The Misguided Matchmaker

by Nadine Miller

  Maddy felt suffused with a warm glow of happiness. She had found the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her days, and he felt the same about her. If the truth be known, she didn’t really care where they lived. Life with Tristan would never be dull.

  A raindrop splashed against her cheek…and another and another. She’d been so absorbed in her happy musings she’d failed to notice the dark clouds gathering on the horizon. She could see now that a spring squall was about to burst upon them.

  “We’ll have to find shelter,” Tristan shouted over the rising wind.

  Shielding her eyes from the rain now lashing her face, Maddy searched for a barn or shed to wait out the storm. None were in sight. But off to her left, in the lee of a vine-planted hill, she spied one of the cadoles in which the vineyard workers slept during harvest. The tiny, stone beehive-shaped structure might be dark and windowless and just barely large enough to hold two people—but it would protect them from the downpour.

  “Over there,” she directed, pointing to the barely discernible mound of fieldstones.

  Tristan turned his head and his handsome features froze in horror. His face paled and he swiped at his brow as if beads of perspiration were mingling with the raindrops. “You cannot be serious,” he choked. “It’s scarcely large enough to hold a family of ground squirrels…and it has to be as black as pitch inside.”

  Maddy smiled to herself as she urged her horse toward the cadole. Was Tristan afraid that if they holed up in such close quarters, he would be tempted to kiss her again? For a confirmed rake, he had certainly become a stickler for propriety. This latest revelation made her more certain than ever that he intended to court her once they reached London.

  “This is no time to quibble over details,” she declared, and promptly dismounted, tied the mare’s reins to the nearest grape stake and crawled through the narrow entrance into the cadole.

  “It is roomier than it looks from the outside,” she called over her shoulder.

  Tristan gave no answer and she poked her head out to find him standing beside the hut in the pouring rain. “Don’t be so foolish,” she chided. “There is plenty of space for two people as long as you keep your head down.”

  Tristan groaned. Nothing in the world could induce him to crawl into that tiny stone hut and huddle in the dark until the storm passed. “I’ll wait out here,” he said tersely. “It is just a spring shower and will soon be over.”

  “Not soon enough to keep you from catching a case of lung fever.” Maddy peered up at him, a frown puckering her brow. “Do not think I am unappreciative of your concern for my reputation. Your honorable conduct does you credit, but how do you think I will feel if in protecting my good name you make yourself seriously ill?”

  Tristan stared at her, mouth agape. What was the fool woman prattling on about now? And what bearing did his fear of enclosed spaces have on her good name? Then he remembered she couldn’t possibly know he turned into a craven coward at the very thought of being trapped in such a space.

  Devil take it, he might as well confess his problem. He knew her well enough now to be certain she would never let up on him until he did—and what did it matter if she took him in disgust? Better that than the starry-eyed look she’d been giving him ever since he’d made the mistake of kissing her.

  “My honor notwithstanding, I could not make myself crawl into that hut if my life depended on it,” he said grimly. “I have had a terror of enclosed spaces since I was a small child—especially small, dark, enclosed spaces. The traboules were hellish enough; I would turn into a raving lunatic if I crawled into this hut.” There, he’d said it; let her scoff if she wished. Until now only Garth and Carolyn had been privy to his shame.

  Maddy peered up at him from the entrance of the hut. “I have heard of such an affliction,” she said matter-of-factly. “I do not believe it is terribly uncommon. But why in heaven’s name didn’t you mention this in the traboules instead of turning into a snarling beast every time we entered an enclosed space?”

  She frowned. “Don’t tell me. I already know. Your stupid masculine pride. I have to wonder what le bon Dieu had in mind when he made men the rulers of the world. They are such a silly, prideful lot.”

  In a matter of minutes Maddy had reduced the affliction that had haunted him since childhood to something she “didn’t believe was terribly uncommon.” One would think he’d confessed to having a hangnail, not a case of abject cowardice. But devil take it, this slip of a girl’s calm acceptance of his debilitating weakness was almost as embarrassing as the weakness itself.

  Shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other, he watched her brush away the water that had dripped onto her forehead from the beam supporting the opening of the cadole. “Well at least get the carriage blanket and cover your head,” she said crossly. “I’ve no desire to be nursing you through a head cold for the balance of our trip.”

  Damn her eyes! First she’d made him out a fool; now she wanted to reduce him to some missish creature huddling beneath a blanket for fear of taking a chill. “I do not catch colds,” he said stiffly. “I am impervious to such things. I have never been sick a day in my life.”

  Drawing the hood of his cassock over his head, he hunkered down on the side of the cadole protected from the wind and prepared to wait out the storm.

  “Do you remember what happened when you were a child to put this fear of confinement in your head?” Maddy asked, poking her head out of the hut when the wind died down sufficiently so they could carry on a conversation.

  Tristan pulled the hood further over his face. Of course he remembered. But that was one memory he had never divulged to anyone—not even his siblings.

  “Sometimes putting such things into words is the first step toward conquering them,” she said offhandedly, as if she had no idea she was asking him to bare the blackest secret of his soul.

  Was she right? Would exposing his fears to the light take away the power they still held over him? He doubted it, but he knew from experience Maddy would wring the humiliating truth out of him sooner or later.

  “My mother was a whore in one of the most notorious brothels in the London slums,” he said finally, and heard Maddy gasp. Let the nosy little busybody digest that bit of information if she could. “The abbess let her keep me with her, but only if I didn’t interfere with her professional duties. Hence, whenever she had a customer, which was nearly every night, she locked me in the clothes press. It was very dark and cramped and I was a mere tadpole with more imagination than sense. I used to stuff my fist in my mouth to keep from screaming in terror.”

  Maddy crawled from the hut to sit beside him in the rain, her eyes wide with horror. “But how could she do such a thing, knowing it frightened you so?”

  “She didn’t know,” he said simply. “Why would I tell her? Even a six-year-old could see she had no other option.”

  Maddy felt as if her heart had been rent asunder. In her mind’s eye she pictured Tristan as he must have been then—a little black-haired waif cowering, terrified, in his dark hidey-hole while his mother sold her body as a ten-penny whore.

  He avoided her eyes, staring straight ahead to where, on the far horizon, the sun was breaking through the clouds. “As it turned out,” he said softly, “the driver of a hackney coach solved my problem with the clothes press. He ran her down on a day much like this one. Though, in all fairness, with the rain and wind buffeting him, I doubt he ever knew she was beneath his wheels. She was such a little thing he could easily have mistaken her for a pile of rags someone had tossed into the middle of Haymarket Street.”

  “Oh, Tristan, what a terrible experience for a young boy to suffer.” Maddy slipped her hand into his. “And that’s when the Countess of Rand took you in.”

  “Yes.” He looked at her then—an odd, crooked smile twisting his lips. “The abbess knew who my father was, you see, and had one of her bully boys deliver me to the earl’s townhouse. He disclaimed me, of course, but the countess clas
ped me to her bosom, kissed away my tears, and made me as welcome as if I’d been one of her own. From that day forward, I was Lord Tristan, with nothing to remind me of my former life or my poor little mother except this blasted cowardly affliction which I’ll probably carry to my grave.”

  Maddy gave his fingers a squeeze. “Don’t ever call yourself cowardly again. I think you are the bravest person I’ve ever known. When I think of the torture you must have suffered in those dreadful, dark traboules, I could simply cry.” And leaning her head against his shoulder, she proceeded to do just that.

  Tristan shook his head in dismay. He’d been wrong in supposing he’d earn Maddy’s disgust with his sordid tale. It appeared to make no difference whatsoever in her regard for him. If anything, her eyes held more stars than ever once she dried her tears—stars that spelled trouble ahead, unless he could dissuade her from this idiotic notion that he was some kind of tragic hero.

