to do with it?’
‘It is the easiest part of your anatomy to hit in a crisis.’ He appeared to have regained his good humour. ‘Then Henry and I bundle up your unconscious body and make our escape with you slung unflatteringly over Henry’s shoulder.’ The smile reached his eyes, crinkling the corners in a way that was infuriatingly attractive.
‘There is the death penalty in Maubourg for striking a member of the Grand Ducal family,’ Eva stated. And see how you like the thought of a coarse hemp noose around your neck, Mr Ryder!
‘What a good thing we will not be in Maubourg if such an eventuality transpires.’ They sat in silence. Eva glared out of one window, Jack looked out of the other, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle.
Eventually the coach turned, lurched and began to ride more smoothly. Eva dragged her attention back to the landscape and away from a satisfying daydream of seeing Mr Ryder dragged off in chains to the scaffold. They had reached the post road to Grenoble.
‘Are you going to sulk all the way to Brussels?’ Jack enquired.
‘I am not sulking. I have simply not got anything to say to you, you insolent man.’
‘I see. I apologise for the remark about your chin.’
‘What part of that remark, exactly? Threatening to hit it?’
‘No, making an uncalled-for personal remark.’
‘Has anyone told you how inf—’ She broke off at the sound of a fist being banged on the carriage roof.
‘Hell.’ Jack sat upright. ‘That means trouble. We are almost at the border—do you normally have it guarded? There was no check when we entered the Duchy.’
‘No, never. Our army is minute and there are far too many passes and back roads to make it worthwhile putting on border guards. What do we do?’ Jack would have a plan for this, he couldn’t intend that they stop, surely? Eva braced herself, expecting the horses to be whipped up to ride through whatever obstruction lay in their path.
But Jack was on his feet, balancing against the swaying of the coach as Henry began to rein in. Eva stared as he groped under the edge of the seat he had been sitting on. There was a click and the whole top folded up leaving a rectangular space. Jack threw her valise into one end and gestured. ‘In you get. There are air holes.’
‘No!’ It gaped, dark and stark as a sepulchre. Eva could feel the panic constricting her throat. Don’t talk about nightmares…it makes them come real… The edges of her vision clouded as though grey cobwebs were growing there. The shadows in the corners shifted…the sound of stone grinding on stone…the scratch of bone…
‘In!’ Jack gestured impatiently, his attention on the scene outside as the carriage came to a halt. There were voices raised to give curt orders. ‘Now!’
Duty. It is my duty to survive. It is my duty to be strong. Eva scrambled in, and sat down. The air seemed to have darkened, she was light-headed. Don’t shut it, no! Don’t! The scream was soundless as Jack pushed her down until she was lying prone. He said something, but the roaring in her ears made it hard to hear. Then the lid closed on to darkness. Forcing herself to breathe, she raised both hands until the palms pressed against the wooden underside and pushed up. It was locked tight. Trust him, he will let you out. Trust him. Trust…he will come.
Jack sat down in the corner of the carriage, ran his hands through his hair, crossed one leg negligently over the other and drew a book out of his pocket. He raised his eyes to look over the top of it as the door was flung open. ‘Yes?’ It was a soldier in the silver-and-blue Maubourg uniform. Sent by Prince Antoine, no doubt.
‘Your papers, monsieur.’
‘But of course.’ Jack put down the book, taking his time, and removed the documents from his breast pocket. His false identity as a Paris lawyer was substantiated by paperwork from a ‘client’ near Toulon who wished for advice on a family trust. He fanned out the documents without concealment, extracted the passport and handed it across.
The man took it and marched away towards the front of the vehicle without even glancing at it. Damnation. That probably meant an officer. Jack climbed down and walked forward to where a young lieutenant was scanning the papers, three soldiers at his back.
‘You are on your way back to Paris, monsieur?’
‘Yes. I have been on business near Toulon.’ The young man’s thumb was rubbing nervously over the wax seal. The lieutenant was inexperienced, unsure of himself and probably wondering what on earth he’d been sent out here to deal with.
‘What other vehicles have you passed since yesterday?’
‘I have no idea.’ Jack stared at him blankly. It was a useful trick. People questioning you expected you to lie, to make up an answer, to be able to catch you out. An honest admission of ignorance took the wind out of their sails and made you seem more credible. ‘I have been reading, sleeping. I take no notice of such things. Henri, what have you seen?’
Henry shrugged. ‘All sorts, monsieur, all sorts. What is the lieutenant looking for?’
