The Wicked Deeds of Daniel Mackenzie(33)
Author: Jennifer Ashley

“Ye’ve seen nothing of squalls until it’s the snow whirling around Kilmorgan Castle in a wild white blizzard. But Kilmorgan’s a fine place in the height of summer, when the light never really goes away. ’Tis beautiful. You’ll like it.”

Violet stopped, her fork halfway to her mouth. Daniel went on scraping the last of his sauce from his plate, not noticing her hesitation.

Again he was implying they would be friends for a while. That he’d show her this place with the lofty title of Kilmorgan Castle, in the summer when light lingered into night.

“You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said lightly.

Daniel looked up at her, his smile rich and hot. “Oh, sweetheart, I always keep my promises.”

The innkeeper’s wife entered again before Violet could think of a reply. The woman started piling empty dishes onto the tray, taking their compliments on the food in stride. “Just a bit of home cooking,” she said. “Now, we’ve fixed the bedroom upstairs for you. The day is short, the storm is upon us. You’ll not be flying anywhere tonight.” She chuckled. “To be sure, when Jean ran in to tell me a man and his lady wife had been flying high and were now stuck in a tree, I thought he was having fancies. But you’re foreign. What you get up to is beyond me.” She shook her head at them, more amused than dismayed.

Here was another difference between Violet’s life and Daniel’s. People were instantly kind to Daniel, as though his charm were contagious. Violet had not forgotten the cruelty of the villagers who’d forced her and her ill mother out onto the road and into the tempest. These people seemed kind and caring, but Violet knew that if she’d arrived alone, without Daniel with his charm and wealth, they would have regarded her with deep suspicion.

“Thank you,” Daniel told the innkeeper’s wife. “I confess, it would be better to rest our weary bones here than to try to make our way back to the coast tonight, even if my man could reach us with a cart. Which he can’t. He’ll have been cut off by the gorge—I’m sure Simon and Dupuis sensibly returned home. We’ll spend the night here and return in the morning.”

Spend the night. Violet ceased to breathe. To rest in a warm, soft bed, tucked away with Daniel, hidden from the world . . .

“I can’t.” Violet jumped to her feet, speaking rapidly in English. “My mother won’t know where I am. She’ll worry herself frantic.”

Daniel lifted his hand. “No matter, my love. We’ll send a message.” He switched on his smile as he spoke again in French. “Do you have a telegraph office nearby, Madame?”

“There’s a train station in a village three miles from here. They have a telegraph.”

Violet felt obligated to put forth one more argument. “If there is a train three miles from here, then we can go back. Three miles is an easy journey, even in a storm.”

The innkeeper’s wife chuckled again. “City folk. It’s not the Gare du Nord, Madame. Train stops twice a day, once each way, and you’ve already missed both.”

“Ah, well, that decides it,” Daniel said, not worried.

“That decides it,” Violet echoed. She was going to spend the night here, as Daniel’s wife, no matter what.

The innkeeper’s wife took them upstairs to the first floor, and unlocked a room that was about ten feet square. An enormous bed, which took up most of the room, rose under the beams, a bright fire danced on a hearth, and a tray laden with hot coffee and cups lay on a table near the fire.

“I’ve brought you out a nightgown, Madame,” the innkeeper’s wife said, shaking out a long, slightly yellowed cotton gown. “I’ll help you undress, same as a lady’s maid. And my husband will do for you, Monsieur.”

“I don’t need much doing,” Daniel said. “You get comfortable, Vi. I’ll take care of the message to your mum. She doesn’t need to worry about us.”

He kept up the verisimilitude well. No stammering, no embarrassment, no forgetting parts of the fiction he was weaving. But at the same time, he was giving Violet time to change out of her clothes without him near in this tiny room.

Daniel departed on his errand, the innkeeper’s wife agreeing that mothers worried—she worried every day about her son off working in Aix-en-Provence instead of helping them tend the inn.

“Not that we have much to do here,” she went on. “City folk come out seeking country air in the summer, and sometimes the shooting parties get this far, but in spring, with the planting, and city folk keeping to their theatres and operas, not many come out to see us.”

And the inn was a bit away from the railway, Violet finished silently, and those with money took the fast trains from Paris to the coast. Not much call for a coaching inn these days. Daniel had been right that these people could use extra money.

Still chattering, the innkeeper’s wife unbuttoned and unlaced Violet’s dress and petticoats, helped her out of her corset, and slid the warmed and pressed nightgown over her head. Violet hadn’t been waited on in such a very long time . . . or had she ever been, like this? As though she were a true lady, married to someone like Daniel.

Daniel returned in little over half an hour. By then it was fully dark, and he came noisily into the bedroom, bringing with him a wave of cold and the smell of wood smoke.

Violet had curled up on the soft chair before the fire after the innkeeper’s wife had gone, and remained there, too tired to rise. She’d wrapped a borrowed dressing gown and a blanket from the bed around her, her feet pulled up under them. “You walked three miles there and back awfully fast,” she said to Daniel. “The coffee is still warm, I think.”

“I met a boy from the next village halfway along, and he carried the message back for me. He was expecting me. Gossip must be spread by carrier pigeon between these villages.”

He came to pour himself a cup of the coffee, which put him close to Violet. His coat still held the cold of outside, but the wool of his kilt smelled warm. The heat of him slid through Violet’s blanket and made her draw herself closer.

“The innkeeper’s wife brought a nightshirt for you,” Violet said, clutching her cup. “It’s laid out on the bed.”

Daniel shucked his coat and hung it on a hook, caught up the nightshirt, and sat down in the other chair, resting the nightshirt on his lap. “Kind of her.”

“They’re being very kind, I’ve noticed.” Violet kept to English, knowing anything overheard in French would be all over this village and the next by the following morning, presumably by carrier pigeon. “They like you, and perhaps sense your aristocratic connections.”