The Captive by Grace Burrowes Page B

whores in constant uproar, bad rations, disease, and cold, for you to throw it all away by taking ship for England.”
    Michael Brodie was the son of a wealthy Scot, though he’d found it prudent to tend toward his mother’s Irish side of the family when in France. Robert Girard, as he chose to be called, suspected dear Michael had some bulldog ancestry in his lineage too—the affectionate variety of course.
    “Michel, I have a desire to see once again the land of my father’s people. You needn’t accompany me.”
    Michael’s green eyes lit with a zeal that boded ill for French colonels lacking an instinct for self-preservation.
    “This has to do with that damned duke, doesn’t it?”
    “No, it does not.” Girard waved the serving girl away, meaning no insult to the yeasty, frothy, tepid weissbier favored at the rathskeller. “My decision to travel has to do with being weary to my soul, and England being some place where the government will not seek to kill me, not officially. Proper fellows that they are, they have sent me letters to this effect.”
    In fact, the War Office had extended informal clemency to him, in order that France might offer the same courtesy to others whom the cessation of hostilities had left in delicate straits.
    Michael waved the girl over, and because he was a good-looking devil who never bothered the ladies, over she came. That they spoke English also didn’t hurt, the English being the most solvent among the nationalities thronging Vienna of late.
    “ Drei biere, bitte. ”
    “Michael, are you attempting to inebriate yourself with beer?” For it would take more time than Girard had to see that accomplished, and more than three beers.
    “Two of them are to dump over your fool head. You will die a painful, bloody death in England. The English gentlemen are great ones for blowing each other’s brains out or sticking one another in the lung or the gut on the so-called field of honor. The higher their title, the more likely they are to lack sense.”
    “I have had enough of violence, thank you sincerely.” And to be honest, the welfare of a certain duke did also trouble him. Mercia had stayed alive for one reason—to kill his captors—and a man with such an agenda bore careful watching.
    Revenge could keep a man alive against all odds, but it took a heavy toll on a fellow’s common sense.
    And thus Girard did, indeed, still worry about his favorite English duke.
    The beers were delivered by the smiling, handsome little brunette lady who looked about sixteen years old. They all looked about sixteen years old anymore.
    Michael tipped generously, assuring both good service and privacy, and watched the serving maid as she scurried across the room in answer to a bellowed summons.
    “You have a sister about her age, don’t you, Michel?”
    Michael left off watching the girl and took the kind of prissy sip of his ale that suggested the foaming head of the drink was a damned nuisance. “If you’re going to England, I’m bloody well going with you.”
    He ignored the question thoroughly, revealing that the sister—sisters, in fact, there being more than one—were a sensitive topic.
    “The English government will not officially try to kill me,” Girard mused, “but that leaves a good dozen Englishmen who will take offense at my continued existence, your damned duke among them.”
    “He’s home now, Mercia is,” Michael said, hunching over his beer stein. With his blond hair and size, he fit in easily among the locals, but his conscience meant he was not at all compatible with the prevailing sense of opportunism and self-interest loose in an otherwise lovely city.
    “You should go home too, my dear, though I will allow you to join me as far as England. I get good service when I drag you about with me.”
    “Are you going to England to kill him?”
    “I told you, I have had enough of violence, and I am not given to dissembling,” Girard said, shoving to his feet and leaving