The Pride of Lions by Marsha Canham Page B

faced him. “I will admit,”she said quietly, “that I would prefer not to have to look at your face again until the morning.”
    After a brief hesitation his husky laugh pricked the fine hairs across the nape of her neck. “It would be my pleasure to oblige, madam.”
    He bowed with a flamboyant swirl of the black cape and departed, leaving Catherine to stare at the closed door. She heard his boots echo on the floorboards and mentally cursed every step he took, hoping against hope a plank would give way and plunge him to his death below. The footsteps went only as far as the room next door, however, where they were met by the scrape of a chair and a muffled greeting.
    Deirdre, seeing the weariness on her mistress’s face, set the pormanteau aside and hurried over to check if there was water in the cracked pitcher that sat on the nightstand.
    “Oh, Mistress Catherine, I do wish there was something—”
    “ What the bloody hell did you bring her here for? ”
    Both Catherine and Deirdre were startled by the outburst and turned to stare at the partition wall. They waited, holding their breaths, but whatever was said next was ordered into more reasonable tones by Montgomery’s sharp reprimand. It was Catherine who noticed a bright sliver of light halfway up the partition—a knot in the wood or a crack from aging—and, curious despite herself, she tiptoed over to the wall and pressed a rounded violet eye to the gap.
    Deirdre was plainly shocked. “Mistress Catherine!”
    “Hush. I just want to see who he is talking to.”
    There were two other men in the room with Montgomery. One was of medium height, rangy-looking and thin, as if he had not had a good meal in some time. His cheeks had only the sparsest of dirty brown hairs covering them, making him appear to be not much older than Catherine. The second man, who’d had his back to the wall, paced forward in thought, turning at the far wall toprovide a glimpse of his face. He was almost as tall as Montgomery, but lean and graceful in his movements, with the somber, contemplative features of a man who might have been a poet or a philosopher. Both of the strangers were dressed casually in loose-fitting home-spun shirts, leather jerkins, and plain breeches.
    “She won’t be a problem after tomorrow,” Montgomery was saying as he moved away from the door and stood directly in Catherine’s line of sight.
    The philosopher leaned into the light and inspected the fresh cut on Montgomery’s temple. “Her husband give you that?”
    “It was … a slight miscalculation on my part. Nothing to worry about. We should be more concerned about the rumors we heard in London. They were true. The colonel tells me several regiments are making preparations to move north; they expect to have their orders by the end of the month.”
    “So they suspect something?”
    Montgomery nodded grimly. “They know our friend is not in Normandy anymore, and they don’t believe for a minute he has gone back to Rome. Some are even convinced he has already crossed the Channel with an army.”
    “The colonel told you this?”
    Montgomery removed his tricorn and tossed it on the bed along with his greatcoat. “It was a risk, meeting up with him in Derby, but the reports he passed on were too important to trust to regular couriers. He’s concerned—with good reason—that the English army knows too damned much about our business. Too damned much for the information to be coming from their people alone.”
    “Information goes both ways,” the philosopher said quietly.
    “Aye, an’ the colonel’s no’ one tae talk, bein’ Sassenach himsel’,” the younger man noted.
    Catherine lifted her eye from the peephole, momentarily taken aback at the sound of the broad Scots accentand the vilification placed on the word Sassenach —a vulgarism used by the Celts to denote anyone of English birth.
    “Is something wrong, Mistress?” Deirdre asked in a whisper.
    “Shhh. I … don’t know.”