Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Giselle slowly opened her eyes against the weak sunlight, and then closed them again, shivering in the cold of the day. She wriggled slightly to sink deeper into her mattress, and found that it was far less comfortable than she remembered. Gritty.
And thinking of gritty, her pillow was not nearly so soft nor smooth as the linen she usually had. Eyes still closed, she moved a hand to move her pillow – and felt only soil.
Her eyes snapped open, and were flooded with sunlight that barely dappled through the silver birch leaves that were above her.
Mind racing, attempting to remember where she was and how she had got there, Giselle pushed herself up on her elbows and attempted to take stock as a slight twinge in her arm reminded her that it had been injured.
The inn. The Loxham Inn, and running. Running away from a man, and getting into a boat – éduard.
Giselle sat up properly and slowly stretched her arms behind her to button up the back of her gown which she had loosened for comfort the night before. So, her last act as the Great Whisperer had failed, and now she was here, having to deal with the consequences.
This was so typical, she thought. I did not even want to be a spy in the first place, and now I am stuck here on this island, in the depths of winter, with no way of getting back to complete my mission, with a gentleman who not only wants to catch me, but is a revolutionary himself!
She tried to force down the wave of nausea that came up at the very thought of the revolutionaries, and her parents, and Pierre…
Giselle stood up and stretched. There was no point in dwelling on such matters when she had problems to solve right here, right now, and her immediate problem was thirst.
The pain in her arm was dull now, and in a few hours, she would barely notice it.
Leaving her shoes on the beach, but high up near the silver birch trees where they could not be taken by the swelling tide, she picked her way through the trees with her ears pricked, listening for that tell-tale sign of water.
It did not take her long to find it. A tiny stream, trickling down towards the ocean as though in a hurry to gain a little salt. Giselle knelt down and cupped her hands, taking her time to drink to slowly satiate her thirst. Who knew how long she would come to depend on this little stream?
A sound – a movement? She spun around on her heels and looked around wildly, looking for éduard, an animal, perhaps another man.
Nothing moved, save the wind. It was just the natural movement of a woodland, the trees breathing in their slow and timeless way, but it was enough to start her pulse racing, and as her eyes swept around the area, they landed on éduard.
He was but twenty feet from her, in a clearing that she could just make out. He was asleep, with his greatcoat lying a few feet away from him, carefully folded as though he was going to be marked on his tidiness and cleanliness.
Giselle stifled a laugh. He was strange, this revolutionary companion that she had acquired.
Polite and stiff at times, almost too familiar at others.
It was as though he was playing a part, rather than anything else, and yet he had spoken so definitely against the nobility that he could surely not be anything else.
His greatcoat. It was just lying there, unattended. She bit her lip, but knew that she would never get an opportunity like this again.
Creeping forward as softly as she possibly could, Giselle moved into the clearing while keeping a careful eye on the sleeping éduard. He did not shift a muscle as she reached out for his greatcoat, and did not stir as she began to carefully and methodically go through the pockets.
Most were filled with the typical detritus of any man on the road: shillings, string, a small pocketknife, a snuff box, nothing of import. The sword she had already seen in the inn lain close by him as he slept, and she was not fool enough to attempt to take it.
And then her fingers closed on something different: parchment folding close, with something on it – a seal?
Giselle’s breathing stopped as she pulled out the letter. Now this was something that could give her real insight, but as her fingers turned it around to display the address, her heart seemed to stop.
In the most stylised and curled writing she had ever seen – even in France – the letter was addressed to: Prince éduard of Aviroux.
Prince éduard. Prince éduard. Prince éduard of Aviroux.
Giselle’s wide eyes flickered between the letter and the sleeping man, as her fingers tingled and her head started to spin. It is possible that éduard had lied to her about his true identity just as much as she had lied to him about hers?
If he was truly a prince, then why was he hunting down the Great Whisperer? Would he not support my work, Giselle thought wildly, to protect people like himself? Why would he not be working with her, rather than going around pretending to be a revolutionary and hunting her down?
