by Edith Layton
“Catherine,” came a low whisper in the dark, “do go to sleep. For we must travel hard in the morning. We go a roundabout route.”
“How did you know I was not sleeping?” she whispered back.
“I could hear you thinking,” Sinjun chuckled. “And I could not hear you snore.”
“I don’t snore.” Catherine giggled, thinking again, as she had all evening, that the marquis seemed to have put off his cold, cynical manner as he had put off his immaculate garments. Now he seemed so much younger and more carefree that she had a difficult time remembering the aloof aristocrat she had met a hundred years ago in another life, in London.
“Nonsense,” he replied softly. “Hear old Jenkins sawing away over there? I’ll wager between the two of you, I won’t have a moment’s rest this night.
“Catherine,” he said again, after a pause, “do not worry. We shall see you safely home again. But I wonder—how shall you explain your travels away to your family when you get home? Should I expect your brother-in-law at my doorstep at dawn with a pistol clutched in his hand? For while I consider Jenkins an excellent chaperone, I do not know if William will.”
“Not William,” Catherine smiled; “Arthur. And I assure you, you need not fear. Indeed, he will be grateful to you for seeing me safely from my own muddled affairs.”
“I don’t have to make reparation for sullying your good name?” he asked lightly.
There was a moment’s silence, and then he heard her reply in a suspiciously low, broken tone. “Indeed, I do not see how anyone could have sullied it more than I.”
Sinjun silently cursed himself for an insensitive clod, and then went on as if he had not heard her, “I must admit that if I knew my sister was traveling with me, that is to say, if I were not myself, and heard that my sister was traveling with me, I should be outraged and fly to her defense.”
Catherine gave a little laugh. “I did not know you had a sister.”
“Well, I was not hatched from an egg,” he protested, in mock affront. “Of course I have a sister, and I had a mother and a father as well, you know.”
“Tell me about them,” Catherine said sleepily.
And so the lofty Marquis of Bessacarr lay back upon his straw pallet in an abandoned French farmhouse on a cold March night and spoke into the darkness of his sister’s wild extravagances and her complacent husband, and their brood of unruly children. Encouraged by Catherine’s delighted response, and prodded by her questions, he told her in less merry tones about his wastrel father and his invalid mother. By the time the natural progression of his story had led him into deep water and he fell silent, wondering how to tell her of the mistakes he had made in his career, he noticed she did not urge him to continue. Instead, he only heard her muted, even breathing.
He rose and went to her. She lay like a child with one hand under her cheek and the other flung out in sleep. He knelt to cover her more securely with her coat. If she were an actress, he thought almost angrily, seeing the easy peace sleep had brought her, she was the best he had ever met.
“I make no doubt”—Jenkins’ amused voice came from the shadows—“that you have put many females to sleep of nights. But I do doubt that you’ve ever just talked one to sleep before.”
“Go to sleep, you old pretender,” the marquis grumbled as he sank down upon his bed of straw again, “or you’ll wake her.”
Chapter XV
Their journey was not half so simple as Catherine had anticipated. The weather was against them. First rain, then cold to freeze it where it lay, then wind and more rain slowed their forward movement. They dared not go by coach, and yet increasing numbers of coaches, private and hired, passed them on the roads. It was as the marquis had predicted: The English—at least some small portion of the more than fifteen thousand who had arrived on French shores since Louis had been put back on the throne—were beginning to go home again.
At every stop either the marquis or Jenkins would engage the inhabitants of the small villages or farming communities in easy conversation. Rumor was everywhere, and while the farrier in one town would insist that they were at war with the pigs of England again, the one in another town would steadfastly maintain that Louis still held sway and the adventurer Bonaparte was still at Elba, safely out of harm’s way.
Other incidents impeded them. Catherine’s horse, never in the best condition, began to founder as they traveled further toward the coast, and they had to stop and search and bargain till they could trade it for another, younger bit of horseflesh that an avaricious farmer near Vironvey agreed to part with. When Catherine insisted on paying Sinjun for the expense, he grew angry, and their bickering caused Jenkins to comment that he felt as though he were seeing two children home from an outing that had overtired them.
Jenkins, for his part, had insisted on calling Sinjun “lord” and “sir” till Sinjun had cursed him and snarled that Catherine would understand if he dropped the pose and continued to call him “lad” or “friend” or “enemy,” for fiend’s sake, so long as he was done with posturing as a correct gentleman. Jenkins had looked wounded and explained that those names were only for Sinjun’s ears alone, and not for use in company. And when Sinjun rejoined that Catherine was by no means polite company, she looked so stricken that both the marquis and Jenkins together had to jest and make up foolish verses to old songs till they had jollied her out of her depression.
One day they had to sit and wait out the weather in the shelter of a disused barn. For the rain and wind were so fierce that they knew neither the horses nor they themselves could have traveled far. They had passed the time telling stories, speculating on the fate of those they had known in Paris. When, at noon, Jenkins produced an old, limp deck of cards, they had cheered as though they had been given the rarest treat.
