by Edith Layton
She’d sat up all through the long night, wondering at what cruel hoax, what odd jest, or what mad imagining had produced such a letter. Harry was dead. It was as much of a fact as the name of the king and the state of the nation. The government had declared it, his friends had mourned him, she’d written and gotten acknowledgment of her sympathies from his bereaved family. Though she’d never seen his grave, she knew it lay in Belgium. She knew of no firmer truth. Yet here was a note, in his hand, to hers, which said he was alive, and would be here with the coming of the new day.
She couldn’t find an exit from any of the main rooms, and so she crept through the cavernous kitchens, glad of the increasingly milky darkness which gave a luminous glow to the room to help her find her way as she made for the back door to the garden the note had promised was there. The kitchen maid sleeping on her pallet near the stove only sighed as Francesca tiptoed past her, as though she really were in the dream she had begun to believe she was in, and the great door sighed open at her touch, as a door in a dream might, as she stepped out into the cool dying night.
She could see nothing but shapes at first as she pulled her shawl around her and looked out into the rising mists. Then she ventured to walk further from the door into the garden, but hesitantly, as if she were entering unknown waters that grew deeper with each step. There was no sound; even the birds had only just begun to sense the coming dawn, but the grass was cold and wet beneath her thin slippers, so she began to believe this was real.
Then she saw a different shape, a shape that might have been another human, looming up from the gray mists. She stepped further forward and peered intently as first dawn came rising to release the birds from night’s silence and a faint cool morning wind began to blow the mists away.
“Harry?” she whispered into the increasing light. If she were mad, she would be entirely so, she thought as she dared to whisper again, “Harry?”
“Fancy?” the apparition said. “My Fancy?”
And hearing that voice, muted as it was with wonder and secretiveness, she knew. She fled into his arms, and they came round her, real as anything in her life now was, and they held her close against living, breathing warmth. And if nothing else convinced her this was real here in the blank chill morning, the scent of the gaming house that still clung to him, of tobacco and tallow and lingering spirits she detected as he breathed her name into her ear with wonder, did, even before she raised her eyes to his face and cried, “Harry!” as though without being pinned to reality by his spoken name he’d disappear into the mists again.
“Hush!” he said, warning her to silence, and he held her wordlessly until she stopped shaking and could look at him and speak with reason again.
He was the same, she thought as she stared up at him and let her doubting fingers touch his cheek, the same, only different in this colorless bleak light, for there was no sunlight to enhance the straight light brown hair and lift it from the commonplace, and no brightness to light the subtle attraction of that lean sensitive face. There was nothing about him to distinguish him, he’d so often jested, from the common run of pleasant young men. He was slender and graceful and very ordinary, he’d insisted, but she’d always thought he’d been wrong, and knew it, and that was part of his charm. For there was enormous charm as well as self-mockery in the warm brown eyes, and the straight nose and smiling mouth were uniquely his, and no other gentleman she’d ever met had that ironic expression that lent such an elegant cast to his even features. No, it was Harry, unmistakably Harry, and if he were dead and risen, then death had not altered him, nor diminished him.
“Here,” he said in a whisper as he wrapped his arm around her and walked her to a corner of the garden where there was a bench. “We’ve a little time to talk before the servants stir and I must go.”
When he felt her start at that, he held her closer to him so that she could hear his words exhaled on the slightest breath and began to speak at once.
“I won’t go until I’ve explained,” he said, and as she relaxed, he laughed lightly and added teasingly, “‘Mrs. Devlin.’”
She flushed, but before she could explain that she’d never thought she’d have to explain to a ghost, he went on, “Thank God you took my name, Fancy, or I’d have never found you. But Madame Renaud has a seamstress who…ah, knows me, and so she mentioned the irony of her having to sew up gowns for a lady with the same name. I was about to tell her that there are a thousand of us Devlins in the world, when she added ‘Mrs. Francesca Devlin’ and I knew in my heart that incredible as it was, it could be no other. I asked after you here at the hotel and found the truth in your lie. Then I saw you, then I found you. God,” he whispered wonderingly, hugging her, “how lucky I was that one maudlin night I’d let fall my real name to the wench.”
“Why?” Francesca said when she could. “Why, Harry?” she asked, pulling from his embrace at last, and facing him. “Why were you dead? Why do you hide now? Why are you here?”
“I’m here to see you and find out what’s going on with you, my girl,” he said sternly. “‘Mrs. Devlin’ is flattering, I’ll admit, but why in God’s name are you all in black and with your hair like that, all in a dowager’s knot?” he said scornfully, leaning back and scrutinizing her until she looked away. “And creeping about with that vulgar family of cits, in the company of a brute like that Arden Lyons, and a care-for-nothing like his hedonistic friend the viscount?”
“I had to work,” she said desperately. “Father has no money left, and I didn’t know, for I came here to be with him when school was done, and I couldn’t stay on in Roxanne’s post, as a gambler’s assistant, and so I was glad to find respectable employment. But the Deemses wouldn’t have hired me as I was, not at my age or in my single state, so I added some years, and your name. But I had to do what I could, for I’d nothing else, don’t you see, Harry? Bram would’ve helped, but he died with you…” She stopped and stared at him then. “What happened, Harry?” she asked again, not defending herself to him any longer, as soon as she realized the absurdity of it, when she didn’t even know why she was able to speak with him.
