The Emerald Swan Read Online Free PDF Page B

“I knew I shouldn’t have left my bed this morning, as soon as I saw the beetle.”
    “Beetle?”
    “Mmm.” She nodded. “Big black stag beetle in the milk churn, swimming for its life. They’re bad cess, you know.”
    “I didn’t.” He leaned companionably against the wall at her side. “They’ve left you behind?”
    Miranda nodded again. “I knew they couldn’t let the tide go but I didn’t realize how much time I’d been away chasing after Chip.” Her gaze returned to the water.
    Gareth too looked out over the harbor, saying nothing for a minute, aware of her beside him and aware that he took pleasure in her closeness.
    “What will you do?” he asked eventually.
    “I’ll have to wait for the next packet to Calais,” she said. “But I gave the money I took from this morning’s performance to Bert, so I have nothing. I’ll have to earn my passage, but how am I to do that in this town after the hue and cry?”
    Gareth’s eyes fixed upon the horizon, on the slowly sinking sun. It was not foreboding he had felt earlier, butexcitement, he now realized. The rush of excitement when a completely unexpected solution comes to light.
    He asked casually, “Would you be interested in a proposition?”
    She looked up at him, and her blue eyes were suddenly wary. But he was regarding her calmly, his mouth relaxed, curving in the hint of a smile.
    “A proposition? What kind of a proposition?”
    “Have you had supper?”
    “How could I have?” she retorted a mite sharply. “I told you I have no money.” It had been a long time since she’d broken her fast at dawn. Because of the need of one final performance before catching the afternoon tide, the troupe had gone without their midday dinner, and she was ravenous. But in her present penniless and homeless state, a night with an empty belly seemed inevitable.
    “Then perhaps you’d like to share mine?” He lifted an eyebrow inquiringly.
    “In exchange for what?” Her lips were dry and she touched them with her tongue. Her eyes were anxious, her voice nervous as she awaited his answer.
    Gareth could see that she knew her present situation was nothing short of calamitous. He could see her eagerness to accept his offer, but her wariness told him the most about her. Despite her life on the streets, or perhaps because of it, she was not about to throw herself on a stranger’s mercy. And it seemed she was not willing to use her body as currency in the usual manner of the streets, if that was what he expected in payment for her supper.
    “I have a proposition to make you. I’d like you to listen to it over supper. That’s all.” He smiled with what he hoped she would see as reassurance, then, to allowher to make up her own mind, he turned and began to walk back to the town.
    Miranda hesitated for barely a minute, then she slid off the wall. Common sense told her that food could only improve her situation and instinct that she could trust his lordship. Chip jumped onto her shoulder, and they followed the earl back to the Adam and Eve.

Chapter Three
    “W HERE
IS G ARETH ? He’s been gone for more than four months.” Lady Imogen Dufort paced the long gallery beneath the portraits of Harcourt ancestors. She was a tall angular woman with a disgruntled mouth, the nostrils of her long nose pinched and white.
    “Passage from France is not always easy to arrange.” Her husband offered the platitude although he knew that it would only incense his wife. Twenty-five years of marriage had taught him that Imogen was impossible to placate. It didn’t stop him trying, however. Nervously, he rearranged the few thin strands of gingery hair draped over his white skull.
    “Whoever said it was?” Lady Imogen snapped. “But it’s August, not January, and the seas are quiet enough. And King Henry is outside Paris, not in the wilds of Navarre. Easy enough to reach, I would have thought, for a man with half an ounce of determination.” She reached the end of the