Sherri Cobb South

by French Leave

  The Mother Superior deliberated for a long moment before making her pronouncement. “I cannot speak for the Almighty but, while I do know He works in mysterious ways, I cannot imagine how even He might expect to encourage virtue by rewarding vice with a handsome and gallant husband! Non, child, it appears to me that the sin in this case belongs to your aunt and uncle, in forcing you to choose between a husband you could not respect and a vocation to which you were not called.” She raised Lisette to her feet by the hand still clasping hers. “But I must remind you that it is not for me to decide. The chapel is open; had you not best discuss the matter with le bon Dieu Himself?”

  * * * *

  “Alors,” pronounced Raoul over a bottle of his host’s excellent sherry, “all is settled. Father Claude will be here within the hour to perform the ceremony.”

  “Oui, so it appears,” Étienne agreed doubtfully. “Still, I wish I might know where milord Waverly is at this moment.”

  Étienne’s wish was about to be realized, for at that moment a commotion at the door heralded the arrival of the next packet from Dover. The travelers surged into the inn to procure refreshments, lodging, or transportation to points further inland. As the throng vied for the innkeeper’s attention, one man stood apart from the crowd, his attention fixed instead on a survey of the taproom. He was tall, dark, and strangely compelling even though his rumpled evening clothes should have appeared ridiculously out of place. Étienne, recognizing him, would have turned his face away, had he not been momentarily distracted by the earl’s companion, a stunningly beautiful woman also clad in evening attire. Here Étienne’s appreciation of feminine beauty betrayed him, for while he assayed Lady Helen’s charms, Lord Waverly caught sight of Lisette’s erstwhile admirer and headed straight for him.

  Upon reaching the table, however, it was not Étienne to whom the earl addressed himself, but Raoul. His communication was brief and to the point.

  “All right, where is she?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Raoul said, looking him squarely in the eye.

  Lord Waverly bared his teeth in a smile with little warmth and less humor. “I think you do.”

  “That, sir, is your misfortune.”

  Waverly seized the weasel-faced Frenchman by the cravat and hauled him to his feet. “By God, if you have harmed one hair on her head—”

  “I tell you, I don’t know what you mean!” declared Raoul, white-faced but unwavering. “Perhaps you have mistaken me for someone else.”

  “I don’t think so. Innkeeper!” Waverly called to the hôtelier, and somehow his voice penetrated the crowd demanding service. “It seems these two gentlemen have forgotten their room assignments. Can you perhaps oblige them?”

  “Oui, monsieur,” replied this worthy. “Upstairs and down the corridor. Last two doors on the left.”

  “Merci.”

  Waverly released his hold on Raoul’s neckcloth, and the Frenchman collapsed back into his chair. Taking Lady Helen by the arm, the earl led her in the direction of the staircase.

  “Wait!” cried Étienne, throwing out an arm to forestall them. “As you have surmised, we have escorted Lisette—Lady Waverly, that is— back to France. Her aunt and uncle, you must know, miss her dreadfully. And since she was reluctant to leave you, my lord, we were obliged to take certain measures to, er, persuade her, but I swear to you there is nothing the matter with her save a case of the mal de mer!”

  To his astonishment, Lord Waverly laughed. “The mal de mer? I fear my wife has been making a May game of you, M. Villiers. Lisette was never seasick a day in her life.”

  “I assure you, my lord, she—”

  “What?’ demanded Raoul. “Not sick, you say? Why, I’ll—” Livid with rage, he shot up from the table and took the stairs two at a stride. Étienne, Lord Waverly, and Lady Helen hurried after him. They caught up with him just as he turned the key in the lock and flung the door open. The bed, though rumpled, was unoccupied. The curtains swayed gently in the breeze from an open window. Raoul strode across the room to it, tore the curtains back, and found himself staring into the sturdy branches of an apple tree.