Or perhaps it was the opposite, she thought in a slow panic. Perhaps he was not a prince at all, and used the title to draw out nobility in hiding – and then handed them to revolutionaries!
It was impossible to know, impossible to be sure of this man: his motivations, his true name, whether anything that he had said up to this point had been true. She had been foolish herself to speak of her parents; it would not do to be too honest any more.
Her eyes moved, almost unconsciously, back to the sleeper.
How could such a handsome man not be a prince?
She was no crétin, she knew that technically being born into a royal house did not immediately bestow upon you fine looks.
But everything she had ever thought of a prince, everything she had ever hoped of a prince, he certainly was.
But this line of thinking could take her nowhere. As quietly as she could, Giselle placed the letter back in the top pocket of the greatcoat, a little confused, a little upset, but stoic. She could not trust this man at all, that was all that was clear.
As she rose and started to pad away, a voice called her name.
“Giselle?”
She looked around quickly. éduard was awake; bleary eyed and a little confused perhaps, but definitely awake.
“I just came to get a drink from the stream,” she said, and immediately chastised herself silently. Would did she say that for? She was under no obligation to explain herself to this, this, révolutionnaire.
“A fine idea, and I may join you,” said éduard, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
Giselle was struck once again by his fine looks, and tried to push it out of her mind. It was time to test this gentleman, if he even was that.
She smiled. “The ground was wonderfully soft, do not you think?”
éduard blinked at her as though she had completely lost her wits. “Soft? Non, I would say more uncomfortable than…”
Giselle watched him closely, and almost smiled as she saw his eyes widen as he recalled his revolutionary declared status. A revolutionary, they both knew, would never complain about simple living, and something like sleep out in the open, on the bare ground, was almost mandatory.
“I mean,” he said quickly, “more uncomfortable than some of the places where I have slept, tu comprends, but nothing to the freezing cold streets of Paris.”
He looked so smug at the cleverness of his turn of phrase that Giselle could not help it. She started to laugh.
A frown appeared on éduard’s face as he asked he irritably, sitting up, “And what, may I ask, is so funny?”
Giselle tried not to grin, but really, it was so very trying. “Because monsieur, I know who you are.”
She was unsure what affect she expected her words to have, but she was unprepared for quite the reaction that she created.
éduard rose quickly, almost falling in his speed to right himself, and his eyes were wide and eyebrows furrowed. “You cannot – you cannot possibly know.”
For a moment, Giselle was unsure how to proceed. She had not considered that she would have to explain exactly how she knew, and it was not going to be an easy explanation. ‘I decided to rummage through your pockets, and this is what I found’, hardly seemed to warrant any of his trust.
“In the boat,” she said, a spark of genius hitting her. “When we were fighting, in the boat. In the struggle, a letter fell out of your pocket, and I saw who it was addressed to, Prince éduard.”
They stood there, silent, staring at each other for almost a full minute.
Giselle found to her surprise that her heart was beating rather fast, and it seemed to quicken each time that their eyes met.
His gaze was so intense that she was unable to stare directly at him, but she did not want to look away.
Somehow, in some way and she was not sure how, this was a test.
She seemed to pass it. Without saying a word, éduard dropped to his greatcoat, and pulled out some bread.
He sighed. “Here. Take some, you must be hungry.”
Giselle hesitated, but at that very moment a growl in her stomach betrayed her, and she stepped forward to take part of the bread that he offered.
As she took it, éduard sat down quietly, gestured that she should join him, and said quietly, “So, la vérité. I am a prince.”
Giselle’s heart beat faster, faster than she had ever felt it, even while acting as the Great Whisperer on dangerous missions.
She had met princes before – if she could remember rightly, her father’s cousin was a prince of Belgium – but that did not make it an everyday occurrence.
A prince, sitting beside her, sharing his crusty and slightly stale bread with her. A prince.
