Page 14 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

But the general had given no sign of recollecting their previous encounter, and the more she knew of him, the less she could imagine such a genial, grandfatherly gentleman capable of keeping secrets. And though Mrs. Scott was more than twice Caro’s age, she was a lady of such good humor, remarkably disinclined to gossip, that when summer had drawn to a close, Caro had felt the loss of her company keenly and had even written to tell her as much.

Now Mrs. Scott wrote “to beg a favor,” she said. But Caro was only too familiar with begging. What this letter offered was a gift—the gift of a new acquaintance. Mrs. Scott’s note described Mrs. Drummond as “a widowed lady, near in age to yourself,” sent to Brighton to recover her spirits and in need of a friend.

A friend.

The very word was balm to Caro’s tortured, lonely soul. She laid it atop her escritoire, covering her father’s note. “Please,” she said to Mrs. Horn, “send her in.”

* * * *

Though it was only late afternoon, in the shadows of the Pyrenees dusk had already fallen. Rather than pause to light a candle, Maxim shifted his papers across the rough-hewn table, chasing the fading sunlight, and continued to write.

The seriousness of the communiqué, and the need to encrypt it as he wrote, left no room for niceties. Napoleon had turned on his Spanish allies and meant to take Madrid. Already engaged in defending Portugal, British forces were about to find themselves in a new phase of the war.

Maxim’s work had never felt more urgent. Or more futile.

In the silence of the room, broken only by the scratch of his pen, he jumped at a tap on the door as if it were the crack of a rifle.

“Entrez,” he snarled, folding the paper on which he’d been writing even as he pushed away from the table and to his feet.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,” came the reply, in French. Pierre Leclerc stepped into the room and made an apologetic bow.

Maxim had hired him as a manservant upon his arrival in the South of France more than a year ago, to help give cover to his assignment. Leclerc, who knew no more than a few words of English, had told him his sister had been assaulted by French soldiers, which he considered ample excuse for his willingness to work for an Englishman.

To explain his own seemingly aimless wandering through the area, Maxim had claimed—in French that belied his own fluency—to be conducting a survey of agricultural practices. Leclerc frequently served as his unwitting courier, ferrying packets of papers to London—to Maxim’s demanding publisher, or so he explained—via the port of Marseille or occasionally even further afield.

Tonight, he would order Leclerc to begin the journey north, to Paris, to deliver the grim news of Napoleon’s plans to the English intelligence officers stationed there. Maxim would stay near Toulouse and see what else he could learn.

“Here,” he said, thrusting the folded paper toward the other man.

Leclerc did not immediately take it. “A message for you, sir,” he said instead, holding out a folded paper of his own.

Maxim took the note—unsigned, but written in the familiar hand of Zebadiah Scott.

You are wanted at home, Your Grace.

Maxim sat down heavily in the chair he had just vacated, probing his mind for some reaction to this oblique announcement of his grandfather’s death. Not sorrow, when the man had once shown himself so indifferent to Maxim’s own. Not grief for a man who had done everything he could to earn his place in hell.

Not relief, either, for the man’s death merely foisted a new set of responsibilities onto Maxim’s shoulders, responsibilities he had been told time and again he could not hope to fulfill.

No matter how hard he looked within himself, all he found was a familiar emptiness, the same hole he’d had in his chest for twenty-five years, more or less. But as his brief stint as a married man had so forcibly reminded him, heartlessness was more comfortable than the alternative.

Maxim turned the paper over in his hands, as if searching for something more. But the message was written in plain English, not encrypted—at least, not in the conventional sense. He grasped his new mission perfectly. He must return home at least long enough to claim the title of Duke of Hartwell. Scott had always been a stickler when it came to his men fulfilling their domestic duties.

Whether Maxim could correctly be called “one of Scott’s men” was another question.

“Sir?” Leclerc ventured. “What is it?”

“It would seem,” Maxim answered, rising, “that I have inherited a title and a pretty piece of property to go with it.” His voice was thick with bitterness. “Since I must take myself to London to claim it, I suppose I’ll just deliver these latest reports myself.” He tucked what he’d written into his breast pocket, intending to destroy the papers later. The message would be safer in his head.

“When will you return?”

Maxim glanced around the meagerly furnished cottage. There would be little enough to pack. “I don’t know. Here? Perhaps never.” If the intelligence he had gathered proved right, in a matter of weeks, new battle lines would be drawn.

Leclerc nodded and turned to leave. But on the threshold, he hesitated. “Please, sir, won’t you take me with you?” Though the young man’s face was in shadow, Maxim could hear the fear in his voice. His fellow Frenchmen might deem his working for an Englishman as a betrayal—even if none of them ever knew the half of it. “We could say I was your valet—even in England, a French valet would not raise suspicions. You would merely be thought a gentleman at the height of fashion.”

He was not wrong. Despite the war, the English passion for all things French had not subsided. The surge of refugees following the Terror had slowed in the years since, but Leclerc had good reason to want to get away.

And the Crown had good reason to want to keep an eye on him, for under the proper pressure, he could reveal secrets he didn’t even realize he was keeping.