Princess of Fortune
Princess of Fortune
Miranda Jarrett
The Princess And Her Protector…When an exiled princess becomes too much for her hosts to handle, Captain Lord Thomas Greaves is called to action. Playing nursemaid to a spoiled and much-too-beautiful princess isn't exactly how Thomas wants to serve his country, but at least it's something to relieve his boredom while he counts the days until he can return to sea.To mask her loneliness, the homesick Isabella has been imperious and difficult since seeking asylum in London. But as the sparks fly between her and Tom, she can't deny her attraction to her handsome bodyguard. And when her life is threatened, Bella realizes that the dashing captain is the first man to treat her like a woman, not just a princess….
“Did you ever guess that you’re the first gentleman I’ve kissed?”
He hadn’t, not at all, but that guileless confession kept him painfully hard. And might all the lords of the admiralty forgive him, he was kissing her again. She parted her lips freely for him, exploring him as much as he was her. He slid his hands along the narrowing curve of her waist, inside her dressing gown so there was nothing but the gossamer-weight linen between him and the quivering fullness of her breasts and this had to stop.
He released her and forced himself to step away from temptation. Her hair was mussed and tousled, her cheeks flushed, her nightclothes askew and, damnation, he’d never wanted any woman more than he wanted this one, whom he’d no right to have.
“Oh, my,” she murmured. “That was not pretending, was it?”
“No.” The blood was still thumping through his body, demanding to be obeyed. “That was as damned real as it gets.”
Praise for bestselling author Miranda Jarrett
“Miranda Jarrett continues to reign as the queen of historical romance.”
—Romantic Times
“A marvelous author…each word is a treasure, each book a lasting memory.”
—The Literary Times
The Golden Lord
“Sexual tension runs high. There are…secrets to be kept, mysteries to be solved and a traditional ending in which sharing truth wins true love.”
—Romantic Times
The Silver Lord
“The characters and plotting are very good and deftly presented.”
—Affaire de Coeur
Princess of Fortune
Miranda Jarrett
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Mary Jo,
A most excellent friend, and a writer who always
inspires, with affection and admiration.
And who else can remain so cheerful
when the fire siren wails at 6:00 a.m.?
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter One
Kingdom of Monteverde, 1796
W ho would have dreamed that London—wicked, wealthy, barbarous London—would become her only sanctuary?
London. Oh, dearest saints in heaven, whatever were her parents thinking?
Isabella forced herself to take another deep breath as she stared out the window of her bedchamber, striving to master the panic and fear knotting in her chest. She still could not quite believe she was leaving this view, this room, this house, and this life, with no guarantee that she’d ever return. Usually so full of activity, the palace now seemed forlornly silent, her father and brother already gone and most of the servants fled to the hills.
Next—last—to go would be Isabella. Earlier her trunks had been taken away, and as her lady’s maid fastened the rows of buttons along the sleeves of her jacket, she felt these last minutes here in her home slipping away more relentlessly than the grains of sand in an hourglass. Inside her kidskin gloves her palms were already moist with anxiety, and her heart raced with dread for what lay before her.
But she was the only daughter of the King of Monteverde, and a Fortunaro princess must be strong as a lioness, full of courage and pride like the fierce, noble beasts that graced the family’s arms. Yes, yes, a lioness of gold: that was what she was, and with fresh determination Isabella drew in her breath and raised her head to what she hoped was a more regal angle.
“Isabella, hold still,” scolded her mother with her usual impatience. No one would ever guess that Mama, too, would be fleeing tonight—which was, of course, the point. Mama was as exquisitely dressed and coiffed as she was every evening, her favorite rubies around her throat and her still-beautiful face with the heavy-lidded eyes so artfully painted that, by candlelight, she could pass for Isabella’s sister instead of her mother.
“If you continue to fidget, daughter,” she continued, looking down her famous nose at Isabella, “and do not let Anna dress you properly, I shall turn you over to the French and that vile little Corsican instead of to the English.”
At once Isabella went still, letting the maid finish dressing her in her traveling clothes. Mama was right: she was eighteen, far too old for such childish restlessness. If it weren’t for General Buonaparte and his ridiculous war turning all the royal houses upside down, a suitable marriage would have been arranged for her long ago.
“That it should come to this, Your Highness,” said the Marchese di Romano grimly, the last of her father’s advisers left in the palace, and one of her mother’s closest friends. He was an older man whose eyes now seemed to wander in opposite directions and who relied weightily upon his gold-headed walking stick, but no one at court had ever doubted that his mind remained as sharp and clever as any fox’s. “That a Fortunaro princess should be forced to scurry away like a low skulking thief, to snivel and beg for mercy from those heathen English—”
“Oh, hush, Romano,” said Mama mildly. “She is going to England because it is the only country that Buonaparte cannot capture. There is no other place where she will be as safe.”
Idly the marchese tapped his stick on the polished floor. “The English will adore our dear princess, you know,” he said, studying Isabella with a connoisseur’s eye. “They are all penny-gallants for a pretty face in distress.”
“She is more than simply a pretty face, Romano,” said her mother sternly. “She is my daughter, and a great beauty.”
“Of course, of course,” said Romano softly, soothing. “She will have no equal among those milk-fed English ladies.”
Though Isabella kept her head proudly raised, as if already confronting those English ladies, her unhappiness was mushrooming. Didn’t Mama plot and plan as expertly as any general? Hadn’t she already explained every detail to Isabella, how it was her duty to be the one Fortunaro to go into exile in London? Isabella wasn’t a fool, and she didn’t need Romano to tell her how to behave. The Monteverdian army had already been pounded and swept by the French in battle after battle, the few remaining troops now poised at the gates of the city for the same surrender that had humbled Florence, Naples, Venice, even great Rome herself. How could Isabella not fail to understand her role as the last proud symbol of her family’s defiance, there under the protection of the King of England?
But why must it be her duty—her fate!—to be the only one sent so far, far away for safekeeping? Why was she standing here in this near-empty palace, her clothes weighed down by the gold coins and jewels sewn into the seams and her heart made even heavier at the thought of the dangerous, lonely voyage before her?
As if to answer, the rumbling roar of the guns began again, closer now than ever before.
“It is time,” said Mama briskly, arranging her cashmere shawl more elegantly around her arms. She took Isabella by the shoulders, her face so close that Isabella could see how the powder settled into the lines around her mouth. “You must go, my brave little lioness. We cannot let the English change their mind, can we? You will go, and you will always remember who you are, what you are, and bring nothing but honor to our name.”
Isabella gave a quick jerk of a nod, not trusting her voice to answer. She must be brave and daring like Mama, and she must not weep and wail like a baby who’d not gotten her way. She turned each cheek for Mama to kiss, then kissed her in return, the quick brush that Mama had always preferred.
“I—I’ll miss you, Mama,” she said with a gulp, blinking back her tears. “God be with you, and with Father and Giancarlo, too.”
“Of course He will, my darling,” said Mama, her smile brilliant as she patted Isabella’s cheek. “He always watches over us Fortunari, doesn’t He? Now Romano and I must go, and so must you. Farewell, Isabella. Farewell!”
And as quickly as that, Mama was gone, leaving only the fading scent of her perfume and the click of her lacquered heels on the marble floors, followed by the fainter tapping of Romano’s stick. Swiftly Isabella turned away. She did not weep, of course, because Mama wouldn’t want that, but inside she felt as empty and abandoned as the palace itself.
She wished that when they’d said farewell, Mama had spoken less of duty and honor, and more of love. She wished that same farewell had been longer, warmer, sweeter, something for Isabella to remember on the perilous voyage to England, instead of the quick, formal parting before Romano. She wished she could admit her fears, instead of always having to be brave as a lioness. She wished—she wished for many things that couldn’t be, things that even a Monteverdian princess had no right to desire.
“Bah, Her Majesty has no heart,” muttered Anna, purposefully just loud enough for Isabella to hear. “No heart at all.”
“Enough, Anna,” said Isabella sharply. It didn’t matter that the older woman had become her lady’s maid by default, one of the last few servants who hadn’t panicked and fled the palace, or that Anna would be her one link with her old life as they traveled together. Isabella’s mother insisted that such familiarity should never be tolerated, no matter the circumstances. “It is not your place to fault my mother, unless you, too, wish to be branded a traitor.”
“Traitors, traitors,” muttered Anna, linking her finger and thumb together in the sign against evil. The gesture made her look even more like an ancient little crow, dressed in black from her stockings to the kerchief tied beneath her chin. “What does loyalty mean these days, eh, with the French devils at our gates?”
“Base-born rabble, nothing more,” countered Isabella, automatically repeating her father’s description of the tawdry French army. To her family, such upstarts were below contempt, unworthy to be even an enemy of their own ancient kingdom. “Our brave army will not waver before such a mob.”
Anna sniffed loudly, that sniff saying much about the pitiful chances she gave the brave Monteverdian army. “Your bonnet and gloves, my princess.”
Isabella lifted her chin so Anna could tie the bonnet’s silk ribbons in a bow, then took the gloves herself, unwilling to let Anna see how her fingers were trembling. Weren’t the Fortunaro women as famous for their strength as for their beauty? Couldn’t she prove herself worthy of her mother’s faith in her to do what must be done?
“Her Majesty said for you to make every haste, my princess,” insisted Anna. “Her Majesty said—”
“It is not your place to speak with such freedom, Anna,” said Isabella curtly, a perfect echo of her mother’s reprimands. “Do you see me disobeying my mother? Do you see me dawdling? Rather it is you and your clumsy old fingers that have delayed me with my dressing.”
“Forgive my clumsiness, my princess,” mumbled Anna, bobbing her head up and down by way of apology. As she did, a rough little pendant slipped free of her bodice: three twigs lashed with red thread into a triangle and strung on a black cord.
“What is that around your neck, Anna?” asked Isabella suspiciously. “You know heathen charms and talismans are not permitted in the palace.”
Quickly Anna tucked the pendant back into her bodice. “It’s naught to do with the devil, nor with the priests, my princess. It’s a family sign, that is all.”
“It still has no place here, and I do not wish to see it again. Now come, bring that lantern, so we might be on our way.”
For the last time, Isabella hurried down the marble staircase, the weight of the treasure stitched into her clothes slowing her steps. Down one flight, then another, into the dark, narrower hallway that led to the lower gardens and the beach. She’d never come this way by night, and certainly never with only a single servant holding a lantern against the darkness. Cobwebs brushed and clung to her clothes, and as she heard the mice scrambling to keep clear of the light, she whispered a quick prayer to guard her against whatever dangers might lie within the murky shadows.
Oh, that bats and rats and spiders and cobwebs might be her only threats!
“This way, my princess,” said Anna, puffing with exertion as she unbolted the last door for Isabella. “The English sailors will be waiting for you on the beach.”
Isabella nodded, holding her heavy skirts to one side as she slipped through the door. Vines had been allowed to grow over the door to disguise it, and as she shoved them aside, the lacquered heels of her slippers sank into the soft sand. The air was cooler here near the sea, and Isabella could taste the sharp tang of salt as she nervously licked her lips. At the water’s edge, perhaps thirty feet away, she could make out the dark shadow of a longboat pulled up on the shore, with men sitting waiting at the oars and two others standing aft, doubtless looking for her. Large men, lowborn and rough, speaking quietly among themselves.
Englishmen.
“Go ahead, Anna,” she said, striving to hide her anxiety as she hung back in the shadows. “Tell those men to come greet me properly.”
But Anna didn’t move, her wizened face inside the black scarf as set as a wooden mask. “You tell them yourself, my princess. I’ll go no farther, not with you.”
Isabella stared at her, stunned. “How dare you speak to me with such insolence? Come here at once, Anna, and do as I say!”
But Anna only shook her head, jutting out her pointed chin for emphasis. “I will never leave Monteverde, my princess,” she said, hissing the words like a curse, “and never with a spoiled little bitch like you.”
Isabella gasped with shock. No other servant had ever spoken to her like that; no, no other person in her memory ever had. “Anna, how dare you—”
But Anna had already slammed the door shut against Isabella.
“Wait!” Isabella grabbed the doorknob, frantically jiggling it with both hands. “Anna, open this door at once, I say! At once!”
But all she heard through the heavy door was the sound of the bolt in the lock scraping into place, and the echoes of Anna’s footsteps fading away down the hall, abandoning her to her fate alone.
“Anna!” she shouted, her fear rising by the second as she thumped her fists against the door. “Anna, come back now!”
“Miss?”
Instantly she turned around, her heart racing in her chest. She could make out little of the English sailor’s face in the shadows, but there was no mistaking how he loomed over her, the prow of his cocked hat pointing downward as he addressed her. The long, dark boat cloak he wore made him seem larger still, but from the braid on his hat and the brass buckles on his shoes, she guessed he must at least be an officer, and perhaps what among the English passed for a gentleman. Beside him was another man with a long pigtail down his back, dressed in rough canvas trousers and a worn, striped jersey that marked him clearly as a common sailor.
And these two were to be her saviors. Oh, Mama, what have you done?
“I’m sorry to have frighted you, miss—er, that is, signora,” said the officer. “But I do need to know if you are—”
“I am the Princess di Fortunaro,” she interrupted in imperious English, drawing herself up as tall as she could. She must be brave and proud, and hide her fear for her family’s sake. “I am not a ‘miss.’ You must address me as ‘my princess.’”
“Very well, then,” said the officer heartily as he touched the front of his hat, and also obviously relieved that she spoke English. “I am Lieutenant Goodwin, at your service, my princess.”
Isabella nodded but didn’t answer. She wasn’t precisely sure what to say in return, true, but she was also waiting for him to show proper regard and respect, and to bow low to her. Wasn’t it enough that she’d made the effort to address him in his own language? But she must recall that he was English, and the English were widely known to have no manners whatsoever. Barbarians, all of them, from their Hanoverian king on down.
“You have, ah, any followers who will be joining you?” he asked, looking past her to the closed door, and cheerfully unaware of how much of a barbarian he was. “Servants?”
“No,” she said, already feeling more alone than she’d ever been before. “There are none that I can trust.”
“No abigail to tend to you?” he asked with surprise. “You’ll be the first lady the old Corinthian has ever seen, you know, there among all us hoary sailors.”
She regarded him with chilly disdain, wishing to put more distance between them. “Not a lady, Lieutenant. A Fortunaro princess.”
“Aye, aye, quite right you are,” he said quickly. “I warrant you’re ready to come aboard, my princess? We’ve already stowed your dunnage, and we’re ready to shove off whenever it suits.”
Isabella frowned. She had worked hard at her English lessons, particularly hard once Mama had decided she must go to London, but these words, these expressions—aboard? stowing? dunnage? shoving off?—had not been in her tutor’s primer. Whatever was this Englishman asking of her?
Gruffly he cleared his throat. “We cannot keep the ship waiting much longer, my princess, not if we wish to get you away safely. We’ll lose the tide.”
The ship, and the tide. That much Isabella could understand. She looked beyond the man and the longboat, and farther out in the bay she now could make out the dark silhouette of the English ship, outlined by the lights from its lanterns. At such a distance it seemed small, as insubstantial as canvas scenery for a saint’s day pageant, and hardly sturdy enough to carry her and these men clear to London.
To London.
“My princess?” The lieutenant was offering the crook of his arm to her as support, as gallant a gesture, she supposed, as an Englishman could muster. “You are ready?”
Oh, please, God, please, grant me find the courage to be strong and brave and worthy, to be a true Fortunaro princess!
She took a deep breath, holding her head as high as if she were wearing her best diamond tiara instead of a plain plush bonnet for travel. She could do this, and she would, one step at a time. Ignoring the lieutenant’s arm, she bunched her skirts to one side to lift them from the sand, and began walking—one step, then the next, and the next after that—across the sand to the waiting boat.
To her future, and to London.
Chapter Two
F or Captain Lord Thomas Greaves, all his dreams of glory and golden plunder crashed in the instant the porcelain monkey shattered against the east wall of the Countess of Vaughn’s drawing room.
Not, of course, that Tom realized it then.
“Ah, the ladies,” said Admiral Edward Cranford pleasantly in the next room, as if this were all the explanation necessary for crashing statuary. “My sister Lady Willoughby and the others shall be joining us presently.”
Thomas nodded, striving to match the admiral’s pleasantness even if it didn’t make a damned bit of sense. It was most unusual for an admiral like Cranford to summon a captain to call upon him socially like this, here at his sister’s house in Berkeley Square instead of the navy offices at the Whitehall, and more unusual still for any ladies to be included.
But Tom would overlook it. Desperation could do that to a man, and God knows he was desperate.
“You were saying you’d found a new commission for me, sir?” he asked, trying to steer the conversation back to more profitable ground. “What ship is it? When can I join her?”
Cranford hesitated, an ominous sign. “Not a commission, exactly,” he hedged. “Not a new ship, but a special assignment from the admiralty. One that is, I believe, uniquely suited to your talents and experience, as well as your rank by birth.”
Disappointment rose sharp in Tom’s throat, and he fought to keep the bitterness from showing on his face. He could guess what was being offered: a regulating captaincy in the impress service, little better than being a kidnapper, and rightly loathed in every seaport town. Or perhaps they’d granted him a plum place in one of the dockyards, sitting day after day on a tall stool at a desk and growing fat like any other countinghouse drone.
But what else could Tom expect? It didn’t matter that he was only twenty-eight, or that he was the fourth son of the Earl of Lerchmere, or that he looked and felt as fine and fit as ever, and quite sufficient to earn the ladies’ approval. What did matter was that the navy had judged him to be an invalid officer, and the navy never changed its collective mind.
For over a year he’d been landlocked, impatiently recuperating from the wounds that had nearly killed him, but he’d beaten all the odds. He’d survived, hadn’t he? He was ready, more than ready, to offer his life again in the service of his country. He was a captain in the greatest navy in the world, his dark blue uniform coat bright with gold lace and brass buttons and hard-won medals on his breast, but none of it was worth a brass farthing without a ship and crew.
“I appreciate the special consideration, Admiral,” he began, trying to keep his words civil. “But I do not believe I require any such preferential treatment. I would prefer that my record stands upon its own merits or lacks.”
The admiral puffed out his cheeks and frowned, the thatch of his white brows bristling across his ruddy-brown face. “You know it wasn’t my decision to make, Greaves.”
“But surely you have influence to change it, sir,” said Tom. He’d spent more than half his life in the navy, and he knew the peril and consequences of speaking too forcefully to a superior, yet he was struggling to keep his temper in check. How could he do otherwise, when his whole life and future were slipping from his grasp? “A sloop, a ketch, anything with a sail! Given that the country’s at war, there surely must be some suitable command—”
“Not for a man in your condition, no.”
“For God’s sake, sir, all you must do is look at me!” For proof Tom held his arms away from his sides, strong and steady and without the slightest tremor. “I’ve mended good as new—better than new! Those infernal surgeons at Greenwich said I was as close to a miracle as they’d ever seen, Lazarus himself, and if that doesn’t make me fit for a new command, why, then I—”
“What the surgeons said was no active duty for two years,” said the admiral sternly. “Two years at the least, to see what course that musket ball takes within your chest. The navy cannot afford to have captains in command whose physical well-being is not to be trusted, especially not one carrying a chunk of French lead next to his heart.”
“But I’m not some damned cripple!” Tom thumped his fist three times on the table beside him, desperate to prove his words. “Look, sir, I’m strong as an ox, aye, and I can thrash any man who dares say otherwise!”
“Damnation, Greaves, then you’ll have to thrash me,” countered the admiral sharply, “because I’ll not let you take that risk, or risk the lives of your men in the process, not when—”
But before he could finish, the double doors between the two rooms flew open and a small, furious woman charged through them, her hands clenched into tight, tiny fists bristling with rings on nearly every finger. Although she was dressed extravagantly for so early in the day—even Tom knew that wine-colored velvet lavished with gold embroidery was not customary at this hour for Berkeley Square, nor were the lavish necklace and bracelets of rubies and pearls—her thick black hair had not yet been brushed, a mass of tangled, knotted curls that bounced against her back with each indignant step.
“Admiral Cranford!” she called, marching directly to the older man, who bowed low in return. Her English was filtered through another language, her accent without apology. “Thank the saints you are here! These women know nothing, worse than nothing! You tell them, Admiral, tell them what imbeciles they are!”
Belatedly Lady Willoughby came hurrying after, the head of the hurled porcelain monkey in her hand as evidence, and her mouth puckered with distress, as if fearing the wrong words would once again slip out.
“The girl came with the best of references, ma’am,” she said plaintively, setting the grinning monkey head on the edge of the mantel. “She has dressed the hair of the Duchess of Kent, and all her daughters. How was I to know she wouldn’t suit?”
“But I am not this Duchess of Kent, am I, eh?” said the young woman, tossing her hair back over her shoulders. “Nor am I one of her daughters, or sons, or small, yapping terriers, either. Ah, perhaps that is what your pretend-maid truly is, a groom to lapdogs! Admiral, Admiral, you see how I am treated, how little respect they show to me!”
Astounded, Tom watched and listened as if it were a Drury Lane farce. The admiral had said that they’d be joined by ladies; he should have warned him instead of this high-handed little harpy. Here he’d been struggling to control himself before his superior, while this chit felt free to rage at Admiral Cranford like a Billingsgate fishwife.
“The maid tends only to fine ladies, not to dogs,” insisted poor Lady Willoughby, wringing her hands. “Brother, I assure you no insult was ever planned or wished for!”
“‘No insult,’ ha,” repeated the younger woman darkly, lowering her chin so her heavy-lidded eyes seemed to smolder with righteous fire. “Would you have me as bald as a pigeon’s egg, then, with every hair ripped from my head? Is that how you would show me honor and respect?”
“Oh, come, ma’am, I’m sure my sister meant no insult,” said the admiral with a forced jollity. “We all want what’s best for you, you know. I’m sure your hair can be set to rights in no time.”
With an exasperated sigh, the younger woman flung her arms in the air, beseeching heaven to take her side and showing a good deal of her breasts in the process.
“Fools and lackeys, every one,” she muttered in Italian. “Toss all their wits together, and it still would not half fill a thimble!”
And that, for Tom, was enough.
