A Night of Secret Surrender

by Sophia James

  ‘We will leave tomorrow night. I do not think we can wait longer.’

  He nodded, but she could tell all this ministering had cost him much and that he needed to rest.

  ‘If I die—’

  She did not let him finish.

  ‘You won’t.’

  The corners of his mouth came up and then he was asleep, his hands beneath his face as a pillow as he turned on his side.

  She would have liked to have lain down beside him and felt his solid bulk against her own increasingly waiflike state, but instead she crossed the room and found a space at the window seat. The night was neither cold nor warm and she was glad for Shayborne’s company here in the silence.

  Her papa felt closer than he had for a long time. Once, her mother and father had meant everything to her, until she had seen the truth of them both in the worst of circumstance.

  Shayborne had had his share of tragedy, too. Anna. Beautiful. Kind. Sweet. Her last thoughts before slumber were of herself dancing in a London ballroom in the arms of the English Major and laughing as though she really meant it.

  * * *

  The morning brought heavy rain. She could hear it against the glass at the window and feel it in the air.

  Shayborne was awake. He was sitting up against the wall, smoking.

  She didn’t know how long he’d been there—her own slumber had been deep and uninterrupted after the drama of the last few days. She hoped he hadn’t been watching her.

  ‘You are feeling better?’

  ‘Much,’ he returned, the flash of his teeth white against the gloom of the early dawn. ‘This rain will help us, for what man wants to brave such weather, even for the sake of his country. It was the same in Spain; armies hunker down when it pours.’

  ‘Perhaps you give yourself too little credit, Major. It would be considered a triumph for any of the intelligence factions in Paris to bring you in and bad weather won’t stop that. The woman I got the medical supplies from yesterday said that if you were caught, their orders were to make certain you were left well enough to be interrogated. Again.’

  ‘And you?’

  She shrugged and looked away, feeling as though a ghost had run across her skin, dancing slowly. ‘I am as replaceable as the next agent. They will kill me on sight, though I don’t plan to make it easy.’

  ‘Then we will have to make certain that they don’t recognise us at all.’

  ‘If I come with you.’

  ‘You will.’

  She liked his certainty and smiled. To place, even for a small while, the responsibility of her safety into someone else’s hands was a liberating—and terrifying—thing.

  ‘Did you tell the person you met last night where you were staying?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. When everyone is scrambling to guard their back it always pays to keep your counsel. Even with friends.’

  ‘You’ve done that?’

  ‘For years,’ he returned. ‘The quality of good intelligence is too important to squander on some personal vanity.’

  When his eyes met her own, Celeste felt something shift inside her, some primal lurch of desire. Today his irises were a dark amber, soaked in pain, but beneath that lay other emotions, deep and quiet but ready to strike.

  He had been hurt like her, she could see that, a hidden sadness that spawned from inside and set the edges of his eyes burning into her own.

  He was a different man now from the one she had known.

  The innocence they’d both lost made her turn away. It was said that he had that particular ability to read people’s faces like books and she did not want him to know anything more of her story.

  If she had any sense, she would get up and leave him now. He was stronger than he had been and the fever had waned. Perhaps the inflammation had subsided, too. She did not offer to look at his leg again, because tending to the wounds of a former lover brought up thoughts she had no right to be thinking.

  And therein lay all the trouble, a familiarity that was both welcome and dangerous.

  It was dangerous to cross a line again that she had still barely recovered from the last time. Through all the years of not seeing him, she had nevertheless kept a firm grip on his movements and successes. He had been so very heroic, his bravery spoken of from one edge of Europe to the other.

  Wellesley’s magical master of intelligence who could escape from any trap set for him, the wily cleverness and the ability to camouflage himself leading even the most jaded of partisans to offer him help as he passed between armies and through towns and cities ransacked by his enemies.

  An unrivalled chameleon. It would be wise to tread carefully around a man who was this sort of legend.

  Leaning forward, she dragged out a small pistol from her bag. She had two of them and knew that whatever weapons he must have carried before meeting Guy Bernard would be long disposed of.

  ‘This is for you. It’s loaded and there are more bullets and dry powder in the double-leather pouch.’

  He looked at what she was offering him, but did not reach out. ‘I seldom carry a weapon. But thank you, anyway.’

  The shocking truth of what he had just admitted sunk in. He would use his wits instead of a bullet.

  ‘Another difference between us, then, Major?’

  He frowned.

  ‘A stranger’s blood on one’s hands has a stench to it. It is a dividing line. Even the most slow-witted might know it as such.’

  He took her fingers into his own at the words, uncurling the anger and tracing the marks on her palm. Such a touch kept her silent, the heat of him burning into desire.

  ‘Then write a kinder story across what has been, Celeste,’ he said finally.

  ‘Fairy tales have that certain ring of untruth to them. A sleeping beauty. A poisoned apple. An unstable mama who loved one daughter a lot more than she did the other.’

  The words came from the pit of her stomach, unexpected, furious, desolate. She’d never disclosed such a grief to anyone before.

