Chapter 7 #2
“For safety, do you mean? Then one does what one needs to do. Does that worry you about this scenario?”
“Compton is a dangerous man, so I can only assume this Guillaume Dubois is as well.”
It was not really an answer. Before he could formulate a response, she continued, “There is never a . . . misunderstanding between partners? The boundaries between fact and fiction remain clear, no matter what’s required?”
“It’s a means to an end, as I said. A job. Nothing more.”
“Impartial, then.” Her color was high again, but it might only have been that the chill wind had picked up.
Trust runs both ways, she’d said, and rightly so.
He ran a hand through his hair and adjusted his hat.
“Not always . . . impartial.” Bloody hell, she deserved more than an indirect answer.
“For the most part on assignments, there are days or weeks on end where one is alone. Observing, gathering information from a distance. Waiting on someone to make contact, moving on to the next place once it’s happened, perhaps only tangentially working with anyone else.
I’ve rarely used so public a persona as Beaumont.
” They had stopped walking by unspoken accord.
“On occasion, with a partner who understood both the stakes and the isolation, and the impermanence of it, if we otherwise suited one another . . .” He lifted a shoulder.
“Here in Paris?” Her bland expression came at some expense, he suspected, given how expressive she usually was. Already he knew that much of her.
“No one in Paris. No one for some months now.”
She traced the trim on her skirt with one gloved finger. He couldn’t guess what she was thinking and so asked instead, “Does that unnerve you?”
Her laugh was genuinely merry, lighting her face.
“To hear that you’ve had lovers? I had not imagined you a monk.
” With a flash of mischief: “Minutes before, you did your best to discompose me by speaking of— How did you phrase it? Inventive, extreme pursuits of carnal pleasure? No, do not deny that was your intent, to shock me. Yet you worry I might find it shocking that you admit you are not a celibate?”
“No,” he conceded, fighting the corner of his mouth turning up. “But one usually doesn’t speak of it in polite company.”
Her dimple showed again “We are well beyond the point of no return with observing the rules of polite company. But unmannerly curiosity aside, why did you share that confidence with me?”
“Working with someone requires trust and a fundamental level of honesty, a valid point you made not long ago. I wished to answer your question without prevarication.”
“Then I thank you. And now we will not misconstrue one another’s motives, whatever occurs.”
He thought again of Amélie’s caution. Whatever his own wants, as she’d put it, he was able to remain professional.
Silence fell between them for a time, more comfortable than before, although they didn’t resume walking.
“It was not shocking in part because I understand your reasons,” Isobel said eventually.
“Oh, certainly not the parts of your life pertaining to intrigue. My own life, up until I left for Flanders, was wholly unadventurous.” A small dismissive motion with her hand.
“The pinnacle of excitement I experienced for most of the six years of my married life was moving with Jamie and his regiment to points around Ireland and England. Even so, there was structure in that. Everything conformed more or less to the same basic outline in each place, once he received his billet.”
Isobel’s gaze was on the Palais Bourbon across the river. “But to your point on isolation, I have come to understand very well since a year this past June what it is to be lonely, to exist without companionship or an enduring relationship with all its comforts.”
“You were happy in your marriage?” he asked. “You loved Jamie?”
“I was,” she said softly, “and I did. I loved and respected him, and he, me. We were contented in all parts of our marriage.” She smiled briefly.
“Although perhaps without quite the consuming passions of which Rousseau writes. But we were comfortable together and good companions. I expect we’d have continued all our lives like that, had not Bonaparte attempted to retake France.
I suppose fortune was with us in that the Greys were on home duty the majority of our marriage.
I see that now, with the power of hindsight.
” Again a brief smile curved her mouth. “Although Jamie’s men did not see it that way when it seemed all the rest of Britain’s fighting strength was making a valiant war against Boney’s forces on the Peninsula. ”
Her gaze, moments before so abstracted, turned to him, sharper now.
“The Greys were not sent into that hell you surely lived during your own years on the Peninsula. Theirs did not come until Waterloo, which is when my own began as well. Since those dark days, I have come all too well to understand how much one misses the absence of physical connection to another when one is isolated.”
“There has been no one since your husband?”
She shook her head. “When we parted at Ghent and Jamie knew significant action was ahead—and soon—he told me that I shouldn’t mourn him all the rest of my days if it was his time.
His love for me was generous to the last, and I promised him I would not live out my life alone.
But I have not even thought of it. Lucy’s disappearance came so shortly after I returned to England.
Hard on the heels of that came the deaths of our mother and father.
I almost feel at times that I am not quite among the living myself, when those I’ve loved most and who most loved me are dead or otherwise gone. ”
Naught but a shade, she’d named herself when he asked her that first night who she was. He understood now as he had not then.
“It is a lonely existence, although in a different manner from yours,” she said quietly. “I have compassion for others who find themselves at equal remove from human warmth.”
Across the river a woman with two small children walked along the quai’s edge. The older child was poking energetically at the water with a long stick as the woman spoke sharply to him.
Isobel drew a deep breath and slowly released it. “Returning to the subject of Frascati’s and perhaps Le Repaire as well, you need not doubt my fortitude.”
Truly, it wasn’t her fortitude that concerned him. Had she lacked fortitude, she’d still be in England at this moment.
“Even should my sister . . .” For a moment, her breath stuttered before she visibly steeled herself.
“Even should Lucy not be restored to me, I will forever be glad if in some small way my participation, however peripheral, aids you in bringing about the downfall of Compton or of Dubois or any others involved in whatever convoluted evil schemes are in play.”
Her eyes fixed on his, clear blue in the weak light, direct and steady.
“You spoke of recognizing the necessity for both trust and honesty between us, of course with allowances in the latter for everything that you cannot tell me about your work. It is all the more necessary when there are so many other deceptions, is it not? So let us agree not only to honesty in all our dealings with one another, but that both of us are committed to doing whatever we must, to go to whatever lengths will bring about the highest chance of success and least risk. For Lucy. For your own work.”
Actively involving her was most definitely not without risk, yet leaving her to her own devices was riskier still; his apprehending her so easily on rue Montmartre was proof positive.
“Aye,” he said, “I’ll enter into that agreement with you.”
She smiled briefly and turned back in profile as she looked again across the water. Without her gaze on him, his eyes lingered on the generous curve of her mouth and the way strands of hair had yet again escaped her pins.
Not all the risks in this operation were from external sources. He’d do well to remember that.