Lessons in French

by Laura Kinsale

  "Well, I do not wish to see her," he replied sweetly. "Good God, what can she want, the little—" He stopped himself. "You didn't tell her I was here, did you?"

  The tone of this callous rejoinder, while not entirely unwelcome to her feelings, somewhat shocked Callie. She'd been feeling miserably ashamed, awakened from a brief dream in his arms to reality again—a reality now graced by the woman he loved so deeply that he had been willing to sacrifice his very life for her. But he didn't appear to understand the situation at all.

  "Of course I told her," she said. "I've arranged for her to come here masked tonight, so that you can safely meet."

  He shook his head slowly. "Callie. Do you despise me that much?"

  She lowered her hand, curling her fingers over the note. "But… she's come to find you."

  "What a gratifying thought. Doubtless she may offer me some further opportunity to hang on her behalf. Thank you, I believe I'll avoid the prospect—and the adorable Mrs. Fowler—altogether."

  Callie turned away, walking across to her dressing table. She dropped the note in an empty pin holder and sat down in bewilderment. "I thought you would wish to see her."

  "What possible reason could I have to want to see her?" he demanded. "I've had done with the woman, you may be sure."

  She picked up a discarded scarf and began to fold it mechanically. "I suppose… I can understand that you've come to regret your… sacrifice… on her behalf."

  He gave a low laugh. "Oh my God." He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. "Regret!"

  "I thought—" She paused. "Then you don't love her anymore?"

  "Been reading the newspapers, have you?" His voice was full of scorn.

  "I did read of it, yes," she said uncomfortably. She tied a knot in the scarf.

  "I see." He gave her a civil bow. "I collect that you subscribe to the school of scandal rags that casts me as a hero for shielding my wife, rather than a scoundrel who forged a note of hand for her to pass to her credi tors." He made a casual, contemptuous f lick of his fingers. "I'm not sure which is more f lattering, being thought a criminal or a screaming fool."

  "Nothing of the sort!" she exclaimed. "I never thought you a criminal. I hope I know you better than that. And however much a miscarriage of justice it might be, surely no one would suggest a gentleman was a fool to risk his own life to protect his wife."

  "Doubtless it would be exceedingly chivalrous, if she were my wife."

  "If she—" Callie started to speak, then broke off and blinked at him. "She isn't?"

  "You have to ask me that?" he inquired bitterly. "I would have thought… you, of everyone—" He blew out a harsh breath. "But what difference does it make?" He shrugged. "No, she isn't. I've never married. Much to my mother's disgust." He gave a slight laugh and leaned against the bedpost, watching her from under lowered lashes. "I've been in love with you, you know, since I was sixteen years old."

  He said it in such a composed way, that for a moment she didn't quite take his meaning. She blinked down at the contorted scarf in her hands, frowning. She forgot, sometimes, how fine and carelessly handsome he was, but it came upon her now with strong force. She forgot because he was her friend; he was simply Trev, who made her laugh. She had adventured with him and had trusted him, slept in his arms.

  "But why do I trouble myself to tell you?" he continued, as if he were speaking to someone else. "You never believe me, and it's not as if I can do anything to the point about it. I might as well be in love with your hosiery, for all the future there is in it."

  "I don't—" She struggled with words. "I don't know that I don't believe you, precisely. You're very dear to me, and I'm sure I'm dear to you too. We're excellent friends."

  "Of course." He nodded. "Friends. And now I'll just go and find a suitable cliff from which to cast myself."

  "Oh come," she said with a wan smile.

  "My God." He pushed away from the bedpost. "Friends! And do you fall into bed with any man who's 'dear' to you? How am I to take that?"

  "Of course I don't." She stood up, letting the knotted scarf slip away. "I can't seem to help myself. With you. About that. It's extremely vexing."

  "You're quite right on that count," he said sullenly. "I'm damned vexed. I'd like to vex you right here on the f loor, in fact. And the idea of Sturgeon vexing you is enough to dispose me to murder. Is that clear? Do you comprehend me?" He took a reckless stride toward her and caught her chin between his fingers. "I'm not your friend, my lady. I'm your lover."

  She was startled into immobility, except to blink rapidly as he looked down into her eyes from so close. He bent and kissed her, a featherlight touch that belied the strength in his hand, a kiss that deepened and invaded her until she was quivering in every limb.

  He broke it off, still holding her face. "Has he kissed you like that?"

  Wordlessly, she shook her head.

  "Have any of them kissed you like that?" he demanded. "Have you had any other?"

  She drew a deep breath and thrust out her lower lip. "Have you?"

  He held her, looking down with a grim hauteur. "That's not an answer. But would you care if I had?"

  It ought to have been uncomfortable to be held in such a forceful manner, but for some reason Callie was merely breathless. "I suppose I—" She faltered. She found the truth excruciatingly difficult to admit. "I'm sure a gentleman such as yourself has a number of… of opportunities, and it would be unnatural, doubtless, if you had not responded."

  He let go of her and swung away impatiently. "Oh, I've had other opportunities, true enough."