They had traveled together for five cold, unpleasant days. They had slept in abandoned houses and begged night’s permission to camp in barns. Their food had been rough, their beds usually straw or their own folded garments, yet Catherine could never remember being happier.
And the cause of her happiness, she had thought on the fifth day, rode alongside her. Though they had been constantly together throughout the journey, and only for a few moments of the day was she ever alone, she grew uneasy when he was not with her. She had stolen glances at his straight back and noted the way the wind tossed his demon-black hair back from his forehead. Each night, like the small children Jenkins had commented on, they had chatted happily in the dark till sleep overtook them. He had been a courteous and charming companion, and every last vestige of the cool autocrat she had envisioned him was gone. And, above all, never once since they had begun their trek had he looked at her with the salacious, burning looks he had used when they met in society. He did indeed, she thought with a mixture of relief and disquiet, treat her as an equal.
He had often made her laugh, there in the night, when they spoke to each other as disembodied voices. And she counted among her life’s greatest triumphs those moments when she in turn reduced him to helpless mirth. Sometimes they spoke of their past lives, and though she found nothing in hers that she thought might interest him, still he pressed her to tell him more. So she had recounted her mother’s sad story, and told him of Jane’s beauty and Arthur’s primness, and even, as the hour grew late and Jenkins seemed to snore in earnest, of her own desire to be a free and independent person rather than an obligation for her sister’s new family to bear.
Sometimes after that first night she told him of Rose and Violet, and tried to make him see that they were nothing like one would have thought, simply common harlots. She told him of their hopes and fears and attempted to let him see that their lives, apart from their trade, were much as anyone else’s. And she felt he did try to understand.
She thought he was far too hard on himself. He did not seem to be able to speak of his past without disparaging it and demeaning himself in jest. He did not appear to be able to speak of the woman he had offered for without congratulat
ing her on her perspicacity in rejecting him. He held himself in low esteem, and she found herself tightening her hands to fists whenever he joked, there in the night, about what an empty, idle fellow he was. For she dared not let him see how very much she wished to disprove what he said. One night, as he was speaking, she almost blurted out, “No, how can you say that? You are a man any woman would give her life to please.” For where would she proceed from there? If he rose and came to her and asked her to prove that, how could she then say, “No, I didn’t mean that.”
The only discomfort Catherine had felt beyond the physical on their journey toward home was the discomfort of knowing that if he knew her feelings—worse, if she displayed them—he would think her to be the easy female he had originally thought her.
So she kept herself under restraint. They spoke of books they both had read and liked. They joked about the people they both had met. They giggled in the night like small children afraid to wake their nanny, Jenkins. But they did not touch. And they did not speak about their new friendship. Catherine kept herself on a tight rein. She was so busy keeping her feelings tightly to herself that she never saw the looks he bent upon her, obliquely and often during their journey.
The next day the sky cleared and it was a cool morning—one of those strange mornings in the earliest spring when the air holds only a tantalizing promise of the splendors of the months to come.
“We’re allowing ourselves a treat today,” Sinjun said as he rode beside her. “We’ve come more than halfway and the coast will soon be in sight. I think we deserve a day of rest. We are on the outskirts of Rouen, and since we have heard no bells tolling or cannon fire, I think we can safely assume the throne lies secure still. So we will stop at an inn. Then it will be an easier day’s journey to the coast.”
“And,” growled Jenkins, “he neglected to mention that my horse’s shoe is coming off.”
“Ungenerous Jenkins,” Sinjun said. “Here I was convincing Catherine it was all due to my magnanimous nature and you have to tell her the blunt truth.”
“Bless your horse,” Catherine cried, “for I think I would trade my soul for a chance to wash my hair and sleep upon a bed that a horse hasn’t used first.”
“And,” Jenkins stressed, “we must go out, His Lordship and I, to nose out the land. We’ll be convivial in the taproom, Catherine, whilst you launder your hair, and find out what’s to know. We need to know if we have to skulk about in Le Havre or if we can ride in like free men and charter a vessel openly. Things depend upon what state the land’s in. And whether there are any looking for us or not.”
Catherine sobered at the reminder that there might yet be danger. For she had felt so secure thus far that she had almost persuaded herself that the night in Paris when M. Beaumont approached her had been nothing but a mad fancy of hers.
The inn they chose heartened her. It was clean and in far better repair than the last one in Saint-Denis.
They had spoken for two rooms. One, Sinjun had explained, was for himself and his good wife, and the other for his brother-in-law. Catherine’s room, she saw with joy, when the proprietor’s daughter had left her at last, after filling the large basin of water Catherine had bespoken, was as lovely as the faded beauty of an old genteel lady. The carpet upon the floor yet bore the outlines of soft spring flowers. And, best of all, Catherine thought as she immersed her hands in the warm scented water, there were soft towels and a cake of soap at the washstand.
