The Wild Princess Page 5

  And she was right about one thing.

  Whether or not the governess and young princess saw the note was of little importance. It must have arrived at the same time as the rats. And now that he knew that neither the little princess nor the woman with her had seen anyone in the room, he also knew that both rodents and letter must have been delivered while they were away from the room. Because he was certain that the rats’ appearance was not by way of their wandering randomly through vents in the walls. They were meant to cause hysteria, to strike fear in royal breasts. And where better to accomplish that than in the intimacy of the youngest family member’s privy chamber?

  “I’m sorry,” Byrne said. “I’ll go immediately and inform the queen of the situation.”

  He was halfway down the hallway when he heard light steps running after him.

  “Wait! Wait there. Don’t you go a step farther, sir.”

  He slowed down, smiling at Louise’s challenge even before he turned to face her. But he kept walking backward, wanting to get to Victoria before Brown finished with his rat extermination.

  “Yes, Your Royal Highness?”

  Louise marched toward him, looking a force to be reckoned with. Shoulders back, head high, eyes aflame—absolutely breathtaking. “Who are you, sir, and what exactly are you doing in the family quarters?”

  He laughed, amused. She was challenging him? He stopped his backward march and planted his feet, forcing her to come to an abrupt halt in front of him.

  “My name is Stephen Byrne. I’m here under the authority of Her Royal Majesty’s Secret Service, on a mission of dire importance. And you are delaying me, Princess.” He gave her a stony look . . . which seemed to have no effect whatsoever.

  “And exactly what mission is that, sir?” Her eyes dropped from his face, down the length of his outfit.

  At first he thought her gaze critical of his choice of clothing. Many people in London were. But his garments satisfied more practical requirements than the fashion of the day. The leather duster and vest were a kind of armor, offering far more protection from a knife attack or even a fall from a horse than any cloth topcoat. Plus it hid the Colt strapped to his hip. And he favored for durability the sturdy dark blue canvas material and riveted seams of his pants over anything available in England.

  Too late, he realized his garments weren’t what interested her. He followed her gaze to the paper corner peeking from his pocket. Before he could stop her, Louise had reached out and plucked the note away.

  “Is this it? Is this the letter you were asking my sister about?”

  “Give that to me.”

  Louise lifted a brow at his tone, ignored his outstretched hand, and muttered something about manners and Americans.

  She uncrumpled the scrap of paper. Her eyes flicked over the words before he snapped it out from her fingertips.

  The lovely heat in her cheeks drained away to white ash. She looked away from him and anchored her bottom lip between her teeth, as though trying to process what she’d just read.

  “Now that you’ve seen,” he said, “you’ll know why I need to speak with your mother. Immediately.”

  “Yes, yes of course.” A hand fluttered to her throat. She wavered on her feet.

  Instinctively, he clasped his hand around her arm to steady her. Within the delicate goldenrod fabric, she felt fragile to his touch. He released his grip almost at once for fear of bruising her.

  “Are you all right, Princess?”

  “Yes. I think so.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as if to rally herself.

  When she opened them again, their gazes connected. He thought he saw a brilliant little spark behind her eyes. But in the next second it was snuffed out. She hastily looked away from him.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You must think me terribly rude. I didn’t mean to shout at you or accuse. It’s just that this is all so disturbing. Rats and threats and”—she hesitated—“and everything.”

  “Of course, Your Highness.”

  “Do you know your way from here to my mother’s office? No, of course you don’t. It’s a rat’s maze. Oh dear, that was an unfortunate choice. Here then, follow me, Mr. Byrne.”

  Five

  Brash. Coarse. Unnervingly powerful.

  What a horrid, ill-mannered man, Louise thought as she raced through Buckingham’s maze of corridors with her mother’s agent close behind her. But recalling that vile note set her thoughts spinning off in a different direction.

  How often, she wondered, do we fail to recognize a critical moment in our lives while it’s actually happening?

