Ivy and Intrigue: A Very Selwick Christmas Read online

The corners of Jane"s lips twitched before she stuffed them back into their bewildered expression.

  “You haven"t an oubliette, have you?” demanded Miss Gwen in tones that indicated than she found the lack of one an unpardonable omission.

  “Noooo….” Lady Uppington"s face brightened. “The very thing! The box room. I always forget things in there. Miles, darling, if you wouldn"t mind carrying the one on the floor?”

  “Aye, aye.” Miles smartly saluted and marched his way across the library.

  “I get to search her!” sang out Henrietta, scurrying along behind.

  “And I,” said Lady Uppington, with a martial glint in her green eyes, “shall personally escort Lady Jerard. She and I have a few things to say to one another.”

  “Now, mother….” Richard released his hold on Lady Jerard, who haughtily shook out her skirts, looking like nothing more threatening than a society matron whose nose had been put out of joint by a mismatched seating plan or too little lobster in the lobster patties.

  “Don"t you „now mother" me, young man. As for you, I want you to keep your hands where I can see them at all times. Try any tricks with hidden pistols and I"ll have you trussed like a Christmas goose before you can say treason. Do we understand each other, Lady Jerard?”

  Now that she was no longer being held twisted into a knot, Lady Jerard appeared to have regained some of her sangfroid. “I don"t in the least understand why any of this is necessary,”

  she said, in the soft, muted tones that accompanied her dewy-eyed look. “It"s not as though I did anything.”

  “Other than waking the entire household,” grumbled Miss Gwen, marching forward and taking a firm hold on the woman"s right arm. “And consorting with foreign agents. Before breakfast!”

  That last appeared to be the final condemnation. Consorting with foreign agents at teatime was one thing; receiving them before breakfast quite another.

  “To the box room with you,” said Lady Uppington firmly, taking Lady Jerard"s other arm and marching her forward.

  “My mother won"t like this at all,” retorted Lady Jerard.

  Lady Uppington"s voice floated back through the door. “No,” she said cheerfully. “I don"t imagine she will.”

  On that sobering note, Lady Jerard was silent.

  “Up we go,” said Miles, hoisting the second woman over his shoulder. A muffled squeak revealed that she wasn"t quite so unconscious as she had pretended.

  Amy felt a small glow of justification. She knew she hadn"t hit her quite that hard.

  Then they, too, were gone, Henrietta trotting along beside, issuing instructions. “Mind the doorframe! To the left—no, no, the right—mind her feet!”

  “Well,” said Jane brightly, as the door clanged closed behind them, blotting out the agent"s anguished howl. “That made a nice little diversion. We"ll have to position someone outside the box room to take down anything they might say. I imagine they"ll have a good deal to say to each other once they"re left alone together.”

  “How did you know?” Amy asked, very carefully focusing on her cousin so she wouldn"t have to look at her husband. “Was it in the message you received?”

  “That?” The amusement faded from Jane"s face. “No. That was another matter entirely. I shan"t be able to stay here long. There is trouble afoot in Paris.”

  “Trouble to do with royalist émigrés?” Richard asked keenly, all Purple Gentian again.

  “Yes.” Jane eyed him narrowly. “How did you know?”

  Richard gave a debonair shrug. “Much as I would love to lay claim to omniscience… Miles told me.”

  “I see.” Jane turned to Amy. “I need reinforcements.”

  This was the moment she had been hoping for, the chance to sweep back to France in a blaze of glory. And Amy realized, with a tiny flutter of panic, that she didn"t want it. Not one bit.

  “Really?” Amy said, trying to keep her voice as neutral as possible.

  Life at Selwick Hall might not be the sort of thing that bards sang of beside the fireside when pressed for tales of heroic deeds, but there were a dozen daily amusements to keep her occupied. There was their actor-turned-butler"s Role of the Week to be laughed at, the antics of their trainee spies to supervise, Richard to be argued and then reconciled with….

  No, she really didn"t want to go back to her brother"s cold stone house in the Faubourg St.

