BEGUILED BY HER BETRAYER BY LOUISE ALLEN EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: LOUISE ALLEN
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Early April 1801. Upper Egypt
There was shade down there and water jars sweating themselves cool and
the start of the green growth that ran from the desert edge into the banks of
the Nile.
Too soon. Quin lay flat on the hot sand of the dune’s crest and distracted
himself from thirst, heat and the throbbing pain in his left arm by
concentrating on the tent below.
Tent was perhaps too modest a word. It seemed to consist of several
interior rooms surrounded by shaded areas formed by poles and flaps of
fabric which, he supposed, would collapse to make outer walls at night.
It was an immaculately neat and well-organised encampment, although
there were no servants to be seen. To one side was an animal shelter with
hitching rail and trough, on the other a reed roof covered a cooking area. A
thin wisp of smoke rose from the banked fire, there was no donkey tied to
the rail and the only occupant appeared to be the man in shirtsleeves who
sat at a table in the deep shade of an awning, his pen moving steadily across
the paper in front of him.
Quin narrowed his eyes against the dusty sunlight. Mid fifties, burly, salt
and pepper brown hair: that was certainly his quarry, or one of them at least.
Sir Philip Woodward, baronet, antiquarian and scholar, neglectful husband,
selfish widower and father and, very possibly, traitor.
A flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye betrayed robes caught
in the light breeze. Someone was approaching. Quin shifted his gaze to
where the monumental columns of the temple of Koum Ombo rose from the
enshrouding sand, dwarfing the mud-walled huts of the little village of
fishermen and farmers beyond it. The person leading a donkey must be
familiar with the area, for they spared no glance for the great ruins as they
passed them by.
It was a woman, he saw as she came closer, clad in the enveloping folds
of a dark blue tob but, like most of the country women of Upper Egypt,
unveiled. A servant – or the other person he had been sent to find?
Madame Valsac, widow of Capitaine Thierry Valsac of Napoleon’s Army
of the East, daughter of Sir Philip Woodward and, maybe, another traitor.
But unlike her father, whose safety was of little concern to the hard-faced
men who had briefed him, Madame Valsac was to be extracted from Egypt
and restored to the custody of her grandfather whether she liked it or not,
and regardless of where her loyalties might lie.
That this might prove troublesome, hundreds of miles from the coast and
the invading British army, in the path of France’s fearsome Mameluke allies
who were believed to be heading north at that moment, and in the midst of
one of Egypt’s periodic outbreaks of plague, had not concerned the
gentlemen in Gibraltar.
Quin was a diplomat who spoke French and Arabic and knew enough of
antiquities to pass as one of the French savants, the scholars left by
Napoleon to explore Egypt under the protection of his under-paid, diseased,
poorly-resourced army. That, so far as they were concerned, was sufficient
qualification.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB