"I thought you might like me to come back to your chambre." He liked the breathy way she said it, the modesty gauzing her desire.
"Whatever pleases you, Fleur."The economy of his answer was a lie. The decision had already been taken. Not to possess her tonight would be like ordering the slow spin of the world to stop turning. "But please understand the consequences of such an invitation, my darling. You know I desire to lie with you again more than life itself."
"More than the Revolution?"
His jaw momentarily tightened but he managed to reply soothingly. "Shall we say that the two are quite compatible."
"Until—" The lamplight they were passing showed him her anxious profile framed by the window. Merde, why could women not enjoy the moment?
The restless shift of taffeta hinted at unhappy decisions still to be made."France needs you, Raoul. That's what this is all about. I don't want to stand in your way and if..." Raoul wondered where her female logic was galloping. "If Quettehou denounces me... If that ever happens, Raoul, you will have to abandon me, swear you did not know my origins."
"Oh." He smiled in the darkness, his heart stirred by her unselfishness. "Quettehou is just an annoying flea of a fellow. I will protect you against him, I promise." To his delighted amazement she burrowed into his shoulder. He tightened his arm comfortingly about her. "Fleur, Fleur?" He tilted her face up. The flicker of street lamps showed the glimmer of teardrops beneath her eyes.
"When you did not come back from Caen, Raoul," she whispered, "I felt so alone. It wasn't the same, the world, without you. I didn't want to go on."
"But you would have done, ma mie," he replied huskily. "People do." Inside he was struggling to stay calm.
"This is so difficult. I'm not sure how to tell you. Raoul, I am... in love with you and... and because I love you, I must let you go."
"Fleur, Fleur." Kissing her, he let his passion be her answer, for his answer was beyond more speech.
Could men deceive with kisses? Oh, Fleur hoped not. She so desperately hoped not, for this wonderful man was kissing her as though it was their last moment on earth. When he gave her chance to draw breath, she laughed breathily, and wrapped her arms more snugly about his neck.
It is the truth that there are few moments of utter euphoria for any living creature. For Raoul, the shining instances had been David's consent to accept him, the taking of the Bastille and the glory of being elected a deputy of the Convention. But Fleur's sweet revelation surpassed all else.
Fortune had taken a hostage; now he could no longer work for the Revolution single-mindedly.
"I realise that France must come first," the aristocrat he adored was saying.
And for the first; time in his life Raoul was really afraid for the future.
Chapter 21
"Bad news?"
Barricaded behind a small stack of leather-bound tomes, Raoul looked up from the writing desk where the Jacobin constitution of France still resembled more crossings-out than finished copy. The morning breeze from the open windows of Hérault's cottage mischievously blew over a page of Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois as though it wanted to read ahead. Fleur watched him reach out for the penknife and idly draw it beneath his thumbnail. "You've read that letter several times," he prompted.
She recognised the tiny telltale mannerisms, the wry tug of his mouth that betrayed a twinge of guilt at keeping her to himself these last two weeks. While they had feasted on love, Emilie had slid out of life.
With a sigh, she folded the letter from Caen.
"Is your friend in need of you, Fleur?"
"No, Raoul." He did not need to know that her dearest Charlotte was about to become an émigrée, deliberately thumbing her nose at the Republic and sentencing herself as a traitor."It's from a girl I knew at school. She would have made a wondrous deputy. She's descended from the dramatist Pierre Corneille."
"Would you like me to insert it in the constitution?" he teased. "All those with a dramatist in their family tree have a prior right to stand for election. Why are you glaring at me, ma mie?" She was getting to know when the banter hid a deeper interest. He didn't believe her. His eyes flicked to the letter and then back to her face and his smile was quicksilver. "And now I suppose this frustrated lady is expecting her third child?" Infuriating man!
"No. Indeed, she has turned down all her beaux." Then Fleur added to satisfy him, "But she is quite miffed with you and your friends for depriving France of the continued services of the Girondin government."
"Let me see."