  This, she couldn’t help believing, was one of those special moments. And not just because of a few silly rats. She had the oddest sense that time itself was waiting for her to open her eyes and take notice of the importance of this particular day, this singular moment, because nothing—nothing—ever would be the same for her. Maybe not for any of them.

  Her skin prickled with apprehension as she lengthened her stride, aware of Byrne close behind her—keeping up easily. He moved more like a predator, an animal, than a man. Silent, serious, instinctively tuned into his surroundings. Her nerves tingled with an uneasy awareness of his presence. And then, at last, they were at their destination.

  From inside her mother’s private office, the same the queen had shared with her beloved Prince Albert when he was alive, Louise could hear familiar male voices. On no other day, under no less urgent circumstances, would she have dared interrupt a meeting between Victoria and her prime minister. But no one stood at the ready to stop them or give permission, and circumstances dictated action not protocol.

  She rapped twice on the heavy oak door. Stephen Byrne didn’t even wait for a response. He pushed past her, shoved wide the door, and she followed his bold entrance into the room to face the five astonished faces of PM Gladstone, Gladstone’s secretary, Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, her mother’s secretary, and the queen herself.

  “Mama”—Louise belatedly thought to curtsy—“I apologize for the intrusion, but this gentleman has urgent business with you.”

  Victoria turned cold eyes from her daughter to Byrne. “I instructed your superiors to allow you to report directly to me, to insure this new so-called Secret Service does not keep vital information from me. I also realize how impulsive Americans tend to be.” Her eyes narrowed and targeted him, as if he were a grouse she was about to dispatch. “But your report certainly can wait ten minutes, Mr. Byrne.”

  Louise shook her head when Byrne let out a little grunt of frustration and seemed about to take a step back. “No. You must give that to her now!”

  She waved her hand at the scrap of paper dangling from his fingertips. A sudden image leaped into her head of one of the no-doubt-by-now-dead rats hanging limply by its tail from Brown’s big fist. The difference being, this little piece of paper was far more dangerous than any rodent.

  “Mama, this can’t wait. Please.”

  Victoria scowled at her disapprovingly. “If this message is so very important, perhaps Mr. Gladstone should also know of its contents?”

  Byrne cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I don’t think it’s a good—”

  The queen silenced him with a look of bleak displeasure. “Mr. Rhodes,” she said, turning to the PM’s secretary, “please do the honor of reading to all present this message that is so critical it stops our government from working.”

  The gaunt-featured man stepped forward, head bowed meekly. He smoothed his thin mustache with two fingers then gingerly plucked the square of paper from Byrne’s hand. He cleared his throat as he silently scanned the words that would remain forever implanted in Louise’s mind.

  The man’s eyes widened in shock. “Oh dear,” he whispered.

  “Mr. Rhodes,” Gladstone’s stentorious voice rumbled in warning. He nodded his head, enveloped in a cloud of white hair, toward the paper. “Proceed, sir.”

  Rhodes ran a finger under his collar. “Beg pardon, but I’d rather not. Not, that is, in f
ront of the ladies.”

  “Read, Rhodes!”

  The secretary’s eyes snapped obediently back to the note. He moistened his lips, swallowed audibly, then let the words tumble out all in one breath. “ ‘Where three got in on four legs another might on two. Does it take a dead princess to win freedom for our Irish brothers?’ ”

  The room fell silent.

  Louise looked at her mother, sitting absolutely still behind her desk in her widow’s black bombazine and crape, her plump fingers wearing only funereal jet rings, hands pressed flat against a gold-embossed blotter. But Victoria’s moon face did not lose its color as Louise had imagined it would. Rather, it blossomed into hot rage.

  “Where did this foolish riddle come from? What does this mean, Mr. Byrne?”

  “It means, ma’am, that we’ve just come from Princess Beatrice’s bedchamber, where she and her governess confronted three very large and hungry rats.”

  “In the palace? Impossible.”

  “No, ma’am, they were most definitely rats.”

