He rose in a single fluid movement, stepping away from the bath. Cyrene turned her head to look at him, but he kept his back to her. There seemed no answer to be made to what he had said, no consolation she had any right, or was to be given any encouragement, to offer. When he began to remove his shirt, stripping it off over his head, she rinsed her face and splashed water over her shoulders and breasts one last time before getting out to make way for him.
He was quick with his ablutions. By the time she had dried herself and put on his nightshirt, then brushed out the wild mass of tangles from her hair that were caused by wearing it loose, he was done. He came to her where she stood before the fire. He took the brush from her and laid it aside on the mantel, then closed his fingers in the soft, fire-warmed curtain of her tresses, wrapping his hands in the silken strands to draw her to him.
“Bright, courageous Cyrene. You deserve better, and I am a fool twice-damned, but I can’t let you go.”
He cupped her face, framing it in her hair, studying it minutely before he brushed her bruised cheek with his lips. He kissed her brow and her eyelids, the point of her chin and the delicate corners of her mouth before settling his lips with care upon hers. His movements gentle, infinitely tender, he sought her sweet flavor.
She should resist him, Cyrene knew, should deny his possession, but it was far too late to try. He had not meant to hurt her, he said; that was also futile. Still, in some strange way, it seemed that she might be healed by the same means that had brought her the most harm, by the ravishing tenderness of his kiss and the enclosing hold of his arms. To try was not, perhaps, the sensible course, but it was the compelling one. She was forced to it not only by his touch, but by some dimly sensed change in what lay between them. He was different. She could feel it, even if she could not grasp its cause, even if he did not recognize it himself.
She lifted her arms, sliding her hands over the hard-muscled planes of his chest and around his neck, clasping her hands in the luxuriant thickness of his hair. Her lips were pliant against his, soft and giving, heated with the desire that gathered inside her. A soft sigh left her and she moved closer still, until the curves of her body were fitted to his in a primitive and perfect interlocking.
After a moment he raised his head on a deep sigh. His eyes were silver with his need as he met her wide gaze, and his voice vibrated deep in his chest as he spoke. “It isn’t fair that you should be so perfect, that everything good and fine should be so much a part of you.”
“I’m not,” she said with a troubled shake of her head. “It isn’t.”
A smile came and went across his lips. “No? Perhaps you’re right. There is a wayward witch in you, too; one who has smuggled her way into my blood, casting spells so that I think only of you, dream of you, long for you until I think I must be going mad. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
She searched his face, seeing in its firm lines desire and what seemed to be respect mingled undeniably with regret. Her voice tight, hardly more than a whisper, she said, “How should it be?”
“Who can say? Perhaps it was meant, after all, as this must… surely… be.”
He lowered his lips to hers once more and, releasing her hair, bent to lift her in his arms. Cyrene felt the swooping swing as he turned toward the bed. A part of her wanted to demand that he explain what he had said, but there was an equally fervid part that did not want to know, was afraid to know. With tightly closed eyes, she warded off the doubts and fears, losing herself, deliberately, in the racing pleasure of the moment.
In this, also, he was different. His touch was always caring, but there was greater tenderness in it, an exquisite lingering care for her that was only partly due to her bruises. It was beguiling, bemusing; she was grateful for it and sought as best she could to return it.
It became a part of them and of this night, feeding, enhancing the thing they still required, were desperately in need of, the ultimate surcease. They sought it with a thousand small kisses and caresses, straining together with pounding hearts and tightly closed eyes, luxuriating, drowning, in purest sensation.
She felt the clamor of blood in her veins, its quick hot passage that radiated heat to her skin so that she stripped off her nightshirt and let it drift from her fingers and over the edge of the bed to the floor. Beneath her the linen sheets were smooth and cool, smelling of starch and freshness. Overhead the rain pattered down, a soothing sound of infinite release that mingled with the quickness of her breathing. The fire crackled softly, spreading its leaping yellow and orange pattern on the walls, making the darkness in the corners of the room seem deeper, turning the single burning candle into a fiery star.
By degrees awareness receded. The hardness of his body was a delight and an enticement. She explored it in unselfconscious wonder, spreading her fingers through the fine mat of hair on his chest, raking her nails gently along the flat expanse of his belly, rubbing her palms over the hair-roughened ridges of his thighs, circling, testing with sensitive fingertips the incredibly smooth and springing length of him. He encouraged her, incited her with the wet and tantalizing track of his tongue, tracing the hollows and tender mounds of her body in his turn, bringing her with deft and consummate care to readiness.
She trailed her nails over the rigid muscles of his broad back. They rippled under her touch, sending a shudder through him that was an indication of the constraint he held on himself. The knowledge filled her with boundless loving joy that fueled her own molten and liquid release. She gasped, pressing against him, then cried out as he grasped her waist, sliding his hand down to her hip to draw her against the unyielding rigidity of his body. She parted her thighs, taking him inside, accommodating his deep, thrusting entry.
