A Kiss at Midnight

“Her name is Henrietta, but she prefers Henry.”

“I love the way she calls her husband sugarplum,” Effie said. “It’s just so—”

“Romantic,” Kate said, laughing.

“I read too many novels,” Effie said shamefacedly.

“I haven’t read many, but the villain always gets his comeuppance, as I understand it. And that’s what’s going to happen to Beckham, I promise you. Think of Henry as being like a fairy godmother: She can wave her magic wand and take care of that nasty little toad.”

“How I’d love to see him turned into a turnip,” Effie said.

“Just watch,” Kate said. “She’ll make turnip mash out of him.”

Twenty-one

Y ou will be taking a large party rabbit hunting this afternoon,” Wick said, catching Gabriel by the arm after the luncheon meal.

“That I will not,” Gabriel said instantly.

“What’s got into you?” Wick demanded. “You’ve never been the most biddable person, but I’d prefer you didn’t go stark raving, if you wouldn’t mind. I have a castle full of people, and your aunt’s reader has already driven half the ladies into fits by handing out fortunes like confetti, and all of them depressing.”

“You want depressing, go talk to my uncle. I had to listen to him for an hour last night as he sobbed—sobbed!—over the failure of his naval spectacle.”

“It’s my fault,” Wick said. “I’d watched them practice it over and over, and I simply didn’t picture the timing’s being altered by drunk passengers.”

“Well, no one drowned,” Gabriel said. “I have it from Miss Starck, who breakfasted with Kate, that the lady is just fine. So no harm done.”

“That being the case, would you get on your bloody shooting gear and take some of these men off my hands?”

“No. Ask Ferdinand to take my place, will you?”

“I’ll see if I can drag him out of the pigsty,” Wick said, turning away.

When Gabriel was sure that Wick was well out of hearing, he snatched a young footman and gave him a number of explicit, rapid instructions.

Then he went to his study, locked the door, and walked over to a small painting hanging on the far wall. In the picture’s background, a battle raged; in the foreground, a songbird perched on a low branch. On the ground below lay a suit of armor, abandoned just where a knight had managed to kick it off. All there was to be seen of him was a lifeless foot in the lower right. And the bird sang on, his hard, alert eye showing total disregard for the crumpled warrior foolish enough to die under his tree.

It was the only painting that Gabriel had brought with him from Marburg, the painting that summed up his hatred of the patterned violence and sporadic warfare that marked all small principalities, including his brother’s.

With an easy crook of his finger under the frame, he pulled the painting out from the wall. Behind it was a simple lever. One yank, and a door opened in the wooden paneling, revealing an extremely dusty corridor.

Wick and he had decided that the benefits of ordering someone to clean the corridor were not worth the potential consequences, inasmuch as the existence of a corridor that ran inside the thick walls of the castle was not so terrible in itself, but the fact that the corridor offered peepholes into most bedchambers?

Dusty it was, and dusty it remained.

Gabriel set off, dismissing from his mind the fact that Wick would be infuriated to learn that he had decided to reveal the existence of the corridor.

He kept pausing, peering into bedchambers to orient himself. Gold hangings meant the so-called queen’s bedchamber, now consigned to Lady Dagobert. He walked past four more peepholes, calculating his location, and then looked again. He blinked and then hastily walked on. If his guests were choosing not to nap after luncheon, it certainly wasn’t his affair.

He skipped four more, tried again, and knew he had the room, because there was Freddie, curled in a tight ball in the middle of the bed. He didn’t hear anything, which suggested that Kate’s maid was not in attendance.

He put his mouth to the peephole and said, “Kate.”

Nothing.

He said it more loudly. “Kate!”

There was a muttered curse word that made him grin, and then the sound of someone walking over to the bedroom door and opening it. He couldn’t see her, but he imagined her staring into the corridor.

She closed the door again, rather more slowly than she had opened it, and he tried again. “Come to the fireplace and look on the right side.”

“I hate people who spy,” she said in a loud voice.

“I’m not spying!” he protested. “All I can see is your bed.”

A withering silence answered him.

“Freddie looks comfortable.”

“Freddie is always comfortable. Why are you spying on a lady’s bed?”

“I came to ask you to go for a drive with me. In secret.”

“I gathered the secret part. How many people traipse through that corridor at night?”

“No one,” he assured her. “Ever. You’re the only person other than Wick who knows it exists.”

“This is England,” she pointed out. “You didn’t build the castle yourself. Probably half your guests know of its existence.” Suddenly an eye presented itself before him. It was a beautiful eye, pale green like the light that comes through a stained glass window, and ringed in brown.

“Is that you?” she asked suspiciously.

“Of course it’s me.”

“Should I pull a lever to let you out?”

“There’s no entrance to any of the bedrooms.”

“Just for peeping,” Kate muttered. “How distasteful.”

“I’ve got a carriage downstairs, and a picnic. I told the footman that I would take one of my aunts to see the old nunnery.”

“A nunnery sounds like a barrelful of monkeys,” she said, turning away. All he could see was Freddie again. She continued, off to the right. “And your aunt, will she enjoy this excursion?”

“Just the two of us,” Gabriel said, and held his breath. No proper young lady would do it. Ever. No chaperone, no maid, no aunt?

Kate’s eye reappeared. “Are you planning to seduce me in the carriage?” The green looked a little darker with displeasure.

“I’d love to,” he said regretfully, “but I wouldn’t be able to live with my own conscience, so I won’t.”

“Have you a conscience when it comes to people like me? I thought you and Wick had summed up my circumstances.”

“You may be illegitimate, though I don’t think you’re a swineherd’s daughter, for all your intimate knowledge of piggeries.”

“I’m not,” she said, and disappeared again. He could hear her walking about. “If I were a swineherd’s daughter would you seduce me?”

“I’ve actually never seduced a maiden,” he said.

“How virtuous of you.”

“It’s likely not a reflection of virtue,” he admitted. “Princes hardly ever manage to be alone, you know. When I was younger, I would have gladly cavorted with a maiden of any variety, but I wasn’t given a chance.”