  Louise shot a glance at Byrne’s dark eyes and felt an unexpected emotional tug she couldn’t define. Although his gaze revealed nothing, and despite the seriousness of the threat to her sister, she had a feeling he was holding back a smile. She would have kicked him in the shin good and hard for seeing any humor in this most grave situation, if he’d been within reach. Shouldn’t they be discovering how this intruder had got in? Where he, or they, might be even now? And what if there was another visitation with far more dire consequences than a warning?

  “It was terrifying, truly,” Louise said. “Bea is in such a state, and Miss Witherstone near apoplexy. Brown remains back there even now”—she shuddered at the thought—“eradicating the beasts.”

  Victoria drew a deep breath, filling her ponderous bosom and letting it deflate again. “I see. Are we to assume this is the work of those Fenian madmen who have been setting off bombs in our city on behalf of the Irish rebels?” She looked pointedly at Byrne but didn’t wait for an answer. “Have you alerted our guardsmen?”

  Gladstone had taken the note from his secretary. After reading it for himself he passed it to Disraeli, who barely let his eyes drift with disdain over its surface before hastily placing it on the corner of the queen’s desk.

  “Brown will handle that, ma’am. Anyone leaving the palace will be stopped and questioned. It’s my suggestion that the wedding party, and all accompanying them, move to the carriages at once. Vacating the palace will allow Brown’s men to search for any other surprises from the Fenians or whoever may be to blame.”

  Gladstone coughed into his lavender gloved hand. “My apologies, Your Majesty, for this unpleasantness. The Irish problem is a tangled one, but it is unconscionable that your family be exposed to—”

  “Nevertheless, we are exposed, as you put it,” Victoria cut him off. “We will continue our discussion, Mr. Prime Minister, on our return from Balmoral, whenever my men tell me it’s safe. Louise, inform any of our Ladies of the Court who aren’t already in their carriages to move to them with the utmost haste.”

  “Yes, Mama.” She turned to leave and was halfway to the door, only vaguely aware of Gladstone and Disraeli bidding her mother a safe journey, when Byrne’s deep voice made her prick up her ears.

  “If I may have a word with you in private, ma’am?”

  “Of course,” the queen said.

  Louise kept on walking, intent on her mission. But she couldn’t help wondering what it was Byrne felt compelled to say that he didn’t want anyone but Victoria to hear.

  Brown didn’t like him; that much was obvious. She had heard the Scot call the American “Raven” in a clearly mocking tone. Normally Brown’s craggy, bearded face screened his emotions. Anyone he didn’t like was simply denied access to her mother. He had that much power these days. Victoria took his advice on almost everything, much to the annoyance of her sons and ministers, both of whom viewed the Scot as opportunistic and crude.

  Yet the queen seemed to trust this foreigner despite Brown’s disapproval.

  How odd.

  Nearly as odd as her reaction had been to Stephen Byrne back at the nursery. Ordering him about as if she were the queen or her older sister Vicky, who sometimes behaved even more pompously with the royal staff than their mother. Why had she become so defensive when she was around the man? She, who enjoyed the relaxed friendship of commoners from all stations in life. She who prided herself on treating everyone with equal cordiality.

  It seemed that the roguish American brought out the worst in her. Or, at least, brought out something she wasn’t sure she could control.

  Six

  Rupert Clark scooped black powder into a paper cylinder. He pinched then twisted the end tight between calloused fingers. Every now and then he stopped what he was doing to check on the work of the younger man beside him. Details were what mattered in this game. Details made you famous, or blew off your hand. Or worse.

  Rupert had joined up with Major General Richard Taylor in the 28th Louisiana Infantry back in ’63. He had learned from his sergeant the technique of rigging an artillery shell with a primer sensitive enough to detonate the shell if a man or horse stepped on a pressure plate. Rupert quickly discovered he had talent for the work.

