Chapter Eleven
My ny won pyw e cammen. (Cornish saying)
I know not who he is at all.
Jack rapped his forehead against the stone mullion of the window.
Why did he keep baring the rogue? It was clearer than the Cornish sky that Miss Penrose hated the fellow, but that was who he was.
Indeed, rule number sixteen stated leopards had spots for a reason.
“My lord?”
“Go to bed, Oliver,” he urged, staring out into the pitch black. “I can manage a shirt and breeches.”
“Hmm, but if I might suggest… Rule number thirty, my lord.” And the door softly closed.
Faugh, so said the virtuous valet but tomorrow he had to compete with that whiskered warrior Hugh for Miss Penrose’s attention and she appeared to prefer the captain’s ill-fitting boots.
Not that Jack was jealous; it simply made the mission trickier.
A light caught his eye from the trimmed but parched lawns. It flickered and swayed, casting the central bed of shrubbery to dancing ogres.
Squashing his nose to the leaded window, he squinted, images distorting through the centuries-old glass, but he could just make out…Benjamin Roskilly.
What on earth was he doing at this hour, scampering around with lantern and odd-shaped sack?
Only one thing for it and besides, sleep would not be forthcoming on such a close evening. Perhaps the young cub was preparing some odd Cornish druidic incantation or somesuch.
But just in case, he stuffed a stiletto knife in his boot.
Jack had attempted to memorise the outlay of this ancient house one morning but nevertheless, without candle, he clanked into some ancestor’s suit of armour in the hall, causing a grunt from the professor’s bedchamber. The stairs also groaned alarmingly, and it would only require some fair damsel to wander the winding halls with fair head tucked beneath fair arm to complete the Gothic ambiance.
No such luck, and he exited through the old hunting door without further mishap and into the faint light of a waning moon.
With eyes flitting for the marauding peacock, he crossed the lawned garden in haste, and promptly tripped over a protuberance on the ground.
“Ouch!”
“Benjamin?” he whispered, wondering why it was obligatory to whisper at night. “What are you doing? Awaiting pesky piskies?”
“Guarding Miss Penrose.”
“Guar…” Jack gazed into the dark and assuredly, also sitting on the ground at some distance from the shrubbery was the lady of the house, not retired abed at all, but with a candlestick by her side, and some kind of white sheet tacked onto a frame. “What is she doing?”
“You can take over,” the lad said, standing only too keenly and stretching his gangly limbs. “’Tes like watching someone ladle out Dozmary Pool with a limpet shell, and this looby weather turns me roving.”
Looby…? Never mind. “You trust me?”
“Old Mrs Mawkin said that despite your fligs and dollymoppin’, you’re no timmersome timdoodle. Night t’ee.”
No idea.
A nod and the young sprig loped off.
Whatever she was doing, Miss Penrose was engrossed, gazing at something on the bedsheet with a magnifying glass.
With cautious tread, he approached. “Are you well?” he whispered, causing her to drop the glass.
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “It’s you.”
That took the wind from his sails.
“It’s exceedingly late, Miss Penrose, what are–”
“I study moths.”
Jack tipped his head back, stared to the heavens, to the stars, to the fates and Saint Ninnidh, as the Duchess of Rakecombe would say, and wondered why the hell they all enjoyed making sport of him so much.
Was he purely on earth for their ridicule?
“I realise,” she began, goggling at a grey insect, “that some people think they are dull but in fact, they’re–”
“Wonderful inhabitants of the night,” he continued with a sigh, quoting Rainham’s explanation for his choice of codename for Jack. “Light on the wing, silent in flight, quick and inventive. Masters of disguise. They hide their true self behind a façade of imitation…”
Absurd.
However, his words caused Miss Penrose to lower her magnifying glass. “Why yes,” she said, gawking at him as though he was the one with antennae sticking from his head.
It would seem she was no longer unsettled by his attentions as her voice was husky but strong with none of that rasp he had noticed when they’d first met.
He kneeled on the grass by her side and peered at the sheet. “Why do they seek the light? It only hurts them,” he asked, always having wondered.
“No one knows for sure. I think it has something to do with navigation, like sailors and the stars. After all, it is I who is making them confused with my false light. Otherwise, they would spend the night feeding and m-mating…but maybe ’tis silly.”
