A Regency Captain's Prize: The Captain's Forbidden Miss / His Mask of Retribution

His very stillness alerted her to her mistake. ‘I…’ She swallowed, and glanced away, searching her mind frantically for a safe answer and finding none. She backed away. ‘You were right; we should be returning to camp. It will soon be dark and the trees—’

His hand snaked out and caught gently around her wrist, preventing her escape. ‘No, no, mademoiselle,’ he said softly, ‘our discussion, it begins to grow most interesting.’ The angles of his face seemed to sharpen and his eyes darken, as he became the hunter once more.

‘Captain Dammartin—’

‘Every detail of every day,’ he said slowly, repeating her words. ‘Where might you learn that, I wonder?’

She tried to free her wrist, but Dammartin’s hold was unbreakable. The thudding of her heart was so loud that she could no longer hear the river. Her breath was shallow and fast.

Foolish, foolish tongue, she cursed, to almost reveal what had remained hidden for so long. Her words had been too few, she told herself; he could not know, he could not. The journals would be safe.

Dammartin slowly pulled her closer, so that they were standing toe to toe within the twilight. ‘From your British newspapers of the time?’ His face tilted so that he was staring down at her.

‘I meant nothing by my words. You are mistaken…’ She tried to step away, but Dammartin secured her other wrist, locking her in place.

His head lowered towards hers so close that she could feel his breath, warm and soft against her face, and see the passion and determination within the darkness of his eyes. ‘From your father’s friends?’ he asked.

She felt the jolt that jumped between them as his mouth brushed against her cheek, light and transient.

‘Or perhaps from your father’s journals?’ he whispered softly into her ear.

The breath froze in Josie’s throat. The blood in her veins turned to ice. She could not suppress the shiver. ‘This is madness,’ she breathed at last. ‘My father kept no journal. Take me back to the camp at once.’ She pulled her face back from his, staring up at him.

‘Where are they, mademoiselle?’ Darkness had crept to cover the sky, but she could still see him through the dim silver moonlight.

‘You are quite, quite mistaken, sir.’

‘We can stay here all night and play this game. Or perhaps you prefer to tell me now where the journals are kept, so that we may eat something of our rice and beans.’

There was silence in which neither moved nor spoke.

‘At home, in England,’ she said at last, knowing that it was not the journals’ existence that was the secret to be protected, but their location. She thought of the irony of the journals’ true hiding place. ‘I will read them when I return to Winchester and then I will know exactly what happened between your father and mine in Oporto.’ She stared at him defiantly, knowing that she could not allow one shred of fear to show. ‘And I will warrant that it is not the lie that you French have told.’

He looked at her with his dark, penetrating stare, and it seemed to Josie that he could see into her very soul.

For too long their gazes held, as if locked in some kind of strange battle of wills, and if battle it was, then Dammartin was the loser, for it was he who looked away first.

‘Let us return to the camp, mademoiselle,’ he said, and, taking her hand in his, he began to lead her back towards the woodland.

She let her fingers lie where they were, warm and comfortable within his own, despite knowing that she should be fighting his touch. But the night was dark and their route through the woodland steep and uneven, and her sense of relief and of triumph was greater than anything else.

Hand in hand, without a further word between them, Josie and Dammartin walked through the trees that would lead them back to the camp of the 8th Dragoons.

The campaign portmanteau which contained all of Josie’s worldly possessions sat opposite her makeshift bed within Dammartin’s tent. It was made of brown leather, battered and scratched from its many miles of travel following her father.

Josie unbuttoned the top of her dress and let the woollen material fall back to expose the chain that hung around her neck. Its golden links glinted within the soft light of the lantern. Her hand disappeared down her dress. From just above her breasts she retrieved what had been threaded to hang upon the chain: a small brass key. Kneeling down upon the groundsheet, she leaned forward towards the portmanteau, neatly turned the key in first one lock and then the other. The fastenings opened easily beneath her fingers. She opened the lid and rested it carefully back.

Inside were piles of neatly folded clothes. They were, in the main, garments that had been purchased with the practicalities of life on campaign in winter in mind. There were two woollen travelling dresses, a sensible pelisse, scarves, a shawl, gloves, a pair of sensible shoes that could be worn instead of her boots, and of course, a large pile of plain white warm underwear, the warmest that she had had. There were stockings and two nightdresses and ribbons and hairpins. Near the top there was a tiny silver and ivory set that included a comb and brush and hand-held looking glass. But Josie was interested in none of these things.

She moved with deliberate care, removing the items one by one, laying them in tidy bundles across the groundsheet, until at last the portmanteau was empty, or so it seemed. Then she pressed at the rear left-hand corner of the portmanteau and smoothly lifted away the false floor. Beneath it, spread in neat piles over the entirety of the base of the portmanteau, as if a single uniform layer, were notebooks.

Each book was backed in a soft paper cover of a deep pinky-red coloration; some were faded, others stained. Josie picked one from the closest corner and opened it. The white of the pages was scarcely visible beneath the pale grey pencil script that covered it. She checked the date at the top right-hand side of the page—21st June 1807—closed the book, set it back in its place in the pile, moved on to the next, until she found the book that contained the date for which she was searching.

The false floor was slotted back into position. The bundles of clothes were returned in neat order to the portmanteau, as was every other item that had been removed. The lid was carefully closed, the key turned within the locks and the straps rebuckled. Only then did Josie make herself comfortable upon the wooden chair and sit down at Captain Dammartin’s little table to lay the notebook upon its surface. She adjusted the direction of the light within the lantern and, taking a deep breath, began to read her father’s journal for the Battle of Oporto.

Josie could barely concentrate on Molyneux’s chatter the next day, for thinking of the words that her father had written. Dammartin had been correct in saying that his father had been captured by hers. It was true, too, that the French major had been paroled, but that is where any similarity between the two stories ended. Lieutenant Colonel Mallington’s telling of the two men’s meeting could not have contrasted more sharply with Dammartin’s.

Her papa had written of respect and admiration between two men who happened to be fighting on opposite sides of a war. Those faded grey words conveyed an underlying sense of something bordering on friendship.

Why should there be such a discrepancy between the two accounts? It made no sense. The more she thought about it, the more she became convinced that there was something very strange about such a blatant contradiction. And she longed to question Dammartin more on his story.

Who was the man who claimed to have witnessed the murder? Someone honourable, who was beyond reproach, Dammartin had said.

She glanced ahead to where the French Captain rode, her eyes skimming his broad shoulders, and the sway of the long, black mane of horsehair that hung from his helmet. She wanted to show him the journal entry, to prove to him that he was wrong, to show him that her father was indeed an innocent man, but she could not.

Trust was a fickle thing, and Dammartin was still the enemy. Even had she torn that single page from its binding so that he might have read only that and nothing else, then he would have known that the journals were in her possession and she knew that Dammartin would not stop until he had them from her.