‘A woman,’ the young man began, then reddened at the grin on Henry’s face and the sound of his own men choking back their laughter. He glared at his men. ‘A fugitive. A woman in her mid-twenties, brown hair, tall. With a man. Probably in a travelling carriage.’
‘No idea.’ The groom was dismissive. ‘Can’t see inside anything closed from up here. Could have passed the Emperor himself and a carriage full of Eagles for all I know.’
‘Very well. You may proceed.’ The officer handed Jack the passport and stepped back.
Jack climbed into the carriage and sat down without a glance up at Henry. Inept and badly organised was the only way to describe that road block. It must have been the first response last night, to send troops out on the main roads. He did not fool himself that this would be the extent of Antoine’s reaction to the disappearance of his sister-in-law.
The rapid tattoo on the roof told him that no one was following them. All clear, he could let Eva out. What a fuss she had made about getting in—no doubt she thought the box contained the dreaded spiders she had confessed to fearing.
Jack unlatched the seat, lifted the lid and caught his breath. For one appalled moment he thought she was dead. Her face was grey, her eyes closed, her hands, clasped at her breast, had blood on them. Then her eyes opened, unfocused on some unseen terror. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No! Louis—don’t let them in!’
Chapter Seven (#ulink_696247d8-05d7-56ab-8417-dffbcf43c18d)
‘Eva.’ A dark shape loomed over her. He had come, just as she knew, just as she feared. The figure reached down, took her shoulder and she gasped, a little sound of horror, and swooned.
‘Eva, wake up.’ Her nostrils were full of the smell of dust, of the tomb he had just lifted her from. She was held on a lap, yet the male body she rested on was warm, alive, pulsing with strength, not cold, dead…
He shifted her on his knees so he could hold her more easily. ‘It’s all right, we are quite safe, there is no one else here.’ Jack? She could not trust herself to respond. A hand stroked her cheek, found the sticky traces of half-dried tear tracks. Flesh-and-blood fingertips against her skin, not the touch of dry bone. She came to herself with a sharply drawn breath. ‘Eva, you are safe,’ he said urgently.
‘Oh. Oh, Jack.’ She burrowed her face into his shirtfront.
‘Are you all right now?’ He managed to get a finger under her chin and nudged it up so he could look into her face. ‘You frightened me. What was all that about?’
‘I am sorry.’ She tried to sit up, but he pulled her back. ‘It is just that that was…is…my worst nightmare. A real nightmare. I keep having it.’ I am awake, I am safe. Jack kept me safe. He did not come.
‘Tell me,’ he prompted.
She had never spoken of it to anyone. Could she do so now? Admit such fear and weakness? ‘When I first came to the castle Louis, my husband, took me down to the family vault under the chapel. At first it was exciting, fascinating, like a Gothic romance—the twisting stairs, the flickering torches. I didn’t realise where we were going.’
The smell of the air—that was what had hit her first. Cold, dry, infinitely stale. Old. Louis had held, not a lantern, but a torch, the flames painting shapes over the pillars and arches, making shadows solid. ‘Then he opened the door into the vault—it seems to go on for ever, right under the castle, with arches and a succession of rooms.’
She had been a little excited, she remembered now. These must be the dungeons. It was all rather unreal, like a Gothic novel. Until she had realised where they were.
‘We were in the burial vaults. All there is down there are these niches in the walls, like great shelves, each one with a coffin on it.’ Jack must have felt her shudder at the memory and tightened his hold.
‘The newer ones were covered in dusty velvet, there were even withered wreaths.’ How did the flowers and leaves hold their shape? she had wondered, still not quite taking in what she was seeing. They had moved on, further and deeper into the maze of passageways. ‘The older ones were shrouded in cobwebs. Some of them were cracked.’ There had been a hideous compulsion to move closer, to put her eye to those cracks and look into the sarcophagus as though into a room.
‘Then Louis started to show them to me, as though he were introducing living relatives; it was horrible, but he seemed to think it quite normal, and I tried not to show what I was thinking.’ Already, by then, she was learning that she must not show emotion, that she must show respect for Maubourg history and tradition, that weakness was unforgivable. Somehow she applied those lessons and did not run, screaming, for the stairs. Or perhaps she had known she would never find them again.
Then they had moved on. She had felt something brush against her arm and had looked down. ‘There was one—an old wooden casket where the planks had cracked and a hand had come out.’ She had tried never to think about it while she was awake, but whenever the nightmare came, this was the image that began it. ‘A skeleton hand, reaching out for me as we walked past. It touched me.’
