Page 81 of Ondine
“Sit down, my fine sir, and I shall tell you!”
Deauveau sat. He didn’t indulge in the ale, but pushed the tankard away with disgust.
“Who are you?” Deauveau demanded.
“Oh, I don’t care to have my name known,” Anne said charmingly. “Call me Jake, if you wish.”
“How—”
“I’ll tell you what I know, sir, then perhaps you will understand! You are the adoptive brother of the late Duke of Rochester. The lands by right belong to his daughter, your niece, yet I think you’ve no real mind ever to turn them over to her! You’ve a son—”
“Raoul,” Deauveau breathed.
“Oh, precisely!” Anne chuckled. “And, yes, I can imagine it well! The fool boy has been tricked—”
“What do you know of this?” Deauveau demanded hoarsely.
Anne leaned closer to him over the table, eyes aglitter like a cat’s.
“I know the, uh, duchess is a little slut! ’Tis no true bride your son would be taking!”
Anne must have been stunned that her beauty failed her, for Deauveau suddenly caught her wrist in a punishing grip. “Is this blackmail?” he rasped out harshly.
Anne appeared stunned, then she chuckled with pure tinkling delight. “Blackmail, nay, sir! I intend to offer you a heavy sum of money!”
“For what?” Deauveau queried suspiciously.
“As I mentioned in my letter, I believe we have common interests. Sir, I think that you would love nothing so much as your niece’s total disappearance—with a death certificate involved—so that you may, by way of being legally next of kin, take all that is hers with none to bar you.
And you would no longer have her there—your son’s bride—a nasty thorn slicing into your ribs! ”
Deauveau stared at her long; he inhaled and exhaled slowly.
“Why should this be done? What do you gain? From where would I receive the money?”
“You are interested!” Anne exclaimed coquettishly. “I’m ever so glad . . .”
“Details!” Deauveau snapped.
“There is a gentleman, a friend, greatly enamored of the girl. He will pay a fair price—”
“Nay! For she could escape him and reappear.”
Anne shook her head. “This friend will not let that happen; he will take her to France until he tires of her, then—umm, shall we say—he may regain his financial loss through another business deal, this with certain sailors who have discovered a pretty face can be their most lucrative cargo.”
“She’ll live—”
“Aye, but justly so—can’t you imagine? No longer duchess or lady, but concubine to some stern sultan!”
Deauveau hesitated, then leaned back, eyeing Anne now with uncertainty. She smiled and placed a small leather purse upon the table. “Gold,” she whispered to him softly. “Go on, touch it! Feel it. Taste it . . .”
Deauveau’s gleaming eyes grew round. He hesitated only a second longer, then reached for the purse, weighing the contents first, then sliding it across the table to himself to peek within.
He looked around, then drew out a coin and bit into it, quickly slipping it back into the purse and secreting the purse within his coat.
“What is your interest in this?” he asked Anne.
“Oh,” she purred, “rest assured, sir, I will gain from it!”
“When? How?”
“Tomorrow evening my friend and I will come with a closed carriage. When you dine”—she paused, indicating the purse he had taken and hidden at his breast—“you must see that the vial of powder you find at the bottom of that bag goes into her drink. Then see that she retires quickly, for in less than half the hour she will sleep like one dead.”
“That is it’?” Deauveau queried crossly. “Then how will I explain her death, her disappearance, to the king?”
“Ah, easily! Easily!” Anne claimed. “You have some servant, surely, who could don something of hers that will hide him? You pretend the next morning that you are going for a drive. Thieves, sir, bandits, will attack you. You will have only to become disheveled then, and make a hue and cry. My friend and I will see that a body is found in London, and that it will be identified as that of Lady Deauveau, Duchess of Rochester. Clean and neat, milord!”
“Nay—not so clean or neat! What of my son?”
“Send him away on business; he need never know.”
Deauveau digested that information for a moment. “It could be done,” he said slowly.
“It can, sir, and will.” Anne smiled beguilingly, then added, “Ah, see, too, sir, that something is done with that blacksmith of yours for the eve.”
“Why?” Deauveau narrowed his eyes warily. “What do you know of him?”
She laughed—nervously, Jake thought, and rightly so!
“I know nothing of him, except that he is a big brute and could be dangerous.”
Deauveau did not seem happy with that; Anne offered him no more information. Deauveau reached for the ale he had previously rejected and drained it quickly, grimacing as the liquid went down.
“Come, sir!” Anne urged with annoyance. “Do you want her gone or not? If you do what I say, none can point to you!”
“Aye, I want her gone!” Deauveau said with vehemence.
