Kitabı oku: «The Uncompromising Lord Flint»

Chapter One
Late May 1820

‘English pigs!’

The wrought-iron bars rattled again as another hailstorm of stale breadcrumbs hit him squarely in the face. She might well be a traitor and a termagant, but Lady Jessamine Fane’s aim was reliably accurate.

‘I’m sorry, my lord. Had we known she was stockpiling her rations to use as weapons we would have relieved her of them.’

Lord Peter Flint dusted the latest baked embellishments from his lapels and smiled tightly. ‘Pay it no mind, Captain. This is an unusual situation for all of us.’ It wasn’t every day that a Royal Navy frigate became a floating prison for one inmate and a female one at that. Nor did he, in the usual run of things, find himself the reluctant gaoler of one, tasked with dragging her foul-mouthed and fiery carcass back to London. A job that he was now prepared to concede might not be as simple as he had first thought. Lady Jessamine did not strike him as one who would go meekly. Or even quietly. The blasted woman had been hurling abuse at them for the better part of half an hour. Hell, she’d been yelling from the moment he boarded the ship and they had set sail an hour ago. A constant tirade of pithy, imaginative and noisy invective issued alongside the flying food from her nest in the shadows.

‘Can we bring some more lanterns down here?’

The brig was unnecessarily dark and forbidding, the heavy, windowless timbers of the hull creaking as they rocked on the tide. Her collection of missiles would be more easily avoided with the addition of some light and he wanted to know exactly what and whom he was dealing with and, no matter what she had done, it seemed a tad cruel to keep her in the dark.

Flint was yet to see her face properly. It was buried in a ratty tangle of dark curls. All he could properly ascertain was despite her strength she was small, judging from the petite size of the grubby hands which gesticulated wildly in a Gallic fashion. Yet her surprisingly sultry French-accented voice and impressive repertoire of insults suggested she was no girl. Not much of a lady either, but then what had he expected?

Lady Jessamine might have once been the daughter of an English earl, but a decade had passed since she had been ripped out of her British life by her traitorous French mother. A mother who had fled England to live openly in sin with her French lover. The Comte de Saint-Aubin-de-Scellon had been one of Napoleon’s biggest supporters. He was still one of his most loyal supporters, if their intelligence was to be believed, and the lynchpin of the French side of the smuggling ring they were yet to destroy. In view of her bohemian and scandalous upbringing, her lack of morals hardly came as a shock. Nor did the treason. As the Comte had had more of a hand in Lady Jessamine’s upbringing than her own father, it was hardly a surprise that her allegiance was staunchly with the enemy.

Like mother, like daughter.

Except the loud-mouthed Jessamine had done more than share a bed with the enemy. If the mounting evidence was to be believed, she had committed all manner of atrocities which had seen good men die. Men he considered friends as well as comrades in arms. Once she had served her purpose and spilled her secrets she would likely hang. And rightly so. All Flint had to do was deliver her to Lord Fennimore, the courts and the lawyer Hadleigh and then he would be shot of her and her foul temper.

Above him, he listened to the sounds of the huge canvas sails snapping in the wind and knew the next few days would not be pleasant despite their fast speed. Aside from this ocean journey, he would then have to spend days stuck in a coach with her. It couldn’t be helped. He was between missions and the rest of the King’s Elite were either in the thick of it or on honeymoon. His friend and fellow spy Jake Warriner had been the first to fall into the parson’s trap, something which still came as a shock considering Jake had always been a committed and cheerful rake determinedly averse to settling down. He had been closely followed by Seb Leatham, who had gone and married an effervescent incomparable despite his painful shyness around women. As both friends had been working on the same mission to catch exactly the same smugglers as Flint, their sudden and unexpected plummet into marital bliss was a worry. Two good men down. A state Flint wanted no part of.

Not this side of fifty at least. Perhaps when he was older and beginning to creak he might welcome the presence of a wife. And then again perhaps not. Merely considering it made him frown.

It wasn’t so much the institution of marriage he took issue with, rather the inevitable tribulations which came along with it. As the youngest of six children, five of whom were female, he’d had quite enough feminine machinations, hysterics and interfering nosiness to last a lifetime. He’d been hen-pecked, mollycoddled and driven to the furthest limits of his sanity for his first twenty years. Those scars still ran deep. Too deep to plunge headlong into marriage any time soon. Women were born conditioned to find ways to control and confound the men they cohabited with. A fact he understood only too well.

