Read Online Almost a Princess by Elizabeth Thornton - Free Book Online Page B

would have known I hadn’t died in the slaughter at St. Michel.”
    “How could he? He doesn’t know your face.”
    “Precisely. Poor Halford. I was sorry to sacrifice him, but he made it so easy. He had to have a rose just like mine tattooed on his left arm. And so we escaped.”
    “Dressed as women!” Joseph said scornfully, but he smiled.
    “Chivalry is one of the earl’s weaknesses,” Piers replied.
    It had been a brutal fight, he remembered, with the only chance of escaping certain death when Lord Castleton called a truce to allow the women and children to go free. Piers and Joseph, disguised as women, had joined the caravan that fled the doomed monastery. The humiliation of it, his abject defeat and subsequent flight, still had the power to make him writhe.
    Piers gestured to the bottle and glasses on the sideboard. “Help yourself to cognac and pour one for me.”
    It was a regular ritual, this sharing a glass of fine cognac before retiring for the night, a symbol of mutual respect and friendship. But Piers didn’t really regard Joseph as a friend. In fact, he didn’t have any friends, didn’t want any, though there were many in Bristol who would have been surprised to hear it. Friendship implied intimacy, a sharing of confidences, and for all his charm, Piers shared himself with no one.
    They pulled chairs up to the fire and sipped their drinks for a moment or two in silence, but Joseph’s words were still turning in his mind, still rankling and he felt compelled to justify himself.
    “You credit the earl with too much intelligence. Collier’s execution has him completely baffled, and not only Castleton, but the authorities also. They’ve had a month to investigate, and it was just as I told you. They don’t know where to begin to look for me.”
    Joseph, no connoisseur, gulped at his cognac as though he were drinking beer. “I wasn’t thinking about now,” he said slowly. “I was thinking about the past, about St. Michel. He found us there.”
    “It won’t happen this time.” Piers’s words were clipped, almost angry. “There is no Judas to betray our movements, no John Collier to give us false information.”
    That’s how Castleton had found him. It was a trap. Collier was their spy at headquarters. As he’d done in the past, he alerted them to the presence of a British convoy escorting a wagon of gold to headquarters. There was no gold, only Castleton and his crack unit of killers waiting for them.
    Collier maintained his innocence to the end, but it had not saved him. Whenever there was a question of a man’s loyalty, Piers always erred on the side of caution. And traitors deserved no mercy.
    “What about your sister?” asked Joseph.
    “What about her?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe she knows something.” Piers smiled. “As far as Letty knows, I died in Spain fighting for king and country. I’m sure the thought brings her solace. She will never believe anything bad of me. Besides, what can she say? She knows nothing.”
    “She knows your face.”
    Piers let out a long, patient sigh. “We’re not likely to come face-to-face, but if we do and she recognizes me, she won’t give me away. We’re family. That means something to Letty.”
    In fact, if he came face-to-face with his sister, he wasn’t at all sure what he would do, but he knew how Joseph’s mind worked, and he knew how to manipulate him. There was nothing Joseph prized more than family. The only real family Joseph had ever known were the “Brothers”—that’s what they called themselves, not deserters or bandits, but “Brothers.” Anyone who betrayed a brother was beyond the pale, and dealt with accordingly.
    The reference to family put Joseph in a nostalgic frame of mind, and he reminisced for a while about the good old days, when the Brothers were warlords in their own domain, until the English milord came among them and spoiled everything. Now there were only two left, himself and Piers, and the souls of the