He spoke her name, she thought; a hoarse plea as he raised himself above her. She moved against him, urging him deeper, trembling in her need for the surge of his strength. He gave it to her, unleashing the plunging urgency of his body’s boundless, headlong drive toward fulfillment. She took him into her, encompassing, giving, rising to meet him, caught in the grace and power of life’s most elemental and uncontrollable joy. Bodies entwined, close, so close, they strove and reached together that convulsing instant of exploding, unbearable beatitude.
And yet they were each trapped within themselves in their ravishing pleasure, separate though joined. They had removed their masks at the end of the masquerade and cast them aside, but, hidden inside themselves, they wore them still.
17
WHEN CYRENE WOKE, the morning light was still dim outside, dulled by the gray cloud cover of the continuing rain. She lay for long moments, aware of René’s deep and even breathing beside her, of the firm warmth of his leg against her. There was no peace in her mind, however. The events of the night before had left a residue of disturbance. It was not just the fact that she and René had been attacked; there was something more hovering at the edges of her mind. It seemed to have come stealing out of her dreams as she slept, worrisome, haunting, a vision without substance.
Abruptly, she knew.
Gaston.
There was no one with so much reason to wish to destroy René, no one with more desire to take her from him, than the Bretons. Gaston’s arrival back in the town coincided so nicely with the attack that it was difficult to believe it could be an accident.
The man who had tried to kidnap her had worn a mask. For most of the time, he had been behind her, out of her sight. Could it have been Gaston? Was it possible? She did not like to think so, but she could not be sure.
The other two men she had seen as well as anyone could wish. They were certainly not Pierre and Jean.
She did not think that the two older Bretons would lend themselves to so base an attack, one that had been meant to end with bodily injury to René, if not death. Gaston, on the other hand, was young and hot-headed. He might accept René’s hospitality and be able to laugh and talk with every show of the magnanimity of those who have lost in a sporting contest, but she thought that he still hel
d a grudge for the loss they had suffered due to René’s treachery and was resentful of the position in which Cyrene had been placed. It was not beyond him to have taken such means to be avenged, no matter how underhanded it might be. The possibility of securing her release would have been excuse enough.
And yet, could that be so? According to Gaston’s view, she was no longer bound. After the passage of so many long days, René could not go to the governor to change his tale without appearing a dupe or else an unscrupulous conniver. He might profess not to care about the first, but he would not be human if it did not give him pause. As for the second, the governor had shown such partiality- for Cyrene that he might well censure René without a hearing, taking her side for the sole purpose of setting her free. Particularly if she was allowed to talk to Vaudreuil, to explain.
The truth was, Cyrene had seen this weakness in René’s control of her long before. She should have pressed it. She should have demanded that he let her go instead of weakly letting their arrangement continue, enjoying the social round, the cachet conferred upon her by his preference for her, delighting in her new finery even as she protested receiving it, reveling in his passion for her even as she scorned it. When had she become so supine? When had she become engrossed in the life he had made for her to the point that she had neglected to question who and what he was and what he had done to her?
“What are you thinking of?”
Cyrene turned her head sharply to find René awake beside her. He was watching her, his eyes filled with shadows as he lay on his side with his head resting on his bent arm.
“Nothing,” she answered in haste. “Just… this and that.”
She thought he was not going to speak again, that he might be drifting back to sleep, for his eyelids closed and his chest slowly lifted and fell. She was wrong.
His lashes swept upward, and he put his question quickly, as though he might not otherwise ask. “If I were to say, Come with me, return with me to France now, on the next ship, how would you answer?”
Her heart jarred inside her chest. The muscles in her stomach clenched. She thought of France as she had last seen it, a cool and gray-green country filled with bustle and noise, hauteur and irascibility, pastries and smiles. Dear France, bright, medieval, glorious France.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“Why?”
What could she say? I hardly know you, and what I know I cannot trust? I don’t belong in France anymore; I’ve outgrown its narrow ways? I would rather be a lady smuggler, unfettered, unconfined, than your precious, cosseted mistress? Here I have love and family of a sort, and there I could depend only on your uncertain desire?
“I just can’t. How can you think that I could?”
He made a soft sound that might have been a laugh or a sigh. “I didn’t think it; I only wondered.”
She turned her head sharply. “Then you weren’t asking?”
“Does it matter?” he said, reaching out to her, brushing the peak of her breast in a delicate caress that sent a frisson of delight along her nerves before drawing her toward him. “I have my answer, and it’s enough.”
Had she made a mistake? That question remained with her long after René had dressed and gone. Sometimes it seemed so, seemed that she was a fool to discard so easily the prospect offered her. To be the chosen woman of a man of wealth and position in Paris had its benefits, even a certain quasi-respectability. There would have been a town house and a carriage, the latest fashions, visits to the theater and to the opera; a circle of friends of the same position, long hours of René’s company, his lovemaking, perhaps even his children. Or if he preferred to return to his father’s estate, there might be a cottage in the country of her own not far away, a place where she could read and sew and make a garden, a place of beauty that he could share. Some such liaisons lasted for years, even a lifetime.
And some lasted a few weeks or months before the man grew tired and, if the woman was lucky, found her another protector to take her off his hands.
René was not known for his constancy in affairs of the heart. Rather the opposite, if anything.