“Their manners are worth a bushel of your so-called wit,” he answered in Italian, automatically using the same curt tone that served to humble disrespectful crewmen. “These fine people don’t deserve such rubbish from you. I’d say a dog groom was what you damned well do need, for I’ve never heard any other bitch carry on like you are now.”
The young woman gasped and swung around to face him, lifting her chin high. “Who are you, to dare address me so?” she asked suspiciously, continuing in Italian. “Do you not know who I am?”
“I am Captain Lord Thomas Greaves, miss,” he said with a smile and a brusque bow. “And as for your name, miss, I do not know it, nor do I particularly care if ever I do.”
“There now, Greaves, I knew you’d charm the lady by speaking to her in her own lingo,” said Cranford heartily in English. “But high time I made the proper introductions, aye? Your Royal Highness, might I present Captain Lord Thomas Greaves, the captain I told you about, and a hero if ever there was one. Greaves, the Princess Isabella di Fortunaro of Monteverde.”
“Your Royal Highness. I am honored,” said Tom, though he didn’t feel honored at all. He felt tricked. A princess, and from Monteverde at that. What in blazes was Cranford up to, anyway? Monteverde might be the oldest of the Italian monarchies, but it was also regarded as the most indolent and decadent, with more blissful corruption packed inside its borders than in the rest of the Continent combined. How could one of their princesses come to surface here, in poor Lady Willoughby’s drawing room?
He took a deep breath to control his temper, then another. “Your servant, ma’am.”
But though it was her turn to answer, she didn’t. She simply stared at him, just stared, reluctantly tipping her head back so she could meet his gaze. She was short, true, not that any man would notice her height once he’d seen how seductively rounded her small figure was beneath the red velvet.
She wasn’t pretty, either, not in the agreeable pink-and-white, strawberries-in-cream way that English girls were pretty. Her features were strong, her profile the kind minted into ancient coins. Framed by that tangle of black hair, her skin was golden pale, with a deeper rose to stain her cheeks and lips. And she seemed unable to keep still, constantly shifting and turning and twisting and gesturing, with an actress’s instinct of how best to keep all eyes firmly on her.
No, decided Tom, she wasn’t like English girls. Her beauty was richer, more opulent, like strong claret after milky tea, and likely just as apt to cause a headache and regrets the morning after.
“Your English is most accomplished, ma’am,” he said at last, falling back into Italian. If she was going to insult the others again, at least he could spare them hearing it. “I compliment you.”
Her smile didn’t reach quite her eyes. “Your Italian, Captain, is fit for the barnyard,” she said, reaching up to touch a finger to one dangling ruby earring. “However did you pretend to learn it?”
Well, then, he could smile, too, if that was the game. Any good frigate captain worth his salt recognized a challenge when given, even if it came from a princess intent upon drawing attention to her breasts by tracing her fingertips idly along the edge of her neckline.
“When I was a boy,” he explained, “my father indulged his interest in Vitruvius, and moved our family to Rome for three years. I learned Italian while there, and having often been stationed in the Mediterranean, the language has proved a useful skill.”
“Rome,” she said scornfully with a little flick of her fingers. “That explains so much.”
“Ah, but Monteverde,” he said easily. “That explains even more.”
He half expected her to slap him. If he were honest, he was almost disappointed that she didn’t. Instead she limited herself to a sibilant hiss of frustration between her clenched teeth, and an extra twitch of her dark red skirts away from him.
“I’m so glad you are here, Captain,” gushed Lady Willoughby, her relief so fervent she was nearly weeping from it. “The princess has been so lonely here, without anyone to speak with, and the condition makes her intemperate. You shall make such a difference in her life in London. How happy she must be at last to meet someone like you!”
But the princess did not look happy, nor, for that matter, was Tom himself feeling exactly cheerful. He’d come here at the admiral’s invitation, full of hope for new orders and a ship to match, and now it seemed he’d leave with neither.
“I am glad to oblige, my lady,” he said, switching to English in deference to the confused Lady Willoughby. He was determined to go now that there seemed so little point in staying. “But if you shall excuse me, I’ll say my farewells and—”
“You may not leave my presence without my permission, Captain,” said the princess tartly. “And I do not wish you to go.”
He stared at her, incredulous. “I am an officer in His Majesty’s Navy, ma’am, not one of your wretched subjects.”
“If you were, my father would have you whipped for your insolence,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “But no matter. You are to be my escort, Captain, my guard while I am exiled here in London. You are to put your life before mine to protect me, and keep me safe from the villains who would wish me harm.”
“Oh, aye, and who wouldn’t?” scoffed Tom. “What makes you believe I’ll take orders from you?”
“Because they do not come from the princess, Greaves, but from your own superiors,” said Cranford sharply, catching Tom’s arm to draw him aside, away from the women and into the corner.
“Blast you, Greaves, haven’t you figured this yet?” Cranford said, lowering his voice as he continued. “Princess di Fortunaro was rescued from Buonaparte by a British navy vessel, and as long as she chooses to stay in England, she will remain under the navy’s protection. That’s His Majesty’s own wish and decision, Greaves, not the princess’s, not mine, and most certainly not yours. It’s the king’s, mind?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Tom, his shoulders squared at attention and his expression studiously blank, the only acceptable response for a sailor being dressed down. “I know where my duty must lie, sir.”
“Very well.” Cranford’s voice was flinty, leaving no chink for argument. “These are your orders, Greaves. You will be quartered here in my sister’s house, for as long as the princess also remains as a guest. You will accompany the princess whenever she leaves the house, you will be armed, and you will be ever watchful for her safety and well-being.”
“I am to be the princess’s bodyguard, sir?” This was worse than being a mere clerk in the dockyards. Far, far worse. “Those are my orders, sir?”
“That, and more,” said the admiral. “Because you’re a lord in your own right, you’ll be her escort, invited to attend the same parties and balls and whatever other folderol pleases the princess, and to the palace, of course.”
“She is in such danger, sir?”
“She is a vibrant symbol of resistance to Buonaparte’s forces,” said Cranford firmly, “and in these unsettled times, symbols matter a great deal. Her life could be at constant risk, and yet it is important that she be seen about London, seen by the very scoundrels who would kill her.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Tom with gloomy resignation. He would rather face any odds in battle at sea than suffer through this on land.
The admiral clapped him on the shoulder. “Buck up, Greaves,” he said. “It’s not so bad as all that, is it? How many times in your career will you ever receive orders as agreeable as these? Squiring a pretty young princess about London at the height of the season?”
Tom didn’t agree. To be chained to the side of that spoiled creature through an endless round of noisy, crowded parties—damnation, why didn’t he just put the pistol to his own head now, and finish what the French had begun?
He glanced past the admiral’s shoulder. The princess was standing before the fireplace, studying her reflection in the looking glass as she smoothed and braided her hair, using only her fingers. She caught his eye, paused, then looked back into the mirror.
“I had no choice but to learn to dress my own hair while I was trapped upon that verminous warship,” she explained as she deftly coiled the braid and tucked it into a neat knot on the top of her hair. “There was no proper lady’s maid there, either.”
Stunned, Tom watched as she took her bonnet from the waiting maidservant and settled it on her head herself. But it wasn’t just seeing how capably she could braid her own hair after she’d made such a fuss. It was the way she was finishing dressing here in the middle of the drawing room. There was an unsettling intimacy to her movements, a seductive balance between royal propriety and nonchalant display, and almost too late Tom realized he’d been staring at the way her breasts pushed higher when she lifted her hands to place her hat.
“If only I had known, ma’am,” began Lady Willoughby, unable to keep the plaintive exasperation from her voice. “If only you had told me you could do—that is, that you knew how you liked your hair dressed, why, surely we could have—”
“Just because I can, Lady Willoughby, does not mean I should.” The princess held out her arms so the maid could drape a paisley cashmere shawl over her shoulders. “Pray recall who I am before you make another such suggestion. Now come, Captain Greaves. The carriage should be waiting, or at least it shall if that has not been bungled like everything else.”
“You are leaving, ma’am?” Tom uneasily realized he was to be included in her plans. “You have an invitation?”
She folded her arms before her, the long tassels on her shawl hanging down nearly to her knees. “I am going anywhere outside this prison of a house. Beyond that, I neither know nor care.”
Without waiting for Tom’s answer or even to see if he followed, she swept grandly from the room and toward the front door, leaving Lady Willoughby to once again scurry along in her wake.
“Women.” Cranford shook his head, as if that single word could sum up all the world’s real ills. “You’ll need a pistol before you accompany the princess, Greaves. Unless, of course, you are carrying one at present.”
“No, sir.” Tom could not believe that these really were his new orders from the admiralty, to trail around London like an armed nursemaid after a spoiled princess. Damnation, he didn’t want to believe it.
“These shall see you through.” Cranford opened the top drawer of the sideboard and took out a long pistol box, holding it open for Tom to choose which gun he preferred. So all of this had been planned from the start, even his acceptance, and as he lifted the nearest gun from the case, he wondered if even that, too, had been preordained. There was nothing fancy about the gun, a standard-issue pistol such as any sailor would carry into battle, yet Tom found the familiar feel of such a gun in his hand oddly comforting. At least something in this morning was as it should be.
“I do not expect you to train that upon every greengrocer’s window, Greaves.” The admiral watched with approval as Tom raised his arm to test the gun’s sight. “After all, we’re in London, not the Peninsula. It’s more a precaution than anything, a way of letting the rest of the world know you are serious about the princess’s well-being. Most of the villains who could bring her any real danger are cowards, anyway, and simply being at her side should be enough to scare them away.”
“I shall follow my orders, sir.” Tom took the plain leather belt that the admiral offered, buckled it low around his waist and hooked the pistol to the ring on the side. It wasn’t exactly the height of London fashion, hanging there over his waistcoat, but it would serve the purpose that the admiral wished.
The admiral nodded. “I never doubted you’d do your duty, Greaves. You’re an officer of the king, and you’ll do whatever is necessary. While you are out with the princess, I’ll have word sent to your lodgings to have your dunnage packed and sent here. You have a manservant?”
“John Kerr, sir. He has been with me since my first command.” Old Kerr would be as disappointed about these new circumstances as Tom was himself, and just as unhappy that they wouldn’t be returning to sea.
“Then I shall make certain my sister has a place for him here, as well.” The admiral unstopped the decanter of port on the sideboard, poured it into two glasses and handed one to Tom. “Here you are. You might need a little fortifying, eh?”
Tom took the glass, the sun turning the liquor golden between his fingers. The surgeons had advised him against drinking, fearing the toll that alcohol might take on his heart, but when he thought of the woman waiting for him in the carriage outside, he decided the risk was worth it. If the port did kill him, then he wouldn’t have to join her after all.
“Long live the king.” Cranford lifted his glass, and Tom did, too. “And confusion to the French.”
“Confusion to the French,” echoed Tom, “especially in Monteverde.”
He downed the port in one long swallow, feeling its heat ripple through him. He stood very still, glass in hand, and waited for the shock, or stabbing pain, or whatever it was that the liquor was supposed to do to him.
But nothing happened. The songbirds in the garden outside were still chirping among the roses, the admiral’s nose was still red, and he, Captain Lord Thomas Greaves, was still very much alive.
“Best you were off, Greaves.” The admiral set down his glass, wiping his mouth with the length of his finger. “The princess will not like to be kept waiting.”
No, she wouldn’t. Tom didn’t need to reread his orders to know that, and with a last bow to the admiral, he headed toward the front door, the pistol heavy against his hip and the prospect of guarding Princess Isabella di Fortunaro a burden he couldn’t escape.
Chapter Three
I sabella stood exactly in the center of Lady Willoughby’s front hall and tried hard—very hard—to keep from losing her temper. It was hot in the airless space, with the doors and windows closed tight and the afternoon sun streaming in through the fan light overdoor. Inside Isabella’s black lace gloves, her hands were sweating, and the long curving feather on her bonnet kept tickling the nape of her neck in a most annoying fashion. The tall case clock ticked away each second with a solemn finality, counting off the wasted minutes that Captain Lord Thomas Greaves was making her wait.
She did not like waiting. She never had, and she never should, considering her rank, but she was determined to give him the benefit of the doubt for this first time. It might not be his fault. Likely the admiral was keeping him with some sort of nonsense, the foolish old man. She would be gracious, and grant the captain the favor of her patience.
But if he ever dared keep her waiting like this again—ah, she would not forgive him, ever.
“I am sure the captain will here shortly, ma’am.” Lady Willoughby gave Isabella her usual watery smile. “He seems like a very nice gentleman.”
Isabella sniffed. “He has not been brought here to be nice. He is here to keep me safe.”
Once again she looked out the long window beside the door. Lady Willoughby’s glossy green carriage with the matched grays was sitting there waiting at the curb, taunting her with the freedom it represented. She didn’t care if the others believed she was exaggerating: she was a prisoner. This was the closest she’d been to leaving this house since she’d been brought to it in the middle of the night, three weeks before, and she could not wait to feel the warmth of the sunlight and the breeze across her skin, and to see more of the city beyond this single boring square.
“I am very sorry, princess,” Lady Willoughby said, as if she could read Isabella’s thoughts, “but I cannot let you go alone. For your own good, you see. You must wait for the captain to escort you to the carriage.”
Isabella frowned, glancing pointedly at the two large footmen standing ready to barricade the door if she tried to escape.
“Oh, yes, of course, you silly goose,” she muttered in Italian, as much to irritate the other woman as to keep her own comments safe. “We cannot tax the gaolers hired to keep me caged like an animal, can we?”
“Yes, just so.” With no notion of what the princess had said, Lady Willoughby smiled again, even as she wrung her hands with despair. “I’m sure when the captain comes, you shall have the nicest drive imaginable.”
Isabella smiled in return and kept speaking in Italian. “True, true, true, quite the nicest, once you give the captain my leash to hold for himself.”
She couldn’t play such tricks on Captain Lord Greaves. How could she have known that Cranford would have found even a single man in this country to speak Italian so well? Tears had started to her eyes when she’d heard the familiar, rolling words, she’d been that struck with sudden homesickness, and for one horrible moment she’d gasped aloud from the shock. But after that she’d managed to hide her feelings, the way a princess always must. She hadn’t let the captain know how surprised she’d been or how lonely she’d felt, and she certainly hadn’t revealed that she’d found him passing handsome, too.
He wasn’t like the other English sailors she’d met on the interminable voyage here, rough, ill-spoken men with dreadful battle scars and missing teeth, and he wasn’t like the sorry old warhorses the admiral had first introduced her to, either. This captain stood straight and proud, his dark blue uniform tailored to show off his broad shoulders and flat stomach. He had fire to him, too, a challenge in his blue eyes and a bite to his smile, and he hadn’t been afraid of her. That was rare, and she liked it.
To be sure, he hadn’t shown her one iota of the respect due her rank, but she could teach him that. He was English, and even an English lord like Captain Greaves could not be expected to understand the finely detailed etiquette of the Monteverdian court. But he seemed clever enough. After these last long, lonely weeks, she would welcome any such challenge, an amusing way to pass the days until Buonaparte was defeated and she could sail for home.
Behind her she could hear his measured footsteps at last coming down the hall to join her, just as she could hear Lady Willoughby’s little birdlike exclamations—such a meek and spineless creature!—as she rushed to greet him. But Isabella didn’t turn, not at first, keeping her face well hidden inside the curving silken arc of her bonnet’s brim.
His first lesson would be simple enough. She would not jump for the delight of his company. He must come to her, and be grateful for her notice.
“What detained you, Captain Greaves?” she asked at last, without turning. “You knew that I wished to leave directly.”
She knew he couldn’t ignore her, not only because of his orders, but because she’d taken care of exactly where she stood. She’d learned that from watching her mother, another of royalty’s little tricks. The sunbeams slicing through the fan light must be making the red velvet of her gown glow like a flame against the stark black and white of the marble floor. How could he possibly be looking anywhere else? It was difficult being a small woman, particularly here in England where the females seemed all to be great gangly storks, and she must rely upon such careful planning to keep attention focused on her.
And for extra emphasis, she let his silence stand for another half beat before, at last, she broke it.
“You have no answer for me, Captain?” She turned, just enough to look over her shoulder, and she did not smile. “No explanation for your delaying me?”
He bowed, his wavy hair falling forward over his brow. “Is there any explanation that would be acceptable to you, ma’am?”
“No. There is not.” She was surprised that he’d answered her question with a question, and surprised, too, that he wouldn’t tell her the obvious reason, that he’d been with the admiral. Unless he hadn’t—a possibility that annoyed her even as it piqued her curiosity. “But no explanation is no excuse, either.”
“I didn’t claim that it was, ma’am.” One of the footmen handed him his gold-trimmed hat, and he settled it squarely on his head, as if preparing for battle. “Is the carriage here, Lady Willoughby?”
“Yes, Captain my lord.” Nervously, Lady Willoughby peered out the window, just to be certain, as if the carriage might have somehow been whisked away by thieves when she wasn’t looking. “But at my brother’s request, I have kept the princess within the house until you joined her.”
“‘Within, within!’” Unable to contain her impatience, Isabella flung one end of the tasseled shawl over her shoulder. “You have done nothing but keep me within, Lady Willoughby, ever since I came here! You might as well have locked me in your darkest dungeon, behind bars of iron, for all that I have been your prisoner!”
“If that is the case, ma’am,” he said, taking her by the elbow without waiting for permission, “then we had better go without.”
She began to pull her elbow away, not liking such familiarity, but then the two footmen blocking the door parted for Isabella and the captain like Moses at the Red Sea. The door swung open, too, and they were outside, on the steps—free!—and Isabella forgot all about the hand at her elbow.
She looked up at the sky and blinked at the brightness. The London sky lacked the brilliance of the one that covered Monteverde, and unlike that perfect enameled blue, this sky was muffled by a haze of coal smoke. But it was still the sky, not the ceiling of a drawing room, and she couldn’t help smiling at the difference as the tassels on her shawl rippled in the breeze.
Yet the captain didn’t share her pleasure. “Come along, ma’am,” he said, steering her down the steps as if her elbow were the rudder on some small boat. “It’s not wise for you to stand out here in the open.”
With an unhappy little sigh, she let him hurry her into the carriage. Not that she had much choice: even with no more contact than his hand on her elbow, she was conscious of how much larger, how much stronger, he was than she. This is what he was supposed to do, watch out for her welfare, but she’d never before had to consider herself a target.
“You ordered this closed carriage, didn’t you, Captain?” she asked as she climbed inside, the leather squabs and polished brass trim warm from waiting in the sun. “After all I’ve been through, you knew I would wish for an open carriage, so I might feel the air, but you chose a closed one instead.”
“Then we’ll keep the windows open.” His glance swept over the quiet square, searching for any sign of something or someone that didn’t belong. “And I believe it was the admiral who suggested the closed carriage.”
“Open windows aren’t the same.”
“No, they’re not.” His expression was stern, all business, as he sat across from her. “I won’t pretend otherwise, ma’am. But I agree with the admiral’s choice. In an open carriage, you would be far too vulnerable to any sharpshooter with a good eye.”
She had not heard that word before—sharpshooter—but she’d no trouble deciphering its meaning. Instantly she pictured herself as she’d appear in that open carriage, a bright patch of red and black, visible from every window and every rooftop they would pass. She knew she should be grateful for the captain’s experience, but the reality behind it frightened her. Though her parents had tried to keep the worst news from her, she knew what had happened to the French royal family. A crown didn’t grant the same omnipotence it once did; Isabella had only to consider how she herself had been sent away to understand that.
Yet she didn’t want to be a villain to those who supported Buonaparte, or a symbol for the English who didn’t. All she wished was to be herself, and for the captain to be the way he’d been inside the house, bantering with her in Italian and not searching shop windows for lurking assassins with chilly English efficiency.
The footman latched the door shut, and at last the carriage rumbled to a start, the iron-bound wheels scraping over the paving stones as they left the square and headed along the city streets. She leaned forward, eager for even a glimpse of the city.
“So where are we bound, ma’am?” The buildings and streets they were passing would mean something to him, neighborhoods and districts he could recognize, while to her everything had a blurry sameness through the window. “Did you or Lady Willoughby tell the driver a destination?”
“I didn’t know one to tell him.” She felt foolish and lost, having earned the freedom she’d craved without any sense now of what to do with it. “I have been too much a prisoner to learn of anything beyond those four grim walls.”
“Ma’am, you were a guest in a Berkeley Square town house.” The captain’s smile was patient and obligatory, a smile guaranteed to make her feel even more foolish and lost. “No one would honestly consider Lady Willoughby’s house to be a prison.”
“It was the same as one.” Her chin trembled. “They allowed me no liberty, no privacy.”
“You allowed them no peace,” he countered. “Nothing Lady Willoughby might have done to you merited that tantrum over your hair. When I was a boy, my mother would have taken a hairbrush to me or my brothers or sisters for behavior like that, and she wouldn’t have used it on our heads, either.”
She’d thought he’d understand, but he didn’t, or at least he was pretending not to, with this nonsense about his mother’s hairbrush. “Your mother wasn’t a queen.”
“No,” he said, pushing his hat back from his forehead with his thumb, “but she was an English countess, which amounts to much the same thing.”
She frowned, wondering what exactly her mother would do or say in this circumstance. “But Lady Willoughby and her servants have been unkind to me, Captain. They did not treat me like a guest. They searched through my trunks and mussed my gowns.”
“How else could they be sure that no enemy could have hidden something harmful in your belongings?” he asked, the logic perfectly clear to him. “They meant only to protect you.”
She sniffed. “They have intercepted my invitations and letters of welcome from my cousins, your English King George and Queen Charlotte, and kept them from me.”
“Lady Willoughby wouldn’t do that, especially not with correspondence from His Majesty. More likely His Majesty has been occupied with affairs of state, and has not yet, ah, found the time to write to you.”
“No, Captain, that was not it at all.” She lowered her voice in confidence, even though they were alone. “Because I am a foreigner, and not English like them, the persons in this house will not trust me. They will not even try.”
He raised one skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t believe that. It’s rubbish.”