  “Gone!” he uttered in choked accents. “She is gone!” For a long moment, the group stared transfixed at the window through which, apparently, Lisette had effected her escape, until an uproar from below broke the spell. Downstairs, a newcomer was attempting to question the innkeeper regarding his more recent arrivals. As the interrogator posed his questions in English (if one could call it that) and his host spoke only French, this proved to be an exercise in futility. Having failed to communicate any other way, the newcomer, having no French at his command, was now endeavoring to overcome the language barrier through volume.

  “Good heavens!” cried Lady Helen, recognizing the voice. “Ethan!”

  Chapter 14

  If you assure me that your intentions

  are honorable.

  PIERRE DE BEAUMARCHAIS,

  Le Barbier de Séville

  Lisette and her flight forgotten, Lady Helen ran to the top of the stairs and looked down onto the entryway below. There stood her husband, gesturing to the innkeeper and speaking in slow, loud accents, as if addressing a deaf person.

  “A lady—no, no, la-dy. A woman,” he explained, sketching a woman’s curvaceous form with his hands. “About this ‘igh and this big around—”

  “Ethan!”

  He turned toward the sound of her voice, and Lady Helen was shocked to discover that he looked distinctly green about the gills.

  “Darling, you look dreadful!” she exclaimed. “Are you all right?”

  If she had acted distraught, if she had begged him to rescue her, he would have moved heaven and earth to save her. But no, there she stood as if only just risen from her adulterous bed, dress crumpled and hair mussed, fretting over his health as if he had not spend the better part of four hours casting up his accounts into the Channel as he raced to reach her. It was more than flesh and blood could bear.

  “Am I all right?” he echoed incredulously, marching somewhat unsteadily up the stairs to confront her. “Me wife runs off with a reprobate, and now she wants to know if I’m all right?"

  Up came Lady Helen’s chin. “I suppose I should be gratified that you tore yourself away from that creature in Green Street long enough to notice I was gone!”

  Sir Ethan blinked at her in bewilderment. He had known the Radneys were staunch Tories, but this hatred of Sir Lawrence Latham seemed excessive.

  “Why do you stare, Ethan? Did you truly think you could conceal such a connection from your wife? I know it all. I have known ever since I came to London.”

  Poor Sir Ethan was by this time thoroughly confused, but one thing was becoming increasingly clear: they were not discussing politics. “Just what, exactly, are you accusing me of?”

  “You have set up that dreadful Hutchins woman as your mistress! You need not bother to deny it. I saw you kissing her in the middle of Green Street.”

  “Oh, so that’s it!” Sir Ethan exclaimed as revelation dawned.

  “Then you do not deny it!”

  “You told me not to bother,” he reminded her. “Besides, I wasn’t kissing Mrs. ‘utchins—”

  “You most certainly—”

  “She was kissing me!”

  “You were hardly struggling to free yourself!”

  “Not to say this isn’t fascinating,” Lord Waverly put in, “but may I suggest you find a less public place to continue this discussion? I daresay these gentlemen will not object if you use Lisette’s room, as they have business to attend to elsewhere—outside, I think, as none of the rooms here appear to stretch to the requisite twenty paces.”

  “Twenty paces?” Raoul echoed, turning pale. “But you would not kill the cousin of your wife!”

  “No, murder within the family can be so awkward,” agreed the earl cordially. “Be assured, I shall shoot you precisely where I intend to.”

  Seizing Raoul by the collar, Wav
erly propelled him down the stairs, pausing momentarily when he drew abreast of Sir Ethan.

  “Oh, one more thing: when you’ve finished here—and I quite realize that may take some time—I shall require your services as second, if you’ve no objection.”

  Sir Ethan stared at him, flabbergasted. “Let me get this straight. You want me to ‘elp you avenge yourself on the man ‘oo kidnapped your wife?” Recalling a similar abduction four years previously in which Lord Waverly had played not nearly so noble a rôle, he hardly knew whether to be offended or amused.

  “Believe me, I am fully alive to the irony of the situation. But there is no one else available for the task. Besides, you cannot deny there is a certain poetry about it—a symmetry, if you will,”

  Taking Sir Ethan’s stunned silence for agreement, Lord Waverly gave Raoul a nudge and steered him down the remaining stairs while Étienne brought up the rear,

  “You almost ‘ave to admire the man’s gall,” Sir Ethan observed to his wife as he watched the trio depart.

