Page 18 of Lord Appleby's Gorgeous Imposter
“Adieu, monsieur.” Clicking her tongue, she urged her mare onward.
This time, he did not follow.
Success rippled through her. But only for a minute.
He would return to her and ask for more. Of course he would. He was incorrigible.
He was the young man who had jumped from their carriage when Diane was snatched by the horde. He was the lad who’d failed to take Diane from the mob, but who had scooped up Viv’s little dog Beau and saved him for her. He was the one who’d demanded his father give her family a cottage on the Appleby estate. He was the young man who had held her in his arms and apologized when his father required he marry another girl, an English girl, for her money. He was the man who had offered to marry her…but never declared he loved her.
He was the man who carved for himself a name in the British Parliament for improvements in roads and bridges. He’d published a treatise on crop rotation. He was an earl of the realm. Rich. Dashing. Her friend. Once that. Once more. Now no longer.
The indefatigable Tate Cantrell. He’d demand anything. Of anyone. Even her.
But this knowledge of where Charmaine was, and why, he would not get.
Because this time, unlike all others, Vivienne Marie Annette de Massé was in charge of her own destiny. She had plans he could not change. She had promised—and unlike so very many, she never broke her promises.
Chapter Four
Tate sat withKane, Lord Ashley, after dinner at Monsieur Jean Lenoir’s house in rue Saint Denis. The merchant financier was one Tate had cultivated to put fair prices on a few French goods to go to Britain. But Lenoir’s second, less publicized, job was the one Tate found more interesting. That was to aid the French army in supplying itself. Others did the same as Lenoir, but it was vital to cultivate them all.
So Tate was here with Kane tonight because he’d been invited and because it added to his social status. Lenoir kept a fashionable house and his chef was renowned. Guests came for the cuisine—and to meet Lenoir’s associates. Few mentioned that the regular entertainment was Lenoir’s wife at the piano or their daughter’s singing—and with good reason. One did not disparage one’s host or his family.
But Tate and Kane had accepted the invitation to dinner, ever happy to pick up nibbles of news about army supplies or troop movements. Tonight, the four military officers in attendance were delightfully inebriated, but as yet, no crumbs of intelligence had fallen from their mouths.
“Too bad,” muttered Tate to his old Eton pal as they took chairs in one corner alone. “I could have stayed home and tended to my knitting.”
Tate’s “knitting” being calculating the value of a recent purchase of surplus French barley to go to Britain. The Frenchcrop had been very good this year, and the British needed grain desperately.
“What of your other pursuit?” Kane asked him.
“No word on our famous friend yet,” Tate said. Scarlett had suggested a covert objective for Tate when she assigned him to Paris. He was to search for a school chum of his, Kane’s, and Ram’s who had gone missing a few years ago after visiting Verdun. They all suspected he had been sent to a French prison for counterfeiting, but Scarlett needed to know if he was still alive. “I have begun a plan, but nothing firm yet.”
“And the other problem, you noticed three weeks ago at the theater when you were with me and Ram?”
Tate blew an exasperated breath. Kane knew about his past involvement with the Massé family. Tate had shared little of his desire for Vivienne. But every other fact of Viv’s impersonation of her older sister Charmaine, Tate had told his friend. Yet about the newest—the ugly rumor that Viv was called to an assignation with Bonaparte—Tate had said nothing. In truth, he was furious when the rumor was confirmed over and over by stories in the morninglibelles. All of them began with the line that a few nights ago, Bonaparte had summoned the “Divine Massé” to his chambers.
“I follow her each day.”So does another.
Tate had begun his watch that very day after he’d ridden with her along the Seine. She went few places. To a modiste twice. To achapelier, a hatter, once. She continued her riding three mornings a week to the stables from which she hired the same mare and the same gruff and burly groom. Tate knew it must be a deprivation for her to ride so infrequently. But he concluded the reason was that when she took to the stage five nights a week, she was quite exhausted and preferred to sleep when she could.
“Still not talking to you?” Kane asked.
“I stay well away. But I watch, and I have hired more men to spell me. I hope for news about the other sister. I’ve done my best.”Done my bestwas code among them for having sent an encrypted message to the offices of Hawthorne & Company. “But I have no clarification.” Scarlett had not replied to him with any information on the whereabouts of Charmaine de Massé. Tate did not fault Scarlett for tardiness or failure. Kane and Ramsey had warned they expected that Fouché read all their correspondence to and from London. Scarlett would respond to Tate only via private courier when and if she had any useful information.
“Well then.” Kane savored a sip of his Armagnac. “Do you know that she was invited to the Tuileries after dark?”
“I do.” Tate’s jaw twitched with anger.
Kane pursed his lips. “May I suggest a change of scenery?”
“Your house?”
“Much more intriguing than my library.” Kane’s ice-gray eyes glimmered as he lifted his glass to drain it.
“That’s hard to imagine.” Tate had a special fondness for his own library. And come to think of it, so did Viv. It was where she’d learned so much Shakespeare by heart and performed so well at Christmastime that Charmaine had taken it up to imitate Viv. Charmaine had left Cantrell Manor in Norfolk and used her knowledge to earn her living on the stage.
“Others begin to leave here,” Kane said, bringing him back to their discussion. “We can follow, then we’ll discover new horizons…and pretend we’ve never seen them.”