“You should believe it, rubbish or not, because it is so,” she said, switching back to speaking Italian. She leaned closer to him, close enough that she could see the darker flecks of blue that sparked his eyes. She clasped her hands before her, beseeching as the shawl slithered off her arm. “Can you trust me, Captain?”
But though she waited, he didn’t answer. Instead of listening, he’d let his eyes follow the shawl as it slipped from her shoulders and came to an abrupt stop there on the neckline of her gown. Monteverdian ladies were not ashamed to display their figures to the best advantage possible, and Isabella had soon realized she wore her gowns cut much lower over her breasts than Lady Willoughby and her dour friends did. Now the captain must have realized the difference, too, his English efficiency scattered to oblivion.
So this, then, was how her mother would have ruled the captain, but the thought gave her no satisfaction. She didn’t want him to be like every other man, whether English or Monteverdian. She wanted him to be better.
“I have trusted no one since I left Monteverde, Captain.” She pulled the shawl back over her shoulder, willing to put aside her disappointment and give him another chance. “No one at all, and certainly none of your English. But you, Captain—truly, I might be able to trust you, if you can but trust me.”
He cleared his throat, and at last looked back at her face. And he knew he’d erred. She could see the chagrin in his expression, which was, she supposed, something.
“I’m an officer of the king, ma’am, sworn to act with honor,” he said. “You should be able to trust me.”
“You are a man first,” she said, thoughtfully stroking one of the shawl’s tassels between her fingers. To her he’d always be a man first, and what a shame it was that he didn’t seem to think of himself that way, too. “And you are a man who hasn’t answered my question. Can you trust me, Captain, so that I might trust you?”
“I told you, ma’am, as an officer—”
“Oh, Captain, not again,” she said. “How can you say that to me, when the others were officers, too?”
“Others, ma’am?” he asked with wary surprise.
“Oh, yes, there were three other captains before you, all old men with white hair, puffed up with their own self-importance and gold braid.” She waggled her fingers over her shoulders to mimic the heavy gold fringes on their epaulets. They had each tried to dictate to her what was proper and what wasn’t, as if they meant to replace her father. They’d lectured her about her behavior and how she’d dressed, and now—now they were lecturing someone else.
He frowned. “What became of them, these other captains?”
So the admiral hadn’t told him he hadn’t been the first choice. She was sorry for that. When she’d told him about the others, she’d only wanted him to realize how superior he was to them, not to make him feel as if he were fourth-rate. Ah, a man’s pride was such a delicate thing!
“Oh, they did not please me,” she said with airy nonchalance, trying to make light of the other men to save his feelings. “I told the admiral to send them away, because I could not trust them.”
“You dismissed them?” He sounded shocked. “Older officers, white-haired gentlemen who deserved respect for their rank and years of service? You dismissed them?”
“I didn’t,” she said, surprised he would be so upset. At least he had some pretense to a title and noble blood. The others had been disagreeable commoners, underlings, and surely his inferiors. “The admiral did. But I do not see why I am not entitled to—”
“You sent those other officers away,” he said, “and because of your whims, they’ve failed their orders. Because of you, ma’am, their lives and careers must be in rare shambles.”
“Their failure is hardly my fault!”
“Who else could be to blame?” he demanded. “How in blazes could you do that to those men, ma’am? It’s bad enough when you berate poor Lady Willoughby, but for you to ruin three honorable gentlemen officers because they did not suit you—”
“I thought I could trust you, Captain,” she said defensively. “I thought because you were as unhappy as I am, you could understand me.”
“Who in blazes says I’m unhappy?”
“You don’t have to say it, Captain!” She sliced her gloved hand through the air as if to cut through his protests. “You do not have to speak one word, either in English or in your barbarous attempt at Italian. You make all perfectly clear. You are no more pleased to be in London than I. You would much rather be back on one of your great smelly navy boats with a ruffian crew of thieves and cutpurses.”
“Ships, ma’am.” He was biting off each word. “In most cases, an English vessel of war is a ship, not a—”
“Very well, then, Captain. A ship. You would rather be in one of your great smelly navy ships than here in this carriage with me. And I see no reason to disoblige you.”
She stood upright, swaying unsteadily in the moving carriage, and thumped her knuckles on the roof of the carriage. “Driver, stop! Here, now! Stop at once!”
The captain grabbed her by the arm, trying to pull her back down on the seat so she wouldn’t fall as the carriage rumbled to a halt. Through the windows Isabella could see other carriages and chaises and shops with stylish ladies and gentlemen strolling along the pavement, enough for her to realize they were on some fashionable street. To Isabella’s satisfaction, many of those passersby were already turning to look at the commotion inside Lady Willoughby’s glossy green carriage.
The captain, of course, thought otherwise. “A moment now, ma’am,” he ordered as he tried to maneuver her back to the seat. “A moment to calm yourself.”
She gasped with indignant shock. She could not recall the last time anyone had dared restrain her like this against her will.
“I will not calm myself,” she sputtered, “because I do not need calming!”
“I won’t let you go until you agree to be reasonable, ma’am.” He held her lightly, almost gently, but there was no mistaking his strength. “I don’t want you hurting yourself.”
“The only one who’ll harm me is you,” she said, trying to wriggle free. It wasn’t easy. His hands were bigger than she’d first realized, his fingers easily spanning her arm in a way that was daunting, but oddly exciting, too. “I order you to release me, Captain, release me at once!”
“My orders from the admiralty must come first, ma’am.” He was working so hard to stop her without hurting her, that, under any other circumstances, she would have laughed out loud. “Damnation, why won’t you show a little sense and stop this?”
“Because I am a Fortunaro princess, Captain,” she said furiously, her temper finally spilling over, “and the Fortunari do whatever they please.”
Abruptly the carriage halted, throwing the captain off balance, and swiftly Isabella jerked her arm free of his grasp. She unhooked the latch on the door and shoved it open, the ribbons on her bonnet blowing up across her face as she teetered on the edge. She’d come too far to change her mind now, and before the captain could pull her back, she stepped from the carriage, her head regally high.
But she’d neglected to wait for the footman to open the step for her, and instead of descending grandly from the carriage, she pitched forward through the empty space in a tangle of red velvet and landed hard on the pavement on her hands and knees, without any grandeur at all.
“Ma’am!” At once the captain was there at her side, kneeling on the pavement beside her. “Are you injured? Should I send for a surgeon?”
“Of course I am not hurt,” she snapped, scrambling back to her feet and brushing him away as well as the two footmen. The palms of her hands stung inside her gloves and she was quite sure her knees were bruised and scraped, but she would never give him the satisfaction of admitting it. Even if a Fortunaro princess might be foolish enough to leap without looking, she would keep the resultant suffering to herself. “I am not some piece of delicate porcelain, to be shattered with such ease.”
He looked relieved. “Then let me help you back into the carriage.”
“Why should I do that?” She straightened her bonnet, retying the ribbons, and looked up at the sign over the shop before her. At least they’d stopped before one she’d plausibly visit, the windows filled with an enticement of bonnets, gloves and ribbons. “We shall go inside here, Captain, to—to Copperthwaite’s Millinery. Yes, that is my wish. A fine shop is not like an open street. There can be no danger to me inside. I shall be quite safe.”
She smiled, proud that she’d made her mouth bend around those awkward English words. Walking forward toward the shop took effort as her bruised knees protested, but through sheer will she kept her smile in place and didn’t wince. Other people were watching, curious and listening, eager to be able to describe any mistake she might make, and she was determined to earn their admiration, not their contempt.
“You can’t do this, ma’am,” said the captain in an impatient whisper as he walked beside her. “It’s not wise.”
“Then I am not wise, because I cannot see reason or cause for not entering this shop.” She was enjoying herself now, relishing the attention of the growing well-dressed crowd on the sidewalk around them, and she raised her voice so the others might hear her. “How am I to earn support for my dearest Monteverde here in London if I never show myself to the English people?”
An excited murmur rippled through the crowd, and she smiled just enough to acknowledge it. This was a part of being her that she’d missed, a part that the captain couldn’t understand, and how could he, really?
One of the footmen hurried to open the shop’s door for her, and she sailed inside. Because Mama had always insisted upon having the dressmakers and jewelers and everyone else come to her at the palace, Isabella had no firsthand experience with shops, and she gazed about this one now with unabashed curiosity.
One long room was lined on either side with pale green counters, and cushioned chairs for customers. While most of the goods were hidden away in the drawers of the tall cabinets behind the counters, special selections had been artfully arranged here and there to catch a buyer’s eye: wide-brimmed leghorn hats with silk flowers, pastel kidskin gloves, veils and ribbons and stocking and garters. Isabella couldn’t imagine having such a selection to choose from, and for once it actually did seem as if the common women might have the advantage over her and her mother in the palace.
With the gracious smile still on her face, Isabella stopped just inside the doors, waiting to be properly recognized and greeted. Every shop girl had already turned to look, as had every customer, and Isabella beamed at the attention. Surely in such a center of fashion as this she would be recognized; surely no assassins could be lurking here.
An elegant older woman glided toward Isabella, the curled ribbons on her cap floating gently around her cheeks. She dipped a genteel curtsy, and Isabella nodded in return.
But Mrs. Copperthwaite wasn’t noticing. “Good day, Captain Lord Greaves, good day! We are so honored to have you visit us—a gentleman of your heroic reputation!”
Beside Isabella, the captain bowed. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “You’re far too generous with your praise. All I did was for my country, nothing that any officer of the king wouldn’t have done in my place.”
“Oh, no, Captain my lord, I would dare differ!” exclaimed Mrs. Copperthwaite. “You are a hero, Captain my lord, and I will not have you argue!”
Mrs. Copperthwaite sighed and clasped her hands before her breasts in a way that Isabella found annoyingly overwrought. A hero, a hero, thought Isabella crossly. If this captain were such a great war hero, then why was he mired here on land, making her life so miserable?
Mrs. Copperthwaite sighed again, at last recovered. “Pray, pray, what shall you have this day, Captain my lord? How might we oblige you?”
“Nothing for me, ma’am,” said the captain. Even with the shopkeeper so shamelessly fawning over him, he was still watching out for Isabella’s safety, his eyes roving all over the counters and cabinets and other customers as he looked for danger. “Though likely my sisters would disagree.”
“Then for—for your friend.” Finally Mrs. Copperthwaite turned to Isabella with a distinctly slighter curtsy. “How might we serve you, miss?”
The shop owner’s expression was respectful enough, but her appraisal was so open—taking in everything from Isabella’s heeled slippers to the plume on her hat, and especially the un-English velvet and gold gown in between—that Isabella knew at once what lay behind it. Because she wasn’t dressed like a milky-mousy English lady, she must be a—a harlot.
“I am not this man’s mistress.” Isabella drew herself up with regal disdain. “I do not know what should give you such a ridiculous idea.”
Beside her, the captain made a growling grumble deep in his throat, and already she knew what that meant, too. He wanted her to behave.
“Mrs. Copperthwaite has said nothing of the sort.” His voice had a forced lightness to it, more warning for Isabella. “She intends no insult to you. She doesn’t know who you are, that is all.”
Isabella didn’t deign to look at him. Most likely he was right about this Mrs. Copperthwaite—if the woman wished to keep her trade, she could ill afford to make any judgments about her customers—but Isabella had no wish to admit to the captain that she’d been wrong. Royalty never did that.
“Then tell her who I am, Captain,” she ordered. “Tell them all.”
His dark brows came together, and the little muscles along the line of his jaw twitched. “That would not be wise.”
“Oh, you are too stubborn!” Without thinking, she lapsed into Italian, flinging her shawl over one shoulder, tassels flying. “Haven’t we already determined that I shall never be a wise woman, not by your preposterous standards?”
Not only was his jaw twitching, but along that same jaw a mottled red flush was now spreading from the immaculate white linen of his shirt.
“Your wisdom, or lack of it, is not my affair,” he said, also in Italian. “Your welfare and safety are. Few in London know you are here, but if you choose to announce yourself like this, in the middle of Copperthwaite’s, then I’ll guarantee the scandal sheets will be filled with it tomorrow.”
“Saints in heaven, what if they are? It will still be your duty to protect me, won’t it?”
“It will,” he said, “but you’ll also make it a damned sight more difficult. Now come, you’ve done enough damage here. Back to the carriage before—”
“Oh, Your Royal Highness,” cried a startled voice in the same Italian. “It is you! Praise the merciful Mother, it is you!”
A small, dark woman in a plain seamstress’s cap and apron rushed from behind the counters toward Isabella. Her round-cheeked face and her singsong dialect could have belonged to any woman in a Monteverdian market, and because of it Isabella smiled, touched by such an unexpected reminder of home.
But before the woman came closer, the captain lunged forward and grabbed her around the waist, jerking her back against his chest. The woman shrieked and fought him, struggling to break free as he caught her right hand and held it firmly in her grasp.
“Maria!” Mrs. Copperthwaite said sharply. “Maria, stop this at once and explain yourself!”
Still the woman plunged and kicked, while only Isabella and the captain knew that she was spewing out the vilest, most profane insults imaginable against every member of the Fortunaro family. She kept the fingers of one hand clenched tightly, and as she tried to twist around toward the captain, the light caught a flash of a polished blade. Shocked, Isabella could only stand and watch, her welcoming smile now frozen on her face.
“Drop it now.” His voice was harsh, efficient. “Save yourself, and surrender.”
“To the devil with you, you English bastard!” she cried, breathing hard with desperation as she tried one last time to twist free. “You deserve to die for defending the royalist bitch!”
But the woman’s strength was spent. The captain pried the woman’s clasped fingers open, and a sharp-bladed pair of sewing scissors dropped to the floor with a clatter. Gasps and ladylike murmurs of horrified surprise rippled through the other customers and shop girls, while the other seamstresses crowded in the doorway to the workroom they were never supposed to leave.
“Send for the constable,” said the captain. “Now.” Obeying instantly, one of the shop girls ran into the street.
Two of the footmen had hurried to relieve him, each taking one of the woman’s arms to hold her until the constable came. Calmly the captain collected the scissors from the floor where they’d fallen, and wrapped them in his handkerchief before he slipped the little bundle of evidence into his pocket. He ignored the woman now, her cap gone and her hair bedraggled and tears of fury streaming down her face as she continued her stream of curses and threats.
But Isabella didn’t have the power to ignore it. She felt the woman’s hatred wash over her like a wave, the intensity of it shocking and confusing, too. Then she noticed the crude necklace that had slipped free of the woman’s kerchief when she’d struggled with Tom. Only Isabella had recognized the tiny triangle of twigs bound with red thread on a black cord.
Isabella knew the symbol, yet she didn’t: a family sign, Anna had told her. But what kind of family—what kind of violence—would link Anna to this woman, and now to Isabella herself?
She felt shaken, her knees trembling and weak beneath her. She’d always believed her father was a good man, and a good king, as well. Buonaparte was the despot, not Father, and as soon as the French could be driven out, the people would rejoice and welcome Father back to his throne. That was the truth, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
Because of Father—because of her entire family—this woman had wanted her dead, and if the captain had not jumped between them, she would have succeeded. Isabella had never seen anyone risk their own life for hers, and the responsibility of it scared her, too. What if the captain had been hurt or even killed trying to save her, simply because she’d insisted on being unwise?
Yet when he came to her now, she saw only concern for her welfare in his face: no reproach, none of the blame that she knew she deserved.
“You are unharmed, ma’am?” he asked her in a gruff whisper. He still spoke in Italian, for her, and that small thoughtfulness was nearly enough to make her weep. “You’ll be safe enough from her now, you know.”
“Oh, Captain my lord, I am so sorry this has happened!” Mrs. Copperthwaite was flushed and distraught, seeing a scandal that could destroy her business. “How was I to know the creature was mad? She has not been a fortnight in my employ, and I only took her in from pity, and because her stitching was so fine, but now—now the only place fit for her will be the gaol!”
“The woman must be tried under your English law.” Isabella spoke again in English. She knew she must be strong and calm, a Fortunaro lioness, and not let anyone see the terror that still hammered in her chest. “Then I am sure she will receive the punishment she deserves.”
“You show great character and courage, miss.” Mrs. Copperthwaite’s smile had a desperate edge. “No wonder Captain his Lord Greaves counts you among his acquaintance, miss.”
The seamstress twisted again in the footmen’s grasp, just enough so she could spit at Isabella’s feet.
“Ha, she is no miss!” she shouted in English, making sure everyone would hear. “You do not know who she is? You do not know?”
“Quiet,” ordered the captain sharply. “You’ve said enough.”
But the woman only laughed, even as the two men that held her half dragged her toward the door.
“She is the only daughter of the villainous royal oppressor of the Monteverdian people!” she shouted over her shoulder. “She is the Princess Isabella di Fortunaro, may she burn forever in the hottest flames of hell!”
Chapter Four
M rs. Copperthwaite gasped, audible to all in the suddenly silent shop. It was equally evident that she was reappraising the princess, trying to shift her opinion of the young woman’s flamboyant dress from that of a gaudy actress or mistress to exotic, eccentric royalty.
“Is this—is this so?” she asked tentatively. “Are you truly—”
“Yes,” the princess said softly, her voice scarcely more than a whisper. “I am.”
“Oh, my goodness.” Mrs. Copperthwaite’s hand fluttered over her chest. “Oh, Your Royal Highness, forgive me!”
She sank into a deep curtsy before the princess, her head bowed and meek. One by one, all the other women in the room followed, graceful dips of crushing pale linen and silk.
It was like nothing Tom had ever witnessed, a scene better suited for the boards at Covent Garden than a Bond Street milliner’s: a melodramatic capture, the princess’s true identity revealed by her would-be assassin, and then in unison every person in the whole wretched shop dropped in an awestruck curtsy. The princess herself couldn’t have choreographed it for more self-centered grandeur.
And yet Tom saw at once that she wasn’t enjoying the spectacle at all. Although he’d easily thwarted her attacker, the surprise and shock had shaken the princess in ways he hadn’t expected. She wasn’t accustomed to real danger like that he’d encountered all his life, and it showed. She’d turned uncharacteristically silent, for one thing, and inside the black brim of her bonnet her face had gone as white as bleached linen, her dark eyes enormous with fear and her mouth pinched. All of her imperious mannerisms had fled, and what was left made her seem very young and very, very vulnerable. She’d stopped being the grand royal Monteverdian princess, and become like any other young woman abruptly confronted with her own mortality.
Thomas held his elbow out for her to take, and when she didn’t, he gently captured her little gloved hand himself and tucked it into the crook of his arm. Following his orders, he had wanted to remove her from the store before anyone learned she was a princess. Now, with that secret gone, he realized how much more important it was for the woman herself that he extricate her from this situation as soon as he could.
“Shall we leave now, ma’am?” he asked. “The carriage is just outside.”
She nodded, and took a shuddering breath as she turned toward Mrs. Copperthwaite. “You may rise. No such ceremony is necessary.”
“Oh, but it is, ma’am!” The older woman straightened, her eager smile proof of how much she wished to gain a royal customer. “It’s not every day we have a great lady of your rank honor us with your custom. What pleases you, ma’am? What might I fetch to show you?”
“Another time, perhaps. I find I am no longer in the humor for such diversions.” She raised her chin, a bit of her customary demeanor returning. “Captain, I am ready.”
“Good day, Mrs. Copperthwaite.” Tom bowed solemnly, then led the princess from the store to the carriage. She managed her exit with a sweeping grace, her free arm angled from her body to show off the drape of her shawl, but only he was aware of how heavily she was leaning on his arm for support.
“You were brave, ma’am,” he said as the carriage drew away from the pavement. “That wasn’t easy for you, I’m sure. You did well.”
“I did not.” Unhappily she slumped back against the squabs. “I wasn’t brave. I was unwise. You said so yourself.”
“That was before, ma’am.”
“Saints in heaven, such a mortal difference.” She sighed and pulled off her bonnet, letting it drop onto the seat beside her. Even in the warm carriage, the color had not returned to her cheeks, leaving her with a drained, forlorn pallor. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I do not wish to speak of this morning again, Captain.”
“I am sorry, ma’am, but you must.” Though he was trying to be kind, there were simply too many unanswered questions about this morning to pretend it hadn’t happened. “You can’t pretend this didn’t happen. I will send for a surgeon to attend you once we return to the house if that will—”
“I told you, Captain, I am not fragile, and I do not require any of your surgeons’ attendings.” She sighed again, wincing as she rubbed her palms together. “Now I wish quiet to contemplate.”
Thomas frowned. The princess did not strike him as a contemplative woman by nature, but if that would help her recover, he could scarcely object.
“Very well, then,” he said softly. “We shall speak later.”
“Later,” she mumbled, her eyes squeezed shut. “Not now.”
Tom suspected she was only pretending to sleep, just as she was pretending to contemplate, but he would grant her that, too. He could use a bit of contemplation himself. Although he had already realized that nothing concerned with the princess would be easy sailing, even so he couldn’t have predicted the disaster they’d found in that infernal ladies’ shop.
What incredible odds had placed the Monteverdian seamstress in Copperthwaite’s? Monteverde was a tiny country. There couldn’t be that many refugees making their way to England, let alone living and working at a skilled trade in London while they plotted revenge against their former king. How much more were those odds compounded by the preposterous coincidence of the princess impulsively stumbling from the carriage into that particular shop at that particular time? Not even the most confirmed gamblers at White’s could have predicted such a sequence.
And now it would be up to Tom to guess what would happen next, with the princess herself as the stakes.
He watched her as she slept, or contemplated, or whatever it was she was doing to escape his questions. Though her face was at ease, there was a fresh wariness clouding it that hadn’t been there earlier, and he was sorry that he hadn’t been able to spare her that change. The admiral hadn’t told him much of her history, or even the details of how she’d escaped the French to come to England. He didn’t know what had become of her family. War was never a good place for a young woman, and he wondered grimly how many other things she’d witnessed or experienced that she wished never again to discuss.
And he’d meant it when he’d called her brave. When the woman had come at her with the scissors, she hadn’t fainted or screamed or tossed her petticoats over her face, the way too many young ladies would. Perhaps that kind of nonsense was bred out of princesses. True, he’d known no others for comparison. But this princess had stood her ground, with a rare courage and grace that he could understand and respect.
