Free Since the Surrender by Julie Anne Long Page A

madam. My family has been puppeteers for centuries. And I do a bit of carpentry for the museum now and again, too. You were admiring the painting?”
    He’d been watching her? Wait: watching her and Chase?
    Had he been listening to them?
    The fine hairs at the back of her neck stirred in distaste. She disliked being watched when she wasn’t aware of it, particularly in light of all that had happened recently. But she had to admit that in all likelihood she would never have seen the man if he hadn’t moved or spoken to her directly, such was his camouflage.
    “I was looking at the painting,” she conceded.
    He smiled faintly, appreciating her careful distinction.
    “And Captain Eversea? He was looking, too?”
    He must have heard her address Chase. She stared at him. He must have heard her address Chase. She stared at him.
    “Yes,” she finally said, cautiously.
    “What drew you to the painting?” The question seemed idle; he turned away from her as he asked it, and was now testing the mobility of the marionette’s neck. He took it in both hands and gave it such a twist that Rosalind’s hands flew to her throat. She dropped them instantly.
    “It…reminded me of my sister.”
    Apparently satisfied with the head, the man retrieved a cloth from his toolbox, hiked the ugly marionette’s shirt and gave its smooth wooden chest a bit of a polish with some sort of pungent oil. Rosalind was peculiarly tempted to avert her eyes. She was relieved when he pulled the shirt down again.
    “Isn’t that interesting?” he mused. “The painting reminds me of my daughter.”
    She was not about to tell him why it reminded him of her sister. He was not further forthcoming regarding his daughter. They regarded each other mutely for a moment.
    Then he turned decisively back to his work. Next he applied the cloth to the lumpy wooden face of the marionette. She winced when he dug his fingers into its carved nostrils and twisted.
    “Do…do you like the painting, sir?” She suddenly wondered what this craftsman thought of the Rubinetto.
    He wiped his knobby hands on a cloth tucked into the waistband of his trousers.
    “No.”
    The word was inflectionless and immediate.
    He backed down the ladder, each rung giving a squeak beneath his weight. He bent for the handle of a toolbox on the floor, gave her a short bow by way of farewell, and walked past her, deeper into the museum, without looking back.

    By his second whiskey at the Velvet Glove, Chase was remembering the day English intelligence confirmed that the d’Alignys were spies for the French.
    Lady d’Aligny, they’d said, was the niece of a high-ranking French official who had the ear of Napoleon and had been the source of information regarding tentative English troop positions. Doubtless she’d flirted the information strategically out of an English soldier, and Chase wondered whom he would need to order flogged. Or worse.
    He wasn’t naive enough to feel any particular sense of betrayal where the d’Alignys were concerned, merely a fatalistic disappointment. War was war, and Englishmen were even now secretly, comfortably, moving through French society, mingling within Bonaparte’s inner circle, making friends, betraying those friends, and sending intelligence both useful and trivial back to Wellington.
    And of course dancing with French wives.
    It had ever been thus in war.
    Colonel March had been philosophically, humorously grim. A battered old soldier, whip-lean, bent just a bit at the shoulders from an old wound, the colonel’s eyes were sharp but not jaded. Without his hat, Chase suddenly found his friend’s hair strangely poignant. Soft as cobwebs. Only a little of it left.
    “We can’t suddenly refuse all of their invitations, of course, because it will reveal what we know and put our own men in danger,” the colonel had said. “They set the best table in all of Belgium. Better to know, aye?”
    “Yes, sir. But what of Mrs. March? She’s a particular