Seduced by the Scoundrel Page 6

  Averil stared at the unresponsive door as it closed behind him and wished she had listened and taken note when she had overheard the sailors swearing on board the Bengal Queen. It would be very satisfying to let rip with a stream of oaths, she was quite certain.

  Castration, disembowelling and the application of hot tar to parts of a certain gentleman—if he deserved the name—would be even more satisfying. She visualised it for a moment. Then, seized with the need to do something physical, if throttling Luke was not an option, Averil shrugged out of the leather waistcoat, rolled up her sleeves and went to find the soap. It was just a pity there was no starch or she would make sure he couldn’t sit down for a week, his drawers would be so rigid.

  She began to sort the clothing, muttering vengefully as she did so. None of it was very dirty—the captain was obviously fastidious about his linen. It also smelled of him, which was disconcerting. Was it normal to feel so flustered by a man that even his shirts made one think of the body that had worn them?

  Averil searched for marks, rubbed them with the soap, then dropped those garments in the hot water. How long did they have to soak? She wished she had paid more attention to the women doing their washing in the rivers in India; they seemed to get everything spotless even when the water was muddy. And it was cold, of course.

  She was scrubbing briskly at the wristbands of one shirt before she caught herself. What was she doing, offering comfort to the enemy like this? Let him launder his own linen—or do whatever he would have done if she hadn’t been conveniently washed up to do it for him. But then, she was clad in his shirt and he said he had no clean ones, so if she did not do it, goodness knew when she would get a change of linen herself.

  Her fingers were as wrinkled as they had been when she had come out of the sea, and she had rubbed a sore spot on two knuckles, but the clothes were clean and rinsed at last. Wringing them dry was a task beyond her strength, she found, so she dumped the dirty water outside on the shingle, filled the buckets with the wet clothes and trudged up the slope towards the camp fire.

  The buckets were heavy and she was panting by the time she could put them down. ‘Would someone who has clean hands help me to—?’ Luke was nowhere in sight and she was facing eight men, with Dawkins in the middle.

  ‘Aye, darlin’, I can help you,’ he drawled, getting to his feet.

  ‘Leave it out, Harry.’ Potts looked up from a half-skinned rabbit. ‘She’s the Cap’n’s woman and we can do without you getting the man riled up. He’s got a nasty temper when he’s not happy and then he’ll shoot you and then we’ll have more work to do with one man less. Besides …’ he winked at Averil who was measuring the distance to his cooking knives and trying not to panic ‘.the lady likes my cooking.’ He lifted one knife, the long blade sharpened to a lethal degree, and examined it with studious care.

  ‘Just joking, Potts.’ Dawkins sat down again, his brown eyes sliding round to the knife. The cook stuck it into the turf close to his hand and went back to pulling the skin off the rabbit as the whole group relaxed. Averil began to breathe again.

  ‘I’ll wring ‘em, ma’m.’ A big man with an eyepatch got to his feet and shambled over. ‘I’m Tom the Patch, ma’am, and me ‘ands are clean.’ He held up his great calloused paws for inspection like a child. ‘Where do you want ‘em?’

  ‘I’ll drape them over those bushes.’ Averil let out the breath she had been holding and pointed halfway up the slope.

  ‘Not there,’ Potts said. ‘They’ll see you.’

  ‘Who will?’

  ‘Anyone in a ship looking this way. Or on Tresco. Put ‘em there.’ He waved a bloody hand at the thinner bushes close to the fire. Potts, she was beginning to realise, had either more intelligence, or more sense of responsibility, than the other men. Perhaps he had been a petty officer of some kind once.

  ‘Why don’t you want anyone to know you are here?’ Averil asked as Tom twisted the shirts and the water poured out.

  ‘Hasn’t the Cap’n said?’ He dropped one shirt into the bucket and picked up another.

  ‘We haven’t had much time to talk,’ she said and then blushed as the whole group burst into guffaws of laughter.

