The Spy's Reward (3 page)

“A very reputable gentleman, madame's courier,” the innkeeper whispered to Meyer. “A former military man, from a good local family.” Evidently the news that Meyer was no relation to Miss Hart had not blunted the innkeeper's impulse to reassure him about her safety.

Abigail Hart held out the calling card. “We are very grateful for your consideration on our behalf, and I deeply regret this inconvenience.” She paused, and then added stiffly, “We would invite you to dine with us, but we will be busy preparing to leave early tomorrow.”

“Naturally.” Meyer gave a slight bow. “I will be staying at the Angleterre, should you require any assistance getting under way in the morning.” He ignored the card. If she wanted to insult him by returning it, she would have to put it in his pocket herself. After a moment her hand dropped.

“Good-bye, Mr. Meyer.”

“Madam, your most obedient servant.” He did not bow this time.

 

 

Diana waited until late in the evening, when Abigail was tired and cross. “That will be all, Lisette,” her daughter said to the maid, holding out her hand for the hairbrush. Abigail's shoulders, unconsciously braced against the maid's inexpert tugs, sagged in relief as the girl bobbed her head and withdrew. “We should have brought your maid,” Diana said, lifting her mother's heavy hair and gently untangling the ends with little swipes of the brush.

Abigail sighed. “Fanny needed Rosie in London. And I thought it would be simpler to hire servants here, people who speak the language and know how to go on.”

“Our coachman has become lost several times,” Diana observed, moving around behind her mother. “Lisette cannot dress hair to save her life. Mademoiselle Esmond looks more like a vulture than a chaperon. And Captain Hervé is very gallant, but a bit impractical.”

“He seems to think I am paying him to kiss my hand and protest his eternal devotion. Rather than to organize our route and book rooms and make sure we have decent horses. You should have seen his dismay when I told him I wanted to leave at nine tomorrow morning.”

“He is always shocked when either one of us appears before noon,” Diana said. “Poor man, I feel sorry for him. What is a cavalry officer to do when the war is over and his side has lost and he has no pension? He can hardly take up ditch digging.”

Abigail tilted her head back, letting Diana run the brush all the way through from the top of her head. “You could be a ladies' maid if we lost our fortune,” she said. “You are almost as good as Rosie.”

“Mmm hmmm,” said Diana, still brushing. Abigail could see her face in the mirror. Her eyes were lowered, and she looked very demure.

“Well then.” Abigail sat up suddenly, putting an end to the performance. “This is all very nice, but what do you want?”

“Am I so transparent?” Diana tried a rueful smile, a mixture of charm and repentance.

That smile had worked quite well on Diana's father. It did not usually work on Abigail. “Yes,” she said tartly. She pulled her hair forward and began to braid it in quick, expert movements. “I cannot in all honesty say that I prefer Lisette's attacks on my scalp, but it has not escaped my notice that every time you offer to brush my hair on this trip you lull me into a trance and then make some outrageous demand. So, what is it this time? Could we possibly put off our departure tomorrow, because another young man has invited you on an outing to another ruined castle, and you will never have such a chance again, and it would be so very lowering to have Mademoiselle Esmond or even worse, your mother, along, so just this once would I be willing to let the young man's sister or aunt or ex-mistress be the chaperon—”

“Mama!” Diana flushed in annoyance; she hated it when Abigail was sarcastic. “She was
not
his ex-mistress.”

“She was not a respectable woman.”

“Well, neither are
you
,” snapped her daughter, before she could stop herself. Then she turned bright red. In the mirror Abigail could see the panic in her eyes, quickly replaced by mortification. “Oh!” She threw down the hairbrush. “It is
your
fault I am so horrid! I was never like this with Papa!” Turning, she ran out of the room, leaving the door open behind her.

Apparently she had forgotten that in order to accommodate the anticipated arrival of Cousin Joshua she had given up her own bedchamber and was now sharing with Abigail. Abigail counted to sixty: ten for Diana to reach the door of her former room, ten for her to remember that it was no longer hers, ten to try to open the locked door anyway, and thirty to concoct some new scheme to placate her disobliging mother. At the end of sixty Abigail still heard no footsteps outside. She shrugged, closed the door, wrapped herself in a shawl, and sat down by the lamp with her book. In the fifteen months since she had become reacquainted with her daughter there had been many similar scenes.

