Miss Weston's Masquerade

They were glaring at each other now. Nicholas slipped the tablets into his pockets and stood up. ‘You will do as you are told while you are under my protection. I have a cultural itinerary planned and I intend to follow it.’ He turned towards the door, dismissing her.

‘Cultural activities like last night, I suppose?’ she jibed. ‘Intellectual conversation with half-naked women? A philosophical study of games of chance? I can imagine what an exhausting time you will have. No wonder you won’t come to Vienna with me, it might stop you enriching yourself culturally.’

Nicholas swivelled slowly to face her, anger etched in his features. ‘You, Cassandra Weston, are a shrew. Sharp-tongued, devoid of feminine graces and intolerant to boot. Well, I capitulate. You have your victory.’

Cassandra swallowed her resentment at his insults. ‘You will accompany me, then?’

‘On the contrary, Miss Weston. You will accompany me. You can see what pleasure there is to be had in travelling on rough roads, sleeping in flea-infested inns and eating disgusting food. And, of course, I shall rely on you to draw my attention to all the cultural sights along the way.’

He was exaggerating the difficulties to frighten her, of course. Cassandra beamed at him. ‘Oh, thank you, Nicholas. I knew you wouldn’t have been so unkind as to have left me. Marseilles and the Mediterranean and Italy. I can hardly wait. Will we cross the Alps?’

‘I sincerely hope not. I despair of you, Cassandra, this is not a treat, this is a punishment. Now, get ready and pack your bags. We will leave after luncheon, before the Count has spread the news of your presence round every gossip in Paris.’

‘Shall I travel as your daughter or your niece?’ Cassandra smoothed her muslin gown. ‘We had better decide for the passports.’

‘Daughter? I’m thirteen years older than you are, brat, not twenty.’ Nicholas grinned wickedly, showing a gleam of white teeth. ‘Think again, Cassandra. I have no intention of dragging a lady’s maid across Europe to lend you countenance. I brought you here as my valet, and my valet you will remai

n.’

‘I will say this for you, Cassie, you don’t sulk.’ Nicholas leaned back against the brocade squabs of his uncle’s travelling carriage and eyed her with more favour than he had for several days.

They had been handed back their documents duly stamped at the Porte d’Italie and Cassandra was folding them carefully back into the leather satchel on the seat beside her.

‘There’s never been much point in sulking,’ she observed, with a last regretful look out of the window as Paris receded behind them. ‘When you spend all your time alone, nobody notices.’

‘Poor brat. What a very dull life you must have led. No wonder you wanted an adventure.’ Nicholas closed his eyes and settled his shoulders more comfortably. ‘Wake me up if anything interesting happens.’

Cassandra sighed and gazed out of the window. It was as if the three days in Paris hadn’t happened. Perhaps she’d dreamt it. Her fingers came up involuntarily to brush her lips. No, that embrace had been no dream. She shivered with mixed pleasure and apprehension. It was foolish to dwell so on her first kiss. It hadn’t meant a thing to Nicholas, that was plain. And now she must settle back into the master-servant relationship when they were among people. When they were alone she must be even more careful because if she continued to provoke and tease him, he would soon realise she wasn’t the child she pretended.

Or did he realise, anyway? The Earl of Lydford was no fool. Perhaps he was pretending to believe her for her own sake. If the truth came out into the open, he would have no choice but to send her off to his mother and hope she wasn’t ruined irretrievably.

On the other hand, his taste in women seemed to run to the older, elegant, experienced and, no doubt married, ladies like Lady Broome. He wouldn’t notice well-scrubbed, innocent country girls. The carriage lurched on the rutted surface of the dry road and Cassandra grabbed a hanging strap to steady herself, wishing she’d brought a book with her. An Italian one would have served to polish up the reading she’d already done in her father’s library.

Nicholas dozed on, seemingly unaffected by the jolting. Cassandra sighed. This was about as exciting as driving to Ware market on a Wednesday. Perhaps foreign travel wasn’t as stimulating as all the books said.

After four long, dusty, uncomfortable days on the road, Nicholas could tell that Cassie was rueing ever challenging him to take her with him. The roads east would have been no better, it was true, but at least she would have been treated as a young lady, with all the status of travelling as the ward of the Earl of Lydford.

Instead, at the end of the interminable roads, mercifully shaded with the poplars Napoleon had had planted to shelter his marching troops, all she could look forward to was a hard truckle bed behind a screen in the corner of Nicholas’s chamber.

The inn at Briare had been acceptable, but the food at Nevers had been every bit as bad as he had been bracing himself for, swimming with grease and heavy with garlic.

As the coach swung out of Maçon, bouncing over the cobbles behind a fresh team, he caught her eye. ‘Comfortable?’

‘Perfectly, thank you.’ Cassie, it seemed, had vowed not to complain, to give him no excuse to say I told you so. Instead, she smiled back, even as her fingers twitched over the additional flea bites she had acquired the night before in the inn, and turned to distract herself with catching glimpses of the river traffic on the Saône.

She had courage, the infuriating brat. Fleas, garlic, dreadful roads – none of them wrung a word of complaint out of her. And she had never mentioned that kiss. I must have been mad. Nicholas resisted the urge to bury his head in his hands and yank out tufts of hair in an attempt to blank the memory of that innocent mouth under his, that surprisingly womanly body under his hands. He should be ashamed of himself. He was ashamed. True, in law, Cassie was old enough to marry, but that didn’t make it right.

He opened the post road map he had bought in Paris and distracted himself by studying it. ‘Not much more of this,’ he remarked. ‘We should reach Lyons this afternoon.’

‘It isn’t so bad, not the actual travelling, anyway. At least your uncle’s carriage is well-sprung and clean, unlike those filthy hired coaches. Or the diligences,’ she added, as they swung out to overtake one of the public coaches lumbering along at four miles an hour with its creaking wicker sides and piles of luggage.

‘Well, you might be all right, but I’m as stiff as a post.’ He stretched his long legs as far as he could, then put his hands behind his neck to rub the sore muscles. ‘I need some exercise and a change of scene from these squalid hovels and dusty verges.’

‘I have to admit the scenery has been disappointing, although the river’s interesting.’ Cassie knelt up on the seat to look out over the wide river, glittering grey in the sunlight. ‘Everyone seems so poor,’ she added, her eyes following a group of ragged children waiting to besiege the diligence with outstretched palms.

‘The aftermath of the war. Napoleon stripped the country of its men and its resources. The women are handsome, though,’ he mused, admiring a slender young woman, her skirts kirtled up to show strong, tanned legs. She caught his eye as the coach slowed to negotiate the herd of pigs she was driving, and smiled, exposing a few blackened teeth. ‘Perhaps not,’ he added quickly, withdrawing back into the coach.

‘None of them seem to have many teeth left,’ Cassandra observed. ‘The guidebook says it’s caused by the frequent fogs, but I can’t see how, can you?’