  ‘Then that was Mary Elizabeth’s problem and not yours. Taken to its full conclusion, your philosophy would expound that I should be held responsible for the death of my own mother. She caught the same sickness I had just recovered from and it killed her.’

  She had forgotten the sorrowful story of the Shaybornes. Two young children left motherless after the Viscountess had been taken by fever.

  For a moment, reason usurped guilt and the anger in her heart lightened. He had been good at words, even back then. It was what had drawn her to him in the first place, this wisdom, for in the Fournier family there had been a decided dearth of it.

  She stiffened at the thought here in the dawn light, only one step ahead of the clutches of peril. The sun had not even risen fully yet, but the day felt hot and worrying, a dozen agencies on their tails and nowhere safe to run.

  If he dies, then the last piece that is good in me will go, too.

  His eyes were of gold edged in bronze. She wondered what Anna had seen in them when she had stood before him, the kind, sweet wife of a thousand days.

  Love, assuredly, and strength. Bravery, too, and cleverness. Such perfection worried her.

  If he was not so sick, she might have kissed him full on the mouth, just to see if there were other things in him that were baser, less fine, but a shout from below had her tensing.

  Shayborne tilted his head to listen. ‘It’s a drunk, a soldier who wants to forget what has been and live only for this moment.’

  ‘You can hear that in his voice?’

  He looked up. ‘The sky is lightening on the Sabbath and he is far from home. There is a loneliness that is easily felt.’

  ‘Have you? Felt it, I mean?’

  He shifted his position and she saw the truth in his face. ‘Many a time and in many a place.’

  ‘How did you begin, then? What led you to become a spy?’

  ‘A few years ago I brought corn, sheep and cattle through the French lines in Portugal to Wel
lesley’s troops. The arrival of transports bringing rations had been delayed, you see, and there was a serious supply problem of food around Torres Vedras.’

  ‘You led live animals back through the ranks of a starving enemy?’ She could not believe his explanation.

  ‘Well, the French fear of the guerrilla bands helped me. Napoleon’s troops were reluctant to venture into the darkness looking for trouble if they heard noises in the night and so there were wide, unpatrolled gaps.’

  ‘Which you found?’

  He laughed. ‘I’d already reconnoitred routes and arranged passwords.’

  ‘Not all luck, then?’

  He ignored that and carried on. ‘The whole enterprise was remarkably successful and gained me the confidence of General Wellesley. After that I found further employment in watching for the movements of the enemy and reporting back.’

  ‘Still in your uniform? It’s what we had heard here in Paris. That you danced through the lines of Frenchmen in your scarlet red.’

  ‘I was a professional soldier who wore a wide and sombre cloak.’

  ‘Because in disguise you would have been summarily hanged? Like John André was in the Americas when he was discovered out of his uniform and stranded.’

  ‘That, too,’ he said quietly and reached for the bottle of wine beside him.

  He remembered this. This sort of conversation. Her wide knowledge of historical events. It had been the same all those years before as they had sat outdoors in Sussex and talked for hours. She never faltered or became boring. She kept him on his toes both then and now. Even with Anna he had not felt this shock of connection.

  The thought made him swallow hard. His wife had been kind and sweet, but she had not been...exciting. Hell, that was an even worse thought than the previous one, the betrayal of a woman he had loved crawling under his skin.

  Celeste’s hair stuck out from under the cap, cropped unattractively. She had probably cut it herself as the back was longer and less mauled. Her eyes were smoky, distrust written across them. But even after years of fear and danger she was still beautiful. So beautiful he turned away.

  ‘You’ll have to bulk up your shoulders if you are to be believable as a lad.’

  The change in topic had her standing, a full frown on her brow. ‘I don’t need tutelage from you in how to be convincing, Major Shayborne. I have existed as a variety of “lads” without problem in Paris for years.’

  ‘Without problem?’ When he stood he put pressure lightly on his wounded leg and was glad when it held. ‘You are known as the White Dove in the circles of espionage. A woman of mystery, McPherson says. A woman who has served many masters.’

  ‘Mystery is one of those imprecise words that holds a lot of different meanings.’

  ‘Why did you risk everything to save me?’

  ‘I was dead even before I warned you, Major, and it seemed pointless to die for nothing. So I thought to make it count.’

  ‘Count?’

  ‘You are a saviour to the world who despises Napoleon and his ruthless tactics. There are many here who hold no sway to vent their voice for dissent and yet by your actions you gave them hope.’

  ‘People like you?’

  * * *

  She watched the words form on his lips and saw the truth of them.

  ‘My father believed so strongly in Napoleon’s ideas that he died for them, six years ago in the house of the woman I met last night. Madame Caroline Debussy. Perhaps you have heard of her?’

  ‘The daughter of the Mayor of Léon?’

  ‘You are well informed, Major, but then of course you would be. Papa was murdered after she betrayed him. She told me that herself yesterday.’

  ‘A hard truth.’