Five minutes later there was a tap on the door, and the handle turned gently. Diana peered around the edge of the door, looking, for once, rather unsure of herself. She stepped in and took a small, nervous breath. “I am very sorry, Mama.” Her face, without its usual practiced repertoire of expressions, was the face of an eighteen-year-old girl rather than that of a sophisticated young lady.

Abigail moved over and made room on the settee. After a few minutes of silence—not an uncomfortable silence—Abigail asked gently, “Should I ring for a tisane?”

Diana shook her head.

“What did you want to ask me?”

The blond curls hid her daughter's face. “Nothing.”

“I might say yes.” Abigail paused. “Unlikely, of course. When you were little you once asked me if I ever said yes. And when I answered ‘yes' you stamped your foot and told me that that particular yes did not count.” That elicited a choked-off laugh. “Is it something about our journey tomorrow? Did one of your admirers ask to come with us? Or do you want me to protect you from Captain Hervé's attentions?”

“I do not find the captain difficult to manage.” Diana sounded more like herself now; there was an amused arrogance in her tone. So far as Abigail could see, Diana did not find any male difficult to manage. Years of manipulating her father and half brother had honed her skills to a terrifying edge. It was her mother—her long-estranged, cautious, unsociable mother—whom Diana could not manage. And vice versa.

“If you must know . . .” A small, slippered foot scuffed carefully in a rectangle over the carpet. “I wondered if you might change your mind and ask Mr. Meyer to travel with us.”

Abigail blinked. Diana had not been introduced to the unwelcome Mr. Meyer this afternoon. She had not even seen him—had she? Abigail had not shown her Joshua's letter; had only said, this morning, that there had been a mix-up and their cousin would not be joining them after all.

“I saw you speaking with him.” More scuffing. “And I asked Monsieur Jusserand who he was.”

The innkeeper was, of course, putty in Diana's delicate little hands.

“It was all a misunderstanding,” Abigail said. She knew her voice sounded stiff; she knew Diana could sense her uneasiness. She tried to sound unconcerned. “Why would you want to change our arrangements, in any case? You just told me that you have no objection to Captain Hervé.”

“I have no
objection
, no. But Mr. Meyer is far more . . . presentable, do you not think?” She shot her mother a look under her lashes. The minx look, Abigail had dubbed it.

“I did not notice.” Abigail used her most repressive, motherly tone.

“Mother! He is
very
distinguished-looking. Everyone on the terrace said so.”

It was no surprise that Diana would want to trade in the portly Hervé for the tall, keen-eyed man who had bowed over Abigail's hand this afternoon. Her daughter collected attractive males like ornaments. And Hervé was already her slave. She wanted a new challenge.

“It would not be right to impose on Mr. Meyer. We will do very well as we are.”

“Why? He rode all the way here from Nice! It is rude of us to send him away like a piece of unwanted baggage!”

Abigail sighed. “Please trust my judgment on this, Diana. It would make me very uncomfortable to accept his offer, although it was well meant. If you are pining for another glimpse of Mr. Meyer, I suspect we will see him once or twice en route. There are not that many inns between here and Grasse.”

There was another little silence. “Are you glad to be going home?” Diana asked hesitantly.

Abigail kept her tone neutral. “I suppose so. Are you?”

“I shall certainly be delighted to see the last of Digne-les-Bains.”

“Well, we never intended to stay here quite so long.” Abigail rose and took off her shawl. She risked a teasing smile. “Were you very bored, dear?”

Diana made a face. “It is so
respectable
! We might as well have been in Bath or Tunbridge Wells.”

“Had we been staying in Bath,” Abigail pointed out, “those charming young English officers you tormented yesterday on the terrace would likely not have spoken to you. In France you are a countrywoman; at home you are Hebrew.”

Her daughter flushed. “Even so, I am very glad to think I will never see Digne again after tomorrow morning.”