  But admiration was not the emotion uppermost in Lady Helen’s mind.

  “If you have not set Mrs. Hutchins up as a mistress, then what, pray, have you been doing in Green Street all this time?”

  “Most nights I’ve been ‘aving dinner and talking politics with Sir Lawrence Latham and a few of ‘is cronies,” Sir Ethan explained, taking her by the arm and leading her into the room so recently vacated by Lord Waverly and the two Frenchmen. Having firmly shut the door behind them, he added, “They want me to stand for election to the ‘ouse of Commons—Lord David Markham’s seat, to be exact.”

  “But that’s wonderful! And all this time I thought—oh, darling, I’ve been so miserable!”

  “So miserable, in fact, that you were willing to take up with Lord Waverly.”

  “Only to make you jealous, and in the end, I could not do it, even though I thought you had been unfaithful!”

  As she ended this burst of eloquence on a sob, Sir Ethan very wisely put aside his political ambitions and devoted himself instead to the far more urgent task of kissing away his wife’s tears.

  Upon the completion of this pleasant exercise, Lady Helen gave a sigh of blissful contentment. “And to think of that odious creature accosting you in the street! Surely such behavior is beyond the pale, even in a woman of her profession!”

  Sir Ethan, recognizing that the hour of reckoning was now at hand, released his wife with some reluctance. “As to that, love, she didn’t exactly accost me—”

  Lady Helen, seeing guilt writ large upon her husband’s expressive countenance, was filled with foreboding. “Ethan! You never accosted her!”

  “I visited her one time,” he said hastily. “Only once, and that not for the reason you think—”

  “Indeed?” challenged Lady Helen, filled with righteous indignation. “And what other reason could there be?”

  “We talked, that was all. We sat in the parlor and drank tea and—talked.”

  Lady Helen was not convinced. “About what, pray?”

  “You, mostly.”

  As he enlarged upon this theme, Lady Helen’s face grew scarlet with either embarrassment or rage; he knew not which, but had no doubt that he would not be left in ignorance for long.

  “Ethan! You discussed all our most intimate—with that—oh, how could you?”

  “ ‘ow could I not? Me only other choices were to drive you to an early grave ‘aving babies every year, or to take cold baths until me skin rotted off. I didn’t care for either one.”

  Lady Helen’s eyes grew round with wonder. “Is that why you haven’t come near me since Catherine was born?”

  “Aye, love, that’s it.” He drew her into his arms and buried his face in her neck. “I almost lost you once, ‘elen. I won’t chance it again.”

  “I was afraid you no longer cared,” she whispered, burying her fingers in his hair.

  He gave a short laugh. “Oh, I cared, all right! I cared enough to buy a bloomin’ fishing boat and chase you clear across the Channel!”

  “You bought a boat? For heaven’s sake, why?”

  “I ‘ad to. I’d already missed the packet, and the next one wouldn’t sail for hours. So I bought a fishing boat off one of the locals and ‘ired ‘im to take ‘er across.” Sir Ethan thought about his maiden voyage, most of which had been spent with his head hanging over the rail. “And a deuced uncomfortable trip I made of it, too.”

  “Poor darling! No wonder you looked unwell. But a fishing boat? What on earth are you going to do with it?”

  “Burn it!” he said with feeling.

  “And so you shall, darling, if that is what you wish. But tell me, did you truly ask Mrs. Hutchins if there was a way to maintain marital relations without having more children?”

  “Aye, love, that I did.”

  “And?” she demanded, agog with eager curiosity, “Is there?”

  * * * *

  It was a much restored Sir Ethan Brundy who entered the stable yard a short time later to find Lord Waverly and the two Frenchmen awaiting him, along with a dour-looking physician and a mournful priest, presumably there to administer the last rites to the loser. Since only one of the combatants was Catholic, the presence of this individual suggested that Raoul’s second had no very great confidence in his ability to best the earl. Sir Ethan had never participated in a duel and was not at all certain that he wished to; however, he had heard them discussed frequently enough at Brooks’s to have a fair idea that the first responsibility of a second was to persuade the participants to settle their differences in a less bloodthirsty manner. He was not surprised, therefore, when Étienne came hurrying to meet him.

