Chapter 8
Heath sat next to Madame Bernard on a settee in Thanet Hall, drinking tea, eating baked eggs on toast, and watching as Giselle spoke with great animation to a Frenchwoman she’d just met. Leave it to the amiable Giselle to make a new friend within ten minutes of arriving.
“Would you like anything else?” Heath asked Madame Bernard in French as she set down her pear half-eaten.
“We are to eat after the procession, no?”
“Yes. This is merely breakfast to hold us over until it starts.”
“Then I shall wait.” She leaned over to him and lowered her voice. “Do you know that woman speaking to my daughter? Was she in Verdun, too?”
“I have no idea. Then again, I didn’t know everyone in the town.”
“My cousin told me Verdun was a small place.”
“Perhaps once upon a time. But when we arrived, there were at least four hundred détenus, some of them women and children. And that wasn’t counting the actual prisoners of war— naval officers, midshipmen, paymasters, sailors, and such—at one point, over eleven hundred men.
There were even a handful of army prisoners of war.
All crammed within the confines of a walled town already full of French men and women. ”
He nodded to Giselle’s French companion. “Some of those French-women married détenus or prisoners who brought them back to England after Napoleon abdicated. That lady is possibly one.”
They fell silent. He found himself wondering what Giselle was saying to her new friend so animatedly.
God, she looked happy. And damned gorgeous.
Her dark brown hair was piled seemingly haphazardly upon her head, giving the illusion that removing one pin would bring the whole mess of it cascading down her silk-adorned back to float easily about her undoubtedly tight bottom.
A bottom he would dearly love to cup in his hands.
Impossible, of course. So was his other fancy, of loosening the ties of her bodice so he could kiss his way inside to her creamy bosom, before taking one of her undoubtedly plump nipples in his mouth . . .
He swore under his breath as his cock started to harden.
She was driving him to distraction, his fascinating French goddess.
In the past week, he had ached for the closeness he and she had found before he’d introduced her to Yates so clumsily.
He liked the interesting way she had of examining the English ways he took for granted.
He enjoyed her enthusiasm for gardens . .
. hell, her enthusiasm for everything new and different.
He loved the way she’d sympathized with Kit.
As every day passed, it took more and more of his control not to sweep her into some corner on one of their jaunts and swive her senseless, if only to gain a reaction other than polite smiles and wary distance.
Fortunately, he hadn’t, but no matter how much he told himself it was for the best, he still yearned—
“You truly love her, don’t you?” Madame Bernard asked.
Fool that he was, he nearly voiced the denial before he remembered he was supposed to love Giselle. Swallowing hard, he lied. “Of course.” If love means I wish to take her to bed. That was all he felt. Wasn’t it?
“I can see it in how you look at her,” her mother said.
Well, at least he had deluded Madame Bernard successfully. That thought brought his cock under control, thank God.
“I suppose you know about Giselle’s father?” her mother went on.
“Which one?” he asked, wondering if Madame Bernard realized how much Giselle had told him.
The woman scowled. “I see my daughter revealed to you all about my foolish behavior before I married.”
He forced a sympathetic smile. “It wasn’t ‘foolish behavior’ for a woman who was about to become the wife of a man she didn’t love.”
How she answered would tell him much about her feelings for Giselle’s stepfather. But Madame Bernard searched his face instead. “Do you care that Giselle was Monsieur Morris’s natural child?”
“No,” he said firmly. “I only care that she is happy.” Married to someone else, preferably, but happy.
Then again, the thought of her married to someone else, someone capable of making her happy, didn’t sit well with him, either.
“Happiness is what I wish for her, too,” her mother said.
That surprised him, given that the woman had let her brother try to choose a husband for Giselle that Giselle hadn’t wanted. This time his question was more direct. “Were you not happy with Monsieur Bernard?”
“He was a difficult man.”
“Was he difficult . . . with Giselle?”
“Sometimes.”
When she didn’t go on, he shook his head.
She was adept at evading answering questions.
He dearly hoped the man hadn’t mistreated Giselle.
That would be something he couldn’t bear, though it might explain why she had fought being urged into marrying a man she didn’t want.
But he doubted Madame Bernard would tell him the truth about that.
So, he changed tacks. “Just out of curiosity, why didn’t you marry Dr. Morris?”
