Chapter One #2
“You know,” she said more cautiously. “You, dead, bleeding poetically into the earth. Me, dead, robbed of the child you never knew I carried.”
“At least we can be sure she will grow up virtuous and pure,” the lord said, his hard lips softening, “unlike her wicked parents. That is the fate of such children, is it not?” His French was excellent but not quite native when she put it together with his English clothes and features.
He risked a great deal being here, with all his wealth on show.
Her pulse picked up. Perhaps here was her solution, this powerful English lord. Perhaps her mother’s god had been listening after all.
She shifted her body to show herself off and slowly smiled. “Our daughter will be a saint, and that’s the least we can expect of her. Her reward, naturally, will be marriage to a good man.”
“Have you ever met a good man?” he said.
“It would not be for me to marry him, if I had.”
“Ah. You are a bad woman.” An appreciative smirk, and then: “I enjoyed your secretive entrance. The door didn’t even click.”
She blushed violently, and downstairs a street organ cranked to life with an accelerating run of notes.
She managed a self-deprecating laugh. “I would have paid more attention to the turns, if I’d known I had an audience.
” She cast her eyes coquettishly down, then looked up at the lord through her lashes.
Stared, if truth be known. She was captivated by him and didn’t know why.
Perhaps it was fear—the still, focused attention of prey.
His eyes seemed not only pale but bright, like light shining on snow. Like each passing moment was caught within their prism.
In all honesty, she felt … immoderate. She wanted to get her hands on that cool, ironic mouth and open it, plunder it. If she could just crack it open, treasure might fall out. Downstairs the music achieved pace and the “War Song for the Army of the Rhine” emerged, melodic and vulgar.
He said, “Bastien is very proud of having acquired Celine Genet, and having the funds to maintain her. That’s you, I think?”
“What makes you say so? Have you heard she’s very beautiful?”
A slight depression of the corners of his lips that wasn’t quite a smile.
She took a step closer. “Or that a man may circle her waist with his hands?”
“Rumour, surely,” he said, but his eyes were fixed, for the first time, somewhere other than her face. Got you, she thought. Men were so easy.
He said lightly, “A woman’s hands couldn’t manage it?”
She wasn’t sure why, but the inoffensive words made her pause. Uneasily, she said, “What are you doing in Bastien’s study?”
“I came to retrieve a letter of mine and have failed to find it. Are you here to empty his drawers? I’ll help, if you like.” He stood and took a pile of letters from the top desk drawer, shuffling through them. “I’m sure there’ll be something you can use to survive him.”
So he already knew Bastien was bound for the guillotine, though she herself had only just found out.
His hair slid forward like pale silk. “These,” he said, holding up two letters, “are from his uncle in the Caribbean. As good a place to start as any.”
With every word he spoke, she grew more uneasy. She had a knack for understanding the basic nature of people, and there was something about this lord she hadn’t understood yet—something essential. It was the thing she was responding to, that felt like fear.
“Bastien will pay you a lot of money to take him with you when you return to England,” she said. And her as well, pray God.
“I don’t need money,” the lord said, bored by the suggestion.
“You have travelled all the way here, at great personal risk. Surely it isn’t so much greater a risk to take him with you? A little risk in exchange for a man’s life. It seems not only fair; it seems to me it is your duty.”
“And is his entire household my duty, too?” said the uncanny voice, laughing at her. “Or just one among their number, in particular?”
“You’d risk your life for a letter,” she said, her temper flaring, “but not for a man. How incredibly deficient.”
“Please, I beg of you, stop.” Amused, he made gestures of surrender.
“It is not I who sends Bastien to his death. Neither was it I who brought attention to his loose tongue. I don’t, as it happens, think it my place to intervene in French affairs.
But yes, I freely admit I’m glad someone is going to shut him up permanently.
” His voice remained cool and amused, but for the first time, his control was imperfect: His eyes betrayed a bitter, private pain.
“He helped me with a prank when I was twelve and precocious. If he’s destroyed the letter I sent him, then he’s the only person besides myself who knows what was in it.
” With sudden violence, he said, “My God, such obstacles he has laid before me! This, of all things, he may not use against me!”
She had the strong sense he was speaking not of Bastien but of some far more dangerous antagonist. Bastien was an insubstantial sort of a man. What was in that letter? What could Bastien possibly know? Whatever it was, this English lord was going to let him die for it.
“Then take only me,” she said desperately. “If you’re going to sacrifice Bastien, at least take the spoils. He intended to offer me to the”—that queer, hot lurch in her stomach—“the Duke of Howard. You can’t turn your nose up at what would have pleased a duke.”
She became aware of the street organ again when it abruptly stopped.
A resounding silence followed, and her heart kicked in her chest like a child’s feet against cupboard doors.
She strained to listen, watching the study door.
They have come, she thought, sick with fear for herself. They have already come for him.
A single violin note played; a door slammed. A burst of laughter, then conversation. The rest of the orchestra found their notes.
She didn’t need to look to know the lord had observed her fear. She had the irrational notion those eyes could not only see her fear but could follow it, that they would find the girl in the cupboard.
“You were promised to the Duke of Howard,” he said slowly.
His face was utterly serious now. “The English duke who is a woman?” His voice lingered over that last word, and every uneasy sense in Celine’s body seized, like she had needed only this one word to understand what essential quality she’d missed.
Woman.
The lord said, “Did Bastien send you up here?”
She was gripped in a dumb amazement and couldn’t answer. Her ears seemed to ring with the force of the revelation.
What she had thought was fear had been nothing but brute, animal attraction.
This English lord was a woman.
Celine saw the moment the lord realised the mistake she had made. The hard mouth began, devastatingly, to smile. Wide and then wider still, until the glittering teeth were unsheathed: a mouthful of treasure sharp enough to gobble Celine up. She couldn’t look away, and she knew, she knew, she knew.
“You’re the Duke of Howard.”