She danced the first enjoyable country set with Lord Torbridge, realizing how much she had missed such activity in recent months. After that, she stood in front of the French window in conversation with some amusing people she knew only vaguely.
“Madame de Renarde,” said an oddly familiar male voice beside her, and she turned, smiling in polite greeting.
“Lieutenant Steele,” she exclaimed, offering her hand at once. “What an unexpected pleasure to find you here.” As he bowed over her hand, she took in his arm, now resting in a heroic sling tied across his good shoulder. “I hope you are well enough.”
He wrinkled his nose at the sling. “You mean this abomination? The local physician insisted I wear it to keep from pulling the wound. I feel like a fraud because I’m sure it’s on the mend. Even the doctor said so.”
“Best do as he says, Lieutenant. No point in consulting him otherwise.”
“I wouldn’t have bothered. It was Mrs. Villin who brought him. But there, I don’t mean to sound ungracious! I trust you are none the worse for our adventure?”
“Of course not. You must know I have no sensibility.”
“I don’t believe that. You merely hold yourself together well. I, for one, give you the credit for getting us all out of the fix alive, though I’ll not deny I didn’t like it at the time.”
She regarded him uneasily. “I hope you haven’t said so to anyone else.”
“Of course not.”
“And are you still at the Hart?” she asked hastily, distracting him from the affront to his tact.
“I am. I only meant to stay the one night and travel on to visit my parents, but the doctor was not keen on my riding just yet. I expect I shall leave it until Sunday or Monday. What of you, madame? Did you not mean to return to London?”
“I did, but I called on my old friends the Vernes, and they persuaded me to stay. And Lady Overton was kind enough to invite me tonight. Are you a friend of Lord Overton? Or Mr. Cromarty, perhaps?”
“Not exactly,” Steele replied with a faint smile. “After you left the Hart, there was a positive invasion of people, desperate to hear all about our adventure. Lord Overton was among them and seemed to regard me as some kind of hero because I fought Captain le Noir. Even though I came off worst.”
“Don’t feel badly. He was wounded, too.”
“Hmm,” Steele said doubtfully. “In any case, his lordship invited me tonight and kindly introduced me to his wife and family and so many lords and ladies, I confess I am quite overwhelmed.”
“Make the most of your heroic status,” Isabelle advised. “Tomorrow, it is liable to be someone else.”
“So beautiful, yet so cynical,” mourned another man suddenly appearing between them in a draught of icy air to press a glass of champagne into each of their hands.
Bemused, Isabelle stared up at the speaker and the glass slipped from her suddenly numb fingers.
Captain le Noir.
Chapter Nine
Captain le Noir—who must have entered through the window, hence the draught—deftly caught the falling glass and presented it once more. She grasped it blindly, her heart seeming to plummet into her stomach. The sight of him was so totally unexpected, so appalling, that it must have been hysteria prompting her to laugh.
“Oh, dear God,” she said shakily.
He was dressed in black evening clothes that fitted his tall, lean frame almost perfectly, his cravat neatly tied. A smile lurked on his lips and in his eyes as they met hers, clearly enjoying her reaction. He looked ridiculously handsome.
“Are you insane?” Steele demanded furiously. “Did we just lie to our countrymen for nothing?”
“Hush, sir, no one lied,” Noir said, reaching behind him from another glass, which he raised in a toast. “To freedom. And beautiful eyes.” He took a sip and seemed pleased. “I think this must be smuggled, too.”
“What the devil are you doing here?” Isabelle demanded, finally recovering her voice.
“There was no time for a proper farewell when I left, so I thought I would come here to pay my respects and thanks and wish you adieu.”
Despite the excitement she couldn’t prevent, a chill passed down Isabelle’s spine. “Dear God, you have not brought your men here to raid?”
“Of course not,” he said, startled. “How stupid do you think I am?”
“Very!” Isabelle and Steele said together, and he laughed.
“Nonsense. I shall merely drink a glass of champagne with you both and then vanish as discreetly as I arrived.”
“Captain, you are putting us in an impossible situation,” Steele said between his teeth. “I have no choice but to arrest you.”
“You have no weapon,” Noir pointed out. He smiled. “I do.”
“Are you threatening us?” Isabelle demanded.
His eyebrows flew up. “Lord, no. The boot was on the other foot, but look, here is Sir Maurice come to join our reunion.”
Sir Maurice, certainly, was walking in their direction with a couple of male acquaintances, but his covert attention did not appear to be on Noir but on Isabelle. Perhaps he had decided to forgive her. Perhaps he had boasted too much to his friends and had to prove her compliance. And none of that mattered, she thought in panic as his gaze shifted to take in his competition—Steele…and Noir.
His eyes widened at the impossibility. And then, in outrage, he left his companions far behind as he stormed toward them, his mouth already open to shout the alarm that would send everyone in the ballroom into a panicked spin.
Hastily, Isabelle seized Noir’s right arm, to stop him drawing his weapon, whether sword or pistol.
But with great aplomb, Lieutenant Steele stepped up to the situation once more, hastily striding in front of Sir Maurice, seizing his arm in an apparently friendly but quite iron grasp and twitching him in the other direction.