"No, I had better not distract you any more." She brushed the edge of Charlotte's letter teasingly across his outstretched palm before sliding it swiftly through the slit in her skirt seam into her petticoat pocket. Charlotte had artlessly mentioned which Girondin deputies had fled to Caen. Raoul probably knew already. She bestowed a kiss on his dark hair and danced out of his grasp, shaking her skirts at him skittishly.
Outside, she stood still, the laughter no longer in her eyes. These last two weeks had been the happiest of her life. The dream of a cottage—a well-fitted out cottage!—in the woods with an adoring prince. But it was a childhood game of house. While she gardened and portrayed the housewife, her play husband, busy at his desk, had no intention of putting a ring on her finger.
With sadness in her heart, she drew in the beauty of this moment with all her senses: the heavy scent of wallflowers, the summer buzz of busy insects, the tangle of colours—gold-centred daisies, pink valerian, pansies in mourning, and blue forget-me-nots reflecting the sky like little looking glasses.
The rustle of sleeve betrayed she was not alone. Raoul stood watching her from the doorway, one arm gracefully raised against the jamb. A frond of flowering rose peered at him on face level and he broke it off, twirling its stem, his mind, no doubt, still planing and joining "equality" to "right to work" while "votes for females" lay in wooden shavings about his chair.
"What is wrong?"
How could she collate the feelings scattered in her mind and set them before him? She wanted children who would know their father; a lawful husband, not a dead one; a front door that would not be broken open by soldiers; beds safe from bayonet thrusts and... bread she did not have to queue for.
It was impossible to tell this man who cared for France that the world his Revolution had created was for her a terrifying anarchy, a paper dream.
"Fleur?"
The actress bestowed a smile upon him across her bare shoulder, and flouncing to the dappled shade, she scooped up her straw hat and skimmed it to the ground. Then, settling into the cushions of the low-slung hammock, she stretched languorosly, her fingers idly playing across the hempen strings.
"The constitution of France," she declared, "decrees that all men of goodly proportion under thirty years of age shall make love at least once a day." With a woman's gaze, she luxuriously appraised the gorgeous mesh of dark hair and finely tanned skin made bare by his unfastened shirt, and moved down provocatively past the sleek line of his waist to his breeches.
"Passed!" he murmured and strode across to stand by the hammock. His face wore the dazed expression of a man intent on fulfilling the clause by every dot and tail.
"The constitution also decrees that such citizens should cook the dinner tonight."
"Not passed." The shocked, inverted hammock spat her face down onto the grass and Raoul sprawled across her, pressing her wrists against the cool green blades. His hand slid up her calf and caressed the warm flesh where her stocking ended. "The declaration of the needs of man," he whispered, "requests that all beautiful girls over sixteen surrender to the nearest gentleman this instant." His kiss between her shoulderblades added a semicolon. It was then a boot nudged his ribs.
"Ha, and I thought you occupied with honing the constitution." Hérault's amused tone drifted inconveniently downwards.
"Oh, that constitution!" exclaimed Fleur, released to wriggle out on her hands and knees.
"Blasphemy!" Hérault's cane took a swipe a
t her derriere. "I would not have lent you Le Nid had I realised it would be used for such scurrilous goings-on." He ran an exploratory finger across the support ropes of his hammock as if looking for unreasonable fraying.
Raoul rolled onto his back and sat up but Fleur was already on her feet, smoothing her grass-stained apron.
"It was most magnanimous of you, Hérault," she conceded, perturbed that some compelling purpose must have brought him in person to disturb their Eden. Hérault gave her a reproachful stare that implied she could have been sharing her favours more democratically and disappeared back into the modest salon.
"Why is he here?" she whispered.
Raoul clawed back his unkempt hair. "Maybe the federalist danger. We'll find out."
She drifted into the cottage after him.
Hérault had already divested himself of his coat and was casting an eye over the desk. "You've been busier than I expected."
"Lord, Hérault, there are limits to frivolity." Raoul's roguish grin had Fleur blushing."I've also been teaching my girl here the rudiments of sketching. Whoever taught her before—" He recognised his error. "Let's just say we've covered a lot of ground," he added.
"Taught her before?" Hérault sauntered over to stand in front of Fleur like a general suspecting a thief in the ranks. "The daughter of a lady's maid taking art lessons."
