Chapter Twenty-Two #2
She stood leaning on the windowsill and scanned the grounds.
A small garden surrounded with ruby-red rhododendrons lay before her.
The owner here, Lady Tracy, evidently believed in random planting.
The only order was that hedge of red. Lilies of white and variegated yellows sprang up here, there, and beyond.
Bluebells spread from one clump of lilies to another.
The greens of the foliage ran the spectrum from the pale green of young shoots to the spring greens of new leaves and the glossy forest green of shrubs and, of course, back to the ever-present rhododendrons.
She was blossoming like those red flowers.
She had changed these past weeks, in infinitely tiny degrees, opening to the air, the sky, and a realm of different possibilities.
Nearing the end of her mission, meeting Gus and Amber again, reuniting with her mentor and her mother’s best friend Madame Le Brun, had begun to conclude her recent life as a spy.
They had reawakened in her a desire to create a new life.
Her thought of retreating to Cornwall was the marker of that.
But meeting Clive had infused her with a new ambition. Her first thought, that she was not worthy of him—a marquis and she, the youngest daughter of a vicomte—faded quickly.
In its place came a new phenomenon. A reawakening, a birth of a new perception of herself in vibrant shades of possibilities.
A foaming white the color of waves crashing on a shore wiped away, little by little, the black marks of her past. Her capture with her sister and brother by Vaillancourt.
His man’s rape of Lisette and her own outrage. Her marriage, abusive and unbearable.
Those angers faded, washed as if with a soft brush into the verdant greens of a summertime romance.
Delicate as a seedling thrusting through good earth, Clive’s seeming instant regard for her, his insistent attentions and his charms, had drawn her.
Lured her, indeed, with lines of affection, as surely as if he drew them with bold black ink, wrapping around her, holding her near.
Watching as if from afar, she had allowed his courting.
She had welcomed it. She had invited it, him to her bed, to her heart.
That was the celestial blue that had seeped into her consciousness and sustained her through capture.
She had not feared death. She had expected Clive’s rescue.
And here she was. Lifting her face to the future, planning a new way to live. She needed her watercolors to paint this scene, this time, this moment of success, in her mind.
Three days had passed since Lord Langley had burst into her bedroom with the news that the French army had left the plains of Boulogne. Relief had washed through her with his announcement.
Somehow, she needed more.
Sure what that was, she had used her time awake to ponder what was lacking.
Aside from her displeasure with herself at her failure to finish and deliver the Brighton drawings, she wished for a resolution of her personal life.
She’d known that Clive had been ready to ask her to marry him just before Langley appeared.
He had not broached the subject again, and she put that down to his desire, and her own, to see her health well improved.
She had spent years denigrating marriage. But Clive was everything her husband had never been. Kind, joyous, temperate, a tender parent, he’d commended himself to her from the first minute she’d met him.
For years, not even when she was married, she had not thought of herself as anyone’s wife. Certainly not as any man’s lover. She’d viewed herself, her life, as one spent alone. Drawing, painting, planting, cooking to please herself only.
She’d even told herself she would live somewhere by the sea, where time and tide blended into an atmosphere without beginning or end.
But that was past. And she was ready now. She loved Clive Davenport. Most wondrously, she did.
She gripped the windowsill and clutched at the handle on the pane of glass. She pushed it open, and the fresh air whirled around her. Fragrances of flowers, grass, and salt infused her with a breath of her new future.
A soft rap at the door was indicative of Clive’s gentle knock.
“Come in!” she called to him, whirling around but bracing herself against the sill and wall.
“Good morning.” He took one step, saw her, and stopped. “You are up!”
“I am.”
His joy was instantly overridden by concern. “Should you be?”
“Yes, I should be. Do come in. Do you have breakfast with you?”
He gestured to one side of the doorway, where he usually placed a tray upon a small stool, before he opened the door. “I bring the usual.”
She wrinkled her nose.
He laughed at her humor.
She straightened her back. “I won’t drink any of it.”
“But—”
“If you insist I drink any of that, dear sir, I will never marry you.”
He froze. “Do you intend to?”
“If you will have a Frenchwoman with no dowry, no family, and one skill—aside from cooking, that is.”