Between his smiling teeth, Isabelle was sure he said, “Not the way, sir. We’d just lose him in the panic.”
“You have to go,” Isabelle said urgently.
“How can I when you hold my arm so tightly?”
At once, she tried to release him, but he clamped her hand between his arm and his body.
“Why are you here?” she asked helplessly, giving in.
“To drink champagne with you.” He began to stroll around the edges of the busy dance floor and for the benefit of any onlookers, she smiled and sipped her champagne.
“Liar,” she said.
“I wanted to see you. I don’t mind what we do.”
“Captain—”
“Call me Armand,” he interrupted.
“Why?” she demanded starkly.
His eyebrows flew up. “It’s my name.”
A surprised choke of laughter escaped her. “I mean, as you very well know, there is no point in calling you anything at all! You will be arrested this time. There is no way out of it.”
“There is usually a way out,” he said vaguely. “That is, there always has been.”
“But no guns this time,” she pleaded. “No swords. There are children in the house.”
“Of course. Who brings weapons to a party?”
She frowned. “You just said you did.”
“I lied to keep Steele busy.”
Again, she wanted to laugh, but her anxious eyes caught sight of Steele and Ashton and the notion died at birth. They were talking to Lord Torbridge and Overton’s son-in-law, Sydney Cromarty, who were watching her and Noir. An instant later, they moved in different directions. So did Steele, toward Lord Overton, while Sir Maurice strode toward Lord Dunstan.
“Where are your men?” she demanded.
“I left them behind.”
Isabelle didn’t know whether to hit him or simply be grateful. “They are gathering to arrest you,” she said abruptly. “You will be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.”
“I will,” he agreed. “But not yet.”
She stared at him. “I don’t understand why you’ve come here! You shoul
d be safely back in France by now. Or at least as safe as someone like you could ever be. Instead, you walk straight into the lion’s den.”
“Are you concerned for me?” he asked lightly, although his eyes devoured her.
She wrenched her gaze free. “Yes,” she muttered. “And for me, since you have singled me out and distinguished me with your attentions. Just as I was reviving my reputation.”
“Look as disapproving as you like. Try to draw free again. Don’t worry, I won’t let you.”
She glared at him once more. “That is not my chief anxiety!”
The dance had ended, and couples were milling off the floor. Among them, moving inexorably in Noir’s direction, were several solitary, purposeful men. And only yards away, young Matthew Lacey, his eyes almost goggling as he stared open-mouthed at Armand. The Frenchman inclined his head and smiled, raising his glass to Matthew before setting it down on a table.
“You know each other,” Isabelle blurted. “How on earth do you know Matthew?”
“I’m wearing his coat, but don’t tell anyone.”
Matthew, too, began to stride toward them.
“To the window,” she urged, tugging Armand’s arm in panic. “It’s your only chance.”
“Someone is there,” he said without obvious concern.
“Captain—”
“Armand,” he reminded her.
“Armand, you will be taken!” she said, no longer bothering to hide her distress. “Arrested and imprisoned. Does that not matter to you?”
“No,” he said, “for it won’t happen until I’ve danced with you.” And without warning, as the orchestra struck up once more, he swept her between Lord Dunstan and Matthew Lacey and onto the dance floor, where other couples were gathering. Men on their own were out of place there, and some of his would be-captors were forced to move off the dance floor, away from them.
Armand’s arm came hard around her waist, and she found herself gliding into the waltz. She fought it, but there was no denying it felt so good, so tempting, to be so close to him, to dance as if they were friends…lovers.
His thumb caressed her hand. He waltzed as she had known he would, graceful yet somehow untamed, holding her a shade too close as he swept her around the floor.
“You really ask me to believe this is all to dance with me?” she demanded, desperately trying to fight her body’s surrender.
“Is it so hard to accept?”
“Yes! Armand, you could die for this.” She held his gaze in sudden terror. “Please tell me you are not trying to die.”
“I am not trying to die.” His voice, suddenly, was hoarse. “I just wanted to see you one more time.”
“Why?” she asked despairingly.
“To learn about you as there was no opportunity to do at the inn. To know what your life is like, how you grew up, your wishes and dreams, your loves and hates.”
“That is a tall order for one dance with a ring of men trying not to stare too hard at us.”
“Ignore them. When did you leave France?”
“When I was three years old, after the revolutionaries captured and killed my uncle and cousins.”
“How did you escape?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do,” he said softly.
She shook her head. “No. I just remember…being afraid, hiding in a dark, cold spaces under floorboards, under the seats of smelly carriages. And a ship full of scary men. And then rain and squalid rooms before our English cousins found us. After that, it was better. We lived in a comfortable, warm house, with enough to eat.” Somehow, under that intense, steady gaze, the words continued to spill out. She told him about her parents’ deaths in the same month, when she was ten years old, how she had enjoyed growing more important to the Longstones, becoming their de facto housekeeper by the time she was fourteen years old. And then had come the trip to London, where she had met Pierre, a fellow émigré.
“No one knew what I saw in him. He was handsome in a way, and he had cleverly made money in the city, but no one would have called him dashing. But he pursued me most flatteringly, and I… I knew there was more to him, and I wanted to know that man. I convinced myself I was in love with him, and I married him.”
