Authors: Shirl Anders
He watched two male servants lifting a spectacular harp into another half cart, just as a large four-door carriage pulled up behind the cart. Brynmore waited expectantly for someone to open the door and climb down from the carriage. However, this did not happen and the driver just waited patiently up on top. A short time later, a footman and a butler came out carrying a traveling trunk with two aproned maids following behind carrying large valises. All were loaded onto the carriage.
Somehow, Brynmore thought, these did not belong to the suspects, Baco and Cernno. The harp and the elegant trunk with the various valises had feminine, or at the very least, a well-appointed nobleman’s look to them. The Germans were more rustic.
Some ten minutes later his theory was confirmed, when an ornately dressed woman, trailing her elaborate skirts, came out of the townhouse with Baco and Cernno. The woman spoke something to one of the two Germans as she approached the carriage. Brynmore cursed his hearing loss as he picked out details of the woman. Older, with an out-of-style powdered wig, sharp nose, and thick theatrical makeup on her face. Dame Baset, perhaps?
Brynmore could feel the crawling itch, slithering up his spine, and the scent of his prey wafted through his senses as he watched the three enter the carriage. He could try to follow, but without a carriage of his own or a horse, it would prove difficult. First, he would try a moment of information gathering while keeping the carriage in sight. To this end, he left his surveillance position and approached the servants still loading the last cart. He had a question about the harp on his tongue, and in little time, he had the owner’s destination. It was an outlying area of Paris and from there to the docks. To further ask the name of the ship that the three were boarding, or the ship’s destination would leave too much suspicion of his casual attentions.
Brynmore tipped his hat and quickly headed in the opposite direction. A swift horse would get him there before his quarry. He knew that he was ultimately just going on hunches, however, too many things pointed to this being the right direction. He had to follow it. Going to the little known Aleuts docks could easily confirm his suspicions, and it would also put him near the French coast where he needed to be to send messages by lantern beacon across the channel. The times were set at midnight each night that a courier in Drummond’s employ would wait for Brynmore’s possible updates.
Now, Brynmore thought, he had something to share. His main concern was the overseas destination of the three he was following. His second concern was the fact that he might have to leave the French coast immediately to follow them overseas. That meant leaving Miss Montoya without a word. It could also mean leaving her with other players around, players she knew nothing about. Brynmore felt certain that she would keep poking and prodding after her brother, stirring up nests of potential danger everywhere she trod.
“Yer bloody daft,” Brynmore accused himself.
She was obviously of the genteel lady sort, and the trauma she had gone through would surely send her backtracking to her home. As much as he tried to deflect the nagging war inside him traveling from one camp of reason to the other concerning Miss Montoya’s motives or further methods, it would not leave him alone. And why, he thought that he had any chance to guess what this one woman might do, he had no clue!
Nevertheless, the only way he was able to quiet his internal carping, was to write a hasty note and give it to a messenger at the nearest livery. He gave a livery boy two pence to deliver the note to one of his personal associates that he used when in Paris. This one was a former spy for England, now set up as a leisurely lawyer in Paris. Brynmore made sure his instructions to the livery boy were clear. He was to deliver the message to Mr. Barcliff and tell Mr. Barcliff to find the woman whose name was on the outside of the missive and deliver it to her. This was of the utmost importance.
Brynmore decided not to long after, while he galloped his hastily purchased stallion down the Paris streets, that what he had succumbed to with the note and inclination, were both bloody good reasons never to involve women in any mission! They distracted a man’s mind, his timing, and his direction. They caused worry, when a man needed full and sharp attention.
“I’m bloody well glad that Drummond and the others are standing firm against their women being involved with this,” Brynmore muttered, as he urged the stallion to further speed, with the wind sharpening and knifing through his clothes.
“You are the whore who married a duke,” Nia muttered to herself, tracing her long pink-painted fingernail absently on the glass top of the table she sat beside. She was “taking the sun” amongst the flowering gardens behind her ducal residence in London, supposedly, a noble recreation for a duchess.
It really should not bother her. Everyone—well, at least Radford’s close friends—treated her like one of their own. However, some of Radford’s stuffy family had pinched noses about her pedigree, or lack of. But, they were that way all the time, Radford would tease her. Radford, the rogue, the man of his own making, beside being bred a duke. He walked his own way and cared little what noble acquaintances thought.
“My family is well-taken care of too,” Nia muttered. Her younger brothers and sisters loved Radford as if he were their uncle. They were here with them more times than not. Radford never bemoaned the care it had taken to continue raising them. Instead, he had embraced it with efficiency, the right amount of sternness, and large amounts of true affection.
I am, Nia thought, living in the perfect bonny fantasy. Radford was her prince come to save her. She was the somewhat tarnished princess, saved and redeemed by love. “He does love me!” Nia argued, gazing out at the sun-dappled roses. “I’m just not sure that he likes me.”
She thought she had evidence too. Radford would never say that he loved her, and then just stop loving her. However, he had never said anything about liking her, and the way they had met and fallen in love was so chaotic. It wasn’t as if they had spent great amounts of time discovering what they had in common.
“Hmm, let’s see, what common interests could a tart and a duke have?” Nia exclaimed, slouching back irritably in her chair. Not that she had been a practicing lady of the night for years. “Blimey, it was only weeks,” Nia paused, “But, I was good at it!”
It seemed that sex, was the only thing she and Radford had in common, earth shattering ground shaking sex. But, it was not enough and that is why Radford was so quiet lately. He actually brooded now, and he had never done that before. Now, he barricaded himself in his study for long hours in the evening, where before they would spend their evenings together. Radford never came to bed anymore unless he thought she would be asleep.
“In fact, we never make love, but in the deep of the night,” Nia muttered with the realization. They only made love now when Radford woke her early in the morning, then he always left before they really talked. “It is because he has discovered he has nothing to say to you,” Nia mumbled.
Had the class distinctions finally settled in, she wondered? What else could she expect? She had been a professed tart, and they were good for sex, but not for talk. Nia wiped a small tear from her eye, blinking into the sunlight. Blimey! She was not reduced to crying? Was she? Hard-nosed Nia O’Shea from the best Irish stock—weeping!
“Och,” she exclaimed. This was daft. She did not know how to be a wife with a brooding husband, a husband that did not like her. Nia tossed down the quill pen she had held in her other hand. She had been trying to write poetry, hoping the sunlight would improve her mood. She stood in a flurry, casting her papers and pen to the ground. Then she turned and fled into the mansion.
Radford rocked back on his heels, one hand hitched in his pocket, the other clamped to the silver knob of his cane. His blurring one-eyed gaze tried to follow his wife’s hurried leave taking. He had been watching her, hidden behind the large oak, his favorite in a well-planned landscape. At the time, his wife had been sitting still as a lovely vision in the sunlight, and he had been able to see her more clearly. But, her rapid movements just now had blurred his faltering vision, but he had heard the sobs.
“Damnation!” he cursed. Perhaps, Nia was pregnant and over emotional? Yet, he knew that was a lie. She could be with child, yes. However, that was not the cause of her emotional state. He knew, it was him.
How had he let everything go so far? He had trapped them both, because he was so afraid of giving her up. Now everything loomed, and still he had not found the courage to tell her, and then release her. The evil part of his soul had hoped that she would become pregnant, and it would be added leverage for her to stay with him, when she discovered he was going blind.
Yet, that was illogical and unreasonable, because he wanted her gone in that case. He intended to demand it! She was young, beautiful, and vivacious. How could he limit her? Because, she is your wife until death do you part! Radford blinked his one eye up into the sun. But, Nia had not had the truth when he had foolishly and greedily married her. No one had. Somehow, in his arrogance and happiness, he had thought his eyesight would improve. Now, he was left on the edge of a steep cliff. He had to jump. He had to tell his wife and tell the Archangels. Still, he hesitated with such control in his hands to completely change his life forever.
“You, arrogant imbecile,” he berated himself. The control was out of his hands, had been out of his hands each month by darkening month as his eyesight worsened.