  As Callie had not herself had any prospects of that nature, she felt at a considerable disadvantage. "Well, then. Perhaps I might care. A little. That is human nature, is it not?" She confessed that much with some effort. "But I would not allow it to disturb me unduly."

  He put his arm along the mantel and stared into the cold fireplace. "You're quite worldly about it, I see," he said with a tight smile. "And here I've been saving myself like some boy virgin."

  She gave him a doubtful look. "I beg your pardon?"

  He leaned on his fist. "To answer your question— yes, I've had other opportunities," he said brusquely. "Yes, I've taken some up. But something always stopped me in the breach. I don't know if you can understand that. I don't know that I understood it myself until lately. But I seem to be yours, Callie. Body and soul." He didn't sound as if it made him happy. "I will be till I die."

  She stood silent, turning the words over in her mind as if they were a strange device that she could not find the key to understand. With a shy move, she looked away and caught a glimpse of both of them in the mirror on her dressing table. Herself, with red hair and a high-colored complexion—if not quite dread fully plain, then certainly with no particular beauty— and him, watching her in the glass, dark-eyed and masculine, exceptionally handsome by any measure.

  The f lush on her cheeks deepened. She felt strange to herself, mortified and confused. "I don't see how that can be true," she whispered.

  "No," he said. His mouth was grim. "No, you can't, because all you can see is what's in that mirror. So! Eh bien! Sell yourself to Sturgeon. I'll be removing to France in any event," he added, "where I'll find myself some vintner who'll overcome his republican scruples so that his daughter can call herself a duchesse. And everything will be très conven able, n'est-ce pas?"

  "You're mine?" she asked in a faint voice, still bemused by his words.

  "I'll do my best to overcome the sentiment, so do not concern yourself about it." He thrust his hands in his pockets. "Ah, and here is your key." He withdrew the key and tossed it onto her dressing table. "I found nothing amiss with the books. They conform to the bank ledgers perfectly, so no hope that the good major can be dissuaded from his engagement to marry your fortune."

  She picked up the key and turned it over in her palm, looking down at it. "Did you wish to dissuade him?"

  "No such thing," he said in a curt voice. "I merely wanted to satis
fy myself as to who had blackmailed him. But it remains a mystery, and I daresay it always will now. Since Mrs. Fowler has managed to locate me, and you've all these assistant secretaries running haphazardly about the house, I don't think I'll tarry here much longer."

  "I don't understand you. If you weren't married—if you never loved her—then why—" She clenched her fist on the key. "Why did you do such a thing for her?"

  "Because I am a screaming fool, that's why!" he snapped. "It wasn't out of love for her, you may be sure. I did it for a friend."

  "A friend!" she cried indignantly. "What sort of friend would ask such a thing of you?"

  "Hush. Do you want to bring the secretaries down upon on us?"

  Callie plopped down in a chair, looking up at him. "What I want is to know how you came to be convicted of a crime on behalf of this Mrs. Fowler. I'm coming to dislike her extremely now, and perhaps I may turn her over to one of these secretaries myself."

  He shrugged. "A benevolent thought, but it would do no good. There's no evidence against her that hasn't already been dismissed by the court. You'd have to bring her to confess to Sidmouth himself, and there's slim chance of that. She may complain of her notoriety, but she likes having her neck spared well enough."

  "But why did you do it? You didn't raise a finger to defend yourself!"

  "It was ill-judged, I'll admit. Though it might have been worse."

  "So it might!" she agreed angrily. "I should like to know what so-called friend caused you to put yourself in such peril! And then I should like to see him tossed head over heels on Hubert's horns." She paused. "Or her," she added conscientiously.

  "Him," Trev said. "But you'd have liked him, Callie. And I know he would have very much liked you. We had a quip between us—" He stopped himself, looking conscious. "Well, that's no matter. Perhaps a female wouldn't appreciate the humor."

  "Perhaps," she said. Some of her rigidity left her, but she felt dissatisfied that she wasn't to be let in on whatever humor this might be. "I collect he is no longer living?"

  "No," Trev said shortly. "He's dead."

  "I'm sorry." Callie lowered her eyes. To be candid, she found herself jealous of any friend who commanded such loyalty from him. "I'm sure you miss him," she said, attempting to enter into his feel ings. "Was he a Frenchman?"

  He gave a laugh. "The Rooster? No, not hardly! Though I met him in France."

  "Oh," she said. "Oh, of course. The pugilist." Callie supposed she shouldn't be taken aback; the papers had mentioned his association with Mrs. Fowler's late husband, but she had never imagined that Trev would have a close rapport with one of the great, hulking men who pounded one another to bloody, raw f lesh in their illegal bouts.

  He seemed to read her thoughts, for he clasped his hands behind his back and bowed. "I haven't led a very respectable life since I left Shelford, my lady."

  She bent her head. "No, I suppose you haven't."

  "I expect if you've read the papers, you know that I've got no property in France, either," he added gruff ly. "It's all a great fabrication that I made up to please my mother."