He studied her now, her dark lashes feathered over the curve of her cheeks. Her breathing was deep, making her mostly bare breasts rise and fall above the low neckline of her gown, and with an honorable effort he forced himself to look back to her face. She wasn’t priggish or overly modest, he’d grant her that. Earlier he’d judged her handsome at best, not pretty, but the more time he spent in her company, the more his opinion was changing. She was pretty. Too pretty, if he were honest, and he shook his head as he considered all the trouble such thoughts could bring him.
Her eyes fluttered open, and she stretched her arms before her, relishing the motion like a waking cat. “We have reached the Willoughbys’ house, Captain, have we not?”
He hadn’t even noticed the carriage had stopped. “Ah, it seems we have.” He leaned from the window, swiftly scanning the front of the house and down each side of the street. “Here, let me help you down.”
But she drew back, her chin down and her arms folded over her chest. “I should prefer you to go first, Captain. To make sure that all is as it should be.”
He nodded, understanding, and privately pleased that she’d put her trust in him. Once more he scanned the quiet square, then held his hand out to her.
“All’s snug, ma’am,” he said gallantly. “Come ashore whenever you’re ready.”
But instead of taking his hand, she slipped past him unassisted, dangling her bonnet from her wrist by the ribbons. She hurried up the steps by herself, leaving him once again feeling chagrined and in the uncomfortable position, for any captain, of following instead of leading.
Perhaps, he thought, they’d not made such progress, after all.
“How was your drive, ma’am?” Lady Willoughby was asking as the princess handed her hat to a maid. “Was it pleasant?”
“‘Pleasant’ is not the word I should choose.” The princess paused before the looking glass, patting and plucking at her hair where the bonnet had flattened it. “Unless, of course, your English definition of pleasure is to be beset by murderous anarchists. Isn’t that so, Captain Greaves?”
“We did have our adventure, Lady Willoughby,” Tom said. The countess looked bewildered, yet also clearly relieved that she was no longer the one responsible for the princess’s “adventures.” “But no real harm was done, as you can see. You are certain about not summoning a physician, ma’am?”
“No, no, no.” The princess frowned at his reflection behind hers, clearly displeased that he’d been considerate enough to ask again. “You will come with me now to the garden, Captain.”
She was leading again, and again he was left to follow, this time down the hallway through the house, and he did not like it. He did not like it at all. “Where in blazes are you going now?”
She stopped and turned to face him. “I am going to the garden, Captain,” she explained with the kind of excruciating patience reserved for small, simple children. “You are joining me. There we shall speak to one another. Then when we are done, we shall leave.”
She glanced past him, back to the hovering maidservant. “I want a pot of chocolate brought to me in the garden, a plate of toast, browned on one side only and the crusts cut away, and a small pot of orange marmalade. I will also require a basin of cooled water—cooled, mind, and not cold, or warm, or scalding, or I shall send it back—and a linen cloth for drying.”
So the old princess had returned, ready to demand the sun and the stars, and expecting to get there, too.
Not that he was above giving orders himself. “Another place, ma’am. Not the garden.”
She stopped again, so abruptly they nearly collided. “The garden is safe. The admiral said it was. There are tall brick walls on three sides, and the house on the fourth has the only entrance.”
“I’ve had men on my crews who could scale a twelve-foot wall like cats,” he said. “They’d be over a garden wall in less time than it takes to say it.”
“Ohh.” Her bravado faltered as her face fell, and again he glimpsed the princess from the carriage. “I have sat there for weeks and weeks, not knowing. Now, however, I see that such a place would not be—would not be wise.”
“No, ma’am.” He didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t have to. “Surely there’s another room in this house, a parlor or library.”
She nodded, and turned the knob on the nearest door. “This is the earl’s library.” She went to stand in the center of the room, before the empty fireplace. “You must understand, Captain, that I have not been here before. So many books depress me. Do you care to read, Captain?”
The room was little used and gloomy, with the louvered shutters over the windows closed tight against the sun’s damage to the bindings. There’d be little threat to her in here, that was certain.
“I do,” he said. “On blockade duty, or a tedious voyage with foul weather, a book is often my best companion at sea.”
“I have never found the patience for reading.” Even now she was pacing, short steps that crossed and recrossed the patterned carpet. “I haven’t the concentration. But that is not what we must discuss, is it?”
“Why don’t you sit?” He held a silk-covered armchair for her. “I don’t intend this to be a trial for you, you know, and I—”
“My father is a good king.” Her words were coming out in a rush, as restless as her pacing. “He is fair, and just, and good. I do not know why that—that woman would say otherwise, because it is not true. You must understand that, Captain. You must.”
“I put no weight in what she said, ma’am.” He was careful of what he said, too. He knew little about her father either as a king or a man, but since a country takes its character from its leader, Tom had his doubts about the King of Monteverde, no matter how his daughter pleaded for him. “Every country has its malcontents, and always has. It’s the French and Buonaparte that’s made them bold now.”
“I thank you for your understanding, Captain.” She bowed her head and spread her fingers in a graceful fan of acknowledgment. It wasn’t hard to imagine her at home in a court’s ritual formality, just as he could easily picture her in the thick of that same court’s self-indulgence and flirtation. What was difficult was seeing her so sadly out of place here in London, a bright exotic bird trapped among the dry leather spines of the earl’s library. “And I thank you also for saving me as you did. I thank you with all my soul and my heart.”
He cleared his throat, uneasy with such lavish gratitude. “I was but following my orders, ma’am.”
The wariness remained in her manner, but there was a dare there, too. “You could have followed them without risking your own life. It was all so very fast, you know. No one there would have faulted you. To have seen me die would have likely pleased them more, to see if my foreign blood was as red as this velvet.”
“Don’t jest like that,” he said sharply. “I’d no intention of letting you be murdered.”
“No?” She stopped pacing and looked directly into his eyes, though he could not tell if she were teasing, or taunting, or simply seeking the truth. “You would have been free of the nuisance of me, Captain. Has that no appeal for you?”
“None,” he said firmly. “Not only did my orders oblige me, but my conscience, as well. And no more of this talk from you, mind?”
Her smile spread slowly, lighting her eyes as she turned her face up to his. He’d never expected her to be shy, but that was there, too, an unmistakable undercurrent to the vulnerability he’d glimpsed earlier.
“You did not have to save my life, yet you did,” she said, her voice low and breathless. “I did not have to thank you, but I did. Is it such a marvel that I trust you, Captain, like no other in this whole English country?”
She was so close to him that her scent, orange blossoms and musk and female, filled his nose, so close that he could see the flecks of gold in her dark eyes, so close he could not miss the sheen of excitement on the twin curves of her breasts, there in the caress of red velvet.
It occurred to him that she expected him to kiss her. It also occurred to him that as much as he would like to oblige her—damnation, as much as he’d like to oblige himself—to do so would be purest madness, and disaster for his career.
He took a step away, clasping his hands behind his back. That was his habit from walking the quarterdeck, but for now it was also the only sure way he’d keep himself from reaching for what she was offering. Even in a wanton place like Monteverde, there had to be other ways of showing trust.
He cleared his throat again. “I am glad that you trust me, ma’am. That should make it easier for you to answer my questions.”
“Your questions.” Her cheeks flushing nearly as red as her gown, she ducked her head and turned away from him. “I had not forgotten, Captain.”
Damnation, he hadn’t intended to shame her, especially when he’d wanted the same thing. Promptly he looked away, too, his own face growing warm, and instead concentrated on a blank-eyed marble bust of Homer that stood on a pillar in the corner.
“There were far too many coincidences this morning for chance alone, ma’am,” he began, striving to be all business. “Have you contacted anyone else from Monteverde since you arrived in London? An ambassador, a friend?”
“The ambassador returned home months ago, before I’d left, to guard his estates from the French,” she said. “I do not believe Father replaced him. Everything was already too unsettled. And as for friends or acquaintances—I have not a one in London, else I would have gone to them instead of here.”
He could not imagine being so entirely adrift in a foreign country. The navy had always been there to support him even if his family and friends had not, and he marveled at the strength this small young woman must possess, forced to depend upon strangers for so much.
“Is there any reason beyond politics that someone would want you dead?” he asked. “Did you bring with you anything of great value? Gold, jewels, paintings?”
She sniffed with indignation. “Lady Willoughby could tell you that. Recall how she and her staff have searched my belongings.”
True enough. That search would have served its purpose, even though Tom didn’t like the notion of her having so little privacy. If anything of real interest had been discovered, then the admiral would likely have relayed it to him.
“Well, then, another reason. Someone who is jealous of your position or rank, or the fact that you escaped while they were forced to remain?”
“No,” she said sadly. “My life has not been so interesting as that. Besides, most Monteverdians would consider my escape a banishment, not something to be envied.”
“There is no one?” He hesitated, wishing he did not have to ask this. “No, ah, no fiancé, or lover?”
“By all the saints in heaven, of course I had no lover!” Her indignation was rising to such heights that he half expected to smell smoke where she’d scorched the carpet. “No Monteverdian princess would dare take a lover before she was wed, and before she’d given her royal husband a legitimate heir.”
“I understand, ma’am,” he said hastily. “You don’t have to say more.”
“But I do,” she insisted, “because you do not understand, else you would never have asked. To risk bearing a bastard child of impure blood, to lose all my value as a bride to any respectable royal house, to sully my family’s name, to be forced to surrender my dowry—I would not do that, Captain, never. Never.”
Oh, hell. Now he’d made a right royal mess, hadn’t he?
“I didn’t say that you had done any of that, ma’am,” he said, wishing desperately for a way to withdraw that particular question. “I was only trying to, ah, to learn if there was anyone else who might wish you harm.”
“Harm, ha,” she said darkly, and muttered some black, incoherent words in Italian that he was certain must be a curse. “I could show you harm, which is what you deserve for that. Because I know exactly what you meant. I may be a virgin, but I am not a fool.”
He felt himself flush again, something that had not happened since his voice had cracked at age twelve. But then, he could not recall ever having had any woman, young, old, or in between, speak to him so frankly of her virginity.
No wonder he was feeling mortifyingly out of his depth, and sinking fast.
“I assure you, ma’am, there was no disrespect—”
“No more of your assurances.” Suddenly she was standing between him and Homer, her dark eyes full of sparks and a fierce tilt to her chin that had nothing shy about it. She snapped her fingers before him, as if to flick away the word itself. “No more of your harms, and your coincidences, and—and no more of your ridiculous ‘ma’am’s,’ either. It is the insipid sound a nanny goat makes, and it does not please me.”
He frowned down at her. He’d always respected titles and ranks, whether it was a senior officer, or his father the earl, and he wasn’t sure why anyone would choose to do otherwise.
“But ‘ma’am’ is the proper way to address you. Even our own queen is called ‘Your Majesty’ only for the first greeting, and ‘ma’am’ after that.”
“I am not your queen, am I?” Her frown matched his. “I am different. You are different. You are the only Londoner who has spoken to me in my own language, and it seems most barbarously wrong of you not to call me by my given name while we converse.”
“Call you by your Christian name?” he asked, incredulous. His experience with ladies might be limited, but he did know that most did not wish to be addressed after a few hours’ acquaintance with the same jolly familiarity used with a drinking crony in a tavern. Here he’d been worrying that he’d been too free, yet she was offended instead by his being too formal.
“Yes, yes. It will give me great comfort, and be so much better than the nanny-goat bleat.” She nodded with satisfaction, as if everything had been decided. “Whenever we are alone, or speaking Italian as we are now, you will call me Isabella. I give you leave. We will speak as friends, eh?”
How could he possibly refuse her when she’d no other real friends in the entire country? How cruel would it be to turn down such a humble request?
She snapped her fingers again, now less from annoyance than for emphasis. “In turn I shall call you whatever your name might be instead of ‘Captain.’ You do have another, don’t you?”
“It’s Thomas,” he said reluctantly. “Tom for short. But I’m not certain this is—”
“Thomas,” she repeated, testing the sound of the name. “Tom. Tomaso. That will do. Ah, here is that lazy maid at last with my chocolate. Set it down there, on that table.”
Tomaso: no one had called him that since he’d been a boy traveling the Continent with his family. Yet from her lips it sounded different, a silky, luxuriant ripple that couldn’t possibly refer to him.
So how in blazes was he supposed to say her name? “Ma’am” might sound like a goat’s bleat to her, but at least it had none of the sinuous, sensuous entrapment of Isabella.
He was saved for the moment as the servants entered with her requests, and he watched her dictate to them with appalling precision. The maid must place the silver tray with the chocolate pot and toast here, squared to the edge of the table. The footman must present the basin of water, holding it steady while she dipped one fingertip into the surface to judge the temperature, and then place it before the wicker-backed chaise, with the linen cloth folded in half over the arm.
“I know you judge me to be too picky, Tomaso,” she said once the servants left. “Perhaps I am. But there is a proper way for things to be done, and an improper one, as well. If standards aren’t kept, why, then, civilization is meaningless, and we should just as well go back to grunting and rooting about naked in the dirt like little piglets.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The unbidden image of her naked made him forget her request.
“Isabella,” she corrected him, fortunately unaware of his true thoughts as she sat on the settee and swung her legs up before her. “You will call me Isabella. Now be an honorable gentleman, and look away while I tend my sorry knees.”
But it was already too late for honorable discretion. Without waiting for him to oblige, she’d pulled her skirts up high over her garters and bent over to inspect her bruised, scraped knees.
She winced as she dribbled the cool water over them, then glanced up at Tom through her lashes.
“I told you to look away,” she said, wrinkling her nose and mouth at the sting of the cold water. “You are not being honorable.”
“Damnation, you have not given me the chance before you go and hike up your skirts!” he sputtered. She was wearing yellow lisle stockings with dark blue garters, the ribbons embroidered with red roses that, unfortunately, matched the scrapes on her knees—pale, plump knees which, scraped or not, were still quite fine to look upon. “What honorable lady would do such a thing, I ask you, let alone ask a gentleman to ignore it?”
She blinked, not at all embarrassed. “But I am not an honorable English lady, Tomaso. I am a princess, and I am entitled to ask whatever I please.”
He took a deep breath, making himself once again look at her face, an event that seemed to be happening far too frequently with her.
“Not that, ma’am,” he said as firmly as he could. “My orders regard your safety and well-being, not your—your modesty.”
“My modesty. How very English that sounds!” She grinned, and widened her eyes for emphasis. “Well, then. You have reasoned this better than any periwig judge. Since we are in England, I rescind my order. Look at my sad little knees if you wish, and I shall not protest.”
With a groan of frustration he dropped into the chair across from her, wondering if even one of those great admiralty lords had any idea of what he was going through.
“Why the devil aren’t you having one of the lady’s maids tend to you? What reason could you have for doing this here instead, except to plague me?”
“Because you are the only one who knows how it happened,” she said, dabbing at her knees. “I was impulsive and—and unwise. Stepping from a carriage without waiting for the step is something a simpleton would do, not a princess. The maidservants in this house whisper about me enough. They do not need to see that I have skinned my knees like a clumsy child. But you—I cannot have such a secret from you, can I?”
He hadn’t expected that. “You are fortunate you weren’t more badly hurt,” he said gruffly. “You could have broken your leg, or worse.”
“I’m fortunate in a great many ways, I suppose.” She dried her knees and flipped her skirts back down, smoothing them around her ankles for good measure. “I could also have been stabbed with a pair of embroidery scissors which, given my ineptitude at handwork, would have been most ironic.”
He frowned grimly. He supposed it was good that she could make light of it, but he could not. “‘Ironic’ isn’t the word I would have chosen.”
“It is better than the alternative, yes?” Her smile turned wistful. “What happened today in that shop was not your fault, Tomaso. You couldn’t have stopped more than you did. I have lived most of my life with the whole world watching, and I know no other way.”
“But I shouldn’t have let you go into that infernal shop in the first place.”
“That’s because you believe the best way to keep me safe is to lock me away, but that won’t do for me, not at all.”
She smoothed a stray lock of hair behind her ear, her smile turning bittersweet. “On my family’s crest are three lions, brave and fierce and ready for any challenge. That is how I am, too, Tomaso. Why else would I have come all this way on my own, away from my family and my home? I would rather face life with a roar than hide and quake with my hands over my eyes. Can’t you understand that, Tomaso, even being English?”
He grumbled, but he nodded, because it was the easiest reply, if not the best.
But he understood, all right. He understood that he was becoming more and more tangled in the complicated life of this small, fierce lioness, and there wasn’t a blasted thing he could do about it.
With her legs curled up beneath her, Isabella sat in the center of her bed and listened. She’d always been good at listening, particularly like this in the dark. There were a great many things that could be learned that way, stray bits and scraps of interesting information that others tossed away without a thought, information that could prove most useful.
Consider all she’d learned of Lord and Lady Willoughby and their establishment in the few short weeks that she’d been their guest. Simply by listening, she’d learned that the earl stayed downstairs drinking long after the countess had retired, and that when he finally came upstairs—his footsteps unsteady, muttering to himself—he’d go not to his wife’s bed, or even his own, but up another flight of stairs to the servants’ rooms, where he’d make the kitchen maid’s iron bedstead squeak off and on all night.
Isabella herself did not care about the earl’s proclivities. She’d certainly overheard worse things in her parents’ palace. The earl was a man, and a lord; he could do what he pleased. But because all the other servants seemed to know, too, the house was closed for the night far earlier than was fashionable, the fires banked, the candles doused, and everyone in their beds. But for Isabella, the moment she heard the earl’s footsteps meant the moment she knew she’d be undisturbed. Until morning, there’d be no more servants knocking at Isabella’s door, no more invented reasons for the countess to come chirping into her rooms, hoping to discover who knew what. Locking her bedchamber door was useless, for the countess held the keys to all the rooms in the house, and had no reluctance to use them.
So in the dark Isabella listened, straining her ears, and smiled when she finally heard those last footsteps of the day. The door upstairs opened and shut, and Isabella hopped off her bed. Barefoot, so she’d make as little noise as possible, she lifted the chair from her dressing table to the top of the trunk at the end of her bed. Then she climbed up first onto the trunk and then the chair, steadying herself with one hand around the bedpost. Her heart was racing with excited dread, and she had to remind herself to take care, and not fall again as she had earlier.
Now she could see over the top carved wooden frame that supported the bed’s curtains. The bottom of the frame was lined with the same brocade as the curtain, gathered into a showy sunburst over the mattress, but the top, here where no one would ever see, was covered by a stitched piece of coarse muslin, tacked into place only in the corners. Using a butter knife that she’d kept from her breakfast tray for the purpose, Isabella pried the tacks free, slowly peeled back the muslin and sighed with relief.
There, sandwiched between the lining and the muslin, lay the quilted linen petticoat of her traveling clothes, the skirts spread out in a fan so the outline wouldn’t show from below. Gently she touched the petticoat, reassuring herself that it hadn’t been touched, and again whispered thanks to her mother for suggesting such a clever hiding place. No one, certainly not foolish Lady Willoughby, would ever think to look here.
Lightly she traced one quilted channel, her fingers following the lumpy outlines of the treasure stitched within for safekeeping. Scores of gold coins, each stamped with the Fortunaro lions, were only the beginning. The real prize was the oval rubies, big as pigeon’s eggs and set in hammered gold, that had been in her family since the first Fortunaro had stolen them from the Caesars in Rome and made them the centerpiece of the crown jewels, a symbol of everything grand in her country.
On the voyage to England, the sheer weight of the petticoat and its hidden treasure had been a constant burden to Isabella, but that was nothing compared to the responsibility that had pressed upon her every minute since she’d left Monteverde. Not even her father the king had known she had the jewels, and Mama had made her swear terrible oaths never to tell another.
Isabella’s fingers stilled over the largest ruby, the one etched with the Fortunaro lion. Captain Lord Thomas Greaves had asked her if she’d anything that someone would kill her for. She hadn’t answered him honestly about that, nor had she told him how she’d seen the little triangle made of twigs around the woman’s neck. She couldn’t, not without raising too many other questions she’d no wish to answer. But he’d listened to her, anyway, and the readiness with which he’d accepted her evasion had saddened her no end.
How could it not? He was appallingly masculine in a rough English way, and if she were a sleek Italian lioness, then he was surely the model for the blustery wild lion that stood behind the British throne. No wonder she’d been drawn to him the moment she’d entered the drawing room, and no wonder, too, that she’d wanted to kiss him this afternoon, a giddy, foolish impulse that she’d regretted at once.
Flirtation was not why she’d been sent on this journey. She was not here to amuse herself with the man assigned to watch over her, no matter how broad his shoulders might be, or that he alone in London had made the effort to speak her language. In the long, long lineage of the Fortunaro, she was an insignificant nothing, except for what she might do now for her family’s honor.
As if to remind herself, she touched the jewels one last time before she pulled the muslin back in place and pressed the tacks back into the corners with her thumbs. But instead of climbing down to the floor, she slumped wearily on the chair, her hands resting on her bruised knees and her bare legs dangling over the chest.
She liked Tom Greaves, and she trusted him, and if they’d been born any other two people in this world, then that would have been plenty. But not only were those rubies hidden in the canopy reason for someone to pursue her; for a Monteverdian princess, they were also reason to die.
With a little sob, Isabella buried her face in her hands, and gave in to the unfairness that had become her life.
Chapter Five
T om walked down the empty street toward the river, wanting no other company than his own. He’d given up trying to sleep any longer in his unfamiliar bed in Lady Willoughby’s guest room, and had set out from the silent house when the skies were still dark, or at least as dark as they ever were in London. Now the first light of dawn was pinking the horizon, and heavy-eyed linkboys were going from light to light, dousing the night’s flames for the coming day.
The early morning was chill, damp with dew that had fallen like a silvery haze over the dark wool of Tom’s uniform coat, and his breath showed before his face. Yet still he walked on, lengthening his stride in the foolish hope that exercise alone would be enough to ease his restlessness.