  ‘Why not share the joke?’ Luke strolled out from behind one of the tumbledown stone walls. He had his coat hooked over one finger and hanging down his back, his shirt collar was open, his neckcloth was loose and he gave every indication of just coming back from a relaxing stroll around the island. Averil suspected that he had been behind the wall ever since she had approached the men, waiting to see what happened, testing their mood.

  ‘I said that we had not talked much.’ She hefted the bucket with the wrung linen and walked towards the bushes. Any gentleman would have taken the heavy pail from her, but Luke let her walk right past him.

  ‘No, we have not,’ he said to her back as she shook out each item with a snap and spread it on the prickly gorse. ‘I’ll tell you over dinner.’

  ‘Tell ‘er all about it, will you, Frenchy?’ Dawkins said and the whole group went quiet.

  Frenchy? Averil spun round. He was French? And that made the men … what? Not just deserters—turncoats and traitors.

  ‘You call me Captain, Dawkins,’ Luke said and she saw he had the pistol in his hand, loose by his side. ‘Or the next time I will shoot your bloody ear off. Nothing to stop you rowing, you understand, just enough to make sure you spend what is left of your miserable life maimed. Comprends-tu?’

  The man might not have understood the insult in the way he had just been addressed, but Averil did. And her French was good enough to recognise in those two words not the pure accent of someone carefully taught as she had been, but a touch of originality, a hint of a regional inflection. The man was French. But we are at war with France, she thought, stupid with shock.

  ‘Aye, Cap’n,’ Dawkins said, his face sullen. ‘Just me little joke.’

  ‘Go back to the hut, Miss Heydon,’ Luke said over his shoulder. ‘I will join you at dinner time.’

  ‘I do not want to go to the hut. I want an explanation. Now.’ It was madness to challenge him in front of the men; she realised it as soon as she spoke. If he would not take insubordination from Dawkins, he was most certainly not going to tolerate it from a woman.

  ‘You get what I choose to give you, when I choose,’ Luke said, his back still turned. ‘Go, now, unless you wish to be turned over my knee and taught to obey orders in front of the men.’

  Her dignity was all she had left. Somehow she kept her chin up and her lips tight on the angry words as she walked past him, past the silent sailors and down the slope towards the hut. Bastard. Beast. Traitor …

  No, she realised as she got into the hut and flung herself down on a chair, Luke was not a traitor. If he was French, he was an enemy. The enemy. And she was sitting here, an obedient little captive who shuddered under his hands and wanted his kisses and washed his shirts and trailed back here when she was told. She was an Englishwoman—she had a duty to fight as much as any man had.

  Averil jumped to her feet, sending the chair crashing to the floor, and twitched back the crude curtain. There was a navy ship at anchor out there—too far to hail, and probably, unless someone had a glass trained on the island, too far to signal with anything she had to hand. But she could swim. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? If she ran down to the sea, plunged in and swam, surely they would see her? And if Luke gave chase then that would create even more of a stir. Someone would come to investigate and, even if he shot her, he would have to explain the commotion.

  She was out of the door and running before she could think of any objections, any qualms to slow her with fear. The big pebbles hindered her, but she was clear of them, up to her knees in the water, before she heard anything behind her.

  ‘Get back here!’

  Luke! She did not turn or reply, only ploughed doggedly on, fighting through the thigh-high waves. ‘Stop or I will shoot!’

  He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t shoot
a woman in the back. Even a French agent wouldn’t—

  She didn’t hear the shot, only felt the impact, a thumping blow below her left shoulder, behind her heart. It pitched her forwards into the sea and everything clouded and went dark. Her last thought as she felt the water closing over her head was of shocked anger. He said he would not kill me. Liar.

  Chapter Six

  ‘Wake up.’

  It seemed that the voice had been nagging at her for hours. Days, perhaps. She did not want to wake up. She did not think she was dead and this obviously was not heaven unless angels habitually sounded angry and impatient. But even if she was alive, Luke had shot her. Why should she have to wake up and face that? It would hurt.

