by Sophia James
‘I know that Jeremy missed his brother when he went to the military academy, for he spoke of him often to me.’ Vivienne’s expression was sad as she said this, leaving Celeste to wonder whether she would ever move on to another marriage, a different life.
‘Do you remember the younger Shayborne, Celeste?’ Her grandmother now asked this. ‘I recall him in the house at Langley a few times before your father took you away.’
‘I do.’ She kept her voice low and a smile plastered across her face. ‘I knew him briefly.’
‘Someone turned up here a few weeks ago asking about Major Shayborne, come to think of it. It seems the fellow knew you once in Paris for he left a note. When we get back home I shall find it for you as it had completely slipped my mind with all that has been happening of late.’
Celeste nodded and tried to pretend it was just a trifling communication, but darker thoughts chased around in her head. Loring chose that particular moment to let out a squawk from his Moses basket at one end of the long table and she was glad for the interruption.
She felt the world of espionage sink back into her skin, that certain smell of fear in her nostrils, the chilling knowledge of danger in her heart. A tea party in the middle of the English countryside with laughter and cakes was safe and normal and lovely for others, but not for her.
She was as ruined as they got and as damaged and already the creeping fury of the world that she had lived in for years was coming back, encompassing others, good people, innocent people, tangled in deceit.
‘You look pale, Celeste.’ Vivienne’s voice held concern. ‘Perhaps a sip of the lemonade would help. The cook has the tastiest recipe in the whole land, Jeremy used to say, and I do believe that it is true.’
Celeste brought the glass to her mouth once Loring had resettled.
‘It’s very good,’ she said, and the small tête-à-tête continued on, just as if the bottom had not completely fallen from her world.
* * *
Later in her room and alone she opened the sealed note her grandmother had finally found for her.
Guy Bernard is alive and word has it he will travel to England in early October to deal with both you and Major Shayborne.
C.D.
The rest of the page was blank.
Caroline Debussy.
He will try to kill you. He will stalk you until he is triumphant. He is consumed with revenge and rage.
Those words could have been as easily written there as the others.
She had not killed Guy Bernard then in the dungeons in Paris? She could scarcely believe her incompetence.
Guy Bernard had not come. Yet. But she could feel that he soon would. His mother’s birthday was on October the tenth and she knew he would not miss that. If there was one thing about him that was good, it was the love of his aged mother and his aunt. Today it was the ninth.
The walls of her room seemed to cave inwards, the colour darker than it had been, the windows further away. It was happening all over again, only this time it was all of them who were in the firing line of hatred—the target of a madman.
She needed to travel to London to warn Summer of Guy Bernard’s plans. She needed to find him because all this was her fault, her doing.
A knock on the door had her standing and she was surprised when her grandmother waited there.
‘May I come in, Celeste?’
Short of being rude, there was nothing else for it but to invite her in and wait until she was seated on the leather wing chair by the window.
‘My daughter was a weak woman and my son has shaped up to be exactly the same, but I think you are a strong one. I am glad of it, for I can see the shadows in your eyes and the ghosts that roam in your head. Your father was careless with his political beliefs and I was too forceful with my demands. Between the three of us, I do not think we served you well and I am sorry for it. More sorry than you could ever imagine.’
Speechless, Celeste watched her, uncertain for once of what to say.
‘I want you and your child to stay here. I want you to be safe, but I can see already that I have lost you to whatever was contained in that letter, and that you will leave. But I promise I will do everything in my power to help you come home again. Everything, Celeste, without fail.’
‘I am not who you think I am, Grandmère. The innocent and arrogant girl you knew is long gone and I have done things, been things, that you could not like.’
‘In order to live?’
‘To survive. There is a difference.’
‘When your mother found life tough she gave up. I am glad you are not like her in that way. At least you fight for your existence.’
‘I was a spy in Paris as part of an underground and covert organisation. It was not a job for the timid or for the overly moral. It was neither a kind nor a gentle occupation.’
Celeste tipped up her head as she said this, no hesitation in it. If her grandmother would banish her now, then she would not argue. All she wanted finally between them was the truth.
‘I sent people to find you so many times in France. I had reports about your father and about his situation, but there was never anything of you. You disappeared from the face of the earth.’
‘I became someone else after Papa died.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I had to.’
‘And now?’
Celeste took in a breath. ‘Now I need a carriage to take me to London, Grandmère, and I need some lad’s clothes, trousers, a shirt and jacket and a hat. Things a serving boy might wear off-duty.’
‘A disguise, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘To deal with the person who brought the letter.’
‘No. To try to save a person mentioned in it.’
‘And you think you can? Save him, I mean?’
She nodded. ‘If I don’t, everything will have been for nothing.’
‘Then I will summon the butler to aid us. What else do you require?’
Celeste’s mind ran across other necessities, but she had some money and she had good weapons. With the element of surprise that might very well be enough.
‘Luck,’ she said quietly. ‘And your prayers.’