One should never mention mating to a rogue. It conjured images of scorched nights and a mesh of bodies. Miss Penrose’s legs wrapped around his waist, hands knotting her hair to a messy tangle as he–
“Show me some moths,” he pleaded. Surely lepidopterous insects would quash any improper thoughts. “Do you pin them into one of those little cases.”
“Eugh, no!” She glared at him. “I don’t know why gentlemen feel the need to do that, the need to subdue nature.” She scrunched her nose. “Actually, I do, it’s to feel superior. Anyhow, I find they stay still long enough on the sheet to be studied, and then I write my observations. I may attempt a watercolour tomorrow. They are created for flying, Lord Winterbourne, and I could not pin one down, even in death.”
She peeped oddly at him and he wondered if they were still talking of moths.
“Call me Jack,” he murmured. “Please.” In this moon-tipped dark, her whole body was cast in grey light – such a beautiful and beguiling colour. Had he once considered it dull?
“Why?”
“Because…” He reached for some practised line of seduction, some droll retort, but… “I always envisage my father when I hear that title, and he was an utter blackguard. I dislike it.”
She smiled. “It would be my pleasure, Jack. And you must call me Tamsyn.”
Why did he feel as if he’d just won fifty pounds at Ascot?
“Now, Jack,” she said, pointing at a puny grey fellow, “this is a Marbled Green or Cryphia muralis.”
On closer inspection, he saw it wasn’t grey at all, but a subtle moss green with black jagged lines. “Curious markings.” It stalked the sheet as though a duke.
“Moths camouflage themselves to blend in and some, like the Marbled Green, have patterns to break up their outline. You’d never see him against a lichen-covered rock. Hidden in plain sight.”
She continued talking, pointing out the various names and body parts, but Jack’s brainbox had wandered on. He stared at her lips as she talked, her hands as she pointed, her hair as it lapped her shoulders.
Everything about Tamsyn was…enticing. He could stay out here all night watching her natter on about moths.
“And this one, as Linnaeus catalogued in his Systema Naturae, is the Foppiso magnifico from Smellium Londinium,” she whispered, pointing at a huge fellow with furry bits.
“A what?”
He’d not been listening, Tamsyn had gathered some time ago. He’d been…gawping.
And not at the moths.
Why she didn’t know. She’d no curvy figure like Lowdy or pretty green eyes like Mrs Tripconey. Everything was pale except for her summer skin and she even lost that in winter.
“I think it worth repeating,” Tamsyn said, clearing her throat, “the Foppiso magnifico from Smellium Londinium.”
He scrutinised the moth. “It does appear a magnificent creature with splendid legs and a huge…wingspan.”
A giggle escaped her. His humour was infectious, bawdy even, and she suspected he laughed most of his conquests into bed. But he also mocked himself, aware of his own nature, and it was too difficult to stay aloof from him.
One of the moths flew from the sheet, its reddish-brown wings flitting in her face for a moment, before disappearing off – at last realising the flame held no value.
“That was one of my favourites, the Feathered Thorn or Colotois pennaria. So called for its antennae as they have…feathery bits on them.”
“Do they live long as moths?” Jack asked as he watched it vanish into the night.
“A few weeks or so. It depends. Some species die after mating,” she murmured low, aware this wasn’t really a conversation to be conducted betwixt a woman and a rogue… At night. In the dark. Alone. “Mating is its sole purpose in life.”
Jack twisted, eyes as bottomless as a copper mine, grin wide. “A most principled endeavour that deserves reward.”
Stretching out on the clipped straw-like grass, their legs brushed in the silence. He sat so very close.
“And what principles guide Jack Winterbourne?”
His grin faltered. That lemon citrus cologne had deepened with the warmth of his skin, now redolent of succulent oranges from the glasshouse, sweet and ripe and tempting.
“Polished boots?” she prompted, attempting flippancy. “Perfect cravats?” Anything to lighten the sultry atmosphere, the night closing around them.
No more than shirt and breeches clung to his lean frame, this particular cravat dangling imperfectly around his neck, unknotted and baring his throat to the weak moonlight.
Dishevelment suited him. Usually he was so well-turned-out, but she liked this more slapdash marquess – unaffected and real.
“Honesty,” he finally answered, drawing her from those wandering thoughts.
She cocked her head, not foreseeing that. “Then tell me why you are here.”
A mournful cry – the peacock searching a mate.
Tamsyn expected the marquess to leave or for lies to spill from those perfect lips.