  ‘Why should I?’ Averil asked.

  ‘So I can strangle you?’ the voice enquired and became identifiable as Luke.

  ‘You shot me.’ She opened her eyes, surprised to find she was not frightened or in great pain. Perhaps she was in shock. Best to lie very still—she was badly wounded, surely she must have lost a great deal of blood?

  ‘I did not shoot you.’ He was looming over the bed, tight-lipped and furious. ‘I threw a stone at you and you seem to have fainted.’

  ‘Oh.’ Averil sat up and yelped in pain. ‘It hurts! You could have killed me if you had hit my head.’

  ‘I hit what I aim at,’ Luke said. ‘It is just a bruise. You might want to cover yourself up.’

  Averil glanced down and found she was naked. Again. Her borrowed clothes were draped, steaming, over chairs in front of the fire. She grabbed the edge of the blanket, pulled it up to her chin and sat there glowering back at him.

  ‘What the hell were you doing?’ He turned on his heel and walked away as though he was having trouble keeping his hands off her. Averil was not deceived into thinking he was restraining lustful urges.

  ‘I intended to swim to the nearest ship,’ she said. ‘It was one thing not to try to escape when I believed you were just deserters, but when I realised you are a French spy I had to do something.’

  Luke folded his arms and looked at her without emotion or denials. ‘Why do you assume I am a French spy?’

  ‘Because you are French, because you have lied to the Governor about why you are here and because you are hiding those men and training them for some nefarious exercise.’

  ‘That is almost entirely correct on all points, Miss Heydon, and you have drawn entirely the wrong conclusion from it.’

  ‘What is not correct?’ she demanded, wishing she had her clothes. Defiance was much easier when one was not naked, she had discovered.

  ‘I am half-French.’ Luke’s shoulders lost their angry rigidity and he sat on the edge of the table and regarded her with what looked like exasperated resignation. ‘I am going to have to trust you.’

  ‘Well, you cannot. Not if you are my enemy.’

  ‘I may be that—you seem determined that I am—but I am not England’s enemy. I am an English naval officer and I am also le comte Lucien Mallory d’Aunay.’

  ‘A French count? A Royalist?’

  That produced a bark of laughter. ‘Shall we say, a constitutional monarchist? That, at least, was what my father was until Madame Guillotine took his head off and ended his political philosophising.’

  He rubbed both hands over his face and through his hair and emerged rumpled and with no sign of the anger of a few moments before, only a weary patience. ‘Averil, will you take my word of honour that what I tell you is the truth? Because if you will not, then I fear we are at an impasse. I cannot prove any of it, not here and now.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said with total honesty. He shrugged and suddenly seemed very foreign. ‘I wish I had some clothes on,’ she added, half to herself.

  ‘Why on earth would that make any difference?’

  ‘I want to look into your eyes.’

  ‘I will come to you then.’ He knelt by the bedside and looked steadily at her. ‘What can you see?’

  ‘My own reflection. Your cynicism. Weariness.’ She made herself relax, let herself sink into the wide grey gaze. ‘Truth. Truth and anger.’

  ‘Ah.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘I will tell you then, but you must swear to keep it secret.’

  ‘Who am I likely to be able to tell?’ she demanded.

  ‘You never know.’ He got to his feet and went back to the table. ‘My mother was Lady Isabelle Mallory and she married my father in 1775. In 1791, when the king was forced to accept the written constitution, I was fifteen. My father was strongly in favour of the new order and believed that bloodshed and revolution would be averted by the more democratic form of government.

  ‘Maman insisted that it would be a disaster and said she would return to her parents in England. I wanted to stay in France, but my father told me my duty was to look after my mother and that he would send for us when France became the stable land of freedom and prosperity that he predicted.’ He paused and Averil found she was holding her breath. ‘She was right, he was wrong and he paid for it with his head during the Terror in ‘94. Our loyal family servants followed him to the guillotine.’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry. Your poor mother.’ He spoke so flatly that she could only guess at the emotions under the words, what he must have felt when the news reached England. ‘You speak very good English. I would never have guessed you were French.’

