Page 52 of Whiskers and Wiles

“Katherine, my darling,” Lord Headland had called for her in a pseudo-whisper. “Where have you gone? I wish to speak to you, to reclaim the love we once had.”

Kat had dashed for a row of tall hedges, managing to keep just out of sight. She was grateful that her gown was a shade of greenish-yellow that helped her to blend in with the rosemary bushes and withered grape vines, but Lord Headland was nothing if not persistent.

“Dearest Katherine,” Lord Headland whispered as he stepped into the herb garden. “I do not believe for one moment that you and that odious Lord Waldorf are engaged. It cannot be, for I know you hate him after the cruelty he showed you years ago. I will never be cruel to you, my love. I will keep you as my own princess. You will never have to lift a finger for the remainder of your days. You will never have to rise from our bed, if you so choose.”

Kat made a sour face and peeked around the corner of the grape vines. As Lord Headland had his back to her in his search, she darted out from behind the bushes, leaping toward the small tool shed the garden contained and concealing herself behind it.

For a long while, there was silence. Kat dared not move from behind the shed, however. Lord Headland was still nearby, and the gap between the shed and the nearest door into the house was too wide.

But then help came from the perhaps unlikely form of Waldorf.

“If you’ve any thoughts of finding and harassing Lady Katherine, you had better give them up at once and leave the woman alone.”

Kat jerked straight and whipped to peek around the edge of the shed when she heard Waldorf enter the kitchen garden and take Lord Headland to task. Her eyes went wide as the two of them stepped closer to each other in confrontation. They were too far away to hear what more was said, but Kat recognized the opportunity to flee.

She crept out from behind the shed, and when Waldorf met her eyes for the briefest of moments, then pretended not to see her, she dashed for the nearest open door to the house.

That door took her straight into the kitchens. The Oxwick servants were surprised to see her, but it was a fairly easy thing to claim to be there to fetch a bit of fish for Napoleon. Once that was sorted and the fish was given to her, wrapped in paper, Kat proceeded to slip up to her room, her nerves bristling with the fear that she might encounter either Lord Headland or Waldorf once more.

“Napoleon?” she called out once she was safely in her bedroom. She locked the door behind her on the off chance that Lord Headland would be mad enough to attempt to force entry, even though she had denied him. “Napoleon!”

Kat was nearly moved to tears at the beautiful sight of Napoleon stretched out on the windowsill of one of the sunny windows, looking as though he’d made himself quite at home. As soon as Kat approached him with the wrapped fish, however, he rolled to stand, stretched and arched his back, then jumped down from the window to wander over, as if mildly curious about what Kat was doing in the lovely room he’d been given.

“Oh, my darling,” Kat said, rushing to the other side of the room and crouching before her true love. “What a day it has been already.”

Napoleon pushed his face against her palm as Kat pet him, purring regally. He was more interested in the contents of the paper than being flooded with affection, however, so Kat sat on the floor and opened the paper, revealing the fish.

“I am so devilishly tired from traveling and the strain of the missions I have been set on,” she confided in Napoleon as he happily devoured the fish, giving only cursory attention to her. “It is so difficult for one to make correct decisions while deprived of sleep.”

She rubbed her eyes with the base of her hands for a moment, then sighed when the action only threatened to cause the tears she had barely been holding back to flow.

“I do not know what I think of Waldorf anymore,” she confided in Napoleon, who smacked his mouth appreciatively as he ate his meal. “He did me a great wrong and altered the course of my life, but that was so long ago, and my life has been wonderful in so many ways, that I should let that bygone be bygone. He seems to recognize that he was as much in the wrong as I was, but then he behaves as if he has never set a foot wrong in his life.”

Napoleon finished his fish and proceeded to lick the paper, raising his eyes hopefully to Kat as he did, as if there were more treats to be had.

Kat smiled at her friend and scratched his head. “He has reminded me of all the reasons I fell in love with him to begin with,” she confessed. Her instinct was to feel ashamed of herself for that, as if she’d failed some great mission yet again, but her heart beat fondly for the object of her failure. “I always knew he could be brash and boorish, that he was sometimes rude to people, and that he was stubborn in his opinions. I knew that from the beginning, but I found it easy to overlook, because I embodied those same traits.”

She sighed and gathered up the paper, crushing it into a ball, then stood and took it to throw in the fire as Napoleon returned to his favored window for a bath.

“I had hoped that because we shared those flaws, we could overcome them together and be more congenial people towards all,” she went on, moving to sit on the windowsill beside her friend.

She attempted to pet and cuddle Napoleon, but he gave her such a vicious look of indignation, then returned to bathing himself, that she gave it up and merely confided in him instead.

“He is still the man I fell in love with,” she said, gazing out the window and wondering where Waldorf was. “Only, he is older and wiser and altogether more stable now. I can see the man he would have been, had we never had our break. I can see the kindness and instinct to protect and make the world safer within him. Why else would he have taken up the profession he has if he did not wish to make the world better? And I must confess that I find him nearly irresistibly handsome without those damnable whiskers. It is almost enough to make me glad I thwarted the Beaver Society, or whatever it was he belonged to.”

“It was the Badger Society,” Waldorf spoke from the door joining their rooms.

Kat shot to her feet, the breath knocked right out of her. The very last thing she wanted in that moment was for Waldorf to have overheard her ramblings about him. She did not want his head to swell, and she did not want him to think her silly or weak because…because she still cared for him?

That did not seem right.

Waldorf stepped farther into her room, his expression unreadable, but soft. “You destroyed a decades’ old organization that had been working toward the same cause that you love, all because you wished me to shave my whiskers? You could have simply asked.”

“I am so sorry,” Kat said by rote, then blinked. Had Waldorf just made a joke about the horrible thing that had happened to them not three days prior?

Waldorf sighed and moved to sit on the edge of her bed. There was something exhausted about him, but with a feeling of tiredness that reached into his bones and past the misunderstandings of decades rather than simply being the exhaustion of a few days of travel. It drew Kat in and made her heart beat faster.

“I’ve just been downstairs, conversing with Lord Walsingham,” he said.

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