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Miranda Jarrett
The Princess And Her Protector…When an exiled princess becomes too much for her hosts to handle, Captain Lord Thomas Greaves is called to action. Playing nursemaid to a spoiled and much-too-beautiful princess isn't exactly how Thomas wants to serve his country, but at least it's something to relieve his boredom while he counts the days until he can return to sea.To mask her loneliness, the homesick Isabella has been imperious and difficult since seeking asylum in London. But as the sparks fly between her and Tom, she can't deny her attraction to her handsome bodyguard. And when her life is threatened, Bella realizes that the dashing captain is the first man to treat her like a woman, not just a princess….
“Did you ever guess that you’re the first gentleman I’ve kissed?”
He hadn’t, not at all, but that guileless confession kept him painfully hard. And might all the lords of the admiralty forgive him, he was kissing her again. She parted her lips freely for him, exploring him as much as he was her. He slid his hands along the narrowing curve of her waist, inside her dressing gown so there was nothing but the gossamer-weight linen between him and the quivering fullness of her breasts and this had to stop.
He released her and forced himself to step away from temptation. Her hair was mussed and tousled, her cheeks flushed, her nightclothes askew and, damnation, he’d never wanted any woman more than he wanted this one, whom he’d no right to have.
“Oh, my,” she murmured. “That was not pretending, was it?”
“No.” The blood was still thumping through his body, demanding to be obeyed. “That was as damned real as it gets.”
Praise for bestselling author Miranda Jarrett
“Miranda Jarrett continues to reign as the queen of historical romance.”
—Romantic Times
“A marvelous author…each word is a treasure, each book a lasting memory.”
—The Literary Times
The Golden Lord
“Sexual tension runs high. There are…secrets to be kept, mysteries to be solved and a traditional ending in which sharing truth wins true love.”
—Romantic Times
The Silver Lord
“The characters and plotting are very good and deftly presented.”
—Affaire de Coeur
Princess of Fortune
Miranda Jarrett
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Mary Jo,
A most excellent friend, and a writer who always
inspires, with affection and admiration.
And who else can remain so cheerful
when the fire siren wails at 6:00 a.m.?
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter One
Kingdom of Monteverde, 1796
W ho would have dreamed that London—wicked, wealthy, barbarous London—would become her only sanctuary?
London. Oh, dearest saints in heaven, whatever were her parents thinking?
Isabella forced herself to take another deep breath as she stared out the window of her bedchamber, striving to master the panic and fear knotting in her chest. She still could not quite believe she was leaving this view, this room, this house, and this life, with no guarantee that she’d ever return. Usually so full of activity, the palace now seemed forlornly silent, her father and brother already gone and most of the servants fled to the hills.
Next—last—to go would be Isabella. Earlier her trunks had been taken away, and as her lady’s maid fastened the rows of buttons along the sleeves of her jacket, she felt these last minutes here in her home slipping away more relentlessly than the grains of sand in an hourglass. Inside her kidskin gloves her palms were already moist with anxiety, and her heart raced with dread for what lay before her.
But she was the only daughter of the King of Monteverde, and a Fortunaro princess must be strong as a lioness, full of courage and pride like the fierce, noble beasts that graced the family’s arms. Yes, yes, a lioness of gold: that was what she was, and with fresh determination Isabella drew in her breath and raised her head to what she hoped was a more regal angle.
“Isabella, hold still,” scolded her mother with her usual impatience. No one would ever guess that Mama, too, would be fleeing tonight—which was, of course, the point. Mama was as exquisitely dressed and coiffed as she was every evening, her favorite rubies around her throat and her still-beautiful face with the heavy-lidded eyes so artfully painted that, by candlelight, she could pass for Isabella’s sister instead of her mother.
“If you continue to fidget, daughter,” she continued, looking down her famous nose at Isabella, “and do not let Anna dress you properly, I shall turn you over to the French and that vile little Corsican instead of to the English.”
At once Isabella went still, letting the maid finish dressing her in her traveling clothes. Mama was right: she was eighteen, far too old for such childish restlessness. If it weren’t for General Buonaparte and his ridiculous war turning all the royal houses upside down, a suitable marriage would have been arranged for her long ago.
“That it should come to this, Your Highness,” said the Marchese di Romano grimly, the last of her father’s advisers left in the palace, and one of her mother’s closest friends. He was an older man whose eyes now seemed to wander in opposite directions and who relied weightily upon his gold-headed walking stick, but no one at court had ever doubted that his mind remained as sharp and clever as any fox’s. “That a Fortunaro princess should be forced to scurry away like a low skulking thief, to snivel and beg for mercy from those heathen English—”
“Oh, hush, Romano,” said Mama mildly. “She is going to England because it is the only country that Buonaparte cannot capture. There is no other place where she will be as safe.”
Idly the marchese tapped his stick on the polished floor. “The English will adore our dear princess, you know,” he said, studying Isabella with a connoisseur’s eye. “They are all penny-gallants for a pretty face in distress.”
“She is more than simply a pretty face, Romano,” said her mother sternly. “She is my daughter, and a great beauty.”
“Of course, of course,” said Romano softly, soothing. “She will have no equal among those milk-fed English ladies.”
Though Isabella kept her head proudly raised, as if already confronting those English ladies, her unhappiness was mushrooming. Didn’t Mama plot and plan as expertly as any general? Hadn’t she already explained every detail to Isabella, how it was her duty to be the one Fortunaro to go into exile in London? Isabella wasn’t a fool, and she didn’t need Romano to tell her how to behave. The Monteverdian army had already been pounded and swept by the French in battle after battle, the few remaining troops now poised at the gates of the city for the same surrender that had humbled Florence, Naples, Venice, even great Rome herself. How could Isabella not fail to understand her role as the last proud symbol of her family’s defiance, there under the protection of the King of England?
But why must it be her duty—her fate!—to be the only one sent so far, far away for safekeeping? Why was she standing here in this near-empty palace, her clothes weighed down by the gold coins and jewels sewn into the seams and her heart made even heavier at the thought of the dangerous, lonely voyage before her?
As if to answer, the rumbling roar of the guns began again, closer now than ever before.
“It is time,” said Mama briskly, arranging her cashmere shawl more elegantly around her arms. She took Isabella by the shoulders, her face so close that Isabella could see how the powder settled into the lines around her mouth. “You must go, my brave little lioness. We cannot let the English change their mind, can we? You will go, and you will always remember who you are, what you are, and bring nothing but honor to our name.”
Isabella gave a quick jerk of a nod, not trusting her voice to answer. She must be brave and daring like Mama, and she must not weep and wail like a baby who’d not gotten her way. She turned each cheek for Mama to kiss, then kissed her in return, the quick brush that Mama had always preferred.
“I—I’ll miss you, Mama,” she said with a gulp, blinking back her tears. “God be with you, and with Father and Giancarlo, too.”
“Of course He will, my darling,” said Mama, her smile brilliant as she patted Isabella’s cheek. “He always watches over us Fortunari, doesn’t He? Now Romano and I must go, and so must you. Farewell, Isabella. Farewell!”
And as quickly as that, Mama was gone, leaving only the fading scent of her perfume and the click of her lacquered heels on the marble floors, followed by the fainter tapping of Romano’s stick. Swiftly Isabella turned away. She did not weep, of course, because Mama wouldn’t want that, but inside she felt as empty and abandoned as the palace itself.
She wished that when they’d said farewell, Mama had spoken less of duty and honor, and more of love. She wished that same farewell had been longer, warmer, sweeter, something for Isabella to remember on the perilous voyage to England, instead of the quick, formal parting before Romano. She wished she could admit her fears, instead of always having to be brave as a lioness. She wished—she wished for many things that couldn’t be, things that even a Monteverdian princess had no right to desire.
“Bah, Her Majesty has no heart,” muttered Anna, purposefully just loud enough for Isabella to hear. “No heart at all.”
“Enough, Anna,” said Isabella sharply. It didn’t matter that the older woman had become her lady’s maid by default, one of the last few servants who hadn’t panicked and fled the palace, or that Anna would be her one link with her old life as they traveled together. Isabella’s mother insisted that such familiarity should never be tolerated, no matter the circumstances. “It is not your place to fault my mother, unless you, too, wish to be branded a traitor.”
“Traitors, traitors,” muttered Anna, linking her finger and thumb together in the sign against evil. The gesture made her look even more like an ancient little crow, dressed in black from her stockings to the kerchief tied beneath her chin. “What does loyalty mean these days, eh, with the French devils at our gates?”
“Base-born rabble, nothing more,” countered Isabella, automatically repeating her father’s description of the tawdry French army. To her family, such upstarts were below contempt, unworthy to be even an enemy of their own ancient kingdom. “Our brave army will not waver before such a mob.”
Anna sniffed loudly, that sniff saying much about the pitiful chances she gave the brave Monteverdian army. “Your bonnet and gloves, my princess.”
Isabella lifted her chin so Anna could tie the bonnet’s silk ribbons in a bow, then took the gloves herself, unwilling to let Anna see how her fingers were trembling. Weren’t the Fortunaro women as famous for their strength as for their beauty? Couldn’t she prove herself worthy of her mother’s faith in her to do what must be done?
“Her Majesty said for you to make every haste, my princess,” insisted Anna. “Her Majesty said—”
“It is not your place to speak with such freedom, Anna,” said Isabella curtly, a perfect echo of her mother’s reprimands. “Do you see me disobeying my mother? Do you see me dawdling? Rather it is you and your clumsy old fingers that have delayed me with my dressing.”
“Forgive my clumsiness, my princess,” mumbled Anna, bobbing her head up and down by way of apology. As she did, a rough little pendant slipped free of her bodice: three twigs lashed with red thread into a triangle and strung on a black cord.
“What is that around your neck, Anna?” asked Isabella suspiciously. “You know heathen charms and talismans are not permitted in the palace.”
Quickly Anna tucked the pendant back into her bodice. “It’s naught to do with the devil, nor with the priests, my princess. It’s a family sign, that is all.”
“It still has no place here, and I do not wish to see it again. Now come, bring that lantern, so we might be on our way.”
For the last time, Isabella hurried down the marble staircase, the weight of the treasure stitched into her clothes slowing her steps. Down one flight, then another, into the dark, narrower hallway that led to the lower gardens and the beach. She’d never come this way by night, and certainly never with only a single servant holding a lantern against the darkness. Cobwebs brushed and clung to her clothes, and as she heard the mice scrambling to keep clear of the light, she whispered a quick prayer to guard her against whatever dangers might lie within the murky shadows.
Oh, that bats and rats and spiders and cobwebs might be her only threats!
“This way, my princess,” said Anna, puffing with exertion as she unbolted the last door for Isabella. “The English sailors will be waiting for you on the beach.”
Isabella nodded, holding her heavy skirts to one side as she slipped through the door. Vines had been allowed to grow over the door to disguise it, and as she shoved them aside, the lacquered heels of her slippers sank into the soft sand. The air was cooler here near the sea, and Isabella could taste the sharp tang of salt as she nervously licked her lips. At the water’s edge, perhaps thirty feet away, she could make out the dark shadow of a longboat pulled up on the shore, with men sitting waiting at the oars and two others standing aft, doubtless looking for her. Large men, lowborn and rough, speaking quietly among themselves.
Englishmen.
“Go ahead, Anna,” she said, striving to hide her anxiety as she hung back in the shadows. “Tell those men to come greet me properly.”
But Anna didn’t move, her wizened face inside the black scarf as set as a wooden mask. “You tell them yourself, my princess. I’ll go no farther, not with you.”
Isabella stared at her, stunned. “How dare you speak to me with such insolence? Come here at once, Anna, and do as I say!”
But Anna only shook her head, jutting out her pointed chin for emphasis. “I will never leave Monteverde, my princess,” she said, hissing the words like a curse, “and never with a spoiled little bitch like you.”
Isabella gasped with shock. No other servant had ever spoken to her like that; no, no other person in her memory ever had. “Anna, how dare you—”
But Anna had already slammed the door shut against Isabella.
“Wait!” Isabella grabbed the doorknob, frantically jiggling it with both hands. “Anna, open this door at once, I say! At once!”
But all she heard through the heavy door was the sound of the bolt in the lock scraping into place, and the echoes of Anna’s footsteps fading away down the hall, abandoning her to her fate alone.
“Anna!” she shouted, her fear rising by the second as she thumped her fists against the door. “Anna, come back now!”
“Miss?”
Instantly she turned around, her heart racing in her chest. She could make out little of the English sailor’s face in the shadows, but there was no mistaking how he loomed over her, the prow of his cocked hat pointing downward as he addressed her. The long, dark boat cloak he wore made him seem larger still, but from the braid on his hat and the brass buckles on his shoes, she guessed he must at least be an officer, and perhaps what among the English passed for a gentleman. Beside him was another man with a long pigtail down his back, dressed in rough canvas trousers and a worn, striped jersey that marked him clearly as a common sailor.
And these two were to be her saviors. Oh, Mama, what have you done?
“I’m sorry to have frighted you, miss—er, that is, signora,” said the officer. “But I do need to know if you are—”
“I am the Princess di Fortunaro,” she interrupted in imperious English, drawing herself up as tall as she could. She must be brave and proud, and hide her fear for her family’s sake. “I am not a ‘miss.’ You must address me as ‘my princess.’”
“Very well, then,” said the officer heartily as he touched the front of his hat, and also obviously relieved that she spoke English. “I am Lieutenant Goodwin, at your service, my princess.”
Isabella nodded but didn’t answer. She wasn’t precisely sure what to say in return, true, but she was also waiting for him to show proper regard and respect, and to bow low to her. Wasn’t it enough that she’d made the effort to address him in his own language? But she must recall that he was English, and the English were widely known to have no manners whatsoever. Barbarians, all of them, from their Hanoverian king on down.
“You have, ah, any followers who will be joining you?” he asked, looking past her to the closed door, and cheerfully unaware of how much of a barbarian he was. “Servants?”
“No,” she said, already feeling more alone than she’d ever been before. “There are none that I can trust.”
“No abigail to tend to you?” he asked with surprise. “You’ll be the first lady the old Corinthian has ever seen, you know, there among all us hoary sailors.”
She regarded him with chilly disdain, wishing to put more distance between them. “Not a lady, Lieutenant. A Fortunaro princess.”
“Aye, aye, quite right you are,” he said quickly. “I warrant you’re ready to come aboard, my princess? We’ve already stowed your dunnage, and we’re ready to shove off whenever it suits.”
Isabella frowned. She had worked hard at her English lessons, particularly hard once Mama had decided she must go to London, but these words, these expressions—aboard? stowing? dunnage? shoving off?—had not been in her tutor’s primer. Whatever was this Englishman asking of her?
Gruffly he cleared his throat. “We cannot keep the ship waiting much longer, my princess, not if we wish to get you away safely. We’ll lose the tide.”
The ship, and the tide. That much Isabella could understand. She looked beyond the man and the longboat, and farther out in the bay she now could make out the dark silhouette of the English ship, outlined by the lights from its lanterns. At such a distance it seemed small, as insubstantial as canvas scenery for a saint’s day pageant, and hardly sturdy enough to carry her and these men clear to London.
To London.
“My princess?” The lieutenant was offering the crook of his arm to her as support, as gallant a gesture, she supposed, as an Englishman could muster. “You are ready?”
Oh, please, God, please, grant me find the courage to be strong and brave and worthy, to be a true Fortunaro princess!
She took a deep breath, holding her head as high as if she were wearing her best diamond tiara instead of a plain plush bonnet for travel. She could do this, and she would, one step at a time. Ignoring the lieutenant’s arm, she bunched her skirts to one side to lift them from the sand, and began walking—one step, then the next, and the next after that—across the sand to the waiting boat.
To her future, and to London.
Chapter Two
F or Captain Lord Thomas Greaves, all his dreams of glory and golden plunder crashed in the instant the porcelain monkey shattered against the east wall of the Countess of Vaughn’s drawing room.
Not, of course, that Tom realized it then.
“Ah, the ladies,” said Admiral Edward Cranford pleasantly in the next room, as if this were all the explanation necessary for crashing statuary. “My sister Lady Willoughby and the others shall be joining us presently.”
Thomas nodded, striving to match the admiral’s pleasantness even if it didn’t make a damned bit of sense. It was most unusual for an admiral like Cranford to summon a captain to call upon him socially like this, here at his sister’s house in Berkeley Square instead of the navy offices at the Whitehall, and more unusual still for any ladies to be included.
But Tom would overlook it. Desperation could do that to a man, and God knows he was desperate.
“You were saying you’d found a new commission for me, sir?” he asked, trying to steer the conversation back to more profitable ground. “What ship is it? When can I join her?”
Cranford hesitated, an ominous sign. “Not a commission, exactly,” he hedged. “Not a new ship, but a special assignment from the admiralty. One that is, I believe, uniquely suited to your talents and experience, as well as your rank by birth.”
Disappointment rose sharp in Tom’s throat, and he fought to keep the bitterness from showing on his face. He could guess what was being offered: a regulating captaincy in the impress service, little better than being a kidnapper, and rightly loathed in every seaport town. Or perhaps they’d granted him a plum place in one of the dockyards, sitting day after day on a tall stool at a desk and growing fat like any other countinghouse drone.
But what else could Tom expect? It didn’t matter that he was only twenty-eight, or that he was the fourth son of the Earl of Lerchmere, or that he looked and felt as fine and fit as ever, and quite sufficient to earn the ladies’ approval. What did matter was that the navy had judged him to be an invalid officer, and the navy never changed its collective mind.
For over a year he’d been landlocked, impatiently recuperating from the wounds that had nearly killed him, but he’d beaten all the odds. He’d survived, hadn’t he? He was ready, more than ready, to offer his life again in the service of his country. He was a captain in the greatest navy in the world, his dark blue uniform coat bright with gold lace and brass buttons and hard-won medals on his breast, but none of it was worth a brass farthing without a ship and crew.
“I appreciate the special consideration, Admiral,” he began, trying to keep his words civil. “But I do not believe I require any such preferential treatment. I would prefer that my record stands upon its own merits or lacks.”
The admiral puffed out his cheeks and frowned, the thatch of his white brows bristling across his ruddy-brown face. “You know it wasn’t my decision to make, Greaves.”
“But surely you have influence to change it, sir,” said Tom. He’d spent more than half his life in the navy, and he knew the peril and consequences of speaking too forcefully to a superior, yet he was struggling to keep his temper in check. How could he do otherwise, when his whole life and future were slipping from his grasp? “A sloop, a ketch, anything with a sail! Given that the country’s at war, there surely must be some suitable command—”
“Not for a man in your condition, no.”
“For God’s sake, sir, all you must do is look at me!” For proof Tom held his arms away from his sides, strong and steady and without the slightest tremor. “I’ve mended good as new—better than new! Those infernal surgeons at Greenwich said I was as close to a miracle as they’d ever seen, Lazarus himself, and if that doesn’t make me fit for a new command, why, then I—”
“What the surgeons said was no active duty for two years,” said the admiral sternly. “Two years at the least, to see what course that musket ball takes within your chest. The navy cannot afford to have captains in command whose physical well-being is not to be trusted, especially not one carrying a chunk of French lead next to his heart.”
“But I’m not some damned cripple!” Tom thumped his fist three times on the table beside him, desperate to prove his words. “Look, sir, I’m strong as an ox, aye, and I can thrash any man who dares say otherwise!”
“Damnation, Greaves, then you’ll have to thrash me,” countered the admiral sharply, “because I’ll not let you take that risk, or risk the lives of your men in the process, not when—”
But before he could finish, the double doors between the two rooms flew open and a small, furious woman charged through them, her hands clenched into tight, tiny fists bristling with rings on nearly every finger. Although she was dressed extravagantly for so early in the day—even Tom knew that wine-colored velvet lavished with gold embroidery was not customary at this hour for Berkeley Square, nor were the lavish necklace and bracelets of rubies and pearls—her thick black hair had not yet been brushed, a mass of tangled, knotted curls that bounced against her back with each indignant step.
“Admiral Cranford!” she called, marching directly to the older man, who bowed low in return. Her English was filtered through another language, her accent without apology. “Thank the saints you are here! These women know nothing, worse than nothing! You tell them, Admiral, tell them what imbeciles they are!”
Belatedly Lady Willoughby came hurrying after, the head of the hurled porcelain monkey in her hand as evidence, and her mouth puckered with distress, as if fearing the wrong words would once again slip out.
“The girl came with the best of references, ma’am,” she said plaintively, setting the grinning monkey head on the edge of the mantel. “She has dressed the hair of the Duchess of Kent, and all her daughters. How was I to know she wouldn’t suit?”
“But I am not this Duchess of Kent, am I, eh?” said the young woman, tossing her hair back over her shoulders. “Nor am I one of her daughters, or sons, or small, yapping terriers, either. Ah, perhaps that is what your pretend-maid truly is, a groom to lapdogs! Admiral, Admiral, you see how I am treated, how little respect they show to me!”
Astounded, Tom watched and listened as if it were a Drury Lane farce. The admiral had said that they’d be joined by ladies; he should have warned him instead of this high-handed little harpy. Here he’d been struggling to control himself before his superior, while this chit felt free to rage at Admiral Cranford like a Billingsgate fishwife.
“The maid tends only to fine ladies, not to dogs,” insisted poor Lady Willoughby, wringing her hands. “Brother, I assure you no insult was ever planned or wished for!”
“‘No insult,’ ha,” repeated the younger woman darkly, lowering her chin so her heavy-lidded eyes seemed to smolder with righteous fire. “Would you have me as bald as a pigeon’s egg, then, with every hair ripped from my head? Is that how you would show me honor and respect?”
“Oh, come, ma’am, I’m sure my sister meant no insult,” said the admiral with a forced jollity. “We all want what’s best for you, you know. I’m sure your hair can be set to rights in no time.”
With an exasperated sigh, the younger woman flung her arms in the air, beseeching heaven to take her side and showing a good deal of her breasts in the process.
“Fools and lackeys, every one,” she muttered in Italian. “Toss all their wits together, and it still would not half fill a thimble!”
And that, for Tom, was enough.
“Their manners are worth a bushel of your so-called wit,” he answered in Italian, automatically using the same curt tone that served to humble disrespectful crewmen. “These fine people don’t deserve such rubbish from you. I’d say a dog groom was what you damned well do need, for I’ve never heard any other bitch carry on like you are now.”