As if spirited by magic, he was before her, his arms around her, gathering her up off her toes against his solid form.
“I will have you, all of you, for the rest of our lives.” He dropped a kiss to the tip of her nose.
“I have money. It brings me the necessities of life. I have family. But it is not complete. I want to fill it up with you, wonderful you.” He pulled away, whimsy in his manner.
“In addition, of course, I do like your cooking. I would be pleased to marry a lady who does it so well that, frankly, we will never have to hire a cook.”
Laughing, she cuffed him.
He held her so near, her body was his. “In that case, I accept your proposal, my darling, if you agree to one thing.”
“Anything you want of me is yours,” she whispered.
“Tell me that your mind is clear of your past tragedies.”
She stilled, butterflies in her stomach at this that she had not anticipated.
“I am done with revenge. I am done with old horrors. I have used my skills to do what I can for this effort abroad. I will live anew.” She cupped his cheeks. “Do you know why?”
He shook his head.
“Because you are my everything, earnest and bright. You are all the colors of my sea and earth and sky. Even the spectrum of heaven. I love you, Clive Davenport. I love you. And if you will have me as your wife, I will rejoice in the thousands of ways you have filled my world with the hues of tenderness and sweet regard.”
Tears dotted his blond lashes. “I will have you, my darling. I will have you for the rest of our lives. Never to part. What say you to a wedding next week?”
She slanted two fingers across his handsome lips. “In Richmond.”
He curled her close. “You want to live there?”
“When I saw it months ago, a crisp winter sun gilding the white stones, I told myself I could find happiness in its walls. Then I asked in town whose house that was, and to my delight they described the man whom I’d glimpsed and admired his form, his stance, his mien.
I caught your title, but then moved it to the back of my mind.
I never thought to meet you. Nor have you.
Never thought you might care for me, too.
So, yes, I would like to be married in your Richmond house and live in it whenever you wish. ”
“Wherever you wish to be, there I am also, my darling.”
*
Two days later, they stood at the front door of Lady Tracy’s home, their luggage loaded in Clive’s traveling coach, which he’d had sent from London for their journey to Richmond.
“You have been so gracious to us,” Giselle told the young widow.
“We can never thank you enough, my lady.” Clive shook hands with Halsey’s cousin. “You will come to our wedding, I do hope.”
“I would not miss it. Nor would Reggie.” Lady Tracy hugged her son close to her side.
Giselle bent to the little boy who had so eagerly come to her room each afternoon this past week and read her his favorite stories.
All of them were the English translations of the fabulist La Fontaine’s stories for children.
Reggie would read in English and Giselle would sit, entranced that this young boy of eight did her such a service.
At one point reading “Le Loup et la Cigogne,” or “The Wolf and the Crane,” Reggie had wondered what the original book would look like with pictures.
Giselle, remembering with fondness her mother reading the same story to her, asked him to get her a paper and pencil.
She recreated for him the illustration she recalled in the little, well-thumbed book in her family’s chateau library.
Reggie had wished to trace her drawing, and Giselle, surprised and pleased by his interest, had helped him.
Afterward, the little boy had pressed his drawing to his chest and said, in imitation of the moral of that story, “I shall always thank those well who do a kind service for me.”
She had hugged him to her, telling him she wanted him to come to her wedding to Lord Carlisle, and read stories to a new little friend, Annabelle.
Now he stood beside his mother, his little lips pressed together as a tear slid down his charming cheek.
“I will see you very soon, Reggie.”
“We will read more stories, madame?”
“We will, over and over.”
“Will you teach me how to draw the other animals in Monsieur la Fontaine’s fables?”
“I certainly will. We will encourage Annabelle to join us.”
He stood taller with that idea. “We three can write a book and draw the illustrations together!”
“A fine idea, Reggie. I am eager for your visit.” And what she told him was to encourage him, but also to see herself as a tutor of those who wished to learn how to draw.
The young boy kissed her on the cheek. “Au revoir, madame.”
She ruffled his hair. “Au revoir, monsieur.”
*
Minutes later in the carriage, she snuggled closer into Clive’s sure embrace and allowed herself to shed the tears she had contained at their departure.