Nora’s hands,tiny but graceful across the lacy work in her lap, moved with musical precision. She made needlework a dance. Jamie wondered what she would look like in a ballroom. She—and thecount—had drawn the line at balls and dancing while mourning her brother.Next year then,he thought,she will dance.He wondered if she could waltz and yearned to teach her.
Longing for what he would never have benefitted no one. He dragged his eyes back to the papers on his desk and forced his mind back to the numbers on the document in front of him.
The paper made him ill. The contents, a set of instructions and goals for the English trade delegation, bored him. The manner in which it came to him turned his stomach.
The instructions, written by the English authorities, had fallen into Sardinian hands. It included tariffs to negotiate, wine harvests to catalog, towns in the Piedmont to explore, and much more. Giovanni had possession of an explosive document. Jamie wondered how that had happened.
Nora looked up and smiled at him. He smiled back. He feared he looked as sick as he felt.
“Preparing lessons? Or translating?”
“Both,” he murmured vaguely. “What do you call that kind of needlework?”
“Crochet,” she said, holding up a tiny silver hook.
He went back to work. The sooner he translated it, the better. Wentworth would want to know they had it. His heart skipped a beat. Perhaps Giovanni or Castellimonte wanted Wentworth to know. Perhaps they fed it to him on purpose. He had no idea why.
A deep shuddering breath put a period to the thought. Between them, Wentworth and Castellimonte had him looking suspiciously under every rock. He would start examining puppies for weapons next.Translate, Jamie, don’t think.
“Mending is less frivolous,” Nora said into the silence.
“What?”
“Mending. Practical and useful. I will have lace shawls a’plenty by the end of the week and be forced to start on dresses for Isabella. We don’t need all this fancywork, and it isn’t useful.”
His English wren had returned.
“What do aristocratic ladies do with the endless piles of needlework they do to keep their hands busy?” she asked while her hands stitched along.
“Seat cushions,” he said, looking back at his work. That’s what his mother did, in any case, and some of the other grand ladies he had met.
The odd feel of the silence made him look up. Nora’s eyes had a question, but she didn’t ask it.
“At least that is what I’ve always heard,” he said. She looked away and went back to her work.
“Damn.”
Nora’s head bobbed up again.
Did I said that out loud?“Sorry,” he mumbled, “it’s the paper.” She looked back down, but not before he caught the questions in her eyes. She wouldn’t ask him. He hated to see her dampen down her curiosity but was glad for it at once.
He forced his attention back to the page and immediately regretted it.Damn and seven kinds of damnation, he thought when one particularly sensitive passage caught his attention.
Victor Emmanuel isamenable to favorable rates. He is easily influenced. We must continue to cultivate him directly.
Favorable to England it meant.If he failed to translate that passage, Giovanni would certainly puzzle it out. Jamie felt his gorge rise. It took all his self-control to write the translation and push through to the last sentence of the report. “We anticipate highly favorable negotiations,” he read. Castellimonte, he thought, would see about that. He translated it as written.
He raised his pen, picked up his transcription for Wentworth,and recorded a copy. Even rubbing his hands on his trousers didn’t make the dirty feeling go away.
Two words stuck in his mind, “easily influenced.” Forces inside the Sardinian kingdom would be unhappy about that, very unhappy.
Jamie stuffed one set of papers into his portfolio with shaking hands and folded the other for dispatch to Wentworth. He attempted to smile at his wife. The smile became genuine at the sight of her.
Nora caught his eyes and returned his smile with one full of promises. His heart skipped a beat when she put her lacy shawl aside and rose to face him. Drawn to her as a moth to light, he closed the distance and pulled her in for a kiss.
“Time for bed?” he asked with a raised brow. He adored her blushes. They turned to her room, with his arm around her shoulder, but he remembered something that made him stop.
“I forgot to warn you. We are invited, or rather expected, at the Palazzo again for dinner in two days.”