  Germaine with its over-decorated reception rooms and the musty wing where her father"s wigs still moldered on their stands in ever-present reminder of all she had lost thirteen years before.

  “Reinforcements?” Amy echoed, her voice rusty.

  Jane nodded. “I wondered if I might borrow your Miss Grey.”

  Miss Grey? Not her? Amy wasn"t sure whether to be relieved or offended.

  Relieved, she decided. Definitely relieved.

  And just a little bit offended.

  “Miss Grey? I mean, yes, of course, Miss Grey,” Amy floundered. “She"s done really quite well in our course.”

  “If you think she"s ready,” said Jane, with a nice degree of polite deference, “I believe I might have a role for her.”

  “Well, yes.” Amy looked to Richard. “I think she is. Don"t you?”

  “Good.” Jane nodded her approval as she moved towards the door. “That will be very helpful.

  There are too many places for me to be all at once, and others where even a disguise won"t admit me. Your Miss Grey will be a vast help.”

  Even though she knew it was the adult equivalent of a pat on the head, Amy couldn"t help feeling just a little bit pleased. It was nice to be useful, even if it wasn"t the way she had initially intended. Jane was right. One person couldn"t be in the same place all at once.

  Perhaps their spy academy might fill more of a real need than she had originally thought, rather than just being a way to pass the time.

  As Amy puzzled that out, her husband took a slight, hesitant step towards her. Her stomach doing a little flip, she looked warily up at him. They were the only ones left in the room.

  There were too many questions hanging between them: France, Lady Jerard, France; they jammed in her throat like a half-masticated mouthful of particularly gluey Christmas pudding.

  Richard cleared his throat. He was clearly having Christmas pudding problems, too.

  Jane stuck her head back around the door. “Oh. I almost forgot.”

  Amy and Richard both looked quizzically at her.

  “Happy Christmas.” And the door touched back against its frame, closing Jane out, smile and all.

  Well. Biting her lip, Amy turned back to her husband, who was busy examining the woodwork.

  Locking his hands behind his back, he took an entirely unnecessary circular stroll, ending right back where had started. “An unusual start to the holiday.”

  He was being urbane again. Urbane and civil and so polished that Amy could practically see her own reflection in him. That was the thing about polish. It might be pretty, but it was fundamentally obstructive, deflecting scrutiny, masking honest emotion. If she were in a mood to be obliging, she could do the same. She could put on her best company voice and reply with the same sort of detached amusement, pretending there were nothing at all wrong with the fact that the woman whom they had apprehended had been someone he had—much as it galled her to admit it—once thought he loved. She could smile and laugh and pretend she didn"t mind that there was still the prospect of separation hanging over them or that he had never bothered to come to bed that night.

  It was what any good daughter-in-law of a marquess would do. Polite. Civilized. Controlled.

  But she hadn"t been raised to that. She might be the daughter of a viscount, but he had been a French viscount. The French did things differently. They embraced in public, kissed on both cheeks, ate the odd frog leg, and weren"t afraid to admit to strong emotion. She hadn"t been raised to keep a stiff upper lip and pretend she didn"t feel what she felt, or to turn herself as chilly as the snow on the ground.


  She would never make a proper society lady but she was what she was and that was that and if Richard hadn"t figured that out when they were courting and he had caught her running about Paris in the dead of night in a pair of men"s breeches, then he wasn"t as bright as she thought he was.

  In short, they were going to have it out now, whether he liked it or not.

  Amy squared her shoulders, looked her husband full in the eye and announced belligerently,

  “I won"t go back to France.”

  Chapter Seven

  All out of darkness we have light,

  Which made the Angels sing this night.

  Glory to God and peace to men,

  Now and for evermore. Amen.

  -- Sussex Carol

  Her husband shook his head. “You what?”

  “You heard me.” Amy folded her arms across her chest. “I"m not going, and I don"t want to.”

