A Regency Captain's Prize: The Captain's Forbidden Miss / His Mask of Retribution. Margaret McPhee

and the straps rebuckled. Only then did Josie make herself comfortable upon the wooden chair and sit down at Captain Dammartin’s little table to lay the notebook upon its surface. She adjusted the direction of the light within the lantern and, taking a deep breath, began to read her father’s journal for the Battle of Oporto.

      Josie could barely concentrate on Molyneux’s chatter the next day, for thinking of the words that her father had written. Dammartin had been correct in saying that his father had been captured by hers. It was true, too, that the French major had been paroled, but that is where any similarity between the two stories ended. Lieutenant Colonel Mallington’s telling of the two men’s meeting could not have contrasted more sharply with Dammartin’s.

      Her papa had written of respect and admiration between two men who happened to be fighting on opposite sides of a war. Those faded grey words conveyed an underlying sense of something bordering on friendship.

      Why should there be such a discrepancy between the two accounts? It made no sense. The more she thought about it, the more she became convinced that there was something very strange about such a blatant contradiction. And she longed to question Dammartin more on his story.

      Who was the man who claimed to have witnessed the murder? Someone honourable, who was beyond reproach, Dammartin had said.

      She glanced ahead to where the French Captain rode, her eyes skimming his broad shoulders, and the sway of the long, black mane of horsehair that hung from his helmet. She wanted to show him the journal entry, to prove to him that he was wrong, to show him that her father was indeed an innocent man, but she could not.

      Trust was a fickle thing, and Dammartin was still the enemy. Even had she torn that single page from its binding so that he might have read only that and nothing else, then he would have known that the journals were in her possession and she knew that Dammartin would not stop until he had them from her.