  “Ah, monsieur!” cried the Frenchman, wringing his hands in agitation. “Cannot you make milord see reason? We must put a stop to this, you and I!”

  “And you think ‘e’d listen to me? Not by a long chalk! ‘e’d look down that ‘aughty nose of ‘is and tell me a work’ouse brat couldn’t possibly understand an affair of honor. And ‘e’d be right, too, come to that.”

  Étienne found this description so in keeping with his own impressions of Lord Waverly that he made no attempt to refute it. “But think you that he will kill Raoul?”

  “I think ‘e’ll do just what he said ‘e would. ‘e’ll shoot Raoul exactly where ‘e intends to.”

  In fact, Lord Waverly’s confrontation with his wife’s cousin was almost anticlimactic in its efficiency. Raoul’s temperament was much better suited for bullying defenseless young women than for acquitting himself on the field of honor, and his terror at finding himself forced into the latter was such that the result was a foregone conclusion. The paces were stepped off and the signal given, then the two men turned and fired. Lord Waverly’s ball passed cleanly through his shoulder (precisely as the earl had intended that it should), and thus Raoul’s life, such as it was, was spared.

  While the doctor cleaned and bandaged the wound, Waverly restored the pistols to their velvet-lined case, his whole demeanor showing more concern for the well-being of his weapons than for that of his erstwhile adversary. Not until after the doctor and the priest were dismissed from the premises did the earl approach Raoul and his second.

  “If you are quite finished,” he said, “you may come with me. We are going on a little journey, you and I.”

  Étienne was moved to protest. “A journey? But Raoul, he is in no condition to travel!”

  “Then it is most fortuitous that he will have you along to nurse him back to health. Come, gentlemen, we must waste no more time.”

  “Where—where are we going?” Raoul rasped feebly, grimacing in pain.

  “To the wharf. There is a ship bound for Haiti. When it sets sail, the pair of you will be on it.”

  “But—but I have not the desire to go to Haiti!” objected Étienne.

  Lord Waverly pinned him with a look. “I have assured the repellent Raoul that I would not kill my wife’s cousin. I have kept that promise, but I fear—yes, I very mu
ch fear that if I should encounter him again, either here or in England, I might, shall we say, forget? And you, I need not remind you, are no blood relation; therefore I need have no such scruples on your account.”

  Étienne allowed himself to be led to the docks without further protest.

  * * * *

  Satisfying though it was to have shipped his wife’s tormentors halfway around the world, even this successful maneuver did not change the fact that Lisette was alone and quite possibly lost in a sizable city with which neither of them were very familiar. Although Lord Waverly knew he had married a remarkably resourceful young lady, he also knew that Lisette was far too trusting: one had only to recall how readily she had solicited his escort to England to know that she was no more capable of looking after herself than a babe newborn. The thought of her roaming the streets of Calais alone, an easy mark for thieves, cutthroats, or worse, was enough to make the earl’s blood run cold. He would find her, no matter what it took. He would trudge every inch of the city, and beyond it into the surrounding countryside, if he had to. He would not rest until—

  I am far too fond of my own comfort to sacrifice it for any female...

  The memory of his own words brought him up short. He had no illusions that a search such as he proposed would be comfortable; in fact, he had every expectation that it would prove quite the opposite. And yet he was willing—no, determined might be a better word—to undertake such a search on Lisette’s behalf. The only logical conclusion was that she had somehow become necessary to his comfort. Why? He could think of only one reason: the same one expressed by Lady Helen during the frantic drive to Dover. He had fallen in love with his own wife. How very ironic, that one of the most jaded rakes in the kingdom should succumb to the artless charms of a girl almost half his age! It should have been laughable. And yet the thought of his Lisette at the mercy of the local riff-raff had the effect of wiping the sardonic smile from Waverly’s lips. Where was she, and with whom? Was she unharmed?