  Soon he was designing his own, even more sophisticated, explosive devices. General Robert E. Lee heard about his successes and ordered Rupert transferred to the general’s own Army of Northern Virginia, not long after the Confederate victory at Fredericksburg. Will McMahon came on board at Chancellorsville, and he’d taught the boy enough to make of him a good assistant, even if he was a little slow and, sometimes, too impatient for such sensitive work.

  After that they’d marched together, mining roads and blowing up bridges for the South wherever they were most needed.

  Rupert gloried in constructing more and more sophisticated mines and bombs, and he felt proud of his successes. He’d only made one mistake; it had cost him three fingers from his right hand. But he could kill more Yanks in one short minute than any man he knew. And without wasting a single bullet or jeopardizing his comrades’ lives. Never had he felt so empowered, so important as during those grand and glorious campaigns.

  As it turned out, it was all for naught.

  Rupert had believed in their cause, breaking away from the tyranny of the North, saving his family’s land and their way of life for the children he would someday have with his sweet Annemarie. Now there was nothing left back home. Nothing worth returning to anyway. His parents were dead—of natural causes, or so he’d been told. His brother had taken off for somewhere out west. Annemarie perished in the blaze that burned down their house by the ferry landing in Irish Bend, Louisiana.

  Had his wife stayed to try to protect their home? Had those damn Yanks sullied her before setting the house afire? The bitterness of not knowing burned in his gut like a white-hot sulfur flame. Tortured him. Devoured him.

  “We might could head on up to West Virginia, work in the mines,” he told Will.

  “Guess we could.”

  But blasting out shafts was dirty and particularly dangerous work. Blowing a path through granite and shale mountains for the railways out west was more to his liking.

  “Okay by me,” an always agreeable Will said.

  “Trouble is, those damn Chinese work cheap and know their way around dynamite.” In the end, they gave up on that too. Mines or railways—there was nothing else for a man with such a singular talent when there wasn’t a war going on. “Maybe we should just work our way up north. Might be jobs, one sort or another in Chicago.”

  He and Will had left the sickening devastation of their homeland. But they found nothing other than the stinking-of-death, bloody stockyards for work. Nothing, that is, until they stumbled on an Irish-American rally to raise money for militants bent on winning freedom for Ireland. If one brave endeavor couldn’t be won, Rupert reasoned, perhaps another might be. His missing fingers itched at the thought of being
back in the fight.

  He and Will dropped a few words here and there in Chicago about their experiences in the military, taking care not to mention on which side they’d served.

  Two days later a Fenian recruiter scouted them out in McGinty’s on the South Side. The three moved to a dark booth at the back of the bar.

  “Our army o’ freedom fighters,” the man with muttonchop whiskers and a musical Irish lilt to his words explained, “is half Irish boys and half Americans and Canadians who sympathize with our struggle. All brave lads, I’ll tell you. But what we most need these days, boys, are dynamiteers. I hear you know a bit about the subject?”

  “We do,” Rupert said, feeling the old excitement rise through his veins like a thread of mercury in the thermometer. He gave the recruiter an accounting of his and Will’s successes, each mission bringing with it a surge of remembered pride.

  This was what he missed as sorely as a man who’d lost a limb to battle—this feeling of wholeness, of comradeship, of being respected for his trade and expertise.

  “Good black-powder men are hard to find. Joining our war against England is your chance to do some good,” the recruiter said after ordering up fresh pints of Guinness, molasses dark and fragrant with hops. “Dust off the feeling o’ shame at your loss, boys. Turn your gifts into victory. Can you not see how grand it will be?” The man raised his glass to them.

  Rupert could see it. Most assuredly, he could. The aching sting of his own losses—land and wife—seemed less painful when he considered returning to his old art after months of doing nothing but working in the yards under bosses who snickered at his “Loo-si-ana” accent.

  Of course they’d accepted. How could they not?

  Now, all the way on the other side of the ocean, on a deserted road north of London, Rupert brushed his red hair out of his eyes and waved Will over beside him. The two of them squatted down and wired their primers and fuses, just so. They didn’t need to speak. They knew what they were about, having done it hundreds of times before.