“You told me he was a…bounder,” he observed, loosely translating the less than ladylike term she had used at the Hart.
“It took me less than a week of marriage to discover it. He took my pride and my self-respect, but for two years I was a good wife to him, giving him freedom, turning a blind eye, keeping his home, which was never mine. In that time, I learned to grow a hard shell, to play the sophisticate who cared little where her husband strayed. And then one day, I realized I really didn’t care where he was, or even if I never saw him again.”
His expression was attentive, but revealed neither pity nor contempt. “So, what did you do?”
“I left him and returned to my cousins in Sussex. And there I met another man I thought I loved.”
“Did you?”
“Perhaps.” She met his gaze boldly. “We formed a liaison which kept us both sane in difficult times. We never pried beneath each other’s…veils, but I believed we understood each other. I stood with him through a terrible tragedy. And then it was over.”
“How?”
She smiled faintly. “I think we just grew apart. It was no longer our time. I varied my time between London—when Pierre was not there—and Sussex. I became governess to my cousin’s granddaughter, and my one and only lover married another. Just before Pierre died a traitor to the country that had harbored us both.”
She danced backward and turned with him, surely even closer than before. “Now it is your turn,” she said breathlessly. “Who knows what those watching will imagine I’ve been telling you. Thank God I know no government secrets.”
“What do you want to know?”
“About your life. Your wife.”
“You won’t like my life.”
“You won’t know that until you tell me.”
“I don’t even have a name. I don’t know where I was born. Somewhere euphemistically referred to as the Paris streets, but probably a brothel or an orphanage. Certainly, I grew up in such places until I was eight or nine, when a defrocked priest discovered me trying to teach myself to read and count between bouts of thieving. It was he who gave me the surname le Noir, because, he said, my hair was blacker than my heart. Before that, I had just been Armand, though I’ve no idea who first called me that. Anyway, he took me in, sent me to school. Sometimes I went, sometimes I ran away. But somehow, I got a smattering of education, enough to join the army, where they made me a junior officer.”
“Were you a good soldier?”
“Oh, yes. And somehow between campaigns, I met Rose. We married, had a son, and they followed the drum with me. I thought my life was complete, happy. And when the war was over, we were going to buy a farm in the south, where her people lived… And then a fever swept through the ranks, and both Rose and Robert were gone. Along with my life. And so, I sought out distractions. Not to kill myself as people think. Just to stop myself dying.” An almost apologetic smile flickered across his lips. “Do you understand?”
Stricken, she stared at him. “I think I do,” she whispered.
He swallowed. “So much for our pasts. What of the future?”
She shrugged, almost impatient now. “Who knows? I shall be a governess if I can and see where that leads me. What of you?”
“I will have that farm one day, when the war ends. I shall grow grapes and figs and make wine. And I would like to dance with you.”
She let that lie in silence. It was as if a bubble had formed around them, separating them from the other dancers, from the Englishmen waiting to arrest him. They only had this dance. There could be no others.
Or could there?
“In the old days, you would never have been an officer,” she blurted. “Is that why you love your Bonaparte?”
“It’s one rea
son I appreciate him, I don’t love him. He is simply the best soldier in Europe and saved both France and the revolution…before he betrayed it.”
“By crowning himself emperor, you mean?”
“Why get rid of one monarch just to replace him with another? Even if he is rather more given to sense and equality. He should never have done it. Now, no one disagrees with him or they lose their place. He grows into tyranny, listening to no one and believing in his own invincibility. And so, we have the Russian campaign.”
“Do many in France think as you?”
He blinked his eyes back into focus. “Do you want information to give your adopted government?”
“No, I was wondering if the French might end the war themselves by getting rid of Bonaparte.”
He smiled. “What would you do then?”
“I don’t know.” From the corner of her eye, she saw Torbridge speaking to Verne, gazing between the dancers toward her and Armand. Worse, the music, clearly, was coming to an end. Their dance was over. “It doesn’t matter,” she said in despair.
His fingers tightened on hers. “It’s all that matters. Pull free of me as though you hate me.”
“I do hate you,” she whispered, yanking her hand free at the last note.
Armand smiled. “Excellent.” He released her and bowed, walking swiftly through the crowd of dancers, not to the window but to the entrance to the ballroom.
From their suddenly panicked movements, both Torbridge and Verne had lost him. She walked toward them, instinctively drawing their attention so they would not see Armand. What in God’s name am I doing? He is an enemy. My enemy!
Not mine, not mine…
Torbridge started toward her, then was suddenly distracted and veered toward the door. Isabelle followed because there was nothing else she could do.
A few moments later, the crowd parted, and she caught sight of Armand’s back, suddenly lunging forward and rushing out of the ballroom with several gentlemen on his tail, trying not to look as if they were running.
A few people glanced around in amusement, but most went on their way without even noticing.
By the time Isabelle got to the top of the ballroom steps, several men were pounding down the passage, gathering up servants as they went and calling to each other. After a quick glance behind her, Isabelle picked up her skirts and ran after them.
The Broken Heart Page 9
