It dawned on her then, where he was going with this. “They intended to kidnap my mother?”

“Or you, Arthur, Leo, or Beatrice. I don’t suppose it will matter so much who they snatch, as the purpose is likely to have in their possession any royal they can ransom in exchange for Irish separation.”

Louise narrowed her eyes at him. How dare he speak of her family with such familiarity? Yet he seemed unaware of having breached court etiquette. She gave a sniff. “You don’t know my mother. She would never agree to blackmail. She’d stand the firmer in her resolve to retain her hold on the Irish.”

“You actually believe she’d sacrifice the life of one of her children for the good of the Empire?”

“I believe,” Louise said, unable to block past ugliness from her mind, “my mother would do anything in her power to get her own way. I sometimes think she imagines her personal desires as identical to ‘the good of the Empire.’ ” She swiveled on her heel and started walking again, this time back toward the castle. Suddenly, the bracing morning air and solitude of the wild hills held less appeal. Who knew what or who might lurk in these woods? Maybe the American was right to urge caution.

Byrne fell into step beside her again.

They hiked the path side by side for several minutes in silence. She was about to tell him he needn’t accompany her all the way back to the garden gate when it occurred to her that maybe she did want him here. If the Fenians had become so bold as to plan an attack in broad daylight on the queen’s caravan, why should they not lurk outside the walls of one of the family estates to pick off an unsuspecting prince or princess?

“Where are you from, Mr. Byrne?” she asked, not so much curious as disliking his silence and wary of what he might be thinking. She hoped to God it had nothing to do with what she’d looked like with her dress bodice torn half off her.

“Texas. San Angelo, a little cattle town in the western part of the state.”

“Therefore your intriguing garb?” She raised an eyebrow.

He smiled and touched the brim of his hat. “It’s practical, ma’am.”

They walked on, and she thought about him and all she didn’t know about the man. “You don’t sound like an uneducated man, Mr. Byrne.”

“They do have schools in Texas.”

She ignored his making fun of her. “Is that where you studied?”

“No. My mother was from out east. I attended college back where she grew up, in Connecticut. I’d be in New Haven or thereabouts still if it hadn’t been for the war.”

“America’s War between the States?”

“Yes.”

“You fought for the North?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

She waited for him to say more. When he didn’t she couldn’t help prodding. “I assume that means you weren’t a traditional soldier?”

“I was under assignment directly to Mr. Lincoln.” The shadow of a smile disappeared from his lips. His chipped-granite expression warned her to tread carefully. Something about the conversation had rubbed him the wrong way.

“Your president’s assassination was most terrible,” she said. “My mother was so shocked and troubled by it, she wrote a long letter of condolence to Mrs. Lincoln . . . then doubled the guardsmen kept at the royal residence.”

“Booth was a coward and a snake,” Byrne said. “To shoot a man, any unarmed man, from the back and without a single word of warning, with his wife sitting right there beside—”

Louise jerked to a stop and turned to stare at her mother’s agent, aghast. “You make it sound as if you were there that night.”

For a long while he didn’t answer. His gaze slipped away from hers and flitted about the gorse, never staying long on one spot.

“Yes.” The word seemed to rise from the depths of his soul and poison the air around them with his bitterness. “Had I been in the gallery behind the president, I’d have stopped Booth. Instead, I heard the shot from the hallway below.”

“Oh dear,” she murmured and touched his sleeve in sympathy.

He didn’t seem to feel it, and she quickly withdrew her hand. “I wasn’t technically on duty that night. But I should have . . . should have—” He shook his head. His eyes clouded with sadness.

There was nothing she could say. Her hand moved toward his arm again, but she pulled it back with the same caution as when approaching a hot stove. “You were Mr. Lincoln’s bodyguard?”

“Not officially. I worked undercover for the Union during the war, a spy if you will. The information I gathered always went directly to Mr. Lincoln. After the war, as a civilian, I asked to be put on assignment in Washington, to continue on the president’s security detail, but I was told he needed no one else.”

“And your knowledge of bombs?”

