Free The Raven's Lady by Jude Knight

 

     
    In the past eight
years, Felix Maddox had spent more hours staking out suspects than
he ever wished to remember. He couldn’t count the number of nights
he’d spent awake, knowing he’d go into battle the next morning. He
had even been imprisoned for six months.
    This evening as
a guest in what should be his own home was probably not the most
interminable he had ever suffered through. At this moment, though,
it certainly felt like it.
    The lady he was
supposedly here to consider as a wife was pretty enough, he
supposed, if one liked milk-and-water misses who never looked up
from their plates, and who answered every conversational sally with
a monosyllable or a giggle.
    She had sadly
changed from the lively child he remembered. But that was long ago,
almost another life. She was nine, and he was fourteen, the last
time they parted.
    The only
interesting thing about her now, as far as he could see, was the
raven she kept as a pet. He remembered the raven, too. He’d been
the one to rescue the half-fledged bird from a cat, but Joselyn
Bellingham was the one who tended it, fed it, and captured its
affection.
    He’d been
startled when the raven flew in the library window that afternoon,
fixed him with a knowing eye, then marched out the door and along
the hall, to tap at the door of Miss Bellingham’s sitting room
until she opened and let it in.
    Now, though, at
dinner, any sign of originality was absent. And as for his cousin,
the fat oaf who had inherited the viscountcy when Felix was
reported dead, the man’s conversation was all on-dits about people
Felix didn’t know and off-colour jokes that were inappropriate in
front of a lady, and not even funny.
    Miss Bellingham
rose to leave the gentlemen to their port, and Felix forced his
face into a pleasant smile as he prepared to get fat Cyril even
drunker and pump him for any knowledge he had of the Black Fox, the
smuggler Felix had been sent to investigate.
    A waste of
time, in his opinion. Cyril couldn’t organise a bunfight in a
baker’s shop. The condition of the lands and buildings on the
estates of Maddox Grange showed the man was a total
incompetent.
    Felix couldn’t
blame Cyril for thinking he was the viscount. Felix had decided to
stay dead to more easily find the traitors who had given him up to
the French. The released prisoner, Frederick Matthews, was no
threat to them until all of a sudden they were behind bars. Then
Colonel Webster, one of Castlereagh’s men, had approached him and
said the identity he had painstakingly created could be used to
help England win the war.
    He’d stayed in
that identity even after Napoleon was exiled to Elba, sure the
emperor would not accept his defeat. The right decision, as it
turned out—but Waterloo had finished Napoleon’s ambitions forever,
and he was now home to claim his own; just this one last job for
Webster to complete.
    Felix had
nothing against smugglers who simply sought to make a living, but
he hated with a passion the type Webster was after; those who had
smuggled French spies onto English soil. And the Black Fox—the
smuggler leader on the patch of coast that belonged to Maddox
Grange—was, by all accounts, the worst of the worst.
    “So what did
you think of her? Nice tits, eh?” Cyril made cupping movements
under his own not inconsiderable dugs.
    Felix resisted
the urge to punch the fool. “She’s very quiet,” he said.
    “Yes, that’s an
advantage, don’t you think,” Cyril agreed. “Who wants a chattering
woman? And she’s a good housekeeper, don’t you know? And used to
living in the country, so you could just leave her at your
estate—you did say you had an estate, Matthews?”
    “Yes, I have an
estate.” After the meeting with Webster, he’d been sitting at his
club considering his options when Cyril Maddox came in with a group
of cronies. That wasn’t so surprising. The Maddoxes had been
members of Brookes since it opened. He hadn’t recognised Cyril; he
hadn’t seen