Radford tapped his cane in disgust, then moved toward Nia’s strewn papers. It was a mission to read while he still could, to love for as long as he could hold on. Radford reached down and picked up Nia’s papers, lifting them up to the sunlight to read slowly.
“Passion would keep one eye blue. Love would linger with sight deep in our souls. Naked together we see our desire. Breasts to chest, loins slick. We need no light. Our sight is but love.” Radford’s fingers curled, crimping the papers with a tremor. “Damnation.” His wife knew!
His one-eyed gaze jerked upward to the windows of their bedchamber. He thought that he caught sight of a cream-colored flutter. The color of the gown his wife had been wearing. She could be looking down on him right now and he would not know it, but his heart did. His heart knew it, and shakily he lifted the papers to his lips and kissed them. Then, he started forward into the mansion to find his wife.
When Radford entered their bedchamber still holding Nia’s poetry in his hand, he could see that his wife was quite discomposed. She fluttered with agitated movements, apparently haphazardly throwing her stocking, garters, and other frilly accessories onto their large four-poster bed.
“I would try to learn about the things that interest you, Radford,” she said, glancing at him, then glancing away as she lifted two mismatched pairs of stocking with jerky movements. “I could talk to you, about anything you like, really, if you just tell me what it is. Help me along. Anything that interests you interests me.”
Radford tilted his head in confusion, raising the papers in his hand higher into view. “You knew,” he stated, in mixed wonder.
Nia tossed down the stocking with a vexed motion. “Of course I know!” She turned partially toward him, then jerked partially away again. “How could I miss that you do not like your own wife?! That we never talk!”
Radford felt the slight wish that he had two eyes that he could cross at the moment as he stepped closer. “Cherie, I love you. I meant that you know about my going blind!”
“Of course you love me!” Nia exclaimed, grabbing two pairs of garters upward as though she were about to try to strangle them. “You love to have sex with me. You love the color of my red hair. Blimey, you love my laugh. But, Radford! You do not like to talk to me!” The garters sailed across the large expanse of the bed, and Nia turned to him, with her color high and her light green eyes bright.
“No! I meant about going blind, Nia. That you know in regard to that.”
“You see!” Nia’s hands rose upward in an expressive gesture. “There is something we can talk about. Surely you must want to!”
“But, you knew!” Radford said, with his voice rising in exasperation. “I mean that you know!”
“Of course I know. I am your wife.”
“Of course.” Radford said, with an incredulous voice, as Nia interrupted him.
“We could talk of that, Radford. That and-.” Nia paused. “The Archangels. This newest mission. You can tell me how I will help you. You have to tell them, and we can discuss that. Then, we can talk about what you need for me to do, by your side, to help you accomplish your mission.”
“I cannot do it. I won’t!” Radford said, setting the poems on the edge of the bed.
Nia’s hands fell from their expressive dance as she stilled. “You won’t? Why not?” She suddenly seemed to hear him. “Of course you can do it. You are the organizer. You can do that and anything else you can just direct me to do.”
Radford was awed. His wife knew that he was losing his sight, it seemed a second fact, old news, as it were. She assumed he would work with the Archangels as before and with her help obviously. She seemed just naturally to assume that she would help.
“My going blind does not bother you, Nia?” He seemed unable to trust himself to say or ask anything else.
“Bother?” Nia’s expressive hands went to her hips as she tilted her head. “I’m sad for you-.” Then, she added quickly, “No pity though. You will remember all the colors of the world, peoples faces, so many things. You-You are so capable though that I predict there is barely anything you did before that you will not be able to do.”
So matter of fact. So accepting. Radford was rocked back. “I did not know that you knew.”
“You did not? How silly, of course you did.” Nia stepped closer to him. “You know I was thinking as well, sweetheart, that your other senses will be heightened. Do you want to talk about this with me then?”
Damnation, he was an idiot, in love with the most wonderful woman. Radford clasped Nia’s hands bringing them to his lips to kiss, then he looked at her, “Cherie, I want to talk to you about everything.”