Chapter 24 #2
Was it a mistake coming here? A letter might have served as well or better for the news he carried.
Would his presence only stir up reminders of a difficult chapter, one both sisters were no doubt endeavoring to forget?
It had been a journey of some days from Manchester on a series of mail coaches and other conveyances, making many stops and transfers along the way, to reach coastal Kirkcudbrightshire.
Ample time, then, for him to question himself and his motives.
This morning even, walking the half league or so from the Auchencairn Arms to the stone-fronted cottage that Isobel and Lucy shared.
He walked beside her now as the path allowed, following her where it did not. When they arrived, plates and cutlery were laid on the table, two of each.
Miss Muir took up a bonnet from beside the door. “I’ve eaten already,” she said without looking directly at either of them. “I have matters to attend to elsewhere.” And with that, she left.
Isobel looked after her, a fond smile on her face. “She has perhaps eaten, but her only business is absenting herself so that you and I might talk without her here.”
“Has my arrival distressed her, do you think?” How could it not?
“I cannot say if it disturbs her, but she has left you alone with me. I think she doesn’t mistrust you, at the least.”
“And what of you?” he asked quietly. “Does it disturb you that I’ve come?”
She did not immediately offer either denial or affirmation.
And then her lips curved up, enough to reveal the dimple that had so snared him in France.
“It does disturb my peace of mind some,” she said wryly, “but I am glad all the same. Here, please sit.” She gestured just as he started forward; their fingers brushed.
Her eyes met his and fell away. “You are staying in Auchencairn?”
“Aye, at the Arms. I arrived late yesterday. I was uncertain how long it might take to locate you.”
“Those sources of yours did not place me down to the very patch of earth?” she asked, smiling again.
He shook his head, feeling his mouth quirk.
“That does surprise me.” Her tone was light, teasing; she might as well have run a finger along his neck. “How long will you stay?”
“I have nowhere I need to be for a time.”
“Are you not still doing your previous work?” The force of her blue eyes was tactile. She’d read more in his words than he’d said aloud.
“I requested an end to field assignments, although I’ve not closed the door on future diplomatic work.” The Foreign Office was reluctant to entirely cut loose someone with his skill set.
She toyed with her knife. “Why did you leave it? Your work.”
He could hardly say aloud that it was the only way he’d have been free to make the lengthy journey here. How did she even feel about him turning up six months later? Had it only been a flash in the pan, that week last October?
Isobel was watching him. He felt naked. He had no idea what showed on his face; he’d been too distracted for a moment to guard it. With difficulty he recalled her question. “I was ready for a change.” The truth, if not all of it.
After Compton’s death, which had come not quite at his hands but close enough as made no difference, he could no longer reconcile the work he did with who he wanted to be or what he wanted for himself. She was an elemental part of that. He’d had a glimpse with her of what could be, not what was.
“You’ve come to tell me some of what happened after Lucy and I left Paris?”
He nodded curtly, not trusting other words.
“Let us move to the parlor,” she said. “I keep the whisky there.”
Isobel poured them each a tumbler of whisky nearly to the brim. She had the sense they might both need it.
Nathaniel moved to stand near the solitary window. “I cannot tell you all of what came to pass. Many details are still privileged even with the matter resolved.”
“I understand. Tell me whatever you can.”
“Has your sister spoken of any of it?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Not even what she spoke of to you that night. I know little more than I did in Paris.”
He drank before responding. “Basics, then. The baron was not a mastermind in any of it. Dubois and Compton were using him for his social connections and his money. Some of what your sister knew about Cuvelier gave us the leverage we needed. Once the two of you were safely away, Cuvelier found it in his best interests to answer our questions.”
There was perhaps violence implicit in that phrasing. She found she didn’t much care. She had no sympathy for Cuvelier.
“He’s paid for his crimes,” Nathaniel continued, “such as they were, with loss of social status. He’s no longer welcome in Bourbon France.”
She took a large sip of her whisky, letting it burn her throat and nose, before she was able to ask, “What became of Dubois?” More than Compton, it was Dubois who featured in her worst memories of France.
“Cuvelier had many tales to tell. Compton and Dubois thought him only a wealthy inebriate—which he was—but he understood more about their scheming than they realized. Between what your sister knew from her relationship with Compton—”
What does that mean?