  He was wrong about something else also. He was not immune to head colds. For the next two days and nights he alternated between burning with fever and shivering with ague. Maddy never actually said, “I told you so,” but it was there in her eyes each time she looked at him.

  Once she even went so far as to suggest he should spend a few days in bed at a small posting in where they spent a night, but that only made him more determined than ever to push on toward Paris. By the time they entered the city late on the evening of March 19, he felt weak as a kitten. Furthermore, he’d developed a persistent hacking cough and a set of aching muscles that made sitting a horse a constant agony.

  Paris seemed strangely quiet—much too quiet to his way of thinking. One could scarcely credit that Napoleon and his legions were marching triumphantly toward the city—or that there was every likelihood that Parisians might go to bed this night under the king’s rule and wake up tomorrow morning to find the emperor back on his throne.

  “We must make our way to the Tuileries,” Tristan said between coughing bouts. “Castlereagh will want a firsthand report on the fate of King Louis, and I may be the only one who can give it to him.”

  Remembering her grandfather’s fanatic allegiance to the Bourbons, Maddy nodded her agreement, though more than anything else, she longed for a hot meal and a soft bed.

  A crowd had gathered outside the gates of the royal palace. Tristan and Maddy dismounted and, keeping a tight rein on their horses, joined the people on the outskirts. “What is happening?” Tristan asked a grizzled old man leaning on a stout walking stick.

  The fellow regarded Tristan through hooded eyes. “Nothing that should greatly concern you and the lad, Father. It is rumored the Little Corporal sleeps at Fontainebleau tonight, so Fat Louis flees to Ghent.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “But it matters little who sits on the throne of France. Life will be no better or worse for the ordinary Frenchman.”

  He raised his head and peered toward the gate. “Ah, here is the king now,” he said doffing his narrow-billed cap.

  As Maddy watched, two liveried footmen emerged, carrying an oversized chair in which sat a grossly obese man with thinning gray hair and a collection of chins which rested like great, white pudding bags on his purple satin waistcoat.

  She stared at him in disbelief. “Never tell me that overstuffed toad is the king for whom my grandfather was willing to lay down his life?” she whispered to Tristan.

  “That is the king,” he said, stifling a cough.

  A halfhearted cheer went up from the crowd and the perspiring footmen halted for a moment while the occupant of the chair raised a hand in greeting.

  “My beloved countrymen,” he said in a surprisingly strong mellifluous voice, “I fear nothing for myself, but I fear for France. He who comes among us to light the torch of civil war brings us also the plague of foreign war. He comes to place our country once more under his iron yoke. He comes to destroy this constitutional charter I have given you.”

  A smattering of applause rippled throughout the crowd and one young soldier in a tattered Royalist uniform cried, “Vive le roi!”

  The king mopped his brow with a lace-edged handkerchief and continued, “This is the charter which all Frenchmen cherish—may it be our sacred standard!”

  Another cheer from the crowd, this time slightly more enthusiastic. Then, with the combined effort of half a dozen of his stalwart young guardsmen, Louis XVIII was hoisted aloft and stuffed into his ornate traveling-coach. The last Maddy saw of him was a pudgy, ring-bedecked hand waving out the window as the carriage rumbled northward toward the Belgian border.

  Her eyes prickled with tears. “I thank le bon Dieu my grandfather was not here to see his ridiculous travesty of a king fleeing before the Corsican,” she said sadly. She looked about her. “At least he had some loyal supporters to cheer him as he left.”

  “Who will cheer Bonaparte with equal gusto when he enters the city tomorrow,” Tristan said dryly. “The old man speaks for most Parisians. They are sick to death of strife and will settle for anyone who brings them peace. But that is not our problem.”

  He surveyed the crowd, which was scattering in all directions. “So far I have seen no familiar faces, but my luck can only hold so long. More than anything else, we need to leave Paris before someone recognizes me.”

  Mounting his horse, he made a careful survey of the broad avenue flanking the Tuileries. “But first we must find oats for the horses, as well as food for ourselves and beds on which to lay our heads for a few hours. We will make a dash for Calais at first light.”