Abruptly, he stood and her shoulders stooped. There would be no honesty tonight.
“Bloody rule thirty, the cheeky bugger,” he muttered, pacing.
“What rule?” She frowned.
“If all else fails, try honesty. Rule thirty.”
She shook her head, not understanding at all.
He dropped to his knees in front of her once more, fine satin breeches besmirched with grass, and then he leaned close and tipped her chin.
The brush of his fingers scorched, his breath port-laced and sweet.
“Principally, I am here for you, Tamsyn. To learn what happened six years ago.”
She wanted to scream, to scuttle away and hide, but Jack had told her the truth, unvarnished and raw.
Where this man was concerned, she’d so wished to keep her prejudices alive – to see him as a deceiver and yet he constantly opened her eyes to his many contradictions.
An honest scoundrel.
A thought occurred. “Does my father know?”
“Yes, but do not begrudge him for it. He knows the reasoning, and I am under threat of…loss, if I hurt you.”
“And…what is that reasoning?”
Her breath caught.
Please, no. He’s dead.
He has to be dead.
Jack held her gaze. “La Chauve-Souris, Tamsyn. It was he that you stumbled upon that night, wasn’t it? And my superior at Whitehall suspects he may still be alive.”
“No,” she whimpered, pushing out and scrambling back on her haunches. “It cannot be.”
The moth frame crashed to the ground, candle falling, snuffing on the earth, its weak flame extinguished.
Jack lunged forward and pulled her into his arms, so tight, even as she struggled for freedom. He’d not thought on the consequences of honesty but could keep secrets from her no longer. “Tamsyn, I will never allow any harm to befall you.”
“I thought him…dead,” she whispered, voice akin to gravel. “I have to believe him dead. He’ll kill them.”
“Tamsyn.” He placed steady hands either side of her face, compelled her to look into his eyes – her own were stark with terror, tears welling. “It’s purely a suspicion of my superior at the moment. Nothing more.”
She licked her lips, voice scarcely a croak, and it wounded him so to witness despair in such a courageous woman. He pulled her snug to his lap.
“No,” she sobbed. “He must be dead!”
“And maybe he is, at the bottom of the Thames and rotting in hell, but… I need to know what happened to you, Tamsyn.”
“I can’t… I… He’ll–”
Lungs rasped for air.
“Slow, Tamsyn. Breathe, my brave bird. Don’t let that whoreson do this to you.” He feathered her cheek with blunt fingers. “I’ve no need to know yet and I will never force you. Only when you are able.”
He brushed back her hair, stroked, cupped her chin, not knowing what to do, her terror palpable in the stifling night. She bit a trembling lip, eyes closing to blot out the darkness.
And so he kissed her.
To distract, he might have claimed, but that would be a lie.
Supple silk and warm honey. A mere exchange of air, a touch. Her lips quivered beneath his and he soothed, pure and exquisite, fingers clasping, so very tender.
Yet his body ached with a consuming hunger, never before felt. He lifted his head, a breath apart, sweet almonds luring his senses.
“I’ve…” She paused. “No one has kissed me since…him.”
“He kissed you?” Fury ignited.
“Only briefly.”
The fury did not abate, and he closed his eyes. It wasn’t jealousy, for that sentiment only befell others, and yet his Winterbourne temper raged.
“Jack?” A smooth hand cradled his cheek, the word a husky scratch, and in that moment, fury waned.
Opening his eyes, he met Tamsyn’s furrowed brow. “I apologise. I’ve a wicked temper buried somewhere deep.”
“As do I,” she said, raw but composed. “That night… I believe ’twas my temper which kept me alive. I was so angry. I will tell you all, Jack…soon.”
He yearned to kiss her again in answer. Enflame her. Feel her lips quiver anew and never in fear.
But she pulled away.
And anyhow, had he not got what he wanted? Mission accomplished?
Confusion churned his gizzards and he flung himself onto his back, gazing up at the vast array of stars.
Rustling ensued and he realised Tamsyn had joined him in surveying the heavens.
“As a boy, I would stare up at night,” Jack said softly, “and wish I could live on a star. Just me and my brother Vincent.”
“I did the same. But I wished the moths could be with me always.” She sighed, raising herself onto an elbow, no longer looking skywards. “Yet my winged friends always leave by day.”
Jack flung an arm over his eyes.
Bloody Rainham.