To Sketch a Sphinx - Rebecca Connolly Page 0,15

down upon it. Her eyes widened and flicked back to her husband. “It has to be close to midday. Cormeilles is barely ten miles outside of Paris. How in the world has it taken so long to go so short a distance?”

Pratt gave her a very flat, very bland smile, looking as fatigued and haggard as any man alive ever had. “We have averaged roughly five miles an hour for the majority of our trip from Calais, Hal. Since Cormeilles, we have been slower than that, likely on account of the poor conditions of the road, which makes your ability to sleep during that time all the more astonishing.”

“One of my lesser known gifts,” she murmured in shock, sitting back against the seat of the coach and staring at him in bewilderment. “Less than five miles an hour? Are you sure?”

“Believe me, I have made a very careful study of our speed and course in the last thirty-six hours.” He cocked his head, his eyes narrowing. “How did you know that Cormeilles was ten miles outside of Paris?”

One side of Hal’s mouth quirked. “I looked at a map before we arrived in Calais.”

Pratt raised a brow. “And you remembered Cormeilles specifically and the distance it was from Paris? Calais was nearly two days ago.”

“One of my better-known gifts,” Hal said simply as she allowed the rest of her mouth to complete the smile. “I have a rather exact memory. If I see something, I can remember it with a startling accuracy. If I focus on something with some effort, I’m likely to never forget it.”

Now it was he whose eyes widened, and he seemed to still completely in the uncomfortably jolting coach. “What I wouldn’t give for that ability.”

Hal laughed once. “It is not always agreeable, but in your case, yes, I can see how that would be useful.” She glanced out of the window again. “I take it we have entered Paris.”

“Oui,” Pratt replied with a heavy sigh, “and I have never been so pleased to see any place in my life. I may embrace le baron simply for being at the end of the journey.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Hal told him with a playful wince. “I am not at all assured of the nature of my mother’s departure from her family all those years ago, so we may find ourselves coldly received.”

Pratt stared at her in a resigned sort of study. “Now you mention this.”

An earnest grimace exchanged places with the playful wince on her face. “I didn’t want to worry you.”

“What I feel now is worry,” he assured her. “Had I known before, I could have replaced worry with strategy. Now…?”

“Now?” she prodded when he trailed off.

He groaned and rubbed at his brow. “Now I am too bloody tired for strategy, which leaves me with worry, which is not at all comforting, and I’m presently feeling it will be a miracle if we are not shot on sight.”

“It won’t be that bad,” she told him with a laugh that she didn’t feel.

Truth be told, it could be that bad. Her mother hadn’t said much about her family in France over the years, though she had continued to correspond with some of them. Everything her mother had done had seemed contradictory, though her love for her husband and children had been constant. She had likely been as involved with covert operations as her husband, and given that she had left her family to marry Hal’s father, seemingly without the approval of her family, one had to assume she had devoted herself to the British.

But there had always been rumors.

Not among polite society, of course. They had all declared Marguerite Mortimer the most beautiful creature to come out of France, though she had been criticized for bearing the aloof, haughty nature that had spurred on the bloody revolution in her home country.

In the darker, more secret circles that Hal and her brother occupied, however, the lines were rather blurred.

“Where did you stash our private correspondence?” Pratt asked in a low voice as they turned down another row of pristine houses. “As we weren’t detained entering Calais, I must presume that the examiners found nothing?”

Hal shuddered at the memory of being so humiliated as to be examined nearly to the square inch of her by females designated by the customs officials at the port. It was all in an effort to prevent the smuggling in of goods and no doubt various items of a more nefarious nature, but it was