  She had deduced that, in fact, and spent a number of her nights composing scornful remarks to her pillow on his general perfidy and falsehood. But she only said, "I see."

  "I made an attempt to recover it," he said, "and all I received for my trouble was to find myself in the clutches of a moneylender the likes of whom I'd knife in the back if I met him today. But I was young and witless, and I wanted to have Monceaux; I wanted to go to my grandfather and tell him I had it back. Sadly for these fine ambitions, what I got was beaten sense less in a back alley of Paris."

  Callie listened with her eyes lowered. In mockery he called her worldly wise, but she had stayed in Shelford, dreaming of adventures, reading his letters full of humor and invented tales, while he had gone out and been beaten up in an alley.

  "But to shorten this unedifying story," he continued, "I fell in with some English deserters after the war. Big fellows. We were all starving to death." He gave a humorless laugh. "I had the lucky notion of making an exhibition of English boxing in Paris. None of us knew a thing about fighting, so we fixed it. It was a sensation. I'd call for a volunteer to take on these English goddamns—you'll pardon another lesson in my language, Mademoiselle, but I'm afraid that's what we French call your countrymen under certain circumstances—and we'd have some hulking local géant ready to come up and fight. There'd be a lot of sound and fury before we made sure he won, and split the takings with him." He crossed his arms and leaned back against the mantel. "But Jem got tired of it. He began to fight in earnest. And he was good." His voice softened, and he shook his head a little. "He was amazing. But we couldn't make any profit in France by thrashing Frenchmen. So we changed his name, came back to England, and made a bid for the championship."

  "Instead of coming home to your family," she said tartly, "as you might have done in place of starving on the streets of Paris or becoming a… a—"

  "An operator of the Fancy," he supplied. "I arranged bouts and held the stakes. I didn't want to come back. My grandfather was still alive." He paused. "Among other reasons."

  That cause she did comprehend. The old duc had used mockery and scorn like a rapier on his grandson; Trev had always ignored it or turned it away with a shrug, but Callie knew. Their wildest adventures were driven by his grandfather's sneering voice. Trev would give his alley-cat yowl under her window in the middle of the night, and all the rules were at naught then. There would be a hint of violence in his laughter that only some journey to the edge of disaster could quell. To stand before his grandfather and admit that he had tried to regain Monceaux and failed—no. She understood that much.

  "But this is a boring topic," he said with a shrug. "We did well enough for ourselves. Jem fell in love with the adorable Emma, and they had a son, and everyone loved them all, and when the Rooster lay there dying on the grass, he asked me to take care of Emma and the boy." His tone was light and careless, but his expression was rather hard. "Perhaps they didn't print that part in the newspapers."

  "No," she said quietly, "they didn't print that."

  "God knows I tried to do it," he said, drawing a deep breath. "She'd listen to Jem. She's a remarkably silly woman, but she doted on him. Once he was gone—we couldn't deal at all, she and I. There was a nice sum of money that was meant for her and the boy. I had charge of it, but I could see she'd run through it before he was out of short coats. And she did. So I made her an allow ance myself—aye, you may lift your eyebrows, but I'd built up a pretty fortune, and a good deal of it was from making book on the Rooster's fights, so I reckoned it was only what I owed him. But she got herself on tick with some jeweler, and he frightened her, and she was too stupid or stubborn to come to me." He blew a scoffing breath. "As if we'd let a bill broker carry her off without breaking his legs for him first."

  She sat looking at him, sorting out this new Trevelyan in her mind: this rather fierce gentleman of fisticuffs and a friendship that outlasted death. In truth, it suited him better than presiding gravely over a grand châteaus, something that she had always had a difficult time envisioning even with his letters from France full of details and embellishments.

  But there was a certain force, a hint of real brutality about him now. In all her fantasies of pirates and swords, amid the skewering and cannon fire—clean and bloodless in imagination—Trev had been at the center. It had always been a part of him, that violence: hidden and checked, but understood. The world had brought it out in him, she thought. No, he'd never allow anyone under his protection to be carried off or threatened—not when Callie had been tagging along with him on adventures, and not now.

  "I marvel at her lack of sense," she said thought fully. "Certainly you would break his legs."

  He gave her a sardonic smile. "Well, I wouldn't do it personally, of course."

  "I did wonder why all your menservants were so large."

  He made a slight bow.

  "I ought
to be shocked," she said.

  He tilted his head to the side. "Aren't you, ma mie?"

  Callie's forehead creased as she considered the ques tion. She stood up and took a turn across the carpet. "I am exceedingly cross with you, certainly."

  "So I had noticed," he murmured.

  "Trevelyan," she said with determination. She stopped and faced him, taking a deep breath into her lungs in preparation to speak her mind.

  "Call me 'Seigneur,'" he suggested to her mildly. "If you wish to reduce me to a quivering dish of jelly in the most efficient manner."

  She ignored this. "I was led to believe you were married to that woman." She gathered her skirt, strode across the room again, and then looked back at him. "Married!"

  "I'm sure I never said so."