  Wearily, Maddy mounted the little mare and followed him through the darkened streets of Paris. Once they’d passed the partially constructed Arc de Triomphe, which Napoleon had designed to celebrate his early military victories, the streets narrowed and the elegant buildings gave way to a rabbit warren of tenements and tiny, windowless shops.

  The wind was rising sharply and the fetid air hanging over the city was soon thick with the dirt and debris that littered the ancient streets. Holding the reins with one hand and shielding her eyes from the flying grit with the other, Maddy struggled to keep up with Tristan as he urged his stallion down one narrow, twisting alleyway after another.

  Twice he doubled back, passing through the same street they had traversed just moments before. But finally, just when she was certain he was hopelessly lost, he stopped before a recessed doorway at the end of a cobblestone street.

  “My former abode,” he explained in the gravelly voice he’d acquired with his head cold. He pounded on the door. “The landlady is an old friend who can be counted on for a decent meal and a clean bed.”

  He pounded again, and the door opened a crack, then was thrown wide by a small, dark-haired figure in a white nightrail. “Treeston, mon ami,” she shrieked, winding her plump arms about his neck. “What are you, of all men, doing in the garb of a priest?”

  Tristan chuckled, which started him coughing again. “It is a long story, Minette, and one better told over a glass of wine and a plate of your excellent food.” He handed the reins of both horses to a ragged urchin lounging beside the open doorway and instructed him to lead them to the mews, then drew Maddy forward. “Can you put my young friend and me up for the night? We will want adjoining rooms with a connecting door.”

  Minette raised an expressive eyebrow as she stepped aside to let Tristan and Maddy enter. “So, cheri, you have not warmed my bed for ten months and now you wish such an arrangement with this…this creature!” She glared at Maddy.

  Tristan glanced Maddy’s way, as if to gauge her reaction to the risqué question, but by sheer force of will she managed to hide the shock she felt at the woman’s frankness.

  Furtively, she studied this “old friend” of his, who was apparently also an old lover. Even in the dim candlelight she could see the fine lines edging the woman’s black, snapping eyes, which proclaimed her past the first blush of youth. Still, one could not deny her dark, sultry beauty, and her thin nightrail did little to hide her full breasts and rounded hips, two womanly
attributes Maddy had always secretly envied in women more voluptuous than she.

  Minette’s lower lip protruded in a pout. “I have missed you, Treeston. It is my curse in life that my heart should never stop longing for such a cruel, uncaring man.” She cast another venomous glance at Maddy. “And now, you insult me thus.”

  “I have missed you too, cheri,” Tristan said, dropping a chaste kiss on the brow of the woman who had been his lover off and on for almost seven years.

  He found himself strangely embarrassed by Minette’s overt allusion to their former relationship. Her frankness had never bothered him before. In fact, there had been a time when he’d considered it amusing. But now that he was forced to view the situation through Maddy’s eyes… Still, giving the little innocent a glimpse of his former life might be the best way to disillusion her about him.

  In truth, he had no choice but to pacify Minette. She was a jealous little cat, and unless he buttered her up sufficiently, he would find himself with an empty belly and sleeping on the street. But honeyed words were all he intended to give her tonight. He had no desire whatsoever to share her bed—a rare phenomenon he felt certain must be attributed to his heavy head cold.

  Gently he pried her clinging fingers from his arm. “What is this nonsense you’ve come up with?” he asked, chucking Minette under her softly rounded chin and giving her a brief kiss on her pouting red lips. “As I told you, the boy is merely a friend.”

  “This is true?”

  “Have you ever known me to lie to you?”

  “No, but I have often suspected you told me only half the truth.” She shrugged. “Ah well, one cannot expect perfection, and”—her gaze roamed up and down his lean body—“there is much about you to admire.” Within minutes, she had produced one of the delicious cold collations he remembered from when he was her tenant.