“I didn’t die,” he said. “I refused to die.”
But he grew very distant and cold as he said that.
And though she began to suspect his escape had nothing to do with luck, she refused to think of it, and only asked, at once, “But, Harry, how wonderful! Then why didn’t you tell us?”
“Because they wanted me dead,” he said in a flat voice, before he mocked his own words. “Ah, no, they’d never say as much, but it’s far better that they think I’m gone, for I’ll swear, I never had a chance to live, and they won’t thank me for saving myself. I saw Bram die,” he said angrily, “saw him fall from his horse, by my side, and die. You’ve never seen a thing like war, Fancy, pray God you never do. War?” He laughed. “Not really, not like the illustrations we saw in books, not the glorious warfare we studied, no, for all the bombs and smoke, drums and uniforms and banners, it was more like a charnel house. No, a slaughterhouse. The ground was slippery with blood, men’s or horses’, they ran together, and both were without value or meaning. I left, Francesca, when I realized that. I left, and so I live.”
“You ran away?” she asked, incredulous.
“I rode away,” he corrected her sharply.
“You deserted?” she asked, shaking her head. “You deserted,” she said at last, accepting that when he didn’t contradict her again.
“Would it have been better if I’d died?” he asked with barely controlled rage. “I was not born to be fodder for the cannons. I rode away until I thought to stop and change clothes with an obliging Frenchman—a dead one—God knows there were enough of them. He rots in Belgium now under my name. I found my way to Paris, and I live. Can’t you rejoice for that?” he asked, gently again, as she sat staring at him.
“Can’t you go back and explain it all to them now?” she asked. “Surely they’ll understand,” she said, looking for a way out of this co
il.
“Certainly,” he agreed, “they’ll understand as they put my back to a wall and put in the bullets I neglected to have added on the field of Waterloo. No, Fancy, I can’t go back, not as Lieutenant Harry Devlin. That man is dead. Someday I may go back, someday I likely shall, with a new name and with the new face that age will give me. I knew what I gave up in order to live, and I regretted only you. Now, since fate has brought you to me, it must mean it was meant to be, even as I thought. So stay with me, Fancy,” he said suddenly, taking her hand tightly, and smiling again, “until I have that age, and then come home with me too. But as ‘Mrs. Devlin’ in truth this time.”
When she remained silent, only looking at him with those huge dark eyes that became soft brown as the night faded from around her, he added, less lightly than he wished, “I’ve funds. Funds enough, since I got word to my family, and they continue to send them to me secretly. We can live very well, never doubt it, ‘Mrs. Devlin,’” he added on that warm and charming smile, as though it delighted him merely to speak the words.
“No,” she said very slowly, wishing there was more time to think, more time to understand why she’d gone from utmost joy to grief again in moments, and hating to speak even as she reacted, “never as ‘Mrs. Devlin,” Harry,” she said, “for he’s dead, you said so yourself.”
“Where is the honor?” he demanded icily, all at once, “in useless death?”
“Not honor,” she said, tears coming to her eyes as she tried to find the words to explain, and spilling when she finally did, “but there was a necessity. Napoleon would’ve won if it weren’t for fodder for cannons…like Bram. He shouldn’t have died, and maybe there wasn’t a scrap of honor in it, but he did so that Napoleon could be set down once and for all.”
“And so the world goes on without him, and Napoleon still lives,” Harry said, spitting the words out, “and the victorious British rush to France and drink their wines and buy their clothes and women and make them fat and rich again. Is that why Bram died? Well, Harry Devlin died then too, but he’s a wiser gent, for he rose to live again,” he said, himself rising and looking down at her, and then away from her tears. “And if you’re wise, Francesca, you’ll accept it and come with me. I offered for you once, but decided to wait because you were so young. You’re not that young anymore,” he said plainly, “and now I offer again.”
“No, Harry,” she said softly, “because I knew that Harry Devlin, and I don’t know whoever you are now.”
“Do you think to catch Arden Lyons? Oh, yes,” he said wisely, “I saw him escort you to your room last night. But he’s a villain, worse than me. And he’s after the pretty little rich cit, my girl, for all he’ll stoop to dally with you. I offer wedlock, at least.”
“And I am sensible of the honor, but I decline,” she said, not stopping now to think of her words, only knowing they were right as she spoke them, “for I’d never be able to forget, Harry, never.”
“I’d make you forget in time, I swear it,” he said, pulling her close.
“You don’t understand,” she answered, turning her head from his lips. “It’s Bram I’d never forget. And I don’t believe you’d like me any more than I’d like myself if I did.”
“I’ll make you forget everything but me,” he vowed as though he swore at her, and brought his lips to hers.
But he stopped and drew back with a start as she said, just before he kissed her, “I hear someone coming, Harry.”