  That had come out the wrong way round, hadn"t it? Drat. “What I mean is, I don"t—”

  She never got to explain what she meant. In two exuberant bounds, Richard had crossed the space between them, and she found herself squished flat against his waistcoat. “Thank goodness for that.”

  Amy"s nose was mashed up against her husband"s lapel. Not that she was complaining about the sentiment that appeared to have motivated it, but asphyxiation didn"t quite constitute a full answer. In muffled tones, she said, “But you"re the one who wanted me to go.”

  “No, I just wanted you to be able to go if you wanted to go.”

  Language. So confusing. There were times when Amy wondered if they might not all be better off just scratching and grunting and miming at each other, or drawing cave pictures.

  “Then why did you offer?” Amy demanded, scratching her chin on the wool of Richard"s jacket as she tilted her head back.

  Richard eyed her warily, trying to determine whether that were a trick question. “You seemed so unhappy,” he said, “about Jane.”

  Amy felt a little twinge of guilt. She had been. On his behalf as well as her own, she reminded herself. So, really, it had been a very generous sort of unhappiness, taking on his as well as her own. Generous, but perhaps just a little counter-productive.

  “I thought you were unhappy,” she countered, “about not being able to spy anymore.”

  Drawing himself up, Richard opened his mouth to deliver what looked like it was gearing up to be a rousing oration of denial—and closed it again.

  Abandoning the pose, he deflated like a balloon, his breath whistling out beneath his teeth in a long sigh. “I was,” he admitted. “I am. But not as unhappy as I would be if the situation were reversed.”

  “But you were happy there,” Amy pressed. “Before.”

  He took a moment to think about, looking out somewhere into the space over her left shoulder, as though France might be found just to the right of the French doors. “I enjoyed what I did,” he said at long last. “A great deal. If it hadn"t been for circumstances—”

  “For me,” Amy interjected.

  “—I would probably have gone on doing it.”

  Amy"s blue eyes narrowed. Was this supposed to be reassuring? Because if it was, he was going about it all wrong.

  “But,” Richard said, tilting back her chin to look her straight in the eye, “it couldn"t have gone on forever. Sooner or later, Delaroche would have caught up with me. Even if he hadn"t, one of these days, we"ll finally put paid to Bonaparte"s ambitions and see another king back onto the throne.”

  “Here, here,” Amy replied by rote.

  A grin flickered across Richard"s lips before he sobered again. “Either way, capture or success, it had to end eventually. And where would I have been then?”

  “In a French prison?” contributed Amy helpfully.

  “Hopefully not. Have you seen their accommodations?”

  In fact, she had, iron maiden and all. A certain member of Bonaparte"s secret police had somewhat eccentric and antiquarian notions of proper interrogation methods.

  “So,” said Amy, summing it all up, “what you"re telling me is that life with me is marginally preferable to durance vile in one of Monsieur Delaroche"s deeper dungeons.”

  “A little more than marginally,” said Richard generously. “It"s right up there with one of his shallower dungeons. Ouch!” He rubbed his shoulder where Amy had whapped it. “Mid-level, then.”

  “And what if it had all ended in a restoration, rather than a dungeon cell?” Amy prodded.

  Releasing her, Richard prowled across the carpet, kicking the warming pan out of his way.

  “That would have been even worse. At least in the dungeon, I could entertain myself plotting my escape and making mocking noises at my gaolers. At home….” He shrugged helplessly.

  “What was there to do? I"ve never been one for estate management. I don"t find any thrill in betting large sums on the rattle of a pair of dice, and I"ve never been able to see the point in driving my horses too fast. Unless someone is chasing me, that is.”

  Amy thought about it. It was true; after their nine months together, she couldn"t imagine Richard being happy with the polite dissipations that contented his peers. They were driven by boredom; Richard by something else entirely.

  It was a something else that Amy understood very well, not a mere search for diversions to beguile the days, but a quest for something bigger, grander. A cause. A quest. Honor. Glory.

  Something with a purpose to it. Danger for danger"s sake, risk for risk"s sake was not enough.

