Chapter Twenty-Two
North of Le Havre, France
Evan took his wife’s arm and helped her down the gangplank of a packet that had landed before dawn in a small port in Normandy.
Jacques Durand, the renowned smuggler who headed Scarlett Hawthorne’s sea-bound operations and who had been their captain, followed.
So did a very disgruntled Rafe Durham, who now cursed everything about the sea.
After ten days crossing the choppy Channel, all nine aboard swore they’d never sail anywhere ever again.
The smuggler and his crew set foot on the blistered, broken docks and staggered toward wooden crates. Durand, a young man of burnished, seagoing complexion and sun-bleached hair, was as green as his men.
Evan wanted to cast up his accounts for a second time this morning, but his wife amazingly looked as if she had already recovered. Durham confounded him because he had not been ill once, but complained like a barnacled navy man about the terrible sailing they had endured.
The winter storms that had tossed them about were as frightful as the numerous times Durand had sighted French ships in their distance. The French blockade, he’d said, had tightened since Bonaparte lost at Trafalgar.
The British, of course, had retaliated and persistently attacked wherever they found a weakness in French lines. The result was that British ships got through with cargo, and those British goods found excellent prices on a Continent with people starved for cottons, paper, mahogany, and wheat.
“You have been here before?” Evan glanced around at the bedraggled men who worked the port. He spoke French, as he had been warned to do by Durand.
“Many times.” Durand feigned outrage and put up a hand. “Please, no more.” He had observed that Evan’s accent was not good. Evan had tried to improve and taken lessons from Inès, to little avail.
“Count your blessings, sir.” Inès looked at him with a flash of humor in her umber eyes.
He met her order with a quick smirk. “As you wish, madame.”
She giggled, a measure of happiness to be in her own country again, despite the hazards they would soon face.
On the voyage, she had been ill more than he, and he could see she had lost weight.
Still, although her body was thinner, her skin was pink and wind-kissed.
The crossing had agreed with her, storms and French patrols notwithstanding.
He knew why, but did not broach the subject.
If she thought of the timing, if she understood why she slept like a child, if she noticed her breasts were larger, her nipples gloriously deep rose and sensitive when he kissed them, she had given no indication.
She had denied she might be with child that day he confronted her when she planned to leave him.
Her mind was obviously full of their mission here.
He would not bring up the delicate subject again until they were successful here, or she brought it up herself.
“Come with me,” Durand told them, and hoisted his satchel over one arm.
He glanced back at Rafe and nodded. On board, the four of them had spoken and decided to split here on the coast. Rafe, who had insisted he go to France with Evan and Inès, came as assurance they would be successful and escape.
The smuggler promised to set up Rafe in a separate inn and give him the appearance of an old friend of his.
He smiled at Inès and Evan. “I will take you to my favorite auberge.”
The inn was one, he had told them both, where the owner asked no questions. Rafe would wait on the dock for the smuggler to return for him.
“One of our friends?” Inès had asked him about the owner of the inn. She had sailed with Durand from France to England last autumn, and the two were fast friends.
“Absolument.” Durand grinned at Inès now. “Are you both ready to see the capitaine de port?”
He had told them the local harbormaster was in his pay. They would show their passports as Monsieur et Madame La Porte, pay their entry fee, and show their two small valises at customs. They were to claim they were from Toulon on the Mediterranean and here only a short time.
“I will go in first. The proprietor, Monsieur Chantal, and I have been at this so long that he claims such profit from me that he can marry his daughter to the local marchand de sel.”
“Salt is precious,” Inès told Evan, offhand. “The local merchants who sell the good salt from Guérande have suffered because they cannot export as much, what with the blockade.”
Evan nodded. Lack of good salt at a decent price had been, said many, one of the causes of the French revolting against their king. But Evan smiled. One bright spot for the British in this disastrous blockade was that local French businesses suffered for the cut in markets.
At the moment, all Evan cared about was having a good meal on a table that did not lean to one side or the other with the wind—and getting his wife to a comfortable bed.
#
Their trip down the coast of the Seine toward Paris was one of the most pleasant journeys Inès had ever taken.
The weather was sunny; the traveling coaches they hired were wide and comfortable; the apple fritters and the calvados wine from Normandy’s orchards slid easily over her tongue.
No one looked at them oddly, and that, she was sure, was because, true to Durand’s warning, Evan said little.
But also, they had burned their English-made garments before leaving Le Havre.
They had purchased new clothing in the local street markets, and none of it was of any quality at all, though clean.
Beside her was her husband. The greatest boon to her, he was, as ever, kind and understanding.
His acceptance of her actions—her lying and deception of her vice admiral and her terror at being blackmailed by Vaillancourt—astonished and thrilled her.
What man would still care for someone who had done any of that?
She rejoiced that she had the one and only man who could—and he loved her.
With all secrets between them gone, she reveled in his devotion and took him to her each night and day he wished with an ardor filled with the marvel of his love for her.
He was an inventive lover, and she his eager pupil and partner.
His devotion salved her anxiety about this trip and its purpose.
If his soothing care lasted only for a few hours into the night, she awoke knowing he would be hers once again when they sought their bed.
As they spent a night in a convent in sight of Rouen’s huge, old city clock, she realized she might never see that clock again.
As they took rooms in an inn overlooking the little town of Vernon, she urged Evan to abandon the route of the Seine.
“It is too obvious. If La Mère knows I am gone from London, if she searches for me and concludes I’m in France to free Luc, she will expect us to take a fast and simple route.
We must go east through small villages where the French army tends not to be billeted.
Then we can go south to Paris by riverboat. ”
He saw her logic and agreed.
March first, they took rooms in an auberge in Passy to the west of the center of Paris.
There they told the propriétaire they would stay for two nights to rest. Their identities covered by their claim to sell Toulon porcelain, they found a dealer in household goods in Le Halle exchange.
The innkeeper asked no questions. She and Evan took a fiacre the next morning to the left bank of Paris, where they took rooms in a small auberge.
The next morning, they went to seek out help in the Rue du Four from a person whom Inès once knew.