The young woman gasped and swung around to face him, lifting her chin high. “Who are you, to dare address me so?” she asked suspiciously, continuing in Italian. “Do you not know who I am?”
“I am Captain Lord Thomas Greaves, miss,” he said with a smile and a brusque bow. “And as for your name, miss, I do not know it, nor do I particularly care if ever I do.”
“There now, Greaves, I knew you’d charm the lady by speaking to her in her own lingo,” said Cranford heartily in English. “But high time I made the proper introductions, aye? Your Royal Highness, might I present Captain Lord Thomas Greaves, the captain I told you about, and a hero if ever there was one. Greaves, the Princess Isabella di Fortunaro of Monteverde.”
“Your Royal Highness. I am honored,” said Tom, though he didn’t feel honored at all. He felt tricked. A princess, and from Monteverde at that. What in blazes was Cranford up to, anyway? Monteverde might be the oldest of the Italian monarchies, but it was also regarded as the most indolent and decadent, with more blissful corruption packed inside its borders than in the rest of the Continent combined. How could one of their princesses come to surface here, in poor Lady Willoughby’s drawing room?
He took a deep breath to control his temper, then another. “Your servant, ma’am.”
But though it was her turn to answer, she didn’t. She simply stared at him, just stared, reluctantly tipping her head back so she could meet his gaze. She was short, true, not that any man would notice her height once he’d seen how seductively rounded her small figure was beneath the red velvet.
She wasn’t pretty, either, not in the agreeable pink-and-white, strawberries-in-cream way that English girls were pretty. Her features were strong, her profile the kind minted into ancient coins. Framed by that tangle of black hair, her skin was golden pale, with a deeper rose to stain her cheeks and lips. And she seemed unable to keep still, constantly shifting and turning and twisting and gesturing, with an actress’s instinct of how best to keep all eyes firmly on her.
No, decided Tom, she wasn’t like English girls. Her beauty was richer, more opulent, like strong claret after milky tea, and likely just as apt to cause a headache and regrets the morning after.
“Your English is most accomplished, ma’am,” he said at last, falling back into Italian. If she was going to insult the others again, at least he could spare them hearing it. “I compliment you.”
Her smile didn’t reach quite her eyes. “Your Italian, Captain, is fit for the barnyard,” she said, reaching up to touch a finger to one dangling ruby earring. “However did you pretend to learn it?”
Well, then, he could smile, too, if that was the game. Any good frigate captain worth his salt recognized a challenge when given, even if it came from a princess intent upon drawing attention to her breasts by tracing her fingertips idly along the edge of her neckline.
“When I was a boy,” he explained, “my father indulged his interest in Vitruvius, and moved our family to Rome for three years. I learned Italian while there, and having often been stationed in the Mediterranean, the language has proved a useful skill.”
“Rome,” she said scornfully with a little flick of her fingers. “That explains so much.”
“Ah, but Monteverde,” he said easily. “That explains even more.”
He half expected her to slap him. If he were honest, he was almost disappointed that she didn’t. Instead she limited herself to a sibilant hiss of frustration between her clenched teeth, and an extra twitch of her dark red skirts away from him.
“I’m so glad you are here, Captain,” gushed Lady Willoughby, her relief so fervent she was nearly weeping from it. “The princess has been so lonely here, without anyone to speak with, and the condition makes her intemperate. You shall make such a difference in her life in London. How happy she must be at last to meet someone like you!”
But the princess did not look happy, nor, for that matter, was Tom himself feeling exactly cheerful. He’d come here at the admiral’s invitation, full of hope for new orders and a ship to match, and now it seemed he’d leave with neither.
“I am glad to oblige, my lady,” he said, switching to English in deference to the confused Lady Willoughby. He was determined to go now that there seemed so little point in staying. “But if you shall excuse me, I’ll say my farewells and—”
“You may not leave my presence without my permission, Captain,” said the princess tartly. “And I do not wish you to go.”
He stared at her, incredulous. “I am an officer in His Majesty’s Navy, ma’am, not one of your wretched subjects.”
“If you were, my father would have you whipped for your insolence,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “But no matter. You are to be my escort, Captain, my guard while I am exiled here in London. You are to put your life before mine to protect me, and keep me safe from the villains who would wish me harm.”
“Oh, aye, and who wouldn’t?” scoffed Tom. “What makes you believe I’ll take orders from you?”
“Because they do not come from the princess, Greaves, but from your own superiors,” said Cranford sharply, catching Tom’s arm to draw him aside, away from the women and into the corner.
“Blast you, Greaves, haven’t you figured this yet?” Cranford said, lowering his voice as he continued. “Princess di Fortunaro was rescued from Buonaparte by a British navy vessel, and as long as she chooses to stay in England, she will remain under the navy’s protection. That’s His Majesty’s own wish and decision, Greaves, not the princess’s, not mine, and most certainly not yours. It’s the king’s, mind?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Tom, his shoulders squared at attention and his expression studiously blank, the only acceptable response for a sailor being dressed down. “I know where my duty must lie, sir.”
“Very well.” Cranford’s voice was flinty, leaving no chink for argument. “These are your orders, Greaves. You will be quartered here in my sister’s house, for as long as the princess also remains as a guest. You will accompany the princess whenever she leaves the house, you will be armed, and you will be ever watchful for her safety and well-being.”
“I am to be the princess’s bodyguard, sir?” This was worse than being a mere clerk in the dockyards. Far, far worse. “Those are my orders, sir?”
“That, and more,” said the admiral. “Because you’re a lord in your own right, you’ll be her escort, invited to attend the same parties and balls and whatever other folderol pleases the princess, and to the palace, of course.”
“She is in such danger, sir?”
“She is a vibrant symbol of resistance to Buonaparte’s forces,” said Cranford firmly, “and in these unsettled times, symbols matter a great deal. Her life could be at constant risk, and yet it is important that she be seen about London, seen by the very scoundrels who would kill her.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Tom with gloomy resignation. He would rather face any odds in battle at sea than suffer through this on land.
The admiral clapped him on the shoulder. “Buck up, Greaves,” he said. “It’s not so bad as all that, is it? How many times in your career will you ever receive orders as agreeable as these? Squiring a pretty young princess about London at the height of the season?”
Tom didn’t agree. To be chained to the side of that spoiled creature through an endless round of noisy, crowded parties—damnation, why didn’t he just put the pistol to his own head now, and finish what the French had begun?
He glanced past the admiral’s shoulder. The princess was standing before the fireplace, studying her reflection in the looking glass as she smoothed and braided her hair, using only her fingers. She caught his eye, paused, then looked back into the mirror.
“I had no choice but to learn to dress my own hair while I was trapped upon that verminous warship,” she explained as she deftly coiled the braid and tucked it into a neat knot on the top of her hair. “There was no proper lady’s maid there, either.”
Stunned, Tom watched as she took her bonnet from the waiting maidservant and settled it on her head herself. But it wasn’t just seeing how capably she could braid her own hair after she’d made such a fuss. It was the way she was finishing dressing here in the middle of the drawing room. There was an unsettling intimacy to her movements, a seductive balance between royal propriety and nonchalant display, and almost too late Tom realized he’d been staring at the way her breasts pushed higher when she lifted her hands to place her hat.
“If only I had known, ma’am,” began Lady Willoughby, unable to keep the plaintive exasperation from her voice. “If only you had told me you could do—that is, that you knew how you liked your hair dressed, why, surely we could have—”
“Just because I can, Lady Willoughby, does not mean I should.” The princess held out her arms so the maid could drape a paisley cashmere shawl over her shoulders. “Pray recall who I am before you make another such suggestion. Now come, Captain Greaves. The carriage should be waiting, or at least it shall if that has not been bungled like everything else.”
“You are leaving, ma’am?” Tom uneasily realized he was to be included in her plans. “You have an invitation?”
She folded her arms before her, the long tassels on her shawl hanging down nearly to her knees. “I am going anywhere outside this prison of a house. Beyond that, I neither know nor care.”
Without waiting for Tom’s answer or even to see if he followed, she swept grandly from the room and toward the front door, leaving Lady Willoughby to once again scurry along in her wake.
“Women.” Cranford shook his head, as if that single word could sum up all the world’s real ills. “You’ll need a pistol before you accompany the princess, Greaves. Unless, of course, you are carrying one at present.”
“No, sir.” Tom could not believe that these really were his new orders from the admiralty, to trail around London like an armed nursemaid after a spoiled princess. Damnation, he didn’t want to believe it.
“These shall see you through.” Cranford opened the top drawer of the sideboard and took out a long pistol box, holding it open for Tom to choose which gun he preferred. So all of this had been planned from the start, even his acceptance, and as he lifted the nearest gun from the case, he wondered if even that, too, had been preordained. There was nothing fancy about the gun, a standard-issue pistol such as any sailor would carry into battle, yet Tom found the familiar feel of such a gun in his hand oddly comforting. At least something in this morning was as it should be.
“I do not expect you to train that upon every greengrocer’s window, Greaves.” The admiral watched with approval as Tom raised his arm to test the gun’s sight. “After all, we’re in London, not the Peninsula. It’s more a precaution than anything, a way of letting the rest of the world know you are serious about the princess’s well-being. Most of the villains who could bring her any real danger are cowards, anyway, and simply being at her side should be enough to scare them away.”
“I shall follow my orders, sir.” Tom took the plain leather belt that the admiral offered, buckled it low around his waist and hooked the pistol to the ring on the side. It wasn’t exactly the height of London fashion, hanging there over his waistcoat, but it would serve the purpose that the admiral wished.
The admiral nodded. “I never doubted you’d do your duty, Greaves. You’re an officer of the king, and you’ll do whatever is necessary. While you are out with the princess, I’ll have word sent to your lodgings to have your dunnage packed and sent here. You have a manservant?”
“John Kerr, sir. He has been with me since my first command.” Old Kerr would be as disappointed about these new circumstances as Tom was himself, and just as unhappy that they wouldn’t be returning to sea.
“Then I shall make certain my sister has a place for him here, as well.” The admiral unstopped the decanter of port on the sideboard, poured it into two glasses and handed one to Tom. “Here you are. You might need a little fortifying, eh?”
Tom took the glass, the sun turning the liquor golden between his fingers. The surgeons had advised him against drinking, fearing the toll that alcohol might take on his heart, but when he thought of the woman waiting for him in the carriage outside, he decided the risk was worth it. If the port did kill him, then he wouldn’t have to join her after all.
“Long live the king.” Cranford lifted his glass, and Tom did, too. “And confusion to the French.”
“Confusion to the French,” echoed Tom, “especially in Monteverde.”
He downed the port in one long swallow, feeling its heat ripple through him. He stood very still, glass in hand, and waited for the shock, or stabbing pain, or whatever it was that the liquor was supposed to do to him.
But nothing happened. The songbirds in the garden outside were still chirping among the roses, the admiral’s nose was still red, and he, Captain Lord Thomas Greaves, was still very much alive.
“Best you were off, Greaves.” The admiral set down his glass, wiping his mouth with the length of his finger. “The princess will not like to be kept waiting.”
No, she wouldn’t. Tom didn’t need to reread his orders to know that, and with a last bow to the admiral, he headed toward the front door, the pistol heavy against his hip and the prospect of guarding Princess Isabella di Fortunaro a burden he couldn’t escape.
Chapter Three
I sabella stood exactly in the center of Lady Willoughby’s front hall and tried hard—very hard—to keep from losing her temper. It was hot in the airless space, with the doors and windows closed tight and the afternoon sun streaming in through the fan light overdoor. Inside Isabella’s black lace gloves, her hands were sweating, and the long curving feather on her bonnet kept tickling the nape of her neck in a most annoying fashion. The tall case clock ticked away each second with a solemn finality, counting off the wasted minutes that Captain Lord Thomas Greaves was making her wait.
She did not like waiting. She never had, and she never should, considering her rank, but she was determined to give him the benefit of the doubt for this first time. It might not be his fault. Likely the admiral was keeping him with some sort of nonsense, the foolish old man. She would be gracious, and grant the captain the favor of her patience.
But if he ever dared keep her waiting like this again—ah, she would not forgive him, ever.
“I am sure the captain will here shortly, ma’am.” Lady Willoughby gave Isabella her usual watery smile. “He seems like a very nice gentleman.”
Isabella sniffed. “He has not been brought here to be nice. He is here to keep me safe.”
Once again she looked out the long window beside the door. Lady Willoughby’s glossy green carriage with the matched grays was sitting there waiting at the curb, taunting her with the freedom it represented. She didn’t care if the others believed she was exaggerating: she was a prisoner. This was the closest she’d been to leaving this house since she’d been brought to it in the middle of the night, three weeks before, and she could not wait to feel the warmth of the sunlight and the breeze across her skin, and to see more of the city beyond this single boring square.
“I am very sorry, princess,” Lady Willoughby said, as if she could read Isabella’s thoughts, “but I cannot let you go alone. For your own good, you see. You must wait for the captain to escort you to the carriage.”
Isabella frowned, glancing pointedly at the two large footmen standing ready to barricade the door if she tried to escape.
“Oh, yes, of course, you silly goose,” she muttered in Italian, as much to irritate the other woman as to keep her own comments safe. “We cannot tax the gaolers hired to keep me caged like an animal, can we?”
“Yes, just so.” With no notion of what the princess had said, Lady Willoughby smiled again, even as she wrung her hands with despair. “I’m sure when the captain comes, you shall have the nicest drive imaginable.”
Isabella smiled in return and kept speaking in Italian. “True, true, true, quite the nicest, once you give the captain my leash to hold for himself.”
She couldn’t play such tricks on Captain Lord Greaves. How could she have known that Cranford would have found even a single man in this country to speak Italian so well? Tears had started to her eyes when she’d heard the familiar, rolling words, she’d been that struck with sudden homesickness, and for one horrible moment she’d gasped aloud from the shock. But after that she’d managed to hide her feelings, the way a princess always must. She hadn’t let the captain know how surprised she’d been or how lonely she’d felt, and she certainly hadn’t revealed that she’d found him passing handsome, too.
He wasn’t like the other English sailors she’d met on the interminable voyage here, rough, ill-spoken men with dreadful battle scars and missing teeth, and he wasn’t like the sorry old warhorses the admiral had first introduced her to, either. This captain stood straight and proud, his dark blue uniform tailored to show off his broad shoulders and flat stomach. He had fire to him, too, a challenge in his blue eyes and a bite to his smile, and he hadn’t been afraid of her. That was rare, and she liked it.
To be sure, he hadn’t shown her one iota of the respect due her rank, but she could teach him that. He was English, and even an English lord like Captain Greaves could not be expected to understand the finely detailed etiquette of the Monteverdian court. But he seemed clever enough. After these last long, lonely weeks, she would welcome any such challenge, an amusing way to pass the days until Buonaparte was defeated and she could sail for home.
Behind her she could hear his measured footsteps at last coming down the hall to join her, just as she could hear Lady Willoughby’s little birdlike exclamations—such a meek and spineless creature!—as she rushed to greet him. But Isabella didn’t turn, not at first, keeping her face well hidden inside the curving silken arc of her bonnet’s brim.
His first lesson would be simple enough. She would not jump for the delight of his company. He must come to her, and be grateful for her notice.
“What detained you, Captain Greaves?” she asked at last, without turning. “You knew that I wished to leave directly.”
She knew he couldn’t ignore her, not only because of his orders, but because she’d taken care of exactly where she stood. She’d learned that from watching her mother, another of royalty’s little tricks. The sunbeams slicing through the fan light must be making the red velvet of her gown glow like a flame against the stark black and white of the marble floor. How could he possibly be looking anywhere else? It was difficult being a small woman, particularly here in England where the females seemed all to be great gangly storks, and she must rely upon such careful planning to keep attention focused on her.
And for extra emphasis, she let his silence stand for another half beat before, at last, she broke it.
“You have no answer for me, Captain?” She turned, just enough to look over her shoulder, and she did not smile. “No explanation for your delaying me?”
He bowed, his wavy hair falling forward over his brow. “Is there any explanation that would be acceptable to you, ma’am?”
“No. There is not.” She was surprised that he’d answered her question with a question, and surprised, too, that he wouldn’t tell her the obvious reason, that he’d been with the admiral. Unless he hadn’t—a possibility that annoyed her even as it piqued her curiosity. “But no explanation is no excuse, either.”
“I didn’t claim that it was, ma’am.” One of the footmen handed him his gold-trimmed hat, and he settled it squarely on his head, as if preparing for battle. “Is the carriage here, Lady Willoughby?”
“Yes, Captain my lord.” Nervously, Lady Willoughby peered out the window, just to be certain, as if the carriage might have somehow been whisked away by thieves when she wasn’t looking. “But at my brother’s request, I have kept the princess within the house until you joined her.”
“‘Within, within!’” Unable to contain her impatience, Isabella flung one end of the tasseled shawl over her shoulder. “You have done nothing but keep me within, Lady Willoughby, ever since I came here! You might as well have locked me in your darkest dungeon, behind bars of iron, for all that I have been your prisoner!”
“If that is the case, ma’am,” he said, taking her by the elbow without waiting for permission, “then we had better go without.”
She began to pull her elbow away, not liking such familiarity, but then the two footmen blocking the door parted for Isabella and the captain like Moses at the Red Sea. The door swung open, too, and they were outside, on the steps—free!—and Isabella forgot all about the hand at her elbow.
She looked up at the sky and blinked at the brightness. The London sky lacked the brilliance of the one that covered Monteverde, and unlike that perfect enameled blue, this sky was muffled by a haze of coal smoke. But it was still the sky, not the ceiling of a drawing room, and she couldn’t help smiling at the difference as the tassels on her shawl rippled in the breeze.
Yet the captain didn’t share her pleasure. “Come along, ma’am,” he said, steering her down the steps as if her elbow were the rudder on some small boat. “It’s not wise for you to stand out here in the open.”
With an unhappy little sigh, she let him hurry her into the carriage. Not that she had much choice: even with no more contact than his hand on her elbow, she was conscious of how much larger, how much stronger, he was than she. This is what he was supposed to do, watch out for her welfare, but she’d never before had to consider herself a target.
“You ordered this closed carriage, didn’t you, Captain?” she asked as she climbed inside, the leather squabs and polished brass trim warm from waiting in the sun. “After all I’ve been through, you knew I would wish for an open carriage, so I might feel the air, but you chose a closed one instead.”
“Then we’ll keep the windows open.” His glance swept over the quiet square, searching for any sign of something or someone that didn’t belong. “And I believe it was the admiral who suggested the closed carriage.”
“Open windows aren’t the same.”
“No, they’re not.” His expression was stern, all business, as he sat across from her. “I won’t pretend otherwise, ma’am. But I agree with the admiral’s choice. In an open carriage, you would be far too vulnerable to any sharpshooter with a good eye.”
She had not heard that word before—sharpshooter—but she’d no trouble deciphering its meaning. Instantly she pictured herself as she’d appear in that open carriage, a bright patch of red and black, visible from every window and every rooftop they would pass. She knew she should be grateful for the captain’s experience, but the reality behind it frightened her. Though her parents had tried to keep the worst news from her, she knew what had happened to the French royal family. A crown didn’t grant the same omnipotence it once did; Isabella had only to consider how she herself had been sent away to understand that.
Yet she didn’t want to be a villain to those who supported Buonaparte, or a symbol for the English who didn’t. All she wished was to be herself, and for the captain to be the way he’d been inside the house, bantering with her in Italian and not searching shop windows for lurking assassins with chilly English efficiency.
The footman latched the door shut, and at last the carriage rumbled to a start, the iron-bound wheels scraping over the paving stones as they left the square and headed along the city streets. She leaned forward, eager for even a glimpse of the city.
“So where are we bound, ma’am?” The buildings and streets they were passing would mean something to him, neighborhoods and districts he could recognize, while to her everything had a blurry sameness through the window. “Did you or Lady Willoughby tell the driver a destination?”
“I didn’t know one to tell him.” She felt foolish and lost, having earned the freedom she’d craved without any sense now of what to do with it. “I have been too much a prisoner to learn of anything beyond those four grim walls.”
“Ma’am, you were a guest in a Berkeley Square town house.” The captain’s smile was patient and obligatory, a smile guaranteed to make her feel even more foolish and lost. “No one would honestly consider Lady Willoughby’s house to be a prison.”
“It was the same as one.” Her chin trembled. “They allowed me no liberty, no privacy.”
“You allowed them no peace,” he countered. “Nothing Lady Willoughby might have done to you merited that tantrum over your hair. When I was a boy, my mother would have taken a hairbrush to me or my brothers or sisters for behavior like that, and she wouldn’t have used it on our heads, either.”
She’d thought he’d understand, but he didn’t, or at least he was pretending not to, with this nonsense about his mother’s hairbrush. “Your mother wasn’t a queen.”
“No,” he said, pushing his hat back from his forehead with his thumb, “but she was an English countess, which amounts to much the same thing.”
She frowned, wondering what exactly her mother would do or say in this circumstance. “But Lady Willoughby and her servants have been unkind to me, Captain. They did not treat me like a guest. They searched through my trunks and mussed my gowns.”
“How else could they be sure that no enemy could have hidden something harmful in your belongings?” he asked, the logic perfectly clear to him. “They meant only to protect you.”
She sniffed. “They have intercepted my invitations and letters of welcome from my cousins, your English King George and Queen Charlotte, and kept them from me.”
“Lady Willoughby wouldn’t do that, especially not with correspondence from His Majesty. More likely His Majesty has been occupied with affairs of state, and has not yet, ah, found the time to write to you.”
“No, Captain, that was not it at all.” She lowered her voice in confidence, even though they were alone. “Because I am a foreigner, and not English like them, the persons in this house will not trust me. They will not even try.”
He raised one skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t believe that. It’s rubbish.”
“You should believe it, rubbish or not, because it is so,” she said, switching back to speaking Italian. She leaned closer to him, close enough that she could see the darker flecks of blue that sparked his eyes. She clasped her hands before her, beseeching as the shawl slithered off her arm. “Can you trust me, Captain?”