She did not think she could bear being paid off, shuffled away as an irksome responsibility. To live always with that possibility over her would destroy some essential part of her, making her like so many other women under such conditions, hard and suspicious and grasping.
Why did it have to be so difficult? Why could René not have been more ordinary, more common? Or she herself less so?
The street vendor came by at midafternoon, a stooped old crone wrapped against the misting rain in an ancient velvet cloak with tarnished gilt trim, shiny with wet and bare spots where the nap had rubbed away. She cried of her scallions and garlic in a quavering monotone, but her smile was cheery and she smelled of fresh earth and pungent herbs.
It was Martha who called the woman in, being in need of a handful of scallions to cast over the chicken she was cooking for dinner. She left the old vendor standing under the protection of the gallery while she stepped into the salon to speak to Cyrene. M’sieur usually gave her adequate money to buy from such chance peddlers, she said, but had neglected to supply her of late. Did Mademoiselle have a livre or two by her?
René had given Cyrene a purse with coins to use for the little things she might require. So far there had been none, and in any case the purse itself was an embarrassment to her, too much the sign of the kept woman. She had tried to refuse it, but since he would not have it, she had stowed it away in the armoire. When she went to look for it there, she could not find it at first. It had been shuffled to the back, wedged in a corner on a lower shelf. As she searched it out, she had to push aside René’s coats. There was a faint crackling sound as she touched one of them. She paid it scant attention but retrieved the purse and went out to Martha and the woman on the gallery to attend to the domestic crisis.
It was later that the memory of the odd rustling sound in René’s coat returned to puzzle her. René was a meticulous man, more so than most, or that was her impression from her limited experience with her father and the Bretons. He seldom left his belongings scattered around, and unless the clothing he removed was in need of Martha’s services, he always put it away. Martha washed and ironed his linen and, since he had no valet, cleaned and polished his boots; she brushed his coats and pressed the wrinkles from them. There had never been any need for Cyrene to rummage through his shelves in the armoire. If she had been asked, she would have said they held no secrets, for his shirts and coats and breeches, his cravats and his hats were stacked in neat piles and could be easily seen at a glance when the doors of the great armoire were thrown open. Nor were the shelves particularly crowded. Whatever he might have boasted in the way of a wardrobe in France, René had brought with him only a modest assortment of clothing for a gentleman: a half-dozen coats, a score or less pairs of breeches, and no more than three dozen each of shirts and cravats.
Cyrene approached the armoire with misgivings. Prying into other people’s belongings, she had been taught as a child, was ill-bred, a sign of servants’ manners. To ignore that teaching went against the grain to an amazing degree. Circumstances changed matters, she told herself. That did not keep her from feeling guilty and looking over her shoulder for Martha as she delved into the armoire, lifting René’s shirts and pushing his cravats aside. When the dry crackling of paper she had heard came again, she practically snatched the coat from which it issued off the shelf. She thrust her hand into one pocket after the other. Nothing. She must have missed one, she thought, and searched them all again. They were empty.
She gave the coat, a justaucorps of peacock blue satin, a shake. The crackling came again. She traced it, grasping at the section of the coat skirt from which it came.
The paper was sewn into the lining. Cyrene stood still, hovering in indecision for the space of several heartbeats. It was not unknown for travelers to sew their valuables into the linings of their clothes, especially when venturing to distant lands
over routes known to be dangerous. It could be, at times, a sensible precaution. Her own mother had told of how she had sewn her few jewels into the lining of an old fur robe on the voyage from New France to France as a young woman, and then had been horrified to find that her maid had used the robe to line a bed for her little lap dog.
Regardless, René did not strike Cyrene as the kind of man to depend on such a subterfuge to protect what he owned. There must be another explanation.
There was no such thing as a sewing basket in this bachelor household. Cyrene searched for something to slit the stitches with, at last finding a paper knife used to cut the bound pages of books. Sitting before the fire in the bedchamber, she began to open the seam of the coat lining. In a short time, she had a space large enough to insert three fingers. Gingerly, she slipped them into the lining, touching the small paper bundle she could feel through the cloth. She caught the bundle and drew it out.
Money. It was a thin sheaf of treasury notes. Crisp and new, their denominations were not large, but together they represented a substantial sum. She turned them this way and that, studying the engraving that marked them.
Various kinds of paper money, all of it much less valuable than the same amount in gold, were common tender in the colony. Hard gold or silver were, in fact, hardly ever seen, and when they were, they usually wound up in someone’s stocking or mattress. The paper money, however, was usually crumpled, dirty, indelibly creased, and imbued with the smell of sweat. Crisp new notes were suspect. Too often they turned out to be counterfeit.
So it was with the ones Cyrene held in her hands. She had not seen a great deal of money in her life, more often bartering for her needs in the last few years or having them attended to by her parents and grandparents in the times before. Still, the few worthless notes she had seen had made a lasting impression; money was too scarce, too dear, for a person to be taken in by such a thing more than once. On these notes, the engraving was too fancy, yet not quite clear, the paper too flimsy. The notes were counterfeit. She would wager her life on it.
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