"I've had other admirers." Her tone was tart and she sat down pointedly on the chaise longue so the gentlemen might sit also, but Hérault, it seemed, had no intention of divulging his purpose in her presence. She was not to be allowed to play Mme Roland and eavesdrop on the conversation.
"Make us some coffee, mignonne." The ex-nobleman still gave orders.
Standing behind Hérault's broad shoulders, Raoul lifted a hand to his forehead to mask his amusement. For an instant, the paid-up member of the Société Fraternelle looked fit to give the former advocat-general a kick on his aristocratic shin, but Hérault had lent them his cottage.
"Of course, excuse me." Fleur disappeared to the kitchen before she said something that might give her a fast escort to La Force, and instead took her displeasure out by loudly slamming Hérault's kettle onto the wood oven. Then she tiptoed back to eavesdrop.
* * *
"Sacré bleu!" Hérault viewed the tangle of greenery through the open window with disgust. "I'll need to get the gardener in again. It looks like Paris out there. Out of bloody control."
"Fleur's made a start." Raoul drew the chair out from behind the desk and sat down. "I'm surprised to see you. I thought you weren't planning to come here until next week."
Hérault swung round. "Let's say I had to get away. Every time I set foot in the street, there is some hairy, stinking lackey of Marat's thrusting a petition at me, calling for arrests or waving some cursed placard, asking me why I haven't introduced this or that. There was a crowd of slatternly Amazons this morning bawling for bread. I'm wearing out, Raoul. And there's no enthusiasm about the new constitution even if we add in your amendments. Mark my words, the bastards'll probably pass it, shove it in a cupboard and turn the key."
He unwound his stock and peeled it from his throat. "We've inherited a right mess, my dear fellow, and it's getting worse by the hour. There's no decent leadership and I'm not going to stick my neck out."
Raoul made no answer. The dogs that yapped loudest were often at the back.
Hérault sniffed and continued, "I can't see that making an example of Lyons is going to remedy matters and it's getting closer to home. There's a story going round that the town of Evreux rang every bell in the place to welcome Buzot back and that the Calvados army's already in bed with him. We've word that Caen is planning to hold a military rally, and if Normandy forms an alliance with the federalists in Brittany, we'll have to send a force to meet them. Then it will be reprisals. Your name came up as the Angel of Death for Caen. Saint-Just looked so disappointed."
"Christ!" Raoul thrust the chair back and paced to the door. "Not your suggestion, I trust," he growled across his shoulder.
"Hardly!" Hérault's fingers played along the hem of his stock. "You won't be able to refuse or—"
"Or I'll be seen as a closet federalist. Diable! Who did suggest it, then?"
"Marat."
"Merde!" He could already imagine the carts of prisoners trundling along Rue Saint Pierre and turning into the Rue Monte-a-Regret. "Do you have any good news?" he asked grimly.
"Does it exist? Look, what's also nettling me, Raoul, is that we had the monthly election for this new Committee of Public Safety and there's only Thuriot and me. Georges Danton didn't get re-elected."
"What! Who the hell's trying to take over then?"
"Two of Robespierre's unholy trinity—Couthon and Saint-Just. We're losing the edge, Raoul. Georges hasn't the fire in the belly he used to have. He's spending too much time with Louise and his children. I wouldn't admit it to anyone else, my dear fellow, but I'm feeling devilish de trop. God, I'm even beginning to understand how Boissy feels. Boissy!"
"Oh, come on, Hérault. You're just feeling jaded. It'll pass."
"Will it? Remember old Sieyès's pamphlet dividing society into three estates—the nobles, the Church and the rest. Well, I'll give you a fourth one. The printers and hacks. It's 'Who shall we sink our fangs into today, brothers?' and it's me they're swimming after like bloodied sharks."
"It works both ways. Would you have us muzzle them?"
"Yes, the dishonest ones! Damn 'em, after all I've done, the bastards can't forget I was born an aristocrat. Believe me, every time I run into Marat he grins at me like a damn gnome, as if he's got my name on a list."