He loved all his high-strung sisters dearly, was hugely proud and protective of them in equal measure, but also spent a great deal of time wanting to strangle the lot of them. Despite all now happily settled with good husbands and families of their own, they still devoted a huge and wholly unnecessary amount of time meddling in his life.

In the last two years that meddling had become considerably more unbearable than it had been in his youth—before he had discovered the sweet taste of freedom—because now they had collectively decided their little brother was in dire need of settling, too. In their minds, seven and twenty was precisely the right age for a man to marry. He couldn’t return home without an attractive and eligible female being unsubtly wafted under his nose.

Last month, when another mission necessitated a protracted visit to his estate, his troublesome sisters had conspired to procure three potential brides who just happened to be invited to every dinner he was home to eat. And he had been purposely non-committal about his possible attendance at all meals—yet those eligible girls were there regardless. One of whom was so enthusiastic Flint had had to keep his wits about him for a whole week to avoid being caught in a compromising situation. That chit had been hellbent on being ruined and his sisters, and his own beloved mother, had encouraged her ardent pursuit! It was a sad state of affairs when a man’s house wasn’t a safe haven.

Thank goodness the wandering and unpredictable life of a spy had given him a convenient excuse to avoid his siblings for months out of every year. They lived in Cornwall, miles away from anywhere, and he cheerfully resided in London in bachelor lodgings, blissfully female-free. A situation which suited him perfectly. As he knew to his cost, all women—family or otherwise—really couldn’t be trusted.

A hard chunk of well-baked crust caught him on the temple. ‘Do not dare try to ignore me, English pig! Let me out of here! You do not know what you have got into. They will come and they will kill you. Every one of you!’ He dodged the next doughy projectile and rolled his eyes. All this combustible feminine emotion was tiresome. She saw it and became most fervent, her small hands curling around the bars and her dark eyes wide beneath the tangle of curls.

‘Do you seriously think they will let me set one foot on English soil and not be there waiting?’

Something he and his superiors were counting on and the real reason why she had been held tantalisingly on this huge ship, conveniently anchored within plain sight of the beach at Cherbourg for almost six days.

Lady Jessamine was bait.

A tasty morsel to lure her fellow traitors out of the woodwork. ‘You are overreacting, madam. Before you know it, you will be stood firmly back on English soil, in the dock and found reassuringly guilty and we’ll all be much happier for it.’

Her hand went straight to her neck as she stumbled back a step and he felt a pang of guilt at being so brutal before he ruthlessly quashed it. So what if she was a woman? She didn’t deserve his compassion and any residual, instinctually protective ideals about the fairer sex did not apply here. She was a traitor. A criminal.

She might not have wielded the pistols that had killed, but she’d had a hand in loading the bullets and reaped a share in the ill-gotten profits. Shamelessly co-ordinating the smugglers for the elusive Boss, a man the King’s Elite had been desperate to arrest for over a year. The callous and invisible criminal mastermind behind a plot to restore Napoleon to power. His network had infiltrated the upper echelons of the English elite and flooded the market with smuggled brandy, the proceeds from which went straight into the enemy’s coffers.

Alongside the Comte de Saint-Aubin-de-Scellon, the petite Lady Jessamine was his partner in crime. The Boss’s assistant across the Channel. Every covert, coded message they had intercepted in the last few weeks had been written in her pretty, looped handwriting. Times, places, shipments, vessels, corrupt English peers complicit in the widespread and dangerous treachery—Lady Jessamine was privy to it all. In fact, she had assisted in orchestrating it. Always had. There were three other convicted traitors languishing in Newgate awaiting execution who had repeatedly testified to as much.

A midshipman arrived with a lamp and the damp brig was suddenly bathed in golden light. Another pang of pity troubled him as she flinched in pain and shielded her eyes. She’d been kept in the dark too long. Her skin had the grey pallor similar to that seen on long-term prisoners.

Now he could clearly see her body, the evidence of her rough treatment appalled him. One sleeve hung limply at her elbow, ripped nearly clean from the bodice. Finger-shaped bruises marred her upper arm. Her dark hair was matted. Her small feet bare. The remnants of her gown stained and filthy. The coarse, utilitarian fabric surprised him. Flint had expected silk and lace—the obvious trappings of wealth and ill-gotten privilege—not dull, patched serge.

A disguise? It had to be. Once her hideaway had come under siege, it made sense she would don the garments of a servant and attempt to flee capture. But still...