  ‘And there are so very many more of them.’ Her hand came forward by its own accord to stroke down the line of his cheek. ‘I never forgot you. At least know that.’

  The flint in his eyes made her swallow for she wanted him to feel as she did, even if nothing at all could be done about it. She wanted such a power between them, pulling them back to a time that was more innocent, a time when she was still in control of her own fate.

  She felt the heat of him rise against her skin, saw the heavy beat of his heart in his throat and heard the shallowness of breath. And just for a moment, in the new dawn of a breaking day, Celeste felt less broken in the intimacy of his company. Then he moved, the anger in him palpable.

  ‘If they identify me on the road, you are to leave without a word.’ This order fell into the space between them, unpolished and harsh.

  Clasping her fingers behind her back, Celeste wished she might have been braver. It was easy to play the siren when the mark was a man who meant nothing at all to you. But with Summer Shayborne such a charade would not have been a lie.

  He did not want her and she was too afraid to demand to know why not.

  ‘You are a slut, Brigitte. You use men to gain only what you want.’

  Guy Bernard’s words came back to her, whispered in hate.

  ‘Your father told me once that you were careless, but I think you are not that at all. I think you have always known exactly what you were doing.’

  Caroline Debussy’s summary of her character was closer to the truth. She had known, for behind the slaughter of her morals there lay an attempt to protect herself against the nothingness that crouched inside, the ennui that made her sell herself cheaply and without any care whatsoever. The dissolution of responsibility, she supposed, the final acceptance of chaos.

  She was her mother’s daughter in more ways than she knew, after all—shattered inside, irreparably broken. Too scared to jump, too ruined to settle. The props of a husband and a social position that had kept Mary Elizabeth going were missing in her own existence and yet she could not quite give up. Not when this one last chance had been provided so unexpectedly.

  ‘The freedom of lust is a balm for any emptiness, Major, I promise it.’

  The tick at the side of his jaw was the only movement in a face set in cast stone.

  Why had she touched him like that and showed herself so blindly when until now she had only lived in lies? He did not even want such honesty; she could see he did not in the stiffened lines of his body and in the quick sorrow across his face.

  Pity.

  The one emotion she hated more than any other.

  Chapter Four

  Had Celeste just propositioned him with her body? Did the weight of lust and a quick tumble mean nothing at all to her save for a momentary relief of an all-consuming emptiness? He took a deep drink of red wine. Perhaps he had misheard things in his sickness and read her wrongly in a way he seldom did with people? Usually he was so much more certain than he felt now. Resolving not to make more of it with an answer, he turned and searched through the shelves nearby which were full of artefacts.

  ‘Is there a razor here? An old one of your father’s?’ August Fournier had been a man who had always presented himself impeccably.

  Nodding, she pointed to the room he had seen her come out of when they’d first arrived here. It was a bath chamber and there was a large wicker basket containing an oddment of clothes next to a basin. Looking at himself in the mirror, Shay felt strangely disconnected and scattered, a bloom of red on both cheeks and his eyes bright with fever. He wondered about the properties in the medicines of Caroline Debussy, for his wound and the ache in his leg felt lighter, less distinct.

  The harlot’s dress Celeste had been wearing in the torture room of Les Chevaliers lay across the top of the basket. Rummaging through, he found other things that August must have once worn and kept as disguises. He was pleased to see the brown habit of a monk among them.

  The razor was old, but it would be sharp enough to do the trick. He wished his hands did not shake from the fever, but he steadied his left elbow against a shelf beneath the mirror and set to work. The corked bottle filled with water nearby was just what he needed.

  Ten minutes later he smiled at his reflection. The P
yrenees lay to the south through hundreds of miles of French soil. He could follow the river which would lead him into the hills. The French presence would be less obvious there, caught as they were protecting their interests in northern Spain and Portugal.

  And if Celeste Fournier elected to come with him, even with all her nonsense on the freedoms of lust, he would be pleased.

  For so very long he had been sad. But since meeting her here in Paris, his melancholy had been lessened and despite such jeopardy there was a new tingling of excitement. The promise of something he could give no name to. He prayed to God that they might escape from the city into freedom and safety.

  The knock on the door had him turning as it opened.

  ‘I thought perhaps you might be...’ She stepped in, her eyes widening at the baldness of his pate.

  ‘You thought I might be using the razor on my throat instead of my scalp?’

  A dance of lightness in blue eyes was the only reply.

  ‘No matter what happens to me here in France, I would fight for my life, Celeste. I hope you would do the same.’

  Her mother’s demise came to mind and he could see she had been thinking along the same lines. He cursed Mary Elizabeth Faulkner Fournier anew.

  ‘Perhaps when you are ready to leave I will come with you, Major, for it is raining harder than I have heard it do so in a long while and that might make it safer. I can’t bring the medicines, though, for if we are searched...’

  ‘I’ll change the bandage before we depart and leave it at that. The cheese and bread can come, but leave the pistols behind. Bring your blade only.’

  ‘I am not sure if I could pass any close inspection, Major.’