3

 

At the age of twenty-five, Anthony Roth reflected bitterly, he was already a laughingstock in four countries. Oh, not to the man on the street, of course. Merely to his very extensive family and their even more extensive network of friends and business associates. Like this man, a perfume broker, an important client of his late father, who was staring at him seemingly in horror, clearly looking for something in his appearance or manner to explain the stories.

“Is monsieur
the
Anthony Roth?” the Frenchman had asked just now.
The
Anthony Roth. The one who had been jilted by two fiancées within the space of six months, fiancées who had known him since childhood. Cousins, in fact. Anthony had the distinction of being both the first
and
the second Roth ever tossed into the dustbin by his betrothed. No wonder the man was staring. Surely there had to be some hidden defect when a wealthy young man with no obvious bodily affliction could not even manage to wed one of his own cousins in an arranged marriage. Or perhaps he did have a bodily affliction. He was not tall or muscular. He was not graceful or musical. He was a pale, short, nearsighted young man with a very good head for numbers and a reputation for skill and diplomacy in the international financial markets. The latter reputation, however, was fast disappearing this past year, since Anthony had become somewhat thin-skinned after the second broken engagement.

“What do you mean,
the
Anthony Roth?” he snapped, abandoning diplomacy once again.

“The author, of course.”

Taken aback, Anthony blinked. “Author?”

“Of this treatise.” The perfumer pulled down a document box from the shelves behind his desk, untied the ribbons, and extracted a pamphlet with a long title in Latin advertising it as the work of one A. Roth. He held it reverently, smoothing out the corners. “This has increased my clients' yield of tincture of lavender twofold.”

“Oh.” So the man had not been staring in horror. He had been staring in awe. At the wrong cousin. Anthony sighed. “No, that is my cousin Anselm. He is a chemist.”

“A brilliant man.” The perfumer carefully replaced the pamphlet, closed the cover, tied the ribbons in perfect, symmetrical bows, and set the box in exactly the same space on the shelf. “A brilliant, brilliant man.”

Anselm was indeed brilliant. He was also married to one of Anthony's former fiancées, Elena Mendez. Elena had not intended to jilt Anthony. She had been on her way across Europe to the wedding, in fact, when she had fallen in love with Anselm. As she had explained in her very long and very apologetic letter, it was impossible for a young lady of sensibility to remain indifferent to someone when she had seen him wounded during a duel in defense of her honor. Anthony had spent weeks after the receipt of that letter imagining himself as a famous swordsman and deadly shot. He had even gone to a shop in Naples and looked at a few pistols, and a friend had given him the name of a fencing master. But he had been very busy at the bank—especially this last year, when the end of the war threw all the financial markets of Europe into chaos—and nothing had come of his sanguinary ambitions.

“Still,” said the perfumer, with a last, reluctant glance at the box, “it is, of course, an honor to have you here, Monsieur Roth. Normally it is Monsieur Gibel who comes to meet with us.”

Every year at this time, the perfumers of Grasse estimated the spring lavender crop and negotiated loans with the Roth-Meyer Bank for the expensive process of production. Winter still lingered at the higher elevations, but here in the coastal hills of southern France the spiky purple plants were already poking out of the soil. Apparently this would be an exceptional harvest—and, with peace in Europe for the first time in over ten years, the perfumers were confident that they would sell every drop they produced. Since the loan amount was so large, and since Anthony was en route to London in any case, he and his mother had agreed that it would be appropriate for a Roth family member to go in person to this year's meeting. His mother had also hinted delicately and then much less delicately and then almost belligerently that he might wish to travel on from Grasse with his uncle. As everyone in the family knew, Nathan Meyer had been lured to France in the hopes that he might wed Joshua Hart's beautiful young cousin.

“I think it might be a bit awkward,” Anthony had said to his mother, after the first delicate hint.

“No,” he had said, after the second, less delicate hint.

“Absolutely not!” he had shouted, after she had come out and told him that Nathan was impossible with females and would probably welcome his nephew's company and if by some chance Miss Hart did not suit Nathan, perhaps Anthony himself might offer the young lady an alternate choice within the family.