  Sensing he had her, Richard pressed his advantage home, “Without you,” he said fulsomely,

  “I wouldn"t have known what to do with myself. I would never have thought of starting a school for spies. I would be all alone with nothing to beguile the evenings but a pile of old newspaper clippings.”

  Amy snorted. “Nonsense,” she said, in unconscious imitation of Miss Gwen. “I"m sure you would have found multiple candidates to share your hearth and your newspaper clippings with you.”

  “But they wouldn"t have been you.” Memory curved a smile across Richard"s face. “How many women can infiltrate the dungeons of the Ministry of Police and banter with the guards in the local dialect?”

  Now that he mentioned it, that had been a rather nice piece of work on her part. Even constructed on short notice, the serving wench costume had worked perfectly. Amy nodded.

  “True,” she agreed.

  Richard shoved his hands into his pockets. “I wouldn"t want to go back, or change anything that happened. It"s just…. ” He frowned at the woodwork, scrounging for the proper words,

  “It is always easier to wax nostalgic about what we can"t have than appreciate what we do.”

  It was hard to argue with that. Amy heaved a sigh deep enough to make the draperies flutter.

  “I"ve been guilty of that, too.”

  “About that,” said Richard. “When you said you don"t want to go back France… does that mean you don"t want to go back?”

  “I wouldn"t quite put it that way,” Amy hedged, even though she was the one who had in the first place. But if Richard was going to scrub his soul clean, then it was only fair that she do the same. “It"s not that I don"t want to go back at all. Under the proper circumstances, of course I want to go back. It all went by too fast.”

  Across the room, Richard shifted his weight, jamming his hands deeper into his pockets.

  Taking a deep breath, Amy said definitively, knowing that she was closing a door, even as she propping open another, “But these aren"t those circumstances. I don"t want to go back without you.”

  Richard smirked. It was just a little smirk, but easily identifiable to the experienced wifely eye.

  Just in case he got too smug, Amy added frankly, “In any event, I wouldn"t like playing second fiddle to Jane.” It was true. It had been one thing when she and Jane had been neophytes together, both learning their way in the murky world of Bonaparte"s Paris. Back then, she had been the one to take the lead. To go back no
w, now that Jane had had eight months to build up her own methods and networks, would be impossibly galling. “I"m not very good at following orders. I prefer to be right up front, not following along behind.”

  Richard raised an eyebrow. “What about side by side?”

  “Side by side?” Amy echoed.

  Richard strolled towards her, never breaking his gaze. “Side by side,” he confirmed. “A partnership. No leading, no following. I"d say we"ve done fairly well at that so far. Tonight, for example.”

  Could it really be counted as side by side when he had been up on a balcony?

  Amy momentarily ignored that academic wrinkle and went straight for the more important point. “Partnership or not, we"re still on this side of the Channel,” she pointed out.

  “Someone pointed out to me tonight that there"s work to be done here, too,” said Richard, and even though he kept his voice level, Amy could sense the excitement behind it. “The émigré community here is a hotbed of rumors and sedition. I know many of them from my work abroad….”

  “And I don"t know any of them,” put in Amy, caught by the possibility. She looked up at her husband with eyes gone starry. Costumes! She would have the chance to wear costumes again and creep out back alleys and climb through windows. “You could approach them directly, while I could conduct surveillance to make sure they weren"t lying to you!”

  “You can reprise your serving maid performance,” second her husband, enjoying himself hugely.

  “And a few others,” muttered Amy. “There were so many disguises I never had the chance to use….”

  “If that doesn"t work out,” said her husband thoughtfully, “there are other countries, too.

  Places where no one ever saw the Purple Gentian. We couldn"t go as ourselves—our names are known—but our faces aren"t. We could travel safely under an assumed persona.”

  “Italy!” Amy"s face lit up. “They"ve suffered under Bonaparte"s yoke long enough. Or Russia. Surely, there must be work to be done there.”

  “The weather is better in Italy,” decreed Richard. “Not to mention the food.”