Midnight Honor

corrected forthwith.”
    Anne dragged her attention away from Mademoiselle de Boule and responded to the major's pledge with a brittle smile. “There is no need to trouble yourself, Major. I am rarely at home these days myself.”
    “You have business that takes you away at all hours?”
    “No. But I am rarely at home to uninvited visitors.”
    The major arched an eyebrow. His eyes were so pale a blue as to be almost colorless, but they darkened now as the centers flared with intrigue.
    Loudoun, meanwhile, cleared his throat with a gruff
harrumph
. “You heard about the trouble last night, I trust?”
    Angus was slow to pull his gaze away from Worsham. “Trouble?”
    “Mmm. A skirmish on the Inverness road last night between Major Worsham's patrol and some rebels.”
    “Three of my men dead,” Worsham offered. “Several more injured. The leader of the rebels was hit and went down, but his men carried the body away before we could ascertain an identity.”
    “I had not heard about it,” Angus said with a frown.
    “No? I had men following the tracks, but they lost them in the snow. Near Loch Moy, as it happens.”
    “A good choice,” Angus acknowledged. “The woods are thick and the ground rocky enough in places to conceal the tracks of an army.”
    “I will have to remember that,” Worsham said, and the pale eyes flicked back to Anne again. “I trust you would report it upon the instant were you to see anything untoward in the vicinity? Any … wounded men, for instance. Or a large party of armed rebels.”
    “Oh, upon the instant,” Anne agreed.
    Worsham smiled again and Anne felt a chill run up her spine.
    “You know,” he said, “I have the most extraordinary feeling we have met before.”
    “I am sure we have not, Major.”
    “You were not out riding across the moors late last night by any chance, were you?”
    The boldness of the question took Anne by surprise, as it was undoubtedly intended to do, and it was Angus who answered with a wry laugh. “Last night? Last night my dear wife was giving me a sharp piece of her tongue for having had too much to drink through the afternoon and squandering the venison roast she had ordered up for our evening meal.”
    Worsham's pale eyes glittered. “And yet my instincts, especially where a beautiful woman is concerned, are rarely mistaken. Perhaps you have been to London, my lady? To the theater or opera?”
    “No, sir,” Anne said carefully. “I have never been to London, nor have I had the smallest desire to visit, for I have been told it is a dark, dreary place. They say that it always rains, and the smell of offal is so thick in the streets that it clings to all who hail from there.”
    It took a moment for the veil to come off the insult, but when it did, the major's throat turned a mottled shade of scarlet. As stiff as his back was already, he managed to square his shoulders into blocks, and if not for the sudden skirling of a chanter from the far end of the hall, the tightly pressed lips might actually have pulled back into a snarl.
    As it was, Anne felt Angus's hand grasp her arm and steer her over to one of the oak columns, ostensibly to clear the way for the pipers to call the guests into the banquet room. Over the strains of the Forbes's
piob rach'd
, Angus leaned down to whisper in her ear, “Just for your own information, Major Worsham is rumored to be one of the Duke of Cumberland's favored protégés. He sharpened his teeth serving under General Henry Hawley and hasspent the last six months in Flanders slitting throats by moonlight.”
    “He's a bloody
Sassenach,”
Anne whispered back. “And he does not frighten me.”
    “Well, he should. I strongly doubt the last
man
who told him he smelled like shit is able to smell anything at all.”

Chapter Six
    A nne's esteemed mother-in-law laughed with the gusto of a man. “Ye told him he smelled like what?”
    Nearing seventy, Lady Drummuir had the robust girth and forthright manner of a woman who had lived too long and seen too much strife to worry about petty gossips and social-conscious peers—several of whom snapped open their fans at the sound of her gaiety.
    “Like shite?” She wiped her eyes, the laughter jiggling the prodigious expanse of her bosoms. “That'll be the second time in the spate of a week, then, he's been told he needs to bathe wi' more care, damned
Sassenach.”
    The dinner had progressed smoothly enough. The avid appetites of more than sixty guests had