But though she waited, he didn’t answer. Instead of listening, he’d let his eyes follow the shawl as it slipped from her shoulders and came to an abrupt stop there on the neckline of her gown. Monteverdian ladies were not ashamed to display their figures to the best advantage possible, and Isabella had soon realized she wore her gowns cut much lower over her breasts than Lady Willoughby and her dour friends did. Now the captain must have realized the difference, too, his English efficiency scattered to oblivion.
So this, then, was how her mother would have ruled the captain, but the thought gave her no satisfaction. She didn’t want him to be like every other man, whether English or Monteverdian. She wanted him to be better.
“I have trusted no one since I left Monteverde, Captain.” She pulled the shawl back over her shoulder, willing to put aside her disappointment and give him another chance. “No one at all, and certainly none of your English. But you, Captain—truly, I might be able to trust you, if you can but trust me.”
He cleared his throat, and at last looked back at her face. And he knew he’d erred. She could see the chagrin in his expression, which was, she supposed, something.
“I’m an officer of the king, ma’am, sworn to act with honor,” he said. “You should be able to trust me.”
“You are a man first,” she said, thoughtfully stroking one of the shawl’s tassels between her fingers. To her he’d always be a man first, and what a shame it was that he didn’t seem to think of himself that way, too. “And you are a man who hasn’t answered my question. Can you trust me, Captain, so that I might trust you?”
“I told you, ma’am, as an officer—”
“Oh, Captain, not again,” she said. “How can you say that to me, when the others were officers, too?”
“Others, ma’am?” he asked with wary surprise.
“Oh, yes, there were three other captains before you, all old men with white hair, puffed up with their own self-importance and gold braid.” She waggled her fingers over her shoulders to mimic the heavy gold fringes on their epaulets. They had each tried to dictate to her what was proper and what wasn’t, as if they meant to replace her father. They’d lectured her about her behavior and how she’d dressed, and now—now they were lecturing someone else.
He frowned. “What became of them, these other captains?”
So the admiral hadn’t told him he hadn’t been the first choice. She was sorry for that. When she’d told him about the others, she’d only wanted him to realize how superior he was to them, not to make him feel as if he were fourth-rate. Ah, a man’s pride was such a delicate thing!
“Oh, they did not please me,” she said with airy nonchalance, trying to make light of the other men to save his feelings. “I told the admiral to send them away, because I could not trust them.”
“You dismissed them?” He sounded shocked. “Older officers, white-haired gentlemen who deserved respect for their rank and years of service? You dismissed them?”
“I didn’t,” she said, surprised he would be so upset. At least he had some pretense to a title and noble blood. The others had been disagreeable commoners, underlings, and surely his inferiors. “The admiral did. But I do not see why I am not entitled to—”
“You sent those other officers away,” he said, “and because of your whims, they’ve failed their orders. Because of you, ma’am, their lives and careers must be in rare shambles.”
“Their failure is hardly my fault!”
“Who else could be to blame?” he demanded. “How in blazes could you do that to those men, ma’am? It’s bad enough when you berate poor Lady Willoughby, but for you to ruin three honorable gentlemen officers because they did not suit you—”
“I thought I could trust you, Captain,” she said defensively. “I thought because you were as unhappy as I am, you could understand me.”
“Who in blazes says I’m unhappy?”
“You don’t have to say it, Captain!” She sliced her gloved hand through the air as if to cut through his protests. “You do not have to speak one word, either in English or in your barbarous attempt at Italian. You make all perfectly clear. You are no more pleased to be in London than I. You would much rather be back on one of your great smelly navy boats with a ruffian crew of thieves and cutpurses.”
“Ships, ma’am.” He was biting off each word. “In most cases, an English vessel of war is a ship, not a—”
“Very well, then, Captain. A ship. You would rather be in one of your great smelly navy ships than here in this carriage with me. And I see no reason to disoblige you.”
She stood upright, swaying unsteadily in the moving carriage, and thumped her knuckles on the roof of the carriage. “Driver, stop! Here, now! Stop at once!”
The captain grabbed her by the arm, trying to pull her back down on the seat so she wouldn’t fall as the carriage rumbled to a halt. Through the windows Isabella could see other carriages and chaises and shops with stylish ladies and gentlemen strolling along the pavement, enough for her to realize they were on some fashionable street. To Isabella’s satisfaction, many of those passersby were already turning to look at the commotion inside Lady Willoughby’s glossy green carriage.
The captain, of course, thought otherwise. “A moment now, ma’am,” he ordered as he tried to maneuver her back to the seat. “A moment to calm yourself.”
She gasped with indignant shock. She could not recall the last time anyone had dared restrain her like this against her will.
“I will not calm myself,” she sputtered, “because I do not need calming!”
“I won’t let you go until you agree to be reasonable, ma’am.” He held her lightly, almost gently, but there was no mistaking his strength. “I don’t want you hurting yourself.”
“The only one who’ll harm me is you,” she said, trying to wriggle free. It wasn’t easy. His hands were bigger than she’d first realized, his fingers easily spanning her arm in a way that was daunting, but oddly exciting, too. “I order you to release me, Captain, release me at once!”
“My orders from the admiralty must come first, ma’am.” He was working so hard to stop her without hurting her, that, under any other circumstances, she would have laughed out loud. “Damnation, why won’t you show a little sense and stop this?”
“Because I am a Fortunaro princess, Captain,” she said furiously, her temper finally spilling over, “and the Fortunari do whatever they please.”
Abruptly the carriage halted, throwing the captain off balance, and swiftly Isabella jerked her arm free of his grasp. She unhooked the latch on the door and shoved it open, the ribbons on her bonnet blowing up across her face as she teetered on the edge. She’d come too far to change her mind now, and before the captain could pull her back, she stepped from the carriage, her head regally high.
But she’d neglected to wait for the footman to open the step for her, and instead of descending grandly from the carriage, she pitched forward through the empty space in a tangle of red velvet and landed hard on the pavement on her hands and knees, without any grandeur at all.
“Ma’am!” At once the captain was there at her side, kneeling on the pavement beside her. “Are you injured? Should I send for a surgeon?”
“Of course I am not hurt,” she snapped, scrambling back to her feet and brushing him away as well as the two footmen. The palms of her hands stung inside her gloves and she was quite sure her knees were bruised and scraped, but she would never give him the satisfaction of admitting it. Even if a Fortunaro princess might be foolish enough to leap without looking, she would keep the resultant suffering to herself. “I am not some piece of delicate porcelain, to be shattered with such ease.”
He looked relieved. “Then let me help you back into the carriage.”
“Why should I do that?” She straightened her bonnet, retying the ribbons, and looked up at the sign over the shop before her. At least they’d stopped before one she’d plausibly visit, the windows filled with an enticement of bonnets, gloves and ribbons. “We shall go inside here, Captain, to—to Copperthwaite’s Millinery. Yes, that is my wish. A fine shop is not like an open street. There can be no danger to me inside. I shall be quite safe.”
She smiled, proud that she’d made her mouth bend around those awkward English words. Walking forward toward the shop took effort as her bruised knees protested, but through sheer will she kept her smile in place and didn’t wince. Other people were watching, curious and listening, eager to be able to describe any mistake she might make, and she was determined to earn their admiration, not their contempt.
“You can’t do this, ma’am,” said the captain in an impatient whisper as he walked beside her. “It’s not wise.”
“Then I am not wise, because I cannot see reason or cause for not entering this shop.” She was enjoying herself now, relishing the attention of the growing well-dressed crowd on the sidewalk around them, and she raised her voice so the others might hear her. “How am I to earn support for my dearest Monteverde here in London if I never show myself to the English people?”
An excited murmur rippled through the crowd, and she smiled just enough to acknowledge it. This was a part of being her that she’d missed, a part that the captain couldn’t understand, and how could he, really?
One of the footmen hurried to open the shop’s door for her, and she sailed inside. Because Mama had always insisted upon having the dressmakers and jewelers and everyone else come to her at the palace, Isabella had no firsthand experience with shops, and she gazed about this one now with unabashed curiosity.
One long room was lined on either side with pale green counters, and cushioned chairs for customers. While most of the goods were hidden away in the drawers of the tall cabinets behind the counters, special selections had been artfully arranged here and there to catch a buyer’s eye: wide-brimmed leghorn hats with silk flowers, pastel kidskin gloves, veils and ribbons and stocking and garters. Isabella couldn’t imagine having such a selection to choose from, and for once it actually did seem as if the common women might have the advantage over her and her mother in the palace.
With the gracious smile still on her face, Isabella stopped just inside the doors, waiting to be properly recognized and greeted. Every shop girl had already turned to look, as had every customer, and Isabella beamed at the attention. Surely in such a center of fashion as this she would be recognized; surely no assassins could be lurking here.
An elegant older woman glided toward Isabella, the curled ribbons on her cap floating gently around her cheeks. She dipped a genteel curtsy, and Isabella nodded in return.
But Mrs. Copperthwaite wasn’t noticing. “Good day, Captain Lord Greaves, good day! We are so honored to have you visit us—a gentleman of your heroic reputation!”
Beside Isabella, the captain bowed. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “You’re far too generous with your praise. All I did was for my country, nothing that any officer of the king wouldn’t have done in my place.”
“Oh, no, Captain my lord, I would dare differ!” exclaimed Mrs. Copperthwaite. “You are a hero, Captain my lord, and I will not have you argue!”
Mrs. Copperthwaite sighed and clasped her hands before her breasts in a way that Isabella found annoyingly overwrought. A hero, a hero, thought Isabella crossly. If this captain were such a great war hero, then why was he mired here on land, making her life so miserable?
Mrs. Copperthwaite sighed again, at last recovered. “Pray, pray, what shall you have this day, Captain my lord? How might we oblige you?”
“Nothing for me, ma’am,” said the captain. Even with the shopkeeper so shamelessly fawning over him, he was still watching out for Isabella’s safety, his eyes roving all over the counters and cabinets and other customers as he looked for danger. “Though likely my sisters would disagree.”
“Then for—for your friend.” Finally Mrs. Copperthwaite turned to Isabella with a distinctly slighter curtsy. “How might we serve you, miss?”
The shop owner’s expression was respectful enough, but her appraisal was so open—taking in everything from Isabella’s heeled slippers to the plume on her hat, and especially the un-English velvet and gold gown in between—that Isabella knew at once what lay behind it. Because she wasn’t dressed like a milky-mousy English lady, she must be a—a harlot.
“I am not this man’s mistress.” Isabella drew herself up with regal disdain. “I do not know what should give you such a ridiculous idea.”
Beside her, the captain made a growling grumble deep in his throat, and already she knew what that meant, too. He wanted her to behave.
“Mrs. Copperthwaite has said nothing of the sort.” His voice had a forced lightness to it, more warning for Isabella. “She intends no insult to you. She doesn’t know who you are, that is all.”
Isabella didn’t deign to look at him. Most likely he was right about this Mrs. Copperthwaite—if the woman wished to keep her trade, she could ill afford to make any judgments about her customers—but Isabella had no wish to admit to the captain that she’d been wrong. Royalty never did that.
“Then tell her who I am, Captain,” she ordered. “Tell them all.”
His dark brows came together, and the little muscles along the line of his jaw twitched. “That would not be wise.”
“Oh, you are too stubborn!” Without thinking, she lapsed into Italian, flinging her shawl over one shoulder, tassels flying. “Haven’t we already determined that I shall never be a wise woman, not by your preposterous standards?”
Not only was his jaw twitching, but along that same jaw a mottled red flush was now spreading from the immaculate white linen of his shirt.
“Your wisdom, or lack of it, is not my affair,” he said, also in Italian. “Your welfare and safety are. Few in London know you are here, but if you choose to announce yourself like this, in the middle of Copperthwaite’s, then I’ll guarantee the scandal sheets will be filled with it tomorrow.”
“Saints in heaven, what if they are? It will still be your duty to protect me, won’t it?”
“It will,” he said, “but you’ll also make it a damned sight more difficult. Now come, you’ve done enough damage here. Back to the carriage before—”
“Oh, Your Royal Highness,” cried a startled voice in the same Italian. “It is you! Praise the merciful Mother, it is you!”
A small, dark woman in a plain seamstress’s cap and apron rushed from behind the counters toward Isabella. Her round-cheeked face and her singsong dialect could have belonged to any woman in a Monteverdian market, and because of it Isabella smiled, touched by such an unexpected reminder of home.
But before the woman came closer, the captain lunged forward and grabbed her around the waist, jerking her back against his chest. The woman shrieked and fought him, struggling to break free as he caught her right hand and held it firmly in her grasp.
“Maria!” Mrs. Copperthwaite said sharply. “Maria, stop this at once and explain yourself!”
Still the woman plunged and kicked, while only Isabella and the captain knew that she was spewing out the vilest, most profane insults imaginable against every member of the Fortunaro family. She kept the fingers of one hand clenched tightly, and as she tried to twist around toward the captain, the light caught a flash of a polished blade. Shocked, Isabella could only stand and watch, her welcoming smile now frozen on her face.
“Drop it now.” His voice was harsh, efficient. “Save yourself, and surrender.”
“To the devil with you, you English bastard!” she cried, breathing hard with desperation as she tried one last time to twist free. “You deserve to die for defending the royalist bitch!”
But the woman’s strength was spent. The captain pried the woman’s clasped fingers open, and a sharp-bladed pair of sewing scissors dropped to the floor with a clatter. Gasps and ladylike murmurs of horrified surprise rippled through the other customers and shop girls, while the other seamstresses crowded in the doorway to the workroom they were never supposed to leave.
“Send for the constable,” said the captain. “Now.” Obeying instantly, one of the shop girls ran into the street.
Two of the footmen had hurried to relieve him, each taking one of the woman’s arms to hold her until the constable came. Calmly the captain collected the scissors from the floor where they’d fallen, and wrapped them in his handkerchief before he slipped the little bundle of evidence into his pocket. He ignored the woman now, her cap gone and her hair bedraggled and tears of fury streaming down her face as she continued her stream of curses and threats.
But Isabella didn’t have the power to ignore it. She felt the woman’s hatred wash over her like a wave, the intensity of it shocking and confusing, too. Then she noticed the crude necklace that had slipped free of the woman’s kerchief when she’d struggled with Tom. Only Isabella had recognized the tiny triangle of twigs bound with red thread on a black cord.
Isabella knew the symbol, yet she didn’t: a family sign, Anna had told her. But what kind of family—what kind of violence—would link Anna to this woman, and now to Isabella herself?
She felt shaken, her knees trembling and weak beneath her. She’d always believed her father was a good man, and a good king, as well. Buonaparte was the despot, not Father, and as soon as the French could be driven out, the people would rejoice and welcome Father back to his throne. That was the truth, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
Because of Father—because of her entire family—this woman had wanted her dead, and if the captain had not jumped between them, she would have succeeded. Isabella had never seen anyone risk their own life for hers, and the responsibility of it scared her, too. What if the captain had been hurt or even killed trying to save her, simply because she’d insisted on being unwise?
Yet when he came to her now, she saw only concern for her welfare in his face: no reproach, none of the blame that she knew she deserved.
“You are unharmed, ma’am?” he asked her in a gruff whisper. He still spoke in Italian, for her, and that small thoughtfulness was nearly enough to make her weep. “You’ll be safe enough from her now, you know.”
“Oh, Captain my lord, I am so sorry this has happened!” Mrs. Copperthwaite was flushed and distraught, seeing a scandal that could destroy her business. “How was I to know the creature was mad? She has not been a fortnight in my employ, and I only took her in from pity, and because her stitching was so fine, but now—now the only place fit for her will be the gaol!”
“The woman must be tried under your English law.” Isabella spoke again in English. She knew she must be strong and calm, a Fortunaro lioness, and not let anyone see the terror that still hammered in her chest. “Then I am sure she will receive the punishment she deserves.”
“You show great character and courage, miss.” Mrs. Copperthwaite’s smile had a desperate edge. “No wonder Captain his Lord Greaves counts you among his acquaintance, miss.”
The seamstress twisted again in the footmen’s grasp, just enough so she could spit at Isabella’s feet.
“Ha, she is no miss!” she shouted in English, making sure everyone would hear. “You do not know who she is? You do not know?”
“Quiet,” ordered the captain sharply. “You’ve said enough.”
But the woman only laughed, even as the two men that held her half dragged her toward the door.
“She is the only daughter of the villainous royal oppressor of the Monteverdian people!” she shouted over her shoulder. “She is the Princess Isabella di Fortunaro, may she burn forever in the hottest flames of hell!”
Chapter Four
M rs. Copperthwaite gasped, audible to all in the suddenly silent shop. It was equally evident that she was reappraising the princess, trying to shift her opinion of the young woman’s flamboyant dress from that of a gaudy actress or mistress to exotic, eccentric royalty.
“Is this—is this so?” she asked tentatively. “Are you truly—”
“Yes,” the princess said softly, her voice scarcely more than a whisper. “I am.”
“Oh, my goodness.” Mrs. Copperthwaite’s hand fluttered over her chest. “Oh, Your Royal Highness, forgive me!”
She sank into a deep curtsy before the princess, her head bowed and meek. One by one, all the other women in the room followed, graceful dips of crushing pale linen and silk.
It was like nothing Tom had ever witnessed, a scene better suited for the boards at Covent Garden than a Bond Street milliner’s: a melodramatic capture, the princess’s true identity revealed by her would-be assassin, and then in unison every person in the whole wretched shop dropped in an awestruck curtsy. The princess herself couldn’t have choreographed it for more self-centered grandeur.
And yet Tom saw at once that she wasn’t enjoying the spectacle at all. Although he’d easily thwarted her attacker, the surprise and shock had shaken the princess in ways he hadn’t expected. She wasn’t accustomed to real danger like that he’d encountered all his life, and it showed. She’d turned uncharacteristically silent, for one thing, and inside the black brim of her bonnet her face had gone as white as bleached linen, her dark eyes enormous with fear and her mouth pinched. All of her imperious mannerisms had fled, and what was left made her seem very young and very, very vulnerable. She’d stopped being the grand royal Monteverdian princess, and become like any other young woman abruptly confronted with her own mortality.
Thomas held his elbow out for her to take, and when she didn’t, he gently captured her little gloved hand himself and tucked it into the crook of his arm. Following his orders, he had wanted to remove her from the store before anyone learned she was a princess. Now, with that secret gone, he realized how much more important it was for the woman herself that he extricate her from this situation as soon as he could.
“Shall we leave now, ma’am?” he asked. “The carriage is just outside.”
She nodded, and took a shuddering breath as she turned toward Mrs. Copperthwaite. “You may rise. No such ceremony is necessary.”
“Oh, but it is, ma’am!” The older woman straightened, her eager smile proof of how much she wished to gain a royal customer. “It’s not every day we have a great lady of your rank honor us with your custom. What pleases you, ma’am? What might I fetch to show you?”
“Another time, perhaps. I find I am no longer in the humor for such diversions.” She raised her chin, a bit of her customary demeanor returning. “Captain, I am ready.”
“Good day, Mrs. Copperthwaite.” Tom bowed solemnly, then led the princess from the store to the carriage. She managed her exit with a sweeping grace, her free arm angled from her body to show off the drape of her shawl, but only he was aware of how heavily she was leaning on his arm for support.
“You were brave, ma’am,” he said as the carriage drew away from the pavement. “That wasn’t easy for you, I’m sure. You did well.”
“I did not.” Unhappily she slumped back against the squabs. “I wasn’t brave. I was unwise. You said so yourself.”
“That was before, ma’am.”
“Saints in heaven, such a mortal difference.” She sighed and pulled off her bonnet, letting it drop onto the seat beside her. Even in the warm carriage, the color had not returned to her cheeks, leaving her with a drained, forlorn pallor. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I do not wish to speak of this morning again, Captain.”
“I am sorry, ma’am, but you must.” Though he was trying to be kind, there were simply too many unanswered questions about this morning to pretend it hadn’t happened. “You can’t pretend this didn’t happen. I will send for a surgeon to attend you once we return to the house if that will—”
“I told you, Captain, I am not fragile, and I do not require any of your surgeons’ attendings.” She sighed again, wincing as she rubbed her palms together. “Now I wish quiet to contemplate.”
Thomas frowned. The princess did not strike him as a contemplative woman by nature, but if that would help her recover, he could scarcely object.
“Very well, then,” he said softly. “We shall speak later.”
“Later,” she mumbled, her eyes squeezed shut. “Not now.”
Tom suspected she was only pretending to sleep, just as she was pretending to contemplate, but he would grant her that, too. He could use a bit of contemplation himself. Although he had already realized that nothing concerned with the princess would be easy sailing, even so he couldn’t have predicted the disaster they’d found in that infernal ladies’ shop.
What incredible odds had placed the Monteverdian seamstress in Copperthwaite’s? Monteverde was a tiny country. There couldn’t be that many refugees making their way to England, let alone living and working at a skilled trade in London while they plotted revenge against their former king. How much more were those odds compounded by the preposterous coincidence of the princess impulsively stumbling from the carriage into that particular shop at that particular time? Not even the most confirmed gamblers at White’s could have predicted such a sequence.
And now it would be up to Tom to guess what would happen next, with the princess herself as the stakes.
He watched her as she slept, or contemplated, or whatever it was she was doing to escape his questions. Though her face was at ease, there was a fresh wariness clouding it that hadn’t been there earlier, and he was sorry that he hadn’t been able to spare her that change. The admiral hadn’t told him much of her history, or even the details of how she’d escaped the French to come to England. He didn’t know what had become of her family. War was never a good place for a young woman, and he wondered grimly how many other things she’d witnessed or experienced that she wished never again to discuss.
And he’d meant it when he’d called her brave. When the woman had come at her with the scissors, she hadn’t fainted or screamed or tossed her petticoats over her face, the way too many young ladies would. Perhaps that kind of nonsense was bred out of princesses. True, he’d known no others for comparison. But this princess had stood her ground, with a rare courage and grace that he could understand and respect.
He studied her now, her dark lashes feathered over the curve of her cheeks. Her breathing was deep, making her mostly bare breasts rise and fall above the low neckline of her gown, and with an honorable effort he forced himself to look back to her face. She wasn’t priggish or overly modest, he’d grant her that. Earlier he’d judged her handsome at best, not pretty, but the more time he spent in her company, the more his opinion was changing. She was pretty. Too pretty, if he were honest, and he shook his head as he considered all the trouble such thoughts could bring him.