“Part of my job was to track Confederate soldiers intent on blowing up bridges, ammunition dumps, supply lines, and other things critical to the North’s winning the war. Sometimes when I found a bomb, there wasn’t time to summon the men trained to disarm them. I had no choice but to do it myself, or else trigger the thing to save lives but sacrifice a vital road or bridge.”

“So you learned by trial and error.” It seemed to her a dangerous way to train.

“Most of the devices were pretty simple.” He shrugged and started walking again, watching the ground as his boots crunched over the frost heaves and dead leaves. She followed along, matching his strides. “They were either meant to be set off by hand and thrown, or planted and triggered by pressure. Sometimes a mechanical trip wire was used to strike a flint and light the fuse after the dynamiteers were well clear. During that time, I discovered a few soldiers from the South who were particularly creative. Their work was nearly undetectable, and the materials they used were always the same.”

He held up the twine then produced—as if he were a magician performing a sleight-of-hand trick—a sliver of gray stone.

“Flint?” she guessed.

“Good Louisiana flint. So far as I know, there’s none like it in all of England.” He looked at her, his meaning clear. She felt incapable of speech her throat had tightened so. He continued. “I believe the Fenians have recently recruited two of the best black powder men in America. I doubt that dodging their trap just once will put them off their game.”

Ten

Having done all he could by the end of the day to make certain the royals in residence at Balmoral were safe, Stephen Byrne took himself off for a strenuous ponder. The locations best suited to problem solving were, in his estimation, working men’s pubs. Having obtained a stool at the end of the centuries-old oak bar in The Wooden Ox, not far down the road from the castle, he asked for a good dark stout and set to work on both it and his thoughts.

If he’d thought it necessary to station himself outside Louise’s door and watch over her the night long to keep her safe, he would have. But Brown had the place locked up tighter than the Tower of London, his own men stationed at every entrance plus reinforcements ordered up from Aberdeen to patrol and post as sentries. So there seemed little need for him to lose sleep in a drafty hallway. How the princess had slipped past the guards that morning was beyond him. He imagined she’d spent a good part of her youth at Balmoral, and like as not, she and her siblings had discovered secret passageways they’d used in their play. He’d have to alert Brown to that possibility.

Aside from his confidence in the Scot’s security measures, Byrne had another excuse for staying away from the castle. He expected the marquess would be paying a visit to his wife’s bedroom, if only as a matter of form and to calm any untoward gossip among the court. But perhaps Lorne would attempt to perform his husbandly duty.

Byrne didn’t like to think of the dandy, or any other man, touching Louise. Lurid images flashed through his mind, leaving him feeling raw.

Who could really say what went on between the couple? If anything at all. He’d seen them in the carriage during the trip north, sitting apart, never reaching out for each other, never holding hands or touching surreptitiously when others weren’t watching as newlyweds always do. The younger princess wedged between them seemed to serve as a mutually agreed upon barrier.

Maybe Louise was just angry with her husband over a disagreement they’d had, and she was making her point by temporarily withdrawing her affection. Despite Lorne’s attraction to partners of his own sex, he might still have relations with his wife. It wasn’t unheard of for a man who favored other men’s company to be capable of servicing a woman. The warmth they’d displayed at the wedding seemed real enough. It was only after their wedding night that a chill seemed to descend over them.

To Byrne’s thinking, this was the very opposite of what should have been. Affection for a mate naturally grew with time.

A thought struck him then, and he chuckled. Might it be the marquess had attempted to fulfill his obligations in bed but failed to perform satisfactorily for the lady? If he, Byrne, entertained the princess in his bed, he’d be damned if she left it without rosy blooms in her cheeks and stars in her eyes.

Then another possibility came to him. Perhaps the man had demanded acts from her that had shocked her. Offended her. Hurt her.

The bastard.

Byrne’s hand tightened on his glass. He had to make an effort to loosen his grip before it shattered under the pressure. No use speculating, he told himself. Whether or not Louise was married, whether or not she was happy or miserable—the woman was beyond his reach in every imaginable way. He might as well have designs on the famous Lillie Langtry or the queen herself—though that last thought was a singularly unappealing one. Whatever life held for Louise was none of his concern and beyond his control. There was little sense in working himself into a lather over it.