Page 82 of The Traitor
Fable came to a halt, though Sebastian did not ask it of him.
“You’re saying my auntstrandedme in France?” Once the thought intruded on his peace, the idea sat in his mind with the cold, leaden immobility of an ugly possibility.
“Of course not. I’m saying your aunt thrived on the challenges created by your absence, and likely prayed for your safety every night. A woman’s reach will always have limits, compared to a man’s. Is he supposed to be eating those?”
Fable had snatched a mouthful of leaves from some shrub. Sebastian could not think of the English name for it, though it was not noxious.
“No, he is not. The mare’s company has overset him. Come along, you.” He nudged the beast with his calf. “What questions did you answer for the professor?”
A casual observer might have concluded Milly was more cargo than equestrienne. She was inexperienced on horseback, true, but she had the knack of leaving the horse in peace as long as it behaved. One day, she would be an excellent rider, if she so chose, the kind of rider a horse trusted and took care of as it might a member of its own herd.
“I assured the professor I was happy with my choice of husband, assured him I anticipated many happy years as your baroness. I assured him your treatment of me had been all that I might have wished for as a new bride.”
He’d asked her for a single rose, and she’d flung an entire bouquet at him. “You might have simply told him you were content.”
“I am by no means content. Contentment is for children, the elderly, and those who’ve earned it. When we have a nursery full of happy, healthy children, and they are each excelling at their letters, then I can be content. When I can curl up in the library of a chilly afternoon with a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe, then I will be content. When you no longer suspect everybody and everything of nefarious motives, then I will be content.”
And each of her roses came with thorns.
“Often, people have nefarious motives. I have them too.” And now he’d have to consider that Freddy had left him in France for purposes he could not fathom, a thorny undertaking indeed.
“You never did tell me why you were unhappy with Mr. Brodie,” Milly observed.
The mare resumed her doomed efforts at flirtation, though Fable was apparently more interested now in spying another bush of forbidden fodder. “What makes you think I was unhappy with him?”
“You were drinking tea, and your aunt told me you cannot abide the stuff. Then too, Mr. Brodie looked like a guilty schoolboy made to copy Bible verses and go without his pudding.”
Or like a sergeant assigned drill duty when he’d been promised leave.
“I like tea. I particularly like a hearty black, with a touch of gunpowder in the blend. Occasionally, I’ll flavor my tea with bergamot, which I learned from an Italian who passed through the Château on the way to some Papist cathedral in the North of Spain.”
They’d come to the oak avenue that led to the mill where, in Sebastian’s mind, their marriage had begun.
“You like tea, but you deny yourself the pleasure of it,” Milly concluded. “This makes no sense. Tea is not a vice nor, for an English peer, an extravagance.”
“Forgoing tea is a habit,” Sebastian said slowly, “a habit of such long-standing, it barely requires effort to maintain. Tea is English. Coffee is French, and my life depended on my becoming French. I was careful to disdain tea.”
Milly drew her mare up and peered down the row of oaks. The vista was beautiful, in a bucolic, English way that made Sebastian’s chest ache.
“Your life depended on your being perceived as French. My hope would be that instead of becoming English or French, your efforts are now bent in the direction of becoming Sebastian, Baron St. Clair, and my husband.”
“Shall we visit the mill?” He wanted to, wanted to make sure it was still there, still available for a private interlude, if his wife were so inclined.
“No. I have wonderful memories of that mill, but I’d like to see another place you frequented as a boy, and I want to make wonderful memories there, too.”
“Madam, this estate covers thousands of acres, and the smile I see on your face can only be described as naughty. I am but one man, and no longer blessed with the stamina of youth. I suggest you moderate your ambitions.”
Her smile was also enchanting. Enchantingly naughty. Too naughty for Sebastian to think of how few places they might make memories before Tuesday next.
The mare used her tail to whisk a fly off her quarters, which inspired Fable into a sizable dodge sideways.
“And I suggest you stop ridiculing my ambitions and choose us another destination,” Milly said. “What lies off in that direction?” She’d pointed with her whip toward a sheep-dotted rise to the east of the park.
“Our very own ruins lie that way. Some say it was a watchtower for spotting Romans, Vikings, and other nuisances, others say it was some sort of Druid mound converted to a cow byre. Part of it looks like a circle the gods knocked askew.”
“You played there as a child?”
“Endlessly.” Though he’d forgotten that. Forgotten that he’d imagine centurions far from home—brave, brawny, dark-bearded fellows longing for their airy piazzas and sunny Mediterranean shores.
