Miranda Jarrett - Princess of Fortune

“I didn’t claim that it was, ma’am.” One of the footmen handed him his gold-trimmed hat, and he settled it squarely on his head, as if preparing for battle. “Is the carriage here, Lady Willoughby?”

“Yes, Captain my lord.” Nervously, Lady Willoughby peered out the window, just to be certain, as if the carriage might have somehow been whisked away by thieves when she wasn’t looking. “But at my brother’s request, I have kept the princess within the house until you joined her.”

“‘Within, within!’” Unable to contain her impatience, Isabella flung one end of the tasseled shawl over her shoulder. “You have done nothing but keep me within, Lady Willoughby, ever since I came here! You might as well have locked me in your darkest dungeon, behind bars of iron, for all that I have been your prisoner!”

“If that is the case, ma’am,” he said, taking her by the elbow without waiting for permission, “then we had better go without.”

She began to pull her elbow away, not liking such familiarity, but then the two footmen blocking the door parted for Isabella and the captain like Moses at the Red Sea. The door swung open, too, and they were outside, on the steps—free!—and Isabella forgot all about the hand at her elbow.

She looked up at the sky and blinked at the brightness. The London sky lacked the brilliance of the one that covered Monteverde, and unlike that perfect enameled blue, this sky was muffled by a haze of coal smoke. But it was still the sky, not the ceiling of a drawing room, and she couldn’t help smiling at the difference as the tassels on her shawl rippled in the breeze.

Yet the captain didn’t share her pleasure. “Come along, ma’am,” he said, steering her down the steps as if her elbow were the rudder on some small boat. “It’s not wise for you to stand out here in the open.”

With an unhappy little sigh, she let him hurry her into the carriage. Not that she had much choice: even with no more contact than his hand on her elbow, she was conscious of how much larger, how much stronger, he was than she. This is what he was supposed to do, watch out for her welfare, but she’d never before had to consider herself a target.

“You ordered this closed carriage, didn’t you, Captain?” she asked as she climbed inside, the leather squabs and polished brass trim warm from waiting in the sun. “After all I’ve been through, you knew I would wish for an open carriage, so I might feel the air, but you chose a closed one instead.”

“Then we’ll keep the windows open.” His glance swept over the quiet square, searching for any sign of something or someone that didn’t belong. “And I believe it was the admiral who suggested the closed carriage.”

“Open windows aren’t the same.”

“No, they’re not.” His expression was stern, all business, as he sat across from her. “I won’t pretend otherwise, ma’am. But I agree with the admiral’s choice. In an open carriage, you would be far too vulnerable to any sharpshooter with a good eye.”

She had not heard that word before—sharpshooter—but she’d no trouble deciphering its meaning. Instantly she pictured herself as she’d appear in that open carriage, a bright patch of red and black, visible from every window and every rooftop they would pass. She knew she should be grateful for the captain’s experience, but the reality behind it frightened her. Though her parents had tried to keep the worst news from her, she knew what had happened to the French royal family. A crown didn’t grant the same omnipotence it once did; Isabella had only to consider how she herself had been sent away to understand that.

Yet she didn’t want to be a villain to those who supported Buonaparte, or a symbol for the English who didn’t. All she wished was to be herself, and for the captain to be the way he’d been inside the house, bantering with her in Italian and not searching shop windows for lurking assassins with chilly English efficiency.

The footman latched the door shut, and at last the carriage rumbled to a start, the iron-bound wheels scraping over the paving stones as they left the square and headed along the city streets. She leaned forward, eager for even a glimpse of the city.

“So where are we bound, ma’am?” The buildings and streets they were passing would mean something to him, neighborhoods and districts he could recognize, while to her everything had a blurry sameness through the window. “Did you or Lady Willoughby tell the driver a destination?”

“I didn’t know one to tell him.” She felt foolish and lost, having earned the freedom she’d craved without any sense now of what to do with it. “I have been too much a prisoner to learn of anything beyond those four grim walls.”

“Ma’am, you were a guest in a Berkeley Square town house.” The captain’s smile was patient and obligatory, a smile guaranteed to make her feel even more foolish and lost. “No one would honestly consider Lady Willoughby’s house to be a prison.”

“It was the same as one.” Her chin trembled. “They allowed me no liberty, no privacy.”

“You allowed them no peace,” he countered. “Nothing Lady Willoughby might have done to you merited that tantrum over your hair. When I was a boy, my mother would have taken a hairbrush to me or my brothers or sisters for behavior like that, and she wouldn’t have used it on our heads, either.”

She’d thought he’d understand, but he didn’t, or at least he was pretending not to, with this nonsense about his mother’s hairbrush. “Your mother wasn’t a queen.”

“No,” he said, pushing his hat back from his forehead with his thumb, “but she was an English countess, which amounts to much the same thing.”

She frowned, wondering what exactly her mother would do or say in this circumstance. “But Lady Willoughby and her servants have been unkind to me, Captain. They did not treat me like a guest. They searched through my trunks and mussed my gowns.”

“How else could they be sure that no enemy could have hidden something harmful in your belongings?” he asked, the logic perfectly clear to him. “They meant only to protect you.”

She sniffed. “They have intercepted my invitations and letters of welcome from my cousins, your English King George and Queen Charlotte, and kept them from me.”

“Lady Willoughby wouldn’t do that, especially not with correspondence from His Majesty. More likely His Majesty has been occupied with affairs of state, and has not yet, ah, found the time to write to you.”

“No, Captain, that was not it at all.” She lowered her voice in confidence, even though they were alone. “Because I am a foreigner, and not English like them, the persons in this house will not trust me. They will not even try.”

He raised one skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t believe that. It’s rubbish.”

“You should believe it, rubbish or not, because it is so,” she said, switching back to speaking Italian. She leaned closer to him, close enough that she could see the darker flecks of blue that sparked his eyes. She clasped her hands before her, beseeching as the shawl slithered off her arm. “Can you trust me, Captain?”

But though she waited, he didn’t answer. Instead of listening, he’d let his eyes follow the shawl as it slipped from her shoulders and came to an abrupt stop there on the neckline of her gown. Monteverdian ladies were not ashamed to display their figures to the best advantage possible, and Isabella had soon realized she wore her gowns cut much lower over her breasts than Lady Willoughby and her dour friends did. Now the captain must have realized the difference, too, his English efficiency scattered to oblivion.

So this, then, was how her mother would have ruled the captain, but the thought gave her no satisfaction. She didn’t want him to be like every other man, whether English or Monteverdian. She wanted him to be better.