‘You have them. I don’t know what this is all about, but I hope you will come back safe and sound. I would like to name Loring as the next heir of Langley. My son is not likely to make old bones and the place is entailed.’
Shock ran through Celeste. ‘You are sure?’
‘I am. I have set it down in Alexander’s will. There should be no reason for contesting such a succession as long as you swear you were married to his father. With the losses of war and many civil records being destroyed, we will be able to make it work. It need not be something too onerous.’
Lord, could it work, this scheme of her grandmother’s? She had not laid eyes on her uncle since being here, so presumably Alexander was in worse health than he had been when she had lived at Langley before. Another question from her grandmother took her attention.
‘Will you take Loring with you to London?’
‘No, it is too dangerous. He will need to stay here with a wet nurse and the kindest, most trustworthy servants that you have. I will be back within a week. If anyone turns up at Langley asking for me, tell them that I am dead to you and have been so for a good number of years.’
‘Very well.’
‘Watch my son for me, Grandmère, and make certain that he is safe.’
‘I will employ men from the village as guards. No one will slip in unnoticed. I promise you that.’
When her grandmother stepped forward and wrapped her arms firmly about her body, Celeste rested her head on the top of a bony shoulder and found a peace she had been seeking for so very long.
Lady Faulkner was strong enough to keep Loring safe no matter what happened. Celeste knew this from the very depths of her heart.
Chapter Ten
The English houses of the aristocracy were so well-guarded with their myriad servants a
nd their constant attention to detail. She had been perched across from the town house at Number Eighteen St James’s Square for a good few hours now, waiting for Summer to return home, and the dusk was starting to fall.
She knew he would arrive soon for she had spent the morning speaking with some of the servants from the house after pretending interest in obtaining a job there. She had heard that the Viscount was looking to employ a lad to see to the horses and so had used that opportunity to knock at the back door. From there she had begun to chat to one of the kitchen serving girls as she had waited and luckily the girl seemed to have a running tongue and a good deal of free time.
‘The Viscount is in the city until this evening when he is to come home to pack for a journey he will take on the morrow,’ the girl added, ‘to call on a woman who he is fond of. There’s talk of a wedding soon and all of us are in a tither as to what she will be like. His intended, I mean. Word has it she is a great beauty and very rich.’
Miss Crystal Smithson, presumably, the woman Vivienne Shayborne had also spoken of. She’d left after hearing this piece of news to wait out the hours in a tavern a few hundred yards away and, then, amidst the leaves of a spreading oak in the small park opposite the town house as the day turned to evening.
The Luxford carriage arrived just as she was beginning to think perhaps the information from the kitchen maid had been false, the horses running around the sides of the square in an easy canter and then stopping. Other servants from the house filed out and then Summerley Shayborne stood thirty yards away, dressed in clothes that befitted a titled viscount, his head turned so that she could not get a proper look at his face.
But it was him. The same straight posture, the same walk, though without the limp. His hair was the only thing completely different as now it almost reached his collar in a long wavy mass of blond, his fringe pushed back from his eyes with one hand even as he spoke with the man next to him.
Aurelian de la Tomber.
Stepping back into the greenery, she stood very still. She would have to wait until the Frenchman left for she did not dare to show her face to the one she had mistakenly thrown into danger with her accusations of treachery in Paris. Her fingers wound into the bark of an English oak, feeling its texture, finding a touchstone. Above the city, a small moon began to make its light felt in a sky that threatened rain. Eight o’clock. Her breasts ached with their unaccustomed fullness and the cold of the night settled inside her.
* * *
Two hours later de la Tomber left, using the Shayborne carriage as transport to wherever his home was here in London. The lights downstairs were then doused and another moved in a second-storey room, the French doors that led out to a balcony thrown open.
Celeste could not make out any form, save shadow, but presumed this to be the bedchamber of the Viscount. Below the balcony was a wooden lattice firmly fixed to the wall which was raised right up to the second-floor level.
So very easy to climb. This soft world of the English was laughable when compared with all the hidden defences of Paris. Here people lived without expecting trouble, the social norms observed without war tumbling in. The population here gave the impression that conflict would not follow them home and hence embraced their freedoms in a casual way, though from Major Shayborne she had expected more.
When the few other lights below were extinguished she moved forward, glad for clothes that were dark and ones which allowed ease of movement. The footholds were simple and within a moment she was on the balcony, staying still for a moment with her head tipped for any sound.
‘Come in.’
These soft words startled her, emanating as they were from the semi-dark.
He was sitting on a chair with his long legs stretched out before him. A single candle flickered on the table at his elbow.
‘You knew I was here?’
He ignored her query and formed one of his own. ‘Why are you back in England after all this time?’
He sounded distant, indifferent and cold, though the hand nearest the candle shook in the light as he raised it. His hair was tied back now with a leather thing, the formerly careless spill bridled and tamed. The aristocrat was well on show tonight, the political master, resplendent in surroundings that suited him and so far removed from the dirt and poverty of France.
