He had been witty and interesting and charming. He had argued antiquities with Amy as though she were an equal, and not just a young girl who had never been out of the country and knew only what she had stumbled across in her uncle’s library. Good heavens, he had even told her, in the most sincere of tones, that he was honored to know her. In short, he had committed the crime of acting as though he liked her and the even greater crime of charming her into liking him. And then to reveal that he had defected to the French . . .

Suddenly, the man seated across from her took on all sorts of sinister attributes. The smile that a half an hour ago had seemed genial was now mocking. The gleam in his green eyes that had been good-natured became sinister. Even the dark hues of his clothing went from elegant to dangerous, the sleek pelt of a panther on the prowl. He was probably quite practiced at gulling the unwary into liking and trusting him. Good heavens, for all she knew he might be a French spy! Why else would he have been back in England? The logical part of her brain, the bit that always sounded like Jane, reminded her that he might very well have family back in England he wished to visit. Amy silenced it.

Across the table, Richard raised an eyebrow at her in silent inquiry. The gesture made Amy want to whack him over the head with The Proceedings of the Royal Egyptological Society.

Amy struggled for words to voice her revulsion. “Scholarship is all very well and good, but after what the French did—while your own country was at war with them! To join the French army!”

“I wasn’t in the French army,” Richard corrected. “I merely traveled with them.”

Amy rediscovered her voice and her vocabulary. “Egypt was a military action first and a scholarly expedition second! You can’t claim not to have known—I’m sure even the savages in the wilds of America knew!”

“Priorities, my dear, priorities.” Richard realized that he was being provoking, but something about the way Amy was looking at him, as though she had just discovered nine dismembered wives in a cupboard in his bedchamber, brought out the worst in him. The fact that he agreed with everything she was saying annoyed him even more. He brushed an imaginary speck of lint off his sleeve. “I chose to concentrate on the second.”

“You chose to ignore the thousands of innocent people slaughtered on the guillotine. You chose to range yourself with a murderous rabble against your own country!” Amy retorted.

How many people had he saved from the guillotine since he had first joined Percy and the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel? Fifty? A hundred? One lost count after the first few dozen. Richard was trying to remain calm and urbane, but irritation rose through him like heat radiating from the Egyptian sands.

“What,” he asked languidly, “has the guillotine to do with my researches?”

It was quite a credible imitation of a vapid London fop, and Amy reacted just as expected. She sputtered.

Rationally, Richard knew that in her position he, too, would have sputtered, appalled by such selfish callousness. Rationally, he knew that he was behaving in an absolutely appalling fashion. Rationally. Of course, Richard was feeling quite irrationally irate just now and thus enjoying her distress accordingly. The five-year-old in him was of the firm opinion that it served her right. Just what it served her right for, he wasn’t quite sure, but why fret about details?

“That army was led by the same people who cold-bloodedly slaughtered thousands of their compatriots! The ground of the Place da la Guillotine was still red with the blood of the murdered when you went to Egypt. By your very presence, you condoned their villainy!” Amy’s voice rose and cracked with the intensity of her emotions.

“I quite agree, dear girl. What the French did was reprehensible. Did. Past tense. You’re a bit behind the times. They stopped killing off their aristocrats several years ago now.”

“You might as well say that just because a cannibal eats vegetables for a few years, he’s no longer a cannibal,” choked Amy. “The fact still remains that he once feasted on human flesh and he can’t be allowed to get away with it!”

The sheer oddity of the analogy left Richard speechless for a moment. He devoted his energy to fighting off a horrible image of Bonaparte, in the gilded dining room of the Tuilleries, polishing off a human leg, while his elegant wife Josephine munched on an arm. Richard winced. “Let’s keep cannibals out of this, shall we? I assure you, the French may eat horse but they haven’t descended to human.”

“I don’t want to discuss the eating habits of the French!”

“You brought them up.”

“I did no such—oh, for heaven’s sake, it was a metaphor!”

“So, metaphorically speaking, by going to Egypt I metaphorically feasted with the metaphorical cannibals.”

“Yes!”

“You are on a packet bound for Calais.”

Amy blinked. “If you so desperately want to change the subject, you could find a more subtle way of doing it, you know.”