‘Send for soap and hot water, Captain. Some fresh clothes and a hairbrush.’ Whatever she had done, Lady Jessamine was still a human being. ‘And arrange a screen out here so she can bathe in private. The guards can wait outside.’ She was also the sole woman on a ship filled with lusty men who spent the majority of their lives on the ocean with other males.

‘If we can’t see her, there is no telling what she might do! The blasted chit has tried to escape three times already!’

‘The anchor has been weighed and we are miles from shore. Unless she swims underwater with the speed of a dolphin, where exactly do you think she will go?’ Flint turned at the same moment she brushed the dark curtain of hair from her face.

Beautiful.

That was the only thought he had and one that certainly wouldn’t do. He’d been bewitched by traitorous beauty before and had trained himself to be immune since. As her deep brown, almond-shaped eyes locked with his, he abruptly turned on his heel, a little staggered at the odd emotions the sight of her conjured. He had thought he hadn’t needed Lord Fennimore’s stinging reminder about his previous gullibility—now he clung to those insightful words gratefully.

‘Don’t let her wiles waylay you. Remember what happened the last time.’

As if he could forget? His father had almost died as a result. But that had been years ago when he had still been green around the gills and had assumed that all women were like his sisters—over-emotional but good inside. That particular prisoner had duped him with her tears, capitalised on his familial obligation to protect and then thoroughly seduced him into dropping his guard. To then watch helpless as she had shot his poor father with Flint’s own pistol had been a hard way to learn his lesson—but learn it he had. What she looked like and how his body responded had nothing to do what his mission. The mission always had to come first. ‘Get yourself cleaned up. We will talk again in an hour.’

Jess watched him leave. Watched the Captain and her two surly guards follow closely behind, then sank to the floor. The last few weeks had been terrifying and exhausting, but tears had no place now. Self-pity was an indulgence she couldn’t afford—not yet at least. Perhaps soon she could curl up in a ball in a safe little room far, far away and cry for a month to let it all out. Until then, she needed to hold the tears back, knowing instinctively that if she started then she wouldn’t be able to stop.

Everything was going entirely to plan.

Not that she really had any more of a plan now than she had when all this had started a few weeks ago. It was more a series of events and opportunities created out of necessity and desperation and a large sprinkling of unexpected luck, but at least she was out of the run-down pension which had been her prison for the last month and was heading home, albeit as a prisoner again.

She hoped this ship was fast.

The more miles between her and Saint-Aubin the better. Cruel, callous and with the single-minded determination to crush anyone or anything that got in his way under the heel of his glossy boots, that monster had stolen too many years and sucked all the joy out of her soul. Oh, how she hated him! Except now he had an excellent reason to turn all that venom towards her. She hadn’t just escaped, she had destroyed the documentation he would need to fill the void she had left. Every name, every contact, every supplier carefully recorded in her mother’s leather journal now languished somewhere at the bottom of the harbour in Cherbourg. It would take him weeks and possibly costly months to piece it all together again—unless he found her first and forced the details out of her.

Torture, then death.

Neither appealed. Once she was in sight of the English coast, Jess would find a way to escape properly and disappear, never to be found again. A new life and a new identity, miles from the shore, ships and the smugglers who had stolen her old ones.

The only hatch to the brig opened, followed by the tell-tale smell of boiled cabbage and stale sweat, and the same toothless sailor who had watched her lasciviously for the last week, carried steaming wooden buckets of water. Over his shoulder were tossed towels and fresh clothes. Behind him came the other guard, not quite as hostile but no more compassionate, with a small tin bathtub filled with folded sheets which the pair of them suspended from the low ceiling like a sail. Then with a snarl, the toothless one produced a key and undid the padlock of her cell, warily watching Jess as she sat unmoving before him.

‘Your bath, your ladyship. Not that traitors deserve baths as far as I’m concerned. If it was down to me, I’d leave you to rot in your own filth.’

‘As you do?’ Bating him was probably not sensible. The toothless one was free and easy with his fists, but Jess couldn’t bring herself to cower subserviently. She had experienced worse. ‘You stink.’

His lip curled and he raise his hand, then dropped it. A first for him. Something must have changed to make him resist. He threw the soap and hairbrush into the straw in front of her.

‘Once you’re finished, the illustrious Lord Flint wants to see you in his cabin while we get to clean up the mess you’ve made.’ Something which clearly disgruntled the old sea dog immensely. ‘Don’t try any funny business! There’s another guard up there with a loaded musket and orders to kill if you don’t do as you’re told. Bath. Dress. And be swift about it.’ Threat issued, they retreated up the narrow steps to the main deck and the tiny hatch slammed closed once again.