She stripped off her peasant dress and washed herself from top to toe. Then, as she knew she would have more time alone, since Sinjun and Jenkins had the horses to see to, and then would undoubtedly luxuriate in their own room for a space, she allowed herself the bliss of washing straw and dust from her hair in the large enameled rose basin. Glowing with good feeling, she shook out a plain blue frock from her bag and got into it. Clean and dressed, she sat in a chair by the fire to comb out and dry her tresses.
But afternoon came and began to fade, and her hair was completely dry and silky soft, and still there was no knock upon the door. She began to worry and went to the window to look out. There was little activity in the stable yard below. It was only a tranquil late-afternoon scene that met her eyes. There was a small millpond, deserted save for a few geese that patrolled its tiny shores, and the only soul she could spy was a stable boy, drawing water from the well’s pump.
As the hours went by, all sense of ease and delight faded from Catherine. They had been gone too long, and she worried over the dozen misfortunes that might have befallen them. She had almost gotten up the courage to go downstairs by herself, against all of Sinjun’s express orders, when she heard a light tap upon her door.
She fairly flew to the door and flung it open. Sinjun stood there, looking down at her with surprise.
“I hope,” he said, entering the room and closing the door behind him, “that you have no intention of stepping outside in that garb.”
The joy in her face faded.
“This is just an old garment I had when I came to the duchess,” she said in confusion, looking down at her simple high-waisted blue muslin gown.
Her hair, newly washed, fell riotously around her face, and she had to sweep it back to see him when she looked up at him again.
A curious spasm, almost of pain, crossed his face for a fleeting moment.
“It might not be,” he drawled, in a voice she had not heard for many days, “High fashion on the Champs Elysees, “but here it is decidedly not what a simple little peasant wench wears to dinner. It’s as well, I suppose. For it would be better if you did not go down again till we leave.”
She searched his face for the reason for the solemnity in his voice.
“We’ve been out, we two hearty French lads, chatting up the local gentry. And, it seems, they don’t understand why we’re not marching in the other direction, toward Paris. For all the able-bodied young chaps hereabouts are off to war again. They’ve heard that their little corporal is on the high road to glory once more. But it’s not confirmed, of course. So we’ll have to dine without you tonight, Catherine. We’ll get you a tray in your room and we’ll sit and drink with every local know-something we can find.”
Catherine tried to essay a smile. “But Sinjun, you said it’s only a day’s ride to Le Havre. Surely, we can get that far before a war breaks out.”
“Catherine,” he said, his gray eyes serious and steady, “we may well be at war at this moment. I do not know. And if we are, then Jenkins and I are very wanted men. We are not an English peer and his valet—we are also labeled ‘spies’ in some quarters. I do not care to spend years skulking about the French countryside in disguise. And neither do I wish to be clapped in irons in Le Havre. For the ports are the first places the soldiers go to comb through the refugees for profit. So stay in this room and say only a shy little non if a maid or anyone comes to this door tonight.”
Catherine nodded and then, as he turned to leave, tugged at his sleeve. “Must you go out?” she whispered. “Could you not stay and just wait till morning?”
“I must go out. There’s little danger here, I think, and we have to discover how much is fact and how much is minor. And, oh Catherine, if you get the notion of creeping below to aid us by eavesdropping or some other strategy your fertile mind conjures, there is one other bit of news. It seems that there is talk of a reward offered for the apprehension of some vile Englishwoman who stole a fortune from her employer, a certain English lady. And the word is that the miscreant is most probably headed for the coast.”
Catherine shrank back.
“You know I stole nothing,” she gasped.
“Of course. Your purse is in my keeping, remember? It’s a meager treasure you hoarded. And I don’t even know if you are the female they are seeking. But M. Beaumont is a desperate character and dislikes having his will crossed. So stay safe inside, my little French ‘wife,’ and no harm will befall you.”
“Sinjun?” Catherine asked softly.
“Yes?�
�� he answered, his hand already on the knob of the door.
“Will you come back tonight and let me know what you have discovered?”
“Of course,” he agreed. “Otherwise I think you’ll stand and shake all the night through. Don’t trouble yourself so. I said it is all rumor. And you know you are safe with us.”
Jenkins brought her a tray a short while later.
“Best if the maids stay far from this room altogether,” he said, putting it down for her. “When you’re done, wait till there’s no one about, peek out the door if you must, and when the coast is clear, put the empty plates outside. They’ll understand below stairs.”
“They’ll think me a poor shy retiring lady,” Catherine said with a smile.
“There’s that,” Jenkins agreed, “and also the fact that His Lordship explained how his little wife was enceinte, and feeling very poorly after her ride.”
Catherine gasped in indignation, but Jenkins only continued blithely, “He’s a lad who has a fine tale for any occasion. It’s what has made him so valuable in his work. You should see him below stairs, drinking and gossiping, like he was a born Frenchie. All out of sorts, of course, because he’s itching to go off and join up with his emperor’s forces, and he’s stuck with a pretty new wife, expecting her first babe, and he’s got to deliver her to relatives before he’s off to war. He’s even made me feel sorry for him.”
