CHAPTER TWO #3
The spoon dropped from sight, and he felt coolness at his chest as the covers were shifted and someone lifted his good arm for him and placed it comfortably outside the quilt.
Henri caught at the hand, and turned his gaze to find the face he remembered, alight and leaning over him. It had grey eyes.
“Toi, alors? Je te reconnais.”
“Pray, sir, do not excite yourself,” begged the same comforting voice he recalled having heard before. It returned to him that she was English.
“I remember you,” he repeated in her language.
The smile appeared and Henri felt an inordinate measure of relief. The memory was real. Then he was no longer dreaming. The woman shifted, releasing her hand from his grasp, and the light left her face. He realised a candle was burning close by. Was it night? How long had he lain here?
“You have the time of day?”
“The time?” Surprise was in her voice. “Yes, sir, it is past eight, and nigh on dusk already.”
Henri found himself little enlightened by this intelligence.
He would have asked more, but that an earthier need was beginning to impinge upon his senses.
How to express it? His mind balked at the notion of asking for a chamber pot.
And he knew he had not strength to manage on his own.
As if she read his mind, the woman’s next words offered him a ready solution.
“I am going to leave you presently, sir. There is a young fellow here by the name of Reuben, who will attend to your personal comfort while I am gone.” A note of anxiety crept into her voice. “Do you understand me, sir?”
Henri made an effort to express his thanks. “You are very good, mademoiselle.”
Then the face was leaning over him again, and her tone dropped. “I must beg you to listen carefully, sir. Are you listening?”
His gaze roved the contours of her face, and he nodded, only half aware of what she said. She had not the sort of prettiness that drew the eye, yet her countenance had an unusual quality to which he could put no name.
“Say nothing of your origins to this fellow, if you please,” she was asking earnestly.
“You must speak, of course, I see that, but pray do so in English. Reuben will note that you are foreign, but I have a reasonable hope he will not recognise your accent, if you will but refrain from using your own language.”
The sense of this began to penetrate, and Henri frowned in an effort to understand. “You ask that I speak no French?”
“Exactly. I have a particular reason for keeping your nationality secret for as long as we can. Will you do it, sir?”
He tried to nod. “As you wish, mam’zelle.”
The smile rewarded him, and he gazed up into the countenance, wondering at the transformation effected by it. It vanished as she shifted upright.
“Reuben has brought you a nightshirt, and when he has made you more comfortable, Jemima will bring up some broth. I hope you will try to take a little, sir. You have come this far, but you need to build up your strength.”
She turned away then, and Henri watched her slip behind the open door, accompanied by a heavy clunking for which he was at a loss to account. He found himself tired and his lids sank slowly as a haze began to infiltrate his mind.
Jean-Marc was calling him. Henri … Henri! The light bobbed in the darkness as he turned, and a loud report echoed in his eardrums, so that he woke with a start. Blinking dazedly, he gazed upon the huge shadow that loomed over the bed.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but Miss Grace says as how you need this.”
Henri’s eyes focused upon a hulking young man, with an apologetic air and a deferential manner. One broad fist was folded around the handle of a china chamber pot. Relief flooded Henri, and he straightaway forgot the urgent instructions put to him.
“Oui, mon brave, very much I need it!”
Having partaken of a morsel of cold pie and some boiled chicken left over from the Frenchman’s broth Jemima had prepared, Grace felt renewed enough to embark upon the task that had lain like a cancer at the back of her mind, niggling with dangerous question.
The day had been long, and she meant to share the night watch with her maid.
Jemima had been too busily employed in running errands, heating bricks, making broth and doing what she might to render the Frenchman’s sodden clothes habitable to have time to make dinner.
Grace had fetched the maid to watch her patient at about four, while she snatched a hastily thrown together collection of leftovers, and then hastened back to her post. She had managed to persuade Mab to return to East Hall, on the pretext of requiring Reuben’s services, and herself nursed the Frenchman, calming him with soothing words, and watching anxiously for the slightest sign of worsening.
He had lain for the most part in a death-like stupor, interspersed with brief moments of partial awareness when she had spoon-fed him with barley water.
Grace marked his pallor, and kept an eye upon his chest to note whether he breathed evenly.
Instructing Jemima to keep bricks heating on the stove, she wrapped them in linen and packed them about the Frenchman’s body, two and three at a time, shifting them from place to place from time to time to keep him warmed all over, and renewing them as they cooled.
Towards evening, he had begun to look a little less like a waxen effigy, and signs of slight motion heartened her, though she was kept on tenterhooks as his features gained a trifle of colour, worrying whether fever was setting in.
Reuben had arrived too early to be of immediate use, and Grace set him to help Jemima by cleaning the fellow’s mud-caked boots.
It was with heartfelt relief that she had seen the Frenchman wake at last, the green eyes evidently aware.
She was able to give him into the hands of Mab’s young stepson, with instructions to make him as comfortable as he could with a little washing and a nightshirt, together with those intimate necessities she had readily anticipated.
Alone now, Grace was finally free to turn her attention to the little stack of papers entrusted to her care at the outset of her acquaintance with her Frenchman.
Indeed, they could be said to have instigated the possessive attitude she had adopted towards him.
Her hand had rested upon them from time to time during the day, feeling the little bulge they made under her petticoats.
Each time she experienced a tiny frisson of apprehension that an answer lay buried within her skirts as to the question of who had shot the Frenchman, and why.
She instructed Jemima to take up a bowl of broth once Reuben had done his work, and send the lad away.
Even knowing the maid was occupied, and was set to remain above stairs until Grace went up to relieve her at the patient’s bedside, she took the precaution of opening her bureau and sitting down at it.
If Jemima should come in and see her at the papers, she would assume Grace had taken opportunity to get some work done.
Her fingers quivered a little as she dug within the slit at her petticoats and withdrew the package.
Not without difficulty, for the leaves had dried, moulding to the shape of her pocket.
In the light of the candelabrum, Grace prized the different items apart, setting aside two that were sealed.
There was nothing written upon the outside of these, no direction or instruction.
There were three folded sheets, besides the one in which everything had been wrapped.
That was blank, but for a small sketch which looked to be a map, but with only initials to indicate what streets or roads might be depicted thereon.
Grace set it aside and turned her attention to the first of the open documents.
Her French was fair, but damp had rendered the ink fuzzy in places. She managed to decipher the gist, although a number of phrases eluded her. From what she could gather, the contents concerned a proposed trial, wherein the person accused had named witnesses who might speak in his behalf.
Disappointed, for she felt none the wiser, Grace took up another document, which proved to be a list of names, some of which were obliterated with smudges.
There were parentheses beside several names, where someone had penned in comments — as to character?
One was trustworthy, she thought. Another was being watched.
A third had been marked with two asterisks.
Beside two or three, there were merely other names. Of places? It was impossible to tell.
There was similarity in the handwriting of these two, and Grace wondered if they had been written by the man lying upstairs.
She refolded the second paper and picked up the third.
This was much more rewarding, for it was clearly an identity paper, fortunately little damaged by wetness.
An official-looking seal was accompanied by a legality of tone Grace found difficult to translate.
However, she could readily make out her Frenchman’s name.
He was called Henri Rousselle, and a quick calculation from his date of birth told her he was one and thirty years of age. His occupation was given as “aide”, but to what or whom there was no mention.
It gave her the oddest leap of pleasure to be acquainted with his name.
Henri. She pictured his features, pale and lean with those high-boned cheeks, the dark hair that straggled yet, lengthy and unkempt upon the pillows.
She remembered the green eyes, and thought how completely the name suited him. Henri.