Lord Flint.

So that was his name? It made sense he was an aristocrat. Every aspect of his being—from the inscrutable expression on his handsome face, the arrogant stance and the impeccably tailored coat he filled so well—all pointed to as much. His obvious physical attributes aside, the privileged, pampered English male was always the same no matter what magnificent shape or size they came in. Cold, detached and uninterested in any opinions which contradicted their own.

Jess hadn’t been exaggerating when she had warned he was in danger. Saint-Aubin would have them both torn limb from limb and their entrails fed to the dogs in a heartbeat, yet Lord Flint had brushed off her concerns with rude indifference. She hated that.

She remembered her father’s same indifference all those years ago when her mother declared her intention to leave him and take their only daughter with her. Like the arrogant Lord Flint, he hadn’t believed a word of it and lived to rue the day. Or more likely, as it turned out, he had simply been glad to be shot of her and hadn’t rued it at all. The manner of her leaving had certainly given him a valid excuse to dissolve the marriage with impressive haste, disown his only daughter and rapidly find a new wife to finally give him his longed-for son. Cold, detached and uninterested peers of the realm were so at odds with her experience of their French aristocratic counterparts. Saint-Aubin had been hot-headed, suspicious and terminally cruel. While she might have been fleetingly attracted to the man, Lord Flint’s staid, emotionless demeanour had been reassuringly familiar.

He hadn’t bothered introducing himself, not that she’d really given him much chance to or cared overmuch who he was. It wasn’t as if she intended to spend much time in his company. Jess had ranted and raved for all she was worth. If one of Saint-Aubin’s men were on this ship—and she wouldn’t put that past him because he had his poisonous tentacles everywhere—then Jess needed to appear outraged and afraid at being captured rather than relieved. It was relief tinged with a healthy dose of raw terror, but again that emotion was so familiar nowadays, always lurking menacingly in the background, that she had ruthlessly trained herself to ignore it unless absolutely necessary. Right now, while she was bobbing in the middle of the English Channel, it wasn’t necessary.

If they came in little boats in the dead of night to fetch her and drag her back, her only chance at living to see another sunrise depended on her fighting her new captors tooth and nail while lying through her teeth. Once she set foot on English soil, Jess was a dead woman walking. Saint-Aubin or the Boss would have highly paid assassins waiting to eventually erase her from the world unless she outwitted them first.

Until—if—that happened, she could console herself with one not insignificant achievement. Her trail of crumbs had been followed and she was out. That alone was cause for celebration.

Allowing herself a small smile of satisfaction, she rose and dragged the tub to a position which she hoped afforded her the most privacy and emptied the steaming buckets in. It was a meagre bath by normal standards, the water merely a few inches deep, but it was hot and wet and the first proper bath she had been allowed in months. Even conditions in this dank and humid brig were a considerable improvement on her rat-infested prison in Cherbourg or the same, compact four walls in Saint-Aubin’s claustrophobic and oppressive chateau.

All in all, things were looking up. Jess would not weep today. If she was destined to die in the coming few days, then she would take whatever small pleasures she could in the interim. Jess closed her eyes, inhaled slowly and deeply, tucking the constant fear into the little box in her mind where she stored all the bad things, then stripped off her filthy dress, kicking it back into the cell. It was the last vestige of Saint-Aubin and she was done with all that.

From this moment on she was in control of her destiny and nothing and nobody was ever going to get in her way again. The call of freedom and survival was too strong. She took a moment to inhale the sweet, fresh scent of the soap before she gratefully stepped in the tub and lowered herself into the water, revelling in the glorious sensation of soothing, clean water enveloping her skin.

Délicieux!

Paradise.

It was the little things, the things people took for granted, that she had missed the most. The hot meals, the heady aroma of fresh air, this warm bath. The unfamiliar sound of her first language spoken once again and the odd yet comforting way it felt coming from her own lips after all these years. Everyday luxuries she would rejoice in until she gasped her last breath because she was tired of hating herself and determined to begin her life afresh.

The handsome Lord Flint and his aristocratic arrogance could wait until her bath chilled and her skin shrivelled before she deigned to grace him with her presence. If he was to be the latest in her long line of temporary gaolers, it was best he found out early that Jess had never been partial to following orders.