The cool, deadened tone of her voice should have warned him, but he heard only the words and so released her immediately and jumped away, looking about anxiously for the nonexistent intruder she’d warned him about. Then, when he looked to her, the sad, pitying knowledge in her eyes told him the truth.
“I’ve got to leave anyhow,” he said coldly, straightening from the half-crouch he’d automatically, unknowingly assumed, “but I warn you, Fancy, I’m your last best hope. We loved once, we can again. You’ve no money and no prospects, and before long will have no reputation either. And soon you’ll have no more time. I’ll be back to ask once more. But only that. Good-bye. And, oh,” he added, turning back after he’d turned to enter the remaining mists at the margins of the garden, “I ask you, out of charity, and for that honor you are pleased to insist upon, to tell no one of our meeting.”
But before she could promise him that, she heard a noise that could be another person coming, and by the time she turned back to warn him truly, he’d gone.
She stood alone, looking after him. He’d faded like a dream into the receding night. But he’d been real, it had been Harry, although she’d scarcely known him. And then she remembered, only the pain of it quelling her rising wild laughter, that as she’d forgotten to ask, she no longer even knew his name.
The kitchen wench was alarmed to find the lady wandering in the garden, for only the servants’ privies were so far from the house, and the lady might be drunken or mad, or both, from the look on her face. But as the lady then smiled weakly and whispered something reassuring to do with such a fine morning, the little maid was only too glad to agree, and bob a curtsy, and forget her so soon as she’d gone back to the hotel again.
*
They became separated just after they’d rounded a corner and gone down the steps toward the embankment. Francesca didn’t know how it happened, she’d not been paying attention, in truth it was her fault, she thought with rising panic, but suddenly Cee-cee and Mrs. Deems and the maid weren’t there before her. There were dozens of Frenchmen and women, the crowds of them shopping and haggling at the many outdoor vendors’ carts were thick, but they were all of them drably dressed poor Parisians, and the richly attired Deemses would have stood out among them—almost as distinctively as Arden did, she thought, as she looked about once more, to find him standing right beside her. But they ought never to have come here, she thought wildly as she realized she’d lost her employers, even though Arden had gone on about the charms of Paris’ outdoor pet market until Cee-cee, usually so obedient in all things, was on fire to see the dear little caged birds and the wee kittens he’d waxed so lyrical about. For this wasn’t a place for tourists, and the Deemses, she remembered, couldn’t speak a word of French, except for “How much?” and “Are you sure it can’t be gotten more cheaply?…that’s all I have with me just now, and I promise you you won’t find a better offer, I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”
At least, that was what Arden claimed they could say when she told him her fears. And then he laughed at her expression before he assured her that Mrs. Deems, at least, could find her way to safety if she were stranded in the sea with nothing but a ravening horde of pirates and a shark about her.
“She was most likely attracted by a bargain on a cart,” he said, “and her hunting blood was up, so she stopped short to haggle whilst we strolled on ahead. But never fear, there isn’t a less helpless female in Christendom than Mrs. Deems, she’ll likely shout a ‘halloo’ at us any moment, so let’s go on. Well, we can scarcely stand here until we become landmarks, can we? I hardly think you want to eventually overhear some ardent Frenchman saying to his m’amselle, ‘Ah, but, my love, I shall meet you by moonlight tonight by the embankment, as usual, beneath the large Englishman and the beautiful lady in black,’ or do you?” he asked curiously.
She didn’t laugh as long as he’d wished her to, and her haunted expression returned as soon as she was done. But then, he knew he’d never have been able to disengage her from the Deemses so easily if she’d been in her right mind in the first place. He’d actually planned on loudly whispering an invitation to a covert tete-a-tete to Cee-cee so that Francesca could overhear and try to spoil sport, and then be well-served by finding herself alone with him instead. But she clearly was falling down on her usual excellent job. One look at her distraction this afternoon had showed him that if he’d shouted his nefarious plans aloud, she’d still have missed them, and he’d have been well-served by being stranded with Cee-cee instead. And that would have ended th
e game immediately and would never have done, for it wasn’t nearly time for that yet.
“It is possible, you know,” he said, taking her arm as he strolled on, “to enjoy the sights of Paris without keeping one eye on me. No, I don’t find it flattering in the least,” he went on as she almost stumbled, “since I know it’s all duty. I don’t expect it, you see, since few females have found me so rivetingly interesting as you’ve done, you know,” he explained. “Beguiling, yes,” he said wistfully, “amusing, certainly, sensuous, brilliant, and handsome, of course, but never so endlessly fascinating.”
“I share that same intense interest with Mrs. Deems,” she retorted, without thinking, jolted from her inner conflicts by his presumption to become presumptuous herself.
He nodded approvingly; he’d brought her to life once more, and dragged her back from whatever dread things she’d been contemplating. With that father, and her duties, it was a wonder to him that she didn’t fall into the sullens more often.
“Ah, but Mrs. Deems, bless her mercenary heart, would be entirely taken with my charming fortune, and would look sharp to see it don’t slip away,” he said, with a note, she noticed, of true admiration coloring his voice.