  ‘I have thought in it for years. I was already in the English navy when my father died. I went from being Comte Luc d’Aunay to Midshipman Mr Luke d’Aunay—or Dornay—and I did my level best to be an Englishman. But they called me Frenchy and it stuck—the name and the whispers and the lack of acceptance. I was never one of us, never quite English. But I worked and I was lucky and my mother lived long enough to see me gain post rank.’

  ‘She must have been very proud of you,’ Averil said. Poor, tragic woman, her husband executed, an exile in her own home country, her son far away and in danger.

  Luke—no, she supposed she should say Luc— shrugged again, but it was not modesty, she could see that. He knew what he had achieved and against what odds and he was not going to discuss his feeling about his mother’s death with her.

  ‘What went wrong?’ she asked. She wrapped her arms around her knees, wincing a little as the movement stretched the bruise on her shoulder where the stone had hit.

  ‘Admiral Porthington was what went wrong,’ Luc said. He took the knife from his pocket and began to throw it into the tabletop, pull it out, rethrow. ‘I was seconded to assess intelligence and I found a pattern of events that pointed to leaks originating from here. The islands are used a lot by navy shipping, and by supply vessels, and they are conveniently close to France. I dug deeper and found that it all appeared to lead back to a certain gentleman who has interests here. I presented my evidence and it was set aside.’

  ‘But why would it not be accepted and the man investigated?’

  ‘He is Porthington’s second cousin. I had not dug deeply enough.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh, indeed. I was not permitted to investigate any further. Porthington ridiculed the work I had done and refused to countenance any action being taken. I lost my temper.’ Averil could imagine, but she bit her lip, unwilling to provoke him now by saying as much. ‘I brooded on things, drank rather too much and decided to confront him in his quarters—this was at Portsmouth. I would give him an ultimatum—do something or I would go to the Admiralty and lay it before them.

  ‘I barged in and found he had company—very unwilling company. A young woman who he was about to force.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Asked him to stop. He laughed in my face and told me to get out. I hit him.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness.’ Averil knew what would have happened to an East India Company naval officer if he had done such a thing. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Porthington demanded a court-martial, but someone in the Admiralty seems to have had his suspicions, too. I was called in and given one chance—two months to prove
my theory right or I would face a court-martial, which, if it chose, could sentence me to death for striking a superior officer. I could not deny I had done it.’

  To face death as it stared you in the face at sword point or, as she had experienced, in the form of a towering wave, was one thing. To live with a potential death sentence hanging over you for weeks was a refined form of torture.

  ‘That is terrible,’ Averil burst out.

  ‘It was more than I deserved for striking him. I have shot men for less.’

  ‘You were doing your duty by pressing for him to listen to you and you were acting as any gentleman should by defending that woman—surely they saw that?’

  ‘Porthington denied that he had forbidden me to proceed and said I had been told merely to exercise caution while he considered tactics. He portrayed me as headstrong and likely to blunder in and blow the entire investigation. Losing my temper did not help prove him wrong! And as for the woman, she was a servant, not a lady. They seemed to think it made a difference.’ He raised one of those slanting eyebrows. ‘Don’t make me a saint.’

  ‘I am very well aware you are no such thing,’ Averil retorted. ‘I might dislike you personally—’ he raised the other brow ‘—but I hate injustice. Where did the crew come from?’

  ‘The condemned cells. If I am correct and we track down the source of the leaks, then they are pardoned. If I am wrong, or we fail, they die.’

  ‘They do not have very much to lose by killing you and escaping, have they?’ And if they killed Luc, then they would not hesitate to do their worst with her.

  ‘No, they do not. Leadership with men like these is a confidence trick. It is much the same as the way a rider needs to convince a horse that is infinitely stronger and heavier than he that it must obey his commands and bear his weight.’

  ‘But you use brute force when leadership and personality will not work?’