And that was the point, of course. Keep those large, lovely Roth-Meyer bank accounts from being frittered away in dowries and marriage settlements. The best solution was to marry a kinswoman, but since Anthony had clearly bungled his chances for a cousin, his mother was willing to settle for second best: an heiress like Diana Hart.

“I am
never
coming within fifty miles of any courtships, engagements, or weddings involving any member of the Roth or Meyer families ever again,” Anthony had said in a tone of voice he did not even know he possessed. “Do I make myself clear?”

The subject had not been mentioned again. Nathan Meyer was the father of Anthony's other ex-fiancée; and although he did feel just a bit guilty about avoiding his uncle, Anthony preferred to meet him in company in London rather than travel in close quarters with him for ten days. The Meyers terrified him, frankly. It had been almost a relief when Rachel broke their engagement. She was taller than he was, she was more athletic than he was, and she was depressingly full of energy. Her younger brother was even worse: James had taken a false identity as a Christian in order to hold a commission under Wellington, and the exploits of Captain James Nathanson were famous all over Europe. Duels, secret missions, three daring escapes after falling into French hands, women swooning at his feet, etcetera, etcetera. In the company of his Meyer cousins, Anthony had always felt as though they were painted in color and he was a faded gray. As for his uncle—he was the most terrifying of all. He was not lively and charming, like Rachel, or notorious, like James. He was a quiet man, unobtrusive without being timid or humble. His work in the family bank had been competent, no more, and he had spent very little time there since the death of his wife. No one who met him would suspect that he spoke six languages fluently or that he was deadly with a knife or that he could memorize the contents of a desk drawer in a few seconds, down to the last crumb of dried snuff. He had, in fact, been Wellington's principal intelligence agent in Spain and France, and was the most dangerous man Anthony had ever met. No, Anthony would attend tonight's dinner with the perfumers, sign the papers for the loan tomorrow morning, and head back to the coast as fast as he could go. The bank's very efficient courier system would keep him informed of his uncle's movements, and he would take care not to get on the same boat from Antibes, or even to stay in the same town as Nathan Meyer.

The perfumer was asking him something—had he had a chance to rest, to change his clothing? With an effort, Anthony returned his attention to the business at hand. It was nearly time for the dinner, which was at the hotel where Anthony had taken rooms. He let the broker lead the way down the steep hillside and managed to pay attention as the man pointed out shops and factories belonging to his clients. They were deep in a discussion of the new French tariffs when Anthony became aware of an odd, insistent noise. It sounded like shouting. It was coming from the foot of the hill, and now he could see bobbing lights gathering below and hear individual voices.

“
Nom de Dieu,
” said the Frenchman, shocked. “A brawl, so early in the evening?”

There was a sudden pounding of hooves, and Anthony jerked his companion back just in time to avoid being run down in the narrow street. Two riders thundered by, and from the sound of it, more were on their way up the hill. He hauled the perfumer into the nearest alleyway and watched, stupefied, as shouting men ran up the street alongside the next wave of horsemen, waving their arms and slapping the horses' flanks to make them go faster.

“What is happening?” he asked, stunned. “This is no brawl.”

The broker shook his head. “I do not know. Something terrible. The English have invaded, perhaps.”

“Nonsense.” Anthony was quite sure the English had not invaded. Why bother? The newly restored Bourbon king was in London's pocket.

“Austria, then.”

A woman ran by, sobbing, her feet slipping on the muddy cobblestones. Anthony caught her arm. “What is it, madame? What has caused all this commotion ?”

She wrenched her arm away and stumbled on up the street, but he had seen her face in the light from the lantern above the door. Those were tears of joy.

 

 

It was only six leagues from Digne to Barrême, but they were six nearly vertical leagues, ascending several thousand feet to cross the Col de Chaudon, and then dropping down sharply to the hill that cradled the smaller town. The road as it approached the pass was in fact little more than a cart track, and Meyer abandoned the jouncing carriage at the first halt, explaining to the coachman that the horses would find the vehicle easier to pull empty.

