"It's dark in here." Grey's voice was a rasp of sandpaper and velvet. He spoke in the familiar form, as one speaks to the most intimate of friends or to children or animals or servants. Or prostitutes.

"Light candles if you wish. It makes no difference to me." She spoke in the formal mode of speaking, which is how one talks to foreign spies who have kidnapped you.

"I thought Doyle told you to get into the nightgown."

"He did, most certainly. I will let you know if ever I begin taking orders from Monsieur Doyle." She faced the window, the nightgown twisted between her hands, and did not turn toward him. The night ahead would be one of immeasurable difficulty.

Wind came to her off the fields, smelling of cows and the earth and apples. She felt a longing, sharp as a physical pain, to see the fields and the stars above them. It never left her in all these months, that ache.

The shirt she wore billowed loose, then flattened possessively over her breasts and her hips, then blew loose again. Grey's shirt. She had some wide knowledge of men. There were those who would find her alluring, so incongruously within a man's shirt, with her feet bare on the floor and her hair farouche and uncombed about her face. In the so-obvious silk rag she held in her fingers, she would look the whore. Wearing a man's shirt, she appeared the wise and subtle courtesan.

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There were no right choices for her tonight.

She heard him lock the door behind him.

"You've decked yourself out in my shirt. Well, well, well." He was never without that undercurrent of incomprehensible anger when he spoke to her. "Maybe I should have expected that. The nightgown is blatant. Nobody could accuse you of being blatant."

"Have you not tormented me enough for the sin of being French and a spy? This is the middle of France, Monsieur Grey, I am not your lawful prey. Let me go. It is the only sensible answer for any of us."

"After you give me the Albion plans. We'll pay, you know, if that sort of thing matters to you. Extravagantly."

Oh, but Leblanc had much to answer for. It was the final straw among great heaps of straw that his words should set this English upon her, demanding the Albion plans.

How much she would like to say — 'You desire the Albion plans? But yes, I have them tucked here in my garter, you see? Take them away and stop Monsieur Napoleon from making this stupid invasion of your island which will kill many thousand French soldiers and countless English and will not succeed at all.'

It was not that simple. It had never been that simple.

She lied, immediately and convincingly. "I do not have these plans. Never, not once, have I laid eyes upon them."

"You lie well. I suppose I'm not the first man to tell you that."

She hit the windowsill with her fist. "No and no! I am sick of this folly. Leblanc spits poison like a toad and you believe him for reasons wholly incomprehensible. You kidnap me into Normandy for nothing. You endanger me and yourself with this mad insistence to ..."

"Turn around and look at me. I'm damned tired of talking to your back."

"You, I do not find attractive or interesting. In fact, I wish you would go away altogether."

Adamant hands gripped her and turned her, without pain, but very, very firmly. She kept her head lowered, concealing her face from him in the dark.

"You're thinking about fighting me. Don't. Believe me, little fox, you wouldn't like what I do to you. Don't make me show you how thoroughly you're trapped."