“—and what Cuvelier told us, there were more than enough grounds to secure Dubois’s arrest within hours as an enemy of the French state.
It greatly pleased Cezares, the French minister of police, to take charge of Dubois.
Dubois hadn’t gone to ground, even knowing we’d intercepted your sister, even knowing we’d brought in Cuvelier. He believed himself untouchable.”
She could well believe that.
“Baudelaire was instrumental in ensuring Cezares was fully apprised of the particulars,” Nathaniel added.
She smiled, briefly diverted by the mention of étienne Baudelaire. “He is well, M. Baudelaire? Or was when last you saw him?”
Nathaniel nodded.
“I am glad to hear it. But what of Compton?” Was it telling that Nathaniel had not led with Compton when Compton was the focus of his investigation as far as she’d known? That was why he’d been in Paris. Compton was the reason her path and his crossed.
“Dead.” He was silent for a long time after that single soft word.
Then he sighed. “He was slipperier than Cuvelier. I tracked him first to Boulogne. Lost him there. Finally ran him to ground in early January, back in London, waiting on one of his West Indiamen to be made ready for passage to the Caribbean. He thought to slip out of the country permanently, no doubt to continue his criminal enterprises overseas. He nearly succeeded.” Nathaniel fell silent.
“What happened?” she asked softly.
“We struggled. He wounded me. My orders were to bring him in alive if possible, but he knew it was over, that there was nothing ahead but hanging for treason. I had a knife to his throat, waiting for Quinn. I . . .”
And Compton was now dead. She understood, she thought, what he wasn’t saying—that Compton had given him no choice in the matter.
She wanted badly to touch him, to ease the grim line of his mouth, but she kept her seat, curling her fingers into her skirt instead.
“He was full of malice to the end, Compton. He pushed himself onto my blade. Chose to end it with his death rather than face the consequences of his actions. Even so, it was my knife and my hand holding it.”
The distinction mattered to his sense of integrity. She was glad—no, viciously happy—that Compton was dead. Compton had a large part in authoring Lucy’s ordeal, maybe the largest. But she was not happy that it had come at some cost to Nathaniel’s honor.
Or that he’d been wounded—that suddenly registered. “Were you badly injured?”
He took a sip of his whisky and lifted a shoulder in a noncommittal gesture.
She’d known him well enough, once, to suspect the multitude that laconic act might cover. She gentled her voice, although it wanted to shake. “What was the wound?” That shrug said whatever it was, was a near miss.
“A knife, here.” He touched his chest. “The blade struck my sternum. Had it gone just beside or struck lower and slipped between ribs, it would have gone worse for me. As it happened, it had too little force to pierce bone and on through to anything vital.”
Panic seizing her chest said it little mattered that he was breathing at this moment. She remained in her seat with great effort. She wanted to go to him. “Will you show me?”
She thought at first he would not, but then he set down his drink. He’d discarded his jacket earlier; now he undid his waistcoat, a single-breasted garment of heavy linen, and shrugged out of it. “Come closer, then.”
Memory tugged at her. He’d said something similar just before he kissed her for the first time, giving her the choice to approach.
With hands suddenly shaky, she set down her glass and rose. He kept his eyes on her. When she was a handbreadth from him, he pushed down his braces and tugged his shirt loose from his trousers. She held her breath as he pushed the fabric up.
The wound was as he’d described it: a freshly healed slash beginning a hand’s width below the hollow of his throat, nearly centered, running in a jagged line downwards for several inches before curving below his left pectoral muscle and across his ribs, disappearing just after it crossed the wider silvered scar from the French bayonet.
This new scar was still purple where the blade had bitten most deeply, crimson elsewhere.
“Nathaniel . . .” She had no words, nothing save his name, shakily. How very close he had come to death.
“I was younger than Compton.” His voice was quiet. “Stronger too. His aim was unskilled or perhaps just poor this particular time. Either way, he failed.”
“You were fortunate, then.” How close he’d come once again to yet another near-deadly wound. Almost as shocking as evidence of the injury itself was the realization that she would not have heard of his death. He might even now have been dead—and she would never have known.
It was insupportable. The immensity overwhelmed her.