“I’m not trying to change the subject. I’m simply pointing out that you, O scourge of metaphorical cannibals, are on a boat bound for France.”

Amy squirmed slightly in her chair, silent with frustrated anger. She had an uncomfortable inkling of where he was going with that statement.

“I say now, what was that comment you made about guilt by association?” Richard continued loftily. “Something about condoning their evil with my presence, wasn’t it? That’s all very well and good, but isn’t there an old saw about people in glass houses not lobbing stones at their neighbors?

“And that dress you’re wearing.” Amy’s hands flew automatically to her bodice. “Isn’t that in the French style? The revolutionary style? If associating with the revolutionaries is a hanging crime, what about aping their fashions? Speak to me again of condoning.”

Amy stood so suddenly her chair toppled over behind her. “It’s not at all equivalent! It’s been five years—”

“But a cannibal is still a cannibal, isn’t he, Miss Balcourt?”

“—and England is no longer at war with France . . . and . . .”

Amy couldn’t think of any more logical arguments, but she knew, just knew that she was right and he was absolutely, positively wrong. Blast him and blast his nasty, underhanded, sophistic debating techniques! This had gone on far too long. She should have gotten up and left the minute he’d told her he had accompanied the French, not stayed to argue like an idealistic fool.

“And?” Richard looked up from toying idly with the lace on his cuffs.

Amy fought back tears of pure rage. Oh, to be a man, to be able to just punch someone when she didn’t know what to say! “And how dare you judge me when you know nothing of my reasons! Nothing!”

Sweeping her skirts away as though from something infected, she resumed her post by the porthole, her back to Lord Richard.

Left alone in splendid solitude at the little table, Richard realized he finally had the quiet he had craved. After all, hadn’t he just wanted to be left in peace to work? Lighting one of the covered lamps, Richard moved to a berth at the far end of the room and took out the latest dispatches from the War Office. He went so far as to prop a page against his knee and stare at the words on the paper. But all he saw was a pair of angry blue eyes.

Chapter Five

“What right does she have”—whap—“to judge me? She has no idea what she’s talking about.” Whap! Richard pounded the nearly flat pillow under his head into a more hospitable shape. “And why should it bloody well bother me?” Whap! “It shouldn’t bother me. I’m not bothered.” Richard punched the pillow again. He had no illusions that his pounding would render the pillow comfortable, but punching something made him feel better, and he couldn’t very well punch Amy.

After his altercation with Amy, Richard had kept punctiliously to his side of the cabin. There might as well have been a line drawn across the scarred wooden floor. When true dark fell, replacing the rainy gray gloom, Miss Gwen had insisted on raising a literal barrier down the center of the room. “I will not have you share a bedchamber with a person of the opposite sex,” she had declared to the two girls, and gone off to badger the captain for spare sailcloth. The captain had refused to be badgered. Not to be thwarted, Miss Gwen had commandeered Richard’s cloak. Strung up along the center of the room with Miss Gwen’s, Amy’s, and Jane’s cloaks, it made a rather uneven but passable partition.

Unfortunately, it did nothing to keep out the image of Amy’s furious face.

Richard pummeled his pillow again. So the girl had condemned him for hobnobbing with the French. He had thought he was used to that by now. Old Falconstone wasn’t the only one to have taken umbrage at Richard’s activities. Over the past few years, Richard had run the gamut of disapproval, from snide remarks hissed behind his back to outright lectures delivered to his face. Considering the tongue-lashing he had received from the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale in the middle of the Alsworthys’ ballroom, Amy’s protest was mild indeed.

But he hadn’t spent the night awake, abusing his pillow, after being reproved by the Dowager Duchess.

“You are a prize idiot,” he mumbled to himself. He should be delighted to have rid himself of the tedious company of a simpering young female. Usually, he had to employ every ounce of his ingenuity to be rid of them. But to be fair, Amy’s company hadn’t been tedious and she hadn’t simpered. She had bounced, giggled, and occasionally squealed, but she hadn’t simpered. And she had read Herodotus in the original. He wondered if she had stumbled across the plays of Sophocles and what she thought of . . . Richard nipped that line of inquiry in the bud. No matter how many classics the girl had perused, young ladies were a liability that an intrepid spy could not afford. Richard had learned that lesson well five years ago.