“Suit yourself,” growled the man.

Meyer's servant, Rodrigo, said nothing, but handed him the bridle of the familiar shaggy horse with something like a smile.

“Did
you
ride in the cursed thing on the way to Digne?” Meyer demanded.

“Certainly not, señor.” Rodrigo glanced back at the steep descent into Digne. “I, ah, felt it was my duty to observe the road carefully. So as to be prepared for any difficulties when we returned with the young lady.”

“The young lady and her mother and two maids and a footman,” Meyer reminded him. “Imagine trying to bring that lot across the pass.”

Rodrigo looked over at the horses, straining a bit on the steep slope even with no passengers in the carriage. At the summit, half a league ahead, there was still snow. “We would have needed a second carriage, of course.”

“Yes, double the chances of a broken axle.” Meyer paused to adjust one stirrup. “I'm well out of it. Let Mrs. Hart's French captain hire drivers and horses and inspect harness and retie bandboxes onto the roof. We shall proceed at our leisure into Barrême and have supper at that excellent hostelry you discovered.”

“The Cheval Blanc.”

“That's it, yes. By tomorrow night we should reach the coast.” He glanced down at his mount. “On a more prepossessing animal, I trust.”

“And will you send a message to Mr. Roth about Miss Hart?”

The Roth-Meyer banks maintained an extensive and remarkably fast courier system all over Europe. Meyer had made good use of it during his work for the British army.

He thought for a moment. “It would be prudent, although I am tempted to let him stew as the rumors begin trickling back to London.”

“You agreed to come over here and escort her,” Rodrigo reminded him.

“So I did. And look to have escaped undamaged, for once.”

“I did not meet the young lady. What is she like?”

“Fair hair, just out of the schoolroom, and the most accomplished flirt I have seen since Elena Mendez.” He added, after a short pause, “One wonders what my brother-in-law Roth was thinking. She is certainly very pretty, but unless I miss my guess she is a five-foot-tall bundle of willful mischief. I do not envy her future husband. Or, for that matter, her mother, who has charge of her at the moment.”

The track now became very steep, and for several minutes the two men rode on in silence, shifting their weight carefully in the saddle as the road angled up to the summit. Meyer was looking back, checking on the progress of the empty carriage behind them, when Rodrigo reined in beside him with an exclamation. He pointed up the hill to a level stretch just below the pass. “Would that, by any chance, be Miss Hart's party?”

Two carriages were drawn up across the road. At the side of the leading vehicle, whose horses had been unhitched, a stout man in a tricorn was leaning over, talking to another man who was halfway under the body of the carriage. A third man was attempting to hold both the unyoked animals and the pair still poled to the second carriage. Four women stood huddled together a short distance away in one of the few spots not dusted with snow. One, the smallest, had spotted the approaching horsemen. She took two steps towards them, stretched out a tiny, gloved hand in mute appeal, and then crumpled to the ground.

“That is Miss Hart.” Meyer's voice was dry. “The one who just fainted.”

“Is she an invalid, señor?”

“No. A comedienne.” He spurred his horse forward, but the girl was being helped to her feet already, and by the time he arrived she was being settled in the rear carriage with some rugs.

He turned to the mother, who was looking more exasperated than concerned. “May I be of some assistance, Mrs. Hart?”

“Thank you, no. My daughter tripped on a rock.” Out of the corner of his eye, Meyer saw Diana Hart's eyes flash as her elegant swoon was converted into a stumble. “She is already recovered, as you can see.”

Miss Hart was duly introduced, and assured her would-be rescuer that she was only a bit shaken.

“And the carriage?” he asked, looking again to Abigail Hart.

“A broken strap.” She gestured towards her coachman, who had emerged from underneath the lead vehicle. “Jacques tells me the wheel is sound. We should be under way within half an hour. Excuse me one moment.” She went over to the stout man and said something. He removed his hat with a flourish, bowed, and made a long reply, accompanied by more flourishes, which she eventually cut off with a curt gesture. “We will move our second coach to the side,” she said, returning. “I do apologize for blocking the road.”