Her voice broke. Jack made a sound as if to tell her to stop, that it was too distressing, but she was hurrying now. It must all be said. ‘And then he came to two empty shelves and said “And these are ours”. I didn’t understand at first, and then I realised he meant they were for our coffins.’
One day she would lie there, enclosed in a great stone box, sealed up away from the light and air for ever. There would not even be the natural, life-renewing embrace of the soil to take her back.
‘I don’t know how I got out without making a scene. That night I dreamt I had died and woken up in my coffin. I knew I was down there, and they were all out there, waiting, and that any moment Louis would lift the lid and he would be dead, too, and—I am sorry, such foolishness.’
Eva sat up, smoothing her hair back from her face with a determined calm. Discipline, remember who you are. There was pity and respect in Jack’s grey eyes as he looked at her. She could not let it affect her. ‘Ever since then, I have been afraid of very tight, dark, spaces.’
‘I’m not surprised, that is the most ghoulish thing I have ever heard. Did your husband not realise what an effect it was having on you?’
‘Louis was a firm believer in self-control and putting on a good face,’ Eva said with a rueful smile. ‘I soon learned what was expected of me.’
‘Did you love your husband?’
‘No, of course not, love was not part of the expectation,’ she said readily. She had just confessed her deepest fear—to tell the tale of her marriage was easy in comparison. ‘I was dazzled, seduced and over-awed. I was seventeen years old, remember! Just imagine—a grand duke.’
‘A catch, indeed,’ Jack agreed. There was something in his voice that made her suddenly very aware of where she was and that Jack’s body was responding to holding her so closely
‘I…Mr Ryder, Jack, please let me go.’ She struggled off his lap, suddenly gauche and awkward, knowing the colour flaming in her cheeks. ‘Thank you. I appreciate your…concern.’
She settled in the far corner, fussing with her skirts and pushing at her hair in a feminine flurry of activity. ‘You say you have the dream quite often?’ Jack said slowly.
‘Yes.’ She nodded, keeping her head bent, apparently intent on a mark on her sleeve.
‘Very well. You must remember, the next time, that when the lid begins to move, it is me opening it. I will have come to rescue you. There will be nothing unpleasant for you to see, and I will take you safely up those winding stairs, up into the daylight. Do you understand, Eva? Remind yourself of that before you go to sleep.’
‘You? But why should you rescue me in my dream?’ No one has ever rescued me before.’ He had her full attention now. She fixed her eyes on his face as she worried over his meaning.
‘You did not have me as a bodyguard before,’ Jack said simply. ‘All you need to do is believe in me, and I will be there. Even in your dreams. Do you?’
‘Believe in you? Yes, Jack. I believe you. Even in my dreams.’
It was a fairy tale. Eva looked down at her clasped hands so that Jack would not see that her eyes were suddenly swimming with tears. Such foolish weakness! She was a rational, educated woman; of course he could not stride into her nightmare like a knight, errant to slay the ghosts and monsters. And yet, she believed him. Believed in him.
Only the year before she had found an enchanting book of fairy stories by some German brothers and had been engrossed. What was the name of the one about the sleeping princes? Ah, yes, ‘Briar Rose.’
And it was a dangerous fairy tale, for she wanted more than protection from her knight errant—she wanted his lovemaking, she wanted him to wake her from her long sleep.
Jack wanted her, too, she knew, if only at the most basic level of male response to the female. He could not hide his body’s response from a woman nestling in his lap. And that frightened her, for she realised that she had responded to it, been aroused by it, before her mind had recognised what was happening to them. She should have been alert to that danger, she had thought she was. Had she not resolved to maintain everything on a strictly impersonal level, as recently as this morning? That attack of panic had upset all her carefully constructed aloofness like a pile of child’s building blocks.
‘What are you thinking about?’ He was matter of fact again. It almost felt as though he was checking on her mental state in the same way as he would check on the condition of a horse, or test the temper of a blade he might rely upon.
‘Fairy stories,’ she said promptly, looking up, her eyes clear. Telling the truth was always easiest, and this seemed a safe and innocuous subject. Her early training came back—find a neutral topic of conversation that will set the other person at their ease. ‘I found a wonderful book of them last year.’
‘The Brothers Grimm? Yes, I enjoyed those.’ He grinned at her expression. ‘You are surprised I read such things?’
‘Perhaps you have nephews and nieces?’ she suggested.
‘No, none. And I do not think it is a book for children, do you? Far too much sex, far too much fear and violence.’