In her heart of hearts, Giselle could see that a title was the one thing that the delectable éduard lacked. Tall, dark, handsome, brave, obviously charming…and now a prince?
“A prince,” she repeated. “A prince with bread in his pocket.”
“Ah, I am prince of a small place, you would not know it, keeping food on me is second nature on the road,” éduard replied with that Gallic shrug Giselle knew so well.
“A small part of France, right by the border with Italy.
‘Tis a strange custom, but years ago – centuries, even – there was a disagreement between them, and to make amends the King of France made the local duke a prince. The title has continued on in my line for nine generations, leaving me a Prince. The Prince of Aviroux.”
Giselle stared at him. She had heard of similar things happening across France; our love of pageantry, she said to herself silently.
It did not end with golden carriages, and bowing, and feasts that continued on for weeks, rather than days.
No, every now and again one stumbled across a little quirk of nobility and you found yourself a prince.
“I do not like to use the title,” éduard said quietly, finishing a mouthful. “‘Tis not something that I regularly share, amongst my revolutionary comrades, as I am sure you can appreciate.”
Giselle’s stomach turned to rock. Of course, as a revolutionary, the last thing that he needed was to reveal his ancestry.
“But I believe in their ideals,” continued éduard, not noticing the glare that Giselle was giving him.
“Being able to share in them without revealing my…my familial history is something that is very décisif to me. And of course, you share them with me, as a fellow hunter of the Great Whisperer, the one who acts against us revolutionaries.”
It was a challenge not to punch him in the face, Giselle thought.
How on earth am I going to survive on this lump of rock for one more day!
And though she could try to hide from it as much as she liked, it was now impossible to ignore: éduard, or éduard Aviroux, or Prince éduard, whoever he was, was all the more attractive with every moment that she spent with him.
“…more thoughts?”
Giselle started as éduard looked at her expectantly. “Pardon?”
He looked at her strangely for a moment, and then repeated, “We still need to create a plan for getting off this island and back to the mainland, so that we can continue our hunt for the Great Whisperer. Have you had any more thoughts?”
It was a rushing bump back to reality, but it was needed. If she was not careful, she could easily lose herself in the eyes of this dashing prince, and then where would she be?
She coughed. “Well, there is always the chance that there could be other people living here on this island. We do not really know how large it is, or whether there is a population here. Do you even know what island it is?”
éduard shook his head, and something lurched in her stomach as his jaw tightened before he spoke. “I walked a great distance before I fell asleep last night, and I saw neither man nor dwelling habitable by man. I believe that we are alone here.”
“Ah, that is disappointing, but not wholly unexpected,” replied Giselle with a shrug, suddenly aware of how close they were sitting. His arm was just a few inches away, and their hands – they were almost touching. Just one of them had to move, and…
“There is always swimming,” she said hastily, as though trying to drown out her own thoughts. “‘Tis not that far to the mainland, I think, and if we time it carefully, the tide can be our friend.”
Although she had made a statement, rather than a question, Giselle did assume that éduard was going to respond to her words; either to accept, or reject her suggestion. His silence drew her attention, and she saw a little pucker of concern mapped on his forehead.
“Quelle?”
éduard sighed, and looked even more uncomfortable. “I…it does not matter.”
For the first time since their meeting, Giselle looked at him not with irritation, or fear, or contempt, but with compassion.
“éduard, you can tell me,” she said softly, surprised at how gentle her own words were. “I am not going to tell anyone your secret. And think about it – who would I tell?”
She gestured around the silent and empty clearing, and smiled at him; a genuine smile, a smile borne out of something she did not quite understand.
Perhaps it was because there were alone here, with only each other to depend on.
Perhaps it was the stale bread finally filling the hunger that she had tried to ignore for so long.
Perhaps it was the way he smiled back at her, almost despite himself.
“I am sure that my secret is safe with you,” he said, his smile widening. “Giselle, I cannot swim. I can barely float, ‘tis a great failing that I have learned to accept and live with. But if we cannot find a boat, then I will be in this perilous place forever.”