Jane Feather - The Emerald Swan

She looked up at him, and her blue eyes were suddenly wary. But he was regarding her calmly, his mouth relaxed, curving in the hint of a smile.

"A proposition? What kind of a proposition?"

"Have you had supper?"

"How could I have?" she retorted a mite sharply. "I told you I have no money." It had been a long time since she'd broken her fast at dawn. Because of the need of one final performance before catching the afternoon tide, the troupe had gone without their midday dinner, and she was ravenous. But in her present penniless and homeless state, a night with an empty belly seemed inevitable.

"Then perhaps you'd like to share mine?" He lifted an eyebrow inquiringly.

"In exchange for what?" Her lips were dry and she touched them with her tongue. Her eyes were anxious, her voice nervous as she awaited his answer.

Gareth could see that she knew her present situation was nothing short of calamitous. He could see her eagerness to accept his offer, but her wariness told him the most about her. Despite her life on the streets, or perhaps because of it, she was not about to throw herself on a stranger's mercy. And it seemed she was not willing to use her body as currency in the usual manner of the streets, if that was what he expected in payment for her supper.

"I have a proposition to make you. I'd like you to listen to it over supper. That's all." He smiled with what he hoped she would see as reassurance, then, to allow to make up her own mind, he turned and began to walk back to the town.

Miranda hesitated for barely a minute, then she slid off the wall. Common sense told her that food could only improve her situation and instinct that she could trust his lordship. Chip jumped onto her shoulder, and they followed the earl back to the Adam and Eve.

"Where is Gareth? He's been gone for more than four months." Lady Imogen Dufort paced the long gallery beneath the portraits of Harcourt ancestors. She was a tall angular woman with a disgruntled mouth, the nostrils of her long nose pinched and white.

"Passage from France is not always easy to arrange." Her husband offered the platitude although he knew that it would only incense his wife. Twenty-five years of marriage had taught him that Imogen was impossible to placate. It didn't stop him trying, however. Nervously, he rearranged the few thin strands of gingery hair draped over his white skull.

"Whoever said it was?" Lady Imogen snapped. "But it's August, not January, and the seas are quiet enough. And King Henry is outside Paris, not in the wilds of Navarre. Easy enough to reach, I would have thought, for a man with half an ounce of determination." She reached the end of the gallery and swung round, her farthingale swaying so violently it knocked over a small stool.

The lady ignored the clatter as she continued to fume. "But Gareth, as we all know, is as indolent as a lizard in the sun. If it weren't for me, this family would sink into obscurity! The most wonderful opportunity wasted… tossed aside because my dear brother can't be troubled to bestir himself." She fanned herself vigorously, two angry red spots burning on her cheekbones, accentuating the deeply pockmarked skin. "Oh, if only I were a man! I could do these things myself!"

Miles stroked his neat spade beard and tried to appear deep in constructive thought, as if that could somehow achieve this oft-repeated ambition of his wife's. He knew perfectly well that her diatribe against Gareth had its roots in fear that some disaster had befallen him. Imogen was incapable of expressing affection, and her adoration of her brother expressed itself in fierce denial. The greater her anxiety and the deeper her love, the more negative and critical she became.

"But my dear lady, your brother has gone to King Henry," he offered finally.

"Yes, and thanks to whom?" Imogen demanded. "Would he have gone if I hadn't begged and prayed and implored him? On my knees, month after month?"

There was no answer to this. Lord Harcourt had certainly been hard to persuade. It awed Miles that his brother-in-law was impervious to his elder sister's relentless pestering. Floods of tears, terrifying rages, unceasing harassment-nothing seemed to pierce his nonchalance. A nonchalance that Miles at least believed to be little more than a facade. It fooled Imogen into believing her brother needed to be directed into the right paths for his own good and the good of the family. She hadn't seemed to notice that, regardless of her efforts, Gareth continued to go his own way.

Gareth had, however, finally been roused to a spark of interest over this business with Maude. When Imogen had first come up with her brilliant idea to propose Maude as a possible wife to the duke of Roissy, Miles had expected the usual sequence: Gareth would allow his sister to pester him only so far, and then he'd gently but firmly put her in her place with an absolute refusal.

But on this occasion, after a while Miles had seen a certain gleam in his brother-in-law's eye-one he hadn't seen in many a month. A look of quiet calculation even while he'd allowed his sister's passionate diatribes to wash over him.

It seemed that Gareth had seen the advantages to the Harcourts in such an alliance without his sister's vehement assistance. The Harcourt family had lost so much since the massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day, because of their loyalty to Henry and the Huguenot cause, it was not unreasonable to expect their reward now that Henry and his cause had triumphed in France.

"Have you talked again with Maude, my dear?" Miles inquired, turning his rings around on his fingers, wishing he could escape into London where he could find some convivial card-playing company in one of the taverns around Ludgate Hill.

"I will not speak with that ungrateful creature until she agrees to do as she's told." Lady Imogen's voice vibrated with suppressed violence. "I wash my hands of her." She slapped her hands together in illustration, but her husband was not fooled. Imogen was far from ready to give up her plan.

Imogen resume her pacing, then abruptly she turned to the door at the end of the gallery. She said nothing to her husband as she sailed out, leaving the door open behind her.

Miles followed at a discreet distance and when he saw her turn to the left at the end of the corridor into the east wing of the house he nodded to himself. Poor Maude was in for another savage bullying. At least this gave him the freedom to sneak out of the house on his own pursuits.

Imogen marched into the small parlor where her cousin spent most of her days. "Out!" she ordered the elderly woman sewing beside the fire blazing in the hearth, despite the warmth of the afternoon. It was suffocatingly hot in the small paneled room and the air was thick with the acrid reek of the clarified pig's fat smeared on the Lady Maude's chest to guard against chills.

The woman gathered up her embroidery and looked doubtfully between her young mistress, lying on a cushioned settle drawn up so close to the fire as to be almost in the inglenook, and the Lady Imogen, who stood tapping one foot impatiently, her brown eyes glittering with rage.

"Out! Didn't you hear me, woman?"

Lady Maude's companion curtsied hastily and withdrew.

"I give you good day, Cousin Imogen," a thin voice murmured from beneath a mound of shawls and rugs on the settle.

"Don't you dare wish me a good day," Imogen declared, somewhat idiotically. She approached the settle. The girl lying there regarded her solemnly but without fear. Her dark reddish brown hair was rather lank, her complexion had the lifeless pallor of one who is chronically short of fresh air and exercise. But her eyes were a brilliant blue.

"I will not stand for this nonsense another minute. Do you hear me, girl?" Imogen bent over Maude, spitting her rage into her face.