The Swordmaster's Mistress: Dangerous Deceptions Book Two(45)

‘What are you staring at, Faith?’

She had been standing at the window, Guin’s hairbrush in hand, for almost a minute.

‘Oh, I do beg your pardon, my lady. But look.’

Guin drew her dressing robe closed and went to the window. Jared. Of course, it had to be Jared. Not content with turning her sleep into a torrid succession of dreams he was now bending under the yard pump, stripped to the waist – again – while a stable boy laboured away sending the water sluicing over his head.

‘My goodness, now that’s what I call a proper man,’ Faith said. ‘Those muscles – you think he’s not got many, he’s so slim and so quick, but when he’s got his clothes off… I wonder what he’d look like if he took off his – ’

‘Faith!’

‘Sorry, my lady. But he’s a big man, for all that slenderness.’ She didn’t look remotely apologetic, nor did she stop looking. But then neither did Guin as Jared signalled to the boy to cease pumping and stepped away, straightening up and throwing back his head so the streaming wet hair fell down to his shoulders.

‘The green walking dress,’ Guin said decisively, turning back to the bed.

‘Not the mourning black that we put out last night, my lady?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, you are quite right, my lady. I can’t have checked it over properly yesterday,’ Faith said as she picked up the discarded gown. ‘Look, there’s dust on the skirt and the back is quite rumpled. I’m sorry, shall I find the other black walking dress?’

‘I do not think there is any need. Lord Northam would not be the slightest bit offended at the thought of me wearing colours.’

Augustus had expressed decided views on many things and Pretty women decked out like crows being a lot of nonsensical hypocrisy was one of them.

Breakfast was awkward, not because anything was said, not because Jared betrayed by so much as a glance that anything had happened last night, but because he appeared to be completely untouched by it. Guin had armoured herself against smouldering looks, fleeting touches, murmured words and having to deal with none of them left her feeling decidedly unsophisticated and naive. That kind of encounter was obviously nothing special to Mr Hunt.

Guin decided on bright conversation. ‘Have you stayed at the Bell before?’ she asked when they were settled in the carriage once more. ‘You seemed to know your way around very well yesterday.’

Jared turned his head from his silent contemplation of the high wooden palisade surrounding the Norman Cross prisoner of war camp to the right of the road. ‘I was in Stilton some years ago.’ He turned back to the view.

‘Excuse me, my lady, but might I ride up with the driver for a while?’ Faith said abruptly. ‘Only it is such a lovely fresh day and I’m feeling a little queasy.’

‘You are? I’m sorry to hear that, Faith. Pull the check string at once.’ She did not look unwell, but she wasn’t someone who ever complained, so Guin took it seriously.

The coach came to a halt and Faith hopped down before Jared had a chance to open the door for her. ‘Thank you, my lady.’

‘Strange, I do hope she isn’t sickening for anything,’ Guin said as the coach started off again.

‘Only an attack of tact, don’t you think?’ Jared glanced across at her. ‘She thinks I will answer your questions more readily if she isn’t here.’

‘Oh. How… I did not mean to pry, I am sorry.’

‘No matter.’ Jared gave a half-shouldered shrug. ‘The Bell was where I met Monsieur Jacques Favel, my swordmaster. I came across him practicing on that thrashing floor eleven years ago.’

‘You were apprenticed to him?’

‘Nothing as formal as that. I had left home. I had, I think, three shillings left in my pocket and I was sleeping in the hayloft over the road at the Angel when I saw him get down from his carriage with his rapier at his side. I guessed what he was and that evening I went across, my own rapier at my hip, spent some of my precious money on a half pint of ale and watched and listened and, eventually he came down, went across the yard as I did last night and I followed.

‘He heard me come in and let me see that he had. He beckoned me onto the floor, challenged me to draw and had me disarmed and at the point of his sword within a minute. He was being generous, I think.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘He asked me what I was doing. He had eyes like a hawk and a brain to match. It took him no time at all to work out what I was. My clothes were good, if travel-stained, my accent was educated, I’d had the sort of training in fencing that any gentleman’s son receives but there I was, hiding the fact that I was hungry and tired and terrified, in an inn on the Great North Road.

‘He asked me what I was running from and I told him. He asked what I was running to and I had to confess I had no idea. He made me fence again, pushed me until I was angry and then stopped. Told me that he could see something in me, that although I was angry I only became more controlled, more focused. He could do something with that.’ Again, that one-shouldered shrug. ‘And he did.’

‘Will you tell me what you were running from?’ she asked.

‘No. He was the only person I have ever told.’

‘Had you done something wrong?’ Guin persisted.