‘I have come with a warning. Guy Bernard is on his way here to kill you.’
‘You had no need to come. De la Tomber has given me the very same news only this evening, Celeste.’ He said her name without any warmth. He said it as though the very sound pained him.
His eyes glanced across her clothing and she was comforted for the hat which covered much of her face and all of her hair.
He did not want her here, she could tell.
‘I did not realise Aurelian de la Tomber still maintained such good contacts in Paris.’
‘He is in Paris often and has kept abreast of all the happenings to aid his family. It is just as well you waited until he was gone for I am not certain he would wish to see you either.’
‘He was there when the Dubois family were murdered. I thought he was involved in it, too.’
‘Yet you slipped him a knife after he was taken.’
‘He told you of that?’ When he nodded she continued, ‘By then I understood the true nature of Mattieu Benet.’
‘Which was?’
‘He had accrued a fortune privately through the blackmail of others, so his scruples were compromised.’
‘God in Heaven.’
She frowned. She did not recall him as a man who’d sworn much at all, but, with his face dim and indistinct against the low light he felt like a stranger, like someone she did not know well any more.
‘Take off your hat.’
She swallowed, toying with the idea of refusing him completely and then discarding such a wasted emotion.
‘I want to see at least just who you have become.’
‘I doubt such knowledge could be so easily purchased, Major.’ She threw this back at him, even as she reached up for the felt beret.
* * *
Her hair was longer now, the same honeyed brown he remembered from her youth, but curlier. It grazed her shoulder blades, thick and glossy, a woman emerging from the plain clothes of a lad. So very beautiful. That thought angered him, as did the fact that his body warmed to her presence like a moth to flame. He knew she had seen his hand shake, but her unexpected reappearance had reignited inside him everything that he had thought dead.
‘You never wrote to say that you were safe.’
‘Perhaps it was because I wasn’t.’ Scorn and fury threaded each of her words.
He remembered this so distinctly. This fight and conflict. This anger that had kept him at a distance until she’d wound her body around his own in the darkness and taken every piece of him; poles apart like north and south, yet drawn together by gravity and emotion.
‘You must have expected some retribution when you meted out your accusations in Paris.’
‘You are right. I thought I would die. I thought that they would kill me quickly and then it would all be over.’
She sat on the floor suddenly, leaning her head against the wall behind her so that a slice of moonlight illuminated her face. This action reminded him so forcibly of their time in her father’s rooms high above Paris that he felt displaced and uprooted.
‘What stopped you from welcoming death after you escaped, then?’
An expression he did not recognise lay in her eyes, guarded, protective, fierce.
New secrets, he thought. Layers upon layers of them.
‘And so you headed south?’
She nodded. ‘To Rome. Caroline Debussy has good contacts there. It was comfortable and warm.’
‘Lian swears you never reached Italy. Madame Debussy is one of his godmothers and he made it his business to ask her.’
‘Where did he say I went?’
‘To ground. To hide. He said you were thin and sick and brittle when he s
aw you last and that he imagined you were now dead.’
She turned away from the light and reached into her pocket, plainly annoyed by his words.
‘If Guy Bernard comes, shoot him. He won’t give you the chance to make a second escape.’ A pistol he had not seen before sat in the palm of her hand. A beautiful piece inlaid with some shell that glistened in the light.
‘I’d forgotten just how brutal you were. Are,’ he amended.
‘There’s more at stake now, Major. Much more.’
‘More than even life or death? Now, that is intriguing.’
‘It is my duty to protect your back if you will not do so.’
He laughed then, her words so very ridiculous. ‘If you are discovered in my bedchamber, Miss Fournier, it might be your reputation that will need protecting.’
‘I don’t have one. It was lost years ago.’
‘In England you are the granddaughter of a woman who garners much in the way of authority and respect. I doubt she would agree with your assessment and believe me when I say that young women are forced into marriage on much less a count than being alone in the bedroom of an unattached male.’
‘But you are not that, are you? Unattached?’
‘Says who?’
‘Everybody I speak to. The ton is expecting the announcement of your nuptials to a woman of impeccable credentials any second now.’
‘You speak of Miss Smithson?’
* * *
The name jabbed into her heart, piercing her bravado. So it was true, all she had heard. This was not going at all as she had imagined it. Loring’s welfare sat in the wings of jeopardy and she needed Shayborne safe. Safe to be a father to him.
For the first time ever she felt distanced from Summerley Shayborne, her actions in Nantes and Paris leaving her caught in his disapproval and censure.
‘It is none of my business, of course.’ She tried to imbue some sense of apology into the retort.
‘You are right, it isn’t.’
At that she swallowed and was silent, the quiet stretching on between them into more than a few moments. Finally, he seemed to have enough of it and stood to pour himself a drink. He did not offer her one, though when it looked as if he might cross to her side of the room she flinched. He must not touch her. Her body was different now, changed, and a man of detail such as he would notice. As if he recognised her reticence, he moved back.