Her eyes fluttered open, and she stretched her arms before her, relishing the motion like a waking cat. “We have reached the Willoughbys’ house, Captain, have we not?”
He hadn’t even noticed the carriage had stopped. “Ah, it seems we have.” He leaned from the window, swiftly scanning the front of the house and down each side of the street. “Here, let me help you down.”
But she drew back, her chin down and her arms folded over her chest. “I should prefer you to go first, Captain. To make sure that all is as it should be.”
He nodded, understanding, and privately pleased that she’d put her trust in him. Once more he scanned the quiet square, then held his hand out to her.
“All’s snug, ma’am,” he said gallantly. “Come ashore whenever you’re ready.”
But instead of taking his hand, she slipped past him unassisted, dangling her bonnet from her wrist by the ribbons. She hurried up the steps by herself, leaving him once again feeling chagrined and in the uncomfortable position, for any captain, of following instead of leading.
Perhaps, he thought, they’d not made such progress, after all.
“How was your drive, ma’am?” Lady Willoughby was asking as the princess handed her hat to a maid. “Was it pleasant?”
“‘Pleasant’ is not the word I should choose.” The princess paused before the looking glass, patting and plucking at her hair where the bonnet had flattened it. “Unless, of course, your English definition of pleasure is to be beset by murderous anarchists. Isn’t that so, Captain Greaves?”
“We did have our adventure, Lady Willoughby,” Tom said. The countess looked bewildered, yet also clearly relieved that she was no longer the one responsible for the princess’s “adventures.” “But no real harm was done, as you can see. You are certain about not summoning a physician, ma’am?”
“No, no, no.” The princess frowned at his reflection behind hers, clearly displeased that he’d been considerate enough to ask again. “You will come with me now to the garden, Captain.”
She was leading again, and again he was left to follow, this time down the hallway through the house, and he did not like it. He did not like it at all. “Where in blazes are you going now?”
She stopped and turned to face him. “I am going to the garden, Captain,” she explained with the kind of excruciating patience reserved for small, simple children. “You are joining me. There we shall speak to one another. Then when we are done, we shall leave.”
She glanced past him, back to the hovering maidservant. “I want a pot of chocolate brought to me in the garden, a plate of toast, browned on one side only and the crusts cut away, and a small pot of orange marmalade. I will also require a basin of cooled water—cooled, mind, and not cold, or warm, or scalding, or I shall send it back—and a linen cloth for drying.”
So the old princess had returned, ready to demand the sun and the stars, and expecting to get there, too.
Not that he was above giving orders himself. “Another place, ma’am. Not the garden.”
She stopped again, so abruptly they nearly collided. “The garden is safe. The admiral said it was. There are tall brick walls on three sides, and the house on the fourth has the only entrance.”
“I’ve had men on my crews who could scale a twelve-foot wall like cats,” he said. “They’d be over a garden wall in less time than it takes to say it.”
“Ohh.” Her bravado faltered as her face fell, and again he glimpsed the princess from the carriage. “I have sat there for weeks and weeks, not knowing. Now, however, I see that such a place would not be—would not be wise.”
“No, ma’am.” He didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t have to. “Surely there’s another room in this house, a parlor or library.”
She nodded, and turned the knob on the nearest door. “This is the earl’s library.” She went to stand in the center of the room, before the empty fireplace. “You must understand, Captain, that I have not been here before. So many books depress me. Do you care to read, Captain?”
The room was little used and gloomy, with the louvered shutters over the windows closed tight against the sun’s damage to the bindings. There’d be little threat to her in here, that was certain.
“I do,” he said. “On blockade duty, or a tedious voyage with foul weather, a book is often my best companion at sea.”
“I have never found the patience for reading.” Even now she was pacing, short steps that crossed and recrossed the patterned carpet. “I haven’t the concentration. But that is not what we must discuss, is it?”
“Why don’t you sit?” He held a silk-covered armchair for her. “I don’t intend this to be a trial for you, you know, and I—”
“My father is a good king.” Her words were coming out in a rush, as restless as her pacing. “He is fair, and just, and good. I do not know why that—that woman would say otherwise, because it is not true. You must understand that, Captain. You must.”
“I put no weight in what she said, ma’am.” He was careful of what he said, too. He knew little about her father either as a king or a man, but since a country takes its character from its leader, Tom had his doubts about the King of Monteverde, no matter how his daughter pleaded for him. “Every country has its malcontents, and always has. It’s the French and Buonaparte that’s made them bold now.”
“I thank you for your understanding, Captain.” She bowed her head and spread her fingers in a graceful fan of acknowledgment. It wasn’t hard to imagine her at home in a court’s ritual formality, just as he could easily picture her in the thick of that same court’s self-indulgence and flirtation. What was difficult was seeing her so sadly out of place here in London, a bright exotic bird trapped among the dry leather spines of the earl’s library. “And I thank you also for saving me as you did. I thank you with all my soul and my heart.”
He cleared his throat, uneasy with such lavish gratitude. “I was but following my orders, ma’am.”
The wariness remained in her manner, but there was a dare there, too. “You could have followed them without risking your own life. It was all so very fast, you know. No one there would have faulted you. To have seen me die would have likely pleased them more, to see if my foreign blood was as red as this velvet.”
“Don’t jest like that,” he said sharply. “I’d no intention of letting you be murdered.”
“No?” She stopped pacing and looked directly into his eyes, though he could not tell if she were teasing, or taunting, or simply seeking the truth. “You would have been free of the nuisance of me, Captain. Has that no appeal for you?”
“None,” he said firmly. “Not only did my orders oblige me, but my conscience, as well. And no more of this talk from you, mind?”
Her smile spread slowly, lighting her eyes as she turned her face up to his. He’d never expected her to be shy, but that was there, too, an unmistakable undercurrent to the vulnerability he’d glimpsed earlier.
“You did not have to save my life, yet you did,” she said, her voice low and breathless. “I did not have to thank you, but I did. Is it such a marvel that I trust you, Captain, like no other in this whole English country?”
She was so close to him that her scent, orange blossoms and musk and female, filled his nose, so close that he could see the flecks of gold in her dark eyes, so close he could not miss the sheen of excitement on the twin curves of her breasts, there in the caress of red velvet.
It occurred to him that she expected him to kiss her. It also occurred to him that as much as he would like to oblige her—damnation, as much as he’d like to oblige himself—to do so would be purest madness, and disaster for his career.
He took a step away, clasping his hands behind his back. That was his habit from walking the quarterdeck, but for now it was also the only sure way he’d keep himself from reaching for what she was offering. Even in a wanton place like Monteverde, there had to be other ways of showing trust.
He cleared his throat again. “I am glad that you trust me, ma’am. That should make it easier for you to answer my questions.”
“Your questions.” Her cheeks flushing nearly as red as her gown, she ducked her head and turned away from him. “I had not forgotten, Captain.”
Damnation, he hadn’t intended to shame her, especially when he’d wanted the same thing. Promptly he looked away, too, his own face growing warm, and instead concentrated on a blank-eyed marble bust of Homer that stood on a pillar in the corner.
“There were far too many coincidences this morning for chance alone, ma’am,” he began, striving to be all business. “Have you contacted anyone else from Monteverde since you arrived in London? An ambassador, a friend?”
“The ambassador returned home months ago, before I’d left, to guard his estates from the French,” she said. “I do not believe Father replaced him. Everything was already too unsettled. And as for friends or acquaintances—I have not a one in London, else I would have gone to them instead of here.”
He could not imagine being so entirely adrift in a foreign country. The navy had always been there to support him even if his family and friends had not, and he marveled at the strength this small young woman must possess, forced to depend upon strangers for so much.
“Is there any reason beyond politics that someone would want you dead?” he asked. “Did you bring with you anything of great value? Gold, jewels, paintings?”
She sniffed with indignation. “Lady Willoughby could tell you that. Recall how she and her staff have searched my belongings.”
True enough. That search would have served its purpose, even though Tom didn’t like the notion of her having so little privacy. If anything of real interest had been discovered, then the admiral would likely have relayed it to him.
“Well, then, another reason. Someone who is jealous of your position or rank, or the fact that you escaped while they were forced to remain?”
“No,” she said sadly. “My life has not been so interesting as that. Besides, most Monteverdians would consider my escape a banishment, not something to be envied.”
“There is no one?” He hesitated, wishing he did not have to ask this. “No, ah, no fiancé, or lover?”
“By all the saints in heaven, of course I had no lover!” Her indignation was rising to such heights that he half expected to smell smoke where she’d scorched the carpet. “No Monteverdian princess would dare take a lover before she was wed, and before she’d given her royal husband a legitimate heir.”
“I understand, ma’am,” he said hastily. “You don’t have to say more.”
“But I do,” she insisted, “because you do not understand, else you would never have asked. To risk bearing a bastard child of impure blood, to lose all my value as a bride to any respectable royal house, to sully my family’s name, to be forced to surrender my dowry—I would not do that, Captain, never. Never.”
Oh, hell. Now he’d made a right royal mess, hadn’t he?
“I didn’t say that you had done any of that, ma’am,” he said, wishing desperately for a way to withdraw that particular question. “I was only trying to, ah, to learn if there was anyone else who might wish you harm.”
“Harm, ha,” she said darkly, and muttered some black, incoherent words in Italian that he was certain must be a curse. “I could show you harm, which is what you deserve for that. Because I know exactly what you meant. I may be a virgin, but I am not a fool.”
He felt himself flush again, something that had not happened since his voice had cracked at age twelve. But then, he could not recall ever having had any woman, young, old, or in between, speak to him so frankly of her virginity.
No wonder he was feeling mortifyingly out of his depth, and sinking fast.
“I assure you, ma’am, there was no disrespect—”
“No more of your assurances.” Suddenly she was standing between him and Homer, her dark eyes full of sparks and a fierce tilt to her chin that had nothing shy about it. She snapped her fingers before him, as if to flick away the word itself. “No more of your harms, and your coincidences, and—and no more of your ridiculous ‘ma’am’s,’ either. It is the insipid sound a nanny goat makes, and it does not please me.”
He frowned down at her. He’d always respected titles and ranks, whether it was a senior officer, or his father the earl, and he wasn’t sure why anyone would choose to do otherwise.
“But ‘ma’am’ is the proper way to address you. Even our own queen is called ‘Your Majesty’ only for the first greeting, and ‘ma’am’ after that.”
“I am not your queen, am I?” Her frown matched his. “I am different. You are different. You are the only Londoner who has spoken to me in my own language, and it seems most barbarously wrong of you not to call me by my given name while we converse.”
“Call you by your Christian name?” he asked, incredulous. His experience with ladies might be limited, but he did know that most did not wish to be addressed after a few hours’ acquaintance with the same jolly familiarity used with a drinking crony in a tavern. Here he’d been worrying that he’d been too free, yet she was offended instead by his being too formal.
“Yes, yes. It will give me great comfort, and be so much better than the nanny-goat bleat.” She nodded with satisfaction, as if everything had been decided. “Whenever we are alone, or speaking Italian as we are now, you will call me Isabella. I give you leave. We will speak as friends, eh?”
How could he possibly refuse her when she’d no other real friends in the entire country? How cruel would it be to turn down such a humble request?
She snapped her fingers again, now less from annoyance than for emphasis. “In turn I shall call you whatever your name might be instead of ‘Captain.’ You do have another, don’t you?”
“It’s Thomas,” he said reluctantly. “Tom for short. But I’m not certain this is—”
“Thomas,” she repeated, testing the sound of the name. “Tom. Tomaso. That will do. Ah, here is that lazy maid at last with my chocolate. Set it down there, on that table.”
Tomaso: no one had called him that since he’d been a boy traveling the Continent with his family. Yet from her lips it sounded different, a silky, luxuriant ripple that couldn’t possibly refer to him.
So how in blazes was he supposed to say her name? “Ma’am” might sound like a goat’s bleat to her, but at least it had none of the sinuous, sensuous entrapment of Isabella.
He was saved for the moment as the servants entered with her requests, and he watched her dictate to them with appalling precision. The maid must place the silver tray with the chocolate pot and toast here, squared to the edge of the table. The footman must present the basin of water, holding it steady while she dipped one fingertip into the surface to judge the temperature, and then place it before the wicker-backed chaise, with the linen cloth folded in half over the arm.
“I know you judge me to be too picky, Tomaso,” she said once the servants left. “Perhaps I am. But there is a proper way for things to be done, and an improper one, as well. If standards aren’t kept, why, then, civilization is meaningless, and we should just as well go back to grunting and rooting about naked in the dirt like little piglets.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The unbidden image of her naked made him forget her request.
“Isabella,” she corrected him, fortunately unaware of his true thoughts as she sat on the settee and swung her legs up before her. “You will call me Isabella. Now be an honorable gentleman, and look away while I tend my sorry knees.”
But it was already too late for honorable discretion. Without waiting for him to oblige, she’d pulled her skirts up high over her garters and bent over to inspect her bruised, scraped knees.
She winced as she dribbled the cool water over them, then glanced up at Tom through her lashes.
“I told you to look away,” she said, wrinkling her nose and mouth at the sting of the cold water. “You are not being honorable.”
“Damnation, you have not given me the chance before you go and hike up your skirts!” he sputtered. She was wearing yellow lisle stockings with dark blue garters, the ribbons embroidered with red roses that, unfortunately, matched the scrapes on her knees—pale, plump knees which, scraped or not, were still quite fine to look upon. “What honorable lady would do such a thing, I ask you, let alone ask a gentleman to ignore it?”
She blinked, not at all embarrassed. “But I am not an honorable English lady, Tomaso. I am a princess, and I am entitled to ask whatever I please.”
He took a deep breath, making himself once again look at her face, an event that seemed to be happening far too frequently with her.
“Not that, ma’am,” he said as firmly as he could. “My orders regard your safety and well-being, not your—your modesty.”
“My modesty. How very English that sounds!” She grinned, and widened her eyes for emphasis. “Well, then. You have reasoned this better than any periwig judge. Since we are in England, I rescind my order. Look at my sad little knees if you wish, and I shall not protest.”
With a groan of frustration he dropped into the chair across from her, wondering if even one of those great admiralty lords had any idea of what he was going through.
“Why the devil aren’t you having one of the lady’s maids tend to you? What reason could you have for doing this here instead, except to plague me?”
“Because you are the only one who knows how it happened,” she said, dabbing at her knees. “I was impulsive and—and unwise. Stepping from a carriage without waiting for the step is something a simpleton would do, not a princess. The maidservants in this house whisper about me enough. They do not need to see that I have skinned my knees like a clumsy child. But you—I cannot have such a secret from you, can I?”
He hadn’t expected that. “You are fortunate you weren’t more badly hurt,” he said gruffly. “You could have broken your leg, or worse.”
“I’m fortunate in a great many ways, I suppose.” She dried her knees and flipped her skirts back down, smoothing them around her ankles for good measure. “I could also have been stabbed with a pair of embroidery scissors which, given my ineptitude at handwork, would have been most ironic.”
He frowned grimly. He supposed it was good that she could make light of it, but he could not. “‘Ironic’ isn’t the word I would have chosen.”
“It is better than the alternative, yes?” Her smile turned wistful. “What happened today in that shop was not your fault, Tomaso. You couldn’t have stopped more than you did. I have lived most of my life with the whole world watching, and I know no other way.”
“But I shouldn’t have let you go into that infernal shop in the first place.”
“That’s because you believe the best way to keep me safe is to lock me away, but that won’t do for me, not at all.”
She smoothed a stray lock of hair behind her ear, her smile turning bittersweet. “On my family’s crest are three lions, brave and fierce and ready for any challenge. That is how I am, too, Tomaso. Why else would I have come all this way on my own, away from my family and my home? I would rather face life with a roar than hide and quake with my hands over my eyes. Can’t you understand that, Tomaso, even being English?”
He grumbled, but he nodded, because it was the easiest reply, if not the best.
But he understood, all right. He understood that he was becoming more and more tangled in the complicated life of this small, fierce lioness, and there wasn’t a blasted thing he could do about it.
With her legs curled up beneath her, Isabella sat in the center of her bed and listened. She’d always been good at listening, particularly like this in the dark. There were a great many things that could be learned that way, stray bits and scraps of interesting information that others tossed away without a thought, information that could prove most useful.
Consider all she’d learned of Lord and Lady Willoughby and their establishment in the few short weeks that she’d been their guest. Simply by listening, she’d learned that the earl stayed downstairs drinking long after the countess had retired, and that when he finally came upstairs—his footsteps unsteady, muttering to himself—he’d go not to his wife’s bed, or even his own, but up another flight of stairs to the servants’ rooms, where he’d make the kitchen maid’s iron bedstead squeak off and on all night.
Isabella herself did not care about the earl’s proclivities. She’d certainly overheard worse things in her parents’ palace. The earl was a man, and a lord; he could do what he pleased. But because all the other servants seemed to know, too, the house was closed for the night far earlier than was fashionable, the fires banked, the candles doused, and everyone in their beds. But for Isabella, the moment she heard the earl’s footsteps meant the moment she knew she’d be undisturbed. Until morning, there’d be no more servants knocking at Isabella’s door, no more invented reasons for the countess to come chirping into her rooms, hoping to discover who knew what. Locking her bedchamber door was useless, for the countess held the keys to all the rooms in the house, and had no reluctance to use them.
So in the dark Isabella listened, straining her ears, and smiled when she finally heard those last footsteps of the day. The door upstairs opened and shut, and Isabella hopped off her bed. Barefoot, so she’d make as little noise as possible, she lifted the chair from her dressing table to the top of the trunk at the end of her bed. Then she climbed up first onto the trunk and then the chair, steadying herself with one hand around the bedpost. Her heart was racing with excited dread, and she had to remind herself to take care, and not fall again as she had earlier.
Now she could see over the top carved wooden frame that supported the bed’s curtains. The bottom of the frame was lined with the same brocade as the curtain, gathered into a showy sunburst over the mattress, but the top, here where no one would ever see, was covered by a stitched piece of coarse muslin, tacked into place only in the corners. Using a butter knife that she’d kept from her breakfast tray for the purpose, Isabella pried the tacks free, slowly peeled back the muslin and sighed with relief.
There, sandwiched between the lining and the muslin, lay the quilted linen petticoat of her traveling clothes, the skirts spread out in a fan so the outline wouldn’t show from below. Gently she touched the petticoat, reassuring herself that it hadn’t been touched, and again whispered thanks to her mother for suggesting such a clever hiding place. No one, certainly not foolish Lady Willoughby, would ever think to look here.
Lightly she traced one quilted channel, her fingers following the lumpy outlines of the treasure stitched within for safekeeping. Scores of gold coins, each stamped with the Fortunaro lions, were only the beginning. The real prize was the oval rubies, big as pigeon’s eggs and set in hammered gold, that had been in her family since the first Fortunaro had stolen them from the Caesars in Rome and made them the centerpiece of the crown jewels, a symbol of everything grand in her country.
On the voyage to England, the sheer weight of the petticoat and its hidden treasure had been a constant burden to Isabella, but that was nothing compared to the responsibility that had pressed upon her every minute since she’d left Monteverde. Not even her father the king had known she had the jewels, and Mama had made her swear terrible oaths never to tell another.
Isabella’s fingers stilled over the largest ruby, the one etched with the Fortunaro lion. Captain Lord Thomas Greaves had asked her if she’d anything that someone would kill her for. She hadn’t answered him honestly about that, nor had she told him how she’d seen the little triangle made of twigs around the woman’s neck. She couldn’t, not without raising too many other questions she’d no wish to answer. But he’d listened to her, anyway, and the readiness with which he’d accepted her evasion had saddened her no end.
How could it not? He was appallingly masculine in a rough English way, and if she were a sleek Italian lioness, then he was surely the model for the blustery wild lion that stood behind the British throne. No wonder she’d been drawn to him the moment she’d entered the drawing room, and no wonder, too, that she’d wanted to kiss him this afternoon, a giddy, foolish impulse that she’d regretted at once.
Flirtation was not why she’d been sent on this journey. She was not here to amuse herself with the man assigned to watch over her, no matter how broad his shoulders might be, or that he alone in London had made the effort to speak her language. In the long, long lineage of the Fortunaro, she was an insignificant nothing, except for what she might do now for her family’s honor.
As if to remind herself, she touched the jewels one last time before she pulled the muslin back in place and pressed the tacks back into the corners with her thumbs. But instead of climbing down to the floor, she slumped wearily on the chair, her hands resting on her bruised knees and her bare legs dangling over the chest.
She liked Tom Greaves, and she trusted him, and if they’d been born any other two people in this world, then that would have been plenty. But not only were those rubies hidden in the canopy reason for someone to pursue her; for a Monteverdian princess, they were also reason to die.
With a little sob, Isabella buried her face in her hands, and gave in to the unfairness that had become her life.
Chapter Five
T om walked down the empty street toward the river, wanting no other company than his own. He’d given up trying to sleep any longer in his unfamiliar bed in Lady Willoughby’s guest room, and had set out from the silent house when the skies were still dark, or at least as dark as they ever were in London. Now the first light of dawn was pinking the horizon, and heavy-eyed linkboys were going from light to light, dousing the night’s flames for the coming day.
The early morning was chill, damp with dew that had fallen like a silvery haze over the dark wool of Tom’s uniform coat, and his breath showed before his face. Yet still he walked on, lengthening his stride in the foolish hope that exercise alone would be enough to ease his restlessness.
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Miranda Jarrett
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The Princess And Her Protector…When an exiled princess becomes too much for her hosts to handle, Captain Lord Thomas Greaves is called to action. Playing nursemaid to a spoiled and much-too-beautiful princess isn′t exactly how Thomas wants to serve his country, but at least it′s something to relieve his boredom while he counts the days until he can return to sea.To mask her loneliness, the homesick Isabella has been imperious and difficult since seeking asylum in London. But as the sparks fly between her and Tom, she can′t deny her attraction to her handsome bodyguard. And when her life is threatened, Bella realizes that the dashing captain is the first man to treat her like a woman, not just a princess….