Raoul took a deep breath. He hadn't planned on returning yet. These last two weeks with Fleur had been Elysium but he recognised the waters of Lethe lapping round his feet. He kicked a toe at the doorstep. Was it just half an hour ago that life had seemed so blissful?
"I've been away too long."
Hérault came to stand behind him. "There's something else, Raoul."
"Oh yes," he turned. "I can guess." But he was wrong.
"You've got to let her go," Hérault jerked his blond head at the inner door. "The rumours grow more poisonous by the day. She's not worth the risk."
Raoul drew an angry breath. "Quettehou, I suppose. What's the bastard saying now?"
"Everything in the hope that something sticks. Murderess, trollop, hoarder—"
"Ah yes, dispensing soup to the hungry is hoarding." Scowling, he pushed past Hérault and sat down heavily upon the chaise longue.
"Quettehou's saying she's a former aristocrat not an actress. She is, isn't she?"
"I haven't asked." Raoul leaned back against the tasselled bolster, brazening it out. "It's not supposed to matter."
"But it does." Unflinching blue eyes, hard as flint, strove to stare him down.
"Christ, Hérault. I never thought to see this day. You have got the wind up!"
"Yes, and I'm not proud of it. Sorry, Raoul, I don't want her here on my premises." He jabbed the air downwards. "Amusing as she is, I don't want any connection with her any more, and if you'll take my advice, you'll drop her. She'll bring you down."
Raoul stubbornly folded his arms. "And what if I'm not prepared to listen?"
"Oh, but you'll have to."The voice that had persuaded parliaments and assemblies warmed to its purpose. "You are about the only one left of us that Marat isn't trying to undermine—"
"Ha!" Raoul slammed a hand down on the leather seat. "Because the beggar doesn't see me as a threat."
"No, damn it! Because the bastard admires you. You are still the people's hero."
"And yet he lets his minion Quettehou out like a loose cannon to fire where he pleases."
"No, Raoul, it's only Fleur that Quettehou's gunning for." Hérault was wrong; Quettehou would fire at all who protected her. He already had. "Georges wants you to stand for the committee. We need a counterbalance to Robespierre. Don't look so disbelieving. If his trio side with the enragés, they're g
oing to demand the Girondins' execution. You don't want it, I don't want it... The Mountain's not listening to me any more. Do you know what one of the committee said to me yesterday? 'Pooh, you wouldn't even begin to understand, you've never known what it is to struggle'"
"Hérault!" Raoul chided. Tired men imagined hurts where none were intended.
"No, you listen to me! Read the writing on the wall, damn you! If Max Robespierre is the new man, he.s also a stickler for respectability and you're hanging around this actress's skirts like a dog in heat. The chit's already annoyed him when she did that outrageous satire as La Coquette. He hasn't forgotten. You've had your vacation, Raoul, France needs you." He slammed a hand down on the desk. "Oh God! Where's that damned coffee?"
* * *
Setting a tray and listening at a door were incompatible, Fleur disgustedly decided, forced to abandon her post for sensible reasons. She had heard enough already to alarm her. The Convention wanted to make Raoul its butcher while they lurked lily-livered in Paris. Well, she hoped he'd refuse. If he didn't, then she would not be sharing either beds or breakfasts in his company.
It wouldn't be just the Calvados ringleaders and the fugitive Girondins who would get scooped up in the Mountain's net, but small-fry intellectuals like Charlotte and her friends. In fact, Fleur had not the slightest doubt that the insurrection would be used as an excuse to cleanse out anyone with noble connections. Charlotte was astute. No wonder she was packing her bag for England.
Halting behind the door with her tray, Fleur could only wonder that the entire female population of France was not heading across the Channel with alacrity.
Raoul opened the door at the rattle of cups. The relaxed lover had vanished; Paris had him once more within its tentacles.
With an expression smoothed into cosmetic serenity, Fleur hid the urgent desire to bounce Hérault's porcelain off the nearest wall onto his head. Briskly she set down the coffee cups on the small table and straightened, wondering how long the two would brew the news before they poured it out.
Fleur-de-Lis Page 42