She scowled. “He wanted to take me to England. To leave my family and everything I knew. In my day, a woman of my position did not do such things. She married whomever her parents wished her to. Which is what I did.”
If anyone understood how tumultuous it could be to be guided only by one’s parents and not by one’s own choice, it was he.
With a Gallic shrug, she added, “Of course, if I had married Monsieur Morris, I would have ended up avoiding the Revolution, and that would have been preferable. But one always sees better afterward, doesn’t one?”
Another idea he more than sympathized with. He nodded.
Suddenly, someone emerged from the balcony to cry, “They’re coming!” Then, for the benefit of the few French who were there, “Ils arrivent!”
He stood and offered his hand to Madame Bernard. “Shall we?”
“You go on.” She gestured toward the nearest balcony door. “I am cozy here. You must look after my daughter.”
“Of course.”
Fortunately, by the time he reached Giselle she was already searching for him. “What about Maman?” she asked.
“She said she wants to stay inside where it’s cozy.”
Giselle looked conflicted. “I should keep her company.”
“Nonsense. She sent me to take you outside. How often do you get to see the Lord Mayor’s Show, after all?”
He laid his hand in the small of her back, and today she let him. Relishing the small victory, he led her out.
In glittering gold and red, the mounted trumpeters of the Household Cavalry were just then marching by, playing their instruments loudly in a vain attempt to overwhelm the noise and cheers of the crowd.
The Mercers liverymen walked past, resplendent in their red regalia, as did the Drapers livery company.
“What are those?” Giselle suddenly exclaimed as she pointed at two fourteen-foot-tall wicker effigies being carried along by the Basketmakers in the procession, towering over people, horses, and carriages alike.
“Oh, that’s Gog and Magog. They represent the giants that supposedly inhabited the British Isles until some Roman warrior chap named Corineus rid the place of them all. The effigies spend most of their time in the Guildhall, but they’re trotted out for the parade every year.”
He chuckled to himself. “When I was a lad, I asked my father if he could get me a Gog and Magog just like them. But Mother insisted there would be nowhere to put them in our house. Instead, I got both in miniature, which wasn’t at all what I was hoping for.”
“Why would you want two huge wicker effigies?”
Leaning closer, he whispered in her ear, “So I could see if the giants’ manly parts matched their height.”
Although she started to smile, she caught herself quickly enough. “Stop attempting to shock me, Heath. I do not believe you.”
“It’s the truth, I swear,” he said with a laugh. “I was a naughty boy from early on.”
“Now, that, I do believe,” she said archly.
“Look there!” someone cried. “It’s the blacksmiths!”
To be precise, The Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths. He’d forgotten about that. Every livery, as they’d always been termed, was called The Worshipful Company of Something or The Something Company. Idly, he wondered what made a company Worshipful instead of just a plain Something Company.
Perhaps it was the volume of their performance—the blacksmiths were so loud, he couldn’t even hear Giselle ask him a question. Situated atop a long wagon, the blacksmiths pounded anvils in counterpoint, making music with their sole instrument as they rolled past. That was fairly impressive.
They were followed by different sorts of marchers—a band of drummers here, a Worshipful Company there, another military regiment. Then came twenty-four knights on horseback played by actors in tin armor. It was a miracle they stayed on their mounts, given their obviously intoxicated state.
“Some things never change,” Heathbrook told Giselle. “They were inevitably drunk by this point in the few Lord Mayor’s Shows I saw as a boy, too.”
“But why have knights? There have been no knights in armor anywhere in Europe for hundreds of years.”
“It’s tradition. We are fond of tradition here.”
“Is that why the costumes of these marchers look so old-fashioned?”
“Exactly. The Lord Mayor’s Show goes back several centuries.” He shot her an arch smile. “We did not get rid of our aristocracy in a Revolution, remember?”
“Perhaps you should,” she said lightly. “Then you can wear more stylish clothes in your parade.”
He shook his head. One thing about his French miss—she had very interesting opinions. And she continued to express them throughout the procession. She did not like all the various military elements that marched, many playing fifes and drums to entertain the crowd.
“It is bad enough that Napoleon wanted war all the time,” she said. “He has certainly found a suitable playmate in England.”
“And in Russia and the Netherlands and Prussia and a few smaller countries I can think of.”
She sighed. “True. Napoleon found plenty of countries to play at war with.”