Anne smiled and raised her hand, looking about for their tavern maid. Jake frowned then, for he couldn’t see Molly about anywhere. What had happened to the girl?
“Ale here!” she commanded.
“Nay—I need no more.” Deauveau stood, staring down at Anne very carefully once again. “Madam, know this: Beauty moves me not at all. If this plan fails and leaves me beholden, I will find you—and kill you in her stead.”
Anne was not frightened. “Deauveau, I cannot tell you how devoted I am to this bargain of ours! It will not fail; I seek that death certificate with greater vengeance than you can imagine!”
Her passion must have convinced him, for he nodded and strode from the tavern.
Jake barely kept from moving, yet he didn’t dare. The lady Anne would certainly recognize him if she saw him. He would have to wait for Hardgrave to return, for the two of them to leave this place, before he could seek the means to get a message to Warwick.
Once again time dragged. What was Hardgrave, truly the devil’ s own, doing to endure the cold so long?
Once again the minutes dragged endlessly. Even Lady Anne grew impatient, frowning, drumming her fingers against the table, staring at the door again and again.
At least ten minutes passed before Hardgrave arrived, coming ridiculously close to Jake when he went first to the fire to warm his hands and backside.
“What in God’s name took you so long?” she snapped when he joined her.
He shrugged. “I wandered, I lost track of the time. Is the deal made?”
“It is!” Anne exclaimed, too wickedly ecstatic to care any longer that he had taken such time.
Hardgrave nodded. “Good. Then let us quit this place!”
He tossed a coin on the table, and Anne rose. Hardgrave set an arm about her shoulders, and together they left.
Jake had just started to rise, to move limbs cramped from frozen inertia, when Molly burst back into the tavern from the front, shivering with cold, rubbing her red and chafed hands together. But she was so full of excitement that she rushed straight to Jake, heedless of her chills.
“Molly,” he began, “I need help—”
“More than ye know!” she exclaimed in a terse whisper. “The gent—that nasty, arrogant fellow—I saw him from the kitchen, I did. Waitin’ outside, yet waitin’ as if he had something on his mind! I knew ye wanted to know everything, Jake, so I snuck out after him—”
“Without a coat? Bless ye, girl!”
“Hush, hush, listen! When Deauveau—”
“How’d ye know it was Deauveau?”
“I told ye about the Deauveaus, remember!” Molly said indignantly. “Now, listen! When Deauveau came out, calling fer his horse, the other man hailed him before he could leave. Deauveau was impatient; the lord was insistent. He started talking about that friend of yers—”
“Warwick?” Jake demanded.
Molly rolled her eyes at him with reproach . . . “’E’s no blacksmith, that one, he ain’t!”
“Ah, Molly, I know, it’s just—”
“Ye couldn’t trust a tavern wench, I know!” she chastised him. “Well, it seems ye must now, Jake!”
“Molly, I trust ye! Fer God’s sake, tell me what happened next!”
“Lord What’s-his-face told Deauveau that he was the ‘gent’ in question—that all that the lady had said stood, but that there was more.
He told Deauveau that the blacksmith was the duchess’s lover.
Deauveau said that he’d kill the cur; the lord said no, that he wanted to kill the man himself, but that the lady inside was to know nothing of it!
The lord was very insistent, even when Deauveau started raging.
He said that Warwick was his, and his alone to slay, and that he’d been waiting for that vengeance for a long, long time.
Deauveau finally calmed down, and the lord gave him some package, saying that it was more of a ‘powder’—all Deauveau had to do was put it in something that the blacksmith drank, and he’d be out like a downed bull in a matter of minutes.
He said to make it all happen tomorrow night, at the dinner hour. ”
Jake grabbed her cheeks between his hands and kissed her soundly.
“Ah, Molly, yer one in a million fer sure, girl!”
“I like ye, too, Jake. Ye know that!”
“I’ve got to reach Warwick immediately,” he murmured worriedly, but Molly chuckled and swung herself happily onto his lap.
“One in a million, that I be, Jake! My sister’s married to the son of one of the old servants at Deauveau Place; she can have her boy bring his grandpa a new knit shawl.
And old Jem can get a message to the blacksmith, all right, you mark my words!
Jem’s been staying on there just on the chance the girl might come back—he’ll be yer most willing friend! ”
“Then get me a quill, Molly, girl! And know this, ye’ve just made a friend yerself, and that friend be one of the king’s favorites. Rewards, Molly, will be yers!”
“’Tis not fer reward, Jake!” Molly admonished him with a cuff upon the ear . . . “’Tis for love!”
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