Page 109 of The Traitor
“Pixler was the one to alert us to your location,” Wellington said. “Your aunt knew you were in the south of France somewhere, but you’d been careful not to reveal your position in what correspondence she’d had from you.”
“For obvious reasons,” Sebastian said. Milly’s fingers tightened around his hand.
“Just so,” His Grace replied. “You could not have the baroness importuned for such intelligence. Bad enough we gentlemen must choose between duty to our loved ones and duty to the Crown. No need to put the ladies in such a position—and yet, I did. Would somebody find a chair for my guest and his baroness?”
The duke’s courtesy—referring to Sebastian as a guest, having chairs fetched—set off an alarm in the back of Sebastian’s mind.
“We’ll stand,” Milly said. “And we really can’t be staying.”
Sebastian did kiss her, right on her helpful mouth. “Your Grace was saying?”
“We learned from Pixler where you were, and we also learned the boy would have died without your intervention. The beating he took was severe, true, but he said that was more Anduvoir’s doing than yours. Then came the ransom request.”
Sebastian realized too late the direction the duke’s recitation might take.
“Many officers were unofficially ransomed, Your Grace. The French needed coin badly, despite the official position.”
“True enough, but not every officer whose family lacked the funds to ransom him found the lady of the house sitting down to whist across from your dear aunt. Seems Lady Frederica had a prodigious run of bad luck when she opposed Pixler’s mother, and somehow, I gather this is not news to you.”
Milly’s arms around Sebastian’s waist went from protective to necessary, lest his very knees buckle. “How did you learn of that?”
Nobody was ever supposed to know, save Freddy and the professor, and nobody would have believed—
“I didn’t figure it out until the third or fourth occasion of such a coincidence, and then I noticed other patterns as well. Nobody died at your hands, St. Clair, and some weren’t even beaten, and yet you had a reputation for reducing a man to tears and plucking all his secrets from him.”
“At least one secret from every man,” Sebastian said, but he’d nearly whispered the words, while his worlds—his French world and his English world—collided. “I demanded one secret to show my superiors, lest somebody else, somebody worse, be given my command.”
He was at risk for babbling out all of his own secrets, so when Milly kissed him on the mouth, he shut up.
“Yes, you extracted from each officer foolish enough to be found behind enemy lines out of uniform one bit of information—more from a few of the loquacious ones—and you found a way to return them to us more or less whole. This one you ransomed with funds from your own pocket, that one you slipped into a clandestine prisoner exchange, the other escaped after a productive interrogation session—such a pity—and was not recaptured.”
His Grace appeared to study a wine goblet half-full of a pretty ruby claret, and the only sound in the room was Milly sniffling into Sebastian’s handkerchief.
“Every officer you tortured came home,” Wellington said softly. “Even Mercia, whose circumstances were complicated, indeed. I concluded you were a far greater asset to England in your French garrison than you could have been anywhere else.”
“Nobody else—” Sebastian did not know whether to be grateful for, or furious at, Wellington’s recitation.
“Nobody else figured this out? Your aunt clearly had more than an inkling, and she begged me to extricate you from a situation that was obviously difficult and dangerous for you. You were and are a peer of the realm, the Baron St. Clair, a man serving in a war zone, who lacked legitimate male progeny, and if anybody should have been offered safe passage home, it was you.”
“Yes,” Milly said, eyes glittering. “Exactly, and yet you left him there on that miserable pile of rocks, left him without an ally, without any support, and then let these imbeciles challenge him to duel after duel. How could you, Your Grace?”
She voiced Sebastian’s own questions, because incredulity was quickly giving way to rage. The anger trickled into him, a warmth and sense of rightness to it he’d craved for years.
“Lady Frederica and I reached a compromise,” Wellington said. “I sent you a guardian angel, so to speak, and he had orders to offer you safe passage if your life were imperiled. Brodie’s first message back to us was that your life was imperiled daily by your own superior officer, by the advancing English, and by the conflicted loyalties that demanded you abuse your peers to ensure they remained in your care. He requested permission to extricate you from the Château, and I put the matter to your aunt.”
The room was quieter than a graveyard in the middle of a winter night.
“You made an old woman choose between her only living male relative and the safety of British officers held captive at my garrison,” Sebastian said, slowly and clearly, as if the words pronounced sentence on Wellington rather than verified his strategy. “Freddy chose for England, and I remained at that garrison, torturing men I ought to have served with, bankrupting my birthright and my reason, while the same old woman was left to contend with neglected estates, dwindling resources, and no family at her side.”
Had Milly not been weeping softly against his chest, Sebastian would likely have strangled Wellington right then and there. Not an entire regiment of officers would have stopped him. He would have strangled him for Aunt Freddy, for Milly, for himself, and for the men who’d challenged him, for they had been put at risk every bit as much as he.
While Sebastian frankly clung to his wife, he spared a thought for what Freddy had gone through, for the impossible choice she’d faced, much like the impossible choices Sebastian had faced.
Mercia rose. “You were betrayed,” he said quietly. Over Milly’s head, Sebastian saw him looking around the room, seeking any who would argue that conclusion. “You are no traitor to England, though England surely betrayed you. I am profoundly sorry for it.”
Mercia saluted with his wineglass. One by one, the other officers rose and offered a silent toast, until Wellington himself lifted a goblet.
“Sir, I salute you for your aid in the capture of one Henri Anduvoir, a criminal wanted by his own authorities for embezzling monies due theRépubliqueas spoils of war—substantial sums, as it turns out.”
